I had this idea the other night when I was very sleepy -- maybe someone was channeling to me from the future in my vulnerable state.
In the future, everyone will have even more stuff than they do now. And some of it will be a lot nicer than the stuff we have now. Still, we will have stuff that they covet, just like us and the 19th century.
I predict that time travel on a regular basis will start with objects and trade, not people. People from the future will send us their used robots, ray guns, their off-brand elixirs of youth, and even though by their standards those things will be old, worn out, or close to the expiration date, for us, it will be great! We will welcome their gifts. But in exchange, they might ask us to send them the things that they no longer have, or think are cool in some kind of ironic or antiquarian sense, like our iPods or our Taco Bell wrappers. Hopefully it will be the Taco Bell wrappers they want, although an iPod for a ray gun would be a pretty fair exchange. Eventually this gifting will become a regular exchange, trade, and commerce.
Goodwill Industries might end up on the forefront of time travel. Maybe a time travel machine will be invented by one of their temp employees, thought to be mentally handicapped by everyone else, but actually a genius of such awesome powers that we don't even recognize his or her form of intelligence -- some kind of super- Aspergers. He or she will use old bits of computers, clothing, and Little Debbie Snackcakes to fashion a time travel device. And maybe it will only work for objects. And then Goodwill Industries will steal the idea from their employee, or insist that it’s their intellectual property because it was done while the Aspergers-time-travel genius was on the clock (Goodwill will definitely be a villain in the future).
And we will be able to go back in time to get things from the past, too. Collectors will love it. Ebay will install a time-travel plug in. But then the market for everything will collapse, and we will be stuck in some kind of timeless free-market dystopia.
This is sounding more like a screen play than an idea, so that's what I'll call it.
With respects to Online Time Travel Pharmacy.
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