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.
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.
If you’re going back to before technology got good anyway, might as well always travel to ancient greece (preferably Athens, as they’re a bit less violent).
preferably Athens, as they’re a bit less violent
Athens were involved in more conflicts than any other Greek city. If you want just peace in ancient Greece you should choose, paradoxically, Sparta (though as usual it depends on the class you would be born, but the same can be said of any place and time in history).
Maybe ancient Athens? Just sit around eating grapes and talking about triangles and shit. And even if I get rng’d into slavery, I could draw the Pythagorean theorem in the dirt, and a passing scholar would be like “holy shit, come with me dude”
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.
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
Just kill me
You didn’t specify the calendar used 🤓, so I’ll go to the year 1401 in the hijri calendar (1980 in the gregorian calendar)
Why not 1949 in the hijri calendar???
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.
Have fun in 'Nam!
Yeah, I was thinking after I posted this what other wars I might get drafted into.
1870s in the Southeastern United States. I’m gonna make goddamn sure Reconstruction doesn’t just end and Jim Crow functionally re-invents slavery.
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.
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.
What is the significance of that date?
Its as close as possible to now before the 50s
as a queer brown man; i don’t want to be anywhere at all.
why 1949 and where?
Would fit in with the ancient Greeks
@hungryphrog
That’s a difficult one. On one hand if I went to the early/mid Victorian era, it’d be pretty easy to re-invent some shit, and I wouldn’t have to worry about having to re-learn reading in the local language, but on the other hand it’s… the Victorian era.
Antibiotics isn’t as simple as simply getting a fungus to grow in a medium (such as penicillin in cantelope): there can be bad byproducts that also need to be removed, and scaling up the growth to significant quantities can be a big problem. What miiight be easier actually is using viruses to kill bacteria, but you need access to good quality meshes. And industrialization also isn’t as easy as some books make it seem.
I think I’d take one for the team and go back to some ancient mostly egalitarian (but still some excess goods to support specialists) queer friendly society guaranteed to not immediately get wiped out, and get them started on the scientific method early, and hope to butterfly/forewarn the worst shit away.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.
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.
Too Black for that bullshit; you might as well just kill me now
@frauddogg there are plenty of cool pre-colonial civilizations you could join. This kingdom had pottery, metallurgy, literacy, even a sophisticated district court system.
And still wound up eventually becoming a slave-dealing civilization at the same time as they were being “Christianized”-- a fancy term for ‘colonization’. That’s a no-go for me.
@frauddogg yikes, I wasn’t suggesting that. These kingdoms were around for literally hundreds of years without that stuff. OP didn’t say we had to become immortal and live through the rest of history.
I hate the way Europeans effectively colonized everyone’s imaginations so they can’t even conceive of a time and place without them in it.
Well, after like 800 AD, that’s kind of the case. There is no ‘peaceful existence’ in a world with Anglos getting ready to pillage it all. And that’s just taking my melanin into account-- that doesn’t take my mental state into account, and doesn’t take my sexuality into account either. There is no time in the past I look to favorably, and honestly? Until we’ve handled the colonizer menace, I don’t see a time in the future to look favorably to either.
Are you done debate perv’ing at me yet, or do I have to find a more scathing way to phrase it?
Racism is a european “invention”, and can be dated. If you choose any place “before racism”, that will not be an issue.
And also, you can choose any place in a time without europeans.
