While I appreciate the humor- let’s discuss, and as a note I won’t speculate on things related to the nature or possibility of time travel, just logic we can mostly confirm. The majority of winning lottery tickets are computer generated tickets. Even though a time traveler could find out the store and time a ticket was sold and go there to beat the previous winner to the winning ticket- there isn’t a clear way to distinguish which “winners” in this manner were “random” winners and which are fine travelers. From the perspective of the present we would see the events as random either way. A winner who picked the winning numbers specifically might be suspect- but the most suspicious would be a singular winner of a jackpot who picked their own numbers, as any “past” jackpot is at its highest the drawing before a person wins.
That means for the maximum payout, the time traveler would want to be a single winner of the drawing before the true winner won. It seems that to make winning worth the effort of time traveling to game the lottery, the payoff would need to be substantial as in all the ways to use time travel to make money, lottery jackpots aren’t the best or largest, and are very public which increases risk of detection and leaving clear records of oneself. They also require the prize be claimed in person which would make the risk of being apprehended higher.
All considered the idea a future entity alone or working with the past set it up seems unlikely. The idea a past entity independently set up such a trap is equally dubious as it is a rather expensive and involved method with much ambiguity and little basis for consistent success. Certain “pocket cases” involving the future developments of society, law, the world, and the nature of time travel, it’s regulation and implementation COULD make this more feasible. However it’s thin.
I’d be slightly more receptive to the idea that the lottery was set up as some method to launder money or distribute large amounts of funds through time by time travelers. An organized crime outfit, a government agency like a temporal CIA or Illuminati type group with agents implanted in various time spaces coordinated to receive the funds for either pay off or usage for tasks or missions... that might have a little more bite to me.
For example say you grabbed a near homes less guy in 2019 and said “I’m going to send you back to the 1920’s. Once there you’ll receive $300k...” (not a HUGE amount in 2019, but a fortune in 1920..) “All you have to do is buy me this little piece of land in central manhattan and leave a trust for me and make sure the land is sold by your estate after you die in 1947 to XYZ....... you’ll live and die in 1920, but you’ll be rich and eat the best things and have anything you want...” Same idea but what if it’s someone in 2220 saying “go back to 2019 and...” so perhaps in a future where our moneybis worthless but easy to make “perfect counterfeits” of- you could move these counterfeits back in time and distribute them en masse without suspicion by using a lottery. Then you convert the worthless money in the past into something or an amount which will have value on the future.
Because your “employees” are basically working for free for you in the past, the return doesn’t necessarily need to be as high (depending on the nature of time travel. Crime- especially complex crime tends to need to bear profit in proportion to the risks and costs in committing it.) It also wouldn’t matter that it takes lifetimes for your investments to mature because from your perspective it is pretty instant most likely.
However one detail which is still lacking in support of the idea? Identity. In order to pull this off a time traveler would need an identity in the past. Since lottery winners and their lives are so public, we tend to know things like the schools they went to, friends and family, etc. They need identification to collect and in this increasingly digital age the ability to falsify an identity becomes harder and harder. To a point, there is a sweet spot for identity in which there is a large enough population that it isn’t odd no one knows you, but there isn’t yet a level of record keeping an sophistication of authentication to allow you to assume an identity or create one.
Now, time travelers may we’ll have an easy method to counterfeit identification or hack computers to create identity records. However there are too many anomalies that would come up. In which case it would seem most prudent for a time traveler (likely not outing themselves as such but instead perhaps posing as crooked lotto employee,) using a person in the past with something like “I’ll tell you where and when to be to win. You split the money with me X%/X%. I can’t collect as an employee and friends or family would raise suspicion and create a link. You can’t say anything or they’ll take the money and we both go to jail. If you don’t pay me my share I’ll talk and we both go to jail and you lose the money. What do you say....?”
Will Smith has a movie coming out which to me seems like a straight to DVD riff of Looper- but I’m still going to give it a chance. Maybe in theaters. Maybe not. Probably not in theaters. Lol. We will see.
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· 4 years ago
Yeah, I saw an article about that. Gemini Man. It sounds like Looper. Plus, with all the choices Will Smith has been making, I don't know how this movie is gonna turn out. I hope it does good. I like Willie.
He seems like a lovable guy who has some personal demons like any of us do, he seems in the media portrayals to try to do good and be a good guy. I like his acting and he’s been in so many good movies or good roles. Sometimes I think turning down the matrix really screwed him up. He has said that it was for the best because he doesn’t think he’d have done as well as Keanu (and I respect that,) but he turned it down because he didn’t understand it or care for the script much- and part of me feels deep down now he takes these scripts that are hogwash but seem high concept to his sensibilities thinking they’ll be like The Matrix and land with people. He’s good at drama- but not at gravitas. All other issues with AE, if you cut some of the heavy handed oration he played a stern and distant military dad well mostly. The story and effects etc sunk the boat... but for his part he did well.
I even enjoyed seeing him ham it up as Lucifer in that Colin Ferrell fairy tale Star Dust straight to dvd riff that could have maybe almost been good. But yeah... he’s made some questionable career moves and I’d like to see this next one be a win for big willie.
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· 4 years ago
Although I liked Collateral Beauty that came out in 2016. It was such a good movie.
That one went under the radar and under appreciated- especially compared to the less supernatural but spiritually similar Seven Pounds. I think it was a good movie too. Solid and sweet with good performances.
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· 4 years ago
Yeah it's kinda similar. Also, critics hated it so much, mostly because it sounded like Seven pounds.
IT'S A LOOPER SITUATION!