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Last week, I asked people:

Last week, I asked people: if you could travel in time, where would you go and what would you do? Some of the responses, including my own, mentioned the use of time travel to get rich. Hence, a follow-up question:

How could you best use time travel as a tool to gain significant personal wealth with just one trip? This may seem easy at first, but it is probably somewhat harder than you might think. For instance, you can’t go back in time, steal the Mona Lisa from da Vinci’s workshop, bury it, dig it up in the present time, and expect to sell it for hundreds of millions of dollars; it just wouldn’t be worth that much money without the history that it has lived through. You also can’t go back in time and affect the timeline so much that you cease to exist in the present (after all, what’s wealth without existence?). Going forward and checking out stock prices might not work as planned either; one or two big investments and your participation in the market would throw the rest of your picks off.

So, how would you make money off of time travel? Is it even possible to make obscene amounts of money (I’m thinking of billions of dollars here) with just one trip? I’ve closed posting on this, but you can read previous comments here.