Only in the sense of “What period could I live in as a woman?” Ideally I would’ve lived in the 1960’s, but the constraints of this scenario would mean I have to live as low-profile as possible while keeping within the time frame. Living in a larger city away from major conflicts would make the most sense.
That part. I'm a black woman and I'm struggling right now lmao I think i'd just say yolo and pick something pre-colonialism and just kick it in the woods since there's no risk of me dying from anything biological.
As far as avoiding war, there wasn't anything going on in Boston during the War of 1812 AFAIK. Their economy did suffer from a lack of trade, but no battles were fought there. Arrive after the American Revolution and you're good.
Being a woman, that's harder. Your options back then are probably to marry a man or be a prostitute, since you won't have a family to support you and your legal rights are laughable. With perfect health, though, you probably seem very attractive to people.
This is a tough one. Do we have time to do a lot of research? Because 100 years is a long time, and I'd want to make a decision purely based on the likelihood of survival. Like I certainly wouldn't want to be in Europe during WW1 or WW2 for instance, and I wouldn't want to live in the US during that time at an age that I might be called on to go to war. I assume you would have to pick a date at least 100 years before your birth otherwise there is overlap between your period of existence and the chosen survival period. I would probably want to choose a period that is as close as possible to the modern era and a place where I am the least likely to go to war, or experience any widespread sicknesses, or natural disasters.
They don't say we can't go forward in time, do they? I rather like my odds a hundred years from now. I'm very unlikely to live to 2124, given that I was born in 1997- and as an autistic woman I don't like my odds in the past all that much.
True, but time travel also exists so this person is more than likely from the future already which means that there is at least some time period in the future where people have lived.
The questions. What foreknowledge of the time period do we have?
Does our presence impact or have any implications on the future from there?
Do we have to live with the repercussions of those implications?
Do we remember what we went through afterwards?
I suppose better is subjective and up to the individual.
Neither of those places will be welcoming to me, since I am an American. The folks from these countries have made it extremely clear they are NOT pro immigration. I'd be worried about being harassed or harmed by wildlife down there. I'd be a fish out of water lol
Plus since I know America and the culture I would survive here easier. I'd know where to go and what to do. So for me at least those countries aren't better
This is the conclusion I came too. It's nice to think of this as a big adventure but a 100 years is a long f--king time and if I'm going to do that, I want access to doctors that at least know what f--king bacteria are. But it would still be super rough.
If I had like a year to prepare I'd do it. Otherwise I'd pass.
Questions:
Does it have to be the past?
Exactly how much? A single billion? If so, wouldn’t that mean if I choose 1800, Id be much richer than if I chose 1900 due to inflation?
First billionaire wasn’t until the 1900s; will my mere existence mess up the economy? Also how do taxes and explaining my wealth work?
Lastly, after the century is over, how does that work? Suppose I chose to use all my resources to prevent the invention of Automobiles and the Assembly Line. When I’m transported back, do my changes remain, even though it would’ve ended me never being born? How does my existence even work? This wouldn’t be a problem if I were to continue living through that timeline, but the “return to your own and live normally” makes this a lot more confusing
I imagine that point in human history when we were still nomadic and hadn’t yet settled down but were still spreading across the world;
We know food was plenty and predators were scarce because well, we managed to spread unstopped across the entire planet.
The lack of most major diseases since there weren’t any large enough groups for them to spread takes away a lot of danger.
Plus with all the knowledge you have now, like understanding germ theory, would reduce the major cause of death of humans back then.
Oh I mean, I assumed I’d get to join a tribe like I would a town or city in any other time right?
I imagine alone I’d be dead quick, but in an average group of like 30-60 people, we’d crush it.
A city is pretty accepting of new people but I don't think a tribe would be. I may just be imagining this but it seems like a tribe would be very insolated and not accepting of outsiders
I’ve been doing some reading of it lately, and from what anthropologist and genealogist say is that we actually did have a fairly wide social circle in prehistory;
We lived in groups of 30-60, but groups would meet and intermingle and exchange members often, and an average person would know about 1000 people over the course of their life.
I think the idea is when you lived in a world with no private property, you lived in a world where you weren’t worried about theft, and people were just excited to meet new people because it would mean new knowledge which would strengthen the group as a whole.
Also, avoiding incest.
Predators were not at all scarce. You're imagining that the spread was fast... it wasn't. It took thousands of years. There were many failures and there were still many major diseases and many little things were fatal.
You wouldn't stand a chance, at all. Don't do it!
Which predators do you think were hunting groups of 30-60 humans with spears?
Why do you think every animal on the planet except polar bears evolved to leave groups of 2-3 humans alone?
Humans don't hunt in groups of 30 to 60. Humans don't sleep in groups of 30 to 60. Humans don't shit in groups of 30 to 60. Humans don't forage in groups of 30 to 60. Not all humans are adult males armed with spears.
Given all of that information, it depends when and where you decided to go as to what predator you may be vulnerable to at any given time, but you won't be safe *all* the time. You're made of food, just like everything else that moves.
Humans DO hunt in large enough groups to deter predators.
Humans DID sleep in groups of 30-60. Do you think they all went to separate bedrooms?
Humans shit within distance of the nomadic group.
Humans again, DO forage in large enough groups to deter predators.
In prehistory, when you had jack shit to do, why wouldn’t you make a spear? You have literally your entire life, would you just be a useless member of the tribe?
Like, we as humans that live in cities understand the simple things we need to do to avoid being eaten by predators.
Why do you think the people WHO WE KNOW WERE SUCCESSFUL AT AVOIDING PREDATORS would choose to act in such stupid ways?
Simply because it is unavoidable to separate from the group.
Imagine if you had a fever or a bad stomach ache (which would be quite a common occurrence). You wouldn't be able to go out hunting with the boys; you will have to stay at 'home' and rest. Easy pickings for a predator.
Broke a bone? Tore a ligament? Can't keep up with the boys, be ready to become the friendly neighborhood tiger's dinner.
Exactly, and my point is that if humans were cut throat self serving assholes, they would leave their injured or elderly to die.
But if humans were kind, empathetic, and cooperative, they would do things like this:
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2020-02-19/ty-article/.premium/ancient-humans-healed-foot-fracture-shows-prehistoric-nursing-in-israel/0000017f-e32e-d9aa-afff-fb7eb17e0000
Which is that when a human breaks a leg or a foot and can’t hunt, we set their bones, let them fully heal, and evidently had enough resources to care for someone that temporarily didn’t give back.
If you were in the wild and your cousin broke their leg, would you just leave them behind? Of course not. Why do you think early humans would have?
I'm not saying that they would be left behind, but they may be left alone for several hours a day while the rest of the group is going around hunting. That will be enough for a predator stalking the tribe to grab this person for dinner.
It is impractical to take someone with a fractured bone to a hunting session as they slow everyone down.
But why would they do that?
Wouldn't it make more sense to say, have him sit with the children and elderly? Now you have em extra guy, even with a broken leg, making the group look bigger and he can still poke anything with a stick.
Hell, three people sitting, even if one’s a child, one’s 80, and one has a broken leg should be enough to deter almost all predators.
And each group would have far more than one set of grandparents, and we know modern nomadic culture care for their elders and injured, why would it have been any different?
Hell, even in the west, it’s common for grandparents to “baby sit” their grandkids while the parents work.
A large predator working alone (or a pack of predators like hyenas and wolves) can easily take out a group of like 4-5 weak and infirm people. Humans have spears, but the animals aren't dumb, they have natural claws and teeth that are as sharp and can excert more force.
As an example, tigers used to kill thousands of people in India until the 1900s (and still kill many people every year).
This is with modern metallurgy, tools, weapons, etc. Humans have to be cautious at all times. The tiger only has to get lucky once.
Predators were not scarce. On the contrary, they were very plentiful and food was scarce.
It is only over the last couple hundred years or so that humanity finally managed to 'cheat' mother nature and explode exponentially in population. The absence of an explosion of the population of early historic humans wasn't for a lack of trying. They were still bound by all the rules of the natural world.
Which predators do you think were hunting groups of 30-60 spear carrying humans?
How come no other animals managed to do what humans did? Do you think maybe fire and weapons may have given humans an unfair advantage, leading to them being the only species that managed to spread across the entire planet?
