No Stupid Questions

I'd cry, curse god's name even more than I do currently, and then probably die from boredom.

1375? Bro that's the. Middle ages. Fucking kill me.

I'd write the harry potter series from memory. And all the star treks.

612 years in the past
In Brazil. So almost a century before the first europeans landed here. I'm assuming I just plop exactly in my relative earth-location, but in the distant past. (... It would be really funny if this was overly literal, because I'm currently in the 12th floor, so I'd thanos snap into the past and immediately fall to my death)

Well

As a person from modern times -- From AFTER the Americas came into contact with Europe, if I went near a person here in the Land of Palms (that's what the natives called Brazil!) from those times we'd both get horribly infected and die a lot due to how antibodies work. Viruses did a lot of the legwork in genociding the natives. Euros would deliberately do things to infect natives so they'd die of illness.

The place I currently live in is slowly turning into a desert, but was a deep jungle back then (... It was still a deep jungle in the 1910s tbqh).

.......... I think I'd just die? Become food for a jaguar or eat a poisonous fungus or sth.

Would love to indulge in the fantasy of giving the Guarani people guns and a warning to shoot white people on sight just to see how history would change, but that ain't happening.

I'd be fucked. I'm not succeeding in the present, I see 0 reason to believe that would be different in 1375.

Well, I know about hygiene about various diseases, and even how to treat them. I'm also running for my life to the nearest forest, as I don't have any way to prove I'm not a Vagabound or invader, and I can't communicate.

There's no choice but to try to hide deep inside a forest, and try to find a river or lake. I would eventually be forced to drink dirty, risking parasites, unless I get lucky enough to find what I need to purify it.

As soon as that is taken care of, I would focus on covering up my tracks, digging some sort of shelter to hide from medieval people, my next step would be to ensure a food source like fishing, or finding plants I recognize as edible, which might be where I mess up and die (A lot of plants look similar to poisonous ones, mushrooms too).

Next step would be making bog iron, finding copper, and so on, to make life easier at first, but then to defend myself against being discovered.

England is in the midst of the Hundred Years war with France and considering I'm ~193cm and the average height of a man in England in the 14th century is about 171cm... looks like in getting my arse drafted and shipped off to France, to act as some kind of intimidating presence. That is until I have to swing a sword, which my body, that's used to sitting in an office looking over excel spreadsheets, absolutely can't do, so I get bum rushed/hit in the face with an arrow and die.

That's the most likely scenario.

Worst case scenario, considering I don't speak middle English or Latin, I'm treated as an enemy and locked up in a dungeon somewhere.

I don't think there is realistically a best case scenario

Wait 612 years and buy Microsoft.

I'd try and hold my breath to not set off the European diseases into America early.

Let's skip the "I have no basic survival skills" part (also skipping disease) and assume we find a nearby group of humans. If you approach first contact carefully they'd probably let you live with them in exchange for labor, giving you time to learn the language.

I think I have enough ambient exposure to modern technology that I could contribute at least 3-4 major innovations to my group over a couple decades. The challenge would be conveying and implementing ideas more than remembering them. You're not going to get back to modern standards of living in your remaining time traveled years no matter how much you remember, but what little you can impart to others would earn your keep.

I don't know what all the innovations would be, but germ theory and pasteurization come to mind.

650 years ago, the place I live was inhabited mostly by the Ojibwe (a Native American people), so I suppose I'd try to find some of them and try to convince them to not kill me and let me stick around long enough to learn their language. Then I could teach them some of my knowledge. Maybe by the time the Europeans come along they'll be a bit more prepared.

If I can't find anyone, I don't like my chances of surviving for any significant amount of time. Maybe I could make it a few weeks foraging for food and fishing or something, but realistically I'll probably end up starving.

The Ring of Fire series which is about this concept was such an amazing read. Unfortunately the infinite branching plotlines became way more than I could handle.

I'm doing pretty good then. Where I live has been so historically abundant in resources that people were able to just sort of vibe.

I would also establish a calendar, convey it to the locals, and warn them of what is to come along with a timeline.

The first and easiest thing would be to invent calculus. I'm sure other things would pop up situationally, I could probably get basic electricity going with a bit of experimentation.

