You must pick a point in human history before the 1950s to be spend the rest of your life in. What era and place would you choose?

hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 78 points –

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.

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11:59:59 December 31st 1949. Fuck the olden times.

Yeah honestly. People don't realize that if you go too far back you'll likely cause a pandemic and even if you go back to 1949 medicine was still pretty fuckin whack.

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?

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 two three citizens of the fediverse are going to single-handedly defeat them.

Edit: forgot @Nepenthe is now arriving before you.

@Deceptichum pretty sure that was because humans ate the eagles’ main food source, the giant moa, to extinction.

It was also because giant eagle eggs were a (relatively) easy source of protein.

That means you would doom yourself to die alone...

Or you have to spend your whole life building a boat, collecting food and being able to navigate, just to rejoin civilisation

As I'm from NZ atm I would choose here about 800 years ago as well - 800 years ago is about when the first Maori arrived - give or take a few

With my luck I’d die of a katipo spider bite in the first month lol. Also, I’m minded of the scene in the film Boy, where said boy is cooking tea for the family. “Ah no, not crayfish again!” whines his sister. (Though I can’t imagine getting sick of crayfish.) Ask yourself why the Māori started eating tītī/muttonbird…. that smacks of desperation. Pack a few kūmara in your bag, maybe an axe and a box of matches?

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.

as a queer brown man; i don't want to be anywhere at all.

why 1949 and where?

You would have been just fine in, say, North or East Africa a few hundred years ago.

I think they picked 49 because it's as modern as they could get within OP's parameters.

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?

I think you would've been fine in the Roman empire during the Pax Romana.

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.

Lincoln’s booth in Ford’s theater on the night of the assassination right before it happens. Saving the president will immediately give me some credibility and influence, and it could improve reconstruction of the south to an extent that positively impacts modern America.

It may complicate your life though. You'd have no explanation of who you are or why you're there.

It's OK, just tell Abe you're there to kill vampires and he'll let you into his secret society.

one of the best movies I've ever seen. Only slight hyperbole, I was legitimately impressed

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.

@MudMan I think the odds are much better if you're a non-chattel kind of slave, for sure.

Don't get me wrong, you could also just materialize chained up to the bottom of a mine or in the middle of a war campaign lasting 40% of your lifespan and die in a week.

It's just since the premise doesn't say you get to refuse at least this way you'd have a good chance at just absolutely smashing it and maybe bypassing some of the real nasty stuff on the way to technological advancement.

@MudMan totally. Nowhere's completely safe. This kind of thought experiment is always going to be a numbers game.

Pretty sure they would have just done colonialism harder and faster if you tried to get the industrial revolution going sooner.

Would you? I think that's the most interesting question in this hypothetical. Would dropping future tech knowledge in a different context just clone cultural and political progression or change course?

I think assuming industrial revolution inevitably leads to colonialism, then imperialism lets actual colonial powers off the hook. I mean, never mind that you'd probably be able to explain inflation to people and skip past some of the straight-up self-defeating resource chases, arguably colonialism is very dependent on European culture being very specifically theocratic and self-absorbed. Especially if you step in prior to the Middle Ages. Roman expansion had slavery as a common law figure, like everybody else at the time, but their incorporation of other territories was extremely not based on colonial principles, even in parts of Africa that would then be under straight-up colonial rule. Would having muskets and combustion engines have changed that? I'm not sure.

Thing is, industrial revolution bleeds into colonialism. Sure, there was colonialism before industrialization, and colonialism would look very different in a time before nation-states as we know them today, but those resources will have to come from somewhere.

Metallurgy is always where they get you on these things. You can bring stuff like division of labor, assembly lines, and replaceable parts back in time pretty easily, but good luck getting aluminum for your bicycles in any kind of quantity. Not sure how well a bronze bicycle would work, but I bet it could be done.

A steel bycicle will surely work.

The problem with all of it is going to be scale. I think you're right in that you think you can just jump into the technology bit in these Yankee in King's Arthur's Court scenarios and instead you'd probably get stuck trying to revolutionize mining and material science and then die from an ingrown toenail.

Which, to his credit, Twain absolutely covers when he does the thought experiment. I'm constantly impressed that his take was "you'd cherry pick the people that are open minded enough and spend the rest of your life trying to set up an education system only to be chased away regardless because politics is a bitch".

That's still probably the right answer.

About 4 to 6 million years ago. Choosing biological history of humans, see what I can mess up when humans first started

Having as much sex as possible with as many individuals as possible.

Somewhere before the advent of mankind, really fuck with some historians

Sorry to nitpick, but this would be the field of paleontology, not historians.

@Akasazh historians could get messed with via paleoanthropologists.

If there's one that could know its you, Livius.

But as I said it's a nitpick. Usually us historians keep to when language became involved. The rest would be prehistorical, but the distinction is not that clean cut (is it ever?).

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.

You'll be right - OP said your age and a bunch of other things would be preserved. You won't be born there - just transported to the chosen time, to spend the rest of your days.

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.

1940, as there are crazy things that will be going on in the world of computer science (and science in general) over the course of the next few decades and that would be really cool to experience. Kind of sad though to not be alive once we achieve human-level artificial intelligence, would be interested in seeing how that will turn out. I would probably chose America, as I wouldn’t want to spend WW2 in Germany where I live in the present.

