If anyone wants a specific goal, have it be either

  • Earn a Nobel Prize by age 18

or

  • Become a billionaire by age 18

For the sake of the scenario, assume the following:

  • If anyone learns that you are mentally from the future, you immediately have an aneurysm and die. You somehow just know this and therefore must keep your true identity secret.

  • You wake up as a random 10-year-old specifically in 2002, not your 10-year-old self, and not the age you actually were in 2002.

  • You live in the same country, speak the same language(s), and are the same ethnicity as your old self. Your biological sex matches your gender identity (flip a coin if you are enby).

  • You have 2 parents and 1.5 siblings. Your family earns exactly the median income for your country.

  • The person whose identity you now inhabit left a diary. You have no other knowledge of your new identity beyond this.

  • If you try to look for your old family, you learn they had a different child in this timeline who is the same age as you but is not you. They will not believe any attempt to convince them you are related.

  • The USB drive is compatible with any standard USB Type A connector. It is just large enough to fit all of Wikipedia, including hosted media and files, and the drive is read-only. The drive cannot be reformatted.

  • Stock market trends remain generally consistent for 5 years. After that, assume the butterfly effect will start to skew the results, so you cannot predict what will happen after 2007. Sports become too unreliable to bet on with 100% accuracy after 1 year.

  • I feel like I shouldn’t need to clarify this one, but no grooming kids. Assume there is a magical force that prevents you from dating anyone until both you and they are at least 18, and no one is attracted to you unless they would also feel okay dating someone who is your mental age.

EDIT - Additional clarifiers, if this helps:

  • The USB drive is not based on 2002 technology but is fully compatible with it. Assume it uses a novel architecture that can repurpose itself to be compatible with whatever system it is plugged into, as long as it fits the correct type of USB port.
      • hddsx@lemmy.ca
        8·
        11 days ago

        How fucked up is it that I needed your comment to understand the comment of who you replied to? Jesus

      • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
        4·
        10 days ago

        I first thought: hmm okay, I guess being a kid get adults guard down lets you freely go around to do things they don’t expect like (hypothetical speaking) a murder

        Then I read the comment below, someone said “needed that laugh”, and I was like, huh, what’s so funny?, then… it hit me… it hit me like epstein’s private jet crashing into me

        💀

  • Bruncvik@lemmy.world
    24·
    10 days ago

    At 10, I won’t have much money to invest, and I doubt I’d convince anyone to invest on my behalf. So, the butterfly effect on the markets will be at least 10 years away. I’d spend my first 5-6 years soaking up the knowledge that would be most relevant to me for the late 00’s, then from 16 or so I’d use that knowledge for well-paid gigs to earn money to invest, first into the stock market (short term), and later into startups I know will succeed. By 22, I’d start sponsoring the Cincinnati zoo, as a side project. By 24, I’ll use my influence at the zoo to beef up security in the gorilla enclosure. The kid will not fall in, Harambe will live, and today’s timeline will never materialize. Then I’ll retire. You’re welcome.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      11 days ago

      Or Apple, or nVidia. Or all of the above.

      Edit: Actually, nVidia would be a bad call. Apple I think would result in around a 6000% return on investment by our deadline, which isn’t exactly a rocket ride to the moon, but you could probably use Wikipedia’s articles on pump and dumps and other financial scams to know in advance what’s going to happen, and be one of those at the top of the pyramid rather than the bottom in order to raise yourself more short term capital.

      As for all the comments about everyone going for the Get Rich path and not the Nobel Prize… Well, yeah. Even if you do have a literally encyclopedic knowledge of current and future geopolitical events, it’s unlikely anyone important is going to listen to a 10 year old. Especially so if you’re not allowed to give the game away. You could readily trade stocks online in 2002, though, even if you were a minor as long as you could employ some creativity (or get permission from your parents). How convenient that by the time you’re ready to cash out, you’ve just turned into a legal adult.

    • ccunning@lemmy.world
      5·
      11 days ago

      Bitcoin wasn’t invented until 2008 and launched in 2009. Your deadline is 2010. Someone bought 2 pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin in 2010.

  • this@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    131·
    11 days ago

    Step 1: become obscenely rich, at least like 300B before 2016.

    Step 2: use my wealth to prevent Trump from becoming president(get fucked pedo looser!), Also gonna uncover the whole Trump Epstein thing early and get Epstein to testify in court against Trump if possible and put that asshole in jail for the rest of his miserable life.

    Step 3: lobby for the following with the rest of my money:

    • ranked choice voting
    • public transit
    • a proper healthcare system that doesn’t fuck everyone
    • make democracy in the us stronger any possible way I can
    • accelerate green energy transition

    Step 4: retire in a comfortable sized house with some cats.

    At least that would be my plan, but I feel like unintended consequences would probably fuck me over.

    • Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca
      5·
      11 days ago

      The years of buildup to you getting 300B before 2016 would alter the course of history though, making all your knowledge useless after you’ve amassed whatever amount changes history. You’d be hard pressed to make financial gains before you’re 18, so you’d amass 300B between 2010 and 2016. At some point early on you’d draw too much attention and change history enough to have no idea what’s coming.