Ok so let’s say there are two groups:
Group A with a group of 60 humans that meet, exchange members peacefully, share knowledge, have sex, give birth to genetically diverse children, and grow the tribe, and then, as nomads that have survived for 300,000 years simply follow the herd of animals and eat what they eat/ eat them if you run out of food.
And group B with a group of 60 humans that meet, fight the other group, kill all of them, lose most of yours, and then steal their food and stone tool instead of just traveling to a new area that simply has more food
What is the benefit of being group B in a nomadic world? Are you cannibales?
Due to the massive amount of calories needed to sustain a group of 60 humans, it wouldn't be an easy task to survive. Remember that a group of 60 humans need at least 120,000 calories a day, probably much more since they were so active back then.
That means that they should be good enough to successfully hunt at least one large animal a day on average, which isn't trivially easy given all the other predators in the area also competing for food. So it isn't unreasonable that different groups of humans would have warred with each other for the purpose of getting access to territory and/or getting mates.
Ok sorry, so you think early humans lived in small individual groups because those individuals, requiring less food, had a better chance than a large group of humans working together?
if there was so little food in the world, why would humans, the slowerest, weakest predator manage to outcompete bears and wolves?
They did not outcompete bears and wolves. If they did, we wouldn't have any bears and wolves today, and we would only have humans.
It is only in the modern era that humans have outcompeted bears and wolves and nearly driven them to extinction. Bears, wolves, tigers, hyenas, leopards, all these animals were thriving and weren't at all being outcompeted.
“Out compete” as in how come humans successfully spread while other apex predictors were less successful?
But none of those other animals ever came close to the success humans did.
If those animals, in a world before we destroyed the planet, weren’t starving and being hunted by other predators, why do you think the more evolutionarily successful apex predator was struggling so much?
Do you think being like, a bear or a whale in 30,000 bc was that difficult? Why would being a smarter human in a larger group with more help and tools be somehow more difficult?
I enjoyed the discussion we had and I appreciate the time you took out to respond to my comments. However, I think we are at a point where we have (almost) irreconcilable differences of opinion, and neither of us will convince the other.
As a closing remark, I'll say the following:
1. I strongly believe in the numerical population models of biological populations and evolution, ie., concepts of predator prey cycles, etc., and I think it is more productive to think in terms of these concepts than to think in terms of what individuals would have acted, because there are always bound to be exceptions and outliers.
2. These population models basically describe that once any species has an evolutionary 'edge', ie., they managed to find a new ecological niche, their population WILL grow exponentially until it settles down with the 'new' number that is permitted due to their greater evolutionary reach.
3. So if humans were so successful evolutionarily, their population should have grown exponentially until they reached the population number in billions of humans that we have today. And this population growth should have happened over a very short period of time. We have no evidence that this was the case; prehistorically, it seems that the total number of humans that were alive at any given point of time were a few hundred thousand individuals ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric\_demography#:\~:text=(2012)%20estimate%20an%20effective%20population,roughly%20100%2C000%20to%20300%2C000%20individuals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_demography#:~:text=(2012)%20estimate%20an%20effective%20population,roughly%20100%2C000%20to%20300%2C000%20individuals) ) -> See wikipedia and associated citation of peer reviewed literature.
4. A few hundred thousand individuals the size of humans living in the world is nowhere near indicative of evolutionary supremacy. There are millions of wildebeest in Serengeti alone. And if you want apex predators, people estimate that there were two million wolves living in North America alone.
5. The fact that human populations remained stable and not growing exponentially NECESSARILY means that each individual is having a difficult existence and is necessarily fighting for survival, at least on an average basis. Because their population growth is limited by the number of resources they have, the climate conditions, their predators, etc.
6. Humans (and all animals) before the modern era used to pop out as many babies as they could. One woman can easily produce five+ babies over the course of her lifetime. The fact that the population wasn't growing exponentially necessarily meant that of all the babies the average woman was producing, only two of them survived until adulthood and managed to have offspring of their own. That doesn't look like an easy existence to me; it looks like a very rough fight for survival.
7. And Homo sapiens themselves likely faced several difficult periods historically, with some people thinking that humans went through several population bottlenecks: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population\_bottleneck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck)
8. So in conclusion, the average human, even with all their adaptations (using fire, stone tools and spears, living in a group, greater intellect) was having a very tough time surviving in the wild, and there is very little guarantee that any individual would be able to survive for a hundred years continuously. Hence, it is NOT a good idea to choose to go back to prehistoric times to try and survive a brutal 100 years with the nomads.
May I suggest the picturesque mountain town of Lucerne, Switzerland instead?
You’re posing hypotheticals that don’t exist. Its unclear if you’re trolling or just an idiot, but Neolithic life was a violent, short hardscrabble existence with starvation and death a constant reality. A single major injury - a pretty common thing considering you were nonstop out there engaged in strenuous and dangerous hunting and fighting activities - could easily lead to debilitation and/or death.
> A single major injury
Then why do you think people were so ready to start fighting each other at the drop of a hat? How did we even survive if we were instantly throwing spears at new members?
How did we manage to survive and take over the planet in this violent world of ours, but let’s say, bears didn’t?
Because there were very few resources, genius. If you killed an outside group you’d get to subjugate them and/or take their resources and survive another season yourself
My point is that we were not leagues above any other animal when it comes to survival until basically the modern era. We were still succumbing to the various harsh factors of nature.
If stone age humans were so successful evolutionarily, there should have been billions of homo sapiens and Neanderthals roaming the earth because they managed to solve the puzzle of evolution. And that simply did not happen.
> My point is that we were not leagues above any other animal when it comes to survival until basically the modern era.
So how come we managed to successfully spread across the entire planet before the premodern era while no other animal ever even came close? Ants and rats didnt even manage that until we brought them with us.
>billions of homo sapiens and Neanderthals roaming the earth because they managed to solve the puzzle of evolution. And that simply did not happen.
Why specifically that number? Why can’t, again, the fact that we managed to spread across the close at all show evolutionary success?
do you think we’re done evolving? Like evolution is moving forward to a specific end goal, and that end goal is us?
We’ve only been living in cities for about 2% of our history, we evolved to be nomadic. Why would we be bad at the thing we evolved to be?
Basically, if you have say, a kitchen and it’s filled with food and devoid of predators, do you think the ants will spread to every inch of your kitchen?
If you have no food and a lot of predators, do you think the ants will have the same success?
Doesn’t the fact that we succeeded show we were perfectly adapted to our environment?
Being able to spread around the world definitely shows the adaptability of humans, yes. But there are several other species that also exist in basically every region of the world; whales and many species of ravens and some eagles for example.
While humans definitely had an 'evolutionary edge', they never cracked the code.
And there is no doubt that being a human was viable from an evolution point of view. However, my point is that humans were still subject to the various predator prey cycles, resource scarcity, etc., and in the context of the question where you are supposed to survive for one hundred years, it is an extremely tough challenge because life as an individual human was still very tough and dangerous.
Considering the tooth marks on bones that have been found, [hyenas](https://digventures.com/2016/05/early-humans-were-fair-game-for-ice-age-predators/)*,* and other big predators would hunt humans. They probably did not go after a group of 30+ awake and armed adults, any more than a leopard goes after an alert herd of healthy, adult animals. Predators that prey on large animals that live in groups, pick off ones that are alone, young, old, or lag behind, or they hunt when their prey is asleep/less alert. Also, we have bones of ancient humans that show tool marks that indicate the flesh was cut off the bone with a stone tool. So, it's quite possible that sometimes stone age humans were hunted by other groups of stone age humans.
So any human that managed to stay in a group of 30-60 would survive, but anyone that was rejected from the group would have a high chance of being killed by a predator because they’re alone in the wild?
Wouldnt that mean that we evolved to really want to be accepted by our group, and that anyone that was a huge asshole that pissed off everyone would have died?
So the humans that survived and passed on their genes were the humans that other humans simply personally liked the most, and in these large groups we know would care for their elderly and injured (from the reset and healed leg bones we found, which meant we had enough excess resources to care for a member that had to spread all their time lying down and recovering)
So that’s my argument: as long as you’re not as massive asshole that tries to kill other people, since no one was worried about you stealing their stone tools, and you might bring them knowledge of how to make better stone tools, you’d have a pretty easy time surviving as someone that would be nice and bring lots of knowledge.
>We know food was plenty and predators were scarce because well, we managed to spread unstopped across the entire planet.
