Let’s imagine a world where time machines are invented.
Hypothetically, what’s stopping anyone from travelling to the past, where the dollar is much more valuable, and buying things at a much lower price? What if you then go back to the present, sell those things at a higher price and repeat the cycle? And wtf would happen if everyone there started doing that?
Assuming the following conditions:
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Energy is not conserved - that is, you expend less energy traveling to the past than the net energy value of something you send to or bring from the past.
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It takes approximately 1 minute for the time machine to recharge and target a new time and location after use.
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The time machine can transport any object that can be contained in a space, but the space is fairly easy to expand. Think, “setting up a tent”.
All of this, I should emphasize, horribly breaks physics. But it’s not a stupid question. The answer is, essentially, “the economy, as we know it, collapses.”
A lot of people are going to point out that you can duplicate energy sources, items, etc… by bringing them from the past. Yes, that’s true. But what people are missing is that this enables exponential growth as well:
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I buy a gold coin. I put it in a large space.
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2 minutes later, I set my time machine to go 1 minute back in time, collect the coin from myself, bring it to the present. Now I have 2 gold coins.
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2 minutes later, I do this again - collecting the 2 gold coins and bringing them to the (new) present. Now I have 4 gold coins.
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An hour later of doing this, I have over 536 million gold coins.
This works for any reasonably sized object, by the way. A hamburger. A tank of oil. That sweet RTX 5090 for your new gaming rig. A nuclear warhead.
Society, as we know it, isn’t to survive this. The Earth probably isn’t going to survive this. The universe may very well not, although we’ve already broken so many laws of physics getting to this point that it’s a wash anyway.
tl;dr - time machines as popular culture imagines them are a cheat code.
2 minutes later, I set my time machine to go 1 minute back in time, collect the coin from myself, bring it to the present. Now I have 2 gold coins.
I don’t follow. If you took the coin from the past, it no longer exists in the present. You still have 1 coin. You are duplicated, however, and now two of you exist in the present timeline. You could do the duplication glitch by taking the present timeline coin back to the past and giving it to past self, who now has two coins.
This entire “glitch” is posited on the idea that altering your subjective past does not alter your absolute present.
And you’re right - that’s ridiculous. Why wouldn’t taking away something from the past alter the present? This is called causality and thermodynamics, and it’s one of the reasons physics, as we understand it presently, doesn’t really allow for time travel as it is popularly conceived. It’s not about gold coins, exactly, but the idea that you can’t end up with more energy than you started out with (or the mass equivalent of energy).
But OP started with the idea that a time machine which break causality and thermodymnamics exists, so I just pointed out how massively broken such a machine would be.
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All speculation on time travel end out in either paradoxes or infinities.
You are basically wasting your time, time travel is an impossible fantasy and not reality.
Time can be slowed, but there is no way it’s possible to travel back in time, because the past no longer exist. So there is nowhere to travel to.
In the same way the future does not exist yet, so you can’t “travel” to that either.
Time can however be somewhat suspended locally, so if you are suspended in time locally, it will appear as if you are traveling to the future. But in reality you are merely progressing in time faster at a slower pace locally.You assume the past and present no longer exist. You have no proof of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time)
Maybe not because you can’t prove a negative, but since there is no proof that it exist, there is no rational reason to believe it does.
It’s all wishful thinking and speculation for hundreds of years with nothing to show for it.I do however have the proof of logic, because if they do exist, all sorts of logical inconsistencies arise. Which is why fantasies about it, always end out in either infinities or paradoxes.
I can’t prove an invisible pink unicorn isn’t in my room either. But I can say I can’t see hear or otherwise detect it’s presence, even after thorough investigation, and closing the room off for an extended period of time. I still can’t prove it, but the logical conclusion is the complete an utter lack and absence of an invisible pink unicorn in my room.
And yet, you’ve concocted this fantasy that you call “the present,” as if such a thing could exist in a relativistic universe…
That’s not a concoction or a fantasy, but the actual reality. Or are you trying to argue the present doesn’t exist?
Time is seemingly an emergent property of causality. But the exact nature of what time is exactly, is not well understood.
Basic principles about whether time is linear or quantized isn’t even entirely clear.
