Blue or red door?

Like A Duck@programming.dev to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 296 points –
117

Blue door is a monkey's paw. You go back in time? You butterfly-effect shit you didn't intend to.

  • Buy a bunch of Bitcoin? A series of unanticipated changes means people figure out it's a pyramid scheme early and by around 2017 or so, the last Bitcoin miner shuts down. But hey, at least video cards are affordable!
  • Bring back Lotto numbers? Well sorry, buddy, but just by breathing the air differently, the air currents where the numbers are drawn are affected, and you're left with zilch.
  • Got kids younger than 10? They don't exist anymore! If you try to have them again, you end up with other kids who are similar, but not the same as the ones you loved... and have deleted from the timeline.

The answer to these time-travel opportunities is always to run screaming from them. But hey, at least with this one you've got an alternative where you become an instant millionaire! Take the $10 million. Don't fuck the timeline up.

Yeah, the re-do your life idea really gets scary after you have kids. There's pretty much no way you get them back.

Bonus points, odds are you will have a really hard time re-meeting your partner. You're probably a totally different person than you were when you met. The chemistry that got you started is now not there and who knows how you mix now. It may still work, but they might be weirded out by how much you know about them.

For both your sakes, the best option may be to never meet.

I'll take the red door thanks.

My partner and I love this time travel stuff — the truth would be a great pickup line!

The movie About Time deals with this fact. It’s a great movie if you are ok with romcoms

Yeah having acquired a wife and kids in the last decennia really makes this a no brainer.

I mean your wife would likely still be in the picture, just have to win her over again.

Speak for yourself! As someone who will literally be married for 10 years in 2 weeks and has 2 kids I'm going back baby! How else would I stop the marriage! Yeesh.

Blue Door. One of my greatest mistakes was not buying Bitcoin when it was 100 dollars

I fucking did buy bitcoin when it was pennies, but dumbass past me had a nasal problem and spent it immediately.

Amen. Bought my first Bitcoin with RuneScape GP and immediately blew it all

At least you got some fun out of it. The majority of the BTC I ever owned was on my parents computer that somehow wound up in my aunts hands. She stripped it and sold it all for parts...

I wonder what would be more profitable, buying Bitcoin early, or buying Apple stocks early?

Apple, their stock has split several times

Depends how early, right? First days/months of bitcoin they were trading for fractions of a penny. What’s the ROI from $.0001 to $60,000? And in only 14yrs rather than 40.

ah you're right, a single apple stock has only going up 5800 dollars in the past 40 years, which really shows you just how insane and unregulated crypto is

Insane? Yes. Unregulated, also yes. But if you remove the specific issues with bitcoin itself (like that it’s almost entirely used for speculation so far) and just look at the numbers you can see it’s not out of line for a brand new medium of exchange that starts trading at essentially zero but has the theoretical potential to be a major currency in world trade to have an almost unfathomable upside.

Mcap at launch: basically zero

“Mcap” of world trade: trillions (quadrillions?)

Someone tried to get me to buy at $8

I still remember the first time I read about bitcoin and thought to myself "better check this out".

Only I forgot about it until years after that lol

Red door, I can't say how much better I would do things if I did them again. But 10 mil can make things much better right now.

Just look up some stocks to buy on the day of your first mistake before you go through the blue door and as a result you can have however much money you feel like is a good amount in future.

Better yet, buy a huge amount of bitcoin and dump it at the height of the 2018 surge. Stocks implies you have a reasonable amount of money to start with, but bitcoin was worth pennies at the beginning.

I was just thinking stocks so you can get the money prior to 2018

The blue door, because money can't buy me the time back. It's priceless.

Also I could just buy BTC at $2 a piece and make the 10 mill as well. So it's win-win.

I'd even say, im hindsight it was a mistake not to buy bitcoin back then.

I strongly considered buying a single bitcoin for $700. I was irrational with money bit it seemed like a good idea. I decided I was being dumb with my money again and didnt go through with it.

