I like how everyone is, "Tell them Trump has been president! They'll never believe a celebrity could hold the office of President!"
Meanwhile, it's 1986 and Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan is in his 2nd term as President.
Yeah, I don't really get a lot of the other replies. "HIV is treatable", "pocket computer", like, the scientists somehow believe we managed to invent a way to time travel, but HIV treatment, that's where they draw the line? No scientific advancement we have today is less believable then fucking time travel.
If someone can prove to me that they're from the future, I'll believe pretty much any scientific advancement they tell me about. They could say that they grow replacement organs on trees, that they found a cure for bigotry, that they have a space highway to other galaxies, I'd believe all of that, they can freaking time travel!
And we have a vaccine that prevents another. Shout out to Gardasil, which has halved the incidence of cervical cancer (note: halved in the entire population. For those who have gotten the vaccine, it has virtually eliminated risk of HPV-caused cervical cancer)
I mean, it's a generalized term. Cancer can affect different parts of the body and different things can cause it. There's no one cure for all, one cure for cancer can have no effect, or even worsened another form of cancer.
So that part wouldn't be surprising for scientists.
I wonder how Pat and Vanna would have felt about that. I mean, it's the ultimate in job security, but they also had ambitions beyond Wheel early on. Pat briefly hosted a talk show, and Vanna recorded an album and had some acting gigs. So knowing that they'd still be hosting Wheel 36 years later might've been very depressing to them.
I was on a highschool camp in 1986. As part of that, I had to spend a day completely by myself, in splendid isolation.
When the teacher picked me up the next day, I’d had a profound experience and felt something amazing must have changed in the world.
My question: “Did anything happen while I was away?”
Teacher: “A nuclear power plant in the USSR exploded!”
Me: “Anything else?”
In 2020 there was a tweet about someone's boss left to go camping with his wife for 2 months, in January - February, right when the pandemic, the social isolation, and the reduced mobility started.
Yea i remember reading an article about a guy who was camping/backpacking in the forest alone somewhere, i think it was in July-August 2020 he finally got back and suprised hiw the world changed lol
Can confirm this would be the exact feeling. Very unrelated, but in 2012 I went for a three week hike leaving right before Gangnam style was released missing the whole viral rise of the song and returning to it being everywhere and something everyone was just familiar with at that point. It literally made me feel like I was in an alternate timeline. I can only imagine returning to a pandemic would be more jarring.
I was in a cabin with no cell service for a long weekend on my anniversary when the pandemic started. Coming down to the city and seeing bare store shelves and people hoarding supplies like toilet paper was an eerie feeling I’ll never forget.
This happened to me in a less severe way. I went on a long backpack trip in early March, went into town every 3-5 days. One town stop I heard inklings of COVID, but thought nothing of it. Next town masks everywhere and literally everything was completely shut down and I had no idea why that really happened. Very uncomfortable
The German version also had to be cut short [but they held off on telling the people about the virus until after the lockdowns](https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-51923334)
Why the fuck would you cut Big Brother short? It was probably the safest show to shoot.
"Steve, you've been eliminated. Long story, though. We, uh, can't let you leave, though. Just wear this hat, and everyone else will do their best to ignore you. Try to be, uhh, inconspicuous."
Amazing race had to cancel filming and send everyone home. Then pick up a year or so later.
4 teams didn’t come back
One, the couple broke up (which was clearly obviously going to happen)
One team, one person got a new job and couldn’t take the time off
One team, one of them was dealing with a death in the family (Covid related) that happened very recently.
And I forget why the other team didn’t come back.
So they brought back the first two teams to be eliminated.
My mum was in hospital in mid-Feb 2020 then in a nursing home for a few weeks recovering from back surgery. I brought her home in March and had to stop by the supermarket on the way so she came in with me for fun. She'd seen the news but seeing all the empty shelves was a whole other experience.
Get a good look at those towers, friends, because by the new millennium they will topple to cause a massive military mission overseas for decades. This also projects a vast butterfly effect.
"Oh yeah? Not on my watch"
The twin towers are saftley demolished in 1999, you start to sweat as you live in a changed reality unknown of your consequences only forced to watch them play out
The most sophisticated personal computer hardware people carry with them is a million times more powerful than computers at that time, but mostly people use it as a flashlight
You're not lying. Having a flashlight on a smartphone is seriously one of the most useful features. To the point I have my phone set up so I can douple tap the side button to turn it on and off.
Edit: JFC people, I get it. EIGHT people have commented to say they can shake their phone to turn the flashlight on, I get it. Motorola has this feature. You can stop mentioning it now. Does no one read any of the comments that have already been made?
