What technology would you give to ancient people just to fuck with them?
I'd give laser pointers to Neanderthals. Even if they did figure out some useful application for them (maybe hunting?) they'd run out of batteries eventually.
Bicycles. If we could have gotten bicycles a few centuries before cars, I don't think modern cities would be so damn car centric.
If I may ask, where are you from? The city I live in is a nightmare for cars, the roads were made for horses and walking, narrow and winding cobblestone streets and the city tries its best to keep cars out of the center.
US. An utter hellscape. Where we ripped out world class trolleys so they wouldn't inconvenience drivers.
A snow globe from Niagra Falls, a clothes hanger, A Buttplug, a die cast Model of The General Lee, some Tide pods, an assortment of Weeble Wobble’s, The Complete Jane Fonda Workout (large print, hardback edition), A magnifying glass, A bag of Candy Corn.
You're just listing all the things within arms reach, aren't you?
These items are in my go bag.
Arms reach because they’ve all just been pulled out of an ass.
Need justifications
A single glass coca-cola bottle
You must be crazy. ;)
Aye yi yi yi yi
Something with gears. Like a cranked egg whisk. Huge amounts of science went into this, but all of it should be replicable in a few generations of experiment with even bronze working. And it should inspire inventors of the age too
Or wood. Mills used wooden peg gears to great effect for a long time.
The bigger challenge is to have enough jobs worth doing with gears to keep craftsmen trained, since making a smooth turning gear by hand is a thing. If this is Rome, there will be, but they already had some knowledge of gears. If it's cavemen there's not a chance.
I would take a portable CD player, place a CD with Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up on it playing backwards, hook up solar panels, remove the ability to shut it on/off, and set it up a circuit that will:
Imagine how crazy it would be as tech advanced through the ages and people create their own artificial sound and eventually realise that that sounds from the mysterious artifact from the future was playing music BACKWARDS and there's discernible lyrics.
Hopefully the English language is developed and Rick Astley gets to make his song before anyone figures it out!
A large obsidian slab standing perfectly vertically.
oh I'd teach 'em modern english, and then dump a truck load of People's Magazine's outside their hut
Going for a hunt today? Can't. Need to know what Janniston said to Branjelo on page 4
If you’re looking for the biggest change in our timeline for the littlest work I’d give a hindu-arabic numerals to early Greek mathematicians. Watching those guys try to wrap their heads around zero, that would fuck Pythagoras.
The idea that nobody understood the concept of zero until long after the Greeks is just something I can never understand.
Just... how? I don't remember having to be taught what zero was, I'm pretty sure I grokked it instantly.
A Nintendo Switch running Animal Crossing. Assume it has some kind of perpetual battery, and they can figure out how to operate it/play the game, and read our modern English.
I'm thinking they figure modern civilisation is about (or back to) fishing and farming... and that animals are intelligent. Like validating TF outta the Egyptian pantheon. You're a human but you have a dog for a neighbor, here's a koala, a gorilla, an eagle... and they all talk and wear clothes.
(Of course, if we wanna blow their minds with a game AND we can assume they can play it, why not just go straight to Cyberpunk?)
A monolith
That still trips up some people today. That metal monolith that was propped up in the desert a year or two ago comes to mind.
Magnets
And for generations people will ask “Magnets, how do they fucking work?”
Just wait til they discover long neck giraffes, pet cats, and dogs
One of those 3D printed non-round gear toys. They could immediately appreciate both the impressive technology that went into designing and manufacturing it, and that it has no use whatsoever. Which would be a trip.
Leaf blower. They are loud and the "breath" coming from them is pretty awesome.
A Furby.
Robotic animal recreations were actually very popular in the ancient world.
The mechanical Furk
A Roman dodecahedron, it fucks with modern people as well.
Ha ha, that's my one too - tell us what these bloody things are for!!
I'd just give a LGM-118A Peacekeeper MIRV to the Aztecs and say nothing more. I wonder if they would eventually manage to do something with it.
Flashlights.
Fleshlights
Flushlights.
Yes, toilet illuminators, what of it?
Condoms
i would give them nuclear weapons
Yeah finish off human race before it begins
a slot machine and a battery to keep it running
one of those fleshlight vibrators that suck your dick
Neanderthal goes extinct.
A bottle with a highly concentrated solution of polonium, radium, plutonium or anything spicy and ionizing.
Preferably coupled with something that glows nicely, like ZnS. Just pick a suitable fluorescent dye and make it blue or green for bonus points.
I'm reminded of the real-life Brazilian scavengers that found some medical cesium, and decided to do body paint with their kids. :(
I can imagine the body paint story ended badly... No need to look up the facts with an introduction like that.
Wasn't there also a Russian RTG core that was so hot it would melt the snow around it? Some scavengers found it, and got immediately blasted with a lethal does of radiation—as you would expect.
With this post, OP was clearly aiming for a minor annoyance or a frustrating little prank, but that story just gave me an idea that goes a fair bit beyond that... More like diabolical malice, but here goes anyway.
Sending one of those plutonium cores back in time to the neanderthals would be a pretty good candidate too. It doesn't really glow, which is a bummer, but it has other "magical" properties to compensate. The heat might still attract them to it, and the intense radiation would kill them within a day or two. If they somehow manage to touch the plutonium itself—a feat worthy of recognition—they could also experience its toxicity.
A screw
An LED light bulb.
I'd give Masada machine guns.
The fleshlight
Attack helicopters.
Careful, back in the future we might all identify as attack helicopters from then on
That singing fish animatronic. Convinced people it’s a god. Wait for the battery to die and the eventual religious crisis.
They would be deeply concerned as it appears to get slowly possessed by a demon when the batteries are low
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dHchmWsrfUo