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.
I’ve been doing computer engineering long enough to do the field in the 80s and still live as comfortably as I do now, if not more so.
I also sail, with a license old enough that I have my own sextant and reduction tables. I’d assume those skills transfer hundreds of years back, but I wouldn’t like those survivability odds.
Grew up hunting, growing, and preserving a good percent of my food. I might need to brush up on specifics but i think i could do okay if i had social supports for my disability (food providers usually do/did)
my skills sadly don’t allow me to go back in time at all.
I don’t even got skills for today
My day job won’t go far, but my fire expertise and leatherworking skills will take me pretty far
Give me some stone knives and bear skins and I could construct a mnemonic memory circuit. ;-)
I’m a locksmith so any time since the invention of the pin tumbler lock 150ish years ago I will be fine. I don’t prefer it but I can hand file keys without any electric key cutting machines. Before that the bit and barrel locks that were used I know enough to get by though admittedly I don’t know enough history to say roughly how long ago those were invented.
I think my knowledge of first aid and basic anatomy would be of some use in any pre-modern time period. I know enough to make a positive difference at least (wash that cut, dont drink water from downstream of your encampment, give the sick plenty of fluids, etc)
Beyond that, i’d be behind everyone else. I can fish, forage, garden, cook, start fires, and build shelter, but so could everyone for most of human history. I could probaby keep up with a hunter-gatherer society, but i’d be the least capable among them.
I’m a chef, so probably back to when fire started to be a thing people used.
At least as far back as keyboard instruments have been around I could be a musician. Ending up further in time, I’d be a composer; the guy that revolutionised polyphony.
As a software engineer, I’d struggle with the limitations of ten years ago.
I’m a structural engineer. I might not have all the materials needed, but I could probably still design old masonry structures if needed.
I can learn new things, so any time in human history.
I’m an electrical design engineer but I have a degree in mechanical engineering, so I reckon I’d fit in during the industrial revolution or even the agricultural revolution
My skills travel pretty far. But with my gender id not be allowed to use them.
Well, i learned farmer first, so no matter the time, i would revolutionize the field.
I can dig a hole in the earth so I’d say my skills apply all the way back to Ur and Sumeria.
Can you do it without a shovel? Even if hard packed? What if there’s a rock too big for you to lift?
You could go all the way back to dinosaur times when we were burrowing rodents
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.
If the people at the time allowed you and gave you the means to, I think most people could definitively revolutionize one or two fields, and accelerate multiple more
Even just knowing what is possible in the future should not be underestimated. I could point people towards the right track in physics, chemistry, astronomy, material science, biology, medicine, electronics, and so on. But especially in computer science and communications/networking, as those are the fields I know the most of. I could probably be a major founder of the field and (re)discover a lot of parts of it
A lot of science is essentially stumbling around in the dark. Yes, we’re doing it methodically and sometimes we get some pointers towards the right track, but we can’t know what we don’t know. If we knew exactly what it is that we should/could know but don’t, that is a massive benefit. Like for example, at some point in time people didn’t know if antibiotics or vaccines were possible, but if you told them “yeah, I don’t know the specifics, but I absolutely know 100% for sure that it’s possible” you can be sure it would spur a massive investigation into it, and you could give pointers from the bits and pieces you knew
Of course, as mentioned, the big issue is them trusting you and actually believing you have some sort of knowledge they don’t have. If you don’t play your cards right you’ll probably just get killed for being a charlatan lol. But if you manage to get some early wins and score yourself a dedicated workshop/lab and a team, you could do soon much
We seem to all be good peasants now unfortunately haha
Hey now some of us would make terrible peasants.
I don’t have any skills so I don’t think I could get really far back.
I’m barely hanging on now
I haven’t practised it in a long time but my formation was in a horticulture school, I could go pretty far back.
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?
Obviously not.
There are no microsoft developers these days.
Only chatgpt spewing slop.
That’s why every single update breaks some fundamental feature that had been working for ages.
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.
No medicine, no hospitals, no diagnostic or treatment tools? No trauma care. How much can you really do?
As a non-medical person, I can’t do much more than sterilize a wound and apply a bandage. All respect to you but that far back would you be able to do any more?
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…
Penicillin isn’t just growing some mold, it was selected for out of literally tens of thousands of strains of mold that were sent in from around the globe to find one that wouldn’t kill the patient. You would, at a minimum, need: microscope optics, glassblowing equipment to perform extractions and purifications, a source of solvents (ether will only go so far), assaying equipment (even old school stuff needs indicators), and enough industrial progress to make and machine steel to be able to scale any of it up.