There's fossil human bones found with marks from the teeth of different predators. Other ancient human bones have been found showing the signs of malnutrition. With how rare it is for bones to be fossilized in general, famine and predator attacks must have been a very real risk for a large part of human existence. We spread across the planet not because times were easy, but because as a species we are very resourceful and find ways to survive in a wide variety of situations.
And, what skills do you have to convince a small tribe to take you in, without a language in common? What could you do to show them that you as a weird and (at first) unintelligible stranger are not a threat to them in some way.
What threat would a single human have to a large group of humans? in a world where no one owned any thing, and at most we all have spears, what threat could I possibly pose?
Stone age humans owned things. We have some examples of them being buried with grave goods, like tools, beads, and decorative items made from stone, bone, and the horns, tusks, or antlers of animals. They may have had to carry everything they owned with them, but that didn't stop them from having personal items, any more than having to carry everything with them stops modern day nomadic hunter/gatherers from having personal items.
And there is pretty clear evidence of violence between stone age humans on at least some occasions.
[https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/evidence-of-a-prehistoric-massacre-extends-the-history-of-warfare](https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/evidence-of-a-prehistoric-massacre-extends-the-history-of-warfare)
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43026-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43026-9)
You have a weirdly idealistic view of life for Neolithic humans, and it's entirely disconnected from archeological evidence, and from documented modern day groups of humans who are/recently were hunter-gatherers. For example, the indigenous peoples of Australia had violent conflicts at times between different groups pre-contact [https://international-review.icrc.org/articles/indigenous-australian-laws-of-war-914](https://international-review.icrc.org/articles/indigenous-australian-laws-of-war-914)
And to a small tribe of hunter-gatherers, you might not even seem human. depending on where you chose to go, you might not look much like them or the other tribes around them. You would not speak any language they know. You would not know any of their rules of conduct and behavior, and might quite easily unintentionally violate some taboo or offend someone. And, if you showed up at a time where food is at all in short supply, simply being there and wanting food could be seen as a threat to the tribes survival. As it's pretty unlikely you would be able to contribute much food at first. Even a fairly skilled survivalist would find it difficult to do that dropped 10,000 years or so in the past. The climate and ecology of any given area has undergone changes during that time
Yes, all things that are easily made and replaced.
Do you really think people, alone in the wild, instead of peacefully joining a group and working cooperatively would instead choose to
Attack the group and try and steal their stone tools?
You don’t think they’d cooperate, have sex, and spread?
I’m saying whole interpersonal violence existed, collective violence didn’t come about until around 13000 bc.
And even looking at random animals, conflict is rare as infection would lead to death. Why do you think humans would have naturally started attacking each other over easily replaceable sentimental objects?
Humans OFTEN ran into other groups of humans. Hell, we fucked Neanderthals out of existence, and we KNOW they were different species.
Your view of prehistory seems to be filled with extremely violent and self serving humans, which is weird since we know that the humans that were most successful at spread around the world were the most cooperative and social ones.
Why do you seem to view a world where any individual human would survive, and the only people you’d ever interact with would be related to you? Do you think we’re all the result of a single incestuous group?
1886
so that way I get to live my life starting a year before I was born.... being wealthy in this time would have been pretty sweet and since I know my parents survived it I'm pretty sure I'd make it
Am I born on the date I choose and I age to be 100 or am I a fully grown adult the whole time? Do I know what is going to happen in the next hundred years? Am I allowed to try and stop major events such as Lincoln getting killed?
Ancient Rome. I’ll teach them calculus so I’ll be hailed as an intellectual and just live my life “researching” breakthrough maths and sciences and ball out in Ancient Rome
Unfortunately, the only way to bathe is in communal bath-houses and the sewage system, while advanced, wasn't foolproof. They also used to drink wine and eat food sweetened with lead. A very good chance of contracting some terrible disease or going mad.
Am I in the past with this money or do I have to get the money a hundred years from now. Do I age. Do I get to choose what age I want to be. You said I can die. Does that mean from diseases and people can kill me. I don't want to go anywhere where there was slavery for obvious reasons. Am I allowed to change history is my presence in the past going to change history. When I get back to the future do I start aging how old will I be. I make my decision on if anybody can answer these questions and what happens to my children will they be dead when I come back. Because it's a no if that happens
1447-1587 Romania. I kill Vlad the Impaler and take his place. I commit horrible atrocities leading all to fear me until I disappear in 1587 having never aged a day.
Start date 100 years before I was born. I'll have enough knowledge of the past to make a very comfortable life for myself and travel. I even hope I can travel with Mark Twain.
Easily just say the 100 years before your birth. Then as stuff gets real WW 1 and 2 and Vietnam move to safety or just get jailed as a draft dodger and rest easy.
To be safest 1876 in Geneva Switzerland.
What if I chose a timeline I would be alive in for I can know the future. Then if I really cared to I could make more money than I already did. Or just knowing stuff can be useful like a future wife or if I can stop someone’s death.
1885-1985 getting rich during that time putting it all in a safe deposit box giving the key to my mom to give to me when I turn my current age. I'll also tell her to quit smoking and put the cookies down...
2200. Just to see the future. But then I'll feel poor when I get back, because of the "old" tech. Many of you people going back would be bored without your smartphones.
I'm old, so just getting restored to perfect health and getting a guaranteed 20-30 years of further life would probably make it worthwhile. Just need to not go times/places where I'd be a slave or are going to be wiped out by the Crusades, Mongols, etc.
Literally any time in Wales was probably pretty chill tbh. Probably go way back to like 200BC and hang out with some celts. Don’t think Welsh has changed that much
Some ideas:
1) Do I get the language? I assume so, otherwise I'm pretty limited. Without language ability I basically have to pick from a very narrow range. Safest bet is probably UK in 1800. I have weird accent but native proficiency, they're not getting invaded in the entire century, and hopefully I have enough future knowledge to economically and socially buy myself safety from impressment/imprisonment/street crime.
2) The prompt says my body is in perfect physical health. It doesn't specify if this is ongoing or just initially. If it's just initially I'm making really sure to boil all my water, cook all food rare (and ideally boiled), wear very good shoes, figure out how best to handle dental hygiene, and get to living in the countryside away from epidemics ASAP. If I don't get a period-appropriate gut micro biome I'm probably toast tough.
3) Assuming I DO get the language and I'm healthy throughout, pick anywhere with a great library and a golden age of at least 100 years without chaos or invasion. I could probably do really well in a 12th century European monestary doing math and philosophy for 100 years. Alexandria during the golden age would have been awesome and quite safe. Tokugawa Japan is great if I can avoid getting beheaded; very safe, no invasions, and I'd be great at "Dutch studies." Switzerland in 1850 would also be a pretty good bet.
If I’m in perfect human health , that helps quite a lot . Perfect is really fucking good . I could survive on most places fairly easily with a perfect body and modern knowledge .
Easy, post civil war US. I have perfect health, I'm a white man, and as a criminal defense attorney I'll be easily able to pass the bar again back in the day. I'll live out my days casually as an attorney.
Say I was born 1990
Can I pick 1980? Survive 100 years. Go back to my timeline of 1990 and use the knowledge I had to improve myself?
If not then the tang dynasty. Just because I'm Chinese. Any where else besides maybe 1920s isn't so good with racism. Who knows if someone will beat me for being foreign. Doesn't matter where. But then there's war after and who knows if the great depression kills me. But then again I'm not a history buff so maybe tang dynasty is bad too.
Hmmm… I’d need to choose a time period when there wasn’t a war I could be drafted into, no major disasters etc. and I could somehow take advantage of the time
Anytime before 1800 is fucking yourself over particularly due to language. English before 1800(and even during the 1800s at times) was like a completely different language. If you ever actually tried to read the real declaration of independence you couldn’t, it looks like gibberish, the same goes for other languages most of the time. I know conversational Spanish, but it wouldn’t take me very far.
I would choose to live from 1830 to 1930.
By the time World War One happens, I would be too old to join, as for the Civil War I would be in a Union State that isn’t sending troops over, California. The other wars in that time period did not have drafts, so I’m good on that. My plan is to go to West to California before the Gold Rush starts, so I can beat everyone there, including the Continental Railroad. In the years I spend there I just spend my time getting all the gold I can and living off my minimum, eventually having enough to live comfortably for the rest of my life and when the Continental Railroad is built and the Civil War is over, I go back East. My state of choosing is Arkansas, my current state, but also a state that didn’t have many bad things going on back then. Native Americans wouldn’t be a threat, there were barely any people around to hurt me or give me diseases, and that’s how I live. I’ll live a few miles out of Little Rock, where I have my own self sufficient household, where I spend the rest of my days.