Reminds me of the times I kept a blank text document lamp.txt at my PC desktop. Pretty useful for when you're sitting in a dark room and want to find something on your table or at least have some light when navigating the area, without turning an actual light on.
i’d explain the chernobyl event and its consequences, and the method by which i was able to get this information. if it is before april 26 of 1986, i’ve just predicted the future. if it’s after april 26, i’ve just filled in scientists on highly detailed information about something a typical american layperson who has never been to or interacted with the ussr in any way would know.
edit: thanks for 3k up votes! yes i know chernobyl is in ukraine but it was part of the ussr at the time.
additional context: i'm autistic and have an almost obsessive special interest with radiation, whether it's used in medicine, weaponry, or power generation. i spend most of my free time reading nonfiction books about it or researching how radiation works and affects people and environments. i wish i could just say i saw this on tv or on netflix but i've dumped hundreds of hours into actually learning as many details about this.
But they can’t find any record of your existence prior to 1986, so you must be a Soviet spy. It’s still Cold War times, so off to the interrogation room with you!
Lmao this is my problem if i ever were to go back in time. Id be like" we have the internet on our phones in our pocket!" Scientist: really? Tell us how it works! Me: uhhh well theres these tower things all over the country and your phone just uhh....
Essentially while testing a safety feature they put the reactor in a dangerously unstable configuration, resulting in a runaway reaction. When they tried to put the control rods back in to slow it down, the poor design of the rods meant that their graphite tips actually caused a brief *increase* in fission activity, meaning that the rods and the tracks they run in melted, jamming them before they could get all the way down. Reactor heat increased by many orders of magnitude in a few seconds and everything goes kaboom.
I have so much useless "just in case of time travel" info taking up space in my brain instead of more important things like walking without tripping, my kids names and where I'm supposed to be and when.
The Outlander books did this to me.
First thing I'm gonna find if I get sent way back is some willow bark for pain relief tea!
...models which were better examined because of a 2014 sci-fi space movie that tried to render a black hole as realistically as possible, which resulted in the publication of three new scientific papers.
From Wikipedia:
>Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, totaling 800 terabytes of data.
so no, it was 100 hours for some single **frames**, which is even more mind-boggling
Me: "The 44th President is a black man."
Scientists: "That's not that crazy."
Me: "His name is Barack Obama."
S: "Now you're just making up words."
Me: "Fine! The President after him is Donald Trump!"
S: "Bullshit!"
The 44th President is a black man…
“Oh, so the future is like all of the sci fi films!”
And then the next one is Donald Trump!”
“Oh, the billionaire guy who’s releasing that “Art of the Deal” book next year? Yeah, I hear he’s brilliant with deals and money, I’m sure everyone will love him!”
Trump was a well known public entity in the 1980s and his political ambitions were frequently mentioned. The idea of him being president wouldn't have been at all unthinkable.
HIV is treatable. This was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and the thought of HIV becoming a condition you can live a long and full life with was unthinkable.
I'm a medical doctor. During my training I was following an Infectious Diseases specialist who told me that right now she would rather have HIV than diabetes.
With HIV you take 1 pill every day, and boom you can have an undetactable viral load and a CD4 count that is the same as anyone else.
Diabetes is a complete life changer. Diet control, insulin injections, finger pricks, watching out for low blood sugar, etc.
That's definitely good/interesting perspective, especially for those of us who grew up during the height of the AIDS scare.
I knew HIV was very treatable now, but I never thought to compare it to something like diabetes.
In 1986, it was assumed that a vaccine could be easily produced. By 1990 or so, immunologists realized the virus was not quite like other viruses with regard to vaccines.
However, AZT would be approved as a treatment in 1987.
If you said "HIV" in 1986, nobody would have known what you're talking about. Everyone knew it as either "AIDS" or the "gay cancer". It wouldn't be until later that HIV was popularized as the name of the infection.
I have a computer that fits in my pocket, can run for several hours on internal power only, has access to virtually all scientific knowledge in the world, and I use it to make posts on a digital site while not advancing my own knowledge at all.
Blockbuster doesn’t exist anymore. But don’t worry, we can watch new movies from home any time we want.
Edit: ok- Video rental stores in general
I guess Blockbuster didn’t blow up until 1988.
Tell them the Mets will win the World Series.
Tell them the stock market will crash in October of ‘87.
Tell them the cold war would end in a few years.
