Back To The Cretaceous T Rex

[Channing Arther]

Lets say a tech company has figured out a way to travel back in time, but for reasons involving the programming of their machine, they can only go back about a 100 million years into the past, to the late Cretaceous period. Now that the company is here, they might as well try and make use of it by exploiting the natural resources and maybe see how they can get bigger and more powerful.

What can they find in terms of natural resources that would give them a huge leap ahead of their competitors? I would guess that there's copious amounts of coal and natural gas in the Cretaceous, all untouched and unused? Anything else other than that?

EDIT: Just for clarification, let's go with the branching model of time travel, where going back takes you to an alternate version of our Earth in that time period instead of "our" past, just to avoid any paradoxes and butterfly effects

Since you're in the branching model, you really only need to find something once. For instance, say you find a diamond, or a large gold nugget, or anything else easily picked up and valuable to you. Take it home with you, then go back in time 1 day prior to when you found it the first time, and pick it up again, then rinse and repeat, each time going one day further in the past than you did the time before, now you have that many duplicates of what you want.

You don't even need to find something valuable to begin with, you can go back the full 100 million years, put something very valuable in the alternate universe, then go back 99 million years and pick it back up (or a little more if it doesn't last 1 million years), then repeat the process of going back a day earlier and a day earlier until you have as many copies as you like. [Edit] This method assumes that the time machine can travel to the same branched off timeline, which seems reasonable, and OP doesn't address this.

As @AlexP mentioned, fossil fuels are going to be very expensive to remove the Cretaceous and bring back to home Earth. Most of the oil reservoirs should be there, the most prominent oil deposits known today are from the Cretaceous but depending on when you go in the Cretaceous the oil has already had millions of years to form. The difference in time between a 66 million year old late Cretaceous ecosystem with Tyrannosaurus and a 125 million year old one with Utahraptor and Iguanodon is the same time gap as between Tyrannosaurus and the present day. The time gap between Tyranosaurus and Styracosaurus is the same kind of time gap between Homo sapiens and Australopithecus. Additionally, very few petroleum workers are going to want to work in an environment that has large theropods prowling around on land and mosasaurs in the water.

You have certainly never tasted fillet of stegosaur, or spicy archaeopteryx wings, or the delicate seafood delights of ammonite or the Jurassic era oysters, nearly a foot across, of what is now the Isle of Skye.

Hugh Miller in his 1846 "The Old Red Sandstone" (3rd edition) describes a lobster, four feet long. But he can't tell of the delicate flavour of its tail meat, nor how the fillet of the exoskeletal Diplacanthus firms up in the frying pan, yet flakes so delicately to the fork.

All this and more can be yours, for a modest subscription to the Time Travellers Gourmet Club. Events include transport from our exclusive London premises, catering by the best French chefs, and return travel to approximately the month of departure.

Cutlery provided - but bring personal protection when dining in Tyrannosaur territory (see appendix). A memorial will be held on Sunday next for poor Harrington-Smythe, whose duelling pistols proved totally inadequate to the task on our recent expedition to Northern Colorado.

Step 2: Use these resources to create Interstellar Space Probes, designed to travel to distant stars, record loads of data, then transmit it back to us, ready to arrive about 6 months after you crack time-travel.

Step 4: Build receiving units in the present, to capture the transmitted photographs of other planets and solar systems (As a bonus, equip the probes with Time Travel devices, so that the data received is "real-time")

1: Agree with an associate to each later bury an incorruptible record of Catastrophes, Cataclysms and Natural Disasters for the next 20 years in a specific pair of locations, and not to contact each other again until then

Holiday ranches can be built on tens of thousands of square miles of pristine, untouched land, with no planning regulations or zoning laws. Charge whatever the market for billionaires competing for the top prestige sites. Then move on to millionaires and on down until you're putting up concrete blocks for population overspill storage, prisons, etc.

