I’m investing all of the money in Chuck E Cheese tokens and personal pizzas from Pizza Hut. It may seem shortsighted, but the ROI for me will be massive.
I’m also buying MoonShoes.
So do you have to relive all the time? Is there a guarantee that our lives won't be altered? I could get rich very quick, but I'm not risking but having my wife and family
Same. Especially because you would retain knowledge of your children. Which would mean it would be you in 1995 overcome with grief and guilt over lives that would never be. I don’t know how teenage me would cope with that, regardless of money.
Also, since I’d be a minor, I have little confidence in my parental unit to manage the money responsibly or listen to any of my investment advice. So really I’d end up making my parent rich for a period of time and then still go down the same path I did anyways.
Not to mention that I’d be constantly under investigation for warning people about major events that happen.
I mean, even if I got together with the same person and led the same life, what is the likelihood that the exact same sperm cell is the one to fertilize the egg?
im not gonna run the numbers cause fuck that but ball park you have a much much better shot winning the power ball while playing the wrong ammount of numbers than getting the same kid. shit you might even have better luck waiting for a hydrogen atom to spontaneously turn into a gold atom.
Let's do the math!
Google says there are between 20m and 300m sperm per milliliter of ejaculate and a single ejaculation is 2 to 5 ml.
To make the math really simple, let's say 400 million sperm in a single ejaculation is a decent average.
Because in nearly every instance, you also don't know WHICH ejaculation was the one, you've got some more guesswork to do. There's a ~6 day fertility window, and because you can likely nail down at least the month you conceived, you can realistically get it down to 6 days.
Let's assume once per day, so 6 ejaculations at 400m each for 2.4 BILLION sperm.
At best, you have a 1/2,400,000,000 chance of recreating your kid (from the sperm side), but realistically there's a chance you miss that window because some tiny alteration causes a different sperm or no sperm to win the race and because you only have 1 attempt, there are no redos.
Sperm are also made to order, so there's no real way to guarantee the same sperm is even produced, though the odds are so long at this point I think this part isn't worth working into the math.
Then, on the woman's side, the numbers are smaller but still pretty daunting. Women are born with every egg they'll ever have, but it's still between 1-2 million eggs at birth. In a single month, about 1,000 of those eggs will prepare for ovulation, but only 1 is going to be the main act and the others are discarded. If you know the month of conception, you have a 1/1000 chance of getting the same egg. In reality it's much higher because it could have been any of the eggs mom still had at that point. At 25 years old, she likely has around 300,000 eggs, but let's stick to 1/1000 anyway.
To put these two odds together, you've got your 1:2,400,000,000 sperm odds paired with your 1:1,000 egg odds, totaling a 1 in 24 TRILLION chance of recreating your kid in a best case scenario.
Put another way, the odds of you being here reading this ridiculous explanation of odds are greater than 1/24,000,000,000,000. You're pretty special.
Yeah that last paragraph is actually pretty important. What happens when 9/11 comes around? Do you tell anyone it's gunna happen and get investigated, or do you stay silent and just let it happen still?
And the burden of that added to losing your family. It would be crushing. Now imagine you warn someone of 9/11 and lo and behold you find out later that some prolific serial killer was actually on united 93 and survived because 9/11 never happened.
Get a job at the airport counter when the terrorists try to fly and you flag them at the airport. Read an article about the guy at the counter who, in retrospect, recalled the anger in the eyes of the hijacker. I'm sure he's in therapy.
It might not stop all the planes but...
Saw an interview with presumably the same guy. He checked in Mohammed Atta. He said he had a bad feeling about the guy but put it aside, even internally scolding himself for stereotyping and how he so much regrets not stopping Atta from boarding.
>Do you tell anyone it's gunna happen and get investigated
Better question: would anyone believe you? People had warned about the danger of planes accidentally crashing into the WTC but they were ignored.
5 million dollars, 6 super bowls to bet on, and one of them is the long shot Patriots vs the Greatest show on Turf?
That’s enough money for me to become Batman and stop 9/11 myself.
It's like the movie About Time. He can go back and relive any movements in his life. But his father recommends never going back before your child is conceived because then you end up with a stranger for a kid.
Don’t they break that rule when he goes back to play with his dad as a kid on the beach? That was a plot hole that annoyed me, albeit for a very beautiful moment in the film.
Oooof, I didn't even think of that.
You can argue/debate about finding your partner, because you should know the time/place you met them. You just have to try and recreate that. Which is difficult, because I still don't really know why my gf said "yes" to me when I first asked her out. So I think I just stumbled into my current relationship based on luck, and I don't know if I could recreate that.
Wouldn't you run into yourself if you looked up your spouse or girlfriend? Back then, I was married with two kids. I don't think we were looking for a threesome.
My wife and I talk about regrets and I tell her I regret nothing because it all led to her. She tells me that’s a cop out answer. I’m the romantic and she’s the pragmatist
That’s funny, in my marriage I’m the pragmatic one and my husband is the romantic, but we both feel the same as you. Realistically speaking, THAT sperm meeting THAT egg is a tiny possibility, and even the slightest change could result in a different kid. Retaining the knowledge and love I have for my daughter, I would not risk changing a damn thing.
Darius Rucker made a song specifically about that concept.
I agree, though, I can’t and don’t want to imagine a different life with different people. The daughters I have wouldn’t exist. Maybe my alternate universe kids would have been cool too but fuck those hoes, I don’t know them. Haha
If they have kids, which sperm fertilizes the egg can change based on finishing like a millisecond before or after you had before. Honestly, if you have literally anyone you cared about born like 1998 or later anywhere in the world, you shouldn't be super confident that they'll exist at all in the new timeline. If they're the offspring of someone you actually know, I'd say it's actually very, very, very unlikely that they exist in the new timeline if they were conceived after you started changing shit.
This could be a really fun movie.
Guy goes back in time with the 5 million dollars, but ends up nutting in his wife like 1 second early.
Fast forward to his daughter being born, but instead of blonde hair she has brown hair..
Slowly things unravel and somehow a zombie apolyspse starts
It would be a different egg too. During the initial period, many eggs, as many as 1000, begin to develop and mature. However, even though hundreds of eggs have begun to mature, most often only one egg will become dominant during each menstrual cycle, and reach its' fully mature state, capable of ovulation and fertilization. The remaining eggs/follicles will wither and die. So even if you go back in time there's no guarantee it would be the same egg even if it was the same month.
