If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed?
Its the 14th century and you've had no time to prepare, after you're done reading this post you are snapped. What do you do?
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Yeah, this. I have medications I need. When the pair of contacts in my eyes fall out eventually, I'm functionally blind. All that aside, I'd probably starve quickly since I don't know how to make weapons
and other humans haven't made it to where I live yet in 1375nevermind, I'm high. The humans that are there would probably kill me on sight though.I'd probably look around for a couple days and then when I got super hungry just find a cliff to jump off.
and if you manage to evade physical harm, sickness will surely catch up with you. the black death was not a 'one and done' pandemic. it lingered and persisted here-and-there for centuries after the widespread pandemic (known today simply as 'the plague') that claimed 50m+ lives, including half of europe's population at the time
2025 - 650 =1375
1375 is the 14th century. Which do you mean?
Answering the actual question, nothing good would come of it if my location on earth didn't change. Being the only white person in rural northern Japan well before Europeans came in the 1500s would probably not be a good situation for me. The language, at least the written one, was very different. Being the Nanboku-chō era, things would probably be not great since it was in the midst of 60ish years of war with two different people claiming to be in charge. I can't find, at least before my coffee kicks in, exactly what kinda state Mutsu Province, as it was then called, was in at the time.
English would also be unrecognizable in 1375. At a glance, it seems like it was Middle English, which means you'd probably get as much intelligibility with any other English speakers as a monolingual Dutch speaker would have with a monolingual English speaker today. Maybe a bit closer, but still.
Shakespeare was still hundreds of years away.
...Not that any of this would matter to anyone living in North America.
Middle English is certainly difficult to understand, but most words still bear some resemblance to modern English. I think it would probably be more like a native German speaker trying to understand a heavy Bavarian dialect, or at worst a Dutch speaker trying to understand the same.
In my case, I'd probably be OK having studied French and German (and reading things by Chaucer and Gauer). Though French != Norman French, so that may cause some issues.
It's not 1825 where you are?
Technologically, it does feel like that sometimes, but it would seem not.
Yeah, I did it backwards. Like I knew it was the 1300's but when I said the century, I went back a diget instead of forward.
Well, strictly speaking, if your location didn't change you'd be transported into empty space. So you wouldn't have very much to worry about for long.
Heh, that's specifically why I qualified it as 'position on earth'.
I'd use my knowledge of the future to do two chicks at the same time
Fucking A
... and B too
"I figure a guy that can time travel 650 years into the past can set something like that up"
well I'm a woman so anything I do will be witchcreaft. I would probably try to get to north america in some way and warn them "the fuckers are coming".
that would mess up the future lol
"Hey ladies... Ever been with a guy who can read?"
Not so fast. Assuming you're referring to English, the year 1375 would probably put you in the Middle English period. You might not be able to read completely either.
Here's a sample:
The weirder words was easier to read in Swedish
I mean, I've taken English Lit and courses on just Shakespeare so I can indeed read that. Now if I was back when Beowulf was written...
Old English is significantly harder than Middle English, yeah.
I'll probably die of dysentery. Just because I know modern hygiene rules doesn't mean I'll survive interacting with all the other people who don't but are used to local bacteria and viruses.
This is probably the most realistic answer. Either you die quickly or you’d wind up, spreading some major contagious disease that nobody has a defense against and wipe out a huge section of the population.
Oof
Lol
How do you think the boobonic plague got started?
Yeah, it was a time traveller
i mean i don't think it would even be that difficult to just always carry a bar of soap with you and make sure to boil your water and only eat well-cooked food, and wear gloves as often as possible.
sure people would think you're silly and annoying but that's a pretty cheap price to pay for not catching terrible diseases.
It would help to at least try doing that, but in practice this would probably be very difficult - it's likely not possible to always drink boiled water and well-cooked food, and given the possibility of contaminating food and drink after boiling, you might effectively have to prepare all your drink and food yourself, which is logistically difficult given the length of the work days. Diseases also spread in other ways, like smear infections (e.g. on toilets, doorhandles, tools) and airborne infections.
Well, I would give you the answer, but since I snapped back as soon as I read the post, I'm now responding what has been 650 years later for me, and I'm too fucking old for this shit a second time. I bypassed getting snapped back this time by just not reading the post and coming straight in to comment.
Now, what will happen if I read the
Assuming I am physically in the same place, I will fall to my death. If I somehow survive the fall I would be severely injured and alone in the wilderness. Within a few days I would probably die of either my injuries, dehydration, or hypothermia.
Scientifically speaking, the earth is constantly moving in an upward spiral. Your exact physical location would put you in some random outerspace area without oxygen or any protection. Just floating in space until you die.
Scientifically speaking, there is no absolute reference frame. So you can be wherever you like depending on what reference you choose.
How do you define upwards in space? North? Or maybe normal to the orbit and vaguely north?
I think they mean forward wrt the direction the sun is moving relative to the galaxy, like this:
I'm on the Gregorian calendar, 650 years ago is the year 1375. I'm in North Carolina, so if I were to snap back in time at my present location I would be a blue eyed white guy in pre-contact North America. And while I think I'm an above average candidate for the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court scenario I'm not realistically able to start "from scratch." I'd probably make it the summer on forage and my own body fat. I don't picture encountering the natives going particularly well, for me or them. I'm not sick and I'm vaccinated against a lot of shit but watch I'll give them 6 centuries worth of influenza updates.
I don't think it would help that much being plunked down in 14th century England; we're talking Geoffrey Chaucer's lifetime here, to them I'd sound insane. Modern English is a few hundred years off. If they didn't trepan me to let the demons out of my skull and I didn't die of smallpox, I'd try to invent the electric motor 500 years early and be burned for heresy or some shit.
The only non-delusional answer lol
Yeah, I'm here thinking my ass in America pre Columbian exchange is not doing well. Maybe if I make it clear somehow I do not want to do anything but help I could...idk, be part of a native tribe and maybe give them a slight help to the upcoming horrors for them?
It's not going well for anyone.
Double entry accounting system.
I'm an accountant by trade. The double entry system wasn't invented until the 15th century.
I could account for any lords various assets, goods, and livestock in an efficient, reliable and accurate manner
Being too early to market something also leads to failure
It's never too early to efficiently count your sheep!
As an Australian I would struggle significantly unless you were to also transport me geographically.
I would imagine the east coast / tasmania could be interesting. There used to be hundreds of different peoples that are now extinct and we know nothing about. A struggle nevertheless.
Fuck I think I could just vibe with the Noongars, hunting, fishing and sleeping til I died of old age.
Maybe use basic science and chemistry to improve sanitation and quality of life. Not too much, just enough to be regarded as a clever fella, not a warra wirrin bad spirit.
I would kill everyone I meet with the plagues I carry which I'm immune to.
You might have a bad time with all the plagues that have gone extinct since then.
Wash my hands
The definition of succeeding just becomes not dying.
Given the rate at which people would become mentally or physically disabled because of diseases, you could argue it would have a network effect (probably a better term exists): I would have more chances to meet people and influence them, to learn something useful, to accumulate and use wealth for the above, so yeah...
Everyone dies. You just get to try to make the leaderboards, if that's your thing. There isn't a killscreen that we know of.
Now you're a witch
That would be a warlock I guess.
Where do you wash your hands? Hope you brought a big bottle of disinfectant.