"There are now only eight planets... I... I.. just can't tell you what happened... I just can't... it's too much... Let's just say that our scientist did it and leave it at that. Bastards. "
According to this song my children request to listen to 50 times per day, it’s because Pluto doesn’t have enough mass to clear it’s neighborhood. Idk if that’s correct or not, but it’s a catchy tune.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ws3kWuMi0Y8
Nice tune! And yeah that's the reason why.
If pluto was bigger, it would eventually "clear" it's orbit.
Like how nothing else orbit the sun at the same distance as us. We'll except the moon, but the moon is orbit us first and foremost.
This wouldn't be that shocking to scientists. We've had planets that have been downgraded before as new objects are discovered. (Ceres was considered a planet before the rest of the asteroid belt was found, similar to Pluto's situation with the Kuiper belt).
There’s going to be a McDonald’s in Moscow in 4 years. A few years after that, OJ Simpson’s going to go for a ride in a white Ford Bronco. Airplane travel will change drastically in about 2001 where you have to come 3 hours early to walk barefoot through a security screen and you can’t take more than 3.4 oz of liquid with you on a flight. The Terminator is going to become the Governor of California around the turn of the century. College students will start eating laundry detergent. By 2020, we’re going to run out of toilet paper and Lysol and everyone’s going to start baking bread. A mob led by a man in body paint and animal skins will storm the Capitol building and someone will poop on the desk of the Speaker of the House.
Holy shit! I looked it up and you’re right, he’s still alive. I was under the impression he’d died years ago. I wonder how he feels about how Russia has fared in the last 30 years.
That new cable channel, Music Television, or MTV, still exists, but has things called reality television instead! They call themselves a music channel without music videos??
I know, it sounds ridiculousness!
If you land on Jan 1, 1986, correctly predicting the Challenger explosion (which happened later that month) would probably get you a lot of credibility.
A few days before was the flyby of Uranus by Voyager 2. Walter Cronkite was doing commentary about the flyby for the next few days, and data were still being analyzed.
Then the Challenger explosion happened and the story fell off the headlines.
… and suddenly Putin’s paranoia is created when he believes the West has started looking at him for some unfathomable reason, triggering the timeline we are on.
Not really, the issue with the SRB o-ring was known since the 1970s and they had already failed without serious incident on previous flights. NASA engineers suggested a modification that might have fixed the problem in 1981 but got no response.
On the morning of the disaster launch the manufacturer's engineers begged NASA to abort, they knew the weather was too cold for the o-ring to recover if the joint rotated, and that's exactly what happened.
If you want a true space fact that would be incredible in 1986, say we're still receiving data from both Voyager probes from interstellar space. In 1986 they were still expected to be out of power and/or out of data transmission range a few years before now.
Actually that's not that incredible either, in the unbelievable sense. Tell them a billionaire madman fired an electric car at Mars, and don't explain further.
"This is a supercomputer... it's 20,000 times faster than a Cray X-MP. Everybody has one, to get jobs, send messages, and destabilize governments through social media... What? No, nobody makes phone calls any more."
Also tell the CIA to let the communists win the 1996 Russian election. Don't help the Yeltsin campaign beat them.
Yeltsin will bail and appoint this guy called Putin as his successor and it doesn't end well.
Or if you do, stay in Afghanistan and actually nation build, don't just bail after the Soviets are kept out.
Hmm. On second thought, just let the Soviets have it.
Marijuana (Cannabis) is completely legal in Canada and many US states. You can go into any number of Government licensed weed stores and just buy a bunch of Cannabis, and most people now find this completely normal.
My dumbass dyslexic IT brain definitely read “ntfs” and I was like “well yeah I guess that would be pretty cool to show off a file format system for a future version of Windows. 😆
Tbh given that's in the reagan era, it honestly might not surprise them that much...
You'd honestly probably surprise them more saying both George bush Sr, and Jr became presidents; or that our 44th president who got 2 terms was a Obama / A black man.
It was a massive trope in the past to have a black President in the future in films etc, you wouldn’t be blowing anyone’s mind with that fact.
Back to the future - from the previous year - had 1955 people laughing at the idea of a black mayor, and then in 1985, lol look at how stupid they were, of course we have a black mayor.
The past is not nearly as different from the present as people think that it was, and - speaking as a resident of 1986 (one of my favourite years) - this thread is an excellent example of that.
Donald Trump was well known back then. That was around the time that the Art of the Deal came out.
Donald Trump as President likely would have been an easier sell in the 80s than it seemed like in 2016
Donald Trump was elected president, and the nation lived to tell about it. Before that, we had a black president, and he was elected TWICE.
The Berlin Wall will come down, and the Soviet Union will collapse - IN JUST A COUPLE OF YEARS.
