23 KiB
[Q] How could a rational person make the most money off a wardrobe-sized portal to Narnia?
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Author: u/None *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2jfd04/q_how_could_a_rational_person_make_the_most_money/
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Score: 18
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Created: 2014-10-16T15:50:33
Post:
Suppose he has to keep it secret, so no selling of magical items or anything that would give away Narnia's existence.
Comments:
u/artifex0 [+30] (33 minutes later)
How about this:
Found a corporation inside Narnia selling books, technology, veterinary medicine, and so on. Use that revenue to buy up the land around the portal to Earth, and then start experimenting with monetizing the time dilation effect. Build a generator, run the wires through the portal, and and see if the time dilation results in electrical output thousands of times stronger on the Earth side. Build a server farm, and see if you get orders of magnitude faster calculations. Ideally, so long as you could fit more cables though the portal (and data cables in particular can be very thin), you'd be able to vastly outcompete anyone on Earth in those industries, and potentially make billions.
Of course, it might be tough to keep your Narnia-side corporation in business for the thousands of years necessary to make a major profit on Earth. And, if the Narnian economy developed to the point that the people there would be in the market for electricity or data, it might be more profitable to sell directly to them anyway.
That in mind, it might be a better idea to just get rich in Narnia by setting off an industrial revolution, then take a vacation on Earth for a while, come back when Narnia is more technologically advanced than Earth, and then use that new knowledge to get rich by setting off a new technological revolution on Earth.
Eventually, maybe Narnia goes post-scarcity, and then money wouldn't even matter.
u/TheKingleMingle [+16] (59 minutes later)
That in mind, it might be a better idea to just get rich in Narnia by setting off an industrial revolution, then take a vacation on Earth for a while, come back when Narnia is more technologically advanced than Earth, and then use that new knowledge to get rich by setting off a new technological revolution on Earth.
That is genius
u/alexanderwales [+15] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
The big problem with this is that if you're gone for hundreds of years, you might come back to a Narnia that's utterly fallen, or one that's annihilated itself with nuclear weapons, or some other such thing. This is what happens in the books - the children become kings and queens, start a Golden Age, leave, and when they come back the castle has been completely overgrown and their kingdom is in complete disarray.
You're also at a very high risk of giving away the secret.
u/artifex0 [+2] (an hour later)
Sure, but unless absolutely all intelligent life on Narnia were killed, which, though not impossible, seems somewhat unlikely to me, you'd have to wait, what- a few years at most for the radiation to disperse and civilization to rebuild, or for the dark age to end. Then, you could try again.
With regards to secrecy, once you had enough money, you could do a lot of things to hide the portal, the discovery of which would be the only thing that could expose such a strange and unguessable secret. You could divert a river to flood the area, bury it under an artificial hill, build a historically significant monument over it. Anything that could last a few thousand years unaltered would probably work to keep the secret no matter how many inexplicable things you did in either world.
u/Zealousideal_Ad6721 [+1] (9 years later)
Broo imagine you give them electricity and then in 5 earth years you're invaded by space telmarines
u/madcatlady [+3] (7 hours later)
Woah, came here to suggest systems for renting time to kids to muck around and have fun for a few years between classes...
You win. I shall leave now.
u/alexanderwales [+11] Time flies like an arrow (27 minutes later)
Trade. You have two completely segregated economies whose only point of contact is this rational person. Find something non-magical that you can bring into the real world from Narnia, find something in the real world that Narnia would value highly, and swap for profit. A fully-loaded MP3 player would cost you maybe $20, and in Narnia would probably fetch an enormous price from a local lord (though I forget how Narnia's society is really structured). Use the Narnian money to buy a fancy sword, which you can sell in the real world for huge amounts of money - quality made swords are hellishly expensive, on the order of thousands of dollars. Tell people you forged it yourself. Or if the economics don't work for that, find something that they do work for. Is gold comparatively more common in Narnia? Is labor cheaper? At any rate, if you've got the only portal into Narnia, you can exploit the fact that you're the only way for them to engage in trade. No one in the real world needs to know where your stuff is coming from.
