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Facts
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2026
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I've thought about this casually quite a few times. Provided you can get over the language barrier, and people don't just label you as insane, finding the academic elite of the country you're in and explaining to them what you know, you could rocket that country ahead of the rest of the world over a couple of decades.
That's actually an interesting problem:
How would you convince a group of Renaissance-era intellectuals that you are from the future and have unique knowledge?
You need some scientific fact or discovery you could show them, that they don't already know, that can be proven quickly using relatively simple tools and equipment. Or you need some revolutionary invention you can build, again quickly with very few resources.
Sure, I know a lot of scientific facts and information. If made the chief scientific/economic advisor to some Renaissance-era king or ruler, I would be able to substantially advance that country rapidly. But imagine being some rando today trying to get yourself a high-level position on a president's cabinet. Imagine trying to just talk your way into that, while having no prior connections at all.
Yes, if put in charge of a historical country I could work wonders. But forget running the country, how do you even get past the palace gate? Imagine walking up to the residence of any president or prime minister today and trying to talk your way in the door by telling them, "I'm from the future and am here to rapidly advance your nation's technology. Please let me in to talk to your president/prime minister."
Renaissance could actually make it a bit easier to at least demonstrate you have knowledge they don't, as long as you don't pop up too early. If you show up after New World crops have already started popping up in Europe, yoe could demonstrate how tomatoes are safe to eat, provided you don't serve them on dishes or with utensils that they could leach toxins out of.
It also helps mitigate the language barrier if you already speak a modern form of a Romance language and managed to get dropped in a territory where its predecessors were spoken.
Of course, if you go further back in time, I think both aspects get increasingly difficult. Unless this is the first isekai story with a middle aged German academic as the protagonist, I doubt anyone would be remotely prepared to communicate if they got sent back to Anatolia and had to speak Hittite, or something. Then, the pool of candidates with a solid background in the appropriate dead languages gets reduced even further when you filter out those who also lack the technical expertise to be able to explain how to recreate some part of modern technology from scratch, including all the necessary backgrounds processes needed to have the basic technical foundation necessary to be able to implement the thing you know.
If I find myself in that sort of situation, I know I'd be explaining electricity or something and get asked, "How do you get the electricity to start with?". And I would either have to say "Go kidnap some lightning," or "You pay the power company and then flip the light switch." Neither of which are very helpful.
I figure my best bet is somehow getting to the New World first, and bringing back the necessary ingredients so I can invent tacos and burritos, revolutionizing cuisine with a sudden surge of Mexican food options in China or something during ancient history.
There was an xkcd about this, or maybe a vsauce thing, where you could locate a lost relic using that post or something.
Stuff like the titanic, the rosetta stone, etc
Michael vsauce and Hannah Fry's podcast "the rest is science", I literally saw that episode yesterday!
You can basically recreate all modern maths in one book (or scroll) without any expertise outside that field, and become another Euclid (or the first Euclid, if you happen to end up earlier than him).
It did take people an embarrassing long time to figure out you can, despite it being irrational, still put pi on a number line.