What goods yield the best profit for time-travel arbitrage?

Question

You have a time machine... of sorts. It allows you to go into the past in an alternate universe. This universe started the same as ours, until visits from time travelers like yourself started making changes. As a result, modern day events look totally different. Different people have been born, different countries exist, etc. Don't even think about trying to bring back lottery numbers or stock picks.

Time to get rich. You're still one of the early people in the race to exploit this universe, but the lowest hanging fruit have already been picked, namely all of the novel technologies that were developed as a result of timeline corruption have already been brought back and introduced by other time travelers.

You can travel with yourself and 1,000 kg of cargo. You can only travel to the past but can go to any location on Earth. You don't care about timeline corruption because it's a different universe that's getting messed up. You're willing to spend about a month in the past to conduct any necessary business. What is the most money you can make off of a single trip?

Example to beat: you could take 1,000 kg of salt (costing you low thousands of dollars) to ~600 C.E., trade it for 1,000 kg of gold, and bring that back for a profit of $60 million.

Answer 1

High-grade Uranium Ore.

Billions of years ago, Earth had some pretty substantial uranium deposits, at least one of which was pure enough to function as a natural nuclear reactor.

In the modern era, half of it has decayed into lead. Even so, this relatively low-grade ore goes for $100/kg. Go back to just after the deposits formed and the crust cooled enough for you to wander around on it. Pick one that would have been near enough to the surface to get to with only 1000kg worth of digging tools in less than a month. This will take some research, but should be doable. The one that functioned as a reactor was near enough to the surface for ground water to act as a neutron moderator, so I expect there should be at least a few reasonable candidates.

This relatively high purity ore should be worth substantially more than the decayed remnants we have now since it will eliminate several passes of a rather expensive refining process.

Additionally...

High Level Nuclear Waste

This isn't something you get paid for bringing forward. It's something you get paid for taking back, cash up-front, robotic controls on the time machine recommended. If you're feeling generous you punt it back two or three billion years so it'll have time to decay before it really matters, but since it's not actually our universe that's not strictly required. Throwing it back a couple hours would work just as well from our point of view, maybe better if the power requirements for travel increase substantially with the span of the trip...

I'm sorry... Did I just turn the protagonist into a villain?

Answer 2

1-to-1 exchange salt for gold seems to be a legend. You probably have in mind Ghana Empire. Even if it worked, how good are you in local dialects? They would just kill you.

1000kg of gold is probably the best you can hope to bring back. Any bulk goods you take there likely to have much less density, so 1000 kg of goods will not get you 1000kg of gold. It's a dead end.

I would go to 1500-1700 Europe. There were rich merchants and guilds back then.

Sell geographic maps.

Sell Americas to Spanish crown. Explain to them what trade winds are.

Exchange long range communication and navigation equipment for a small share of profit. People were reasonably civilized and trustworthy so you probably could survive without need to use force.

Sell designs for textile manufacturing devices.

Sell information about locations of yet undiscovered gold and silver deposits for a share of profits.

Hard synthetic drugs for nobility.

Modern wheat grain, there were many improvements.

A few of those require somewhat long time to play out, so it may requite additional visits to collect profits. Still, it minimizes your load on your way there and gives you stable huge profits.

You could try healing nobility. It could be very profitable. Explain to them what causes contagion and how to avoid it - even kings were afraid to get sick.

Very open ended question.

Answer 3

Lost artworks in Germany during World War II

I will take 1000 kg of materials including scientific journals and historical records of WW II and sell to past Germany. For a country engaged in total war, these have an invaluable worth.

In exchange, I buy artworks and crafts that they have collected from Europe. I prioritize collecting items that have already been destroyed in my timeline but still exist in the past world. Occasionally, we see artworks that escaped destruction being traded for millions of dollars. Therefore, 1000 kg of artworks could yield an enormous profit.

Answer 4

Aluminum could be a good choice.

Prior to 1856 aluminum was more expensive than gold.

Current prices are on an upward trend, but if you can hit two points back in time, you could stop in 1930 to pick it up at $0.20 per pound and then sell it for gold in 1858.

Answer 5

Antibiotics, Vaccines and Painkillers

What is more precious to someone than their life, except maybe the life of their Child.

