If anyone wants a specific goal, have it be either
- Earn a Nobel Prize by age 18
or
- Become a billionaire by age 18
For the sake of the scenario, assume the following:
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If anyone learns that you are mentally from the future, you immediately have an aneurysm and die. You somehow just know this and therefore must keep your true identity secret.
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You wake up as a random 10-year-old specifically in 2002, not your 10-year-old self, and not the age you actually were in 2002.
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You live in the same country, speak the same language(s), and are the same ethnicity as your old self. Your biological sex matches your gender identity (flip a coin if you are enby).
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You have 2 parents and 1.5 siblings. Your family earns exactly the median income for your country.
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The person whose identity you now inhabit left a diary. You have no other knowledge of your new identity beyond this.
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If you try to look for your old family, you learn they had a different child in this timeline who is the same age as you but is not you. They will not believe any attempt to convince them you are related.
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The USB drive is compatible with any standard USB Type A connector. It is just large enough to fit all of Wikipedia, including hosted media and files, and the drive is read-only. The drive cannot be reformatted.
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Stock market trends remain generally consistent for 5 years. After that, assume the butterfly effect will start to skew the results, so you cannot predict what will happen after 2007. Sports become too unreliable to bet on with 100% accuracy after 1 year.
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I feel like I shouldn’t need to clarify this one, but no grooming kids. Assume there is a magical force that prevents you from dating anyone until both you and they are at least 18, and no one is attracted to you unless they would also feel okay dating someone who is your mental age.
EDIT - Additional clarifiers, if this helps:
- The USB drive is not based on 2002 technology but is fully compatible with it. Assume it uses a novel architecture that can repurpose itself to be compatible with whatever system it is plugged into, as long as it fits the correct type of USB port.
Impossible to read a USB stick from 2025 in the year 2002.
Impossible to read a backup of Wikipedia from 2025 in the year 2002.
Story over.
This is, I’m sorry to say, baloney.
In 2002 Windows XP was already out and natively supported NTFS volumes. So did Windows 2000. XP even supported ExFAT volumes with a patch which was released in April 2001. If you’re a Linux nerd, ext2 or ext3 could easily handle the partition and file sizes required. ext2 had already been available for decades at that point and ext3 was released in 2001 and readily available by 2002.
Without media, the current Wikipedia (according to itself) is a hair over 24 gigabytes not including images and media, which’d fit on a 32 gig flash drive that, while it would be absolutely amazing to 2002 users just based on its sheer usable volume, would handily accept a bog standard NTFS partition readable on any XP or Win2k machine.
There were no flash storage based drives bigger than one or two gigs in 2002, but there were plenty of external USB hard drives in that era that readily exceeded the 4 gig FAT32 file size limit. I know this well because I was there at the time, and I owned several of them. You had to manually format them as NTFS to be able to use the entire capacity effectively and with large files, but they absolutely did work over USB… Just not if you bunged them into a Windows 98 or ME machine. A modern flash drive would be no different. In all practicable terms you could mount a volume up to 2.2 terabytes (i.e. round thousands) or 2.0 tebibytes (powers of two, if you can countenance sounding ridiculous for using the word “tebibyte”) in XP/2K if it were formatted NTFS without having to engage in any chicanery or third party tools. Even a ten year old could do it. You plug it in, and it’d Just Work.
Including media the entirety of the Wikimedia Commons is something like 420 TB, which would be a challenge even today to load onto a single USB flash drive. If you were going to include the media (images and videos) these would probably have to be downscaled significantly in order to fit on any single portable drive, even current ones.
The text content of Wikipedia would be no problem whatsoever. USB 3.0 didn’t exist yet, though, so at best you’d be chugging along loading everything at 2.0 speed if you had a compliant board and all the correct drivers for it (and were running at least Win2k service pack 4). You’d want an HTML dump, not one of their database dumps, because running the current Wikimedia software and database versions would be a challenge for sure. But a browser from 2002 shouldn’t trip up on any Wikipedia content except perhaps any .webp images (2010), or h264/h265 video content.
You’d have a much bigger problem if OP warped you and your USB drive back to 1998 or worse, 1995.
There are ways you could allow it to work, but straight out of the pack it probably would not. Also consider GPT partitions as a likelihood which weren’t around. You’d also have to flip the bit ahead of time in diskpart to treat it as a hard drive without quick removal for xp to handle it correctly I believe.
Quick removal isn’t a big concern since the drive is read only. You might crash anything with an open file handle, but you don’t have to worry about data corruption.
