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?
Die because my medications haven’t been invented yet.
Or be murdered because I’m not christian
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.
1375…
We can work with metals, so we can probably make boilers.
I invent steam power 400 years early.
Re-invent. Your still far too late to be first.
Nothing. I’d sit under an tree and enjoy the peace and quiet. No trump. No DC. No MAGA. No reporters. No non stop ads. No social media. No Google. No Elon. No bezos. The list goes on. Sure I’d probably die of some random disease or bandits. But I’d be okay with it at that point.
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.
Pretty sure the Earth isn’t traveling the universe at light speed
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
It’s not 1825 where you are?
Technologically, it does feel like that sometimes, but it would seem not.
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.
Wash my hands
Now you’re a witch
Where do you wash your hands? Hope you brought a big bottle of disinfectant.
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.
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)
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…