So many deadly childhood diseases that could be cured by say Penicillin. Vaccines for things like Measles, Small Pox etc. would be highly profitable.

Precision engineering tooling

Micrometers, Vernier Calipers, Reference blocks, Lathes, Milling machines, Tap and Die sets and the knowledge on how to build more.

This allows you to mass-produce goods, consistently. This allows you to do things like:

• Make Weapons
• Make Machines
• Make Engines
• The entire industrial revolution etc.

A Really set of fancy amour with Holographic projectors, some low-yield lasers, a Smoke Machine and a Full-auto AR style rifle with lots of Ammo

What is the most profitable thing to do?

Become a God

That's right, we are going full-on Stargate plot here - Convince the locals you are a God, a few random acts of violence for displeasing you, a few random natural disasters, a few miracle cures for known fatal diseases - and hey presto - you are a God.

And you know what Gods love? Tribute, Donations, Gold and other precious items to keep your favor.

Answer 6

Laser and other extinct things

Laser is a plant learn more here that went extinct due in part to over exploitation. It literally doesn't exist anymore, so it is invaluable to people who are interested in such things. You could go to the past and obtain samples of many things that either don't exist anymore or whose true form have been lost/corrupted over time, and form a very posh "super vintage"/super exclusive business.

As an example: you can bring something mundane to us but of obscene value to people in the past (say, a few medications that would cure Alexander the Great before he died), and return with pristine personal artefacts (like locks of his hair and, if you're convincing enough, some selfies) to sell at whatever the hell cost you feel like to someone rich enough to pay for it.

Answer 7

Knowledge and art

After considering some different materials to take, like a ton of aluminium when it was extremely valuable. However, in the end there is only one thing more valuable than any material. Knowledge.

Get a nice time when things like gold and jewels or something valuable in your time were abundant. Then go in with knowledge and sell it. How much would the Roman empire pay for gunpowerder and guns? What about the Spanish for Greek fire? You can travel a month around to sell as much as possible, maybe even with a few friends.

What to take back that is worth more than 1000kg of gold? You take a risk and try to get ancient artefacts with you. Art that is already ancient at the time. Close to a ton of art should offer that a few will be lauded in your own time. Ancient art of probably unknown masters can easily skyrocket to many times 60 million. As an extra you might get some art like crown jewels with you. Start expensive with the raw materials that can get much more expensive after the added value of art.

Answer 8

Platinum is probably a useful one. When first discovered in larger quantities by the Spanish in the Americas it was primarily considered a waste product, and its import even controlled, because people were mixing it with silver to gain more coins.

All this means it should be relatively easy to acquire, given that it was considered fairly worthless, but it's worth a lot in our world (around $31k per kg).

Another option, which probably won't be as valuable, but is still useful if you're strapped for initial trading resources, is to sell tin to bronze age civilizations (though good luck learning local languages for this). Tin is a necessity for making bronze, but it's actually pretty rare. Most tin during that period was imported along long distances from western Europe, while the main civilizations back then were located in the middle east.

Answer 9

Weapons, Medicine, and Knowledge

Weapons:

Direct trade in modern firearms would be limited, but it could be extremely lucrative just for the gee whiz factor. More primitive weapons that could be maintained and produced by the civilization could be extremely valuable. Gunpowder is easily made, and teaching ancients how to make it would not be difficult. Some simple, stable (and not-so-stable) explosives also fit that bill.

Medicine:

You've got a month - find someone dying of the plague or with leprosy and treat it with antibiotics. A simple medicine that actually works would be worth its weight in gold and then some. Arrow extractors, effective ways to treat period specific wounds and ailments and so much more would be valuable to literally anyone. If you could establish trust, basic things like vaccinating the king's family against smallpox would be incredibly valuable medical services. I don't know how much you could get for it, but again, if they trusted you, basic nutrition and sanitation teaching would be incredibly valuable.

Knowledge:

The other two categories included teaching them a bit of technology, but this could easily be exploited in a ton of areas and it requires little to no weight in your time machine. We know the location(s) of mineral resources, foreign lands, and more. The value of this information is almost beyond measure to an enterprising ruler. Glassmaking and the knowledge of how to grind lenses would be useful (telescopes were military tech first, after all). Good farming practices, tech appropriate industry, animal husbandry, and so much more - if you could establish trust then a smart ruler would see the enormous potential of these things.

