HN Explorer

Ask HN: What would you do if you knew the future?

18 points by rivo ↗ HN
This is a thought experiment. Let's assume somebody sent you back in time, to the year 1996. Knowing what you know now, you could start companies called Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook etc. and do everything right from the beginning.

Would you succeed?

Also, would people like Larry, Sergey, or Mark Zuckerberg be virtually unknown in the tech world?

(Surely, there's much more you could do with your knowledge of the future but let's focus on starting companies for now.)

30 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 77.4 ms ] thread
quoderat
Anything I wanted to.

But first, I would get enough money to completely opt out of doing anything like starting companies, worrying about what anyone thinks, etc., and find a lot of land in the middle of nowhere, drop my own fiber link in at vast cost, and ignore the rest of the world as much as I could.

jeremyawon
what do you need a fiber link for if you're going to ignore the rest of the world?
zepolen
I think a lot of success is down to circumstance, right moment, right time, right person and I doubt if you tried to make another Google you'd succeed in the same way.
mattlarge
I think Zepolen is correct, so much comes down to timing. If you look at a lot of the "successes" that you would want to get there before they were reaching slightly beyond current tech/social environment. For example, Flickr/YouTube were predicated on the fact that storage costs were crashing and end user bandwidth was drastically increasing. You couldn't have created them much earlier.

Wikipedia was timed for the explosion of users on the internet allowing for massive crowd sourcing, again you couldn't have gotten there much earlier.

The best way to leverage knowledge like that would be to go back and become the world's most prescient VC. Also avoiding the bubble bursting and the current crash would be great.

I like the idea of going back and getting myself into a position to work on some of these projects though. being able to be there when they happened would be cool

medianama
I think you are giving way too much importance to idea and timing.

The reason Flickr, Youtube, Wikipedia, etc are succesful because they could execute better than their competitors and that might not change by going back in time.

mattlarge
True, but I was being a little ham fisted in my original reply. They did win out by executing better than their competitors in the competition of the moment, but what I was trying to suggest was that, in all probability, no-one could have succeeded in trying to do those things at an earlier time. You couldn't go back to 1996 and start YouTube.

With YouTube you couldn't have survived the storage costs at an earlier time, and also there needed to be ubiquitous playback, in the form of Flash. Flickr similarly would have been financially onerous due to storage costs ealier on.

In 1996 our bandwidth was so tiny that you really could not have done YouTube at that point.

Wikipedia is a slightly different point. It was launched in 2001, so in 1996 you obviously could have gotten a lead on it, but if you look at the growth curve it wasn't until 2005/2006 that it really took off. I just don't think that the community of editors/users was broad enough until that point.

You are totally right that good execution counts for most of the success and going back in time would allow you to do that much better with the hindsight gained. My thought is just that there are constraints over what is achievable at any given time and the common thread that I see in wildly successful companies is that they managed to jump on those turning points just before they are there, first mover advantage and all that gumph.

gaius
you could start companies called Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook etc. and do everything right from the beginning

No you couldn't, because you only see these companies from the outside. You might know the idea, but how many search engines, social networks, etc are/were there? Amateurs talk about strategy, professionals discuss logistics.

The one valuable piece of knowledge you'd have would be exactly when to jump from the NASDAQ ship.

fiaz
I would try my hardest to prevent 9/11.
gaius
No-one would believe you.
ErrantX
the key would be to go back a bit farther so you had large pools of resources way before 09/11. Then use said resources to "plant" evidence of the upcoming atrocity.

But then, you in a cycle, because I am sure there are lots of past tragedies one would want to pre-empt.

Personally I would leave it as it is: harsh as it sounds, tampering with History seems a worrying path to tread...

(no reasons why you couldnt track down Osama - for example - then jump back in time to tell the US forces where he will be at XYZ date to pick him up :))

david927
> no reasons why you couldnt track down Osama

But to stop 9/11, you would have to track down Cheney.

anamax
> no reasons why you couldnt track down Osama - for example - then jump back in time to tell the US forces where he will be at XYZ date to pick him up

The US knew where to get Osama many times. They didn't because they didn't think that he wasn't interesting.