But to argue the present doesn’t exist is like arguing nothing really exists, and then I don’t really have anything to say to you, because that’s like solipsism and that’s absolute nonsense not worth debating.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
The present does not exist. From the previous link:
It can be argued that special relativity eliminates the concept of absolute simultaneity and a universal present: according to the relativity of simultaneity, observers in different frames of reference can have different measurements of whether a given pair of events happened at the same time or at different times, with there being no physical basis for preferring one frame’s judgments over those of another. However, there are events that may be non-simultaneous in all frames of reference: when one event is within the light cone of another—its causal past or causal future—then observers in all frames of reference show that one event preceded the other. The causal past and causal future are consistent within all frames of reference, but any other time is “elsewhere”, and within it there is no present, past, or future. There is no physical basis for a set of events that represents the present.
Many philosophers have argued that relativity implies eternalism.[6] Philosopher of science Dean Rickles says that, "the consensus among philosophers seems to be that special and general relativity are incompatible with presentism.
If two observers will disagree on which events happened in “the present,” then “the present” cannot exist as a real universal entity. “The present” only makes any physical sense in classical, pre-20th century Newtonian mechanics.
This is why the block universe or eternalism makes more sense.
It can be argued that special relativity eliminates the concept of absolute simultaneity
That’s not the same thing. Obviously all experiences are delayed, and therefore about the past, even if it is merely picoseconds.
In that way we can only experience the past, that is obvious, and not relevant to the existence of an objective present.Although we can only experience the present with some delay depending on circumstances, (can be billions of years astronomically) there is zero doubt that there is an objective “present” we all experience and act according to.
You’re still imagining that there is some fixed universe playing out at constant time, and that we all just experience the echoes of this present in different orders. This isn’t what relativity says. Clocks traveling near the speed of light don’t just appear to slow down, they actually slow down.
Different regions of the universe don’t even experience the same flow rate of time. Someone living on a mountaintop experiences time faster than someone at sea level. And yet you cling to this fantasy of their being some universal “present.” You cannot have a universal present in a universe composed of different flow rates of time!
If you are standing in your shower (shower thoughts) and try to travel 200 years back, your location in space is not where the solar system, nor the earth was 200 years ago. So there’s that…
Physics-wise, the only conceived ways to time travel to the past is either FTL travel or wormholes, with the latter requiring “exotic matter” to stabilize, and even then, you can’t go back to any arbitrary time. Nobody knows if exotic matter actually exists. FTL seems off the board.
There are mechanisms in place to keep history and the past safe for historians.
I think our global economy is safe.
Of course THOSE theories don’t work, we haven’t yet figured out the one that will.
So the easiest thing would be to buy cheap commodities that were expensive back then, go back in time and sell, then buy some kind of property or like shares in ibm. You could easily make a lot of money.
But you wouldn’t really be creating wealth, you would just be making it so you end up with it instead of someone else.
The best way to create wealth (assuming you can’t just create energy in the time travel process) is to take technology back.
Taking tech back (making a company with it so your rich too) would actually make humanity have a higher total wealth.
I personally would take solar cells and modern batteries back in time, might as well do some good with it.
There would be machines which produce energy in any form where source is future.
Essentially infinite energy solution. So humans would essentially have infinite energy but if you are allowed to go anywhere in time then why would you stay i ln present. You would immigrate (for lack of better word) to a time when is most suitable and to your liking. You would die in 80 years why do you want to spend time in current world time if you can do better.
It would become like a multiple reality world where like minded people would come together in same reality and people who disagree with them go to their own echo chambers. I belive most people would be looking for fundamental human desires like food, comfort and sex so people will go to time where they get it most easily.
If that happens, I think the economy will suddenly always have been the least of our problems.
Does everyone know that time travel exists? Or is it like a secret? If there was only one, whoever controlled it either way would be all powerful and immediate ruler of all people on Earth. There’s literally nothing you wouldn’t be able to do, and no force could stop you. Economics would be yours to control.
If everyone had access to time machines, it would be chaos. Markets literally would grind to a halt, because time travelers would be perpetually competing to be 1 second ahead of their competitors, all the way back to the beginning of time. Humanity would inevitably destroy itself.