Answer 10

BOOKS. Not even the paper copies themselves. but the stories within, and commit massive plagiarism between timelines. Just stealing every piece of historical fiction from one timeline and churning it out as fantasy series in the other would be endless source of profit. Music, poetry, theatrical plays, the opportunities for stealing IP are endless.

Answer 11

Assumptions

1. There is less wealth in the past than in the present. This means it's always more valuable to bring something forward than to take something back.
2. Physical items like old cash, art, etc. would never solve the problem as anything that looked "new" (like a shiny Roman coin from 400 BCE) would be judged a fake. From a certain point of view, the judgement is correct as age (and rarity) is part of what makes old physical things valuable.

And the biggie...

3. That "value" has meaning based on our world today. You're presenting an alternate world that's so screwed up that it's frankly impossible to assume that any assignment of value today has meaning. (I thought long and hard about voting to close your question on that issue. Were it not for the objectivity of the list, below, and how it can be narrowed, I would have voted to close.) Nothing, nothing at all, is intrinsically valuable. Flood the market with antimatter and its value will drop below the price of eggs (OK, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but you get my point). I'm going to assume that the value of substances in the world today meet your needs and that bringing back the maximum cargo won't cause the value to plummet. Those are whomping big assumptions.

So... what are the most valuable substances today?

From this article and using the 1,000 kg cargo limit from your post we learn that the 12 most valuable substances are:

1. Antimatter (1,000 kg = \$62 quintillion)
2. Californium (1,000 kg = \$25 trillion)
3. Diamond (1,000 kg = \$50 billion)
4. Tritium (1,000 kg = \$30 billion)
5. Taaffeite (1,000 kg = \$20 billion)
6. Painite (1,000 kg = \$9 billion)
7. Plutonium (1,000 kg = \$4 billion)
8. Rhinoceros’s horn (1,000 kg = \$110 million)
9. Platinum (1,000 kg = \$60 million)
10. Rhodium (1,000 kg = \$58 million)
11. Gold (1,000 kg = \$56 million)
12. Saffron (1,000 kg = \$11 million)

What can we exclude from the list?

• Items 1, 2 and 4 might and do exist naturally, but in such small quantities that you'd have to mine pretty much every planet in the solar system to get a metric tonne. They are predominantly manufactured, not mined. Consequently, assuming the equipment necessary to manufacture them can be compressed into a metric tonne of cargo and the manufacturing process only needed 30 days, the only reason to travel through time is to find a safe and quiet place to manufacture. Since there's no non-story-based reason to do that, they're excluded from consideration. (Despite their overwhelming value.)

• Items 5, 6 and 7 can be mined and, having the benefit of hindsight, you know exactly where to mine. But the rarity and/or dangerous nature of the substances begs whether or not it can be done in 30 days or is even worth it. Plutonium notably falls into this category. While it might be reasonable in a universe with such wanton disregard for timelines for no one to care where a tonne of plutonium came from... I suspect it isn't particularly believable.

• Items 9-12 can be safely ignored because, frankly, item #8 is so easily obtained if you have 30 days at the right time that it's not even worth thinking about them.

And the winners are...

• Diamond (\$50 billion)
• Rhino horns (\$100 million)

Which one should we pick? Frankly, even if you knew exactly where to mine the diamonds (and, frankly, you do... assuming the alternate earths are a 100% geological match for this Earth), a single tonne is very likely not enough mass to represent the equipment needed to get the diamonds in just 30 days.

Therefore, the winner is...

Rhino horns.

Click to enlarge. Image courtesy Riding for Rhinos, which isn't at all a scientific site, but the graph makes enough sense to me that I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for it.

Travel back in time to a year before 1900 CE when Rhinoceros were plentiful and technology nearly non-existent to the vast plains of Africa where with a jeep, a good rifle, a chainsaw, and no conscience one could easily obtain approximately 445 Rhinoceros horns in a 30 day period (about 15 Rhinos a day, trivial compared to what antique rifled did to the American Buffalo). Leave the jeep and other equipment behind and return with the horns... bank \$110 mil.