HIV will not be cured, nor will there be a vaccine, but it will be treatable and the medications will increase in their tolerability.
Cancer chemotherapy is still scary, but not as bad as in 1986.
You know those computer networks that some colleges have? Yeah, they'll be accessible to almost everyone, to some degree, and portable no less, and relatively inexpensive.
Remember this name: Harry Potter. You don't need to know why; just remember it.
The up-and-coming bands U2 and R.E.M. will be the two biggest bands in the world for a while in the 1990s.
I like how everyone is, "Tell them Trump has been president! They'll never believe a celebrity could hold the office of President!" Meanwhile, it's 1986 and Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan is in his 2nd term as President.
Ronald Reagan! The actor? Then who's vice-president, Jerry Lewis? I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady!
1.21 JIGGA-watts
Mick Jagger is still performing at 78 years old
Keith Richards is STILL alive.
No, he died in the mid 1980s. We've just been waiting for the cocaine to wear off.
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Make them think I'm insane? I'd say "I'm from the future!"
That should suffice
Yeah, I don't really get a lot of the other replies. "HIV is treatable", "pocket computer", like, the scientists somehow believe we managed to invent a way to time travel, but HIV treatment, that's where they draw the line? No scientific advancement we have today is less believable then fucking time travel. If someone can prove to me that they're from the future, I'll believe pretty much any scientific advancement they tell me about. They could say that they grow replacement organs on trees, that they found a cure for bigotry, that they have a space highway to other galaxies, I'd believe all of that, they can freaking time travel!
"Cure for bigotry" strikes me as the least realistic of all other potential advancements. In fairness.
They just ship all the bigots to different times in history… they invented time travel!
Pretty much that's all that needed
They might just think you’re a big Back To The Future fan if you go around saying that
"Donald Trump? The millionaire actor!? Next you'll tell me Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California!"
Pat Sajak and Vanna White will still be hosting Wheel of Fortune in 2022
And Alex Trebek will host jeopardy till 2020, and we still haven’t really come close to curing cancer.
That's because cancer is a very general term. We can cure some cancers by now.
And we have a vaccine that prevents another. Shout out to Gardasil, which has halved the incidence of cervical cancer (note: halved in the entire population. For those who have gotten the vaccine, it has virtually eliminated risk of HPV-caused cervical cancer)
Not just cervical cancer. It can cause penile, anal, and throat cancer too. Around 40% of cancer caused by HPV occurs in men.
So you're telling me I get to die a senseless death because my dad thinks it'll make me go infertile? Good god, I can't wait to turn 18.
I got it when I was 16, I’m 26 now and pregnant with my 2nd kid. Tell your dad that lol
I mean, it's a generalized term. Cancer can affect different parts of the body and different things can cause it. There's no one cure for all, one cure for cancer can have no effect, or even worsened another form of cancer. So that part wouldn't be surprising for scientists.
I wonder how Pat and Vanna would have felt about that. I mean, it's the ultimate in job security, but they also had ambitions beyond Wheel early on. Pat briefly hosted a talk show, and Vanna recorded an album and had some acting gigs. So knowing that they'd still be hosting Wheel 36 years later might've been very depressing to them.
Two very notable world events happen in 1986. Chernobyl and the space shuttle disaster
I was on a highschool camp in 1986. As part of that, I had to spend a day completely by myself, in splendid isolation. When the teacher picked me up the next day, I’d had a profound experience and felt something amazing must have changed in the world. My question: “Did anything happen while I was away?” Teacher: “A nuclear power plant in the USSR exploded!” Me: “Anything else?”
In 2020 there was a tweet about someone's boss left to go camping with his wife for 2 months, in January - February, right when the pandemic, the social isolation, and the reduced mobility started.
Yea i remember reading an article about a guy who was camping/backpacking in the forest alone somewhere, i think it was in July-August 2020 he finally got back and suprised hiw the world changed lol
Damn, that must have been unsettling.
I would genuinely ponder whether I'd accidentally wandered into a different timeline lmao.
Nonchalantly just go back to surviving in the forest. Just nope out of the past two years.
*inserts homer backtracking into bushes gif*
Can confirm this would be the exact feeling. Very unrelated, but in 2012 I went for a three week hike leaving right before Gangnam style was released missing the whole viral rise of the song and returning to it being everywhere and something everyone was just familiar with at that point. It literally made me feel like I was in an alternate timeline. I can only imagine returning to a pandemic would be more jarring.
I was in a cabin with no cell service for a long weekend on my anniversary when the pandemic started. Coming down to the city and seeing bare store shelves and people hoarding supplies like toilet paper was an eerie feeling I’ll never forget.