Running water would allow for 30% reduction in bacteria, according to some sources.
Also, in that time period soap was known in Spain, France and Italy, and I personally made it in the summer using either olive oil or pork fat.
If you're lucky enough to be middle class you might get easy access to soap and olive oil
you can make impromptu harsh soap by just washing your hands with some wood ash, your hands will probably be chronically dry and red but at least you can definitely have reliably clean hands and tools, combined with wearing some thin leather gloves whenever you're outside the home.
Crude soap is easy to make. Wood ash + water + fat. From there you just fiddle with ratios and timing while trying not to burn your skin off with strong alkalinity.
Thanks, that will be useful knowledge to have when it happens to me
It can also just be a fun hobby. Old-fashioned soap making is a very approachable historical craft. (Modern soap making is also very approachable if you're comfortable handling lye)
Any body of sufficiently rapidly running water should suffice.
Die because my medications haven’t been invented yet.
Or be murdered because I’m not christian
for reference they would almost certainly not murder you for not being christian, at worst you'd be forced to convert and only if you refuse to do that would they sentence you, and even then they might well cut a hand or ear off instead of outright killing you.
Well you can do that today. Find a tree out in the middle of nowhere and sit under it without any electronic devices. Then you are oblivious to all that stuff. You may be bothered by the fact that the things are still happening, but there are also plenty of horrific things happening in that time period you went to, you just won't be keeping track of them.
There is much wisdom buried in what seems like a simple comment here.
Even if you aren’t in the middle of nowhere, you can find or create your oasis.
Absolutely. In these times it is probably the only way to survive and stay sane. Being terminally online and informed is just leading to overdose of the shittiness of like everything. Create a soft bubble of bliss and steer away from noise and trouble. Before, I always thought that escapism is despicable but it feels increasingly like I'm not strong enough mentally to look in the face of reality for prolonged times these days. It's like staring into the sun, it burns you.
I mean, it will still be happening even if you're in the past.
My comment was meant for a totally different post my bad
you might well also die from being called to arms to fight for your king.. sadly we won't be rid of tyrants until we collectively oust them and ensure they are never allowed to rise to power again.
Market myself as a powerful man of religion and/or magician, depending on the local vibe. Then use knowledge of science and tech to build myself a reclusive retreat where I can have regular baths and write books with predictions to mess with the world 650 years after I would die.
I like your style. If you really wanna have some fun, don’t name the United States as the United States, but name the year and then say something to the effect of the most powerful nation in the world will come under rule of an authoritarian individual who has dreams of becoming a dictator.
I love it! Predict that a large empire of equals will fall after 250 years.
keep in mind that historically all the successful scientist have been really quite rich, so make sure to find a noble you can impress and get to sponsor you at first
I know thousands of songs. Also, musical instruments like the saxaphone haven't been invented yet.
Oh I think you're the first person to suggest music! That is a really good idea, provided you don't die of dysentery of course.
Here are some good time travel stories.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/to-say-nothing-of-the-dog-or-how-we-found-the-bishop-s-bird-stump-at-last-connie-willis/7282193?ean=9780553575385&next=t
To Say Nothing Of The Dog. In the future, time travel is organized like the Army. The problem is that the actual travel causes a serious case of 'jet lag.' All the agents act like they are half-drunk and sleep deprived.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-big-time-by-fritz-leiber-science-fiction-fantasy-fritz-leiber/693820?ean=9781606644874&next=t
The Big Time. Two alien races are fighting a time war that spans all planets in the universe. Earth is a minor backwater, but the fighting is just as deadly as anywhere else. A few soldiers and entertainers are catching a few moments respite in a R + R center when the War crashes in on them.
https://youtu.be/-FcK_UiVV40
Predestination. A man is offered a chance to find and kill the guy who ruined his life. All he has to do is trust the stranger who is making the offer.
I have to disagree with To Say Nothing Of The Dog. Time travel is organized by, and exactly like they would, university historians.
I don't remember that?
But that one and Blackout/All Clear are a great pair. And having looked her up, I see I've missed quite a few!
The Domesday Book is pretty tight. Our time-traveling student is trying to get back before the black plague hits her village.
She also has one about the Titanic sinking. Great books, wild rides.
honestly this might actually be the best idea, for most of human history people have been absolutely bored out of their minds and sharing news/stories/songs and really any sort of entertainment has been a perfectly legitimate way to get free food and housing.
any of us could almost certainly just live as travelling bards and do side jobs for actual monetary pay, provided you can get over the embarrassment of performing for an audience, and of course learn the local languages and translate the stories you remember.
If I time traveled to the same geographical region, considering I'm in South Brazil, if I don't get immediately killed by some jungle animal or tropical disease, I'd probably end up starting a pandemic among the natives.
You would die. There are many, many examples of explorers from “advanced” civilizations getting shipwrecked or stranded in an area where primitive hunter-gatherers live. Unless they are saved by the hunter gatherers, they are doomed, despite their knowledge of science and technology. Joseph Henrich talks extensively about these examples in his book, “The Secret of Our Success”
Check out this video to get an idea -> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jaoQh6BoH3c
Yes, but what about you?
Of course I want to think I would do better. Maybe I would manage to integrate with the local indigenous people, but the reality is I would likely die. Either way my knowledge of science and “advanced” civilization will benefit me not at all.
ah yes the famous hunter-gatherers of the 14th century..
considering the modern population distribution, the vast majority of people would end up in places that were large urban areas even back then.
612 years in the past
In Brazil. So almost a century before the first europeans landed here. I'm assuming I just plop exactly in my relative earth-location, but in the distant past. (... It would be really funny if this was overly literal, because I'm currently in the 12th floor, so I'd thanos snap into the past and immediately fall to my death)
Well
As a person from modern times -- From AFTER the Americas came into contact with Europe, if I went near a person here in the Land of Palms (that's what the natives called Brazil!) from those times we'd both get horribly infected and die a lot due to how antibodies work. Viruses did a lot of the legwork in genociding the natives. Euros would deliberately do things to infect natives so they'd die of illness.
The place I currently live in is slowly turning into a desert, but was a deep jungle back then (... It was still a deep jungle in the 1910s tbqh).
.......... I think I'd just die? Become food for a jaguar or eat a poisonous fungus or sth.
Would love to indulge in the fantasy of giving the Guarani people guns and a warning to shoot white people on sight just to see how history would change, but that ain't happening.
I'm in the US and in a place that native Americans didn't have settlements. I'm very familiar with the area and have hunted, hiked, and camped here my entire life. With no preparation or modern equipment I give myself about a week before I get eaten by wolves or a bear, maybe gored by an elk or bitten by a venomous snake. I don't expect that I would see another human during that week. Native hunting parties visited the area so it's not impossible that I would see someone but it's very unlikely.
I would pretend to be super-religious. Throughout the whole of human history, pretending to be super-religious has always been a viable path to survival and personal advancement.
Apart from that, I'd probably just die.
Oh! You could start Mormonism! Its super new as far as religions go, and it was mad easy to convince the masses it was real, all you do is say you have special tablets of text that only you have been given the ability to read by God, and BAM new religion just launched and you're the leader.
The best way to find hidden treasure is to hide the treasure yourself!
to be fair i think the fact that it started in the US is quite vital to it taking off, if you tried it in mainland europe the local priest would come over like a mafioso and politely explain that if you were to have an unfortunate accident then your soul would be spending eternity in hell.
