You have one week before you travel to the year 1500. You can only pack what will fit in a backpack. What do you bring?

A micro sized metal lathe and some tooling. Several kindles with solar charger loaded up with scientific textbooks and machinery handbooks (the Gingery books on bootstrapping a machine shop from scratch would be ideal). Medicine books, environmental surveys, etc. A bit of gold I mean, it’s going to be a heavy backpack.

Don’t bother with electricity, a leather belt off a water wheel will work fine. Bringing modern machining back 500 years could dramatically decrease the time to industrial revolution. A lathe can be used to build pretty much any other machine. The kindle isn’t a durable solution though, you need to find some scribes to start duplicating it. Use the gold to pay the scribes.

You’re probably not going to make it long, what with the rampant disease and lack of modern medicine, but you can hopefully advance the world enough to make some real difference.

/r/AskReddit Thread