3 ms·

This weekend I game mastered a Cthulhu adventure where the characters are caught up in a plot to bring an entire airplane full of technology back through time t

by Udo 12y ago

This weekend I game mastered a Cthulhu adventure where the characters are caught up in a plot to bring an entire airplane full of technology back through time to the 40s... :D If you knew you were traveling back in time the most useful thing you'd bring there isn't the laptop with its capabilities but of course the information on it would be world-changing. I'm not talking about stock prices or anything that foolish - since your time travel event would make the future from that point on uncertain again - but imagine someone bringing Wikipedia back to the seventies. Or better yet, research papers and engineering documents! Personally, if I was unexpectedly transported into the seventies with my laptop, the amount of useful information would probably be limited. But even the (comparatively) few things on it could change the world dramatically. The most pressing concern would be data durability though, so the first order of business should be moving the data off the device onto contemporary media. It would probably take drastically longer to offload/convert the files than the expected time-to-failure of the hard drives though, I'm guessing at least one order of magnitude longer.

DanBC 12y ago
> It would probably take drastically longer to offload the files than the expected time-to-failure of the hard drives though, I'm guessing at least one order of magnitude longer, maybe two. They'd McGuyver it somehow. Display the information and take photographs? Synch a cine-camera to a screen paging through information? While simultaneously squirting information out a port.
- Udo 12y ago
  That's true, especially if the operation is not longer confined to myself I expect an impressive amount of jury-rigging could get through the documents pretty quickly. The music stuff would take a bit longer, but it can be done as well. So yeah :)

by Udo 12y ago

DanBC 12y ago

> It would probably take drastically longer to offload the files than the expected time-to-failure of the hard drives though, I'm guessing at least one order of magnitude longer, maybe two. They'd McGuyver it somehow. Display the information and take photographs? Synch a cine-camera to a screen paging through information? While simultaneously squirting information out a port.

Udo 12y ago
That's true, especially if the operation is not longer confined to myself I expect an impressive amount of jury-rigging could get through the documents pretty quickly. The music stuff would take a bit longer, but it can be done as well. So yeah :)