Basically the title, you need to use the skills you have now and be a productive member of society.
I don’t mean go back and show the wheel or try invent germ theory etc.
For example I’m a mechanic i think I could go back to the late 1800s and still fix and repair engines and steam engines.
Maybe even take that knowledge further back and work on the first industrial machines in the late 1700s but that’s about it.
If you placed me at the beginning of the industrial revolution I could from available materials build a working telegraph and telephone system and do pretty well for myself.
Prior to that I could be a pretty good peasant.
and be a productive member of society
I just write useless software for a useless company. I’m not a productive member of society today, I wouldn’t be one at any point in the past. 🤷♂️
You’re a Microsoft Excel developer?
I don’t have any skills so I don’t think I could get really far back.
I haven’t practised it in a long time but my formation was in a horticulture school, I could go pretty far back.
I’m a physician - am MD. As long as I don’t get burnt at the stake for witchcraft, I could go back as far as I wanted. People’s biology hasn’t changed much since Neolithic times.
Be a shame you can’t make medicines though
Just washing one’s hands before touching the patient would make a massive difference, alcohol is pretty abundant, willow bark tea for the pain (and contact your local herbalist for other remedies), you could infect people with cowpox to vaccinate them against smallpox, you might even be able to grow some penicillin if you manage to make some rudimentary Petri dishes out of broth or beer wort and happen to have the right spores floating around…
As a support engineer for a proprietary SaaS product I would probably be quite limited. But as I also run a LAMP VM and I think that was way more popular as a skill set requirement a little over a decade ago so that could help. Might even get higher pay…
For all of human history, labor has always been a productive skill.
I can do labor in any era.
I’m not even sure I can survive with my skills now.
that’s kind of what I’m thinking right now lmao
I’m pretty good at hunting and gathering. Back before my broken neck and back, I was super into wanting to buy some remote place in the Appalachians and pseudo homestead. I have messed with many of the required skills. I wanted a place in the mountains with a year round creek for a water wheel. Building a foundry and forge, along with a manual machine shop. I was into what I could do using junk from pick-a-part type junk yards. People often only think of parts for whatever low end car, but if you actually have a fundamental understanding of cars and the various technologies in different applications, a junk yard gives tremendous access to industrial technology for many types of machines and equipment. Junk yards are not setup for that kind of thing either. A little bit of flattery and flirting with a cashier goes a very long way when none of the collection of parts on your cart have legitimate prices on the menu.
Even with my disability now, I could probably survive in the wild by trapping game and some minor gardening if the population was low enough and I was in a decent location compared to where/when I live now in the era of the 50 year mortgage fuckwit dystopia.
I could potentially survive on fishing. Not for fish, I tried that once and sucked. But crabs are stupid. A few times gone for fun and can easily get a few in not very long. If I was having to survive I would probably make bigger/more nets or traps too.
I wonder about spear fishing, have seen a few pretty large fish in shallow water before around here depending on the tide, some were certainly possible to hit, even if you don’t hit every time that is a lot of food.
It is easier to spear fish underwater. You do not have the refractive index of light to deal with.
That is with modern equipment though
wait, i have skills??
Baking bread goes back pretty far. Think I’d rather just jump of a cliff, though.
Shhhh no talk only bake.
In a modern oven, sure. I make great bread from flour, water, salt. But without the ovens I understand? Without the fine ground flour? I dunno.
I promise you the lack of modern oven wouldn’t be the worst part. Making do with a wood-fire oven would be fine. It’s the proofing process that would be a pain in the ass. When raising bread, time, temperature, and humidity are all pretty much ingredients, and things can get finnicky. A proofer helps immensely with keeping bulk batches of bread a consistent quality day after day. The cooking bit is the easy part. But imagine just having a change of weather fuck with things and then you have to adjust the environment as best you can so the bread’ll rise right, and keep it stable for hours.
I baked as a living for 5 years, and I’m in the midwest USA, so I dealt with all 4 seasons varying. And on top of that a lot of the shop was glass windows, so you can bet the weather messed with things. Even with the proofer. So without, man, it’s annoying just to think about. Would probably have to seal a room up aside from a chimney, keep a fire going, and take a boiling pot of water off and on the fire to keep the air the right humidity.
I don’t use a proofing oven, or rely on consistent temperature, even now but it does mean I’m sitting here at midnight baking the rye so it can cool overnight because it wasn’t ready to bake earlier so yeah even here in the subtropics I notice the difference in the winter, bread is slower to rise.
I had friends who moved to the bush and built a clay oven and they said all they could successfully bake was popovers because the oven started hot then cooled off, there was no way to keep it constant.
Yeah that’s what my wife said, she’d be a cook and I said on a fire no stove gutting chickens etc all on your own. Then she rethought it and settled on housewife and not a great one haha
It does, but by how far back does it go as an only skill?
I guess you can only go far as far as there are dedicated bakers in the community and flour available. I guess that only takes you as far back as mills are available?
Only a few thousand years. Beats my skillset of SQL and Linux.
1921… Did people mess up their Model Ts?
About as far back as shops went. I work retail, I could work retail in any year I presume
As a waitress, probably the 1980’s.
As a computer scientist / CS teacher, probably the 1960’s… without being outed as a time traveler, anyway.
computer scientist / CS teacher, probably the 1960’s
I’m not sure how well of a living they’ve made back then, but surely mathematicians / math teachers were a thing since ancient times.
Someone who knows a bunch of complexity theory, graph theory, and sorting algorithms for large data sets; but not calculus or set theory is gonna be conspicuously unusual the further back you go.
but not calculus or set theory
My computer science curriculum covered calculus - perhaps not as rigorously as the mathematical sciences, but enough for it to be “working” knowledge (personally, I’ve forgotten 90% of it since graduation).
Plus, I am sure a computer science teacher should be at least familiar with these topics, or be capable of picking them up.
I’m familiar, I could pick them them up (I have before, and like you, forgotten them from disuse), but I certainly don’t know them offhand the way I know, say, Dijkstra’s algorithm.
I can pick things up and put them down, so as long as there’s things that need picked up and put down I’m good.
I hear Sisyphus is looking to train his replacement. In fact, he says it’s a pretty cushy job, as there’s not need to pick things up, and definitely no putting them down