It would have been worth it. Even at $700 it would have been worth it.

I went through the same thing, but I think it was multiple for 50. Total.

However, it was college loan money and I thought that would be too irresponsible to spend 50 on something like that.

Shit

I was going to buy $100.00 worth back when it was 36 cents. I couldn't figure out how to buy it and then my car broke down and that was that.

People eventually buy Bitcoin at the price they deserve, they say

$2? I’d go back to 2012 or whatever and mine it using free electricity in grad school. Hell I’d use their cluster, call the slurm job something like “orbital_freq_prime_factors”

And I’d break up with my college girlfriend

And I’d bring my doctoral dissertation back in time so I didn’t have to write it

Even if the bitcoins didn’t work out, maybe I could buy Pokémon cards for cheap and sell them

Go through blue door to choose red door instead.

This one should be the accepted answer.

Go through the red door and use that money to build a tine machine.

Blue door is essentially erasing your own existence. Why do people even view it as an option? The me that made mistakes created the me today. If I erase those mistakes I wouldn't exist. Just some other guy with an easy life.

True, true. One of the mistakes however is not buying tech stocks in their infancy, so you'd wind up with way more than 10m.

I've forgotten again that the average age on here skews 30+. All the big tech stocks were cheap when I was literally an infant, so I really misunderstood what you said.

Because you have a different view of time and space. You could go back in time and stay the same,it's just a different timeline, where you see a younger version of yourself. But changing anything in his life don't affect yours, only his. There can't be paradox in this model.

Bingo. We are the sum of our experiences mistakes and all. I have an ex i I still long to be together with to the point of a physical ache. But I still wouldn't take the blue door.

Exactly! I can’t count how many times I’ve messed up, but without them I wouldn’t be who I am today. Hence why I pick the red door, not for the money, but so that the experiences that shaped me still mean something.

The blue door implies that your current existence is the one changing your past, i.e. you retain the knowledge of your current existence. The 'you' that made those mistakes therefore still exists, as you would remember the mistakes you've made in order to correct them. The mistakes still happened, your timeline still exists/existed, you're just now in an alternate timeline where your brain was surgically implanted into your younger self.

Red Door cause I know myself enough to know I'm gonna make all the same mistakes even if I had perfect recollection of years of details I don't even remember now.

Why would you go back in time only to make the same mistakes again when you can now have ample opportunity for whole new ones!

Big brain thinking right here. Variety is the spice of life.

Blue door would mean having to relive my childhood years being forced to go to church and Christian school, but without the indoctrination that made it feel like it was a good thing. That would be torture.

Read, give me that money there are more mistakes to be made.

Blue, because I'll might come to this again and take the red door on the second time around.

Who decides what is a "mistake" and what is "fixed"? I feel like going through the blue door would trap you in some kind of infinite loop

Why worry about the past when you can have a brighter future with an extra 10 million cash?

Red. No amount of fixing mistakes will ever repair my lifelong depression.

Blue door without question. Even if there was a stipulation that I couldn't invest in stocks or bitcoin or do anything else that would make me rich.

I fantasise about going back and doing it all again, not making huge changes, but little ones, living my life with the knowledge and security I have now, so I would be able to enjoy my childhood instead of stressing about the future, I could be kinder to people around me and help them when they were struggling. I could tell the people I loved that I loved them instead of keeping those feeling held back due to insecurity. I could spend more time with my pets when I was "too busy" before. I could start the hobbies and sports I ended up loving as a child, and actually have the chance to be competitive at them.

I’ve seen enough of Silicon Valley to know you take the money and run.

After walking into the blue door the first mistake it corrects is that I should have picked the red door.

I don't have any major regrets worth fixing, even though I've made some major mistakes. However, all of my current problems could be solved with $10M. Give me the money

Time travel way way back to when the first fish crawled on land.

And step on it.

You're welcome.