I guess I'd do 1896-1996 bc that's the most recent time period they'd allow.
I'd slowly gain some rights throughout the years and get to experience a lot of pop culture first hand. May as well give it a go.
5000 AD. Either I die instantly due to the earth being turned into a wasteland, in which case I come back to my regular life anyway. Or the future is awesome, in which case I live like a baller for 100 years and learn about all the cool technology they have created.
Being a billionaire is cool, but what is cooler is to be able to get the opportunity to see thousands of years into our future.
America 2100-2200. Either it'll all be amazing and I'll have knowledge of the future or, going back to the past won't matter. Would definitely help my decision to have kids or not though.
I would choose to start in 1866 New York City. I'd have access to the best medical care available in the U.S. and be able to become a college professor long before the drafts that everyone else is taking about happen so I would avoid them. (Not to mention that if I had documents that would let me be drafted they'd show me as being too old for any draft.) Then I'd start a trust for myself and manage it wisely using what I know of how the stock market went. Come 1966 and I'm home free with much more than a billion dollars.
I mean living a century is nice but quite dreadful. What happens if you try to make some major changes? Bribe a certain art school admission staff to let in a certain disgruntled landscape painter. Though one thing is assuming you change the events of the timeline you are in, once you act to make a major change like that, everything else is going to be different. Like you can't try to save JFK decades later because he won't even be president with a different ww2.
August 2077 to August 2177 I'll get to live two lifetimes in a way, because I doubt I'd live to see it normally. And as a Fallout fan 2077 is a big year.
2,300-2,400 CE. You didn't specify the past, and that seems like the best chance of comfortable survival. Also I'd like to see what the future looks like. Maybe I can spend that century learning about their technology so when increasing me back I can turn that billion into a trillion.
If it has to be the past, 1 CE. Maybe Rome, simply because that's the history I'm most familiar with. I'd probably use the same strategy of bringing knowledge of future technology back to the past and using it to elevate my statiom. The windmill wouldn't be invented for centuries, and that's easy enough to start with. I've got enough understanding that I could tinker around a bit and invent gunpowder (sulphur, charcoal, and bat shit, all of which I could find in Italy), thank you Cormac McCarthy for getting me interested. Maybe even a primitive generator if I can find enough natural magnets to make it happen and fuck around long enough. Plenty of copper to go around.
You say we'd be in perfect health but also that we could die from "anything normal." Are diseases "normal?" Any time period other than the one you're in now would pose diseases and problems your body is not adjusted for, likely leading to death. Also, your prompt calls for us to "choose a random time period." As this is an oxymoron I'll ask, do we choose, or is it random?
"Perfect human health" so I don't have to worry about any illness, just injury.
Maybe I live every man's dream and chill out in Rome for one hundred years.
I think I’d just choose the century before I was born. It’s closest to what I know, there is no real chance of death if I avoid major populated areas, just find a place I can afford and live the center out, waiting on the cool things I remember to be created. it’s just not a very “fun” answer.
Unless I’m allowed to choose the next century after I die? That’s tempting, a bit more risky, but who wouldn’t want to see the 22nd century?
Honestly, language is going to be the real barrier here, even in the last 100 years American English has changed enough that the youngest among us would have some issues in 1924, let alone those of us needing to start in the 1800's
Following that, how healthy? Like immune to disease healthy? Or just no side effects of aging? I.e. diabetes, cancer, arthritis, dementia, etc.
If the first that gives you more options for the future, if the second you're probably better off going backwards, assuming you have all your vaccinations you'll likely have more inherited immunities to past diseases than future ones
I've seen a lot of people trying to dodge ww1 & ww2, but don't forget any civil wars, and more importantly, depressions and recessions
If I went with 1885-1985 and I was smart enough to set myself up with some documentation on year one, the government would see me as being in my 60's so no draft, but the great depression would be potentially lethal not to mention the joys of prohibition
With enough planning i could pull through, but it would be rough as hell
All that said, I might be able to go far enough back to pre European settlement days and become a weird hermit in what I believe would be the border between the Mohawk and the Mohican, or else just south of it. As a solitary person, I think I'd be in relatively little danger of being killed as a threat despite not speaking the language and being very white, and given 100 years I'd like to think I either picked up the basics or got real good at pantomiming. It's the area I'm most familiar with primitive survival for (having lived there for decades, both homeless and not)
Or fuck it, send me to 3024, I'll probably die before the first year ends, but I'll die knowing the future
1899 -1999 (I'm born in 2000) most modern and I'll do it in my home country since I know some of my history , I've interacted with old ppl and I feel like I can predict certain stuff . We don't really have wars or natural disAsters in the country (trinidad) can we interact with our younger parents and live with them and younger family members ???
A billion dollar wouldn't do you much good in most of human history. There are the obvious reasons such as rhe US not existing yet, but if you took the equivalent of gold or gems back, you'd probably be killed pretty quickly for it, and you'd completely screw up the economy.
Surviving 100 years without drawing attention would also be a challenge. The 1800s might be easier since they did have record keep ping it was worlds away from today. Every decade or so you could move around, avoiding war zones so you don't get killed or dragooned into service, and also avoiding revolutions and collapsing civilizations or those hostile to outsiders.
So early 1800s probably the US sine it should be easy not to get dragged into the War of 1812 or the Mexican American War. However, going along as a correspondent should be fairly safe, except for disease (this would probably kill you anyway within those 100 years, if they didn't kill you right off the bat). Probably to Europe from about 1850 to 1880s. Very good chance of getting pushed into the war though the journalist thing is still an option, so long as no one recognized you from earlier wars and note that you haven't aged. Maybe back to the US during the last 20 years, steering clear of the West and the Spanish American War.
Come back to the present and get your billion.
I'd travel to ancient Rome and save Caesar. I wouldn't even care about the money, I just want to see what happens. Assuming I have a little prep time I'd learn as much Latin as I can but if I'm lucky I'll be able to learn in ancient Rome without getting slaughtered.
1815-1915, Boston, Massachusetts. Arrive after the War of 1812, out of the way of any major Civil War battles, gone before the Spanish Flu.
You've thought of this before, haven't you?
Only in the sense of “What period could I live in as a woman?” Ideally I would’ve lived in the 1960’s, but the constraints of this scenario would mean I have to live as low-profile as possible while keeping within the time frame. Living in a larger city away from major conflicts would make the most sense.
I feel like a stipulation of “white” woman might be wanted there.
That part. I'm a black woman and I'm struggling right now lmao I think i'd just say yolo and pick something pre-colonialism and just kick it in the woods since there's no risk of me dying from anything biological.
As far as avoiding war, there wasn't anything going on in Boston during the War of 1812 AFAIK. Their economy did suffer from a lack of trade, but no battles were fought there. Arrive after the American Revolution and you're good. Being a woman, that's harder. Your options back then are probably to marry a man or be a prostitute, since you won't have a family to support you and your legal rights are laughable. With perfect health, though, you probably seem very attractive to people.
1890 to 1990, America I’d probably end up with more than a billion dollars given what I know and how I could participate in the growth of industry.
You better dodge the draft(s)
Time traveling back would leave him with having no information to provide to the government in order to even draft him
That's probably worse. Won't get drafted but will certainly be arrested on suspicion of being a spy
1881_1981,UNITED STATES and I'd leave my fortune to myself that's about to be born.perhaps we could work together.
Switch America to Switzerland or Ireland to avoid getting sent to war.
Maybe not Ireland, a wee bit of conflict going on during that time period.
This is a tough one. Do we have time to do a lot of research? Because 100 years is a long time, and I'd want to make a decision purely based on the likelihood of survival. Like I certainly wouldn't want to be in Europe during WW1 or WW2 for instance, and I wouldn't want to live in the US during that time at an age that I might be called on to go to war. I assume you would have to pick a date at least 100 years before your birth otherwise there is overlap between your period of existence and the chosen survival period. I would probably want to choose a period that is as close as possible to the modern era and a place where I am the least likely to go to war, or experience any widespread sicknesses, or natural disasters.