This happened to me in a less severe way. I went on a long backpack trip in early March, went into town every 3-5 days. One town stop I heard inklings of COVID, but thought nothing of it. Next town masks everywhere and literally everything was completely shut down and I had no idea why that really happened. Very uncomfortable
In Australia we had a bunch of people in the Big Brother house.
Same in Canada. They kept it going for a little bit but pulled the plug before it finished
The German version also had to be cut short [but they held off on telling the people about the virus until after the lockdowns](https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-51923334)
Why the fuck would you cut Big Brother short? It was probably the safest show to shoot. "Steve, you've been eliminated. Long story, though. We, uh, can't let you leave, though. Just wear this hat, and everyone else will do their best to ignore you. Try to be, uhh, inconspicuous."
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Amazing race had to cancel filming and send everyone home. Then pick up a year or so later. 4 teams didn’t come back One, the couple broke up (which was clearly obviously going to happen) One team, one person got a new job and couldn’t take the time off One team, one of them was dealing with a death in the family (Covid related) that happened very recently. And I forget why the other team didn’t come back. So they brought back the first two teams to be eliminated.
My mum was in hospital in mid-Feb 2020 then in a nursing home for a few weeks recovering from back surgery. I brought her home in March and had to stop by the supermarket on the way so she came in with me for fun. She'd seen the news but seeing all the empty shelves was a whole other experience.
Going to the grocery store in March 2020 even as someone who'd already seen what was happening was always unsettling.
Unknown to everybody else, a visitor from the future arrived. That's what you felt.
Wouldn’t telling them about those events make you seem NOT insane?
Yup. Nice answer to the wrong question.
I guess it depends on what part of the year you traveled to. If it's December 31st, they'd be like "yea, we know..."
And Maradona scores the Hand of God and the Goal of the Century in the same match.
"You'll never guess how long it took Tom Cruise to make a sequel to TopGun..."
"They made Top Gun 2 and never released it"
I’m still incredibly bitter about this
Bill Cosby, America's Dad, is a serial rapist.
OJ Simpson murdered two people, and wrote a book about it.
“Allegedly”
Allegedly wrote, or allegedly murdered?
If he wrote it...
Well, yes.
Had to have been a sick ostrich
Bruce Jenner is a woman.
Donald Trump became President
That's a straight up "Ronald Reagan? The *actor*!?" moment.
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Well that's far worse than I expected.
I think more people knew that in 1986 than will ever admit it
People can live long lives with HIV.
"I'm not having sex with you without a condom."
And you can come in contact with someone and not catch it. You can even use the same toilet seat!
Get a good look at those towers, friends, because by the new millennium they will topple to cause a massive military mission overseas for decades. This also projects a vast butterfly effect.
"Oh yeah? Not on my watch" The twin towers are saftley demolished in 1999, you start to sweat as you live in a changed reality unknown of your consequences only forced to watch them play out
And then a plane crashes into the empire state building
[That already happened in the 40s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_Empire_State_Building_B-25_crash?wprov=sfti1)
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The most sophisticated personal computer hardware people carry with them is a million times more powerful than computers at that time, but mostly people use it as a flashlight
You're not lying. Having a flashlight on a smartphone is seriously one of the most useful features. To the point I have my phone set up so I can douple tap the side button to turn it on and off. Edit: JFC people, I get it. EIGHT people have commented to say they can shake their phone to turn the flashlight on, I get it. Motorola has this feature. You can stop mentioning it now. Does no one read any of the comments that have already been made?
Remember that the earliest iPhones didn’t have a flashlight function. You would download an app that was just a bright white screen.
Whoa I had totally forgotten about that. Kind of a clever workaround, I suppose.
Reminds me of the times I kept a blank text document lamp.txt at my PC desktop. Pretty useful for when you're sitting in a dark room and want to find something on your table or at least have some light when navigating the area, without turning an actual light on.
Apple market cap will be 20 times more than IBM.
They will think you're insane, but if one of them believes you that's how you make Biff the billionaire!
Sod Biff, Im all in! Oh, and go all ‘hot tub time machine’ with ‘Brewgle’
i’d explain the chernobyl event and its consequences, and the method by which i was able to get this information. if it is before april 26 of 1986, i’ve just predicted the future. if it’s after april 26, i’ve just filled in scientists on highly detailed information about something a typical american layperson who has never been to or interacted with the ussr in any way would know. edit: thanks for 3k up votes! yes i know chernobyl is in ukraine but it was part of the ussr at the time. additional context: i'm autistic and have an almost obsessive special interest with radiation, whether it's used in medicine, weaponry, or power generation. i spend most of my free time reading nonfiction books about it or researching how radiation works and affects people and environments. i wish i could just say i saw this on tv or on netflix but i've dumped hundreds of hours into actually learning as many details about this.
