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?
Wash my hands
Now you’re a witch
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.
you can make impromptu harsh soap by just washing your hands with some wood ash, your hands will probably be chronically dry and red but at least you can definitely have reliably clean hands and tools, combined with wearing some thin leather gloves whenever you’re outside the home.
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…
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
I’d just like to interject that while traveling was rare in medieval times, it did happen. People usually didn’t get thrown in jail for it, even if they didn’t speak the local language.
Regular people didn’t really speak Latin beyond a few bits of prayer. The lingua franca was a mix of various coastal languages (think of the belter patois in the expanse), but even that was only known to traders.
You’d have a tough time for sure, but wouldn’t necessarily get in trouble.
afaik travel wasn’t even particularly rare, it was just rare that you’d travel very far. Certainly in england it was expected that you’d travel to london or whatever for legal reasons at least like once or twice in your life, and of course merchants existed.
but also a really significant travel no one tends to mention is going on a pilgrimage to jerusalem! to my knowledge most people managed to do it once, and that’s a massive journey to undertake without modern vehicles!
thankfully since religion was so important back then, pilgrims were afforded quite significant privileges like guaranteed free food and housing and iirc travel from anyone, to the point that pretending to be a pilgrim was quite a severe crime.
As an Australian I would struggle significantly unless you were to also transport me geographically.
I would imagine the east coast / tasmania could be interesting. There used to be hundreds of different peoples that are now extinct and we know nothing about. A struggle nevertheless.
Fuck I think I could just vibe with the Noongars, hunting, fishing and sleeping til I died of old age.
Maybe use basic science and chemistry to improve sanitation and quality of life. Not too much, just enough to be regarded as a clever fella, not a warra wirrin bad spirit.
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 teach London children the most obnoxious brain rot slang from today as a laugh.
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.
You would be surprised how plentiful food is when there are no people eating it. Fishing with a spear would be easy. So as long as you can make a fire, you shouldn’t starve. But there would also be plenty of animals that would consider you food.
I’d make some fucking soap.
Do you know how to make soap? I’d want to but I’d have no idea how. If it already existed the hard part will be how to make enough money to buy it, as a software dev I’m not sure I’d have any sellable skills
How to make soap: Mix a fat or oil with a strong base like potassium hydroxide, resulting in an exothermic reaction called saponification.
Where do you get potassium hydroxide from in the 12th century?
Soak wood ash in water.
Kind of. All you need is fat and lye. Some experimenting would need to be done but I’m somewhat confident I could figure it out.
And you could make a living selling it. Assuming you can convince people of its benefits.
you can use wood ash, it won’t be a very wholesome or good soap but it gets the job done and is easy to make. Though of course if it’s easy to make then why would people buy much of it from you?
I think it wouldn’t be too hard to convince people to use it for cleaning off obvious messes, way harder to convince them that “oh you see actually diseases are caused by these tiny creatures you can’t see, but trust me they’re there and my product will get rid of them!”.
I know thousands of songs. Also, musical instruments like the saxaphone haven’t been invented yet.
honestly this might actually be the best idea, for most of human history people have been absolutely bored out of their minds and sharing news/stories/songs and really any sort of entertainment has been a perfectly legitimate way to get free food and housing.
any of us could almost certainly just live as travelling bards and do side jobs for actual monetary pay, provided you can get over the embarrassment of performing for an audience, and of course learn the local languages and translate the stories you remember.
Oh I think you’re the first person to suggest music! That is a really good idea, provided you don’t die of dysentery of course.
That’s 1375.
Not good, not bad. Depends on where you ended up on the globe. There absolutely is civilization, but it’s all kings and Tsars and the like. The English and French Hundred Years War is winding down but the plague really did a number on Europe. Lots of war in India. It wasn’t a great time in the Middle East what with the Crusades and all. The Egyptians are conquering Armenia. The Songhai Emprire is growing in Eastern Africa. Southeast Asia had a lot of conquest and a large kingdom growing, might not have been so bad as long as you landed on the winning side. The Ming Dynasty just started in China.
So it’s not like you ended up in pre-civilization or among dinosaurs or something. There are plenty of people around, but it’s still an age of war and conquest. Your best bet to have a great life would be to ally yourself with a strong leader and give them advancements to help that leader “win”. Of course, if he were defeated, you’d be slowly tortured and killed by the opposing side.
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’d use my knowledge of the future to do two chicks at the same time
Fucking A
“I figure a guy that can time travel 650 years into the past can set something like that up”
… and B too
I would warn the Native Americans about the Europeans
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not 1825 where you are?
Technologically, it does feel like that sometimes, but it would seem not.
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’.
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.
Many years ago when I thought about this, I realised I wouldn’t be able to put much of my modern knowledge and skills to use. I decided I’d learn to make basic matches by distilling urine into phosphate, which wasn’t invented until the 19th century, but I’ve forgotten the process. Collect lots of urine and boil it? Also, if you make white phosphate it can cause horrific toothache and they have to remove your jaw… So, I’m hoping another commentor will suggest a safer skill I can brush up to be ready for travel.
i believe toothache would be the least of your problems, chronic exposure to white phosphorous will give you fossy jaw which… just straight up kills the jaw and makes it fall off, at least they don’t have to go out of their way to remove it! yay…