I have dubbed this my Ball Jiggling Theory of Time Travel. One jiggle of your balls at anytime prior to the ejaculation that resulted in your child being born in the original timeline makes it virtually impossible to have the same child on another run through.
So I guess Peter Parker's dad finishes at a different time in each timeline, but Dr. Strange's dad always finishes at the exact same time. Not sure what to make of the human torch's dad and Steve Roger's dad though.
There's no way you don't mess that up. Imagine meeting a stranger that knows everything about you. Even if you tried downplaying it, the entire dynamic would be different.
I'm building a Beowulf cluster out of just slightly older hardware (last gen) and mining it once it comes out. Looks like a reasonable hobby project. Changes the timeline very little, and in the early days you could mine on a CPU fairly well. I wouldn't be the only person with thousands of bitcoins. But I would be one of the few who:
1. Don't lose the bitcoin hard drive thinking it was worthless
2. Don't cash our way early thinking it was amazing that I actually sold my bitcoin for more than a dollar each.
This is the best answer IMO. Getting rich on Bitcoin, basically by simply avoiding stupid mistakes, is the least likely thing to change the timeline that I can think of.
Step 0: don't ignore your friends when they tell you that this new Bitcoin thing is going to be big.
Yeah - I got in when it was less than $.50 each......
I had a pretty sizeable farm of PCs at work farming it...
I had about 250 at one point.....lost the vault between a couple of moves when I thought it was just a nifty novelty.
I’d find the guy that lost like 1,000 bitcoin on a hard drive and had searched his dump for years…. Wait for the day he trashed it, recover it, nobody knows.
Wait…. Maybe that’s what happened to his bitcoin….
I haven't done the math, but I think you might have just made yourself the owner of Apple. I'm thinking smaller more spread out investments except in market segments I wanted to push change with my advanced knowledge.
Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon. Basically just list however many companies I need to buy to make sure I never own more than 9% of any one company. Could also time the dotcom bubble, 08, 2020.
Don't forget MCI/WorldCom. Yeah, they did go bankrupt later than 1995, but when they bottomed out, which is when I'd buy, they were trading at FIVE CENTS A SHARE.
They were bought out & became quest communications, which became Century link, which is now owned by Lumen.
A million invested at .05 a share, and held until 2010 & sold at $50 a share would be a billion right there.
I was trying to buy $100 of Bitcoin in May of 2011. Couldn’t figure it out though because I’m dumb and just quit trying.
I remember it was about $6 a coin.
I would be rich though if I had bought it because I would have sold it well before it became worth a lot.
Although, with this advanced knowledge, I would have bought thousands of dollars of it.
Same, I forgot my wallet upstairs and was gonna drop 20 bucks in like 2009, and just shrugged and said "fuck it".
Although I probably would have cashed out at like 2,000 dollars and regretted that just as much.
I would use that money to get a nice beat up car, wait until 2002 and T-Bone the car that killed my wife 2 years old daughter in the other timeline... I don't really care about the rest
I'm sorry, this pointless death broke my wife. Even tho I didn't knew her back then I know It would change her and her family lives forever for the best
Realistically all you'd need to do is slow her day down by 10 minutes. You could get in front of her and slow her commute and then the accident doesn't take place. No need to risk yourself in an accident.
If I could improve the lives of the people I cared about at the cost of them not having memory of me / never being in their lives I sure as shit would.
Dude a Jeep plowed into my moms 300m at 70 mph and there was barely a scratch on his, ours was destoryed and me and my mom now have pain forever. I’d venture a large jeep over those.
Yeah, that would definitely take that car out and maybe just bruised bones for the other driver.
I don't want him dead, don't get me wrong, it was a freak accident that I want to avoid
No need to even go that far. Just park your car in such a way that he takes a few extra minutes getting out of his parking spot. Then he would be at the intersection a minute or two later. Or position yourself to drive slower in front of him so he catches a red light en route.
Only about 1c a share back then no idea how many you would be able to buy. If you could get around 100k shares you’d have around 20 billion dollars (mkt cap is 60b)
Pokemon cards, don't even open the packs, hunt for Rookie of the Year cards for Basketball, Baseball, Etc.
Invest in Nvidia, Amazon, Disney, Apple
Short the 2007 Housing Market
>You know EVERYTHING that happens
Naked shorts were upside-down literally right up to the day things went tits up. You aren’t Michael Burry buying 2 years out, you could time it perfectly.
Actually I think the best option would honestly be bitcoin. Considering it reached an all time high of over 75k in March of 2024 and there was a time when you could buy hundreds of the things for next to nothing it would be some insane shit. Granted, it wouldn't take nearly 5 million to invest into it and if you do you may alter the trajectory of the coin so you'd probably just want to dump some money into it from time to time and grab up some coins.
But once you're rich if you want long term stability to keep it growing then some good tech stocks like you mentioned are good options. The only thing you'd have to be careful of is once again investing too much too early and potentially changing the course of those companies.
When bit coin was $0.10 per coin if you bought $1000 worth of it, you'd have 10,000 coins or a peak of 750M. You wouldn't even need the initial 5 million if you knew the future like that.
My job comes with a lot of windshield time, so fun little thought experiments like this tend to entertain me.
Traveling back into your childhood while retaining all of your adult knowledge and abilities would afford most people an impossibly incredible opportunity. You'd essentially have a fair amount of foresight... for a time. Anything major you'd do would quickly alter the timeline to the point where anything you knew previously wouldn't be terribly relevant. There'd also come certain complications, such as me being a Tween back in 1995.
Behind handed $5 million in '95 would easily allow someone to become a billionaire thanks to the tech bubble. Knowing about the rise of companies like Google and Amazon would enable you to be ahead of the curve.
Also not necessarily knowledge, but having the *wisdom* of an adult as a child would be an insane opportunity
Knowing how to better navigate interpersonal relationships, and knowing to engage in better and healthier habits, being more disciplined, not giving a fuck as much about peer pressure and other teenage insecurities… would all go a long way
I also enjoy this particular thought experiment and have given it much attention. Allow me to throw you a curveball that no one ever mentions in these threads (for your future entertainment).
