No. Nothing that important in the future.

No. I think it would be a total bummer having to live in the present knowing the future.

No. I wouldn't want to find out bad stuff.

Hells no.

Nah. It would probably screw me up for the rest of my life. I can't imagine wanting to know anything that bad.

Nope. What if the world's not there in a year? That's a 100% risk of death!

Only if I were already near death. (It's like checking out the ending of a novel if you know you won't have time to read the whole thing)

Wow, I'm surprised everyone's said no so far. I'd do this in a heartbeat, even with the 50% chance of dying. The biggest problem would be deciding HOW far into the future to go. 200 years seems a little timid, but if you go much more than that, you might not even be able to comprehend the world as it exists then.

I would TOTALLY do this.

If only because I have a 100% chance of dying at some point. So if I get to see The Future, in all its (possible) glory, why not take the risk?

Yes oh god yes. I'd bring back the stock quotes and/or the winning lottery numbers from about five or maybe ten years in and it would be so worth it for my kids. 50%? Perfect. Leaves me some kind of a legacy.

I wouldn't because I have a kid. But maybe if I didn't.

No! One in two chance of death? I think I'd have a better shot at making the year in the present. Unless, like oneswellfoop says, I was knowingly near death, and would have a good bet on extra time. Play the odds, people, play the odds!

I like Friday night questions.

Do I have to come back?

This is pretty much the same question I ask myself before going through yet another heart procedure because as the heart disease progresses, the procedures become ever more risky. Now I am in the single digit odds range, as in 1 in 5, but the greatest benefit generally concerns the far future.

That is, without a procedure I could, for example, probably live 10 to 15 years with drugs and non-invasive therapies but contend with constant chest pains, depression and exhaustion (remember this is a bell curve, I could die tomorrow). However with the procedure I shift the curve out two to five years, minimize the recurrence of symptoms, and reduce the chances of dying in the intervening years by 20%. BUT, the procedure itself has a 1 in 5 chance of killing me. (I have really dumbed down the statistics here as I don't really want to get into all that.) The flipside to this is that some of the drugs I take now are too new to know the longterm consequences and could destroy my liver or cause cancer. These and other issues all contribute to the equation.

Anyway, back to the question at hand, yes, I would travel 20 years into the future to check my son's welfare and discover what I can do to improve his chances for a happy life.

50-50 chance to die and making the time gone a waste of time? Nope.

Oh man, ardiril, I didn't think of that. Yes, seeing my daughter, who's 2 now, at the age of, say, 30. That would be awesome.

My son is 17 now, so the 50% chance of not surviving is not quite as relevant, assuming of course my life insurance pays off. If I don't make it back, he lives his life as it occurs and all is as it was. However, if I do make it back and can improve his happiness, that makes the risk worth the effort.

I wouldn't do it - if I didn't like what I found, I'd be tempted to try to change the future, and the ripple effects might be too great for me to be prepared to accept.

No. 1) I like living too much to risk 50% chance of death; and 2) I don't even look ahead at book endings. I like being surprised.

Are you allowed to buy life insurance before you go? And is the death instant? Or does it occur somewhere along the way? Is it painful? Maybe the future is so odd, that attempting to take it all in is fatal to half the population, in which case, maybe I can increase the odds by contemplating odd things in advance.

I would do it, but i'd probably only go twenty or thirty years into the future so i could bring back usable information and be able to check up on how people have fared. If i died, so be it.

No way, not at 50%