If you went back and warned everyone about 9/11 the day before, you'd be locked up in gitmo for decades.
You'd probably still be locked up. Too many questions would come you couldn't answer without revealing you were a time traveller.
I think you need to take the same approach as the British during WW2 with the Enigma. They could decrypt the messages and know when attacks would happen, but if they stopped every attack, the Nazis would know and change encryption device. So you need to accept that some people will die and only mitigate the disaster in small but impactful ways.
I have 8 years to prepare to mine Bitcoin.
Also I can start making a name for myself as a prophet
Fuck that. Start mining. Don't say a fucking word to anyone. Don't go overboard on mining. Or if you do, use it/sell some of it early. The only reason bitcoin became popular is because people used it to buy stuff. If you start talking about how it's gonna be worth 80,000 in 10 years you run the risk that more people will hoard it and it won't be worth shit.
Maybe also an evolved strain of the pandemic h1n1 virus. And more evolved versions of other viruses, too. That covid will be more evolved than the original pandemic strain, also. It'll have the transmission increases and immunity avoidance while in the novel virus stage, so going back to warn about covid could instead make it happen earlier and much worse (instead of just earlier). Plus all the other pandemics on top of that, and in a time that is much less ready to pivot office work to wfh.
Time travelling scientists warned us about climate change almost a century ago and here we are.
What if it worked. What if like dr.stranges 1/14million chances. This is the least caustic one.
•
inhales sharply
Don't violate causality, don't violate causality
Don't tell them about the event
meme character enters CDC office
Holds up one finger while channeling a spell with the other - to signal the 1 in 59 million futures or whatever
Everyone just stares weirdly because no one's seen Iron Man let alone Endgame
Yes hi I'd like to buy a bus ticket to Cincinatti, also where can I find a bulletproof vest that will fit a gorilla?
We knew well enough that a pandemic was a realistic risk and had SARS-1 and MERS as warning shots but we're still not very well prepared at the outset of COVID.
We were prepared for COVID until Trump threw away the plan. https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/17/the-art-of-the-pandemic-how-donald-trump-walked-the-u-s-into-the-covid-19-era/
The thing that pissed me off the most about his response is delaying the shutdown of air travel from China.
Bitch that's your thing, hating China.
Realistically, what could a single person do to prevent either 9/11 or the Covid pandemic from happening? Not much.
Now, the assassination of a certain person who wasn't in politics the time might do some good...
It depends on how far back you go and who you contact about he incident and the evidence to solidify the claim. 9/11 could have been stopped relatively easily with a few days notice to national security. The air force could have shot both planes out of the sky. Just call the civilian deaths a tragic casalty of terrorism and use it to help fuel the war. The twin towers could have been shut down that day.
But you've gotta materialize right in front of the commander in chief, bring a mountain of carbon datable evidence like news papers and original classified docs, and hope that you don't get brained on the spot before you make your case.
As for covid, you probably can't stop it but maybe better warn and prepare world governments so they can get their population ready through subtle conditioning like trying to get wearing mask be a fashon trend or advertising bidets heavily as the new rich yuppie thing to show as a status symbol.
Scientists have been talking about a big pandemic for years before Covid. Nobody cared. If I ever get to time travel, I'll use it for personal gain. That's the only way something good'll come out of it.
Bringing evidence from the future is cheating. They wouldn't believe you if you told them the truth but if you say you are a terrorist and placed a bomb in the world trade center, they might evacuate it
Cheating? I didn't think there were rules covering time-based warfare. Damn. Wheres the fun if you can't cause some temporal paradoxes and get a few people stuck in Groundhog Day scenarios. Where's the freedom?
You dont notify the government directly, you notify the news desks of MSNBC, Fox, ABC and the major newspapers. Do it via express postage envelopes a few days out, include any publicly available info on hijackers, flight numbers and times.
The Government might ignore it as a hoax, but not if they know that the information has come via every major news outlet in the country. They have to act.
Call in a bomb threat for the 4 planes to the FBI.
Hoard a warehouse full of toilet paper and profiteer from it.
I dont know what to do about Covid though.
"Hey pentagon have you thought of ... downing those planes?"
Op 1, it was the pentagon's plan all along. 9/11 happens anyway. You die.
Op 2, pentagon's official spits his coffee, you prevent 9/11 but after that... can you really be trusted? You die.
Op 3, pentagon's official laughs at you, 9/11 happens. You can't be trusted. You die.
With prior knowledge of the event and 2 weeks head start? You could do so much including the drastic actions that would result in less lives lost.
If you're going by the comic, you only have 1 day. 18 and a half years for Covid, though.
If you're a time traveller you could build up credibility with other things too. Start contacting a journalist with predictions of future headlines. Go back to October 2000 and say what's going to happen with Bush v. Gore. Then in like July 2001 meet up with them, explain that you're a time traveller which is how you know this, and show them the video.
Fewer*
But what could you do without throwing your life away? Basically you would have to hijack a plane to increase security. Regular appeals by a person claiming to be a time traveler... might not be taken seriously.
IDK, 1 day is prob insufficient for finding and neutralizing unless you're Liam Nissan, John Dick, or Katie Holmes.
Hijacking a plane wouldn't be enough. Plane highjackings were nothing new. They were even common back in the 60's. Conventional wisdom was you cooperate with the highjackers. They have to land eventually.
Nobody anticipated suicide highjackers.
Fewer*
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/less
The traditional view is that less applies to matters of degree, value, or amount and modifies collective nouns, mass nouns, or nouns denoting an abstract whole while fewer applies to matters of number and modifies plural nouns. Less has been used to modify plural nouns since the days of King Alfred and the usage, though roundly decried, appears to be increasing.
Prevent 9/11 probably unrealistic, but you could pull the fire alarm prior to the attack and thereby save lifes
Go to the cops and prove you are from the future. Get there a few days early with the lottery numbers on a piece of paper or smth. That might get them to take you seriously. Of course they will never let you go back.
covid for sure, but one guy with a smuggled knife could have a pretty good chance of stopping at least one of the planes
Just call with a bomb threat, they take that shit seriously and it would have emptied planes and buildings. Call the PD and threaten both towers, the pentagon, and the airport.
They wouldn't buy the attack on the Pentagon. I can't see a scenario where you could threaten the military central of the US that somehow it was endangered from within or outside.
The airport would be a better bet back then.
There’s a game around time travel called Quantum Break that brings up this topic.
Someone brings detailed messages to their past self…and acknowledges, as a way of proving it, that September 11 is going to happen - but due to the way time works, no matter who they warn or what they say, no one will believe them and nothing will change.
I don’t even know if everyone read that bit of text lore ingame, but it was pretty emotional.
The time traveler is trying to save lives, and compared to covid 9/11 isn't even a blip on the radar.
It's implied that in the process of trying to warn people about covid, she inadvertently caused 9/11
Or that younger people simply have no memory of, and were not (or don't realize) affected by, 9/11.