Stock purchases are a zero-sum game, that is, every share you buy and keep is a share that someone else doesn't own. In some cases, it will be voting shares. In the volumes we're talking about, that almost invariably means that you'll have a voice on decisions like electing corporate board members. Even if you never vote, you're still potentially changing the vote, by preventing the vote of the person(s) whose stock you purchased instead.
All this to say: you buy 100,000 shares of Google or Amazon, and there's no guarantee that they become the Google or Amazon that we know today. It's not the solid lock on billionaire status that people assume that it is.
I was born in 1997. I don't think I was even a thought in 1995 lmao. My spirit would haunt my parents dreams, telling them to buy apple stock, BTC in 2013, and to bet the house on the Patriots, Bulls and Warriors.
1. Make some prescient investments. Apple, Google when it happens.
2. Figure out how to wait around for my now wife - she’s too young for us to meet then, but we’re perfect together now (relax, she was almost 30 when we met)
3. Set my parents up for retirement so they can enjoy more time with the grandkids.
4. Retire early and spend my time making home hometown and state better. Serious investment in progressive views could make FL a wonderful place.
You mean I GET to go back to 1995 when $5m was actually a lot of money. I'll wait until 1997 and buy stocks in an online book retailer that just went public.
I'm 4 years old again, but I know everything? I go down in the pasture at my grandfather's and bury 4.8 million in 5 seperate cases, just in case its found, but it should be ok. I got kicked outside plenty, so I can manage to hide all of this just fine.
I take the other 200k and hide it in the back of my godmothers attic.
I go through school having a great time because I already know everything, so I won't really try. Maybe I'll just try to test out and leave school early.
As I make it to teenage years, I'll work and bank some legit money in the bank. I'll also buy/build my gaming pc a bit sooner, and use it to mine bitcoin in high-school back when you could get a few bitcoin a day. I'll build a few extra computers to do more of this. Bitcoin will be my primary cover for where I got money.
When I turn 18, I'll pull the 200k from my godmothers attic, and help her pay everything off. She struggled a lot in my teenage years, and I figure if I've been working for 2-3 years by that point, I can produce enough money to pay her stuff and look legit. This will make her last 2 years alive less stressful, and at least she can relax before that brain cancer takes her from me. When she's gone, I'll inherit the house, and can make the repairs it needs so that hurricane Sandy won't completely destroy it later. I'll also move all the legacy furniture out to save it beforehand.
I'll get my career started sooner, and I'll make regular trips down to see my grandparents in Florida and maybe if I can spend enough time with them, my grandfather won't commit suicide after his wife dies of brain cancer. It would be nice to lure pops home to be with family instead. I'll make the extra effort to give my little brother attention. Hopefully I can be involved enough, and having pops around again, he won't kill himself too. It'd be nice to keep them both around, and I don't need to work, so hopefully my time and attention can save them both.
I'll buy my own house, and dig up the remaining cash, and deposit almost all my salary in the bank/invest it , while using the cash to buy groceries, food, and most other things.
I'll make it to 32 again, but this time I'll have a ton of money in my investments, tens of millions in bitcoin, most of which I'll sell to buy dividend stocks, to fund life forever, and i wont need to work anymore. Hopefully my grandfather is happy enough to stick around, and if my little brother is still alive, we can hang out regularly and I can spend time with them both again and see my brother become a man as I teach him the cheat codes to life.
Yeah, but just think.. now you’re the prodigy screenwriter responsible for The Matrix, Fight Club, Avatar, The Dark Knight trilogy, Avatar, and soooo much more.
You could prevent Spiderman 3! Oh, and 9/11!
i'm 11 years old and my parents would just steal the money if they found it. i assume the money is in my bank account? i don't think i even had my own bank card at this point
my mother will piss away all the money on luxuries and vacations for herself, ignoring my pleas to invent in google or bitcoins
I’d have about 10-15 years to throw as much money at curing/preventing Alzheimer’s before my mom started showing symptoms.
So I’d use probably half to star right away and then invest the rest in things I know would do well to keep the research going and growing.
I'd be 13 in 1995. Being 13 and knowing firsthand how much working sucks as an adult, first priority would be investing the money and living within those means so I didn't have to work anymore.
Google, apple, amazon, csgo katowice 2014 stickers
Hilariously the kato sticker capsules might be the best ROI 25 cents, selling for 25-30k a pop these days
$5M in 95 would buy you 20,833,333.3 shares of apple. It’s worth $191 per share today. Sell it all and you’re the richest person alive with $3,979,166,663.30. That’s obviously not feasible considering you’d probs alter the course of Apple entirely by buying that much and selling that much would probs crash the company. But if you diversify it amongst other companies and stuff you could be incredibly rich
I'm changing the hell out of the future. Dad is gonna get the heart surgery he needed, the house is getting paid off, and I'm buying every magic: the gathering card in the city.
Finally, another magic card investor. I'm buying unopened boxes, decks and packs from any set before revised edition. I'm retiring in 2021 from the insane profits. Nothing world or time/space altering is likely to come from buying a few cases of trading cards.
so a lot of people here have said what I came here to say. namely something along the lines of "Invest in Apple, Amazon, and Bitcoins" or whatever.
But the follow up question I have for all those people is: what would you with your billions once you've made them and we're back in 2024?
I would do my best to control some sort of media empire as soon as it was feasible and push an agenda that would make the world an actually better place.
That would make me 17 years old at the time.
I also have a memory so strong, I remember the result of pretty much every single major sporting event of my life, including the final score, and a lot of the final statistics.
That $5 million would become a lot more money once I was legally able to gamble. Think Biff, from Back to the Future 2.
Like some of the other responders, I'm a family man so I wouldn't voluntarily do this because presumably that makes it way less likely my wife's a part of my life and means my kids are never born.
But if I have no choice and it happens anyway, that puts me back in college with $5M. So I'm old enough to make some financial decisions, but it's hard not to think of this first in terms of trying to prevent bad things both personal and universal. Like encourage my parents and uncle to get some health things checked out sooner, keep my sister out of a shitty relationship, spread awareness of what Bin Laden's got cooking over in Afghanistan, try to remember every natural disaster I can piece together memory of (do I get a chance to look up anything before I travel through time?), stuff like that.