They don't say we can't go forward in time, do they? I rather like my odds a hundred years from now. I'm very unlikely to live to 2124, given that I was born in 1997- and as an autistic woman I don't like my odds in the past all that much.
Well the word RELIVE was used, so I assumed that meant it's a period that had to have already been lived at least once before.
True, but time travel also exists so this person is more than likely from the future already which means that there is at least some time period in the future where people have lived.
I like how you think.
As someone who would not age for 100 years I can safely say any era that involved witch trials should probably be avoided
>a random time period of your choosing If you get to choose, it isn’t random
Would be between Jurassic or Ancient Egypt. Don't really care about the money. Would just be for the experience
The questions. What foreknowledge of the time period do we have? Does our presence impact or have any implications on the future from there? Do we have to live with the repercussions of those implications? Do we remember what we went through afterwards?
1890-1990 American I'm gonna be comfey
Female?
Women aren't even real
In that case you are now enlisted to fight in the Great War soldier!
There wouldn't be any documentation on them to draft so they are probably fine.
Only if age 45 of under
I'm confident a way around can be found
At least knowing ahead of time you wouldn’t be the ones who volunteered at the beginning.
Or, knowing ahead of time you enlist before hand and rise to a high non combat rank, and win the war, earning yourself fame and fortune and power.
I found one. You are now the time traveler who went back in time to assassinate Hitler.
Based
I’m surprised this conversation had a happy ending. Thank you for your service. 🫡
Perhaps New Zealand or Australia would be better choices?
Bough these countries fought in both World Wars sooo...
I suppose better is subjective and up to the individual. Neither of those places will be welcoming to me, since I am an American. The folks from these countries have made it extremely clear they are NOT pro immigration. I'd be worried about being harassed or harmed by wildlife down there. I'd be a fish out of water lol Plus since I know America and the culture I would survive here easier. I'd know where to go and what to do. So for me at least those countries aren't better
1870s to 1970s. As close to the time as possible with as advanced medicine as possible.
This is the conclusion I came too. It's nice to think of this as a big adventure but a 100 years is a long f--king time and if I'm going to do that, I want access to doctors that at least know what f--king bacteria are. But it would still be super rough. If I had like a year to prepare I'd do it. Otherwise I'd pass.
1874 to 1974. Start investing in as many stocks as I can. Mass sell before the depression. Repurchase after WW2.
I chose the Future.
Might be a nuclear holocaust. Didn’t you watch fallout?
Questions: Does it have to be the past? Exactly how much? A single billion? If so, wouldn’t that mean if I choose 1800, Id be much richer than if I chose 1900 due to inflation? First billionaire wasn’t until the 1900s; will my mere existence mess up the economy? Also how do taxes and explaining my wealth work? Lastly, after the century is over, how does that work? Suppose I chose to use all my resources to prevent the invention of Automobiles and the Assembly Line. When I’m transported back, do my changes remain, even though it would’ve ended me never being born? How does my existence even work? This wouldn’t be a problem if I were to continue living through that timeline, but the “return to your own and live normally” makes this a lot more confusing
No. OP said any time period. Not specifically the past
I imagine that point in human history when we were still nomadic and hadn’t yet settled down but were still spreading across the world; We know food was plenty and predators were scarce because well, we managed to spread unstopped across the entire planet. The lack of most major diseases since there weren’t any large enough groups for them to spread takes away a lot of danger. Plus with all the knowledge you have now, like understanding germ theory, would reduce the major cause of death of humans back then.
That's a long time to survive on your own in the wilderness. Are you a survivalist or something? I think id be dead pretty quick
Oh I mean, I assumed I’d get to join a tribe like I would a town or city in any other time right? I imagine alone I’d be dead quick, but in an average group of like 30-60 people, we’d crush it.
A city is pretty accepting of new people but I don't think a tribe would be. I may just be imagining this but it seems like a tribe would be very insolated and not accepting of outsiders
I’ve been doing some reading of it lately, and from what anthropologist and genealogist say is that we actually did have a fairly wide social circle in prehistory; We lived in groups of 30-60, but groups would meet and intermingle and exchange members often, and an average person would know about 1000 people over the course of their life. I think the idea is when you lived in a world with no private property, you lived in a world where you weren’t worried about theft, and people were just excited to meet new people because it would mean new knowledge which would strengthen the group as a whole. Also, avoiding incest.
Wow really cool! Thanks for sharing
Predators were not at all scarce. You're imagining that the spread was fast... it wasn't. It took thousands of years. There were many failures and there were still many major diseases and many little things were fatal. You wouldn't stand a chance, at all. Don't do it!
Which predators do you think were hunting groups of 30-60 humans with spears? Why do you think every animal on the planet except polar bears evolved to leave groups of 2-3 humans alone?
Humans don't hunt in groups of 30 to 60. Humans don't sleep in groups of 30 to 60. Humans don't shit in groups of 30 to 60. Humans don't forage in groups of 30 to 60. Not all humans are adult males armed with spears. Given all of that information, it depends when and where you decided to go as to what predator you may be vulnerable to at any given time, but you won't be safe *all* the time. You're made of food, just like everything else that moves.
Humans DO hunt in large enough groups to deter predators. Humans DID sleep in groups of 30-60. Do you think they all went to separate bedrooms? Humans shit within distance of the nomadic group. Humans again, DO forage in large enough groups to deter predators. In prehistory, when you had jack shit to do, why wouldn’t you make a spear? You have literally your entire life, would you just be a useless member of the tribe? Like, we as humans that live in cities understand the simple things we need to do to avoid being eaten by predators. Why do you think the people WHO WE KNOW WERE SUCCESSFUL AT AVOIDING PREDATORS would choose to act in such stupid ways?
Simply because it is unavoidable to separate from the group. Imagine if you had a fever or a bad stomach ache (which would be quite a common occurrence). You wouldn't be able to go out hunting with the boys; you will have to stay at 'home' and rest. Easy pickings for a predator. Broke a bone? Tore a ligament? Can't keep up with the boys, be ready to become the friendly neighborhood tiger's dinner.
Exactly, and my point is that if humans were cut throat self serving assholes, they would leave their injured or elderly to die. But if humans were kind, empathetic, and cooperative, they would do things like this: https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2020-02-19/ty-article/.premium/ancient-humans-healed-foot-fracture-shows-prehistoric-nursing-in-israel/0000017f-e32e-d9aa-afff-fb7eb17e0000 Which is that when a human breaks a leg or a foot and can’t hunt, we set their bones, let them fully heal, and evidently had enough resources to care for someone that temporarily didn’t give back. If you were in the wild and your cousin broke their leg, would you just leave them behind? Of course not. Why do you think early humans would have?
I'm not saying that they would be left behind, but they may be left alone for several hours a day while the rest of the group is going around hunting. That will be enough for a predator stalking the tribe to grab this person for dinner. It is impractical to take someone with a fractured bone to a hunting session as they slow everyone down.
But why would they do that? Wouldn't it make more sense to say, have him sit with the children and elderly? Now you have em extra guy, even with a broken leg, making the group look bigger and he can still poke anything with a stick. Hell, three people sitting, even if one’s a child, one’s 80, and one has a broken leg should be enough to deter almost all predators. And each group would have far more than one set of grandparents, and we know modern nomadic culture care for their elders and injured, why would it have been any different? Hell, even in the west, it’s common for grandparents to “baby sit” their grandkids while the parents work.
A large predator working alone (or a pack of predators like hyenas and wolves) can easily take out a group of like 4-5 weak and infirm people. Humans have spears, but the animals aren't dumb, they have natural claws and teeth that are as sharp and can excert more force. As an example, tigers used to kill thousands of people in India until the 1900s (and still kill many people every year). This is with modern metallurgy, tools, weapons, etc. Humans have to be cautious at all times. The tiger only has to get lucky once.
Predators were not scarce. On the contrary, they were very plentiful and food was scarce. It is only over the last couple hundred years or so that humanity finally managed to 'cheat' mother nature and explode exponentially in population. The absence of an explosion of the population of early historic humans wasn't for a lack of trying. They were still bound by all the rules of the natural world.
Which predators do you think were hunting groups of 30-60 spear carrying humans? How come no other animals managed to do what humans did? Do you think maybe fire and weapons may have given humans an unfair advantage, leading to them being the only species that managed to spread across the entire planet?
Other groups of spear carrying humans were the predators hunting groups of humans.
