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From: wmartin@brl-vgr.ARPA (Will Martin )
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: The Easy Road to Riches
Message-ID: <3314@brl-vgr.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 6-Apr-84 09:54:53 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-vgr.3314
Posted: Fri Apr  6 09:54:53 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Apr-84 05:47:27 EST
Organization: Ballistics Research Lab
Lines: 75

Using time travel as an aid to the practical and mundane aspects of
life has always appealed to me; I've read SF in which a housewife
time-travels to do her grocery shopping during the Depression, when
bargains were BARGAINS, and we've all seen references to the value
of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal...

However, there are some practical aspects of this that I haven't seen
mentioned in SF. They may well have been, but I don't recall reading
about them. Exactly what is the best way to carry on time-travel-based
commerce?  No matter what information you can carry with you, at some
time you have to get cash or material of value in the time frame in
which you need to make investments or buy goods.  This isn't as easy
as it sounds...

(Aside: a couple assumptions to make the discussion simpler -- 
1) The act of travelling in time and moving materials is easy and
either free or very cheap -- if it requires enormous energy expenditures,
as some have speculated, it becomes so costly as to eliminate the
commercial aspects.
2) You can move to any point in space-time, though limited to stay
on the planet [arbitrary restriction here]; so you can get from
1979 Cleveland to 1803 Paris with your whizz-bang time machine,
without worrying about getting from 1803 Cleveland to 1803 Paris
via boat or whatever...
3) You want to keep this somewhat secret -- no coming back in a
blaze of glory and saying, "Hi There! I'm from the Twentieth Century
and I want to trade these wonderful cassette players and Cluture Club
tapes for these dingy old statues you have sitting around the Forum...")

OK -- here you are in 1984 with your time machine and bank account and
microfiche of the Wall Street Journal.  You want to go buy Xerox when it
was Haloid (or whatever), Polaroid, gold, etc., when it was at its lowest
and sell at the highest peak.  How do you do it?  Just going to the bank
and getting a briefcase-full of Federal Reserve Notes isn't going to
help -- most of them will date from releases later than the dates you
will be going to, and they will be considered very good counterfeits.
Most of the things you could buy, take back, and sell for more than you
paid for them will be anachronistic, thus violating your secrecy --
the Time Police from 4754 will come and get you, right?  This leaves
out peddling Walkmen and calculators in 1953.  It seems that you will
be best off with some sort of basic materials instead.

Now, I recall that aluminum was more valuable than gold before the
modern refining processes were developed.  So you buy aluminum ingots
and zip back to Napoleonic France, where you offer to trade this for
gold. This should work for a small amount, but the problem is that,
since there was so little aluminum and it was high priced, and it isn't
very pretty, there's little demand for it.  They made table services
out of it, for ostentation, but the jewelers and smiths could only sell
so many of those; your market gets glutted.

Another source of income could be retrieving lost art and historical
artifacts just before they were destroyed or lost -- pulling the contents
out of the Library at Alexandria microseconds before the flames reach them,
for example.  A traditional way of avoiding changing the past but
recovering from the tragedies of history.  But what will you do with the
carload of scrolls once you have them?  Unless the fact of time travel is
known, no one will believe that these new-looking scrolls came from
2000 years back, so how do you sell them?  And if you try to sell them
in the time when you need current currency to make your investments, 
you have changed YOUR past.

What about land?  Well, I could go back to the Pre-Cambrian and plant
indestructable claim markers all over Gondwanaland.  I'd have to break
secrecy, but could I then claim all the continents by right of prior 
discovery? Somehow, I doubt that I could get the legal system to
enforce my claims.

So, before this gets any longer, I'll sum up by asking: "How DO I
get rich by time travel?"  [I just happened to come into possession
of a brand-new but hot-wired 3942 Chronocruiser, with bucket seats
and a hyperspatial trunk, blue with green trim, and I'm just itching
to give it a spin...]

Will