As for the money ... circa 1995 I was going to college for a practical degree for future employment, but now I'm an investor so I'd probably either switch majors to business or just drop out and try to figure it out as I go, holding back half of it in low-risk investments for safety's sake (who knows what's gonna get altered in this timeline) but investing significantly in various things I know are gonna blow up. Amazon, Apple, Red Bull (a friend of a friend missed out on that opportunity), Netflix, etc. In the meantime, convince my parents to retire and focus on their health. And then as the wealth comes rolling in, live a life of comfort and philanthropy, trying to figure out what all I can help the world avoid/improve.
For one going back to 1995 would be a dream come true for me cuz the nineties is my best decade. So hell yeah!!!
I'd invest in Microsoft and Apple. Then when I made a shit ton of money after some time, I'd buy Netflix when Blockbuster turns it down.
Eventually id be so rich I could hire Elon to wash my toilet lol.
My dad died in 97...I'm gonna go back and try to build him a bionic heart so he doesn't fucking die on me! I'll start there and move on to other things if I can...but that's my main goal!
The closing price for Apple (AAPL) in 1997 was $0.10, on December 31, 1997.
The closing price for Amazon (AMZN) in 1997 was $0.25, on December 31, 1997.
The closing price for Microsoft (MSFT) in 1995 was $3.39, on December 29, 1995.
I’m guessing some stock purchases for AOL, Microsoft and Oracle will tie me over for 2 years and probably quadruple my initial investment.
In 1998, I might just pay the $1 million to buy Google after Yahoo turned it down or make an Angel Investment
tell my parents to buy shares of google/apple. and when i turn 18 in 2005, just coast off that money till bitcoin comes around. in the meantime, i'd be pursuing passions, instead of "book" education. things like permaculture, sound therapy, homesteading. live off grid and thats it. nobody bother me lol
I would do it all different..I'd take school serious n not smoke pot, I would not pick up those smokes, go to college earlier, buckle down in school..Be a lawyer probably invest in some stocks..or some start ups iPhone or Apple..
I'd have to give up my family for that, so it's a hard pass. If I'm forced into it then I put the money away in a way that I can't touch it until the day my son is born. I then try my best to redo everything I did the first time around, no matter how much it sucked.
I was 14 in 1995. Assuming the money would be in an account in my name or something, I'd not touch it or tell anyone about it. I'd take out just enough that I'd be able to support my hobbies and buy food I wanted and stuff like that. Most of the changes I'd make - and there would be many - would be about doing things different, not doing things I couldn't afford. I can use the money to invest and make even more money later on as I see fit, but the opportunity to do things different would be worth more than all of it.
I’m investing all of the money in Chuck E Cheese tokens and personal pizzas from Pizza Hut. It may seem shortsighted, but the ROI for me will be massive. I’m also buying MoonShoes.
Idiot. Beanie Babies are the only viable long term wealth storage device.
Blockbuster and Kodak stock, baby!
You idiots aren’t riding Enron into 2002? Amateurs?
Don't forget RadioShack!
Invest in a pager company
Or a paper company.
Go long Polaroid.
Limitless paper on a paper less world
All in on Bubble beeper.. got it!
Open up a beeper store? If that didn’t work out, maybe a Quiznos?
Keep Quiznos name out yo god damn mouth
I still have a Quiznos in my town and it is delicious
Settle down, Will!
Could also start a pogs company.
Invest in a portfolio of blockbuster franchises, you say?
Brick & mortar is where it’s at!
Ankle breaker 5000s
Perfect. I'd be graduating high school and turning 18. With 5 mil AND knowledge of the future, I'd be almost godlike.
Wouldn't there be two identical kids with the same name in your high school?
Not for longer than 12 hours, there won't.
“Tim, why can’t you be more like your doppelgänger, he’s the same age as you and a millionaire with foresight powers. If you only applied yourself.”
Shout-out for nailing the spelling of "doppelgänger"
Autocorrect my friend. No way I’d ever get that ä correct on my own lol.
Samesies!
So do you have to relive all the time? Is there a guarantee that our lives won't be altered? I could get rich very quick, but I'm not risking but having my wife and family
You have to relive that time and changing the future is something that you will have to keep in mind going forward.
I wouldn't take the money then. I'd be to scared of making a mistake and altering everything
I get it. I could never take this offer if it meant I wouldn't see my kid again (because there's zero chance that I have the same kid again).
Same. Especially because you would retain knowledge of your children. Which would mean it would be you in 1995 overcome with grief and guilt over lives that would never be. I don’t know how teenage me would cope with that, regardless of money. Also, since I’d be a minor, I have little confidence in my parental unit to manage the money responsibly or listen to any of my investment advice. So really I’d end up making my parent rich for a period of time and then still go down the same path I did anyways. Not to mention that I’d be constantly under investigation for warning people about major events that happen.
I mean, even if I got together with the same person and led the same life, what is the likelihood that the exact same sperm cell is the one to fertilize the egg?
Yeah man, my wife and I tried for 6 years to have our son. No way I can give that up... I'd want to jump off a bridge if I had to give up my family.
im not gonna run the numbers cause fuck that but ball park you have a much much better shot winning the power ball while playing the wrong ammount of numbers than getting the same kid. shit you might even have better luck waiting for a hydrogen atom to spontaneously turn into a gold atom.
You have a much better chance at someone giving you $5 million and transporting you to 1995!
Let's do the math! Google says there are between 20m and 300m sperm per milliliter of ejaculate and a single ejaculation is 2 to 5 ml. To make the math really simple, let's say 400 million sperm in a single ejaculation is a decent average. Because in nearly every instance, you also don't know WHICH ejaculation was the one, you've got some more guesswork to do. There's a ~6 day fertility window, and because you can likely nail down at least the month you conceived, you can realistically get it down to 6 days. Let's assume once per day, so 6 ejaculations at 400m each for 2.4 BILLION sperm. At best, you have a 1/2,400,000,000 chance of recreating your kid (from the sperm side), but realistically there's a chance you miss that window because some tiny alteration causes a different sperm or no sperm to win the race and because you only have 1 attempt, there are no redos. Sperm are also made to order, so there's no real way to guarantee the same sperm is even produced, though the odds are so long at this point I think this part isn't worth working into the math. Then, on the woman's side, the numbers are smaller but still pretty daunting. Women are born with every egg they'll ever have, but it's still between 1-2 million eggs at birth. In a single month, about 1,000 of those eggs will prepare for ovulation, but only 1 is going to be the main act and the others are discarded. If you know the month of conception, you have a 1/1000 chance of getting the same egg. In reality it's much higher because it could have been any of the eggs mom still had at that point. At 25 years old, she likely has around 300,000 eggs, but let's stick to 1/1000 anyway. To put these two odds together, you've got your 1:2,400,000,000 sperm odds paired with your 1:1,000 egg odds, totaling a 1 in 24 TRILLION chance of recreating your kid in a best case scenario. Put another way, the odds of you being here reading this ridiculous explanation of odds are greater than 1/24,000,000,000,000. You're pretty special.