To be fair to diamonds, it only takes 2kg of diamonds to add up to that \$110 million. It's pretty believable that you could dig up 2kg of diamonds in 30 days. In fact, if you knew where to dig, you might find it in just a week and only need to travel back far enough to be well before any of the known mines opened. But I honestly don't know if there's a place on Earth in, say, 3000 BCE that with a shovel and a wheelbarrow you could dig up 2kg of diamonds in 30 days. But it's believable.

Honorable Mention

Californium. To beat that \$110 million payoff one must only manufacture 5 grams of Californium.

Today, it takes 2 years to produce Californium and there's only two nuclear reactors in the world that can do it. But we're talking time travel here! And that's something invented in the future, not today! So we can believably rationalize a time before time travel but after today when there is a process and location somewhere that could produce 5 grams in 30 days.

Of course, what you're taking back in time is a metric tonne of firepower to hold off the world's powers for that 30 day period while you take control of the appropriate facility. But that would make an exciting story, would it not?

However, if it's indeed true that Californium could be so easily obtained (hah-hah) by jumping into the past then it's very unlikely that it would have the value stated in the list, above. Part of the reason it's so valuable is that it's so honking hard to manufacture it. Make it easy to manufacture and it's no longer as valuable. Thus, the honorable mention and not the win. Note, however, that you could use Californium as a literary Macguffin such that there happens to be a moment in time where there's 5 grams of Californium waiting to be stolen....

Why not mention Antimatter bruh?

Yes, it would take only 2 nanograms of antimatter to beat out Rhinoceros horns and one could make the same argument I just made on behalf of Californium to obtain it. But "antimatter" has been such a well-worn SciFi trope that I felt that the "reality" of the opportunity would be lost in the "perception" of the trope. I'm also a bit worried of what might happen if you haul antimatter through your time travel device. It might have... universal effects... ifyouknowwhatImean.

Go read the italicized paragraph after the Honorable Mention. It all applies here.

BY THE WAY...

Having said all that, it's likely a lot simpler to plan a heist from a De Beers vault. That's a metric tonne of cut diamonds. And, yes, there's that much in the vaults. Why waste your time trading with the locals in an alternate world or sweating away in a mining project when you can just piss on their economy and rob a boatload of diamonds? This question is ridiculously story-based. Why am I not voting to close? I've invested too much time writing the answer... but fair warning.

And having said all that...

After reading through my answer before clicking "submit" I realized that, yes, I should have voted to close this question. It doesn't matter what you choose. I can come up with a story-based explanation for why any commodity on Earth will make you the most profit. This is why we have a "Too Story-Based" closure reason. Take this for what it's worth.

Answer 12

Be extreme...

PW: Past World | CW: Current World

As soon as time-travel have been enabled, CW's E. Musk and J. Bezos started to brainstorm ideas to massively exploit PW. They now are ready to start the industrialisation or their solution (whatever it may be), and believe me, they expect to make much much more than $60 millions profit ! Therefore, PW worths a loooooot more than this for them...

Seal patterns of the first H bomb in small armored metal tubes with an automatic opening system on a given date and a tracking system. Go to PW in 1900 and spend a month traveling from country to country and offering these little presents to every leader you can meet.

Go back (?) to CW and go tell E. Musk, J. Bezos and their friends that if they want to exploit PW past 1914 they have to pay you to reveal the tracking signature. No paiement ? PW will surely blow up at the first world-war it will know making it unusable.

Answer 13

Trade Tranquilizer rounds, for captive dinosaurs. Sell them to people who want to make Jurassic park.

Offer modern fertilisers in exchange for Cleopatra recording some personalised messages for your clients, and signing the objects they wanted her to sign. If she can be persuaded to visit the future to make an after dinner speech at the shareholders meeting of {super rich company} then that's also an option.

Another time traveller got to Cleopatra before you. Try Rameses. Or get Winston Churchill to give you your speech, in exchange for enough guns and bombs to make it worthwhile for him. Doesn't even really cost him any time, given you have a time machine.

Trade gold to bribe some Roman soldiers to sell you the body of that random guy they crucified. This timeline doesn't matter. Sell a "about to resurrect, actual Jesus Christ from another timeline" to the highest bidder. The cross and grail as well. Maybe some billionaire with an awful disease thinks one the other or both will cure them.

