Ask Lemmy

Immune to disease? Welp, time to become a massive slut throughout the ages.

I would survive on Mamie Van Doren, Brigitte Bardot, Sheree North, Rebecca De Mornay, Pam Grier, Rosie Perez... I mean I could go on.

...I mean someone's gotta make horny posts without Violet here, right?

if I am immortal then just do my own thing. Work a job for a while and move on. Rinse and repeat. I have been a nobody for 63 years. It is not really that hard. You know like the Highlander.

As I was reading this, I disappeared in a flash of light and landed in 1945. But I have a plan.

• Learn acoounting, get a job, grind for 10 or so years
• Start investing in Ford, GE etc. and wait for the compound interest to kick in
• Buy a farm, continue to invest. Retire "early"
• Grow a beard, get some white hair paint
• Travel to "relatives" in Australia for 6 months every year
• While in Australia, get rid of beard, set up alternative identity as my own nephew, get involved in fledgling computer domain, invest
• Back home, take up fishing, end up disappearing at sea one day, nephew inherits everything
• I am nephew. Got enough money now to stop working, buy a vineyard in NZ, spend 6 months in the year abroad
• Invest in IBM, I should be filthy rich by now
• Hire professionals to set up a dozen or so alternate identities in English speaking countries. Kill nephew, avoid Australia for the next 20 years
• Numbered Swiss accounts, different looks, pro theatre makeup, the works. By now my 10+ offshore companies own 10% of Berkshire Hathaway between them
• Rotate identities as needed. Invest in the dot com bubble from 100+ offshore shell companies. Cash in and buy tech stocks after the crash. I am now richer than God, but still not intervene in not-yet-current affairs
• No posh events, no media, no socials ffs. My ghosts come and go. I own a few law firms that take care of business and identity management. When suspicions arise, I change countries. Ireland works for a while. I now own 10-20% of all major tech companies, because I bought them before it was cool
• I get into crypto early. Money has no meaning anymore. I mark the days and months remaining to May 19, 2026, when all of this began. I need to insert myself into my old life right as past me begins the journey, will probably feign a nasty flu afterwards to get back on track. Small price to pay for total freedom

And here we are. Money wise, I own about half the world and now I can finally act. Where should I start?

How do you survive until modern day?

I just do ... you literally said I cannot die.

Become a famous actor, nobody will believe I'm immortal because it's not possible.

Sit around and wait. I'm immortal.

So you just get a normal job and get to live through one of the greatest economic booms of American history where you can raise a family of 5 with one singular income?

Literally just go to work for 40hrs a day 5 days a week and you could have damn near anything you want as long as you're white?

This is a dumb "what if".

How will I survive if I cannot die? I just will

Go to Leningrad, kill Putin parents, die. If still living, go to next city to kill another old fart fucker parents. Fuck this world.

Kill history’s greatest bastards and/or their parents until I destabilize and cease to exist.

Do I have prep time? I'd like to research what sorts of things will disappear over that period that will be incredibly valuable if "found" in 2026. Stamps, particular issues of comic books, coins, that sort of thing. That way I can build up a nice nest egg for when the "you can't change the timeline" restriction comes off.

Once I get close to modern times, buy a bunch of Bitcoin while it's super cheap. That's easier to sit on without causing disruption than stocks would be.

When 2026 hits, cash in.

immortal

looks inside

how do you survive?

You're immortal

How do you survive...?

I think you answered your own question.

Why did you make it so easy? Throw someone back to 10,000 BC. If its just ~80 years thats easy. You can't die. Just go make a little place to hang out in a cave or somewhere extremely remote. You dont even need food or water.

1945? Bank robbery is still incredibly easy. Literally all forensics is during this time period is just fingerprinting. People are also malnourished and incredibly weak compared to the average person in 2026. So beat up some GI that illegally kept a gun from the war, use that to perform a series of bank robberies along the west coast of the US and the American South (where Gold stores were concentrated during the gold standard period we find ourselves in).

After that invent corporate trusts and the concept of multi-layer corporate holdings. This would be having a corporation per property owned, which is owned by a corporation and uses services from another corporation, all of which eventually ends in a labyrinthine ownership path that few, if any, forensic accountants in the 1940s could possibly follow to find out it's all just me.

By understanding, even just vaguely, which cities and areas get built up over time in history and buying surrounding properties cheaply and simply holding them until areas are built up enough to sell them for massive profit I would be able to generate essentially infinite money from basic seed money. Add onto this a series of bank and hedge fund holdings that are informed roughly when to invest in specific companies as they come up through the ages the infinite money glitch becomes an exponential money glitch.

Again layers and layers of holdings on holdings on holdings creates obscurity and complexity that would take well into the age of computers to ever unravel. A kingdom easily rivaling the Rothschilds, while being even more hidden as I'd be copying their modern techniques a half century before they perfect them.

