What are the skills and knowledge you could actually bring & fully realize at some point in the past?

And we're taking this in the strictest, nerdiest, materialist lense. I don't care how smart you are you ain't making a steam engine the in bronze age, for instance.

So what could you create, with just your knowledge & period tools? What kind of institutional, technological, philosophical innovations could you realistically recreate? How would you interface with the social fabric of society to not be some crazed pariah who never positively influences the place they went?

  • Dolores [love/loves]
    hexagon
    ·
    2 years ago

    i don't think any population has permanently dedicated itself to ultraviolence on outsiders. i assumed you'd be innoculating before the euro diseases show up, but if they're already there and killing people people would take it for sure

    • JuneFall [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Maybe some math. People were really interested in tracking movement stars, planets etc. So if you learned their system of notation you might be able to speed up the development of certain mathematics since they’d see the "practical " value in it for astrological or religious purposes.

      Edit I think they are actually joking (as it happened cause altered timeline?)

      • Dolores [love/loves]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 years ago

        they had decades of hostile colonial contact from the british with which to learn a relatively harsh policy toward outsiders, but even so it is not one universally enforced. and that's a tiny group of people. i don't think you could replicate it even on another bigger island like haiti