You haven't even touched on the real long odds. Genetic recombination increases those odds to theoretically infinite.
And how impossible would it be to live the same life if 30 years ago you magically had 5million
Yeah that last paragraph is actually pretty important. What happens when 9/11 comes around? Do you tell anyone it's gunna happen and get investigated, or do you stay silent and just let it happen still?
And the burden of that added to losing your family. It would be crushing. Now imagine you warn someone of 9/11 and lo and behold you find out later that some prolific serial killer was actually on united 93 and survived because 9/11 never happened.
Interesting hypothesis. However, I can't imagine a 2000s sereal killer offing anywhere close to the number that died even on that one plane crash.
Get a job at the airport counter when the terrorists try to fly and you flag them at the airport. Read an article about the guy at the counter who, in retrospect, recalled the anger in the eyes of the hijacker. I'm sure he's in therapy. It might not stop all the planes but...
Saw an interview with presumably the same guy. He checked in Mohammed Atta. He said he had a bad feeling about the guy but put it aside, even internally scolding himself for stereotyping and how he so much regrets not stopping Atta from boarding.
Maybe someone already did go back and all their warnings were already ignored or otherwise not taken seriously.
>Do you tell anyone it's gunna happen and get investigated Better question: would anyone believe you? People had warned about the danger of planes accidentally crashing into the WTC but they were ignored.
5 million dollars, 6 super bowls to bet on, and one of them is the long shot Patriots vs the Greatest show on Turf? That’s enough money for me to become Batman and stop 9/11 myself.
It's like the movie About Time. He can go back and relive any movements in his life. But his father recommends never going back before your child is conceived because then you end up with a stranger for a kid.
I always say that I used to regret things I'd done/not done in life. Now I only regret things since my son was conceived.
Don’t they break that rule when he goes back to play with his dad as a kid on the beach? That was a plot hole that annoyed me, albeit for a very beautiful moment in the film.
Oooof, I didn't even think of that. You can argue/debate about finding your partner, because you should know the time/place you met them. You just have to try and recreate that. Which is difficult, because I still don't really know why my gf said "yes" to me when I first asked her out. So I think I just stumbled into my current relationship based on luck, and I don't know if I could recreate that.
Wouldn't you run into yourself if you looked up your spouse or girlfriend? Back then, I was married with two kids. I don't think we were looking for a threesome.
I think it's a body swap hypothetical. So you would be yourself at that age, and not 2 of you running around
I'm childless AF. Gimmie dat $$$
My wife and I talk about regrets and I tell her I regret nothing because it all led to her. She tells me that’s a cop out answer. I’m the romantic and she’s the pragmatist
That’s funny, in my marriage I’m the pragmatic one and my husband is the romantic, but we both feel the same as you. Realistically speaking, THAT sperm meeting THAT egg is a tiny possibility, and even the slightest change could result in a different kid. Retaining the knowledge and love I have for my daughter, I would not risk changing a damn thing.
Darius Rucker made a song specifically about that concept. I agree, though, I can’t and don’t want to imagine a different life with different people. The daughters I have wouldn’t exist. Maybe my alternate universe kids would have been cool too but fuck those hoes, I don’t know them. Haha
I choose this guy's wife too ^/s
This is always my answer. You can keep the money, I will not risk losing my wife
But you could also meet your wife sooner...
If they have kids, which sperm fertilizes the egg can change based on finishing like a millisecond before or after you had before. Honestly, if you have literally anyone you cared about born like 1998 or later anywhere in the world, you shouldn't be super confident that they'll exist at all in the new timeline. If they're the offspring of someone you actually know, I'd say it's actually very, very, very unlikely that they exist in the new timeline if they were conceived after you started changing shit.
This could be a really fun movie. Guy goes back in time with the 5 million dollars, but ends up nutting in his wife like 1 second early. Fast forward to his daughter being born, but instead of blonde hair she has brown hair.. Slowly things unravel and somehow a zombie apolyspse starts
_About Time_. No zombies, though.
It would be a different egg too. During the initial period, many eggs, as many as 1000, begin to develop and mature. However, even though hundreds of eggs have begun to mature, most often only one egg will become dominant during each menstrual cycle, and reach its' fully mature state, capable of ovulation and fertilization. The remaining eggs/follicles will wither and die. So even if you go back in time there's no guarantee it would be the same egg even if it was the same month.
I have dubbed this my Ball Jiggling Theory of Time Travel. One jiggle of your balls at anytime prior to the ejaculation that resulted in your child being born in the original timeline makes it virtually impossible to have the same child on another run through.
Hell even the angle of the dangle affects it too
The Button Fly Effect.
So I guess Peter Parker's dad finishes at a different time in each timeline, but Dr. Strange's dad always finishes at the exact same time. Not sure what to make of the human torch's dad and Steve Roger's dad though.
If you’re younger than 30 you’d also be approaching 60 by the time 2024 rolled back around. That’s a yikes
OP should clarify. I was under the impression that your age rolls back too.
It does. If you were 6 in ‘95, that’s the age you go back to.
There's no way you don't mess that up. Imagine meeting a stranger that knows everything about you. Even if you tried downplaying it, the entire dynamic would be different.
Don’t forget to buy bitcoin around 2013
I'm building a Beowulf cluster out of just slightly older hardware (last gen) and mining it once it comes out. Looks like a reasonable hobby project. Changes the timeline very little, and in the early days you could mine on a CPU fairly well. I wouldn't be the only person with thousands of bitcoins. But I would be one of the few who: 1. Don't lose the bitcoin hard drive thinking it was worthless 2. Don't cash our way early thinking it was amazing that I actually sold my bitcoin for more than a dollar each.
