You would still have the same age, gender, personality, skin color, etc. and you would be able to speak at least one local language and would know basic information of the era and place. Your family, social standing, and such would be randomly picked.
11:59:59 December 31st 1949. Fuck the olden times.
Yeah honestly. People don’t realize that if you go too far back you’ll likely cause a pandemic and even if you go back to 1949 medicine was still pretty fuckin whack.
Lobotomies for all!
New Zealand 800 years ago. The rest of the question doesn’t matter because there were no other humans there.
I pick NZ, 801 years ago
Are you and @bstix forgetting that there were giant eagles that probably ate humans?
In that case, I also choose NZ 802 years ago.
There are now no humans there 799 years ago.
And people ask why Gandalf didn’t call em up to fly to mount doom.
Oh you mean the ones that went extinct not longer after meeting us?
@Deceptichum pretty sure that was because humans ate the eagles’ main food source, the giant moa, to extinction.
I don’t think you
twothree citizens of the fediverse are going to single-handedly defeat them.Edit: forgot @Nepenthe is now arriving before you.
@Deceptichum pretty sure that was because humans ate the eagles’ main food source, the giant moa, to extinction.
It was also because giant eagle eggs were a (relatively) easy source of protein.
That means you would doom yourself to die alone…
Or you have to spend your whole life building a boat, collecting food and being able to navigate, just to rejoin civilisation
As I’m from NZ atm I would choose here about 800 years ago as well - 800 years ago is about when the first Maori arrived - give or take a few
With my luck I’d die of a katipo spider bite in the first month lol. Also, I’m minded of the scene in the film Boy, where said boy is cooking tea for the family. “Ah no, not crayfish again!” whines his sister. (Though I can’t imagine getting sick of crayfish.) Ask yourself why the Māori started eating tītī/muttonbird…. that smacks of desperation. Pack a few kūmara in your bag, maybe an axe and a box of matches?
Dec 31st 1949.
I’m a queer woman, so these sort of time travel questions boil down to preserving as many rights as I can.
as a queer brown man; i don’t want to be anywhere at all.
why 1949 and where?
You would have been just fine in, say, North or East Africa a few hundred years ago.
I think they picked 49 because it’s as modern as they could get within OP’s parameters.
Would fit in with the ancient Greeks
Where, the U.S.? Seems like there’s gotta be other times and places that were more woman- and queer-friendly, right?
You’d think places like San Francisco would be better, but 20 years later the Stone Wall riots happened. It was pretty rough all around to be gay in that time, though I’m sure some places were worse than others.
fwiw: gay nightlife in san francisco was at its zenith in the 50’s & 60’s .
the san francisco we have today is a tiny dim more conservative ember of what it was back then.
Need to pick a time when estrogen was invented
Maybe back to like ancient Greece or something?
I think you would’ve been fine in the Roman empire during the Pax Romana.
Rome would kinda suck for a woman, especially a queer one.
What is the significance of that date?
Its as close as possible to now before the 50s
Fair enough, though at that point you’d probably get better results if you went further back. The 50s were…really bad.
To be entirely fair I’d probably just ⚡ 🧑🏿🦱 ⚡ myself either way. Not willing to try and survive without my meds.
Just kill me
Given that there were 2 world wars in the early 1900s and that I like tech in general I would also choose 12/31/1949. At least I might have a PC sometime in my lifetime and I’d probably live to use it and not be a corpse on some beach somewhere.
Just pick Switzerland.
Have fun in 'Nam!
Yeah, I was thinking after I posted this what other wars I might get drafted into.
Lincoln’s booth in Ford’s theater on the night of the assassination right before it happens. Saving the president will immediately give me some credibility and influence, and it could improve reconstruction of the south to an extent that positively impacts modern America.
It may complicate your life though. You’d have no explanation of who you are or why you’re there.
