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?
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.
Fuck you buddy, I’m barely getting by with modern medicine, you just ended me.
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.
Probably die
This is very A Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_Arthur's_Court
I hated that book. So pretentious.
I’d go live in a cabin in the forest, again.
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.
Wouldn’t I be in like empty space?
I would warn the Native Americans about the Europeans
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.
If you could somehow inoculate them against smallpox you might have a fighting chance.
Congratulations, you just brought diseases to the new world.
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.
LAB LEAK
/s
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.
Wash my hands
Now you’re a witch
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…
Where do you wash your hands? Hope you brought a big bottle of disinfectant.
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)
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
Any body of sufficiently rapidly running water should suffice.
Good thing I binge isekai anime
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.
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?
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.
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.