  • slakje@piefed.socialEnglish
    8·
    11 days ago

    I would just be happy to have a re-start at life and a chance to make better choices. Enjoy simpler times, get a head start on hobbies and passions, see my favorite bands that are no longer around :)

    Eventually I would invest in things which would earn me a safety net and extra income (hard to do that as a 10 year old), but not in companies that go against my values. I don’t need to get rich but I would like enough to be able to benefit my loved ones and community. Not the most ambitious, but practical.

  • venusaur@lemmy.world
    8·
    11 days ago

    If I was able to make lots of money somehow I’d buy up CDS’s before 2008 market crash.

    Otherwise I’d just start mining bitcoin in 2009.

    • ccunning@lemmy.world
      5·
      11 days ago

      10,000 bitcoins were worth ~$20-40 in 2010.

      You will need ~500,000,000,000 (500 Billion) bitcoin (unless my math is wrong, but suffice it to say, it’s a lot).

      I believe to date only about ~20 million have been mined.

    • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      10 days ago

      Did you get this prompt off of Tumblr or something? It’s shit.

      I guess you don’t really like hypotheticals…

      C’mon pal, why be so hostile to OP? This question is interesting.

    • vateso5074@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      10 days ago

      Nope, I made it up while bored out of my mind at work and trying to think of random scenarios just as thought experiments. This one seemed good enough to share, but I’m not a good judge of what people are into, I can remove it if it’s shit.

      • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        10 days ago

        I can remove it if it’s shit

        Lol pls don’t let other people’s opinions influence you. As long as its not bigotry or weird political agendas, you should just go ahead and post, if others don’t like it, that’s why there’s an upvote/downvote system, but you DON’T have any duty to remove it. Judging by the votes, the overwhelming majority likes it more than dislike.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        11·
        10 days ago

        The main reason I think it’s a poor prompt is, you’ve ruled out almost all creativity here, to the point there are really three valid answers:

        • I’d invest whatever money I can get relatively conservatively because my ability to predict the future decreases with time
        • I’dUsurp a favorite artist of mine by recording their songs a few years earlier
        • I’d play Nintendo games again.

        You undermine the whole “what would you do if you could go back in time 23 years with a copy of today’s Wikipedia” thing by having the timeline diverge. So a lot of “I would make sure I’m here at this moment so I can have this effect on history” are sanded down to a nub.

        Same with “I would invest in this, that and the other” because you’re ten. You don’t really have the power to do that and say on the down low. Sports betting is right out because most if not all advantage you have is gone long before you can reasonably place a bet. Consider the Back to the Future universe; first of all they explicitly state that Biff placed his first bet on a horse race on his 18th birthday, and second it’s established that media from the future will change to represent its new history. Biff’s riches might have changed sports outcomes, but the sports almanac would change to reflect the new scores. Your prompt includes an immutable copy of Wikipedia that does not change even as the universe around it does, and your scenario causes it to diverge beyond usefulness before you can put it to profitable use.

        You’ve ruled out any “I try to change major world events by warning people or whatever” because you have to keep your identity as a time traveler a secret. Same with any “I’d be an oracle.”

        So you might have a general gist of how things are going to go for awhile but it might not, so you’re going to be an above average but not godlike investor, and because Wikipedia deliberately does not contain song lyrics or tunes for copyright reasons if you want to pass off commercial works of music or performance art as your own you’ll need to have already memorized them.

        Or, like so many folks, 'I’d just be ten years old again. Play Gamecube games."

        You’ve set up such a narrow set of rules that this almost doesn’t feel open-ended.

  • stoly@lemmy.world
    6·
    10 days ago

    First, see if they have the wining numbers for Powerballs that were never won. Something in the tens to hundreds of millions. Then use the entries on the stock market to invest in things that will take off, allowing you to sell before they tank.

    Then take all that money and put it in to left wing think tanks that will make this mess go away entirely.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
    5·
    10 days ago

    If I had money to invest in things when I actually waw back in 2002, I would have been set for life today. My high school economy class that year played some game that used real world stocks but with virtual money. We started with 10k and it went all school year; whoever had the most money at the end won a prize (a huge bag of candy). I won and all I had done was put half my money into Google and the other into Apple at the start and never touched it or even looked at it.

    In this scenario, I still don’t know how the info would necessarily help me get rich unless it had enough technical knowledge to recreate things before they “naturally” were invented so I could take credit. Presumably, I still would not have real money. I could probably get a lot of bitcoin. I used to have like 2 or 3 coins people gave away for free becsuse, at the time, they were worthless.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
    5·
    10 days ago

    I probably start voicing concerns about the housing situation in 2006 then bet everything shorting it in 08. From there I buy a foreclosed house study electrical engineering and attempt to get a solar panel startup going cooperatively in the hopes of pushing 2014 Obama to focus on full renewables.

    I don’t need a lot of money, I need a future.