TLDR: Authentic people/artefacts/specimens from the distant past are going to be more valuable to bring back than gold.

In a very strange accent, of someone struggling to make the sounds of the English language.: "Hello Gavin. You know how much you love classics? Well, this is Cleopatra wishing you a Happy 27th Birthday from your loving wife Rebekah! I also signed your copy of "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt". Happy birthday again Gavin."

Answer 14

Forget antibiotics - they are indeed worth their weight in gold (and more), especially to nobles dying due to infections, but you'd have hard time to make them believe, and even if you do, sooner or later you'll fail to heal somebody important having an unrelated disease (where you will be pressed hard to heal him, "or else").

Instead, bring Viagra to a relatively sexually open society, such as ancient Rome, Greece or China. Just make your homework to make sure they are not time-corrupted by funtamentalist Christian or Muslim evangelists.

Alternately (or in addition, to diversify), since Viagra can be a bit difficult to get unless you have connections, bring stimulants - coffeine tablets, if nothing else. And painkillers.

All of this has immediate effect and would be in huge demmand. Of course, you risk being taken prisoner and your cargo confiscated and being forced (under torture, of course) to reveal where it comes from, but then again, this danger is always there. You might want to start selling in small quantities.

Answer 15

My Kingdom for a Horse ... or 200 submachineguns...

It is not your future stuff that is unimaginably valuable nearly so much as your ability to know the exact moments in history when those things would be worth literally any cost to the right buyer. Imagine being the Harappan Leadership of Golconda around the year 500BCE. Your little city state controls the entire world supply of diamonds, but despite your immense wealth, you are just a small country faced with the ever expanding Persian Empire at your doorstep. It is literally a battle you can't win, and you know it.

Then out of nowhere, a messenger of Indra descends from the heavens in a magical chariot, and offers you a trade. The weapons of the gods in exchange for an equal measure of diamonds:

1000kg is enough for about 200 MP5 sub-machineguns and 1,000,000 rounds of ammo. The total cost is about $583,000, but this relatively small modern arsonal is enough to stop even the largest of ancient empires in its tracks. Half a million dollars sounds like a lot of money, but don't worry, the bank loan you need will be well worth it.

Diamonds, were worth a LOT of money, even back then, but the Golconda diamond mines were so rich in them that they were one of the only civilizations in history that could possibly come up with 1000kg of them. The key here though is how much they are worth today. While gold is the most valuable resource available to most civilizations before the invention of rifled firearms at a current market cost, gold is only worth about 88 million dollars per ton. However, a ton of diamonds averaging a medium size and clarity are worth 14.5 billion dollars giving you over 160 times your return on investment compared to any payment any other ancient civilization could possibly pack into your time machine.

Even back then, a ton of diamonds was worth a LOT of money. There is nothing you could bring back from today that would intrinsically be worth thier weight in diamonds, but it is not the value of your goods you are bartering with persay. You are trading in thier own lifes-and-deaths. For that, any price they can pay, they will pay, even if it means impoverishing one of history's wealthiest city states to ever exist.

Why Golconda?

Most of the worlds large diamond mines were not developed and then conquered until at least the 1700s. While modern firearms are certainly superior to 18th century firearms, 1000kg of them are simply not enough to guarantee victory because by this time period, rifled barrels were already the norm; so, there is not really a range at which you can spray an enemy army down with bullets where they can not also shoot back with a reasonable amount of accuracy.

There is also not a commodity more valuable to modern man than diamonds that does not require a nuclear reactor or particle accelerator to create. So, even if your time traveler might know where to find a more dense source of wealth, those things will be much more expensive if possible at all for past civilizations to produce; so, there is no point in going back in time for them. Now if you could go forward in time, you could probably get a really good deal on some antimatter or some portable fusion reactors in the year 3000 and bring it back for some insane profits, but the OP said you have to go to the past; so, this is not an option.

What makes Golconda the perfect customer is that the Persian Empire's army was too vast for Golconda to even imagine a scenario where they could win, but Persia had no weapons that could parallel the rate of fire or range of modern firearms. This means that the people of Golconda, would understand that these weapons would change thier odds of survival from approximately 0% to 100%. It's that certainty of survival going one way or the other based on your weapons that makes them priceless enough to be worth the absorbent price you are asking for.

