Stephen Wolfram Q&A

Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

May 14, 2012

If you were forced to pick a five-year period from history to be sent back to, what period would you pick? Your arrival date will be randomly picked from the five-year period, meaning that you will arrive somewhere in the five-year period. Also this is a one-way trip, and there will be no return to the present. You can only bring with you what you can carry and already have access to, meaning anything you already own or can buy within one hour (budget limited to your current holdings) that you can carry.

Well… I’m not sure how well I’d do before modern candy and other comforts 🙂

I guess I’d want to bring a computer and everything needed to repair it. Not sure I could fit a generator. So it’d have to be some time after electricity…

Heck… this is a weird hypothetical question. It would surely be fun to be telling people all the stuff we know now. But too far back and they really wouldn’t comprehend it.

I think the late 1800s might have been intellectually interesting—that was a time when the formalization of lots of things was happening, and with a different push it might have gone “all the way” to ideas of computing, but didn’t.

Where do I get to go in the world in your setup? Victorian England might have been amusing in some ways.

Oh… perhaps I should go after 1959, so I could influence “myself”… and change my answer to this question.

Heck… I give up…

Just Curious...