The World of Stuff .com

How to Buy A Space Shuttle With Duct Tape

I’ll be back to a regular posting schedule soon, but in the meantime, here’s another guest post from Peter Hurford. Are my “Links At The End of the Post”^TM really that famous?

It’s me again; the Greatplay.net Peter Guy. Jordon is busy “entertaining” — whatever that might mean — so he told me specifically to, and I quote, “[f]eel free to be TWoS’s first repeat guest poster.” So, while Jordon may be coming back on Tuesday, I can sneak this guest post in before he gets back.

But what should I blog about? I warn you that it’s very dangerous to blog without “A Concrete Idea”^TM beforehand. Otherwise you end up with rambly posts like this one, instead of cool things like Monkeys on Typewriters.

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So, instead I’m going to tell you a little story. Here you go:

How to Buy A Space Shuttle With Duct Tape
by Peter Hurford

First, head down to your basement and into your time machine. The reason the time machine exists in your basement will be explained later — you should not actually need a time machine to complete this journey. You only need Duct Tape.

Operate your time machine and travel into the future until you get to an era where time machines have been invented. Use your $1 million to buy your own time machine. Send this time machine back in time to your basement, present day. This accounts for the time machine in the previous paragraph. Like the time machine, the $1 million will be explained later, and are not needed to start the journey.

After you have your time machine, go back in time to 1920 and open a bank account. Find someone and offer to trade your duct tape for a penny. They will definitely accept, as duct tape had not yet been invented, and thus is an unseen wonder. Deposit your penny into an account with 3% interest, compounded annually. By the time you get back to 2010, you should end up with $0.14 in 1920s money, which, due to interest, is now worth $1.44. Offer to buy money dated before 1920 on ebay, using your new $1.44.

Now that you have $1.44 in 1920s money, go back in time and redeposit that in your account along with the penny you found on the ground. Going back to 2010, you should now have $167.39, with interest and adjusted for inflation. You will have to repeat this process two more times to get $1 million — specifically, you’d have $3,610,088.83. You can then use to buy the time machine in the second paragraph, which will account for the time machine in your basement in the first paragraph.

NASA says that a space shuttle costs about $1.7 billion. Assuming the time machine costs $1 million, you should have $2,610,088.83 left over. Going back and forth between 1920 and 2010, starting with $2,610,088.83, you should need to make two trips to get $1.7 billion — specifically, you’d have $56,291,504,222.13.

So buy the space shuttle. You lose your duct tape in the process, but you get a space shuttle, and you should have enough money left over to launch it. If not, one more trip with your remaining $54.6 billion should net you an additional $7.9 trillion.

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Since this is the website that requires “Links At The End of the Post”^TM, here’s the compounding interest calculator and the inflation calculator I used for the math in my story.

If Jordon were writing this post, he probably would have linked to stuff off of The J-Walk Blog. The comparison of the Big Mac and Burger King Burger seems interesting, seeing if that commercial is really true. And here’s a picture of the world’s tallest man and the world’s smallest man.

If I were writing for the World of Stuff, my go-to link site would probably be Digg — today there’s this picture of a door, this failure at the FBI, this retrospective about buying drinks for girls at a bar, and how to spot bogus user reviews.

Well, with that, I’m off.

See you around, stuffers!