It’s OK, just tell Abe you’re there to kill vampires and he’ll let you into his secret society.
one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Only slight hyperbole, I was legitimately impressed
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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I mean, tune it just right and you can get the Industrial Revolution started a couple millenia early and maybe bypass the whole colonialism nonsense. Middle ages is too late, too much theocracy. Common knowledge gets you in grecorroman spaces, but maybe you can overshoot a touch and get some nice Phoenician traders to bankroll your plan to mass produce bycicles or Ikea-style furniture and ship it all over the Mediterranean.
Just… hope you stay healthy or that the rules let you pack a bunch of antibiotics. Or maybe learn a bunch of modern medicine before you go. Maybe prioritize the whole “discovering penicillin” thing when you get there.
Problem with that plan is you don’t know if you will be a slave.
Not necessarily insurmountable, but still a good point.
You may still have an easier time getting things up and running as a slave in antiquity than as a serf in the Middle Ages, depending on where you end up. Pretty sure you’d have a better shot as a slave in antiquity than in the US or other colonial areas, both because colonialism reeeeally sucked and because you’d have relatively more valuable skills.
@MudMan I think the odds are much better if you’re a non-chattel kind of slave, for sure.
Don’t get me wrong, you could also just materialize chained up to the bottom of a mine or in the middle of a war campaign lasting 40% of your lifespan and die in a week.
It’s just since the premise doesn’t say you get to refuse at least this way you’d have a good chance at just absolutely smashing it and maybe bypassing some of the real nasty stuff on the way to technological advancement.
@MudMan totally. Nowhere’s completely safe. This kind of thought experiment is always going to be a numbers game.
Pretty sure they would have just done colonialism harder and faster if you tried to get the industrial revolution going sooner.
Would you? I think that’s the most interesting question in this hypothetical. Would dropping future tech knowledge in a different context just clone cultural and political progression or change course?
I think assuming industrial revolution inevitably leads to colonialism, then imperialism lets actual colonial powers off the hook. I mean, never mind that you’d probably be able to explain inflation to people and skip past some of the straight-up self-defeating resource chases, arguably colonialism is very dependent on European culture being very specifically theocratic and self-absorbed. Especially if you step in prior to the Middle Ages. Roman expansion had slavery as a common law figure, like everybody else at the time, but their incorporation of other territories was extremely not based on colonial principles, even in parts of Africa that would then be under straight-up colonial rule. Would having muskets and combustion engines have changed that? I’m not sure.
Thing is, industrial revolution bleeds into colonialism. Sure, there was colonialism before industrialization, and colonialism would look very different in a time before nation-states as we know them today, but those resources will have to come from somewhere.
Metallurgy is always where they get you on these things. You can bring stuff like division of labor, assembly lines, and replaceable parts back in time pretty easily, but good luck getting aluminum for your bicycles in any kind of quantity. Not sure how well a bronze bicycle would work, but I bet it could be done.
A steel bycicle will surely work.
The problem with all of it is going to be scale. I think you’re right in that you think you can just jump into the technology bit in these Yankee in King’s Arthur’s Court scenarios and instead you’d probably get stuck trying to revolutionize mining and material science and then die from an ingrown toenail.
Which, to his credit, Twain absolutely covers when he does the thought experiment. I’m constantly impressed that his take was “you’d cherry pick the people that are open minded enough and spend the rest of your life trying to set up an education system only to be chased away regardless because politics is a bitch”.
That’s still probably the right answer.
The surgery that kept me alive at birth wasn’t invented until the late '80s. So I guess I would just be fucked no matter what. So put me wherever they want, any time before 1950 is going to suck ass for me.
Now assuming that part of my time travel comes with being able to fix my heart stuff. I would like to be born in the early 1900s. I can’t think of a single time where I’m not going to fight both war and awfulness in the general world. But at least then I could be around for some cool developments.
You’ll be right - OP said your age and a bunch of other things would be preserved. You won’t be born there - just transported to the chosen time, to spend the rest of your days.
Somewhere before the advent of mankind, really fuck with some historians
Sorry to nitpick, but this would be the field of paleontology, not historians.
