It seems like everyone has time-traveled except me. From Dr. Who to Doc Brown, folks have been traipsing the timeline since H.G. Wells wrote about the Time Traveler’s adventures in 1895.
More often than not, the journeys to the past and future have ended in disaster. My theory is that people of the Sherman and Mr. Peabody persuasion have used their WABAK machines or Tardises or souped-up DeLoreans incorrectly.
Rookie mistake, of course. The basic time-traveling error of trying to bite off more than they can chew. That’s why the Star Trek universe has the Prime Directive, which prohibits Starfleet personnel and spacecraft from interfering in the normal development of any society, and mandates that any Starfleet vessel or crew member is expendable to prevent violation of this rule.
Hence the reason plans like the one to kill an infant Hitler always fail. The trick is to make your changes small. Forget the Butterfly Effect. My suggestions for profiting from Time Travel are microscopically subtle. Please allow me to give you a few tips.
Sure, investing in Apple or Amazon before they went global would be easy, but also obvious. Might I suggest traveling back to the 1960s and becoming a Zither salesman. There wasn’t a movie or television show that did not make use of this bizarre musical instrument. A small fortune to be had without interrupting the timeline.
If you are not of the musical persuasion, perhaps you would be interested in being a parchment purveyor in the time of Gutenberg. Or paper. Or lambskin. The point being, having a printing press is useless if there is nothing on which to print. Fill the void, fill your pockets, and temporal continuity is none the wiser.
If you are a fan of post-Watergate 1970s, here is a thought. Purchase a quarry. The “It” fad for the time was the Pet Rock (literally a rock in a box), or the obligatory rip-off, the Rock Concert (a stack of pebbles mounted on a larger rock). Don’t want to be saddled with a rock farm? Fine. Pick up what you need off the highway and start a roadside stand. Wherever the wind takes you.
A variation of the quarry plan would be to barter round rocks (or “wheels,” in today’s vernacular) to Cro-Magnons. The only issue would be calculating the exchange rate for animal pelts and dinosaur teeth in today’s economy.
Sure, you might be (rightly so) concerned about the ethics of jumping through the timestream for personal gain. Allow me to Introduce the “Star Trek IV” defense. Trapped in the past while trying to save the future, USS Enterprise doctor Leonard “Bones” McCoy and engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott approached a manufacturer and gave him the formula for Transparent Aluminum in exchange for material they needed to save future Earth.
In a side conversation, McCoy asks Scotty if giving the manufacturer the secret to transparent aluminum would affect the timeline, to which Scotty replies, “For all we know, this is the man who invented Transparent Aluminum in the first place.” Problem solved!
A bigger consideration to, ummm, consider: There are easier, more subtle ways to pad your pockets without altering the timeline. After all, what good is making a fortune in the past if it affects your family’s lineage? There might be no present (or future) you to rake in the dough.
Perhaps it is better to stay in the present and like it. After all, you might accidentally alter the past and become a bald, overweight neurotic. Oops.