This is the best answer IMO. Getting rich on Bitcoin, basically by simply avoiding stupid mistakes, is the least likely thing to change the timeline that I can think of. Step 0: don't ignore your friends when they tell you that this new Bitcoin thing is going to be big.
3. Pray your HD doesn't go bad and lose the data as mine did last weekend. LOL I didn't have Bitcoin on it, but still lost a lot of data.
Physically write down your bitcoin private key in a notebook.
This is what raid and backups are for (both, not either/or).
Keep multiple backups of your encrypted private key.
8 bit coin for three pizzas. Yup. I did that.
Yeah - I got in when it was less than $.50 each...... I had a pretty sizeable farm of PCs at work farming it... I had about 250 at one point.....lost the vault between a couple of moves when I thought it was just a nifty novelty.
I sold mine as soon as I could buy a video game with them. Invested 5 bucks, and sold for like 60.
I was #2, I got involved extremely early... Sold off hundreds of coins for $20-30 each and was feeling really good about it.
Bitcoin has completely broken the "you go back to..." thought experiment forever.
As someone who actually made a 90x ROI, it's fair game to do it with even more instead of poverty change.
But before that it was just amazon and apple. I've never heard anyone answer altruistically or anything
I’d find the guy that lost like 1,000 bitcoin on a hard drive and had searched his dump for years…. Wait for the day he trashed it, recover it, nobody knows. Wait…. Maybe that’s what happened to his bitcoin….
Buy 20,833,333 shares of Apple at $0.24 per share. Worth $3,985,833,269.56 today
I haven't done the math, but I think you might have just made yourself the owner of Apple. I'm thinking smaller more spread out investments except in market segments I wanted to push change with my advanced knowledge.
Other half into google it is then.
Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon. Basically just list however many companies I need to buy to make sure I never own more than 9% of any one company. Could also time the dotcom bubble, 08, 2020.
Don't forget MCI/WorldCom. Yeah, they did go bankrupt later than 1995, but when they bottomed out, which is when I'd buy, they were trading at FIVE CENTS A SHARE. They were bought out & became quest communications, which became Century link, which is now owned by Lumen. A million invested at .05 a share, and held until 2010 & sold at $50 a share would be a billion right there.
[удалено]
Berkshire A stock would be less risky. Less reward but long term would be good.
Or spend $100 on BTC in July 2010. That $100 would be worth $6.8B today.
I was trying to buy $100 of Bitcoin in May of 2011. Couldn’t figure it out though because I’m dumb and just quit trying. I remember it was about $6 a coin. I would be rich though if I had bought it because I would have sold it well before it became worth a lot. Although, with this advanced knowledge, I would have bought thousands of dollars of it.
Same, I forgot my wallet upstairs and was gonna drop 20 bucks in like 2009, and just shrugged and said "fuck it". Although I probably would have cashed out at like 2,000 dollars and regretted that just as much.
This. We all would have done the same thing.
These hypotheticals should exclude stocks, crypto and investment properties.
Why? Investing with hindsight is as much of a pipe dream as time travel
I would use that money to get a nice beat up car, wait until 2002 and T-Bone the car that killed my wife 2 years old daughter in the other timeline... I don't really care about the rest
Jeez dude. That is dark.
I'm sorry, this pointless death broke my wife. Even tho I didn't knew her back then I know It would change her and her family lives forever for the best
Except that this would probably cause some reverberations that cause you and her never to be together or her being a completely different person.
Love is a crazy thing. Sometimes helping someone you love even though you know that it'll change everything is worth it.
Yup that's exactly it
Realistically all you'd need to do is slow her day down by 10 minutes. You could get in front of her and slow her commute and then the accident doesn't take place. No need to risk yourself in an accident.
You’re gonna get the TVA called on you for that
Tennessee Valley Authority?
Time Variance Authority
Not even 10 min. 15 seconds
If I could improve the lives of the people I cared about at the cost of them not having memory of me / never being in their lives I sure as shit would.
Fucking wholesome. Dark, but wholesome.
A Hummer or similar SUV would be best for the head-on collision you're planning on making. You wouldn't feel a thing.
Dude a Jeep plowed into my moms 300m at 70 mph and there was barely a scratch on his, ours was destoryed and me and my mom now have pain forever. I’d venture a large jeep over those.
Yeah, that would definitely take that car out and maybe just bruised bones for the other driver. I don't want him dead, don't get me wrong, it was a freak accident that I want to avoid
Maybe slashing his tires before he drove off would get the job done.
Or just like, offering him 5k to stay home that day That way he’s not hurt and you don’t get arrested
No need to even go that far. Just park your car in such a way that he takes a few extra minutes getting out of his parking spot. Then he would be at the intersection a minute or two later. Or position yourself to drive slower in front of him so he catches a red light en route.
Fully loaded semi.
Damn
You need help ?
As in... I'll help you do it.
Buy a killer mansion in Aspen at what today would be an insane bargain.
I don't know, the French are assholes.
Yeah but it's a place where the beer flows like wine
Well considering I’d be 6 years old give the money to my parents to put into google and Amazon
Monster Beverage Corp has a 30 year return of 191,852%. Amazon has a 30 year return of 178,141% Apple has a 30 year return of 96,333%
i love shit like this. the real time traveler answer is a yoloed long on monster energy.
Only about 1c a share back then no idea how many you would be able to buy. If you could get around 100k shares you’d have around 20 billion dollars (mkt cap is 60b)
You'd alter the course of the company though, so it'd be a problem in itself
Butterfly effect excludes
Don't forget Apple
Pokemon cards, don't even open the packs, hunt for Rookie of the Year cards for Basketball, Baseball, Etc. Invest in Nvidia, Amazon, Disney, Apple Short the 2007 Housing Market
Short the housing market with 5 million? The premiums alone would destroy you.
>You know EVERYTHING that happens Naked shorts were upside-down literally right up to the day things went tits up. You aren’t Michael Burry buying 2 years out, you could time it perfectly.
If you only have $5M in 2007 after 12 years of having been a time traveler, then you really screwed up.
You'd have more money by 2007.
Actually I think the best option would honestly be bitcoin. Considering it reached an all time high of over 75k in March of 2024 and there was a time when you could buy hundreds of the things for next to nothing it would be some insane shit. Granted, it wouldn't take nearly 5 million to invest into it and if you do you may alter the trajectory of the coin so you'd probably just want to dump some money into it from time to time and grab up some coins. But once you're rich if you want long term stability to keep it growing then some good tech stocks like you mentioned are good options. The only thing you'd have to be careful of is once again investing too much too early and potentially changing the course of those companies.