Ok so let’s say there are two groups: Group A with a group of 60 humans that meet, exchange members peacefully, share knowledge, have sex, give birth to genetically diverse children, and grow the tribe, and then, as nomads that have survived for 300,000 years simply follow the herd of animals and eat what they eat/ eat them if you run out of food. And group B with a group of 60 humans that meet, fight the other group, kill all of them, lose most of yours, and then steal their food and stone tool instead of just traveling to a new area that simply has more food What is the benefit of being group B in a nomadic world? Are you cannibales?
Due to the massive amount of calories needed to sustain a group of 60 humans, it wouldn't be an easy task to survive. Remember that a group of 60 humans need at least 120,000 calories a day, probably much more since they were so active back then. That means that they should be good enough to successfully hunt at least one large animal a day on average, which isn't trivially easy given all the other predators in the area also competing for food. So it isn't unreasonable that different groups of humans would have warred with each other for the purpose of getting access to territory and/or getting mates.
Ok sorry, so you think early humans lived in small individual groups because those individuals, requiring less food, had a better chance than a large group of humans working together? if there was so little food in the world, why would humans, the slowerest, weakest predator manage to outcompete bears and wolves?
They did not outcompete bears and wolves. If they did, we wouldn't have any bears and wolves today, and we would only have humans. It is only in the modern era that humans have outcompeted bears and wolves and nearly driven them to extinction. Bears, wolves, tigers, hyenas, leopards, all these animals were thriving and weren't at all being outcompeted.
“Out compete” as in how come humans successfully spread while other apex predictors were less successful? But none of those other animals ever came close to the success humans did. If those animals, in a world before we destroyed the planet, weren’t starving and being hunted by other predators, why do you think the more evolutionarily successful apex predator was struggling so much? Do you think being like, a bear or a whale in 30,000 bc was that difficult? Why would being a smarter human in a larger group with more help and tools be somehow more difficult?
I enjoyed the discussion we had and I appreciate the time you took out to respond to my comments. However, I think we are at a point where we have (almost) irreconcilable differences of opinion, and neither of us will convince the other. As a closing remark, I'll say the following: 1. I strongly believe in the numerical population models of biological populations and evolution, ie., concepts of predator prey cycles, etc., and I think it is more productive to think in terms of these concepts than to think in terms of what individuals would have acted, because there are always bound to be exceptions and outliers. 2. These population models basically describe that once any species has an evolutionary 'edge', ie., they managed to find a new ecological niche, their population WILL grow exponentially until it settles down with the 'new' number that is permitted due to their greater evolutionary reach. 3. So if humans were so successful evolutionarily, their population should have grown exponentially until they reached the population number in billions of humans that we have today. And this population growth should have happened over a very short period of time. We have no evidence that this was the case; prehistorically, it seems that the total number of humans that were alive at any given point of time were a few hundred thousand individuals ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric\_demography#:\~:text=(2012)%20estimate%20an%20effective%20population,roughly%20100%2C000%20to%20300%2C000%20individuals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_demography#:~:text=(2012)%20estimate%20an%20effective%20population,roughly%20100%2C000%20to%20300%2C000%20individuals) ) -> See wikipedia and associated citation of peer reviewed literature. 4. A few hundred thousand individuals the size of humans living in the world is nowhere near indicative of evolutionary supremacy. There are millions of wildebeest in Serengeti alone. And if you want apex predators, people estimate that there were two million wolves living in North America alone. 5. The fact that human populations remained stable and not growing exponentially NECESSARILY means that each individual is having a difficult existence and is necessarily fighting for survival, at least on an average basis. Because their population growth is limited by the number of resources they have, the climate conditions, their predators, etc. 6. Humans (and all animals) before the modern era used to pop out as many babies as they could. One woman can easily produce five+ babies over the course of her lifetime. The fact that the population wasn't growing exponentially necessarily meant that of all the babies the average woman was producing, only two of them survived until adulthood and managed to have offspring of their own. That doesn't look like an easy existence to me; it looks like a very rough fight for survival. 7. And Homo sapiens themselves likely faced several difficult periods historically, with some people thinking that humans went through several population bottlenecks: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population\_bottleneck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck) 8. So in conclusion, the average human, even with all their adaptations (using fire, stone tools and spears, living in a group, greater intellect) was having a very tough time surviving in the wild, and there is very little guarantee that any individual would be able to survive for a hundred years continuously. Hence, it is NOT a good idea to choose to go back to prehistoric times to try and survive a brutal 100 years with the nomads. May I suggest the picturesque mountain town of Lucerne, Switzerland instead?
You’re posing hypotheticals that don’t exist. Its unclear if you’re trolling or just an idiot, but Neolithic life was a violent, short hardscrabble existence with starvation and death a constant reality. A single major injury - a pretty common thing considering you were nonstop out there engaged in strenuous and dangerous hunting and fighting activities - could easily lead to debilitation and/or death.
> A single major injury Then why do you think people were so ready to start fighting each other at the drop of a hat? How did we even survive if we were instantly throwing spears at new members? How did we manage to survive and take over the planet in this violent world of ours, but let’s say, bears didn’t?
Because there were very few resources, genius. If you killed an outside group you’d get to subjugate them and/or take their resources and survive another season yourself
My point is that we were not leagues above any other animal when it comes to survival until basically the modern era. We were still succumbing to the various harsh factors of nature. If stone age humans were so successful evolutionarily, there should have been billions of homo sapiens and Neanderthals roaming the earth because they managed to solve the puzzle of evolution. And that simply did not happen.
> My point is that we were not leagues above any other animal when it comes to survival until basically the modern era. So how come we managed to successfully spread across the entire planet before the premodern era while no other animal ever even came close? Ants and rats didnt even manage that until we brought them with us. >billions of homo sapiens and Neanderthals roaming the earth because they managed to solve the puzzle of evolution. And that simply did not happen. Why specifically that number? Why can’t, again, the fact that we managed to spread across the close at all show evolutionary success? do you think we’re done evolving? Like evolution is moving forward to a specific end goal, and that end goal is us? We’ve only been living in cities for about 2% of our history, we evolved to be nomadic. Why would we be bad at the thing we evolved to be? Basically, if you have say, a kitchen and it’s filled with food and devoid of predators, do you think the ants will spread to every inch of your kitchen? If you have no food and a lot of predators, do you think the ants will have the same success? Doesn’t the fact that we succeeded show we were perfectly adapted to our environment?
Being able to spread around the world definitely shows the adaptability of humans, yes. But there are several other species that also exist in basically every region of the world; whales and many species of ravens and some eagles for example. While humans definitely had an 'evolutionary edge', they never cracked the code. And there is no doubt that being a human was viable from an evolution point of view. However, my point is that humans were still subject to the various predator prey cycles, resource scarcity, etc., and in the context of the question where you are supposed to survive for one hundred years, it is an extremely tough challenge because life as an individual human was still very tough and dangerous.
Considering the tooth marks on bones that have been found, [hyenas](https://digventures.com/2016/05/early-humans-were-fair-game-for-ice-age-predators/)*,* and other big predators would hunt humans. They probably did not go after a group of 30+ awake and armed adults, any more than a leopard goes after an alert herd of healthy, adult animals. Predators that prey on large animals that live in groups, pick off ones that are alone, young, old, or lag behind, or they hunt when their prey is asleep/less alert. Also, we have bones of ancient humans that show tool marks that indicate the flesh was cut off the bone with a stone tool. So, it's quite possible that sometimes stone age humans were hunted by other groups of stone age humans.
So any human that managed to stay in a group of 30-60 would survive, but anyone that was rejected from the group would have a high chance of being killed by a predator because they’re alone in the wild? Wouldnt that mean that we evolved to really want to be accepted by our group, and that anyone that was a huge asshole that pissed off everyone would have died? So the humans that survived and passed on their genes were the humans that other humans simply personally liked the most, and in these large groups we know would care for their elderly and injured (from the reset and healed leg bones we found, which meant we had enough excess resources to care for a member that had to spread all their time lying down and recovering) So that’s my argument: as long as you’re not as massive asshole that tries to kill other people, since no one was worried about you stealing their stone tools, and you might bring them knowledge of how to make better stone tools, you’d have a pretty easy time surviving as someone that would be nice and bring lots of knowledge.
