[IW] Ordinary Worlds with valuables!

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Especially with seving platter sized giant spiders that die without added oxygen in the atmosphere and then kill you with it.

I can only read that while finishing with, "No, I expect you to die, Mr. bond."

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I can only read that while finishing with, "No, I expect you to die, Mr. bond."

Certainly the average Bond villain would want a company exporting from that world on speed dial.

[ericthered]

I recently read Guns, Germs and Steel, and realized one of the great things you could get from a TL1 or TL0 far parallel is alternate crops: a strain of wheat that doesn't exist on other worlds. This won't be something you keep trading and trading, but something you pull out once and then plant on home-line or even just grow on a colony world. Then you do a whole bunch of lab work on breeding it in with existing strains and modifying it to be competitive with modern wheat. And then you send it back to the world it came from in its new and improved state and get a tax write-off for humanitarian effort! (just joking about the last one).

The 'Organic Foods' movement will also pay good money for early versions of classic crops.

[Flyndaran]

Except that you also run the risk of invasive organisms. There's also the issue that the less like your crops they are, the less your knowledge of cultivation applies.
A mass die off of your mono-culture could lead to adventurers scrambling to find out why from natives of its source world.
"You didn't periodically add (long list of odd ingredients) to your fields? Are you an idiot?" Finding out which ones are really necessary and which ones are superstitious folk tradition would complicate the matter.
Imagine if one of the ingredients is a completely different plant that comes with its own problems.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Except that you also run the risk of invasive organisms. There's also the issue that the less like your crops they are, the less your knowledge of cultivation applies.
A mass die off of your mono-culture .

One of the advantages that Homeline has is that it no longer has to worry about loss of diversity due to food crop mono-cultures. You can always hop out and get seeds for another kind of wheat or a different kind of potato that that's immune to the blight from the "Ireland never has a potato famine" alternate.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

One of the advantages that Homeline has is that it no longer has to worry about loss of diversity due to food crop mono-cultures. You can always hop out and get seeds for another kind of wheat or a different kind of potato that that's immune to the blight from the "Ireland never has a potato famine" alternate.

That exaggerates the risks of an invasive species disaster.
Customs inspections for vegetation is even more important than animals in many ways.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

That exaggerates the risks of an invasive species disaster..

It doesn't talk about an invasive species disaster at all. The blight or whatever could be native. Why is everything italicized?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

It doesn't talk about an invasive species disaster at all. The blight or whatever could be native. Why is everything italicized?

Invasive species is inevitable. It's only a matter of how severe and often. Making it a policy to grab everything of interest willy nilly means that such disasters will be very common and often very severe.

[wellspring]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Very good point.



Better yet, since the sack of 1204AD, caused by a vennomous Doge of Venice, destroyed more Greek literature than all the burning of Alexandria's Library combined, drop in in 1203AD. Bring a means to photograph tens of thousands of books and art objects.

If I were in the art extraction business, here's how I'd do it. I'd commission a very convincing, historically plausible fake (perhaps after having surreptitiously photographed the original). Matching pigments, technique, brushstrokes or the medium's equivalent, etc. As close as possible. Then I'd simply pull a switcheroo. The timeline gets its (convincingly faked) Mona Lisa, and I get the original. This is blatantly illegal from Infinity's perspective, but devilishly hard to catch. By the time it comes to light in a given world-line, if ever, often a century or more has passed.

A legal version works for pieces of art or artifacts that are lost forever to history (eg paintings on the Titanic). I'd do exactly what Astromancer is talking about: stage my theft immediately before the disaster, subbing out a convincing but not necessarily perfect forgery. The forgery is bombed by nazis or communists, lost in shipwrecks, nuked, eaten by rats, consumed by fire, whatever. The timeline suffers virtually no disruption.

Recordings of famous events or people, obviously, would be another valuable export. Genetic harvesting for genome projects would be another. Not just scientific: how about people trying to trace their lineages? I just saw Finding Your Roots on PBS, and imagined how interesting it would be to view a historical echo for this project. You could use DNA analysis to determine lineage, and even get some footage of ancestors and the circumstances of their birth. Stuff we have to infer from archeology.

Then there's the whole can of worms opened if you found more worlds like Blip. Major computing project? Just have a stealthy data center there, exporting the results when you're done. Among many, many other abuses. Try to find an uninhabited version if you can.

For an alternate work of fiction, try the world where Patrick Stewart left Star Trek: The Next Generation at the end of the third season. The series goes just as long, is just as highly acclaimed, and is a MUST SEE for star trek fans, especially the season 7 episode "Parallels", where First Officer Worf ends up in an alternate reality where Picard is still captain (guest star patrick stewart), Worf never married Troi, and Wesley is gone from the Enterprise.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by wellspring

...
Recordings of famous events or people, obviously, would be another valuable export. Genetic harvesting for genome projects would be another. Not just scientific: how about people trying to trace their lineages? I just saw Finding Your Roots on PBS, and imagined how interesting it would be to view a historical echo for this project. You could use DNA analysis to determine lineage, and even get some footage of ancestors and the circumstances of their birth. Stuff we have to infer from archeology.
....

All those kinds of things specifically requires unmodified echoes and not just really close parallels. You also have to find people that care about the exact times those echoes comprise.
It would be fun to prove so many marriage based genealogies false. Infidelity is far too common to ever trust lineage more than a generation or two, and often not even then without D.N.A. corroboration.