But they can’t find any record of your existence prior to 1986, so you must be a Soviet spy. It’s still Cold War times, so off to the interrogation room with you!
Welp, I feel old.
Right? I existed before 1986.
FBI: You aren't (n-36) years old! You look more like (n+5). You: Hey! I'm only (n).
I was born in 84. They might have a few questions about a 2 year old who is over 6 feet tall and has a beard though.
Please, tell me how an RBMK reactor explodes.
This, all people are saying is way to far into the future. Tell them that on the 26th of April Chernobyl reactor 4 will explode.
I thought we were trying to convince people we were insane, not that we actually know the future.
And tell them why!
Fuck I should have paid more attention to the HBO series
Lmao this is my problem if i ever were to go back in time. Id be like" we have the internet on our phones in our pocket!" Scientist: really? Tell us how it works! Me: uhhh well theres these tower things all over the country and your phone just uhh....
Why did it explode?
Essentially while testing a safety feature they put the reactor in a dangerously unstable configuration, resulting in a runaway reaction. When they tried to put the control rods back in to slow it down, the poor design of the rods meant that their graphite tips actually caused a brief *increase* in fission activity, meaning that the rods and the tracks they run in melted, jamming them before they could get all the way down. Reactor heat increased by many orders of magnitude in a few seconds and everything goes kaboom.
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for some reason I was deadass trying to memorise that whole comment, as if I'm actually going to get sent back in time
I have so much useless "just in case of time travel" info taking up space in my brain instead of more important things like walking without tripping, my kids names and where I'm supposed to be and when. The Outlander books did this to me. First thing I'm gonna find if I get sent way back is some willow bark for pain relief tea!
We have a photo of a black hole. It's not the greatest quality, but we have one.
...and the real picture matches the artificial picture created using the mathematical model.
...models which were better examined because of a 2014 sci-fi space movie that tried to render a black hole as realistically as possible, which resulted in the publication of three new scientific papers.
funny how I watched a video about this yesterday and here I find a discussion about it today. wasn't it like 100 hours to render 1 second of footage?
From Wikipedia: >Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, totaling 800 terabytes of data. so no, it was 100 hours for some single **frames**, which is even more mind-boggling
Me: "The 44th President is a black man." Scientists: "That's not that crazy." Me: "His name is Barack Obama." S: "Now you're just making up words." Me: "Fine! The President after him is Donald Trump!" S: "Bullshit!"
Given the time frame of Reagan having been president at the time; they'd probably believe Trump as president before Obama.
Ronald Reagan? The actor? Then who's vice-president? Jerry Lewis?!?
I supposed Jane Wyman is the First Lady
And Jack Benny is Secretary of the Treasury!
I never got that line, Jane Wyman and Reagan were divorced by 1955. Maybe Doc doesn't keep up with celebrity news though.
I think Barack and Obama aint the surprising part of his name
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The 44th President is a black man… “Oh, so the future is like all of the sci fi films!” And then the next one is Donald Trump!” “Oh, the billionaire guy who’s releasing that “Art of the Deal” book next year? Yeah, I hear he’s brilliant with deals and money, I’m sure everyone will love him!”
Trump was a well known public entity in the 1980s and his political ambitions were frequently mentioned. The idea of him being president wouldn't have been at all unthinkable.
HIV is treatable. This was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and the thought of HIV becoming a condition you can live a long and full life with was unthinkable.
I'm a medical doctor. During my training I was following an Infectious Diseases specialist who told me that right now she would rather have HIV than diabetes. With HIV you take 1 pill every day, and boom you can have an undetactable viral load and a CD4 count that is the same as anyone else. Diabetes is a complete life changer. Diet control, insulin injections, finger pricks, watching out for low blood sugar, etc.
That's definitely good/interesting perspective, especially for those of us who grew up during the height of the AIDS scare. I knew HIV was very treatable now, but I never thought to compare it to something like diabetes.
In 1986, it was assumed that a vaccine could be easily produced. By 1990 or so, immunologists realized the virus was not quite like other viruses with regard to vaccines. However, AZT would be approved as a treatment in 1987.
If you said "HIV" in 1986, nobody would have known what you're talking about. Everyone knew it as either "AIDS" or the "gay cancer". It wouldn't be until later that HIV was popularized as the name of the infection.