It's 1375 and I'm asphyxiating somewhere in the Milky Way about 600 light years from Earth.
But let's assume that somehow my latitude, longitude and altitude relative to Earth somehow remain the same. Now I'm spawning several feet in the air probably in sight of several villagers. If I'm lucky, they'll think I was sent by God. If not I'm gonna have a real bad time. There's a good chance I'll break a bone in the fall, and that's not going to go well at all.
But let's assume there are trees here. Lots of them. That's actually pretty likely. They hide my sudden appearance and mitigate bone breakages.
Now I'm on the outskirts of a village, battered and bruised and very strangely dressed. I don't speak any language they'll understand despite technically being from that area. Middle English is the language of the day, and I speak something that won't evolve for at least another 200-250 years. Shakespeare is technically modern English and is hard to comprehend sometimes. Here we're talking Chaucer and that's pretty much opaque.
I'm literate, but not in Latin, and that's the language of the Church. I'm numerate, but they haven't got beyond Roman numerals yet.
I'm not even sure where the church is. I know where it is in the modern day, but that building's no more than 200 years old. Maybe it's on the same site. I'd head there for shelter at least.
I know the Lord's Prayer in modern English. Chanting that quietly might spark some recognition in anyone present but then it might count as blasphemy to say it in anything other than Catholic-Church-approved Latin.
Come to think of it, I could probably blow a couple of minds by writing the alphabet they know and then the same with the extra letters that have been added since.
And then I'd be burned as a witch.
Pretty sure the Earth isn't traveling the universe at light speed
Yeah, I was about to go to bed when I was writing that. "Several" or "a few" would have been better.
1375....
We can work with metals, so we can probably make boilers.
I invent steam power 400 years early.
You'd need metallurgy which was only invented in the process of building bigger naval guns, much later.
The issue was pressurizing the steam, which wasn't possible in the middle ages. You had no rubber for seals, no steel that would hold, and no tools to drill holes precisely enough.
That's why the Romans already used steam for simple parlor tricks but it couldn't be made to do actual work until the modern era
Real science and innovation comes in increments
Modern synthetic rubber would indeed be unavailable, but I vaguely recall reading something to the effect that early steam engines used leather seals or something like that.
But yeah, there's a lot of missing prerequisites for machinery. Even simple rotary power -- like from a windmill or waterwheel -- would suffer from being incapable of long distance transmission. Such a limit means the interior lands of a country away from a river or coast would remain unusable for development beyond basic agriculture. No railroads, no A/C, no Phoenix Arizona.
Re-invent. Your still far too late to be first.
People always think that the spark of invention is all that's required, ignoring the social and material tinder and kindling that's required for something to be useful and take off.
the real trick is to find some appliation for the technology that is easy enough to build that you don't need later advancements to pull it off, yet useful enough that anyone is actually going to bother doing it.
or like, be really good at marketing
Wait 612 years and buy Microsoft.
I'd die pretty quickly.
I would teach London children the most obnoxious brain rot slang from today as a laugh.
The butterfly effect of that would be weird because all of our brain rot slang would change then.
Exactly, that's the fun part. Would it get worse, or swing the other way, having kids talk like uppity old money aristocrats?
What place do I get teleported to? If I'm teleported to the same place on Earth, then I just fell down several meters into a swamp and am probably going to die here.
You teleported to somewhere safe and private, you won't fall to your death and nobody will see you lol.
Try to find the nearest shaman, apothecary or herbalist and trade my future clothes/pocket contents for some hallucinogens and painless poison. I ain't living through a time before electricity.
I reread the Bitcoin paper yesterday, so with my newly refreshed knowledge id find the nearest mathimation, explain it to them, implement the protocol with paper records, handwritten hashes, and messages on horseback or something. After a few years when every major economic power realizes how valuable a deflationary currency that Mansa Musa doesn't control (14th century african gold-salt bazzilionare, ~400 bill USD today), the price of my currency would increase vastly, making me super rich.
So dead
other people would probably have a higher chance of dying than me from the immunity I've got and all the diseases I carry
I'd be dead since the Earth wasn't in the same position 650 years ago. Even taking that out of the equation, I'd die since I can't communicate with anyone and don't have the survival skills.
ah, someone who understands that celestial bodies change spatial positions with time... nice
Actually 🤓, position and velocity are relative, so that's a nonsensical statement without defining a reference object for the Earth's position. If we're not assuming you end up safely on dry land, you could just as easily end up light-years away as wherever you were relative to the sun.
Actually 🤓 if we use the sun as our reference, they could not be light years away and would in fact be relatively close to the Earth, the distance being at most the diameter of Earth's orbit, which even at most is less than 20 light minutes.
My point was that using the Sun, Earth, or really any object as a reference is arbitrary and the "same position" at two different points in time is completely undefined.
I would warn the Native Americans about the Europeans
Europeans would show up and my Native American homies would be armed with cartridge rifles, six shooters and a crank rotary machine gun.
I would try for better, but I think there just wouldn't be the time for fine tooling more advanced fire arms would require. Even getting all that going before I croak is going to take a lot of ambition.
Also assuming they don't think I am some evil spirit that they quickly kill when I demand industrial metal facilities be constructed.
Oh, they would probably also have penicillin before the white man, so that would be a major advantage.
Congratulations, you just brought diseases to the new world.
LAB LEAK
/s
afaik one person is far from enough to set of an entire pandemic, especially with a much lower population density and no rapid transport.
it's feasible that they doom a village and get hunted down, though.
If you could somehow inoculate them against smallpox you might have a fighting chance.
Not native, just 1st to migrate. 1st Americans or Amerindians.
If your argument is that humans can only be "native" to southeast Africa... that's dumb. It might be defensible in an ecological sense but sociologically the word is used differently.
Fuck you buddy, I'm barely getting by with modern medicine, you just ended me.
This is something I often wonder about, what could one person even do with all of today's common knowledge? You can't very well just invent the printing press and have the same impact as Gutenberg - you need something what the few people who can read would, and most people can't translate the bible from Latin into renaissance German and/or don't know enough about the catholic church to write scathing remarks on it like Luther.
You can write and read - that's something. Maybe more importantly, you can do math with arabic numerals - boom, easy accounting job. With a bit higher education, you may even just invent calculus once more. You know how long it took for people to figure out you can put pi on the number line? Proving all the formulas in your head is the hard stuff, but you have a head start just by knowing them. We all clown on the wormhole explanation with the paper, but it does prove Euclid wrong 400 years early.
Ah, and you can just become a medical genius by using soap and bandages - "do no harm" is better than most.
Heres the thing though, you can write, but can you write and read Middle English from the 1300's? There are some similar words but its a very different language than what you and I are used to, it's another 200 years before Shakespeare and most English speakers struggle with even as far back as that.
I just asked AI to write my above comment in Middle English
"Lo! Her is the thinge, but thou mayst writen, canstow yet writen and reden in the Englissh of the thrittene hundred yere? Certes, ther ben som wordes ylich, but it is ful divers from that which thou and I ben y-used to. Two hundred wynters yet moot passen er Shakspere shal come, and fele folk that speken now Englyssh han gret strif to undirstanden that tyme."
Even that is very modern-looking to this Chaucer enjoyer.
You probably can read middle English sooner than you can speak it. Like writing with a feather on parchment, I assume you don't just die and have time to learn.
