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.
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.
Ah I just tried out a new 64gb stick and you’re correct. I thought it would be EXFAT, but thought they were gpt by default. That appears to be untrue for the majority of drives according to a Google search too.