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.
  • Zak@lemmy.world
    2·
    14 hours ago

    I can think of a few things I do not like about the world today that I imagine I could improve in a scenario like that. They include:

    • Much of the world’s communication is mediated through centralized social media platforms that use opaque algorithms to determine what content people see. (Yes, this is a very Lemming concern)
    • There is a significant rise in (mostly) right-wing populism worldwide, driven, I think in part by the above.
    • Corporations and governments are increasingly able (and motivated) to block access to their digital systems from general-purpose computers that their owners fully control. Even the mainstream press saw Microsoft Palladium as a nightmarish power grab in 2002, but did not react the same way to Google SafetyNet in 2014.
    • I do not own a Gordan Murray Automotive T.50.

    Social media

    2002 is before anybody had a convincing lead in this field, but blogs were already popular, and on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog kid. I could start planting the seeds of more advanced federation capabilities through open source development right away. I’m assuming I have a computer of course, but I think even if I didn’t I could probably get my hands on something older just by expressing interest and aptitude.

    After laying the technical foundations and establishing some credibility as a developer and technologist, my goal would be to build something with significant mainstream appeal by the time Facebook opens to the public in late 2006. I’d need access to money at that point, whether my own or through investors, though as a federated system, I wouldn’t have to bear all of the costs (nor would I have the ability to extract all the profits, but even a hundredth of Zuck’s net worth is obscenely wealthy).

    Populism

    I honestly do not know how much of this is due to the present day social media environment, but I’m sure it’s a significant factor. I like to think that by tuning the design of social communication tools for more thoughtful discussion, more thoughtful leaders would thrive. Barring that, if I was obscenely wealthy, I could put my thumb on the scale by less honorable means, and I like to think I wouldn’t be so terribly corrupted by the money and power as to use it for evil.

    One idea that comes to mind for political discussion is used in Pol.is and (perhaps ineffectively) Twitter community notes: surface points where people who usually disagree are in agreement.

    Protecting general purpose computing

    This one is hard to the point I’m not sure it’s achievable, but It’s so important. The obvious approach is to launch a mobile operating system, which would have to at least stay even with Android. Microsoft tried this in 2012, and that was too late despite their entry attracting some diehard fans. If I have the superior OS and majority market share, I’m in a good position to resist attempts to mandate locked bootloaders and remote attestation.

    The good news is it’s not hard to do a better job with some fundamental design decisions given perfect hindsight, and with Android being open source, it wouldn’t be hard to support Android apps. There weren’t a lot of dependencies on Google’s services in the early days.

    This one would be reliant on the social media play for capital and credibility. It would need to be well underway by 2010, which is a tight timeline, but not impossible.

    An absurdly expensive sports car

    If either of the above plays works even moderately well, I can have my 11,500 RPM redline V12 three-seater. If not, I’d still be in a position to make a bunch of money, and I’d be trying some of them in parallel.

    Nobody’s going to give a ten year old control of an investment account just because they say they have some good ideas about the stock market, but if my hypothetical parents are anything like my real ones, after a couple months of demonstrating nearly-unbelievable skill at investing fake money, I’d be able to talk them into letting me invest a couple hundred dollars of real money and snowball things from there. I’d also know which startup ideas worked, what decisions were important in their success, and which founders I wouldn’t feel bad about ripping off.

    Even as reality diverges, I think certain trends were inevitable. Social media will happen. Smartphones will happen. Streaming will happen. EVs will happen. Generative AI will probably happen, but I think I might try to push that one back a few years if I was in a position to do so. Flying cars, fusion power, and space colonies probably aren’t happening by 2025 regardless of how many butterflies flap their wings.

  • AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip
    1·
    12 hours ago

    Realize I’m somehow older than I actually would have been, would be the first thing I do. Next is do the best I can to act like a 10 year old and not cry over the fact I’m back in 4th grade again.

    Though, knowing me, I’d absolutely get caught if I’m still mentally the same person I am now. I mean, if I inhabited the body of an extrovert, I’d be doomed because the parents would go from seeing their extroverted kid become immediately introverted yet unable to care what others think of him/herself. They’d see their child suddenly become a radically different person.

    Also, ain’t no way I’d be able to make it through a few days before getting caught because I guarantee I’d be suspicious because my way of speech would absolutely slip through. There ain’t no way a 10 year old child would be spouting things like Chinese swears like NMSL or speaking Japanese words or short phrases or getting away with swearing, which if I’m still mentally me, would most likely if my internal filter comes with me on this nightmare.

    And don’t even get me started on my movements when I’m at home. I don’t always walk like a normal person when I move and I’m pretty sure that’s the autism and not being corrected by my parents.

  • Bruncvik@lemmy.world
    22·
    2 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.

      • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
        4·
        2 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

        💀

      • hddsx@lemmy.ca
        8·
        2 days ago

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

  • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
    4420·
    2 days ago

    Impossible to read a USB stick from 2025 in the year 2002.

    Impossible to read a backup of Wikipedia from 2025 in the year 2002.

    Story over.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
      312·
      2 days ago

      This is, I’m sorry to say, baloney.

      In 2002 Windows XP was already out and natively supported NTFS volumes. So did Windows 2000. XP even supported ExFAT volumes with a patch which was released in April 2001. If you’re a Linux nerd, ext2 or ext3 could easily handle the partition and file sizes required. ext2 had already been available for decades at that point and ext3 was released in 2001 and readily available by 2002.

      Without media, the current Wikipedia (according to itself) is a hair over 24 gigabytes not including images and media, which’d fit on a 32 gig flash drive that, while it would be absolutely amazing to 2002 users just based on its sheer usable volume, would handily accept a bog standard NTFS partition readable on any XP or Win2k machine.

      There were no flash storage based drives bigger than one or two gigs in 2002, but there were plenty of external USB hard drives in that era that readily exceeded the 4 gig FAT32 file size limit. I know this well because I was there at the time, and I owned several of them. You had to manually format them as NTFS to be able to use the entire capacity effectively and with large files, but they absolutely did work over USB… Just not if you bunged them into a Windows 98 or ME machine. A modern flash drive would be no different. In all practicable terms you could mount a volume up to 2.2 terabytes (i.e. round thousands) or 2.0 tebibytes (powers of two, if you can countenance sounding ridiculous for using the word “tebibyte”) in XP/2K if it were formatted NTFS without having to engage in any chicanery or third party tools. Even a ten year old could do it. You plug it in, and it’d Just Work.

      Including media the entirety of the Wikimedia Commons is something like 420 TB, which would be a challenge even today to load onto a single USB flash drive. If you were going to include the media (images and videos) these would probably have to be downscaled significantly in order to fit on any single portable drive, even current ones.

      The text content of Wikipedia would be no problem whatsoever. USB 3.0 didn’t exist yet, though, so at best you’d be chugging along loading everything at 2.0 speed if you had a compliant board and all the correct drivers for it (and were running at least Win2k service pack 4). You’d want an HTML dump, not one of their database dumps, because running the current Wikimedia software and database versions would be a challenge for sure. But a browser from 2002 shouldn’t trip up on any Wikipedia content except perhaps any .webp images (2010), or h264/h265 video content.

      You’d have a much bigger problem if OP warped you and your USB drive back to 1998 or worse, 1995.

      • Lasherz@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 days ago

        There are ways you could allow it to work, but straight out of the pack it probably would not. Also consider GPT partitions as a likelihood which weren’t around. You’d also have to flip the bit ahead of time in diskpart to treat it as a hard drive without quick removal for xp to handle it correctly I believe.

        • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          Straight out of the pack it would probably be factory formatted as ExFAT. If you had the correct patch on a Windows XP machine (KB955704) it would literally be plug and play.

          MBR’s volume size limit is 2 T(i)B. You don’t need GPT for these types of storage sizes.

          • Lasherz@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 days ago

            Ah I just tried out a new 64gb stick and you’re correct. I thought it would be EXFAT, but thought they were gpt by default. That appears to be untrue for the majority of drives according to a Google search too.

        • Dion Starfire@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          2 days ago

          Quick removal isn’t a big concern since the drive is read only. You might crash anything with an open file handle, but you don’t have to worry about data corruption.

    • vateso5074@lemmy.worldOP
      12·
      2 days ago

      For the sake of the scenario, in addition to the details listed in the body of the post, assume the USB drive is type A and is readable by any PC with a USB type A connector, regardless of generation. It can also be read regardless of file system.

      There’s an inherent supernatural element to the premise, so assume “it just works.” There can be a specialized browser on the drive as well if you feel like you wouldn’t be able to make use of the raw HTML files.

      • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
        61·
        2 days ago

        No assumptions are even required because this commenter is simply flat out wrong. See the breakdown here, or TL;DR: It would be trivial to mount a drive up to 2.2 TB (not GB, not MB…) using 2002 hardware.

        I think a bigger assumption in this scenario is that if you’re reborn as a random 10 year old holding a USB flash drive, you’ll zap to a place on the globe with ready access to a recent computer.

        • vateso5074@lemmy.worldOP
          2·
          2 days ago

          Yep. My household in 2002 had a computer, but that’s because I had a parent who worked in IT. Most people I knew at the time didn’t have one. By 2002, ~40% of the United States still did not have access to a computer at home, though the gap would keep closing year over year.

          But that’s just data for the United States. Other countries may have had lower rates of adoption at that time, and in a scenario where you would be less likely to wake up in a random household with a computer, it would require a bit more thinking to figure out how to get access to one.

