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You wake up as a random 10-year-old in 2002 with your memories intact. In your hand is a USB drive with a backup of Wikipedia as of Jan 1 2025. You must keep your identity secret. What do you do? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by vateso5074@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

97 comments fedilink hide all child comments

If anyone wants a specific goal, have it be either

Earn a Nobel Prize by age 18

Become a billionaire by age 18

For the sake of the scenario, assume the following:

If anyone learns that you are mentally from the future, you immediately have an aneurysm and die. You somehow just know this and therefore must keep your true identity secret.
You wake up as a random 10-year-old specifically in 2002, not your 10-year-old self, and not the age you actually were in 2002.
You live in the same country, speak the same language(s), and are the same ethnicity as your old self. Your biological sex matches your gender identity (flip a coin if you are enby).
You have 2 parents and 1.5 siblings. Your family earns exactly the median income for your country.
The person whose identity you now inhabit left a diary. You have no other knowledge of your new identity beyond this.
If you try to look for your old family, you learn they had a different child in this timeline who is the same age as you but is not you. They will not believe any attempt to convince them you are related.
The USB drive is compatible with any standard USB Type A connector. It is just large enough to fit all of Wikipedia, including hosted media and files, and the drive is read-only. The drive cannot be reformatted.
Stock market trends remain generally consistent for 5 years. After that, assume the butterfly effect will start to skew the results, so you cannot predict what will happen after 2007. Sports become too unreliable to bet on with 100% accuracy after 1 year.
I feel like I shouldn't need to clarify this one, but no grooming kids. Assume there is a magical force that prevents you from dating anyone until both you and they are at least 18, and no one is attracted to you unless they would also feel okay dating someone who is your mental age.

EDIT - Additional clarifiers, if this helps:

The USB drive is not based on 2002 technology but is fully compatible with it. Assume it uses a novel architecture that can repurpose itself to be compatible with whatever system it is plugged into, as long as it fits the correct type of USB port.

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[–] ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I was in college in 2002, so I would go there and tell myself what is going on. That shouldn't break the rules since nobody but me would know what was happening (just a different version of me). Working together with a blueprint of the next two decades, it would be trivial for college me to make money in the stock market. I would raise as much money as I could before the 2008 housing bubble bursts so I could buy up a lot of property cheap.

From there I could use the information on close elections to politically swing things the way I want. 20 year old me would practice writing so I could get into writing newspaper editorials, building my reputation as someone who has exceptional ability to predict political and social trends. This reputation would give me a foothold to get to speak to and advise people in power, further allowing me to shape the direction of politics. With this money and influence, I could make sure COVID was handled properly, that the war in Ukraine never happened, and that climate change was addressed with the seriousness it deserves. I could save hundreds of millions of lives and nobody would ever know.

[–] vateso5074@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

I think you caught me there on a verbiage technicality.

I probably should have worded it better in the additional details of the premise, but my intent was that your old self simply doesn't exist in this timeline. Your family is there, but they had some other kid instead of you on the same date you were born.

If your name is Jarnathan Smith, you like baseball and your favorite color is puce, you'd instead find that your family had a kid named Archideld Smith who likes rugby and whose favorite color is mauve.