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?
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.
Start making siege weapons.
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 erano 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. 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.
Real science and innovation comes in increments
Die of bubonic plague, get killed for being a witch/warlock, die of appendicitis…
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
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.
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 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 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.
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.
Prophecy some major upcoming events, subsequently market myself as a saint, grab a comfy church position
Or be burned on a stake.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How do you think the boobonic plague got started?
Yeah, it was a time traveller
spreading some major contagious disease that nobody has a defense against and wipe out a huge section of the population.
Oof
Lol
die almost immediately
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
I’d use my knowledge of the future to do two chicks at the same time
“You don’t need that knowledge to do two chicks at the same time, man.”
“If you want two chicks to double up on a dude like me, you do.”
“Hey ladies… Ever been with a guy who can read?”
“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:
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.
The weirder words was easier to read in Swedish
Fucking A
“I figure a guy that can time travel 650 years into the past can set something like that up”
… and B too
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
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.
If I snapped you back in time 650 years
2025 - 650 =1375
Its the 12th century
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.
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’.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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:
Scientifically speaking, there is no absolute reference frame. So you can be wherever you like depending on what reference you choose.
Clearly I am OVERprepared for this with my VAST knowledge of Doctor Who. And nothing else.