Side note, I now want to translate all my emails to my supervisors into middle English
That reads like Dutch to me. Perfect! I'll be fine.
Should be noted though, even with the best plan, your frail body, weird language and no local knowledge will mean you probably still die in 2 - 72 hours.
I'd make some fucking soap.
Do you know how to make soap? I'd want to but I'd have no idea how. If it already existed the hard part will be how to make enough money to buy it, as a software dev I'm not sure I'd have any sellable skills
How to make soap: Mix a fat or oil with a strong base like potassium hydroxide, resulting in an exothermic reaction called saponification.
Where do you get potassium hydroxide from in the 12th century?
Soak wood ash in water.
Thanks! at least I have a plan now, if I were to suddenly appear hundreds of years ago, I'll probably just die
Oh neat, thanks!
Kind of. All you need is fat and lye. Some experimenting would need to be done but I'm somewhat confident I could figure it out.
And you could make a living selling it. Assuming you can convince people of its benefits.
you can use wood ash, it won't be a very wholesome or good soap but it gets the job done and is easy to make. Though of course if it's easy to make then why would people buy much of it from you?
I think it wouldn't be too hard to convince people to use it for cleaning off obvious messes, way harder to convince them that "oh you see actually diseases are caused by these tiny creatures you can't see, but trust me they're there and my product will get rid of them!".
probably die
The chances of that do seem to be high.
England is in the midst of the Hundred Years war with France and considering I'm ~193cm and the average height of a man in England in the 14th century is about 171cm... looks like in getting my arse drafted and shipped off to France, to act as some kind of intimidating presence. That is until I have to swing a sword, which my body, that's used to sitting in an office looking over excel spreadsheets, absolutely can't do, so I get bum rushed/hit in the face with an arrow and die.
That's the most likely scenario.
Worst case scenario, considering I don't speak middle English or Latin, I'm treated as an enemy and locked up in a dungeon somewhere.
I don't think there is realistically a best case scenario
I'd just like to interject that while traveling was rare in medieval times, it did happen. People usually didn't get thrown in jail for it, even if they didn't speak the local language.
Regular people didn't really speak Latin beyond a few bits of prayer. The lingua franca was a mix of various coastal languages (think of the belter patois in the expanse), but even that was only known to traders.
You'd have a tough time for sure, but wouldn't necessarily get in trouble.
afaik travel wasn't even particularly rare, it was just rare that you'd travel very far. Certainly in england it was expected that you'd travel to london or whatever for legal reasons at least like once or twice in your life, and of course merchants existed.
but also a really significant travel no one tends to mention is going on a pilgrimage to jerusalem! to my knowledge most people managed to do it once, and that's a massive journey to undertake without modern vehicles!
thankfully since religion was so important back then, pilgrims were afforded quite significant privileges like guaranteed free food and housing and iirc travel from anyone, to the point that pretending to be a pilgrim was quite a severe crime.
Wouldn't I be in like empty space?
Die a slow death from hyperglycemia once my pump runs out of insulin.
Infect the indigenous population with some god awful pathogen they have no defense against.
Die to a pathogen I have no defense against.
Die to the indigenous population due to being a white dude in pre-contact North America.
It uh... wouldn't be pretty.
I’d be dead in the vacuum of space. You never mentioned that I’d just go back in time, you forgot the coordinates. Now I’m floating, dead. Thanks man.
This. Once you understand enough about the universe how all coordinates are relative and everything is moving relative to everything else... Like, how the fuck is time travel supposed to work it it was anywhere like this naive movie idea of it? Time travel Hollywood style is literally not a continuous operation and as such absolutely unphysical.
Well since all cordninates are realative, and your relative position to earth is unchanging, wouldn't that mean that everything else moves around you while you and the earth stand still and go back in time?
If the earth is going back in time as well then the whole planet as it is today would begin to freeze as a rogue planet unconnected to any star.
There's a reason the tardis is a time and space ship.
Sorry I guess I should have clarified, but I think the other reply said it alright.
basically, if I move backwards in time, in my own spacetime, then my relative position in the universe would remain unchanged. hence Maybe I go back to where I was in time and relative to the universe(my parent's home 20 years back). the tardis can put you back in time and change where in that time you were.
This is all theoretical, but maybe hollywood isn't as far off as we think (even if they would have arrived there by chance and not logic)
Time travel like that can only go forward. If you want to go backward you need to decouple yourself from your relative position in spacetime. Or find a way to go faster than light without ever going light speed, which will definitely need a space ship.
Good one. I am the frame of reference myself... And we rewind time around me, kind of.
Okay, that at least does not sound so wrong like the "teleportation-style" approach!
What you say is like the extreme form of how time travel worked in Primer (the movie), which in fact is an interesting variation.
Nobody would be able to understand me because English has diverged so far from 12th century English that it's a different language. Also I'd be in north America where nobody had even seen a white person. Additionally, I'm 20 ft above the ground right now in a building that didn't exist back then. Finally, I'd be rightfully blamed for bringing plague to the native tribes of the area and likely killed.
Assuming those hurdles were all cleared: I'm a mechanical engineer. So, I'd tell the natives where iron ore, coal, and oil was buried and how to extract and refine it. Tell them how to make gunpowder. Speed run making steam engines and lathes. Get north american natives armed, industrialized, and organized against the external European threat.
That right here is all you need. If you can actually forge a gun and show them how to make gunpowder, you don't need anything else. Although even then you would probably be executed shortly after for being a threat to the nobility.
Die as you forgot to teleport me to where the earth was at the time.
Otherwise I guess my main knowledge that could be useful is some basic first aid. Secondary to that, a little bit of electrical stuff.
Assuming you live in the west, you want to get executed by the catholics?
I'm really hoping to stay where I am. I'd rather try to integrate with the Coast Salish people than 14th century Christians.
I would fall from a very high place
Unfortunately in that circumstance, I'd likely be a horrible vector for disease. Not much chance of survival if I spread devastation wherever I go.
casually ends humanity with time traveling covid
Blame OP, she's the one who sent me back in time.
Probably die
Basic geography could go a long ways, if people believe you. At this point people were exploring the world trying to find the spice Islands, but didn't know WTF they were doing. Magellan navigating the strait that would be named after him was impressive at its time, but now we know the best way from Europe to Asia (and spices and stuff) by sea without any modern canals is by going around Africa. Like, it still sucks and it's a long trip but it's doable compared to going to damn near Antarctica.
This assumes I don't die, can communicate, and am not in the then-unpopulated (and quite landlocked) current location of Denver, Colorado.
Edit: bonus fact: if a sailor managed to smuggle a knapsack full of cloves back, it was worth about as much a house
Well, I'm in Australia so I would try and communicate with the indigenous population and teach them how to defend themselves against the upcoming colonist invasion and take advantage of what they have to offer, starting with forcing a signed treaty.
American here: governments have never cared about signed treaties with natives. But your heart's in the right place.
Thanks. I think they do ok in New Zealand though with the Maori.
Many years ago when I thought about this, I realised I wouldn't be able to put much of my modern knowledge and skills to use. I decided I'd learn to make basic matches by distilling urine into phosphate, which wasn't invented until the 19th century, but I've forgotten the process. Collect lots of urine and boil it? Also, if you make white phosphate it can cause horrific toothache and they have to remove your jaw... So, I'm hoping another commentor will suggest a safer skill I can brush up to be ready for travel.
i believe toothache would be the least of your problems, chronic exposure to white phosphorous will give you fossy jaw which.. just straight up kills the jaw and makes it fall off, at least they don't have to go out of their way to remove it! yay..
