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.
I mean, tune it just right and you can get the Industrial Revolution started a couple millenia early and maybe bypass the whole colonialism nonsense. Middle ages is too late, too much theocracy. Common knowledge gets you in grecorroman spaces, but maybe you can overshoot a touch and get some nice Phoenician traders to bankroll your plan to mass produce bycicles or Ikea-style furniture and ship it all over the Mediterranean.
Just… hope you stay healthy or that the rules let you pack a bunch of antibiotics. Or maybe learn a bunch of modern medicine before you go. Maybe prioritize the whole “discovering penicillin” thing when you get there.
Problem with that plan is you don’t know if you will be a slave.
Not necessarily insurmountable, but still a good point.
You may still have an easier time getting things up and running as a slave in antiquity than as a serf in the Middle Ages, depending on where you end up. Pretty sure you’d have a better shot as a slave in antiquity than in the US or other colonial areas, both because colonialism reeeeally sucked and because you’d have relatively more valuable skills.
@MudMan I think the odds are much better if you’re a non-chattel kind of slave, for sure.
Don’t get me wrong, you could also just materialize chained up to the bottom of a mine or in the middle of a war campaign lasting 40% of your lifespan and die in a week.
It’s just since the premise doesn’t say you get to refuse at least this way you’d have a good chance at just absolutely smashing it and maybe bypassing some of the real nasty stuff on the way to technological advancement.
@MudMan totally. Nowhere’s completely safe. This kind of thought experiment is always going to be a numbers game.