You would still have the same age, gender, personality, skin color, etc. and you would be able to speak at least one local language and would know basic information of the era and place. Your family, social standing, and such would be randomly picked.
New Zealand 800 years ago. The rest of the question doesn’t matter because there were no other humans there.
As I’m from NZ atm I would choose here about 800 years ago as well - 800 years ago is about when the first Maori arrived - give or take a few
I pick NZ, 801 years ago
Are you and @bstix forgetting that there were giant eagles that probably ate humans?
Too Black for that bullshit; you might as well just kill me now
@frauddogg there are plenty of cool pre-colonial civilizations you could join. This kingdom had pottery, metallurgy, literacy, even a sophisticated district court system.
And still wound up eventually becoming a slave-dealing civilization at the same time as they were being “Christianized”-- a fancy term for ‘colonization’. That’s a no-go for me.
@frauddogg I wasn’t suggesting that. These kingdoms were around for literally hundreds of years without that stuff. OP didn’t say we had to become immortal and live through the rest of history.
I hate the way Europeans effectively colonized everyone’s imaginations so they can’t even conceive of a time and place without them in it.
Well, after like 800 AD, that’s kind of the case. There is no ‘proud’ or even ‘peaceful’ existence in a world with Anglos getting ready to pillage and pervert it all. And that’s just taking my melanin into account-- that doesn’t take my mental state into account, and doesn’t take my sexuality into account either. There is no time in the past I look to favorably, and honestly? Until we’ve handled the capital-worshipper colonizer menace in this era, I don’t see a time in the future to look favorably to either.
Are you done debate perv’ing at me yet, or do I have to find a more scathing way to phrase it?
Are you done debate perv’ing at me yet, or do I have to find a more scathing way to phrase it?
Yikes. I thought we were having a friendly conversation. Sorry to have upset you, will not bother you again.
I’m a little bit incapable of “friendliness” regarding people smugging at me on some redditor headassery like “nooooooo, there’s good points of history” like they’re not ancient history (when y’all get to play these ‘lul december 1 1949’ games) far and away from here or won’t all get ruined by usually the same people from 800 AD/CE/whatever measure you care about onwards. It starts sounding like all you care about doing is talking over people in absolutely shit faith.
like they’re not either ancient history far and away from here
They are ancient history and far away. That’s the point. Knowing about alternatives is part of anticolonial resistance.
I’ve figured out that you’re using a hexbear term to personally insult me. For the benefit of us both, I’m blocking you now and won’t be seeing or answering further comments from you.
Racism is a european “invention”, and can be dated. If you choose any place “before racism”, that will not be an issue.
And also, you can choose any place in a time without europeans.
Sounds like you’re grasping for ways to justify longing for worse off pasts tbh
Why?
You didn’t specify the calendar used 🤓, so I’ll go to the year 1401 in the hijri calendar (1980 in the gregorian calendar)
Why not 1949 in the hijri calendar???
Dec 31st 1949.
I’m a queer woman, so these sort of time travel questions boil down to preserving as many rights as I can.
as a queer brown man; i don’t want to be anywhere at all.
why 1949 and where?
The location, geography and placement is randomly picked?
Then like the other guy said December 31, 1949 11:59 pm
To be born before this time randomly anywhere in the world means that there is a high chance you’d be dropped into an impoverished hell hole with nothing, no chance and no help … God help you if you are female.
I have a whole rant on this topic, but the short version:
It’s dentists.
The gnarliest mountain man, who hunts bears with his bear hands, can be brought to his knees with a toothache. The toothache never sleeps, can’t be fought, and always eventually wins. Even basic dentistry is life saving - even another human with a pair of pliers and some moonshine - but I’d much rather have novocaine.
Dental problems a hundred years ago were not as problematic as we think. I’m Indigenous Canadian and my parents were born and raised in the bush and judging from family photos I’ve seen from a hundred years ago … most people had decent teeth. I have photos of my grandmothers parents who must have been in the 60s or 70s and they all had full teeth, probably not the best but they had obvious white teeth.
Cavities and tooth problems are a modern problem from wealth … we eat too much starch and sugar and generally just eat way too much of everything. Before the modern era, up to about the mid 1800s, the average person ate about five pounds of refined sugar a year - today the average person consumes about 100 lbs of sugar a year. … and those are the averages! Back a hundred years ago, you were wealthy if you could get sugar … most people just couldn’t afford to eat it … most people couldn’t afford to eat! And they ate more simple diets and less often.
The biggest fear I have about going back to the past is just getting a flesh wound, a hang nail or a scratch that could fester into an infection and either take a limb or kill me.
Dental problems aren’t about them looking good; teeth used to kill. Dental disease used to be the 5th leading cause of death. Your great-grandparents aren’t the best bar for dentistry in the past as modern dentistry began in the 18th century.
If you’re going back to before technology got good anyway, might as well always travel to ancient greece (preferably Athens, as they’re a bit less violent).
preferably Athens, as they’re a bit less violent
Athens were involved in more conflicts than any other Greek city. If you want just peace in ancient Greece you should choose, paradoxically, Sparta (though as usual it depends on the class you would be born, but the same can be said of any place and time in history).
Sparta has much worse problems than war. Not to mention, even today some “spartans” don’t consider themselves to be greek. It’d be like going to an icecream shop and buying a single cookie.
Sparta has much worse problems than war.
Shitty ultraconservative social structure and mass serfdom but looking at their history they usually ended up worse after even victorious war - due to their shitty social structure rather than war itself. Though it still took them over a century and something along 5 lost wars in a row to end up in the dustbin of history.
even today some “spartans” don’t consider themselves to be greek
Today Sparta is a small town mostly unrelated to the ancient one except rough location, it was depopulated for centuries and refounded by king Otto in 1834. So it sounds weird they don’t consider themselves Greeks, why would they since they literally are. Anyway they don’t have much to do with ancient Spartans since ancient Sparta has been totally razed and its population sold into slavery by Visigoths, and later Slavs raided the area multiple times in VI and VII century, causing remaining population to flee.