Well, I would give you the answer, but since I snapped back as soon as I read the post, I'm now responding what has been 650 years later for me, and I'm too fucking old for this shit a second time. I bypassed getting snapped back this time by just not reading the post and coming straight in to comment.

Now, what will happen if I read the

I would pretend to be super-religious. Throughout the whole of human history, pretending to be super-religious has always been a viable path to survival and personal advancement.

Apart from that, I'd probably just die.

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.

Hope that I don't start the early spread of New World diseases to indigenous Americans

And I'd be dead by the end of the week

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.

I would die quickly because I don't have any wilderness survival skills and the land I live in (USA) was inhabited by hunter gatherer tribes whose language is completely unrelated to anything I know and whose customs are completely unknown to me as well. But beyond that, even if I got teleported to England where I at least know a similar enough language to where I could figure out middle English decently quickly, I think people seriously overestimate how useful just having modern knowledge is.

For example, say you want to build a gun. Do you know how to forge a gun barrel with medieval steel and make gunpowder out of bat shit and sulfur? Because I sure as hell don't. I could probably make gunpowder but how the hell would you get the money to pay someone to make a gun barrel for you? And further, even if you had the skills yourself, basically nobody today deals with raw materials as inconsistent as what they were working with back then and therefore don't have practice working with them. Even if you introduced something like germ theory to them why would anyone believe you? You'd probably get just as sick as everyone else even with following modern sanitation standards for yourself because nobody else would be. Same with math. Want to speedrun introducing calculus to the world? Good luck trying to prove it to medieval mathematicians without having deep knowledge of euclidean constructive proofs and philosophy to even allow for something like an infinitesimal to exist. There's very little one person can realistically do to change the world on their own.

Get to smelting!

I'm in Japan and while I can speak modern Japanese I don't know shit about classical Japanese so I'd be screwed. I'm also not Japanese so good chance I end up getting killed or some shit

Fuck you buddy, I'm barely getting by with modern medicine, you just ended me.

I would be among Native Americans in what is now the Seattle area. To them I would be a gibbering idiot who didn't even know their language, and they would probably kill me.

I'm in the US and in a place that native Americans didn't have settlements. I'm very familiar with the area and have hunted, hiked, and camped here my entire life. With no preparation or modern equipment I give myself about a week before I get eaten by wolves or a bear, maybe gored by an elk or bitten by a venomous snake. I don't expect that I would see another human during that week. Native hunting parties visited the area so it's not impossible that I would see someone but it's very unlikely.

Unfortunately in that circumstance, I'd likely be a horrible vector for disease. Not much chance of survival if I spread devastation wherever I go.

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

It's 1375 and I'm asphyxiating somewhere in the Milky Way about 600 light years from Earth.

But let's assume that somehow my latitude, longitude and altitude relative to Earth somehow remain the same. Now I'm spawning several feet in the air probably in sight of several villagers. If I'm lucky, they'll think I was sent by God. If not I'm gonna have a real bad time. There's a good chance I'll break a bone in the fall, and that's not going to go well at all.

But let's assume there are trees here. Lots of them. That's actually pretty likely. They hide my sudden appearance and mitigate bone breakages.

Now I'm on the outskirts of a village, battered and bruised and very strangely dressed. I don't speak any language they'll understand despite technically being from that area. Middle English is the language of the day, and I speak something that won't evolve for at least another 200-250 years. Shakespeare is technically modern English and is hard to comprehend sometimes. Here we're talking Chaucer and that's pretty much opaque.

I'm literate, but not in Latin, and that's the language of the Church. I'm numerate, but they haven't got beyond Roman numerals yet.

I'm not even sure where the church is. I know where it is in the modern day, but that building's no more than 200 years old. Maybe it's on the same site. I'd head there for shelter at least.

I know the Lord's Prayer in modern English. Chanting that quietly might spark some recognition in anyone present but then it might count as blasphemy to say it in anything other than Catholic-Church-approved Latin.

Come to think of it, I could probably blow a couple of minds by writing the alphabet they know and then the same with the extra letters that have been added since.

And then I'd be burned as a witch.

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