• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          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.

            • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
              3·
              1 year ago

              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.

      • Weirdbeardgame@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, I tried to leave it a bit open. i meant era in the sense of “the 90s, 80s, modern 2000s etc” but that can be taken other ways

      • bitsplease@lemmy.ml
        6·
        1 year ago

        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

  • ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world
    8·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
      21·
      1 year ago

      You’ve just got to pick carefully. Race (as in skin colour as the determining factor for group identity) was invented in the 17th century, so before that you’re just a foreigner like the rest of us would be. After that, yes, avoiding Europe and European-inspired places is recommended.

  • drascus@sh.itjust.works
    6·
    1 year ago

    It’s crazy that every point in history has its own blend of “suckitude” that don’t want to deal with.

  • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
    5·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
        1·
        1 year ago

        I wouldn’t be preempting pizza, the Romans already prepared it*. At most I’d introduce a specific type of pizza - bread, melting cheese, oregano. Perhaps topped with figs and onions and cured ham.

        *excerpt from the Aeneid, published around 20 BCE, telling tales that were already old back then:

        Aeneas and his chiefs, with fair Iulus, under spreading boughs of one great tree made resting-place, and set the banquet on. Thin loaves of altar-bread along the sward to bear their meats were laid (such was the will of Jove), and wilding fruits rose heaping high, with Ceres’ gift below. Soon, all things else devoured, their hunger turned to taste the scanty bread, which they attacked with tooth and nail audacious, and consumed both round and square of that predestined leaven. “Look, how we eat our tables even!” cried Iulus, in a jest.

  • itty53@vlemmy.net
    5·
    1 year ago

    My highschool days. Wouldn’t change a thing either, except I wouldn’t start smoking cigarettes.

      • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
        2·
        1 year ago

        I believe in the multi-verse approach to backwards time travel. Solves the grandfather paradox. When you go back in time you branch to a new timeline. So if you went back to your high school days, you would be in a world where a version of you exists as a youngster and version of you exists in parallel as the guy who travelled back in time. You’d be two different people and you could talk to your younger self without creating a paradox. When travelling forward in time you stay on the same timeline. Quantum mechanics theorizes that’s what happens.

  • pleasestopasking@reddthat.com
    4·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • rbhfd@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • Jim@lemm.ee
    4·
    1 year ago

    California in the 1960’s. Being a hippy during Woodstock sounds like the ultimate experience I missed out on just because I didn’t exist at the time

  • olpappy@mander.xyz
    4·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • Stovetop@lemmy.ml
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.