You can do a lot more if you don't care about keeping the portal secret, obviously.
u/AmeteurOpinions [+3] Finally, everyone was working together. (41 minutes later)
I wouldn't give it a year before the secret is out. I'd imagine the sword-collecting community is small and thus tight ly knit, and if someone began selling high-quality blades without any prior reputation with smiths and dealers, that's going to cause questions, even if only from idle curiosity. You might be able claim that they are simply a family treasure you want to sell, which would get the attention of historians.
I feel like the only long-term method would use low-profile items, but that doesn't seem worth the bother.
And I have way to many hyphens.
u/alexanderwales [+11] Time flies like an arrow (55 minutes later)
The sword-collecting community is small, but they don't have any significant muscle or intelligence gathering. So even if they have questions, what the hell are they going to do about it? It might be possible to test the swords for radiation and figure out that they weren't forged in a world where atomic weaponry has been used, but that seems somewhat unlikely. It would be one of those minor mysteries that I doubt would ever go anywhere.
It would also be possible to set yourself up as a smith-savant. And if you wanted to get into the business of selling swords, it would probably be wise to at least learn something about them in order to get the highest prices. If it were me, I would present myself as sort of an asshole that's highly secretive about his techniques - never giving tours of my workspace, never sharing tips with anyone, just taking from the community and never giving back.
u/Geminii27 [+3] (20 hours later)
With access to Narnian labor, you have the ability to take orders for highly specific hand-crafted items that would usually take hundreds, if not thousands of hours to produce, and ship them out the same day.
You could buy fresh wine and age it for decades or centuries in a day. Same with cheese (to a lesser extent).
If you could set up an electrical generator of any kind (including solar, hydro etc) with sufficiently smoothed output, you could run a 3D printer which finished jobs near-instantly from the perspective of the outer world.
You could set up cell-division/replication vats and have them churn out massive amounts of whatever hospitals wanted. 100% patient-compatible skin, for starters. And strides are being made in growing organs. Imagine being able to offer a medical research lab the ability to super-accelerate organ growth tests; they could run a thousand tests an hour instead of having to wait months on each one to see how it turned out.
u/noggin-scratcher [+2] I am a happy tree (4 hours later)
You can do a lot more if you don't care about keeping the portal secret, obviously.
For example, you can stop doing the busy-work yourself, and grow rich by charging for transit through the portal.
Anyone wants to trade? They're going through you.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (4 hours later)
Yup. And not just trade, but it would be possible to open up Narnialand, which I'm sure you could charge immense amounts of money for. And you could trade more exotic things, like talking animals (not as slaves - you'd pay the talking animals, or allow them free room and board).
u/Geminii27 [+1] (20 hours later)
Even if gold (or another product) had a much thinner profit margin to mine and refine, you could make it up on volume. It doesn't matter if you only make a dollar an ounce if you're able to produce thousands or millions of ounces in what seems like an extremely short time.
u/TastyBrainMeats [+9] (2 hours later)
For additional fun, remember that any age gained in Narnia is undone upon your return through the wardrobe.
u/noggin-scratcher [+7] I am a happy tree (4 hours later)
Do you re-age when you go back to Narnia, or can you munchkin the crap out of this by doing all of your ageing in Narnia, and returning to Earth only occasionally to reset the clock?
u/TastyBrainMeats [+11] (5 hours later)
Judging by my faded memory of the books, the clock flat-out resets. First book, the four kids have a long and eventful reign, grow into full adults (and then, over a decade later, head back through the Wardrobe and get de-aged with no time passed).
In Prince Caspian, they return - though not through the Wardrobe - and arrive as the same age they've by then become in Earth, rather than as adults.
u/Toptomcat [+7] (12 hours later)
They don't seem to come back from Narnia with the outlooks and memories of adults who have reigned over a kingdom for decades, though.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (23 hours later)
That's because if they did, they'd probably have to live their lives as utter lies or be committed to a mental institute. Which wouldn't make for a very good series. The Magicians series by Lev Grossman does a good deconstruction of this, especially in the third book.
u/TastyBrainMeats [+3] (13 hours later)
That's true.
u/Rebuta [+3] (18 hours later)
I hate that
u/TastyBrainMeats [+2] (21 hours later)
Possibly some kind of mental safety valve? Might be frustrating to be treated as kids when you have a decade and a half of memories of kingship.
u/Rebuta [+1] (a day later)
Even if they walk out and think. "oh, all of a sudden i feel stupider and have lost my sex drive" They'll still remember the way they used to think. It would be like developing a mental illness if their mental capacities were stripped so suddenly.
u/TastyBrainMeats [+1] (a day later)
"Stupider"?
u/Rebuta [+1] (a day later)
I could say that it was inside the "" marks of someone who was feeling stupider.