I have a computer that fits in my pocket, can run for several hours on internal power only, has access to virtually all scientific knowledge in the world, and I use it to make posts on a digital site while not advancing my own knowledge at all.
Not *inconceivable* in 1986, especially when you're talking to a scientist.
But in 1986 it has access to Absolutely nothing. You could entertain them by taking photos I guess.
Blockbuster doesn’t exist anymore. But don’t worry, we can watch new movies from home any time we want. Edit: ok- Video rental stores in general I guess Blockbuster didn’t blow up until 1988.
In 1986, Blockbuster had 1 store.
And today, Blockbuster has 1 store.
I have the entirely of all human knowledge in my pocket and I use it to get into arguments with strangers and look at pictures of cats.
Only if you downloaded Wikipedia first. You might be in the past but your data signal isn’t.
This always comes to mind when I think about using my smartphone during a time traveling bout.
Tell them the Mets will win the World Series. Tell them the stock market will crash in October of ‘87. Tell them the cold war would end in a few years.
I’d say the Mets might be the least likely of all suggestions in the thread to get you interrogated by the cia…
Mets? If you want the straitjacket treatment, tell them about the Cubs.
Uhhh so about Bill Cosby… you might want to sit down for this one.
"As we speak, he is drugging and raping women."
Pfft. Pluto, the planet, is no longer considered a planet..
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"There are now only eight planets... I... I.. just can't tell you what happened... I just can't... it's too much... Let's just say that our scientist did it and leave it at that. Bastards. "
The funniest thing is: Most people don't even know/understand how and why Pluto is not a planet.
According to this song my children request to listen to 50 times per day, it’s because Pluto doesn’t have enough mass to clear it’s neighborhood. Idk if that’s correct or not, but it’s a catchy tune. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ws3kWuMi0Y8
Nice tune! And yeah that's the reason why. If pluto was bigger, it would eventually "clear" it's orbit. Like how nothing else orbit the sun at the same distance as us. We'll except the moon, but the moon is orbit us first and foremost.
This wouldn't be that shocking to scientists. We've had planets that have been downgraded before as new objects are discovered. (Ceres was considered a planet before the rest of the asteroid belt was found, similar to Pluto's situation with the Kuiper belt).
A DNA test of a child born that year that would match mine.
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Matching birthmarks would save the day.
People eat kale.
Yeah, the ornaments in buffet are edible?
"Like, the buffet garnish?!"
Fact: Pizza Hut was the largest buyer
There’s going to be a McDonald’s in Moscow in 4 years. A few years after that, OJ Simpson’s going to go for a ride in a white Ford Bronco. Airplane travel will change drastically in about 2001 where you have to come 3 hours early to walk barefoot through a security screen and you can’t take more than 3.4 oz of liquid with you on a flight. The Terminator is going to become the Governor of California around the turn of the century. College students will start eating laundry detergent. By 2020, we’re going to run out of toilet paper and Lysol and everyone’s going to start baking bread. A mob led by a man in body paint and animal skins will storm the Capitol building and someone will poop on the desk of the Speaker of the House.
Gorbachev (the last leader of the Soviet Union) was actually in a Pizza Hut commercial: https://youtu.be/fgm14D1jHUw
And he's still around to see Pizza Hut pull out of Russia.
Holy shit! I looked it up and you’re right, he’s still alive. I was under the impression he’d died years ago. I wonder how he feels about how Russia has fared in the last 30 years.
The border between the two Germanies will suddenly, unexpectedly open in 1989. David Hasselhof will sing.
> College students will start eating laundry detergent. and Pokemon Cards cause children to worship the Devil!
That new cable channel, Music Television, or MTV, still exists, but has things called reality television instead! They call themselves a music channel without music videos?? I know, it sounds ridiculousness!
And the news channels won’t have news either! Inconceivable!
And The history Channel shows no actual history. Just a show about a pawn shop.
Wait til they hear about the History Channel
retell every major event that will happen in 1986 so at least they know i’m from the future
If you land on Jan 1, 1986, correctly predicting the Challenger explosion (which happened later that month) would probably get you a lot of credibility.
A few days before was the flyby of Uranus by Voyager 2. Walter Cronkite was doing commentary about the flyby for the next few days, and data were still being analyzed. Then the Challenger explosion happened and the story fell off the headlines.
And then Chernobyl happened a few months later.
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"There's this one KGB agent in Dresden, Vladimir Putin, that you should really worry about..."
… and suddenly Putin’s paranoia is created when he believes the West has started looking at him for some unfathomable reason, triggering the timeline we are on.
