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?
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.
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.
Fly under the radar as much as possible, find a cute girl and settle down and have a lot of kids.
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
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.
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)
- find cloth to cover my face and hands so I don’t transmit or catch any diseases
- distill water so I can drink it without getting diseases
- use yams or horse urine to create HRT
- communicate with the locals and seek a local blacksmith to create a metal tube with metal balls inside it, and mix charcoal, potash, and sulfur to make a primitive gun to defend myself against the people who think I’m a witch or a demon or whatever
- talk to the women and encourage them to rise up against the system and patriarchy, teach them how to make weapons, about 4 field crop rotation if they don’t already know it, otherwise about automated steam engines, weavers, hydroelectric dams, etc
- march up to the feudal lord and demand democracy, with the fear of the gun and half the population behind me they will agree
- teach about the scientific method to get them to question things, do their own research, and learn more
- there will be scientific labs, primitive computers can be developed, we can spread our advanced culture to the rest of Afro-Eurasia, also prevent slavery
- warn people about going to America and Australia unprepared, go with them in modern ships and don’t spread disease, talk to the locals and trade with them and learn from them, don’t kill them or replace them. Teach them the tech advancements too
- Write down lots of things, invent the printing press if not already invented, document human knowledge and encourage more documentation by others
This is all if I have any measure of success at the first things and don’t die or kill myself
- establish a new culture in the Americas that will unify and kill European settlers on sight.
- teach the native Americans about the future they’re preventing
- teach them European science, politics, history, economics, etc
- give them a technological advantage that will set them ahead of Europe by 650 years by teaching them manufacturing skills.
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.
