Submitted 2 days ago by Kookie215@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Its the 12th century and you’ve had no time to prepare, after you’re done reading this post you are snapped. What do you do?
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.
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?
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.
If you could somehow inoculate them against smallpox you might have a fighting chance.
Congratulations, you just brought diseases to the new world.
LAB LEAK
/s
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.
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.
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. 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.
Wouldn’t I be in like empty space?
612 years in the past
In Brazil
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.
The place I currently live in is slowly turning into a desert, but was a deep jungle back then.
… I think I’d just die? Become food for a jaguar 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.
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.
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 regions 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!
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’d die pretty quickly.
Use all the science i know from school to helpfully quicken scientific progress and spread trans propaganda
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.
Wait 612 years and buy Microsoft.
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 want possible in the middle ages. You had no rubber for seals, no steal that would hold, and no tools to drill holes precisely enough.
That’s why the Romans already used stream 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
no rubber for seals
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
Die of bubonic plague, get killed for being a witch/warlock, die of appendicitis…
Re-invent. Your still far too late to be first.
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.
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.
I would fall from a very high place
Probably die
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.
Maybe you missed the “as much as possible” part
Fuck you buddy, I’m barely getting by with modern medicine, you just ended me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’d kill your ancestors.
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
Well I be naked, so would need to make/steal clothing very quickly
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 canale 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.
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 1 day ago
I know thousands of songs. Also, musical instruments like the saxaphone haven’t been invented yet.
Kookie215@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Here are some good time travel stories.
bookshop.org/p/books/…/7282193?ean=9780553575385&…
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.
bookshop.org/p/books/…/693820?ean=9781606644874&n…
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.
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.