Then you have all the research value, even a dead t-rex would probably be worth millions. Everything that lived would have research value, even just a tissue sample would have value for genetic research, and who knows what kinds of drugs or spices you could find, the whole foundation of modern genetic research (PCR) is founded on bacteria found in Italian hot springs what might be found in the cretaceous. Then there are simple things like calibrating astronomic or climate research.

Then there is incidental profits, sauropods steaks, ornithipod leather, manoraptorian "fur". How much will a rich Chinese business man pay for powdered t-rex bone or scale considering what is paid for rhino horns and elephant tusks.

someone else mentioned fishing so I won't steal their thunder, but you also have simple things like shellfish. Humans have done a huge number on shellfish in our time. You used to be able to buy clams the size of dinner plates on the street in NY as street food, now a clam or lobster that size is auctioned off as rare prize. You have a whole new ocean to plunder, plus it is full of shallow seas so it should be even more productive than modern oceans.

There was a science fiction story from the 1950's set in a resource depleted future Earth with a toxic polluted atmosphere. The scene opens in the hermetically sealed house of an inventor demonstrating a time machine that had been launched back into prehistoric time (a prototype of a machine for extracting mineral resources). The inventor explains to his colleague that despite this remarkable technical achievement, it had turned out that it would never be possible to time-transport anything larger than simple molecules. The colleague sympathises that this must be a great disappointment. The inventor draws his colleagues attention to the breeze coming from the machine. "What?", "That's the sweet air of the Cretataceous." Not the solution they'd been looking for, but the one they needed. Sadly I don't have my books with me anymore and I can't tell you who the author was.

I find that branching is the less interesting model. You can simply take what you want from where you want. Why bother going to the cretaceous when you could travel to 500 years ago with guns and take all natural resources from that branch, where we have data on where the mines, oil and gas where. If we don't mind destroying these branches we can even sell human hunting.

On the other hand, if we go to our own branch, we could artificially create oil deposits. We grow lots of big herbivore dinosaurs in a controled location and then burry them in the proper conditions to ensure a oil deposit in a know position in the future.

In the past I have asked a question about using triceratops to pull carts. We could possibly ride some ornithopods such as the iguanodon. And if Google can use goats to mow their lawn, maybe we could use ankylosaurus for that too.

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This is what Antarctica might have looked like around 90 million years ago. The Cretaceous was one of the warmest periods in the last 140 million years. Back then, the planet's climate meant that temperate rainforests could grow at the poles. Alfred-Wegener-Institut/J. McKay (CC BY 4.0)

The Cretaceous is a geological period that began 145 million years ago and ended 66 million years ago. It is the last period in the Mesozoic Era. It comes after the Jurassic Period and before the Paleogene - the first period of the Cenozoic Era, our current era.

The Cretaceous is split into two smaller time periods called epochs. The Early Cretaceous Epoch lasted from 145 million years ago to 100.5 million years ago and the Late Cretaceous Epoch lasted from 100.5 million years ago to 66 million years ago.

Our planet's continents were once joined together into one supercontinent called Pangea. It formed about 335 million years ago, but by the end of the Jurassic, this single landmass had begun to break apart. This continued throughout the Cretaceous and by the end of the period the continents had moved almost into the positions they are in today.

Back then Earth was a lot warmer than it is today and there was little or no ice at the North Pole or South Pole. Sea levels fluctuated but were in the most part high. In fact, at times sea levels were 170 metres higher than today.

Shallow seas formed, dividing some continents. In the Late Cretaceous, for example, the Western Interior Seaway split North America into two landmasses. At its largest this sea was more than 3,000 kilometres long, almost 1,000 kilometres wide and 760 metres deep.

'We have evidence from West Antarctica of polar forests that would have been dominated mainly by conifers, things like podocarps, araucarias, and probably gingko trees as well, with understories of ferns and cycads,' explains prehistoric plant expert Dr Paul Kenrick.

Unlike the temperate rainforests that exist today in North America's Pacific Northwest, including in Oregon and Washington, each winter the Cretaceous polar forests would have had to survive four months of the year living in the total darkness of polar night. A very long period without Sun for plants to survive!

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