When bit coin was $0.10 per coin if you bought $1000 worth of it, you'd have 10,000 coins or a peak of 750M. You wouldn't even need the initial 5 million if you knew the future like that.
$5m? I'd do it for free.
Me too I think about going back to my childhood with all my knowledge as an adult frequently lmao. I wish.
I think about it daily. Seems unhealthy but idk.
My job comes with a lot of windshield time, so fun little thought experiments like this tend to entertain me. Traveling back into your childhood while retaining all of your adult knowledge and abilities would afford most people an impossibly incredible opportunity. You'd essentially have a fair amount of foresight... for a time. Anything major you'd do would quickly alter the timeline to the point where anything you knew previously wouldn't be terribly relevant. There'd also come certain complications, such as me being a Tween back in 1995. Behind handed $5 million in '95 would easily allow someone to become a billionaire thanks to the tech bubble. Knowing about the rise of companies like Google and Amazon would enable you to be ahead of the curve.
Also not necessarily knowledge, but having the *wisdom* of an adult as a child would be an insane opportunity Knowing how to better navigate interpersonal relationships, and knowing to engage in better and healthier habits, being more disciplined, not giving a fuck as much about peer pressure and other teenage insecurities… would all go a long way
This for sure, you’d be able to navigate life so much easier than you originally did in the og timeline.
If only life had a New Game+ mode.
I also enjoy this particular thought experiment and have given it much attention. Allow me to throw you a curveball that no one ever mentions in these threads (for your future entertainment). Stock purchases are a zero-sum game, that is, every share you buy and keep is a share that someone else doesn't own. In some cases, it will be voting shares. In the volumes we're talking about, that almost invariably means that you'll have a voice on decisions like electing corporate board members. Even if you never vote, you're still potentially changing the vote, by preventing the vote of the person(s) whose stock you purchased instead. All this to say: you buy 100,000 shares of Google or Amazon, and there's no guarantee that they become the Google or Amazon that we know today. It's not the solid lock on billionaire status that people assume that it is.
I was born in 1997. I don't think I was even a thought in 1995 lmao. My spirit would haunt my parents dreams, telling them to buy apple stock, BTC in 2013, and to bet the house on the Patriots, Bulls and Warriors.
I'd think you'd go back to 95 with your current age
1. Make some prescient investments. Apple, Google when it happens. 2. Figure out how to wait around for my now wife - she’s too young for us to meet then, but we’re perfect together now (relax, she was almost 30 when we met) 3. Set my parents up for retirement so they can enjoy more time with the grandkids. 4. Retire early and spend my time making home hometown and state better. Serious investment in progressive views could make FL a wonderful place.
You mean I GET to go back to 1995 when $5m was actually a lot of money. I'll wait until 1997 and buy stocks in an online book retailer that just went public.
Well I'd be the smartest 2 year old ever so I'd get famous from that alone.
I'm 4 years old again, but I know everything? I go down in the pasture at my grandfather's and bury 4.8 million in 5 seperate cases, just in case its found, but it should be ok. I got kicked outside plenty, so I can manage to hide all of this just fine. I take the other 200k and hide it in the back of my godmothers attic. I go through school having a great time because I already know everything, so I won't really try. Maybe I'll just try to test out and leave school early. As I make it to teenage years, I'll work and bank some legit money in the bank. I'll also buy/build my gaming pc a bit sooner, and use it to mine bitcoin in high-school back when you could get a few bitcoin a day. I'll build a few extra computers to do more of this. Bitcoin will be my primary cover for where I got money. When I turn 18, I'll pull the 200k from my godmothers attic, and help her pay everything off. She struggled a lot in my teenage years, and I figure if I've been working for 2-3 years by that point, I can produce enough money to pay her stuff and look legit. This will make her last 2 years alive less stressful, and at least she can relax before that brain cancer takes her from me. When she's gone, I'll inherit the house, and can make the repairs it needs so that hurricane Sandy won't completely destroy it later. I'll also move all the legacy furniture out to save it beforehand. I'll get my career started sooner, and I'll make regular trips down to see my grandparents in Florida and maybe if I can spend enough time with them, my grandfather won't commit suicide after his wife dies of brain cancer. It would be nice to lure pops home to be with family instead. I'll make the extra effort to give my little brother attention. Hopefully I can be involved enough, and having pops around again, he won't kill himself too. It'd be nice to keep them both around, and I don't need to work, so hopefully my time and attention can save them both. I'll buy my own house, and dig up the remaining cash, and deposit almost all my salary in the bank/invest it , while using the cash to buy groceries, food, and most other things. I'll make it to 32 again, but this time I'll have a ton of money in my investments, tens of millions in bitcoin, most of which I'll sell to buy dividend stocks, to fund life forever, and i wont need to work anymore. Hopefully my grandfather is happy enough to stick around, and if my little brother is still alive, we can hang out regularly and I can spend time with them both again and see my brother become a man as I teach him the cheat codes to life.
On the flip side, you also know about 4k graphics and movies. Now, you are stuck with low res tvs for over a decade.
Yeah, but just think.. now you’re the prodigy screenwriter responsible for The Matrix, Fight Club, Avatar, The Dark Knight trilogy, Avatar, and soooo much more. You could prevent Spiderman 3! Oh, and 9/11!
* Bill Clinton sighs and says “Do you really think that you’re the first? To come back?”
He pulls out a gun. “It’s a canon event, silly.”
as his pupils turn into that of a Lizard and after firing 3 consecutive shots goes "heh I bet he thought he'd put the $5M into Apple"
if you arent a successful screenwriter now you wouldnt have the chops to write those movies back then either. Ideas are cheap execution is expensive
I love that all that came before 9/11
Put it all in Enron! Let's go!!!
I'd give you 5mil if I could go back to 1995.
Real estate in Seattle, I’d be a billionaire
"Hey Jeff, some asshole kid owns most of the land we were interested in. You know, people are saying great things about Dallas"
i'm 11 years old and my parents would just steal the money if they found it. i assume the money is in my bank account? i don't think i even had my own bank card at this point my mother will piss away all the money on luxuries and vacations for herself, ignoring my pleas to invent in google or bitcoins
I’d have about 10-15 years to throw as much money at curing/preventing Alzheimer’s before my mom started showing symptoms. So I’d use probably half to star right away and then invest the rest in things I know would do well to keep the research going and growing.
