I’ll choose to go back a few minutes so I can stop myself from getting sucked into the time portal…
Congrats, you are now stuck in a few minute time loop. Enjoy your new hell.
“Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain.”
Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain!
Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain!
1: Ten seconds from now, I have shit to do.
2: A week ago. “I bet you a billion dollars that sub implodes…”
1491 to the soon-to-be landing point of Christopher Columbus. I would bring an arsenal of modern day weaponry and then arm and train the natives in anticipation for when his ships appear on the horizon.
Very excited to see what Italian people would cook without tomatoes.
Still a lot of pasta, which predates the Columbian exchange. But probably a lot more focus on herbal seasonings, cheese/dairy, oils, etc. Carbonara probably still popular. A lot more pesto on average.
Pizza would be white pizza with toppings, maybe with a pesto base. Fish, meat dishes, and European vegetable dishes probably still mostly untouched.
You’re really just missing tomato sauces and gnocchi with the lack of the Columbian exchange, and tomato is essentially optional in many Italian dishes anyways. Surprisingly not as big a change as I would have thought.
I think maybe in North America we associate tomatoes more strongly with Italian food because it was more readily available for Italian-American immigrants than it was back in Italy.
Smart dudes posting to jump to pre-Bitcoin times coming in 3-2-1
You know, there’s a variety of assets you could get in on the ground floor with.
And the smart move would be to spread it around anyways, no telling what a sizeable investment in - for instance - Apple might have had early on, maybe it would change history so that it didn’t turn out successful
Better to do some bitcoin, some of each major stock you can recall, and funds for industries you know will take off
1 hour into the future so I can eat lunch early and avoid the dangers of going to some new reality I don’t have the skills or resources to deal with.
1 week into the past so that you can put a bet on some event that you actually still remember, and avoid the dangers of the distant eras
OK… where in the world would I pop up?
If where I live, in Paraná: 1300 then. I’d be teaching the local Kaingang: a few farming techniques, a bunch of food-preserving techniques, writing and paper making. Ah, and gunpowder too, so they can use it against the Spaniards coming from Asunción and the Portuguese from the coast. Past that I’d… marry a local girl and try to live a happy life? Language would be a struggle though, because even if I knew 2023 Kaingang or Guarani that doesn’t automatically makes me know some older variety of the language.
If anywhere in the world: Republican Rome, around 150 BCE. I know basic Latin so it wouldn’t be actually easier to adapt than the above. I’d probably find some craft to live from, either in a taberna selling food or blacksmithing. I actually know a few Roman recipes (thanks Apicius), I could even give them a bit of modern twist; they should already know pizza (Virgil mentions it) but a modern style pizza bianca would be new. Perhaps I should leave a note to the Julii that, if one of them conquers Gaul, he should watch out for potential killers.
You would fuck up history by preempting pizza? What kind of pizza would we end up contemporarily?
I always think it would be cool to visit some historical moment. Then I remember I’m not white and that I would not be having a very good time.
I’d like to see a lot of things in history but not sure I’d like to live in those times. I’d go back to 1980 because a bunch of cool stuff happens in the 1980s and 1990s that I could fully enjoy and exploit.
As recent as possible to have modern medicine; I like not dying from a flu…
Whenever I had the flu, I just went through it. Maybe some medicine to feel less sick, but nothing to actually prevent it from killing me.
We all have an immune system that is used to combating the flu.
The germs you’d get in contact with from a basic lack of hygiene, that’s what will get you.
Note that I’m a healthy 30-something person, so the flu is not much of an issue for me. I don’t want to disminish its deadlines on people with lower immune systems, but they would suffer in environments with bad hygiene even worse.
That was mostly a general statement rather than specifically about influenza. People often died from things that we don’t worry about in the modern era. Stuff much worse than influenza that we don’t need to worry about today we’re devastating back then, like smallpox. Perhaps I should have used smallpox as an example, since this is a disease that literally doesn’t exist anymore.
I think I’d go paleolithic. Pre-agricultural, on the move finding food, being in nature. It’d be dicey obviously but like whatever, if you die you die. I feel like the physical activity, adrenaline, living in community, being in nature… Would just be nice. I feel like I probably wouldn’t be depressed anymore eventually. Like who would have the time?
Also damn can you imagine seeing like 4000 lb armadillos and shit? Living among a bunch of now-extinct megafauna seems like it would be both thrilling and terrifying. Honestly I’d probably die by trying to Disney princess with a twelve foot tall deer or some shit.
I like how you just verbed the fuck out of Disney Princess.
Four hours from now, because then I’d be off work for the day.
It said era, so I assume “modern” could just as well land you in 2006 Iraq, if it’s even allowed.
I mean, it’s also time travel, not location travel, so I’d be most likely to end up in space and die almost instantly.
Depends what reference frame you’re using. If you’re following an inertial frame backwards through time you’re most likely to end up deep inside the Earth, actually, because that would put you in a sort of orbit.
I don’t think that’s any better.
It’s not. The good news is it’s sucking you in like a high pressure opening doesn’t, and at least your end isn’t falling, so that’s probably not how the magic works.
The other trope-based possibility is it leaves you roughly where you geographically are in your new era. That’s limiting as hell if you’re somewhere with a short history like I am, which I guess is another argument to go recent.
1990s A.D. so I can enjoy the great music whilst also being able to see the birth of Linux.
Now I’m imagining Linus sitting in his basement and suddenly some nerd just pops into existence behind him. “Don’t mind me. I’m just going to watch over your shoulder.”
lol
3000
I don’t really want to miss my family for that long. Maybe I’d go back to when my kids were babies and become a live-in nannydad? I could see that getting weird though.
If I didn’t have that level of control but I absolutely had to go somewhen, I guess I’d either go a few decades in the future to see how it shapes up, or to the neolithic era so I could finally find out a bunch of things we’d never otherwise have known. That era seems like it was pretty cool, and I happen to know enough baseline science to actually recreate some of my favourite amenities.