this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2025
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If anyone wants a specific goal, have it be either

  • Earn a Nobel Prize by age 18

or

  • 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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[–] Eq0@literature.cafe 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

2002… uff, that would be hard. As a ten year old there is so little you can do!

I guess I would steal an identity and get some ground breaking research out on a quicker time scale. In particular trying to get ahead of the climate deniers. I would invest in some whatevers that made it big as soon as possible, then during the 2008 crisis, then Bitcoins.

I would find it impossible to not look for my friends and family, even just stalking them from afar. That would probably drive me insane.

I’d use my wealth to lobby hard for climate justice and climate research. Probably still hide my true identity. I’m not American, so I would need to think really hard if preventing Trump is worth it, but I would lobby for a quicker energy transition and for a better social net. I’d assume with the knowledge I have at hand, I could even tweak the end result of the 2008 crisis… but that would be a massive butterfly to introduce.

On a global scale, I would think that some properly timed interventions in Africa could have dramatic impacts both socially and ecologically, but I’d have to study more to figure that out.

[–] vateso5074@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

2002… uff, that would be hard. As a ten year old there is so little you can do!

Yep, that's the catch! You have the knowledge, but who's gonna let a 10-year-old open an investment account? Or who's going to believe that a presumably middle-of-the-pack 4th grader suddenly unlocked the secret to mRNA vaccines?

I'm with you, I think identity theft is probably the easiest way to start out (especially back then when it was so widespread, and not as many people knew what to look out for) but it becomes one more secret to have to keep covered up that can screw you over later if found out.

[–] Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

Just spend 8 years planning. By the time you'd be 18 you'd still have 15 years of events before your knowledge caught up. I'd expect the trickiest part of it all would be making sure whatever you do doesn't alter the timeline. One mistake and it won't matter what you know if the course of history changes.