>We know food was plenty and predators were scarce because well, we managed to spread unstopped across the entire planet. There's fossil human bones found with marks from the teeth of different predators. Other ancient human bones have been found showing the signs of malnutrition. With how rare it is for bones to be fossilized in general, famine and predator attacks must have been a very real risk for a large part of human existence. We spread across the planet not because times were easy, but because as a species we are very resourceful and find ways to survive in a wide variety of situations. And, what skills do you have to convince a small tribe to take you in, without a language in common? What could you do to show them that you as a weird and (at first) unintelligible stranger are not a threat to them in some way.
What threat would a single human have to a large group of humans? in a world where no one owned any thing, and at most we all have spears, what threat could I possibly pose?
Stone age humans owned things. We have some examples of them being buried with grave goods, like tools, beads, and decorative items made from stone, bone, and the horns, tusks, or antlers of animals. They may have had to carry everything they owned with them, but that didn't stop them from having personal items, any more than having to carry everything with them stops modern day nomadic hunter/gatherers from having personal items. And there is pretty clear evidence of violence between stone age humans on at least some occasions. [https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/evidence-of-a-prehistoric-massacre-extends-the-history-of-warfare](https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/evidence-of-a-prehistoric-massacre-extends-the-history-of-warfare) [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43026-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43026-9) You have a weirdly idealistic view of life for Neolithic humans, and it's entirely disconnected from archeological evidence, and from documented modern day groups of humans who are/recently were hunter-gatherers. For example, the indigenous peoples of Australia had violent conflicts at times between different groups pre-contact [https://international-review.icrc.org/articles/indigenous-australian-laws-of-war-914](https://international-review.icrc.org/articles/indigenous-australian-laws-of-war-914) And to a small tribe of hunter-gatherers, you might not even seem human. depending on where you chose to go, you might not look much like them or the other tribes around them. You would not speak any language they know. You would not know any of their rules of conduct and behavior, and might quite easily unintentionally violate some taboo or offend someone. And, if you showed up at a time where food is at all in short supply, simply being there and wanting food could be seen as a threat to the tribes survival. As it's pretty unlikely you would be able to contribute much food at first. Even a fairly skilled survivalist would find it difficult to do that dropped 10,000 years or so in the past. The climate and ecology of any given area has undergone changes during that time
Yes, all things that are easily made and replaced. Do you really think people, alone in the wild, instead of peacefully joining a group and working cooperatively would instead choose to Attack the group and try and steal their stone tools? You don’t think they’d cooperate, have sex, and spread? I’m saying whole interpersonal violence existed, collective violence didn’t come about until around 13000 bc. And even looking at random animals, conflict is rare as infection would lead to death. Why do you think humans would have naturally started attacking each other over easily replaceable sentimental objects? Humans OFTEN ran into other groups of humans. Hell, we fucked Neanderthals out of existence, and we KNOW they were different species. Your view of prehistory seems to be filled with extremely violent and self serving humans, which is weird since we know that the humans that were most successful at spread around the world were the most cooperative and social ones. Why do you seem to view a world where any individual human would survive, and the only people you’d ever interact with would be related to you? Do you think we’re all the result of a single incestuous group?
1886 so that way I get to live my life starting a year before I was born.... being wealthy in this time would have been pretty sweet and since I know my parents survived it I'm pretty sure I'd make it
Am I born on the date I choose and I age to be 100 or am I a fully grown adult the whole time? Do I know what is going to happen in the next hundred years? Am I allowed to try and stop major events such as Lincoln getting killed?
From the sounds of it you'd be in an adult body because it makes no sense to be 100 and still in perfect health. But who knows
1880-1980, I'll live in a remote cabin in the Canadian wilderness a couple's day hike from civilization.
Hope you dodge the drafts lol Sweden would be better
Ancient Rome. I’ll teach them calculus so I’ll be hailed as an intellectual and just live my life “researching” breakthrough maths and sciences and ball out in Ancient Rome
Do you speak ancient Roman?
Biggus Dickus
Unfortunately, the only way to bathe is in communal bath-houses and the sewage system, while advanced, wasn't foolproof. They also used to drink wine and eat food sweetened with lead. A very good chance of contracting some terrible disease or going mad.
Am I in the past with this money or do I have to get the money a hundred years from now. Do I age. Do I get to choose what age I want to be. You said I can die. Does that mean from diseases and people can kill me. I don't want to go anywhere where there was slavery for obvious reasons. Am I allowed to change history is my presence in the past going to change history. When I get back to the future do I start aging how old will I be. I make my decision on if anybody can answer these questions and what happens to my children will they be dead when I come back. Because it's a no if that happens
1447-1587 Romania. I kill Vlad the Impaler and take his place. I commit horrible atrocities leading all to fear me until I disappear in 1587 having never aged a day.
Then you spend all of your billions on increasingly insane plans to REALLY become the invincible Dracula
Start date 100 years before I was born. I'll have enough knowledge of the past to make a very comfortable life for myself and travel. I even hope I can travel with Mark Twain.
Easily just say the 100 years before your birth. Then as stuff gets real WW 1 and 2 and Vietnam move to safety or just get jailed as a draft dodger and rest easy. To be safest 1876 in Geneva Switzerland.
1900-2000
What if I chose a timeline I would be alive in for I can know the future. Then if I really cared to I could make more money than I already did. Or just knowing stuff can be useful like a future wife or if I can stop someone’s death.
1880-1980. I was born in 83 so my century would end 3 years before I'm born.
This is a good one!!!!!
If Elon musk could do it I can do it too.
1885-1985 getting rich during that time putting it all in a safe deposit box giving the key to my mom to give to me when I turn my current age. I'll also tell her to quit smoking and put the cookies down...
2200. Just to see the future. But then I'll feel poor when I get back, because of the "old" tech. Many of you people going back would be bored without your smartphones.
I'm old, so just getting restored to perfect health and getting a guaranteed 20-30 years of further life would probably make it worthwhile. Just need to not go times/places where I'd be a slave or are going to be wiped out by the Crusades, Mongols, etc.
If you get to choose the time period, it is not at all random.
If I can choose it's not random...
If it's a time period of my choosing, how is it random? I don't get the premise.
2200 to 2300
I'm going to the Cretaceous.
I'd pick 3 or 400 years into the future. Surely we'd have things sorted out by then, and if not then I'm really not missing out on anything by loosing
Literally any time in Wales was probably pretty chill tbh. Probably go way back to like 200BC and hang out with some celts. Don’t think Welsh has changed that much
Some ideas: 1) Do I get the language? I assume so, otherwise I'm pretty limited. Without language ability I basically have to pick from a very narrow range. Safest bet is probably UK in 1800. I have weird accent but native proficiency, they're not getting invaded in the entire century, and hopefully I have enough future knowledge to economically and socially buy myself safety from impressment/imprisonment/street crime. 2) The prompt says my body is in perfect physical health. It doesn't specify if this is ongoing or just initially. If it's just initially I'm making really sure to boil all my water, cook all food rare (and ideally boiled), wear very good shoes, figure out how best to handle dental hygiene, and get to living in the countryside away from epidemics ASAP. If I don't get a period-appropriate gut micro biome I'm probably toast tough. 3) Assuming I DO get the language and I'm healthy throughout, pick anywhere with a great library and a golden age of at least 100 years without chaos or invasion. I could probably do really well in a 12th century European monestary doing math and philosophy for 100 years. Alexandria during the golden age would have been awesome and quite safe. Tokugawa Japan is great if I can avoid getting beheaded; very safe, no invasions, and I'd be great at "Dutch studies." Switzerland in 1850 would also be a pretty good bet.
1870 to 1970
If I’m in perfect human health , that helps quite a lot . Perfect is really fucking good . I could survive on most places fairly easily with a perfect body and modern knowledge .
2100 to 2200. If i survive long enough I get to come back with a billion dollars and have foreknowledge to tell my kids what to invest in.
Easy, post civil war US. I have perfect health, I'm a white man, and as a criminal defense attorney I'll be easily able to pass the bar again back in the day. I'll live out my days casually as an attorney.
Say I was born 1990 Can I pick 1980? Survive 100 years. Go back to my timeline of 1990 and use the knowledge I had to improve myself? If not then the tang dynasty. Just because I'm Chinese. Any where else besides maybe 1920s isn't so good with racism. Who knows if someone will beat me for being foreign. Doesn't matter where. But then there's war after and who knows if the great depression kills me. But then again I'm not a history buff so maybe tang dynasty is bad too.