That’s 1375.
Not good, not bad. Depends on where you ended up on the globe. There absolutely is civilization, but it’s all kings and Tsars and the like. The English and French Hundred Years War is winding down but the plague really did a number on Europe. Lots of war in India. It wasn’t a great time in the Middle East what with the Crusades and all. The Egyptians are conquering Armenia. The Songhai Emprire is growing in Eastern Africa. Southeast Asia had a lot of conquest and a large kingdom growing, might not have been so bad as long as you landed on the winning side. The Ming Dynasty just started in China.
So it’s not like you ended up in pre-civilization or among dinosaurs or something. There are plenty of people around, but it’s still an age of war and conquest. Your best bet to have a great life would be to ally yourself with a strong leader and give them advancements to help that leader “win”. Of course, if he were defeated, you’d be slowly tortured and killed by the opposing side.
Hope that I don't start the early spread of New World diseases to indigenous Americans
And I'd be dead by the end of the week
You would be surprised how plentiful food is when there are no people eating it. Fishing with a spear would be easy. So as long as you can make a fire, you shouldn't starve. But there would also be plenty of animals that would consider you food.
I would die quickly because I don't have any wilderness survival skills and the land I live in (USA) was inhabited by hunter gatherer tribes whose language is completely unrelated to anything I know and whose customs are completely unknown to me as well. But beyond that, even if I got teleported to England where I at least know a similar enough language to where I could figure out middle English decently quickly, I think people seriously overestimate how useful just having modern knowledge is.
For example, say you want to build a gun. Do you know how to forge a gun barrel with medieval steel and make gunpowder out of bat shit and sulfur? Because I sure as hell don't. I could probably make gunpowder but how the hell would you get the money to pay someone to make a gun barrel for you? And further, even if you had the skills yourself, basically nobody today deals with raw materials as inconsistent as what they were working with back then and therefore don't have practice working with them. Even if you introduced something like germ theory to them why would anyone believe you? You'd probably get just as sick as everyone else even with following modern sanitation standards for yourself because nobody else would be. Same with math. Want to speedrun introducing calculus to the world? Good luck trying to prove it to medieval mathematicians without having deep knowledge of euclidean constructive proofs and philosophy to even allow for something like an infinitesimal to exist. There's very little one person can realistically do to change the world on their own.
I also feel like suggesting people wash their hands, and having it work, would immediately get you accused of being a witch.
It probably wouldn't work though. Say you wash your hands. Okay that helps some against certain diseases but not against respiratory disease, many types of foodborne illness, the plague, etc. You'd still get all of those just as easily as everyone else without also having a backdrop of the germ theory of disease to explain other ways to prevent disease and antibiotics to cure bacterial infections.
This is the state of biology in the middle ages. This is a medieval Scottish bestiary, a book of animals, which contains many interesting facts about animals such as beavers biting their testicles off to throw away pursuers, several animals spontaneously generating from nothing, and many animals that don't exist (my favorite is the Bonnacon, a bull that spews firey shit as a defense mechanism). Medieval scholars also didn't accept experimentation as a valid means of gaining knowledge - they were stuck on Plato's ideas about matter being flawed and untrustworthy and true knowledge only being able to come from Reason (and in the case of the medieval era, Divine revelation). Obviously you could show them bacteria (if you could somehow fashion a powerful enough microscope with medieval tech, which is not a trivial task) and they'd have to believe in it but how would you get them to believe that those little guys cause disease when that took us a couple hundred years in actual history?
I don't think I know a single language from the time, so I'm probably getting murdered because I'm a strange foreigner who can't defend themselves with words.
Edit: I’m taking the middle road here and assuming something around year 1250 or so, not 1100 or 1400 as confusingly set in OP.
Okay, so unlike most other scenarios, I think I would be fine for a while at least. The peoples living where I live would have made and kept more or less regular contact with the sons of bitches from the south that would later crusade us (or I think maybe one of the crusades is presently ongoing at the time…) so while I would both introduce and be hit with diseases or more likely strains of familiar ones new to my body/their bodies, I think it wouldn’t be as destructive as entirely separated landmasses like America vs Europe.
So if I survive the shock my body gets hit with, and I don’t kill everyone around me, I think I would be fairly well received. As far as I’ve read, the languages and dialects were different than after the formalization of the written form, and at this time these lands were just starting to get forced under Swedish rule, so with my basic understanding of Swedish and of course my native language, I think I would be able to communicate well enough to not get instantly killed as a demon or something.
I think my best bet would be to introduce myself as some sort of demi-god, a bastard son of the god of forests and the hunt probably, which would hopefully explain my alien attire and materials used to make them. And the alien accent/dialect of both the local language or Swedish, depending on where I’d land. If the first contact I make aren’t local but crusaders, I suppose I’d have to try and push myself as a wandering preacher of Christ or something. I’d have to hope they’d speak Swedish, since I do not know German well enough to form two words together, and they’d likely be the next likely encounters. Novgorodians I think were fine with the Swedish language in general, so if our current knowledge of history was off enough that I’d meet them here, I’d still be fine. No idea what I’d pretend to be to them though. My limited knowledge of history doesn’t help there. But as far as I understand, they were sort of a melting pot of close-by cultures, and not so focused on these lands at this time, they’d just take me for a local hermit and let me run off clumsily.
If I was able to survive the first encounters and get myself to a village or a hillfort, I’d try and establish myself as a wise one, helping with calculations and engineering and whatnot to the best of my capabilities, which I would think honestly should far exceed those of the locals at the time. So maybe I’d get by just for being useful and knowledgeable.
But I don’t think I’d live a long life. These were a turbulent and violent time and one village elder or the other, fancying themself a king or whatever, would just send assassins to off me for being an asset for the local leader where I’d end up in.
Even if I’d travel to avoid this problem, it probably wouldn’t take until my old ages to have someone or something off me just by happenstance. And I wouldn’t want to live a hermit in a time where internet or computers aren’t a thing. I think the only way to cope would be to focus on a family, try and bring up children and have that fulfill my life as best it can, as long as it can.
Honestly, I consider myself lucky in this scenario. We still have our language alive and in use, the same the locals would speak at that time. This together with the general superstitious nature of the local tribes — which the crusades and Christianity, with overt blood and sadistic violence, would (thankfully later, I hope for my sake here, at least according to our current knowledge) succeed in some amount to water down and turn them to its specific flavor of lame ass superstition — would make it probably at least somewhat likely I wouldn’t be killed on sight or something to that effect.
