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.
  • vateso5074@lemmy.worldOP
    2·
    2 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·
      2 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·
      2 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.