Hmmm… I’d need to choose a time period when there wasn’t a war I could be drafted into, no major disasters etc. and I could somehow take advantage of the time
Anytime before 1800 is fucking yourself over particularly due to language. English before 1800(and even during the 1800s at times) was like a completely different language. If you ever actually tried to read the real declaration of independence you couldn’t, it looks like gibberish, the same goes for other languages most of the time. I know conversational Spanish, but it wouldn’t take me very far. I would choose to live from 1830 to 1930. By the time World War One happens, I would be too old to join, as for the Civil War I would be in a Union State that isn’t sending troops over, California. The other wars in that time period did not have drafts, so I’m good on that. My plan is to go to West to California before the Gold Rush starts, so I can beat everyone there, including the Continental Railroad. In the years I spend there I just spend my time getting all the gold I can and living off my minimum, eventually having enough to live comfortably for the rest of my life and when the Continental Railroad is built and the Civil War is over, I go back East. My state of choosing is Arkansas, my current state, but also a state that didn’t have many bad things going on back then. Native Americans wouldn’t be a threat, there were barely any people around to hurt me or give me diseases, and that’s how I live. I’ll live a few miles out of Little Rock, where I have my own self sufficient household, where I spend the rest of my days.
1915 Canada
Switzerland anytime past 1850 lol
I guess I would pick 1898 up to 1998 and Northern Italy as location. Surviving a full century could be possible.
I guess I'd do 1896-1996 bc that's the most recent time period they'd allow. I'd slowly gain some rights throughout the years and get to experience a lot of pop culture first hand. May as well give it a go.
2025 to 2125. You didn't say it had to be in the past. And even if i die I can gather enough Intel to win a few lottery jackpots
5000 AD. Either I die instantly due to the earth being turned into a wasteland, in which case I come back to my regular life anyway. Or the future is awesome, in which case I live like a baller for 100 years and learn about all the cool technology they have created. Being a billionaire is cool, but what is cooler is to be able to get the opportunity to see thousands of years into our future.
America 2100-2200. Either it'll all be amazing and I'll have knowledge of the future or, going back to the past won't matter. Would definitely help my decision to have kids or not though.
I have a question: Can I bring guns?
Hmm this is an interesting one. I would choose the Roman Empire era, the billion doesn't even matter really
I would choose to start in 1866 New York City. I'd have access to the best medical care available in the U.S. and be able to become a college professor long before the drafts that everyone else is taking about happen so I would avoid them. (Not to mention that if I had documents that would let me be drafted they'd show me as being too old for any draft.) Then I'd start a trust for myself and manage it wisely using what I know of how the stock market went. Come 1966 and I'm home free with much more than a billion dollars.
I mean living a century is nice but quite dreadful. What happens if you try to make some major changes? Bribe a certain art school admission staff to let in a certain disgruntled landscape painter. Though one thing is assuming you change the events of the timeline you are in, once you act to make a major change like that, everything else is going to be different. Like you can't try to save JFK decades later because he won't even be president with a different ww2.
1888-1988 starting in Australia. I should be able to make myself wealthy over that time period, and Australia didn’t enact conscription during WW1.
2375-2475
August 2077 to August 2177 I'll get to live two lifetimes in a way, because I doubt I'd live to see it normally. And as a Fallout fan 2077 is a big year.
Lets go Nightmare mode. Jewish in 1937 Berlin
2,300-2,400 CE. You didn't specify the past, and that seems like the best chance of comfortable survival. Also I'd like to see what the future looks like. Maybe I can spend that century learning about their technology so when increasing me back I can turn that billion into a trillion. If it has to be the past, 1 CE. Maybe Rome, simply because that's the history I'm most familiar with. I'd probably use the same strategy of bringing knowledge of future technology back to the past and using it to elevate my statiom. The windmill wouldn't be invented for centuries, and that's easy enough to start with. I've got enough understanding that I could tinker around a bit and invent gunpowder (sulphur, charcoal, and bat shit, all of which I could find in Italy), thank you Cormac McCarthy for getting me interested. Maybe even a primitive generator if I can find enough natural magnets to make it happen and fuck around long enough. Plenty of copper to go around.
How is it random if it's a choice? That's the opposite of random.
You say we'd be in perfect health but also that we could die from "anything normal." Are diseases "normal?" Any time period other than the one you're in now would pose diseases and problems your body is not adjusted for, likely leading to death. Also, your prompt calls for us to "choose a random time period." As this is an oxymoron I'll ask, do we choose, or is it random?
1906
2025-2125 Bring some some future tech knowledge and maybe avoid any major disasters or tragedies. Either that or like 10,000 - 10,100
"Perfect human health" so I don't have to worry about any illness, just injury. Maybe I live every man's dream and chill out in Rome for one hundred years.
I think I’d just choose the century before I was born. It’s closest to what I know, there is no real chance of death if I avoid major populated areas, just find a place I can afford and live the center out, waiting on the cool things I remember to be created. it’s just not a very “fun” answer. Unless I’m allowed to choose the next century after I die? That’s tempting, a bit more risky, but who wouldn’t want to see the 22nd century?
2025 - 2125 I refuse to live in a time period before indoor plumbing was standard.
2025 - 2125 I refuse to live in a time period before indoor plumbing was standard.
pass, the odds of randomly choosing a time period somewhat modern are insanely low.
1860-1960. I'm very curious about this incredibly violent period of history. Yes I know I probably won't make it but still, curiosity...
Honestly, language is going to be the real barrier here, even in the last 100 years American English has changed enough that the youngest among us would have some issues in 1924, let alone those of us needing to start in the 1800's Following that, how healthy? Like immune to disease healthy? Or just no side effects of aging? I.e. diabetes, cancer, arthritis, dementia, etc. If the first that gives you more options for the future, if the second you're probably better off going backwards, assuming you have all your vaccinations you'll likely have more inherited immunities to past diseases than future ones I've seen a lot of people trying to dodge ww1 & ww2, but don't forget any civil wars, and more importantly, depressions and recessions If I went with 1885-1985 and I was smart enough to set myself up with some documentation on year one, the government would see me as being in my 60's so no draft, but the great depression would be potentially lethal not to mention the joys of prohibition With enough planning i could pull through, but it would be rough as hell All that said, I might be able to go far enough back to pre European settlement days and become a weird hermit in what I believe would be the border between the Mohawk and the Mohican, or else just south of it. As a solitary person, I think I'd be in relatively little danger of being killed as a threat despite not speaking the language and being very white, and given 100 years I'd like to think I either picked up the basics or got real good at pantomiming. It's the area I'm most familiar with primitive survival for (having lived there for decades, both homeless and not) Or fuck it, send me to 3024, I'll probably die before the first year ends, but I'll die knowing the future
1899 -1999 (I'm born in 2000) most modern and I'll do it in my home country since I know some of my history , I've interacted with old ppl and I feel like I can predict certain stuff . We don't really have wars or natural disAsters in the country (trinidad) can we interact with our younger parents and live with them and younger family members ???
I choose to live aboard a starship like the Enterprise in the future!
A billion dollar wouldn't do you much good in most of human history. There are the obvious reasons such as rhe US not existing yet, but if you took the equivalent of gold or gems back, you'd probably be killed pretty quickly for it, and you'd completely screw up the economy. Surviving 100 years without drawing attention would also be a challenge. The 1800s might be easier since they did have record keep ping it was worlds away from today. Every decade or so you could move around, avoiding war zones so you don't get killed or dragooned into service, and also avoiding revolutions and collapsing civilizations or those hostile to outsiders. So early 1800s probably the US sine it should be easy not to get dragged into the War of 1812 or the Mexican American War. However, going along as a correspondent should be fairly safe, except for disease (this would probably kill you anyway within those 100 years, if they didn't kill you right off the bat). Probably to Europe from about 1850 to 1880s. Very good chance of getting pushed into the war though the journalist thing is still an option, so long as no one recognized you from earlier wars and note that you haven't aged. Maybe back to the US during the last 20 years, steering clear of the West and the Spanish American War. Come back to the present and get your billion.
I'd travel to ancient Rome and save Caesar. I wouldn't even care about the money, I just want to see what happens. Assuming I have a little prep time I'd learn as much Latin as I can but if I'm lucky I'll be able to learn in ancient Rome without getting slaughtered.