Alternatively I think I would very much enjoy visiting Ancient Greek, although I’m not too sure when would be the best time for that; maybe at the peak of Athen.

1940s

The only correct answer, the past, was the worst. I like having antibiotics, not dying in childbirth, hot running water e.t.

Can always take the knowledge with you. Memorize how to do critical parts of plumbing. The antibiotics part yeah that would suck.

Memorize how to do critical parts of plumbing

Ok, we need to go to the store and buy some pipes.

What are pipes?

Oh. I think I fucked up.

Come on, obviously they knew what pipes were in the 1940s. They are cylinders made of lead.

You could probably memorise how to identify the right fungus and isolate penicillin, right?

Exactly. Although a person can really only retain so much info, but yeah if you can figure out how to memorize both anti biotics and plumbing you'd be a very popular person and potentially be an excellent leader.

Yeah, antibiotics is a big one. Plus, some of my skills might actually still be useful in the 40s.

But life did suck in a lot of places for a lot of people in the 40s. WW2, the devastation left behind by WW2, and horrible social attitudes. Good luck in 'the west' if you're not a straight white cis man.

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

Social standing is random though based on OP’s rules. It would be terrible to end up as part of the lowest caste.

1870s in the Southeastern United States. I'm gonna make goddamn sure Reconstruction doesn't just end and Jim Crow functionally re-invents slavery.

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"

Caveman era. Give me a heavy rock and a cave and ill make do somehow.

Back in time if you're gay? Or trans? Or a woman? Or a person of color?

No thanks.

Gay? Ancient Greece. Person of color? Just pick someplace that won’t have significant contact with different races during your lifetime.

If you go further back in time you can get back to fairly queer friendly societies

The way your society currently discriminates and segments humans is not universal

Right?

We're going on a tangent here, but I feel like Western progressives, particularly with anglo backgrounds, tend to think the entire world runs by their parameters and always has. There is nothing intrinsic to the current kinds of bigotry in their societies. It's pretty arbitrary and specific, in fact.

@MudMan yeah this. Threads like this make me really wish more non-western ancient history was taught in schools.

As an American, I wholeheartedly agree. I often wish I had a sturdier foundation in world history.

Especially ancient Africa! Look up Mansa Musa, king of Mali. Carthage too. Zimbabwe. Benin. Egypt too, it’s in Africa.

If I could speak the local language and know basic information about the era and place, I would join the Navajo people from whence 12.5% of my DNA originated because I identify with that the most, it's strong in me. I feel like a fish out of water currently. I would be so happy with them. In fact I was recently in Arizona and I wanted so much to join the Navajos but I know it doesn't work that way. You have to be born in there in order to assimilate.

And I'd choose a point in history long before they were conquered by Europeans. I don't want to deal with any of that traumatic massacre bullshit.

Damn, I’m sorry you feel out of place in your home. Totally get wanting to live among a people you identify with.

I reckon if you could get there 10 years early you could probably prevent the entire thing. If you were capable of convincing some of the larger groups within the americas of the impending invasion, there were certainly people and resources enough to put together a small navy and start patrolling the eastern coast. Throw is some modern knowledge of firearms and metallurgy to help them develop some cannon, and Columbus never makes it to America.

Back in Europe people assume him lost at sea, and leave the atlantic untouched for another generation. With that much time to prepare, who knows how things play out.

I'd die pretty quickly without modern medicine, so I might choose the era with the easiest access to strong opiates to make the process less painful.

As a gay man, maybe early empire Rome? Or even like early nomadic tribe times? Like, before there were institutions large enough to oppress people en masse. I'm sure there was plenty of gay sex happening as a nomadic hunter or trader.

You didn't specify the calendar used 🤓, so I'll go to the year 1401 in the hijri calendar (1980 in the gregorian calendar)

@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.

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).

Athens might be somewhat nice if you just aren't a slave, metic, or woman.

For the first two groups, public displays of intelligence suffices as a way to get a more comfortable life. For the last, tough luck - better try traveling to the future instead.

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).

Sparta has much worse problems than war. Not to mention, even today some "spartans" don't consider themselves to be greek. It'd be like going to an icecream shop and buying a single cookie.

Sparta has much worse problems than war.

Shitty ultraconservative social structure and mass serfdom but looking at their history they usually ended up worse after even victorious war - due to their shitty social structure rather than war itself. Though it still took them over a century and something along 5 lost wars in a row to end up in the dustbin of history.

even today some “spartans” don’t consider themselves to be greek

Today Sparta is a small town mostly unrelated to the ancient one except rough location, it was depopulated for centuries and refounded by king Otto in 1834. So it sounds weird they don't consider themselves Greeks, why would they since they literally are. Anyway they don't have much to do with ancient Spartans since ancient Sparta has been totally razed and its population sold into slavery by Visigoths, and later Slavs raided the area multiple times in VI and VII century, causing remaining population to flee.

I think the key to ensuring a successful outcome for yourself would be to pick egalitarian societies, because then you have the highest chance of not spawning as enslaved or lowly.

So something like the late neolithic Samarra in ancient Mesopotamia, or maybe one of the American continent societies that had democracy.