Quiz

Hmmm.
This is a fun question but its not specific enough.
1000 to 2000 years is a big gap with regards to what has already been discovered and exploited.
Location is another biggie.
Are you on an island? A continental land mass? What latitude?
Give me a year and a location and I'll figure it out.

 

I agree, I think the location makes a big difference. It'd be one thing to land somewhere in the Roman empire, entirely different to be somewhere in China or in South America.

 

Roman Empire, say around year zero (from current perspective). Speaking of history, I'm vaguely familiar with European history around that time. China... no idea, except they were about as quarelling among themselves as Europeans. South America... absolutely no idea. I think Mayas and Aztecs came some 1000 years later.

By the way, making gunpowder from saltpeter is fun, but the real deal is making saltpeter from (cow) urin

 

I have no idea how to make saltpeter, to be honest. Up until this post I actually thought it was some sort of mineral.

EDIT: There is naturally occurring saltpeter, it's called niter. So I wasn't entirely wrong.

 

So now it depends on what your agenda is.

If its the desire to advance science based on one's own knowledge using the materials available, the first thing that came to my mind was since the art of metallurgy was somewhat advancing during this period, I would locate some Lodestone (naturally occurring magnets found on all continents) and fashion a rudimentary generator to demonstrate the existence of electricity.

Depending on their ability to extrude wire, one could build a primitive Morse code like telegraph device fairly easily. They could run with that. And since its the human race....I'm sure the new technology would be advanced rather quickly.... and then exploited in some fashion related to war.

 

There is a "slight" difference between AD 1 and AD 1000, so instructions unclear, please specify...

But of course I would do magic and start a religion. Best business of the last 3000 years...

If it is AD 1000 I would sail West and discover America. In AD 1 it is too early... In AD 1 I would go to Israel and start a journal about the local politics... Some interesting thing might happen...

 

Okay, aside from buying AAPL immediately after constructing my bamboo cannon, I would go nuts on zero.
https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/history-zero
Zero built base-10.
Base-10 rocked the world.

(At least til hexidecimal came along. Bastards. )

 

Making some assumptions that you're mot exactly naked and afraid, but you have nothing but the clothes on your back and whatever contents are in your pockets. First let us hope you're not freezing to death in the middle of nowhere. In that case you are dead in short order. If you're in the middle of some desert, again probably dead in short order. Lets say you appear in some populated area. You can choose to play yourself off as some kind of god, or choose to try and blend in. Either way, you have nothing but your wit and some basic survival skills. Given the state of the average American in todays world, most would be dead or slaves within a week.

 

One thing I'm trying to emphasize with this "Quiz" is the importance of "politics" relative to hardcore "technical" skills. If you're old enough, you've come to realize this in the workplace.

The situation in this quiz would be a politics vs. technical on steroids. It's obvious you'd have a huge, huge technical advantage over the native competitors. But could you make any use of it without politics?

==== So step 2 in this story:
You are rescued by some local peasants, who then direct you to the local landlord and realizing there might be something to you, he grants you the favor of giving you food, shelter, a modest stipend for common expenses but most of all, makes you one of his advisers.

Question is, could you play this to your and perhaps society's advantage (like beating 1-2 thousands years of ignorance and carnage), or get murdered in a short while? Because, if you're old enough, you may have noticed that people hate change.