Imagine the year 1518, and imagine you as part of some fantastical storyline have to get zapped back there, what single item would you take with you?
For my UK readers, you would be going back to the earlier part of King Henry VIII reign, one of the most famous rulers in our history. But to answer this question we need to understand a bit more what life was like then.
Its said that society and technology has changed more in the last 100 years than it had in the preceding 1000, and you could take an average person from 1918 and send them back to 1818 and they would probably be ok, whereas sending us back 100 years would lead to us being incapable, or sending the 1918 denizen to our time would be equally as difficult for them. Think about massive changes in the last 100 years, the normalization of high speed transportation and flight (and space flight), the social revolutions, equality, breaking down of class divides, modern medicines and vaccines, improvements in food production and food quality, and the changes in human labour connected to them. Concepts like computing, the internet, AI, blockchain are coming faster and faster, our pace of change is accelerating.
500 years ago, most people were subsistence farmers (producing food for their own bellies) and any small mounts left could be sold, a very few people had enough money/power to not worry about food production/security.
What single item would I take back
For me, it would be the telescope.
Not so new and fangled that it would be mistaken for witchcraft and have me burned at the stake, but also about 100 years before its actual discovery. It would give me the power and influence I would need to survive in such a hard time, because I could provide real benefits to generals in armies, or see which ships were on the horizon. But it would also allow me to show people that the universe is bigger than can be seen with the naked eye, and there is more to creation than the Church of the time understands.