Or I could say that you know what the fuck I mean. I also didn't capitalise my i.
u/TastyBrainMeats [+1] (a day later)
No, I mean I'm really not sure what you meant there. I mean, they lose fifteen years of experience, but that wouldn't make them dumber, would it?
u/Rebuta [+2] (a day later)
Oh, yeah, kids don't just have less knowledge than adults.
But wait, They didn't loose that experience at all, if they lost the experience that would mean they had forgotten their time in Narnia wouldn't it? They didn't forget. That sounds like death to their old royal selves and I don' think Aslan would allow such a thing.
Is this a discussion about adult vs child intelligence independent of what existing knowledge the might have, or something else? That's that I was getting at.
u/TastyBrainMeats [+1] (2 days later)
I really don't recall the books well enough, or understand human neuropsychological development, to judge that.
u/Toptomcat [+1] (2 days later)
And, perhaps more to the point, I sincerely doubt C.S. Lewis did either.
u/Infosopher [+8] (4 hours later)
Did you just read the smbc-comic? ;) http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3513#comic
u/CopperZirconium [+4] (45 minutes later)
I would work on the Narnia side of things. I think I can get more power and profit from using Earth resources in Narnia than Narnian resources on Earth. I would gain starting cash by selling little bits of useful tech like flashlights, ballpoint pens, lighters, or maybe spices if they have a better return rate. Once I have enough starting capital, I would start setting up infrastructure, schools and generally do as the Connecticut Yankee did in Arthurian England.I would do this because an industrial society would be more profitable than a medieval society. The effectiveness of this plan is dependent on whether I can give away Earth's existence to Narnia.
u/autowikibot [+2] (46 minutes later)
#####
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#### A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court:
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is an 1889 novel by American humorist and writer Mark Twain. The book was originally titled A Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Some early editions are titled A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.
In it, a Yankee engineer from Connecticut is accidentally transported back in time to the court of King Arthur, where he fools the inhabitants of that time into thinking he is a [magician](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magician_(fantasy))—and soon uses his knowledge of modern technology to become a "magician" in earnest, stunning the English of the Early Middle Ages with such feats as demolitions, fireworks and the shoring up of a holy well. He attempts to modernize the past, but in the end he is unable to prevent the death of Arthur and an interdict against him by the Catholic Church of the time, which grows fearful of his power.
Twain wrote the book as a burlesque of Romantic notions of chivalry after being inspired by a dream in which he was a knight himself, and severely inconvenienced by the weight and cumbersome nature of his armor.
====
^Interesting: ^A ^Connecticut ^Yankee ^in ^King ^Arthur's ^Court ^(1949 ^film) ^| ^A ^Connecticut ^Yankee ^in ^King ^Arthur's ^Court ^(1921 ^film) ^| ^Mark ^Twain
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u/eaglejarl [+3] (4 hours later)
My first thought was to use it for cargo transport -- shift tons of stuff to Narnia, then you only have to move the wardrobe, not all of the tons of stuff. Could be a space launch technique if you can find a way to keep it secret what you're doing. That's not optimal, though.
Oh, how about nuclear waste disposal? Put it in Narnia, go back a few Earth days later to find that it's safely broken down into its final base state. (Tough on Narnia of course.)
Rich people who, for whatever reason, want to disappear from the face of the Earth now can -- for a very large fee.
As I recall, the wardrobe existed in both Narnia and Earth, right? When you went back to Earth, you climbed through the Narnia-side wardrobe? And the wardrobe could be moved in Narnia without affecting the one in Earth and vice versa?
If so, and if you had two wardrobes then you're golden. It gives you:
- Effectively teleportation: set the two up one against the other in Narnia and widely separated on Earth. The time compression means that the pass through the Narnia segment takes effectively zero time.