Straight out of the pack it would probably be factory formatted as ExFAT. If you had the correct patch on a Windows XP machine (KB955704) it would literally be plug and play.
MBR’s volume size limit is 2 T(i)B. You don’t need GPT for these types of storage sizes.
That’s the impossible part?
I can mount an old drive made in 2002 right now, formatted in a 2002 era format, and put text files on it, compressed with tar and gz from 1990 if need be.
I assume that is the hardware we have to work with in this scenario.
Now try to save wikipedia on it.
(btw it wasn’t text files, it was a backup)
A backup can mean many things. One interpretation is as text files, which works.
Edit: actually any “backup” will work as long as the compression is pre-2002-era. After that it’s something I could work out with a hex editor worst case.
Text content of wikipedia is 24GB compressed.
USB drives in 2002 could hold up to 256GB.
This isnt hard man
MB :-)
Ah, sorry this is me being actually stupid. I was looking up normal drives. My apologies.
Yeah we’d have to filter this a bit.
On that note, I’ve often wondered how big text-based Wikipedia would be if you pared it down to the most accessed articles, and cut out the articles on, say, the highest-scoring curling players from Zimbabwe in 2007.
I don’t know why I was expecting there would be any discussion in here other than NOOOOOO wojacking about technical feasibility rather than what you’d do with the knowledge
Found the kill joy
too bad :-)
I’m not sure hope my reply ended up in that comment of yours
We can assume whoever was smart enough to create a machine that can transport your consciousness into the past so it can inhabited that of a random child (murder btw), was also smart enough to transform the usb data into something that could be read and used in 2002.
For the sake of the scenario, in addition to the details listed in the body of the post, assume the USB drive is type A and is readable by any PC with a USB type A connector, regardless of generation. It can also be read regardless of file system.
There’s an inherent supernatural element to the premise, so assume “it just works.” There can be a specialized browser on the drive as well if you feel like you wouldn’t be able to make use of the raw HTML files.
No assumptions are even required because this commenter is simply flat out wrong. See the breakdown here, or TL;DR: It would be trivial to mount a drive up to 2.2 TB (not GB, not MB…) using 2002 hardware.
I think a bigger assumption in this scenario is that if you’re reborn as a random 10 year old holding a USB flash drive, you’ll zap to a place on the globe with ready access to a recent computer.
Yep. My household in 2002 had a computer, but that’s because I had a parent who worked in IT. Most people I knew at the time didn’t have one. By 2002, ~40% of the United States still did not have access to a computer at home, though the gap would keep closing year over year.
But that’s just data for the United States. Other countries may have had lower rates of adoption at that time, and in a scenario where you would be less likely to wake up in a random household with a computer, it would require a bit more thinking to figure out how to get access to one.
I’d probably look to schools and libraries as a place to start. If that’s not an option, then it’d be figuring out how to befriend a local rich kid who might have a computer. Otherwise, the USB is effectively a paperweight for some time and you’re left only with your memories of the future for guidance until computer access becomes more available.
Oh jeez I grew up with an engineer father and a mom who did punch card programming back in the day and just kinda assumed most people had a computer in the 90s
ok now you killed me :-)
I guess more accurately I killed whatever 10 year old you magically mind swapped with, haha.
That brings to mind how the fuck most of us are going to avoid spending a nice long time in mental health treatment for the sudden change of personality and loss of memory
Yep…you have a diary which likely covers big life events and chunks of recent history, but I hope you’re a good actor.
My thoughts were similar to what others had suggested, find some way to simulate an accident, some sort of head trauma, or a serious illness to help sell why you suddenly can’t remember much and why your personality is different. But I think a whole lot is going to require trying to be as invisible as possible for a while and try to pick up context clues from observing people around you.
And in the scenario above, even if simply explaining your situation honestly didn’t suddenly kill you, I would hate to imagine the reaction of these parents who realize their child is effectively dead and has been replaced by some sort of fae changeling.
I doubt even the max number of USB 1.1 devices per bus can hold the size of current Wikipedia. (Quick Google shows ~4TB usb3.2 drives. And 127 individual devices. Gives you Max 508TB. In 2023 the size of everything in Wikipedia was ~430TB. )
I don’t know about the formatting of Wikipedia but SD cards were on the market in 2002, so a micro SD card in a flash drive adapter would be possible, no?
People in this thread are grossly overshooting when they’re assuming various technologies became available. USB flash drives absolutely existed in 2002. Not very big ones, by modern standards, but I personally owned a one gigabyte USB 2.0 drive in 2002 for which I paid many dollars. It allowed me to retain my title as king of the campus for several months.