Im sure itd fuck with both fields
@Akasazh historians could get messed with via paleoanthropologists.
If there’s one that could know its you, Livius.
But as I said it’s a nitpick. Usually us historians keep to when language became involved. The rest would be prehistorical, but the distinction is not that clean cut (is it ever?).
@Akasazh fair enough; that’s a nitpick worth making.
:-)
About 4 to 6 million years ago. Choosing biological history of humans, see what I can mess up when humans first started
Having as much sex as possible with as many individuals as possible.
The location, geography and placement is randomly picked?
Then like the other guy said December 31, 1949 11:59 pm
To be born before this time randomly anywhere in the world means that there is a high chance you’d be dropped into an impoverished hell hole with nothing, no chance and no help … God help you if you are female.
I have a whole rant on this topic, but the short version:
It’s dentists.
The gnarliest mountain man, who hunts bears with his bear hands, can be brought to his knees with a toothache. The toothache never sleeps, can’t be fought, and always eventually wins. Even basic dentistry is life saving - even another human with a pair of pliers and some moonshine - but I’d much rather have novocaine.
Dental problems a hundred years ago were not as problematic as we think. I’m Indigenous Canadian and my parents were born and raised in the bush and judging from family photos I’ve seen from a hundred years ago … most people had decent teeth. I have photos of my grandmothers parents who must have been in the 60s or 70s and they all had full teeth, probably not the best but they had obvious white teeth.
Cavities and tooth problems are a modern problem from wealth … we eat too much starch and sugar and generally just eat way too much of everything. Before the modern era, up to about the mid 1800s, the average person ate about five pounds of refined sugar a year - today the average person consumes about 100 lbs of sugar a year. … and those are the averages! Back a hundred years ago, you were wealthy if you could get sugar … most people just couldn’t afford to eat it … most people couldn’t afford to eat! And they ate more simple diets and less often.
The biggest fear I have about going back to the past is just getting a flesh wound, a hang nail or a scratch that could fester into an infection and either take a limb or kill me.
Dental problems aren’t about them looking good; teeth used to kill. Dental disease used to be the 5th leading cause of death. Your great-grandparents aren’t the best bar for dentistry in the past as modern dentistry began in the 18th century.
You can pick the place too.
1940, as there are crazy things that will be going on in the world of computer science (and science in general) over the course of the next few decades and that would be really cool to experience. Kind of sad though to not be alive once we achieve human-level artificial intelligence, would be interested in seeing how that will turn out. I would probably chose America, as I wouldn’t want to spend WW2 in Germany where I live in the present.
Alternatively I think I would very much enjoy visiting Ancient Greek, although I’m not too sure when would be the best time for that; maybe at the peak of Athen.
1940s
The only correct answer, the past, was the worst. I like having antibiotics, not dying in childbirth, hot running water e.t.
Can always take the knowledge with you. Memorize how to do critical parts of plumbing. The antibiotics part yeah that would suck.
Memorize how to do critical parts of plumbing
Ok, we need to go to the store and buy some pipes.
What are pipes?
Oh. I think I fucked up.
Come on, obviously they knew what pipes were in the 1940s. They are cylinders made of lead.
You could probably memorise how to identify the right fungus and isolate penicillin, right?
Exactly. Although a person can really only retain so much info, but yeah if you can figure out how to memorize both anti biotics and plumbing you’d be a very popular person and potentially be an excellent leader.
Yeah, antibiotics is a big one. Plus, some of my skills might actually still be useful in the 40s.
But life did suck in a lot of places for a lot of people in the 40s. WW2, the devastation left behind by WW2, and horrible social attitudes. Good luck in ‘the west’ if you’re not a straight white cis man.
1600 India. I’m royalty and get to meet my ancestor and favorite historical figure Akbar. And yes the mughal empire is my roman empire
Social standing is random though based on OP’s rules. It would be terrible to end up as part of the lowest caste.
I think the only caste Mughals did was your clan.
Yikes. Uhh. 1950. Cause you’re really pushing your luck before that if your background is random.
