Say that you suddenly wake up in the year 1875. You end up talking to someone and you want to convince them that you’re from the future. How do you do that?
I would show them Fortnite dances unimaginable to their primitive minds.
Elvis Presley dancing was considered borderline obscene not that long ago comparatively, so you might end up in the sanitarium if you said “hey, watch me floss!”
If they speak in hillbilly, valleygirl, inner-city slang and various grunts.
Find where to submit a patent, and patent the Telephone as Bell creates that in 1876, and patent the internal gas combustion engine for cars.
Mostly need the engine because I’d probably fail to be able to explain properly how to get a phone working properly, I understand the concepts, but proving enough for a patent to hold up, not sure.Congratulations, now I’ve become an enemy of the world because I’d have to use all the money I made from the engines to invest quickly in converting to renewable non gasoline based combustion engines to save the world from myself
You know both telephone and internal combustion engine well enough to do that?
I’d fail without Wikipedia to check the facts.
A gas powered engine, for sure. That’s why I said the telephone might not end up holding up. Spark, fuel/oxygen varies by carburetor. Contained in a cylinder. Head pushed up, attach to opposite side, and get your sparks in sync. Carburators don’t need electronics so I wouldn’t try for fuel injectors at that time. All you need is a working concept and evidence it can work for a patent really. Then anyone who comes about wanting to use the concept, say Mercedes in Europe or Ford after in the U.S. and you take your payouts. Don’t need to continue making the products. Invest the earnings into battery research. Paying researchers and giving them the information that we can beat lead acid with nickle cadmium and eventually lithium ion should get us pushed into a company patenting the future of battery tech for that time. Throw in sodium ion based for shits and we’ve got the future of all batteries for 100 years paying a fragment of production.
*Note by in sync you should be able to instigate the spark just using the downward stroke of the opposite head. So the time could never be off, just have to ensure your spark stays connected to the aforementioned lead acid batteries that we are looking to phase out
That probably could get done, I forget that patents don’t need a huge amount and you’ve got a much better knowledge of the intricacies of it than I do.
I can give you a 18 min tutorial and you’ll know how they work as well. It isn’t super"knowledge" I’m a doof like all others. DM me and I have no problem discussing how those mechanics work. I started college in Aerospace engineering. Left with a degree in Math/physics and spent most of my career in IT. I promise the aptitude to learn and the wanting to learn aren’t on the same plane. Most of computer science proves such
strikes me as easier to make a working prototype of a phone. at least if simple speakers and mics already exist. did they?
The microphone was part of Alexander Graham Bells invention I believe. I assume speaker was included as well, otherwise what would it be used for, the radio wasn’t around yet
I was thinking maybe gramophone or earlier precursors. But looking at those things they’re mechanically coupled not electrically, so not really the same thing.
I’d stand on street corners telling everyone who passed by that one day people would be putting pineapple on pizzas.
Hehe
This made me read the second post like they were trying to stealth infiltrate pineapple on pizza into the culture…
I would speak Polish and it would be enough proof with the right story to convince someone. I would be then immidietely killed for danger to the Russification and Germanisation efforts.
(Poland didn’t exist in 1875)
Wouldn’t they just identify you as a subversive from 1875, instead of a liberated person from the future?
Hey, Ludrol. “A bip a shap a slip a tap a eyshioni” [I am from the year 4877 and I speak Bippy, a language of the Bipp Republic of Darkness a country that won’t exist for another thousand years.
It won’t work for Bipp Republic of Darkness in 2025 but for Poland in 1875 it would. Recently the January Uprising of 1863 has failed. The people will want to believe that Poland will exist in the future and that their sacrifice wasn’t/was* in vain. Due to emotional baggage of occupation it will work as people want hope and believe that they will win. I am not calling to logic but to emotions.
Poland is a country with thousand years of history.
*Depends if I will tak to Pozytywista or Romantyk
I guess I don’t know enough European history. Which means that when I say “that makes a lot of sense. You have convinced me” it means very very little and you should not feel like you have won any debate.
Just kidding. The Bipp Republic supports your methods.
I wouldn’t try and prove anything.
I would “invent” a few basic tchotchkis and nick-nacks to get money, then out to California ahead of
the Gold RushHollywood? to …something, I dunno, and buy land.Invent a couple variations on heat pumps and electric motors. By 1928 sail away to New Zealand.
California’s gold rush was 1849.
Aw, dammit. See, I would have showed up as late to that party as if I had done it today.
So, as far as a casual one on one conversation, I don’t know. But some sort of formal petition to the public or a person of power, I would look for known geological activities like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions before going back in time. Weather events are too fickle. We can’t really affect geological events though.
It looks like Mount Iliamna had a known eruption in 1876. You could spend a few months getting attention before it happens. The same way people who give very specific doomsday predictions do. This way, once the eruption happens everyone will be certain you’re telling the truth. Or at least, most people won’t think you’re crazy. They may still be skeptical, but this will be enough to get people to lend you and ear and take warnings seriously. It is probably too early in the industrial revolution to really get people to slow down their progress if you want to stop climate change. A similar stunt around the time the first suppressed reports of climate change happened would be better at that.