Wow you know how to do all that stuff right now off the top of your head without books or instructions? I am impressed. I feel like the best I would be able to do alcohol wise is distilled prison hooch. Like I know the basic priceable but not the recipe.
yep, 3000bc+ going back to copper and bronze.
but there's a tremendous jump from being able to smelt metal in small quantities - obtaining enough ores for each, for example, is probably more than one person work to produce anything usable. smelting, gathering wood or other fuel, building ovens and water wheels etc... and no one to call on for expertise...
hard couple of decades to produce some wire :D
primitive technology youtube channel has him trying to make iron for a few years with everything handmade. watch it to see what you'd be up against.
common but still cottage industry forged. a fiefdom would break up tasks to smaller smiths to forge chain for mail, or steel billets for creating axe heads.
in small quantities and with considerable value, yes. you're not going to wander up to some trader and say "gimme 300 furlongs of your shiny copper wire' lol. and how would you buy it if you could? you have no specie, no tender beyond half knowing a bunch of kinda true science factoids.
for example, the baghdad battery is rather contested as to it's actual purpose. Konig hypothesizes that it was a battery due to finding thin layers of gold he assumed were electroplated. Read the wikipedia article, these ideas aren't really supported by a lot of the other evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery
Do my best to warn the locals of the coming invasion. Learn their language and teach them English and tell them not to trust any group of strangers who speak it.
Help improve their technology as best I can. I’m not sure how much I’d be able to improve it. At least, teach them to wear masks and wash their hands when around sick people.
You're a stranger speaking English trying to convince the locals not to trust any stranger speaking English?
Yes. I’d have to learn their language first, anyway. I already know bits of modern versions but not much. Then, introduce the warning of invasions and teach them English with the caution that people speaking groups of people speaking will bring death and destruction.
It’s not like they’ll already have a fear of English or any concept of the language before I teach it to them.
They should probably fear the Spanish first. Or the French. Or the Portuguese. Depending on area.
I guess it's worth a shot but you'd a few hundred years after the Norse abandoned their settlements in North America and about 120 years before Columbus's first voyage.
I don't think our English is anywhere close to Olde English though, we might be hardly able to understand them ourselves, and I don't think they would understand us at all.
I'd try and hold my breath to not set off the European diseases into America early.
find the nearest sword and belly flop on its pointy side
650 years ago this place was a sea. So I’d end up having to swim at least a couple of kilometers. Considering the current sea temperatures, I’d probably die of hypothermia before I could reach the shore.
Learn to build dams
like Amsterdam, which would already be a 100 years old
I'd be fucked. I'm not succeeding in the present, I see 0 reason to believe that would be different in 1375.
Use all the science i know from school to helpfully quicken scientific progress and spread trans propaganda
Assuming I’m snapped back to the same part of the earth, climate-wise that’s ideal in the US PNW coming out of spring. Plenty of berries and food to forage, and I’ll probably impress the natives with my watch and well made clothes. I can probably get the native tribes to metals, and gain acceptance with my magic hand tool that will briefly shine light at night for a few weeks. I don’t know offhand where copper would be, but I know gold is in the streams, and I know how to placer mine, so I can get some electricity going with that and magnetized rocks from lava flows.
I think first contact would be the key.
Fly under the radar as much as possible, find a cute girl and settle down and have a lot of kids.
You will not be flying under any radars lmao
The second he opens his mouth they know something off. Dialects and languages did change a bit.
If you're around superstitious and xenophobic people things can get out of hand quickly.
I think a lot of people in this thread are overstating the suspicion of outsiders. International trade has existed for thousands of years. There was even limited tourism in the middle ages. It would be rare to encounter people that you couldn't communicate with, but I don't think you'd be automatically sacrificed.
I'm in London, so would fare better than most as they would definitely be familiar with outsiders. That said people in many of the old European cities would likely be able to blag their way to local universities. Oxford definitely already existed 650 years ago so I'd start by heading there.
I think all scholarly writing was in Latin at the time, so I'd need somebody to translate, but (with luck) I could move maths on a couple of hundred years. I reckon I could get basic electricity going too. Obviously the more you said upfront the more suspicious people would be, but if you drip-fed knowledge over a few years, trying to let the steps rest upon each other you could probably share a lot of what we know today.
Fair point. Im from the country side of central Europe which should have some raiding going on at that time. I cant imagine the people to be super open.
Hell, even in 2025 people mistrust outsiders where im from.
My language didn't even exist at that time. It would be a proto version mixed from 3 cultural groups which started forming at that time.
Maybe you missed the "as much as possible" part
Maybe, but you did say you were going to find a cute girl. So you will be encountering some radars. I wish you the best of luck in this thought exercise
I find it hilarious that in even a thought experiment with no bearing on reality you always have people that will shit on your hypothetical fantasies.
First I would seek the attention of the local ruler by cooking interesting dishes with modern knowledge.
Then I would ask him to create an akademy. I don't know the details but I know what can be known. Intelligent people will reinvent the knowledge.
Some side businesses should make enough money that the akademy and thus further development doesn't entirely rely on the king.
Build cities with public transport and no cars, because there is no car.
Success.
You tried.
Edit: But don't worry, your myriads of novel diseases in your body will pretty much wipe out the continent you spawned on. Revenge!
All your points are opportunities. Some should just not be taken immediately. When in Europe, it's not good to start with traveling earth, think Gallileo. When in America, it's better to build weapons first before contacting Europe.
Great idea with the food. Probably won't get called a witch while building trust. Although I have no confidence in my ability to recognize any vegetable or spice, but hopefully a brine would be enough.
I become a scribe or accountant, since I can write cursive, do math, and know some Latin.
There was a monastery within walking distance of my home at that time, so that's where I'd head first.
Prophecy some major upcoming events, subsequently market myself as a saint, grab a comfy church position, sell indulgences, profit. Works in pretty much any era.
You can name some upcoming events between 1375-1376 that would get you enough fame to make a living, off the top of your head?
Or be burned on a stake.
How well do you know 14th century minutia? That can end up being a very long con if the next thing you remember is like the general lines of Joan of Arc's whole deal in 50 years or whatever.
Nah, just say the plague will ravage the land, war will last for another seventy years, and you're the only hope of salvation - that pretty much sums up the late 1300s. Then just get your followers off the battle lines, adopt a bunch of cats to keep the rat problem at bay, and practice basic sanitation and isolation - what we learned during COVID.
Within a couple of years, yours will be the only thriving community. Play your cards right, stay peaceful, prosperous, and show deference to the church and you'll be pretty much set. Might even wrangle a sainthood if you play your cards right.
/s to all this of course... most likely I'd just use my extensive knowledge of porn and poetry to try and charm a noblewoman to take care of me.
Probably not the answer you thought, but succeed by knowing there are wild animals that could easily kill me. It's either I die by that, or wait until the lack of my blood thinners kills me, sl I'd definitely take the quicker death than the slower one.
I don't have the knowledge to survive in the 12 century so either some Native Americans find me and are kind enough to teach me to survive
Or I just die.
This is very A Connecticut Yankee in King Author's Court
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_Arthur%27s_Court
I hated that book. So pretentious.
I'm in Japan and while I can speak modern Japanese I don't know shit about classical Japanese so I'd be screwed. I'm also not Japanese so good chance I end up getting killed or some shit
Anyone else a fan of Nate Bargatze?
Good thing I binge isekai anime
There's a former nunnery down the road. I suppose I'd try to join. Or maybe find a farmer who's looking for someone to look after his kids because his third wife died in childbirth.
Try to use some type of boiling water technique to invent drinkable sanitary drinking water that doesn't get me drunk (might not be necessary in some parts of Asia)
Most parts of the world that is not North America: try to convince some wealthy persons and bar owners to sponsor me to getting a bunch of bread molds and rats/mice, possibly even pigs, to conduct antibiotics and vaccine research, otherwise I might die from random sources...
