I'm looking for some logical ideas as to why a futuristic system would send professional time-travelers back in time to carry out jobs. In 12 Monkeys James Cole is sent back to try and find and prevent the release of a virus that wiped out most of mankind, so that idea's out of the equation. In Looper, the Mob use TT to dispose of their hits, so there's another idea gone. This will be for flash fiction, so I really only need the most basic of concepts, but I'm really struggling to think for what reason people would be hired to travel back in time. To avert disasters doesn't really work (and has already been explored in 12 Monkeys)
Financial gain? Are your time travellers able to change things in the past? If someone could travel back to 1975 with a couple bars of gold, sell the gold and use the money to set up a numbered corporation and then have that numbered corporation buy stock in Microsoft? That'd be worth a fair penny. Or, slightly less intrusively, to send information back - travel back to 1975, convince your younger self that you're from the future, have your younger self invest all available money in Microsoft... etc. All the standard paradoxes would apply, of course, and if EVERYONE sent themselves back to invest in the same company, the stock would soon be so overpriced it would no longer be a bargain...
Thanks for those ideas, @BayView. This was supposed to be a flash fiction that would take me 30 minutes to write. I'm now a couple of hours in and rapidly losing interest. Sorry to have wasted your time.
Ooh, I like that one! ETA: And maybe there'd be a wrinkle that, in order to minimize the likelihood of a paradox, the time traveller has to collect specimens that have either just died or are just about to die (but could be saved in the future) and leave behind organic matter in the same volume and composition as the corpse of the rescued animal, or something else that would keep the impact from rippling out...
I wrote in the short story competition a few months ago. Global warming has people starving, most crops can't handle this. Reserchers finally manage to (some gen technology) find new crops, but they are fifteen years to late. So they send a message back 45 years. You could do something along those lines with antibiotics, or any problem (energy, pollution, extremisms overpopulation)
The protagonist has come up with a great concept for a flash fiction competition, only far too late. So they hire somebody to travel back in time and tell their past self to write the story and submit it. Sorry, couldn't resist.
something obvious like he's sent back in time to clean public toilets in a region because there's a possibility, but no proof, that urinal germs in this particular region might have contributed to a slight rise in geriatric mortality 2150. It's a'job,' y'know - he has to do it, other time-travellers perform important duties. But, of course, as the chief executive says 'your cleaning is no less important...' ... Come on @Jud. ... Or, he's working as a pig-troll in the 21c on behalf of the feminist hegemony Planet Labia. His tweets ensure Earth will eat itself digitally - leaving plateaus free for Labia and the Cockwomble conspiracy to battle it out aside the ruins of NY City. A proxy war even. Worms inside worms...cross-stitch/double-cross.
If I were an industry, I would use professional time travelers to maximize my profits. If knew what happened in 5 years, I would do things differently.
Other people in industry would do the same thing. The Efficient Market Hypothesis would be replaced with the All-knowing Market Hypothesis. Worried about Climate Change? People from the future can tell us the impact. Don't think it's caused by humans? We radically lower industrial output and see what time travellers say about the impact. Let's just hope that the people from the future tell us the truth. What happens to the version of you that sent the time traveller back? Do you continue in that version of reality, and if so what does it gain you to send the information back? Or does that version of you cease to exist, in which case sending a time traveller back is philosophical suicide? Either way, it seems that a different version of you gets the gain from your actions.
Don't look at me, I'm not writing the story. And that's why a company would keep the technology propitiatory.
Kew gardens has a DNA sample of an otherwise extinct species of olive, they also list endangered/extinct plant species. There's also the possibility of not travelling through time in the corporeal sense. Steins; Gate explored the idea of being able to send a digital copy of your brain's data (time leap as it's called) and overwriting that of your past self. It depended on you having a phone but it is an interesting idea. The precursor to that was sending emails to the past as well.
University History department, but it's already been done with The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis. The first one picked up a Hugo and a Nebula though, so the concept worked out well.
