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

I’d roll out the cotton gin!

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.)

Immediately kick off the industrial revolution, with an accelerated path to large-scale power-generation, electrical devices, and information technology.

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.

It reminds me Mark Twain's novel " A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" part when he convinced the people that he cause a Solar eclipse and gain a position as a principal minister of the King.

(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.

This is practically the same question as asking if you woke up tomorrow and an EMP had gone off, effectively putting us back to 1718, what would you do? The first thing would be to try to survive the 95% die off of population that would occur because the number of people would be completely unsustainable at that technology level.

The 2nd thing I'd do is kick myself for not doing everything I could to get the government to finally harden the electrical grid and other infrastructure before catastrophe struck.