Not sure if I could reasonably do those given my limited biology knowledge, but I guess they are worth trying. Besides that I'd just try to be less blunt/offensive so I don't get sent to jail and try to live my best life I guess
You’d have to work pretty hard to get drunk on small beer.
Basically start digging my grave, wondering if I'm gonna die from my asthma or my dermatitis first in that era. I'm betting on my asthma.
Well, staying in the same location? I'm in the US, so... I'd probably try to get writing invented. To my knowledge, besides some of the Central American empires, there's no evidence or even claim of there having been any kind of writing or system for making information durable. I know there's a lot of clay here, I'm pretty sure we could bake clay tablets to store down information. There's also tule reeds here that were already being extensively used, and those could probably be made into a kind of paper as well. As to whether the people would accept that, I have no fucking idea at all; what we know of the California tribes suggests they were always semi-nomadic, but that's all very well into the post-contact period and much of what we know was written down by the Spanish while being the biggest bastards they possibly could to the locals. I dunno how useful record-keeping would be to a nomadic people. It's also entirely possible the people would be like "uh, yeah, we know how to write, dummy", and it was just lost in the multiple waves of pandemics.
I think probably something that -might- be achievable is figuring out glass. I'm mostly sure that if the native Americans had glass, we would have seen some sign of it in the archeological record by now. I'm sure some smarty pants is going to come along and tell me "you can't just throw sand in a kiln and make glass, you need a special kind of sand blah blah blah and here's 99 reasons why that won't work". Yeah, you're probably right, but I don't know any better, so I'd still definitely try. I also remember reading that clear glass was a thing figured out near Venice when they started adding grass ash or some shit to the sand, so I'd definitely experiment with that, too. Glass is just dead useful -and- pretty, so I'm fairly confident I'd get some acceptance that way.
I would say metal smithing, but the only metal deposits nearby that I know of are mercury and gold. You can't make nails and tools out of mercury and gold.
Also, maybe water wheels? To my knowledge, we have no record of native Americans using water wheels for work (I.e. grinding corn or acorns into flour). I think if I managed to put a basic water wheel together, I'd be pretty popular.
sigh it's called oral history and it was working just fine before the settlers showed up
Yes, 100%, I don't at all want to give the idea that no history was ever remembered, and I don't want to sound like I'm shitting on oral history either. I just... really wish someone had written some stuff down. There's so much that's lost to time because of the pandemics that swept the post contact world and all of colonization that followed.
yes a lot of cultures went extinct but not because they didn't have writing. it's because there was no one left to pass on the knowledge.
if we think about it from the perspective of contemporary indigenous people, they know how to read and write English but that's a side effect of boarding schools. and it's led to more intensive cultural extinction because of forced assimilation.
tldr: some tribes had writing before Columbus, some didn't. cultural genocide is effective in both oral and written traditions
The Ring of Fire series which is about this concept was such an amazing read. Unfortunately the infinite branching plotlines became way more than I could handle.
Slowly and with plenty of witnesses invent the toilet. But like out of wood pieces like a barrel or ship. Rain barrel on the roof for water. Start suggesting more contained sewage.
Should be just enough to not get dead for heresy or something but live comfortably and help a shitty situation.
They had sewage and toilets since Roman times. It wasn't affordable to many (and you couldn't make it affordable) but they definitely knew how to make it.
Human urine was collected and used for many things (mostly the ammonia). Human feces was used as fertilizer in a lot of the world until very recent times and collected in certain areas.
Well I be naked, so would need to make/steal clothing very quickly
Well, I'm in America, so...
I guess I'd prep the natives to help put up a proper fight. Find a way to teach them that white people (like myself) carry diseases and to stay away and keep them away. If they land on your shores, drive them back. Never let them get a foothold. I'd try to convince them that I was a demon that got away from the other demons to warn of our coming.
I'd do my best to make it so nobody remembered the name Christopher Columbus except as the idiot that died because he thought the world was much smaller than it is and never returned from his voyage.
Congratulations, you already killed them all
Most likely, you'd just start their mass depopulation pandemic a bit earlier.
Start a cult.
Everything I've seen for the last decade indicates it's pretty easy and highly profitable.
and you have all the knowledge of what cults already took off like wildfire. Mormonism for example, that shit is gold.
You don't even have to show the gold. Just say you saw it and it's now in that tent over there. No you can't go in. This is what was written on it though. Oh it's in a language only I can read. Don't worry, I'll translate. Give me your wife.
Depends what clothes I'm wearing when it happens.
If I'm wearing anything that could remotely be seen as fancy back then (which I mean a lot of modern clothes could pass off as), since I'm near the ocean, I'd immediately run into the water not seeing anyone, and then pretend I'm a royal foreigner who ended up shipwrecked. Since I usually wear a watch, have a tungsten (Wolfram) crystal wedding band as well, that would help me in passing off as royalty as well. This is assuming the people helping me aren't brigands. There's things we do and know of that we take for granted that could be used to pass off as someone upper class too, like reading.
Then next steps would be to get to an aristocrats home, and eventually I'd imagine somewhere where I could work with scholars so they can teach me the language and we can work on translation so we can understand each other. Would have to be extremely careful of smallpox during all this of course.
Once we could, that's when I'd finally whip out my phone to trusted scholars and pull up my survival books, books on plumbing, etc specifically, and to explain that this is a special metal and glass book that can hold many books that's common in the land I'm from, and that I can teach them how to build them. But that we'd need to build plumbing because I'd like a shower by then.
There's a book with almost the exact same premise.
Destiny's Crucible.
It's fairly good, can be a bit slow though. (I'm 7 books in)
I really enjoyed that series (don't remember which book I stopped on). I think the slowness of it gave a sense of finding a home along with the main character.
There's also Lest Darkness Fall which is pretty good.
I'd cry, curse god's name even more than I do currently, and then probably die from boredom.
1375? Bro that's the. Middle ages. Fucking kill me.
I guess I could make a name as a mathematician, though that'd depend where the fuck I'm snapped to.
I'd like to warn the Incas to not trust anyone with white skin, kill them all on sight and NEVER let any of them get within 100km of Potosi, but I don't think I'd be anywhere near the Andes either way.
I would basically become a Jewish witch and either build a small community of people or die of some ancient plague, either way I wouldn't be thriving but I might just survive.
I don't know how to refine oil, but knowing that its refinable into diesel/gasoline is a pretty good start to looking for it. Steam power easier to figure out. A head start on murdering some sperm whales for lighting industry seems easy enough to figure out. Partnering with metal smiths who might have a clue on making gun barrels, and pipe's in general that could be used for advanced weaponry, would be an easy path to get governments to give me a ton of money for weapons research by just showing them some drawings. Doesn't really matter if I ever figure out how to do it, just the vision of what is possible would make me richer than Musk. Richer if I can help enslave all of humanity to one empire.
Electricity is a pretty easy concept. Steam power driving magnets and copper. That rare earths make better magnets should be easy enough to search for them. Copper wires to deliver the electricity easy AF. Can help jump start progress to late 21st century for some things.
I would make an IT startup.
Probably die of gangrene after stubbing my toe or something else stupid. Prior to modern medicine, diseases and things we think of as mild were often deadly.