          I’d probably look to schools and libraries as a place to start. If that’s not an option, then it’d be figuring out how to befriend a local rich kid who might have a computer. Otherwise, the USB is effectively a paperweight for some time and you’re left only with your memories of the future for guidance until computer access becomes more available.

          • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
            3·
            2 days ago

            Oh jeez I grew up with an engineer father and a mom who did punch card programming back in the day and just kinda assumed most people had a computer in the 90s

          • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 days ago

            That brings to mind how the fuck most of us are going to avoid spending a nice long time in mental health treatment for the sudden change of personality and loss of memory

            • vateso5074@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              1·
              2 days ago

              Yep…you have a diary which likely covers big life events and chunks of recent history, but I hope you’re a good actor.

              My thoughts were similar to what others had suggested, find some way to simulate an accident, some sort of head trauma, or a serious illness to help sell why you suddenly can’t remember much and why your personality is different. But I think a whole lot is going to require trying to be as invisible as possible for a while and try to pick up context clues from observing people around you.

              And in the scenario above, even if simply explaining your situation honestly didn’t suddenly kill you, I would hate to imagine the reaction of these parents who realize their child is effectively dead and has been replaced by some sort of fae changeling.

    • Deestan@lemmy.world
      12·
      2 days ago

      I can mount an old drive made in 2002 right now, formatted in a 2002 era format, and put text files on it, compressed with tar and gz from 1990 if need be.

      I assume that is the hardware we have to work with in this scenario.

        • Deestan@lemmy.world
          131·
          2 days ago

          A backup can mean many things. One interpretation is as text files, which works.

          Edit: actually any “backup” will work as long as the compression is pre-2002-era. After that it’s something I could work out with a hex editor worst case.

          Text content of wikipedia is 24GB compressed.

          USB drives in 2002 could hold up to 256GB.

          This isnt hard man

            • Deestan@lemmy.world
              71·
              2 days ago

              Ah, sorry this is me being actually stupid. I was looking up normal drives. My apologies.

              Yeah we’d have to filter this a bit.

              • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
                4·
                2 days ago

                I don’t know why I was expecting there would be any discussion in here other than NOOOOOO wojacking about technical feasibility rather than what you’d do with the knowledge

              • dalekcaan@feddit.nl
                2·
                2 days ago

                On that note, I’ve often wondered how big text-based Wikipedia would be if you pared it down to the most accessed articles, and cut out the articles on, say, the highest-scoring curling players from Zimbabwe in 2007.

        • Grimy@lemmy.world
          4·
          2 days ago

          We can assume whoever was smart enough to create a machine that can transport your consciousness into the past so it can inhabited that of a random child (murder btw), was also smart enough to transform the usb data into something that could be read and used in 2002.

    • ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      61·
      2 days ago

      I doubt even the max number of USB 1.1 devices per bus can hold the size of current Wikipedia. (Quick Google shows ~4TB usb3.2 drives. And 127 individual devices. Gives you Max 508TB. In 2023 the size of everything in Wikipedia was ~430TB. )

    • benderation@lemmy.zip
      1·
      1 day ago

      This doesn’t make sense to me. You’re saying that if you had a 2002 computer to work with today, it’d be impossible to make a device that plugs into the USB port, can be read by the computer, and can store many gigabytes?

      I mean, surely you can put a little computer in the device that emulates exactly what the 2002 computer expects.

    • ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 days ago

      I don’t know about the formatting of Wikipedia but SD cards were on the market in 2002, so a micro SD card in a flash drive adapter would be possible, no?

      • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        People in this thread are grossly overshooting when they’re assuming various technologies became available. USB flash drives absolutely existed in 2002. Not very big ones, by modern standards, but I personally owned a one gigabyte USB 2.0 drive in 2002 for which I paid many dollars. It allowed me to retain my title as king of the campus for several months.

        • ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 days ago

          My computer hard drive was 8 gigs at that time, so I totally get that an era appropriate flash drive that could hold Wikipedia wouldn’t be possible. I was assuming that it would be a flash drive from the future (or present depending on perspective).

    • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      2 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·
      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·
        1 day 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·
        1 day 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.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      2 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
      3·
      2 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
    121·
    2 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·
      2 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.

  • stoly@lemmy.world
    6·
    2 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
    4·
    2 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.

  • slakje@piefed.socialEnglish
    8·
    2 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.

  • 🦄🦄🦄@feddit.org
    61·
    2 days ago

    I would do anything to start transitioning before testosterone has a chance to wreck my body…

    • vateso5074@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      Well you’re in luck, one bonus of the scenario is stipulated in the body of the post!

      Your biological sex matches your gender identity (flip a coin if you are enby)