Why trade in commodities instead of knowledge or historical artifacts?

While certain artifacts can be similar in value to diamonds, the problem with them is verifying authenticity. Those few things that can rival the cost per weight of a diamond tend to be one of a kind, and have to be scientifically verified by measuring thier age before anyone would pay anywhere near thier maximum worth. So, even if you did come back with an authentic collection of ancient manuscripts, renaissance paintings, etc... their lack of apparent age would simply make them look like high quality recreations as opposed to authentic artifacts; so, they would not actually fetch anywhere near thier whole value.

Also, commodities like diamonds are traded in bulk. This makes finding a buyer for your billions of dollars worth of goods far easier than trying to auction off a collection of artifacts to one collector at a time. So even if you could prove your collection of scrolls from the Library of Alexandria is real, and even if it is worth billions of dollars in theory, it would take years to find enough wealthy collectors to come along and buy them from you.

Answer 16

Paintings

Famous paintings can easily be worth tens or hundreds of million dollars now but if you're able to acquire appropriate currency for the time via of the other methods mentioned here, you can probably also buy art pretty cheap. In particular if you can find an artist when they're suffering hard times, you could probably buy a large portion of their works for a relative pittance. As usual this might have unintended consequences (they stop painting because they're no longer tortured starving artist, or have an accident while blackout drunk) that might lead to some other works not getting made in that timeline, but what do you care?

Ideally you'd want to then take these paintings, and store them in a secure location in this timeline where you could retrieve them an appropriate time later so they would stand up to carbon dating (assuming that works the same across timelines) and not appear to have been painted last month. This might not actually be as needed if there is only ONE other timeline since then there'll be at most 2 of any painting that wasn't painted multiple times.

Answer 17

Slaves

One thing we have discovered with our new genetic analysis abilities is that the Neanderthals weren't particularly unusual. Modern humans are hybrids of quite a few different hominid branches. Go back and find one that's advanced enough to be trained for common household tasks, but still subhuman enough that nobody will care too much as long as you treat them at least as well as a dog or cat.

Answer 18

It may be tempting to go back into the far past and bring back exotic plants and animals (T-rex, seed ferns, pterodactyls...) and open your own exotic pet store and nursery. However, any plant matter and animal matter you bring along the way may alter evolution thereafter, and the deeper into the past is your time travel for your trophy hunt, the deeper is the impact on evolution. That is especially true if the plant or animal you brought was the progenitor of a more recently evolved organism. What would humanity look like if you hunted the same Tiktaalik from which all mammals, including humans have evolved? I guess the traveler returns to his time line, his time machine loaded with ancient plants and animals to sell and then finds that humanity as he knows it has ceased to exist. Where his home once stood he finds a dense forest teeming with even stranger plants and animals. Now, he has nobody to sell his bounty to and he cannot just "undo" the damage.

While everyone is busy making profits without thinking about the consequences, the traveler can make good profits from saving extinct plants and animals that were driven to extinction by humanity itself, rather than traveling to pre-human periods. He should not interfere with human history itself beyond that. Teach the past generations about the impact of their acts on the environment, and apply alternative solutions. Governments will hire you for the restoration services. Your advanced knowledge will be an asset. Before you return to your time, buy gold with the money you have earned, because currencies are not forever.

You may say that any knowledge handed over to past generation may alter the time line. True. Even traveling to the past would do just that. However, there is a difference between traveling millions of years into the past and hunting the same animals which would give rise to humans, or selling guns to the Greeks to help them dodge the Roman attack (which has lead to the Middle Ages era) or just traveling to the 19th century and teach farmers sustainable agriculture instead of the slash-and-burn method. Each has its own impact and you must have the least impact possible.

Answer 19

The limiter on profit is in the material you bring home, not what you trade for it. To that end I'd go to Namibia, in particular the area around our worlds ghost town of Kolmanskop, take a 1000kg of supplies, bring back 1000kg of diamonds, that's 5 million carats worth.