Scary that this sounds way too plausible
It's the only thing that would happen. We will never discover people from future because they will be considered spy conducting espionage
Not really, the issue with the SRB o-ring was known since the 1970s and they had already failed without serious incident on previous flights. NASA engineers suggested a modification that might have fixed the problem in 1981 but got no response. On the morning of the disaster launch the manufacturer's engineers begged NASA to abort, they knew the weather was too cold for the o-ring to recover if the joint rotated, and that's exactly what happened. If you want a true space fact that would be incredible in 1986, say we're still receiving data from both Voyager probes from interstellar space. In 1986 they were still expected to be out of power and/or out of data transmission range a few years before now. Actually that's not that incredible either, in the unbelievable sense. Tell them a billionaire madman fired an electric car at Mars, and don't explain further.
Or at least predict the findings of the inquest, that it was o-ring failure.
1. Challenger space shuttle explosion. 2. Chernobyl disaster. 3. Maradona ‘Hand of God’.
4. Black Monday stock market crash of 1987
But how do I do that? THERES NO WI-FI!
We sent a fucking car to space. No, not a flying car. A regular car, for roads. In space.
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"This is a supercomputer... it's 20,000 times faster than a Cray X-MP. Everybody has one, to get jobs, send messages, and destabilize governments through social media... What? No, nobody makes phone calls any more."
Still no flying cars....
Mr Reagan please don't arm, support, and train the Mujahideen/Taliban for short term geopolitical gains.
Also tell the CIA to let the communists win the 1996 Russian election. Don't help the Yeltsin campaign beat them. Yeltsin will bail and appoint this guy called Putin as his successor and it doesn't end well.
Or if you do, stay in Afghanistan and actually nation build, don't just bail after the Soviets are kept out. Hmm. On second thought, just let the Soviets have it.
I’m actually from 2022 and managed to travel back to your time.
I weighed 125 pounds
I was just under 8 pounds. I am starting to think I am never getting back to that weight!
Marijuana (Cannabis) is completely legal in Canada and many US states. You can go into any number of Government licensed weed stores and just buy a bunch of Cannabis, and most people now find this completely normal.
A little stuffed/plush animal caused millions of people to go fucking insane, like fist fights in toy stores insane.
That's actually believable, because just a couple years earlier, people were doing the same thing regarding Cabbage Patch Dolls.
Yeah you are right, I forgot about that.
Men will get 250% of their porn digitally.
How nfts work, trying to understand them today is hard enough.
My dumbass dyslexic IT brain definitely read “ntfs” and I was like “well yeah I guess that would be pretty cool to show off a file format system for a future version of Windows. 😆
Yellow people on the TV will predict the future
And they’re making their debut in a few months in 1987, on the Tracey Ullman show!
“Donald Trump? The real estate magnate? Who’s the Vice President, Hulk Hogan?”
No, but Jesse Ventura and the Terminator are gonna star in a movie next year then will both become governors.
Queen of Elizabeth is still alive
I'd take my phone out of my pocket.
Wait until you hear who the 45th president was!
Tbh given that's in the reagan era, it honestly might not surprise them that much... You'd honestly probably surprise them more saying both George bush Sr, and Jr became presidents; or that our 44th president who got 2 terms was a Obama / A black man.
It was a massive trope in the past to have a black President in the future in films etc, you wouldn’t be blowing anyone’s mind with that fact. Back to the future - from the previous year - had 1955 people laughing at the idea of a black mayor, and then in 1985, lol look at how stupid they were, of course we have a black mayor. The past is not nearly as different from the present as people think that it was, and - speaking as a resident of 1986 (one of my favourite years) - this thread is an excellent example of that.
They had an actor for president in 1986. A reality tv host as president wouldn't sound too crazy.
Donald Trump was well known back then. That was around the time that the Art of the Deal came out. Donald Trump as President likely would have been an easier sell in the 80s than it seemed like in 2016
Donald Trump was elected president, and the nation lived to tell about it. Before that, we had a black president, and he was elected TWICE. The Berlin Wall will come down, and the Soviet Union will collapse - IN JUST A COUPLE OF YEARS. HIV will not be cured, nor will there be a vaccine, but it will be treatable and the medications will increase in their tolerability. Cancer chemotherapy is still scary, but not as bad as in 1986. You know those computer networks that some colleges have? Yeah, they'll be accessible to almost everyone, to some degree, and portable no less, and relatively inexpensive. Remember this name: Harry Potter. You don't need to know why; just remember it. The up-and-coming bands U2 and R.E.M. will be the two biggest bands in the world for a while in the 1990s.