Am I the only one who thinks there haven't been big 'mistakes" in their life, just, you know, life? I mean, sure, there are things I would do differently given the chance, but not something I would call big mistakes. I would definitely go for the money - I would even pay money not to have to go though my teens again lol

Yeah... The mistakes are learning experiences. They help us grow. If your mistakes are "I dated a girl who cheated on me" and "I leased an expensive car when I shouldn't have"... Those things probably helped shape you into a more rational, mature person, assuming you learned from them.

Now if your mistake is "I worked 80 hour weeks for 30 years for my shitty career and never saw my family and now I'm dying early from stress induced heart attacks" or "I had some shady dealings in the past and now the mafia is after my family", I'd take the mistake-fixing door. But hopefully most people's mistakes aren't quite that bad.

This is literally a nightmare I once had. I dreamt that I found a time machine and started changing my past little by little, working backwards and fixing minor mistakes, then bigger and bigger ones, but seeing no major impacts on my life. Like fixing a flunked exam only changed the diploma to a "with honors" one and nothing else. But I kept going until a certain event in my life that had really profound impact on my emotional health and made me attempt suicide, but it was also the one that really shaped me into who I am today. After preventing it, bam, Im in a place and a role the current me would've never wanted to be in, and the guy I turned into probably didnt want either, it was just so much worse off. After that dream I started to go much more easier on myself. I still cringe from time to time when I remember my past actions, but I dont really regret what happened anymore.

You should watch thr movie 'The Butterfly Effect' its literally that. He initially goes back in time to fix something but then winds up ruining everything.

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This is going to be very age related I think for most folks. Myself blue door after making and taking with me a list of lottery numbers and dates along with major sporting event outcomes and horse races for good measure. Oh also stocks along with buy sell dates and value on those dates.

Why? Just buy bitcoin, and if you somehow butterfly effect away bitcoin, but whatever 3 crypto coins hit the market first.

ugh no. I still don't want to support climate change like that.

Red door fo shiz. Those “mistakes” led directly to the pretty fuckin cool life I have now.

You are a result of your personal experiences. Going back and changing would make you an entirely different person.

I've made many mistakes in life, still I like the person I've become. And I'm still absolutely in love with my husband. For 23 years now - wouldn't trade that for a new life.

So red it is!

Easily the money. There were many things in life that didn’t go quite right for me, but there was a lot that did as well. If I muck around with what already happened, I might end up worse than I did.

Red Door. Fuck dealing with my life again during that time. Plus, the butterfly effect would be a major concern.

Blue door for sure. I can invest early in a ton of stuff that would get me way above 10 mil. And in this economy, not investing was a mistake.

Red. People won't care about my mistakes if they're drinking mojitos on my yacht.

Too much coding for me. I read 10 milli as millisecond. And i was like what?

10 mil in hand. Had to make mistakes to learn and get better.

Haven't really made many mistakes in my life, so.... red door!

If I went through the blue door my son wouldn't exist, so fuck that give me the money.

If I can fix my mistake of dumping my NVDA positions at $2.70 (post-split pricing) in 2010, then definitely the blue door.

Blue door. I've only just figured out what I want to do with my life and I'm terrified I'm running out of time.

I'm happy with how my life turned out for the most part. Red door to make the rest of it more fun and less stressful

If you go through the blue door can you also fix the mistake of going through the blue door? Would that invalidate the fixes you had applied earlier? Or can you technically walk through both doors, I'm a big fan of having cake and eating it!

Also mistakes are how you learn, I feel like if you had never made any mistakes you wouldn't learn lessons from them it could completely change your fundamental character. After all are we not just the sum of our experiences?

If I fixed all my mistakes in the past, me would not be me. So the choice is really between my death and 10 mil. I will leave to to the reader to guess which one I choose. You have two attempts.

I'm fine with most of my mistakes so I'm going through the red door.

I'm sure I've made plenty of mistakes, but I'm happy enough with where my life is now. Red door it is.

Red, it'll take longer than whatever time they send me back to to fix all that