Ask HN: If you woke up tomorrow and it is 18th century, what would you do?

Hypothetical question, you woke up tomorrow and it is 1718 or it is 1018 or 318 BC? And you have your knowledge (just knowledge, you can't bring anything with you to the past), what would you do, how would you use your knowledge?

(assume the language is not the issue and don't worry about the grandfather paradox)

First, it would be personal tragedy. I'd never voluntarily go back in time. EVER! That said, I'd go ahead and invent modern real analysis (along with the rudiments of abstract algebra) and give the math aficionados of 18th century run for their money. If nothing I'd write simply mind-blowing political and science fiction that takes place in the future (every day life in 20th and early 21st century.)

Start writing down every damn thing I could remember. I can barely remember the skills I had in college I haven't used. It would fade pretty fast amid daily life as a serf.

Bonus: If my writings survived, I'd make Nostradamus look most insignificant indeed.

Seriously though, this is one of my very favorite road trip games. Your family can keep their punch-buggies, we do this.

(Wake up where? You mention the grandfather paradox but 1718 is precisely 70 years before my country is invaded/colonized by the British. My very presence, as a 'European' on the continent of Australia would tear a rip in the fabric of space-time.)

So presumably I'm back in my ancestral homelands of Britain and Ireland.

But language is an issue.

(revival efforts aside) Norn, Cornish and Manx are several of the languages of the Crown that have gone extinct since 1718. I would catalogue these endangered languages and stress the importance of preservation and multilingual education - which is a theme in 21st C society in the case of Welsh, Basque, Catalan etc.

And the 18th century brought education to deaf children into modernity. The interventionist in me would unify fledgling British, French and Martha's Vineyard efforts into a common variety so that the world's hearing impaired can communicate in the same language.