No Stupid Questions

Use all the science i know from school to helpfully quicken scientific progress and spread trans propaganda

Well, first I'd have to learn Old English, I think. Hell, even Middle English isn't understandable.

Hopefully I could get up to speed before they locked me up, or worse.

Well I be naked, so would need to make/steal clothing very quickly

This is something I often wonder about, what could one person even do with all of today's common knowledge? You can't very well just invent the printing press and have the same impact as Gutenberg - you need something what the few people who can read would, and most people can't translate the bible from Latin into renaissance German and/or don't know enough about the catholic church to write scathing remarks on it like Luther.

You can write and read - that's something. Maybe more importantly, you can do math with arabic numerals - boom, easy accounting job. With a bit higher education, you may even just invent calculus once more. You know how long it took for people to figure out you can put pi on the number line? Proving all the formulas in your head is the hard stuff, but you have a head start just by knowing them. We all clown on the wormhole explanation with the paper, but it does prove Euclid wrong 400 years early.

Ah, and you can just become a medical genius by using soap and bandages - "do no harm" is better than most.

I'd die pretty quickly.

612 years in the past
In Brazil. So almost a century before the first europeans landed here. I'm assuming I just plop exactly in my relative earth-location, but in the distant past. (... It would be really funny if this was overly literal, because I'm currently in the 12th floor, so I'd thanos snap into the past and immediately fall to my death)

Well

As a person from modern times -- From AFTER the Americas came into contact with Europe, if I went near a person here in the Land of Palms (that's what the natives called Brazil!) from those times we'd both get horribly infected and die a lot due to how antibodies work. Viruses did a lot of the legwork in genociding the natives. Euros would deliberately do things to infect natives so they'd die of illness.

The place I currently live in is slowly turning into a desert, but was a deep jungle back then (... It was still a deep jungle in the 1910s tbqh).

.......... I think I'd just die? Become food for a jaguar or eat a poisonous fungus or sth.

Would love to indulge in the fantasy of giving the Guarani people guns and a warning to shoot white people on sight just to see how history would change, but that ain't happening.

I would make an IT startup.

I would pretend to be super-religious. Throughout the whole of human history, pretending to be super-religious has always been a viable path to survival and personal advancement.

Apart from that, I'd probably just die.

Probably die

I'm in the US and in a place that native Americans didn't have settlements. I'm very familiar with the area and have hunted, hiked, and camped here my entire life. With no preparation or modern equipment I give myself about a week before I get eaten by wolves or a bear, maybe gored by an elk or bitten by a venomous snake. I don't expect that I would see another human during that week. Native hunting parties visited the area so it's not impossible that I would see someone but it's very unlikely.

Wait 612 years and buy Microsoft.

Market myself as a powerful man of religion and/or magician, depending on the local vibe. Then use knowledge of science and tech to build myself a reclusive retreat where I can have regular baths and write books with predictions to mess with the world 650 years after I would die.

I would fall from a very high place

If I time traveled to the same geographical region, considering I'm in South Brazil, if I don't get immediately killed by some jungle animal or tropical disease, I'd probably end up starting a pandemic among the natives.

I'd make some fucking soap.

Many years ago when I thought about this, I realised I wouldn't be able to put much of my modern knowledge and skills to use. I decided I'd learn to make basic matches by distilling urine into phosphate, which wasn't invented until the 19th century, but I've forgotten the process. Collect lots of urine and boil it? Also, if you make white phosphate it can cause horrific toothache and they have to remove your jaw... So, I'm hoping another commentor will suggest a safer skill I can brush up to be ready for travel.

This is very A Connecticut Yankee in King Author's Court

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_Arthur%27s_Court

I hated that book. So pretentious.

It's 1375 and I'm asphyxiating somewhere in the Milky Way about 600 light years from Earth.

But let's assume that somehow my latitude, longitude and altitude relative to Earth somehow remain the same. Now I'm spawning several feet in the air probably in sight of several villagers. If I'm lucky, they'll think I was sent by God. If not I'm gonna have a real bad time. There's a good chance I'll break a bone in the fall, and that's not going to go well at all.

But let's assume there are trees here. Lots of them. That's actually pretty likely. They hide my sudden appearance and mitigate bone breakages.

Now I'm on the outskirts of a village, battered and bruised and very strangely dressed. I don't speak any language they'll understand despite technically being from that area. Middle English is the language of the day, and I speak something that won't evolve for at least another 200-250 years. Shakespeare is technically modern English and is hard to comprehend sometimes. Here we're talking Chaucer and that's pretty much opaque.

I'm literate, but not in Latin, and that's the language of the Church. I'm numerate, but they haven't got beyond Roman numerals yet.

I'm not even sure where the church is. I know where it is in the modern day, but that building's no more than 200 years old. Maybe it's on the same site. I'd head there for shelter at least.

I know the Lord's Prayer in modern English. Chanting that quietly might spark some recognition in anyone present but then it might count as blasphemy to say it in anything other than Catholic-Church-approved Latin.

Come to think of it, I could probably blow a couple of minds by writing the alphabet they know and then the same with the extra letters that have been added since.

And then I'd be burned as a witch.

England is in the midst of the Hundred Years war with France and considering I'm ~193cm and the average height of a man in England in the 14th century is about 171cm... looks like in getting my arse drafted and shipped off to France, to act as some kind of intimidating presence. That is until I have to swing a sword, which my body, that's used to sitting in an office looking over excel spreadsheets, absolutely can't do, so I get bum rushed/hit in the face with an arrow and die.

That's the most likely scenario.

Worst case scenario, considering I don't speak middle English or Latin, I'm treated as an enemy and locked up in a dungeon somewhere.

I don't think there is realistically a best case scenario

1375....

We can work with metals, so we can probably make boilers.

I invent steam power 400 years early.

Fuck you buddy, I'm barely getting by with modern medicine, you just ended me.