Assuming I appear naked in a field in England in 1375, I would first try to, in no particular order (at first, then a particular order)
This is all if I have any measure of success at the first things and don't die or kill myself
I don't want to pop your bubble, but I think you died somewhere around step 3
The first and easiest thing would be to invent calculus. I'm sure other things would pop up situationally, I could probably get basic electricity going with a bit of experimentation.
I'd use my knowledge of history, politics, psychology and science to become an influential advisor to powerful lords and help them conquer the world in exchange for living in luxury.
so all those genocides weren't enough, you want a repeat with you at the helm?
Yes.
Well, first I'd have to learn Old English, I think. Hell, even Middle English isn't understandable.
Hopefully I could get up to speed before they locked me up, or worse.
Middle English is understandable. It's tricky and there are lots of unexpected differences but you'd get used to it. This is right at the edge of Early Modern English and the Great Vowel Shift.
I dunno, I've listened to some Middle English on a History of English podcast, and could follow along only slightly. I'm sure I could come up to speed quickly, since it at least has the French influence already (if I remember right).
I'm not familiar with the great vowel shift, is that a result of the Norman invasion in 1066, adding French into Old English? (That's the sequence, right? It's been a while since I read about it).
They don't actually know why it happened. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
I'd go live in a cabin in the forest, again.
I claw my way out of a few feet of soil, and walk about thirty minutes to where the local Olhone maintained a ceremonial shellmound from 800 BCE until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1700s. By all accounts the Olhone were chill hunter-gatherers, so my best bet would probably be to befriend and join them.
They’d be more knowledgeable than me about everything in the local environment, so I don’t think I’d have much knowledge that would be of use to them. (They seem to have known of other nearby groups that practiced agriculture, but saw no need for it themselves.) I might eventually consider traveling north or south along the coast, but many other groups in western North America practiced warfare and/or slavery (unlike the Olhone), so I’d probably be best off staying put.
Start making siege weapons.
First off. Do I get to bring stuff with me? Like say the entire printed off contents of wikipedia.
also, I would like find one or two things that hadn't quite been invented yet and 'invent' it.
also, Also, with a modicum of military power, I'd probably start a religion.
This assumes I have time to learn the local dialect
In what language? Modern English didn't exist yet and neither did pretty much any modern language. Good luck trying to get the local nobles and priests to decipher the hundreds of codices you brought with you that are in some strange language that nobody has seen before
Wikipedia is for my benefit, so I can just read it.
Nobody else needs to even know I have it, necessarily.
Them not being able to read it might even be a boon.
The goal is to get a leg up on things, not start having nuclear reactors in the medieval era.
For example muskets had an iterative development as small incremental changes took place. Relatively small changes made modest improvements.
It would also be nice to know when eclipses are about to happen, for, ah, reasons.
I could probably discover electricity, depending on where I landed. Jewelers of the time could make wire, copper was common, and magnets (lodestones) had been discovered. Realistically though I'd be a dumb giant (ie, speak no known languages of the time and statistically I'd have like a foot on the "tall" people of the era). I'd probably try to find some party trick that looked like magic to people of the era then hope that people would welcome and try to integrate me rather than burning me as a witch. Then I'd probably die in a week or two anyway to some disease lol
The party trick thing reminded me of a book series called Magic 2.0 that I read a while back . This guy figures out that the universe is a simulation and basically hacks the code; now he can jump through time as he pleases. He goes back to the Middle Ages and brings plastic wrap with him and calls it clear paper, which convinces everyone that he's a wizard. It was a fun read but got dumb around the 3rd-ish book.
Coating wires to make windings may prove tricky tho
Uhh anyone know where to get estrogen injections in the 14th century?
I bet there is a crunchy mom that can tell you what plant to eat, but there's like a 70/30 chance its gonna kill you instead.
Better odds than having my body change back, sooooo ....
1375? Die from malaria, I guess? Be eaten by an alligator? Or oh no, hasten the demise of the Tocobaga with my exotic biology? Either they would kill me or get me sick, or vice versa. Also, fall on my ass when my house disappeared.
I would follow the river to the bay, I guess, and see if I could find anyone, or anything I might be able to eat.
I'd kill your ancestors.
Don't threaten me with a good time.
Well, I know about hygiene about various diseases, and even how to treat them. I'm also running for my life to the nearest forest, as I don't have any way to prove I'm not a Vagabound or invader, and I can't communicate.
There's no choice but to try to hide deep inside a forest, and try to find a river or lake. I would eventually be forced to drink dirty, risking parasites, unless I get lucky enough to find what I need to purify it.
As soon as that is taken care of, I would focus on covering up my tracks, digging some sort of shelter to hide from medieval people, my next step would be to ensure a food source like fishing, or finding plants I recognize as edible, which might be where I mess up and die (A lot of plants look similar to poisonous ones, mushrooms too).
Next step would be making bog iron, finding copper, and so on, to make life easier at first, but then to defend myself against being discovered.
Clearly I am OVERprepared for this with my VAST knowledge of Doctor Who. And nothing else.
I'd probably be dead in no time for a long list of reasons
First of all, nobisy would be able to understand me, as even current English would be barely recognizable by them
Then there is the issue that I'm probably at least a foot taller than most people and let's just say that "being even remotely different" back then was a good reason to be killed
Then there is the food issue. Food was scarce (hence most people being quite a bit shorter than me) so it'd be hard to keep myself fed. Clean water? Hah, good luck with that.
Then there is the issue of diseases. I probably carry shit that their bodies won't be able to handle, si being around me will likely make people sick, which in turn will get me labeled as a witch which would get me tortured and burned. Similarly but conversely, loads of diseases that were rampant back then are now gone, and likely my body is less equipped to handle that, I'd die from some disease
Ignoring all of that...
I'd probably start spreading the knowledge of democracy, and the harms of religion, and how important it is to immediately kill kings or king wannabes. I'd make a library with a vast wealth of knowledge and give access to the first country that successfully transforms itself to a representative atheist democracy with laws in place to ensure that no king, fascist, or wannabe will ever be able to rise up again.
That country would become the dominant world power within decades, spreading democracy and science over the world.
I would be among Native Americans in what is now the Seattle area. To them I would be a gibbering idiot who didn't even know their language, and they would probably kill me.
Get to smelting!
Good luck finding enough wood for that ! Energy was reaaaally expensive back then.
I'd write the harry potter series from memory. And all the star treks.
This seems like a good idea, but you would have to make a lot of changes to make it relevant to the times. I think it could work
Let's skip the "I have no basic survival skills" part (also skipping disease) and assume we find a nearby group of humans. If you approach first contact carefully they'd probably let you live with them in exchange for labor, giving you time to learn the language.
I think I have enough ambient exposure to modern technology that I could contribute at least 3-4 major innovations to my group over a couple decades. The challenge would be conveying and implementing ideas more than remembering them. You're not going to get back to modern standards of living in your remaining time traveled years no matter how much you remember, but what little you can impart to others would earn your keep.
I don't know what all the innovations would be, but germ theory and pasteurization come to mind.
I'm building a boat to go find the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria to sink them real good. Then nuke China and Ruzzia at their palaces. Same to every "kingdom". That's what they all deserve. Complete erasure from history. Instead people would just know that there used to be an asshole who wanted everyone to work and give him all the money.
basically, I want to destroy white colonialism. we have a toxic culture that honestly doesn't deserve to exist on a planet it wants to destroy.
I'm also curious to see how North America would turn out after 650 years have passed after I have achieved my goals.