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LOL
http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/130916.html
So, my mother and I were talking about time travel. Her big plan with time travel is to go back in time, exchange modern bills for older series bills, and do her groceries on the cheap. Which, quite aside from being the very definition of a mundane utility, has a few practical problems with it.
Lets take a shopping trip in 1980. She obtains $100 in $20s from the 1980 series. It's not clear if she's doing this exchanging now or in the past, but I think making the exchange now creates fewer logistical difficulties, though the end result will be the same.
She goes back in time and does her shopping, using those bills. But those bills already exist! With every trip, she is devaluing the money by adding 5 new 20s to the mix. Worse, if she continues this shopping, sooner or later those bills are going to meet! It'll be a paradox to beat all paradoxes. The world will explode! And why?
Because my mom wanted to pay less for coffee.
So, my mother and I were talking about time travel. Her big plan with time travel is to go back in time, exchange modern bills for older series bills, and do her groceries on the cheap. Which, quite aside from being the very definition of a mundane utility, has a few practical problems with it.
Lets take a shopping trip in 1980. She obtains $100 in $20s from the 1980 series. It's not clear if she's doing this exchanging now or in the past, but I think making the exchange now creates fewer logistical difficulties, though the end result will be the same.
She goes back in time and does her shopping, using those bills. But those bills already exist! With every trip, she is devaluing the money by adding 5 new 20s to the mix. Worse, if she continues this shopping, sooner or later those bills are going to meet! It'll be a paradox to beat all paradoxes. The world will explode! And why?
Because my mom wanted to pay less for coffee.
no subject
IIRC, Christopher Stasheff used a similar device in one of his books--people buried things like a child's toy doll in BC and dug it up in like the '60s, when museums and collectors were paying lots of money for such things.
My own get-rich-quick plan with time travel involved aluminum ingots and gold coins. (Take aluminum back to before it was cheap, convert to dollars, convert to gold.)
But the "lost" knowledge--how did they make Chartres Blue? What was the process for the micro-granulated gold pieces from Rome that we STILL can't duplicate? Stonehenge, Nazca, so much to go and FIND OUT--