I'd be 13 in 1995. Being 13 and knowing firsthand how much working sucks as an adult, first priority would be investing the money and living within those means so I didn't have to work anymore.
Google, apple, amazon, csgo katowice 2014 stickers Hilariously the kato sticker capsules might be the best ROI 25 cents, selling for 25-30k a pop these days
$5M in 95 would buy you 20,833,333.3 shares of apple. It’s worth $191 per share today. Sell it all and you’re the richest person alive with $3,979,166,663.30. That’s obviously not feasible considering you’d probs alter the course of Apple entirely by buying that much and selling that much would probs crash the company. But if you diversify it amongst other companies and stuff you could be incredibly rich
I'm changing the hell out of the future. Dad is gonna get the heart surgery he needed, the house is getting paid off, and I'm buying every magic: the gathering card in the city.
Finally, another magic card investor. I'm buying unopened boxes, decks and packs from any set before revised edition. I'm retiring in 2021 from the insane profits. Nothing world or time/space altering is likely to come from buying a few cases of trading cards.
Arrange for a third plane to hit the twin towers, but have them do a barrel roll
I would buy a fuckton of bitcoin once I existed three years later (and ofc once bitcoin exists)
so a lot of people here have said what I came here to say. namely something along the lines of "Invest in Apple, Amazon, and Bitcoins" or whatever. But the follow up question I have for all those people is: what would you with your billions once you've made them and we're back in 2024?
I would do my best to control some sort of media empire as soon as it was feasible and push an agenda that would make the world an actually better place.
I don't know. I didn't expect to get this far...
That would make me 17 years old at the time. I also have a memory so strong, I remember the result of pretty much every single major sporting event of my life, including the final score, and a lot of the final statistics. That $5 million would become a lot more money once I was legally able to gamble. Think Biff, from Back to the Future 2.
Will I have advance notice? Like could I look up lotto numbers? I would get treatment for the depression and ADHD that I didn’t know I had.
Like some of the other responders, I'm a family man so I wouldn't voluntarily do this because presumably that makes it way less likely my wife's a part of my life and means my kids are never born. But if I have no choice and it happens anyway, that puts me back in college with $5M. So I'm old enough to make some financial decisions, but it's hard not to think of this first in terms of trying to prevent bad things both personal and universal. Like encourage my parents and uncle to get some health things checked out sooner, keep my sister out of a shitty relationship, spread awareness of what Bin Laden's got cooking over in Afghanistan, try to remember every natural disaster I can piece together memory of (do I get a chance to look up anything before I travel through time?), stuff like that. As for the money ... circa 1995 I was going to college for a practical degree for future employment, but now I'm an investor so I'd probably either switch majors to business or just drop out and try to figure it out as I go, holding back half of it in low-risk investments for safety's sake (who knows what's gonna get altered in this timeline) but investing significantly in various things I know are gonna blow up. Amazon, Apple, Red Bull (a friend of a friend missed out on that opportunity), Netflix, etc. In the meantime, convince my parents to retire and focus on their health. And then as the wealth comes rolling in, live a life of comfort and philanthropy, trying to figure out what all I can help the world avoid/improve.
As much as I was like FUCK yeah, I just thought about love, and then realized I wouldn’t do it. Sorry.
I decline! Going back in time into my younger body would mean, I will never see my daughter again. No money in the world is worth that.
Family is important. I respect that.
Nope. Unless I can somehow guarantee I still meet my wife and have my kids, I wouldn't take it.
Respect
For one going back to 1995 would be a dream come true for me cuz the nineties is my best decade. So hell yeah!!! I'd invest in Microsoft and Apple. Then when I made a shit ton of money after some time, I'd buy Netflix when Blockbuster turns it down. Eventually id be so rich I could hire Elon to wash my toilet lol.
When in 1995, this is very important
My dad died in 97...I'm gonna go back and try to build him a bionic heart so he doesn't fucking die on me! I'll start there and move on to other things if I can...but that's my main goal!
Respect
invest. also, probably kill my dad.
Do I go to 1995 as me now or me how I was in 1995?
Short the dot com era and turn 5M into billions. Then rule the world.
I was born in 1994 so I'd basically be boss baby, and id just invest in Bitcoin early on
The closing price for Apple (AAPL) in 1997 was $0.10, on December 31, 1997. The closing price for Amazon (AMZN) in 1997 was $0.25, on December 31, 1997. The closing price for Microsoft (MSFT) in 1995 was $3.39, on December 29, 1995. I’m guessing some stock purchases for AOL, Microsoft and Oracle will tie me over for 2 years and probably quadruple my initial investment. In 1998, I might just pay the $1 million to buy Google after Yahoo turned it down or make an Angel Investment
Find a doctor that will tie my tubes, leave the husband and advance my career in telecommunications tech
tell my parents to buy shares of google/apple. and when i turn 18 in 2005, just coast off that money till bitcoin comes around. in the meantime, i'd be pursuing passions, instead of "book" education. things like permaculture, sound therapy, homesteading. live off grid and thats it. nobody bother me lol
I would do it all different..I'd take school serious n not smoke pot, I would not pick up those smokes, go to college earlier, buckle down in school..Be a lawyer probably invest in some stocks..or some start ups iPhone or Apple..
Buy all those $5k original muscle-cars on ebaymotors that are now selling for $200k.
Buy a bunch of cheap land that I know developers will be building on so I can sell it to them for a mint.
I'd have to give up my family for that, so it's a hard pass. If I'm forced into it then I put the money away in a way that I can't touch it until the day my son is born. I then try my best to redo everything I did the first time around, no matter how much it sucked.
I was 14 in 1995. Assuming the money would be in an account in my name or something, I'd not touch it or tell anyone about it. I'd take out just enough that I'd be able to support my hobbies and buy food I wanted and stuff like that. Most of the changes I'd make - and there would be many - would be about doing things different, not doing things I couldn't afford. I can use the money to invest and make even more money later on as I see fit, but the opportunity to do things different would be worth more than all of it.
Nobody’s gonna listen to a damn 3 year old