this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
244 points (96.6% liked)

No Stupid Questions

40574 readers
632 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

(page 4) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Lumiluz@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Depends what clothes I'm wearing when it happens.

If I'm wearing anything that could remotely be seen as fancy back then (which I mean a lot of modern clothes could pass off as), since I'm near the ocean, I'd immediately run into the water not seeing anyone, and then pretend I'm a royal foreigner who ended up shipwrecked. Since I usually wear a watch, have a tungsten (Wolfram) crystal wedding band as well, that would help me in passing off as royalty as well. This is assuming the people helping me aren't brigands. There's things we do and know of that we take for granted that could be used to pass off as someone upper class too, like reading.

Then next steps would be to get to an aristocrats home, and eventually I'd imagine somewhere where I could work with scholars so they can teach me the language and we can work on translation so we can understand each other. Would have to be extremely careful of smallpox during all this of course.

Once we could, that's when I'd finally whip out my phone to trusted scholars and pull up my survival books, books on plumbing, etc specifically, and to explain that this is a special metal and glass book that can hold many books that's common in the land I'm from, and that I can teach them how to build them. But that we'd need to build plumbing because I'd like a shower by then.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] CreatingMachines@fedia.io 4 points 1 week ago

Basically start digging my grave, wondering if I'm gonna die from my asthma or my dermatitis first in that era. I'm betting on my asthma.

[–] ChillPenguin@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

I would make an IT startup.

[–] Roundeyegweilo@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago

I'd cry, curse god's name even more than I do currently, and then probably die from boredom.

1375? Bro that's the. Middle ages. Fucking kill me.

I would basically become a Jewish witch and either build a small community of people or die of some ancient plague, either way I wouldn't be thriving but I might just survive.

[–] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Probably die of gangrene after stubbing my toe or something else stupid. Prior to modern medicine, diseases and things we think of as mild were often deadly.

[–] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Assuming I appear naked in a field in England in 1375, I would first try to, in no particular order (at first, then a particular order)

  • find cloth to cover my face and hands so I don't transmit or catch any diseases
  • distill water so I can drink it without getting diseases
  • use yams or horse urine to create HRT
  • communicate with the locals and seek a local blacksmith to create a metal tube with metal balls inside it, and mix charcoal, potash, and sulfur to make a primitive gun to defend myself against the people who think I'm a witch or a demon or whatever
  • talk to the women and encourage them to rise up against the system and patriarchy, teach them how to make weapons, about 4 field crop rotation if they don't already know it, otherwise about automated steam engines, weavers, hydroelectric dams, etc
  • march up to the feudal lord and demand democracy, with the fear of the gun and half the population behind me they will agree
  • teach about the scientific method to get them to question things, do their own research, and learn more
  • there will be scientific labs, primitive computers can be developed, we can spread our advanced culture to the rest of Afro-Eurasia, also prevent slavery
  • warn people about going to America and Australia unprepared, go with them in modern ships and don't spread disease, talk to the locals and trade with them and learn from them, don't kill them or replace them. Teach them the tech advancements too
  • Write down lots of things, invent the printing press if not already invented, document human knowledge and encourage more documentation by others

This is all if I have any measure of success at the first things and don't die or kill myself

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I don't know how to refine oil, but knowing that its refinable into diesel/gasoline is a pretty good start to looking for it. Steam power easier to figure out. A head start on murdering some sperm whales for lighting industry seems easy enough to figure out. Partnering with metal smiths who might have a clue on making gun barrels, and pipe's in general that could be used for advanced weaponry, would be an easy path to get governments to give me a ton of money for weapons research by just showing them some drawings. Doesn't really matter if I ever figure out how to do it, just the vision of what is possible would make me richer than Musk. Richer if I can help enslave all of humanity to one empire.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago

I guess I could make a name as a mathematician, though that'd depend where the fuck I'm snapped to.

I'd like to warn the Incas to not trust anyone with white skin, kill them all on sight and NEVER let any of them get within 100km of Potosi, but I don't think I'd be anywhere near the Andes either way.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I claw my way out of a few feet of soil, and walk about thirty minutes to where the local Olhone maintained a ceremonial shellmound from 800 BCE until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1700s. By all accounts the Olhone were chill hunter-gatherers, so my best bet would probably be to befriend and join them.

They’d be more knowledgeable than me about everything in the local environment, so I don’t think I’d have much knowledge that would be of use to them. (They seem to have known of other nearby groups that practiced agriculture, but saw no need for it themselves.) I might eventually consider traveling north or south along the coast, but many other groups in western North America practiced warfare and/or slavery (unlike the Olhone), so I’d probably be best off staying put.

The first and easiest thing would be to invent calculus. I'm sure other things would pop up situationally, I could probably get basic electricity going with a bit of experimentation.

[–] Mediocre_Bard@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

I'm doing pretty good then. Where I live has been so historically abundant in resources that people were able to just sort of vibe.

I would also establish a calendar, convey it to the locals, and warn them of what is to come along with a timeline.

[–] Denixen@feddit.nu 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'd use my knowledge of history, politics, psychology and science to become an influential advisor to powerful lords and help them conquer the world in exchange for living in luxury.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

First off. Do I get to bring stuff with me? Like say the entire printed off contents of wikipedia.

also, I would like find one or two things that hadn't quite been invented yet and 'invent' it.

also, Also, with a modicum of military power, I'd probably start a religion.

This assumes I have time to learn the local dialect

[–] markovs_gun@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

In what language? Modern English didn't exist yet and neither did pretty much any modern language. Good luck trying to get the local nobles and priests to decipher the hundreds of codices you brought with you that are in some strange language that nobody has seen before

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] RBWells@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

1375? Die from malaria, I guess? Be eaten by an alligator? Or oh no, hasten the demise of the Tocobaga with my exotic biology? Either they would kill me or get me sick, or vice versa. Also, fall on my ass when my house disappeared.

I would follow the river to the bay, I guess, and see if I could find anyone, or anything I might be able to eat.

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Well, first I'd have to learn Old English, I think. Hell, even Middle English isn't understandable.

Hopefully I could get up to speed before they locked me up, or worse.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›