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?
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.
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.
Tell them how to make gunpowder.
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.
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.
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.
Most likely, you’d just start their mass depopulation pandemic a bit earlier.
white people (like myself) carry diseases
Congratulations, you already killed them all
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)
I’d kill your ancestors.
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
Probably die
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
That reads like Dutch to me. Perfect! I’ll be fine.
Even that is very modern-looking to this Chaucer enjoyer.
Side note, I now want to translate all my emails to my supervisors into middle English
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.
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.
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.
The only non-delusional answer lol
find the nearest sword and belly flop on its pointy side
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.
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.
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.
