If you can pick the physical, but not the social, makeup then you don’t have sufficient precision to reliably pick out a world that is actually significantly worse of than your home timeline—if it supports humans, either it has social and technological structures conductive to a high-utility equilibrium social order, or it can be dystopian. Note that base-line earth is largely dystopian in the sense I mean here!
Most of the population is living lives much poorer than our understanding would permit. , and you will not be able to reliably predict the social structures at all from the information you have. Which also means picking a world certain to have problems you can solve is impossible, and you will in fact be certain to land in a world with social and political structures you dont understand at all. Which will probably cause you difficulties.
Best bet for landing somewhere where you can do some actual good, with a skillset that will allow you to do so?
Study the engineering principles of heavy EE, hydro-power, Nuclear Engineering, metallurgy, and the techniques of the modern agricultural revolution.. Pick a world with no easily available fossil fuels. With sufficient knowledge it should be possible to specify out a path to an industrial economy that goes “Muscles and animals->Hydro->Nukes” and you are likely to have some info which is useful to the locals regardless of what level they start at.
Well, this is fiction so there’s a fair handful of deus ex machina here; if it needs to happen for the story, a particularly bad world needs only to be plausible to come about. Moreover, there’s a poorly-defined mechanism which makes the chosen world be more like what they expect it to be than would be really justified by its description. Sorry I’m doing a poor job of describing the exact setup, since it’s a little convoluted. It’s also not a 100% known mechanism for the character involved either.
If you can pick the physical, but not the social, makeup then you don’t have sufficient precision to reliably pick out a world that is actually significantly worse of than your home timeline—if it supports humans, either it has social and technological structures conductive to a high-utility equilibrium social order, or it can be dystopian. Note that base-line earth is largely dystopian in the sense I mean here! Most of the population is living lives much poorer than our understanding would permit. , and you will not be able to reliably predict the social structures at all from the information you have. Which also means picking a world certain to have problems you can solve is impossible, and you will in fact be certain to land in a world with social and political structures you dont understand at all. Which will probably cause you difficulties.
Best bet for landing somewhere where you can do some actual good, with a skillset that will allow you to do so? Study the engineering principles of heavy EE, hydro-power, Nuclear Engineering, metallurgy, and the techniques of the modern agricultural revolution.. Pick a world with no easily available fossil fuels. With sufficient knowledge it should be possible to specify out a path to an industrial economy that goes “Muscles and animals->Hydro->Nukes” and you are likely to have some info which is useful to the locals regardless of what level they start at.
Well, this is fiction so there’s a fair handful of deus ex machina here; if it needs to happen for the story, a particularly bad world needs only to be plausible to come about. Moreover, there’s a poorly-defined mechanism which makes the chosen world be more like what they expect it to be than would be really justified by its description. Sorry I’m doing a poor job of describing the exact setup, since it’s a little convoluted. It’s also not a 100% known mechanism for the character involved either.