- Effective space launch: put one wardrobe in space
- Power generation. Set the wardrobes up one above the other, facing up / down; you now have a potential energy difference that you can use to generate hydropower, and the water will automatically recycle back to the top.
- Claim the Randi prize by showing that you can do something faster than humanly possible -- they give you a giant box of Legos and some directions for how to build the Empire State Building or whatever. You step into the wardrobe and reappear a moment later with the completed assembly. Other methods are possible, of course.
- Aging wine, whiskey, whatever else benefits from sitting around for a while
- Make gemstones -- the recipe for (e.g.) diamonds is heat + pressure + time. Use the time compression to handle the time. We can already make fake gems so I don't know if this would be better / cheaper.
u/Jon_Freebird [+3] (4 hours later)
Pretty sure there was only one wardrobe, the Narnia side is basically a slow transition from trees to fur coats to wardrobe.
u/comport [+3] (7 hours later)
The wardrobe gets its properties from the wood, grown from a seed taken from an interdimensional crossroads iirc. There is no way to make a second wardrobe, and I can't imagine the effect is robust or well understood enough to break it apart for new constructions.
u/PeridexisErrant [+2] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (17 hours later)
A seed grown from an apple from the Garden of
EdenAslan, which amounts to the same thing.
u/comport [+1] (18 hours later)
That makes sense. I was thinking of the wood between worlds.
u/ArisKatsaris [+6] Sidebar Contender (7 hours later)
If we're talking about the wardrobe itself, all passage through it seems to happen at Aslan's desire at historically necessary moments -- therefore your best bet is to be as virtuous as can be, and hope your virtue will be rewarded with a kingdom. ;-)
u/E-o_o-3 [+3] (2 hours later)
Ugh, it has to be secret? Is it a one way secret (no sign of narnia to our people) or a two-way secret (no sign of our world to narnia either?)
And are you trying to get Narnia-rich, Earth-rich, or both? And do you have any skills / business savvy? (I'm noticing that everyone here assumes you know how to run a business)
u/sicutumbo [+3] (5 hours later)
Well yea, it's a major that isnt part of STEM. A decent afternoon of studying should teach enough to do well. Maybe 2 if you feel like there isnt a rush.
In case this wasnt obvious, /s
u/None [+3] (10 hours later)
Study on the Narnia side. Take as long as you like, aging is undone, and barely any time passes here.
u/frodo_skywalker [+1] (a day later)
Good point - running a business effectively is significantly harder than many realise. The enormous potential arbitrage could compensate for lack of experience, though.
u/scooterboo2 [+3] Tinker 3: Embeded Systems (4 hours later)
xkcd from: http://xkcd.com/821/
u/xkcd_transcriber [+2] (4 hours later)
Title: Five-Minute Comics: Part 3
Title-text: Resulting in The Little Rock 9x + C.
Stats: This comic has been referenced 9 times, representing 0.0241% of referenced xkcds.
^xkcd.com ^| ^xkcd sub ^| ^Problems/Bugs? ^| ^Statistics ^| ^Stop Replying ^| ^Delete
u/Empiricist_or_not [+2] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (12 hours later)
Why make it secret? Work out a deal with someone who can replicate the white witches petrification spell and reverse it, then prove you have magic based suspended animation at the cost of a spell and some foam pellets, use this to make a deal with a world power or large corporation, say Google, so you can maintain control. Demonstrate the time dilation effect and import the best anti-aging biologists, fusion researchers, FAI researchers and any other useful moonshot. Maybe see if magic can SAFELY create controlled fusion and RTS+ superconducting transmission lines while you are at it.
Edit: grammer Edit2: Maybe this could be a good FOOM?
u/Toptomcat [+2] (12 hours later)
The existence of a wardrobe-sized portal to Narnia implies the existence of some approximation of the Christian God- possibly on the other side of the portal only, less possibly on both. Confirming or disproving this seems to me to be slightly more important than any amount of money, if only because Lion-Jesus is likely to energetically and effectively object to any defacement of his dad's property, which would be inherent in most obvious kinds of moneymaking schemes. My first instinct would be to track Him down and try to get His help in working out what was going on. Though wow would that be an awkward conversation.