Holocene eruptive activity from Iliamna is little known, but radiocarbon dating seems to indicate at least a few eruptions, all before the European settlement of Alaska. Prehistoric eruptions have been dated to 5050 and 2050 BCE (VEI-4), 450 BCE and 1650. Historically observed eruptions took place in 1867 (VEI-2) and 1876 (VEI-3), with unconfirmed eruptions in 1933, 1947, 1952 and 1953.[7]
Simple, I tell them I’m from the time when the Higgs boson was finally detected in a particle accelerator experiment that was done in a giant machine located underground in a country on the other side of the ocean.
I’d be in my own house, although it may look a little different. The guy that lives there would, presumably, be very confused. So I’d show him pictures of it on my phone and he would probably be even more confused and probably burn me alive as a witch.
First I tell them the proof to Fermat’s theorem.
(For those who aren’t familiar with it: it originates from 1637, but nobody in the world was able to prove it until 1994. Therefore it was known among scientists and scholars in all the world during these centuries as one of the greatest riddles in history)
I get world famous, instantly, with newspaper headlines everywhere.
Mathematicians in all countries are able to verify my words, so I gain endless credibility, and I can travel to all kinds of places where they want to hear me speak etc.
A little bit later they will find out that I am not that good at math. Well, not bad, but not good enough by far to find that proof. So there is the next riddle about me.
Then I can tell that I am from the future. And since I have gained credibility before, they are going to listen now.
This is one of the few answers that would actually work without you being thrown in a mental asylum. You get into any university, ask to get the math/physics teachers together and present it to them, this certainly will start a chain reaction.
To add something to that, after you’ve been “busted”, adding “in the timeline or universe I’m from, it’s been proven by Andrew Wiles in 1994”
You get into any university, ask to get the math/physics teachers together and present it to them, this certainly will start a chain reaction.
The demonstration of the proof is actually incredibility complicated. You’d need to develop many new concepts of mathematics (all requiring proper proofs and getting your new contemporaries to agree with you) before you can preform it.
All without the use of a electronic calculator and modern computer graphing and visualization techniques.
I’m not convinced its actually feasible… You’d be recognized as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time from all the new concepts you’ve introduced, not just the proof for Fermat’s last theorem. I’d pick something else. Like predicting an earthquake or something.
Istr that Ramanujan claimed that Kali gave him ideas in his dreams. Maybe he was actually a mathematician from the future but decided that telling the truth would not be feasible.
I mean… Ramanujan was the GOAT, but he was still able to do his proofs. That’s more or less my point. He didn’t suddenly convert a bunch of Oxford mathematicians to Hinduism because he was able to do incredible math proofs (i think they would have been similarly unconvinced he was a time traveller). The proof was in the pudding… in the proofs.
In order to do Wile’s proof of Fermat’s last theorem, you have to invent 100 years of math from memory, something Wiles himself would (almost certainly) struggle to do, but maybe he could pull it off. I remember reading an article about Wile’s proof, and he was incredibly humble about it, and described it as a collaborative effort between himself and his peers IIRC. The proof itself wasn’t complete without a correction from another math academic IIRC. This thread is like, kind of a misunderstanding of math academics.
In 1875 you don’t have ZFC set theory and Cantor’s works are bleeding edge (I think Cantor’s work is controversial and incomplete in this time… fuck it, maybe you should just work with Cantor himself if you can find him. Maybe he’d believe you. I didn’t take math history IDK)
I cannot find a source to link to it now but I remember reading through Godel’s incompleteness theorem, a proof of Fermat’s theorem isn’t possible without the extensions of classical mathematics that were developed in the 20th century.
You’ll have to take my word for it on that last bit. I’m a time traveling dolphin, after all.
Anyway, that’s more or less my point, you’d have to basically be an incredibly talented math professor (in theoretical mathematics, not applied) to demonstrate this proof to satisfaction to a bunch of professors in 1875. You’d also probably have to be white and male. It’s just not something a casual lemmy poster can like, do, you know? There’s a reason that Fermat’s theorem wasn’t proven for 350 years despite being accepted as true.
(edit: I am tired so this is rambley)
Do you know the proof by heart? Would you be able to recite it like that?
It was purely a theoretical question, wasn’t it :)
With a theoretical “suddenly”, so no time to cram knowledge in prep. In my reading of it, at least.
No, the question was “How do you [prove that your from the future]?” You laid out a scheme, which you are likely not capable of doing, especially because you missed the bit about the terrifying complexity of that particular proof.
Wiles’ demonstration of Fermat’s simply stated proposition is more than a hundred pages of complex math involving such esoteric concepts as Selmer groups, Hecke algebras, elliptic curves, modular forms, Euler systems and Galois representations. 350 Years Later, Fermat’s Last Theorem Finally Proved
So I guess, if you take this seriously, you better start preparing.
Don’t get it twisted. I’m not taking the question any more seriously than anyone else in this thread (including you).
The flaw in the logic of your plan didn’t require any serious analysis. If you think it did, then “Thanks for the compliment, I guess.”
But how would you get a job without your social security number? /s (sorry, from another thread that someone took too seriously)
Why the hell would you want to do that? Just do lots of cocaine and invent coca cola
Fistfull of coins.
I could prove that I am an AI because in the future Internet will be AI only with no humans left
winning lotteries consistently.