With infinite exponential money during the golden age of capitalism I can wait until the present day when I'd no longer be effecting the timeline and then start funding communist revolutions globally, allowing for myself to become a martyr in the revolution.

If you vary the timeline too much you will cease to exist.

But there's a chance you will make the timeline better for those you leave behind? I'd be spending a lot of time in NYC, waiting for an opportunity...

I move to a country where you can have quality of life at very cheap costs. One of the larger Greek islands maybe. I try to live healthy even despite the "immune" feature because life is better then.

Make a fortune of course from knowing the future but keep it secret. Remain unknown to the greater public.

Buy a little house and a patch of land to grow my vegetables. Learn languages. Make friends.

Try to do 'good things' with the money (find out what good things are...).

I would have said start betting like Biff Tannen, but that probably will end up changing the timeline "too much".

But if I can't die and am immune to disease, I guess I exploit that. Can't drown so I'll hop in an ocean and go somewhere. No need for food or lodging. I'll just wander for the next 100 years and peoplewatch.

I stay in my same body, at the same age I am now, keep all my teeth, etc? I am nearsighted, it's gonna be difficult.

What happens when I pass the day I am born, though? Are there 2 of me?

I don't think I'd change the timeline much anyway, it seems hard to. Though I'd love to become a lawyer and advise Al Gore against conceding the election he won. Even if I ceased to exist that might be worth it.

Fuck it dude, I'd just go bowling.

Live a more or less normal life? Actually, some skills from more modern times could get you some good jobs over the decades, depending on what you know. You could achieve an independently wealthy status without getting wildly famous if you play your cards right.

I think if I was 20 I could just backpack all over, get easy cash in hand jobs and fuck around for decades. However, if I'm sent back now at 48 being twice the weight I was at 20 I'd probably struggle as this late middle-aged oddball who has come from nowhere and has no period-specific skills.

Move to Montana or Idaho. Live out in the middle of nowhere. Read a bunch of books.

The hardest part is documentation. 1945 is perhaps easier to "create" an identity following the war, as so many we displaced. But after that it would mean needing to change identity every so often. I'd probably stay in Europe, either in my home country of the UK or maybe even move to West Germany. Both countries did well in the post war 1950s, although not as well as the US. Maybe I'd go to the US because post war may have been an easier time to slip in to the country and then take part in the post-war boom?

I'd start trying to earn money, and put every penny I could into a company I owned and use that to buy stocks and shares in companies I know would do well in the post-war boom. The key is compounding investments to make more money longer term, accepting lower standards of living initially. In the 40s-60s that'd be largely blue chip companies like Coca-Cola, IBM, GE, Proctor & Gamble. Then as new big names of the future came along I'd buy into them - obvious ones being Microsoft and Apple in the 1970s, Google in the 2000s. And of course, probably buy into Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hatherway at the earliest opportunity in the 1960s.

With wealth I'd create new identities - a "son" to inherit the business every 20 years or so. Move around every 10 years or so, maybe between countries to help keep anonymity and to stay under the radar. Unfortunately it could also need a degree of criminality to be able to keep this going - identity fraud but at a low level. Maybe set up a trust, and every 10-20 years be a new lawyer who manages it. So much of that can be done somewhat anonymously and somewhat remotely even in the past.

The aim - if I am to be immortal - would be to accumulate a lot of wealth, spread across multiple countries, to prepare for getting back to today when fore-knowledge runs out. Because not knowing what happens next, all you can do is then try and prepare for possibilities, and making shit ton of money seems like a sensible way to guarantee security and comfort.

EDIT: The other thing to do of course: buy and sell land. Knowing that cities will grow rapidly is perfect for buying up land for later development. And also in many big cities, certainly in Europe anyway, there was a period of suburbanisation with matching collapse of the urban core. A lot of apartments and buildings were sold cheaply as demand was depressed, but then the trend started reversing again in the 1980s though to now. Imagine buying up apartment buildings in London, Paris, Berlin etc. Then all you have to do is live off the income - pay your taxes and no one really is going to ask who owns what, and who exactly is getting the money.

How do you start? Like terminator completely naked with nothing as an adult? EDITED - also where do we end up in space?

I wonder how many people in this thread have read/seen 11.22.63 before.

Without some amount of preparation, I think I'd just end up mostly working for cash and living out of a van for most of that time, or otherwise staying off-grid. There's a surprising amount of paperwork involved in legally existing as a person.

Also, since memorizing statistics is not one of my hobbies, I'd want/need some kind of written ledger to have an edge in back-alley sports betting.

Just for fun's sake though, I'd try my hand at writing professionally again, as a novelist, but just ripping off the plots of movies and TV shows that haven't been filmed yet. Self-publishing everything under pen names of course, to preserve my anonymity.

Functionally impossible unless you completely isolated yourself from civilization. Any impact to "the past" will alter your origin, even if just by changing which sperm cell fertilizes a complete stranger's child. You have to define what "too much" variance means.