To maximise profits work with cut stones ready for the home market, modern diamond cutting equipment can be pretty lightweight. Provided I stick to stones that are at least 1 carat that appears to be a minimum sale value of ~10 billion USD. US$17.5 billion as of July 2024 if it's all good quality 1 carat stones and nothing exceptionally good quality or larger weight. A lot of what came, and still comes, out of that desert is bigger stones that are high quality. Given that most of the 1000kg of supplies is in the form of food and water almost all of that sum is pure profit.

Painite and Taaffiete would be even more profitable but they're so rare that you couldn't guarantee getting your whole 1000kg in the allotted time, if at all.

Answer 20

Go back to Europe in 1350 with 1000 kg of Penicillin. Find poor people with the plague and demonstrate it curing them (for free) in front of every noble you can find. Sell it to the nobles for whatever you desire, especially if they or someone they love already has it. 1000 kg is a LOT of doses.

Bring along instructions for creating rat bait using commonly known materials just for good measure.

Answer 21

Images and data. What did famous people look like? How were the various Pyramids, Stonehenge, Great Wall, etc. built? What were the contents of the Great Library? Determine the entire human lineage from the human / chimpanzee divide. Was there really a snowball earth? Get samples of the oceans over hundreds of thousands of years to study evolution. Study the evolution of written language in various societies from tokens to pictograms or alphabets. find the proto-indo-european language. So.. many... questions...

Answer 22

This is a bit of a frame challenge.

You should be trading whatever you need to in order to acquire real-estate in your universe's present.

Gold is about to become worthless in your universe's present. You're not just looking to get rich quick for tomorrow, you're looking to quickly build wealth that lasts the rest of your life. Sure, since you're getting in on it early you could build vast quantities of gold, but what about in a few years when time-travelling business becomes mainstream? What's everyone else going to come back with? Gold. So much gold will be introduced that its value will plummet. Society will chaotically search for other stores of value, but whether it's diamonds or rubber-ducks time-travelers will introduce so much of it that physical commodities will not be reliable stores of value over the long-term. However, you're smart in that you've recognized this now.

You need to acquire as much real-estate as fast as possible. Time-travelers can bring back a lot of things, but they can never bring back more land. Therefore, whatever you invest in real-estate should remain comparably stable at the market price regardless of what chaos happens with gold and other commodities. Today your yard might be worth $100,000, tomorrow it might be worth 200 gold bars, next month it might be worth 1,000,000 rubber-ducks. However, you're covered because you're renting out however much land you need to in whatever currency is in flavor in order to cover your lavish living expenses. Enjoy being rich!

Answer 23

First Folio

" Short of cash and a proper time machine? Don't worry, Timely Investments will help."

"Seems that we are providing the Time machine, the Elizabethan clothes, authentic weathered shillings, Shakespearean acting courses, and so forth... we want 50 percent of your proceeds...you understand your contract contains an NDA. Don't want anybody sharing our unique abitrage strategy, sign on the dotted line please.

As an arbitrage agent, you wil go back to Shakespeare's time (1623-ish), and attempt to buy copies of his first folio for 10-100 shillings per book. You will purchase a certain number of them, 262 exist now, to return to the present.

Hopefully, with a little detective work, you will get something even better and rarer, like an original unpublished work which also verifies his identity. Perhaps, a first draft of King Lear or Hamlet? At least you know where the guy is, roughly speaking, Stratford on Avon.

In our current time, each first folio can command a price of 10 million dollars, or at the time of writing, 7.2 million pounds. Not bad for the generous buying price of 100 shillings.

Now, You might be tempted to take a selfie with the Bard to sell as an NFT or trade this copy of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for a manuscript. While I am sure he would get a chuckle out of that, this is probably a bad idea. Here at Timely Investments, we prefer to walk a delicate line with timeline corruption. ..And we take the repayment of our investment very seriously, so don't bungle the job.

Better safe than sorry, you may have to buy and dispose of...destroy..the other folios to retain supply and demand, and perhaps even hide the facts of Shakespeare's identity so that they are less well known- eliminating timeline corruption, and burrying your tracks. A little misdirection will help "er..Maybe it was Francis Bacon..?". and with a little bit of work, Shakespeare's actual identity will remain shrouded in mystery and the corrupters won't get there first.

Next stop Satoshi Nakamoto. "