No Stupid Questions

I reread the Bitcoin paper yesterday, so with my newly refreshed knowledge id find the nearest mathimation, explain it to them, implement the protocol with paper records, handwritten hashes, and messages on horseback or something. After a few years when every major economic power realizes how valuable a deflationary currency that Mansa Musa doesn't control (14th century african gold-salt bazzilionare, ~400 bill USD today), the price of my currency would increase vastly, making me super rich.

Try to find the nearest shaman, apothecary or herbalist and trade my future clothes/pocket contents for some hallucinogens and painless poison. I ain't living through a time before electricity.

I would warn the Native Americans about the Europeans

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.

I'd die pretty quickly.

I would teach London children the most obnoxious brain rot slang from today as a laugh.

I'd be dead since the Earth wasn't in the same position 650 years ago. Even taking that out of the equation, I'd die since I can't communicate with anyone and don't have the survival skills.

probably die

This is something I often wonder about, what could one person even do with all of today's common knowledge? You can't very well just invent the printing press and have the same impact as Gutenberg - you need something what the few people who can read would, and most people can't translate the bible from Latin into renaissance German and/or don't know enough about the catholic church to write scathing remarks on it like Luther.

You can write and read - that's something. Maybe more importantly, you can do math with arabic numerals - boom, easy accounting job. With a bit higher education, you may even just invent calculus once more. You know how long it took for people to figure out you can put pi on the number line? Proving all the formulas in your head is the hard stuff, but you have a head start just by knowing them. We all clown on the wormhole explanation with the paper, but it does prove Euclid wrong 400 years early.

Ah, and you can just become a medical genius by using soap and bandages - "do no harm" is better than most.

Die as you forgot to teleport me to where the earth was at the time.

Otherwise I guess my main knowledge that could be useful is some basic first aid. Secondary to that, a little bit of electrical stuff.

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

Wouldn't I be in like empty space?

Die a slow death from hyperglycemia once my pump runs out of insulin.

Infect the indigenous population with some god awful pathogen they have no defense against.

Die to a pathogen I have no defense against.

Die to the indigenous population due to being a white dude in pre-contact North America.

It uh... wouldn't be pretty.

I'd make some fucking soap.

Nobody would be able to understand me because English has diverged so far from 12th century English that it's a different language. Also I'd be in north America where nobody had even seen a white person. Additionally, I'm 20 ft above the ground right now in a building that didn't exist back then. Finally, I'd be rightfully blamed for bringing plague to the native tribes of the area and likely killed.

Assuming those hurdles were all cleared: I'm a mechanical engineer. So, I'd tell the natives where iron ore, coal, and oil was buried and how to extract and refine it. Tell them how to make gunpowder. Speed run making steam engines and lathes. Get north american natives armed, industrialized, and organized against the external European threat.

I’d be dead in the vacuum of space. You never mentioned that I’d just go back in time, you forgot the coordinates. Now I’m floating, dead. Thanks man.

I would fall from a very high place

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.

Well, I'm in Australia so I would try and communicate with the indigenous population and teach them how to defend themselves against the upcoming colonist invasion and take advantage of what they have to offer, starting with forcing a signed treaty.

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.

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

Probably die

Basic geography could go a long ways, if people believe you. At this point people were exploring the world trying to find the spice Islands, but didn't know WTF they were doing. Magellan navigating the strait that would be named after him was impressive at its time, but now we know the best way from Europe to Asia (and spices and stuff) by sea without any modern canals is by going around Africa. Like, it still sucks and it's a long trip but it's doable compared to going to damn near Antarctica.

This assumes I don't die, can communicate, and am not in the then-unpopulated (and quite landlocked) current location of Denver, Colorado.

Edit: bonus fact: if a sailor managed to smuggle a knapsack full of cloves back, it was worth about as much a house

Use all the science i know from school to helpfully quicken scientific progress and spread trans propaganda

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.

Fly under the radar as much as possible, find a cute girl and settle down and have a lot of kids.

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.

I don't think I know a single language from the time, so I'm probably getting murdered because I'm a strange foreigner who can't defend themselves with words.

I would use the superstitions of the people of the area to scare them away from me and my space. I would build a Catalan forge and a smelter that is powered by falling water. I would make gunpowder but not share the recipe. I would also distill alcohol for sale and for hygiene. I would use Leedskalnins PMH to create permanent magnets and use them to make electricity. Electric fences also help keep the superstitious barbarians away. I would also be a beekeeper.

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

First I would seek the attention of the local ruler by cooking interesting dishes with modern knowledge.

Then I would ask him to create an akademy. I don't know the details but I know what can be known. Intelligent people will reinvent the knowledge.

Some side businesses should make enough money that the akademy and thus further development doesn't entirely rely on the king.

Build cities with public transport and no cars, because there is no car.

Success.