That's the Cassandra problem. How do you convince the US to do something about Osama before 9/11? Lots of people claim to know the future.

ErrantX
Ah no not what I meant; thatapproach would be on a par with trying to stop 9/11 (aka bad).

I mean NOW, in the modern day, find Osama then jump back a month or 2 and provide the military with the date / time / location :)

Theoretically then you are not affecting the "past" provided the US military dont arrive till after you make the jump back in time.

tsally
Could the first black president have been elected with out it? (Serious question)

I doubt Bush would have gotten elected for a second time if it wasn't for 9/11 and I think Obama would have had a much harder time getting elected if Bush hadn't destroyed the public's opinion of the republican party.

pavel_lishin
I think I'd rather prevent an eight year war that's going nowhere and all the unnecessary death than comes with it, rather than elect an arbitrary minority who may not have been elected if his opponents weren't the worst possible option.
ErrantX
I think "an eight year war that's going nowhere and all the unnecessary death" is not an overall assessment of the effect 9/11 has had.

Indeed stop it and you could well kill more people (no by atroscities but by the butterfly effect etc.) - do you then go back and stop those deaths? Where does it stop? Do you go back to influence the decisions that affect every innocent life, do you constantly tweak history to ensure the maximum people "survive"?

The fact that 9/11 HAS happened means that if anyone has invented a time machine at some point in the future (or whenever) they either took the correct decision not to change history dramatically. Or they did and that was a potential consequence.

As I said below. Tampering with History itself is an unbelievably dangerous game.

Tangurena
Well, to be honest, that Obama got elected to the Senate in the first place had a lot to do with the self-destructive behavior of the incument Senator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ryan_(Senate_candidate)#

And the major newspapers covered up the illegal wiretappings for more than a year. Originally they were going to be released just prior to the 2004 election. I contend that if they had been released, then Kerry would have won overwhelmingly. This cover-up, along with a few others, such as Abu Ghirab, lead me to have no sympathy for the struggling newspapers - they abandoned us when we needed them.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/doj-nixed-inves.htm...

mrduncan
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. - Alan Kay
mseebach
I'd start a bunch of buzzword-heavy .com's and cash out late 1999. Then I'd go into real estate and cash out in 2007. Then I'd retire.
ShabbyDoo
Why not just make "risky" stock trades? It's work to actually build stuff. Seriously though, I think the OP meant something a bit different than the literal interpretation of future knowledge that I'm taking.
Tangurena
Going back to 1996? With what I know now? I'd try to make a lot less mistakes with the woman I was in love with back then.
josefresco
Don't you people watch movies? This never turns out well.

Quoting Jeff Goldblum: "Ooh, aah, that's how it always starts, and then later the running and screaming"

Celcius
I've got no idea but re-coining (or I guess pre-coining) the term web 2.0 into something that doesn't make me cry a bit on the inside every time I or others mention it is pretty high on my list.
banned_man
Founding a company would be the wrong way to go about exploiting this time hack. Too much relies on execution, so the possibility for failure is substantial. There is a much easier way to make money if you can time-travel.

What I'd do: ask for 30 minutes before I go, and log into Yahoo finance. Find a 2% gainer for each day on the stock market. Each day, move half of my net worth into the gainer (only half as a measure of caution; I might inadvertently alter the future and screw myself). The reason to aim for +2 is to avoid insider trading suspicion; putting my money into a +10 or -20 (shorting) every day would land me in jail; no one would believe I could tell the future because of time travel. Each day, I'd earn a 1% profit.

Starting from $10000, I'd get to $10 million within 720 trading days, or about 3 years. At this point, I'd limit my profits to $100k per day because otherwise I'd be at the level where I could actually change the future, eroding my gains. So I'd gain "only" $25m/year for the next decade, cashing out at $250m.