Just finding the correct strain of mold to begin to produce any form of antibiotics would need a pretty insane amount of hardware to make what we would consider a rudimentary lab in modern times, let alone isolating it in a way that’s safe for human consumption.
Before the twentieth century killing the patient wasn’t a big deal, it was kind of expected. Robert Liston, the best (or at least fastest, which for surviving patients was what mattered) surgeon of the nineteenth century, once had a 300% death rate in one of his surgeries (he killed the patient, an assistant, and a spectator) and all the reaction he got was “well, it was a good attempt, try to do better next time”.
Just keep trying until you find a strain that kills less patients than the previous one. They would probably have died from gangrene anyway, so it’s not like you’re killing them, really, just changing the cause of death. 🤷♂️
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…
About as far back as shops went. I work retail, I could work retail in any year I presume
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 I’m the era of the 50 year mortgage fuckwit dystopia.
We have a winner!
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
You did not understand the abstraction. I covered all of human history from hunter gatherer to modern.
Are there hunter gatherer methods of launching a spear effectively while underwater? Plus wouldn’t it be much harder to see the fish.
Scuba or snorkeling – diving leads to spear fishing. It helps to have modern elastics to make a riffle like spear gun. When under water, big fish are easy game. You’ll see them easily in the ocean and reasonably well in large rivers and lakes too. With rivers and lakes you can just noodle with large catfish. If you reach into holes and cervices, catfish will bite your hand. It is more like sucking. You just pull them up, not tackle or equipment needed.
Without modern elastics, any bow or torsion based energy storage system would work to make a crossbow like action. I could easily flake a rock to make a crude knife, and fashion something out of some sticks.
In would probably struggle most with my chemistry using organics I find in nature. I know stuff like the best bows are recurved with composite wood. Ultimately, I am loosely aware of the innovations of Watts with the pressure regulation of a steam engine. I know how to make bloom iron. And I know the basics of indirect heating and atmospheric control of the Bessemer process. Additionally, I am aware that the key to lathe precision is a heavy base, and that a lathe screw lead is able to cut a more accurate lathe screw lead, and eventually achieve any machine precision desired. Prussian blue or any dye based pigment, is used with a special thick chisel to hand scrape metal flat. Magnetite is the primary ore for iron. Steal is all about precision control over the carbon content. Heating calcium carbonate is super handy. Boxite requires chemistry to get to the aluminum. High voltage arcs across electrodes in air will make nitric acid, but guano is the most accessible form of nitrates at smaller scales. Potatoes are the most important food source to scavenge.
A general deep curiosity and willingness to explore are the key personality traits. I love learning at a fundamental level where I actually understand stuff. I am not all that bright, just a jack of all trades type person where I have a very broad set of skills and understanding of the world. I’m a swiss army knife – all the tools, but the world’s shittiest scissors.
1921… Did people mess up their Model Ts?
Those things are seriously weird to drive.
For all of human history, labor has always been a productive skill.
I can do labor in any era.
I have no callouses or stamina. It would take a long time for me to become productive at labor. As an older guy, maybe never
That’s true. I’m young ish and fully vaccinated so I’ve got a lot of years on humans from most of history.
I’d have to re-remember a lot of stuff I’ve forgotten, but late 70s, early 80s.
Unless you count “typing” as a marketable skill, then I could probably go back to 1872?
You probably type too fast for the old typewriters and don’t hit hard enough, but you’d adapt.
All the way back
wait, i have skills??
Windows 98 SE
Not very. Once you get past my birth the technology is so different most everything I know outside the basics like reading, writing, and math are useless. I don’t know how to program with punch cards in assembly. I might do alright in a chem or biology lab for awhiles. Pipetting would be a bitch though.
Given a fresh restart, carpenter or blacksmith probably. Id loathe the lack of food though
No sugar tonight in my coffee
No sugar tonight in my tea
No sugar to stand beside me
No sugar to run with me
Da-un-do-dow dow da-un-do-dow
Da-un-do-dow dow un-dow-dow
Da-un-do-dow dow da-un-do-dow
Da-un-do-dow dow
How long has Excel been around?
I think Incan knot tying was a bit like a spreadsheet, maybe you could adapt.
I am very good with hair braiding so could probably get work in a rich lady’s house I guess. Good with numbers (I work as an accountant) but the past seems so relentlessly sexist not going to try.
I am a carpenter so I could probably go back and get drinks after work with Lu Ban in 5th century BC China.
That i guess really is a trade that wouldn’t have changed much in hundreds of years, woods still wood just have to pray to the milwakee God for a faster way to do it all
Be the next jesus haha
Italian Renaissance maybe? I can paint pretty good
Good enough to be paid though?
…eh I guess
Yeah I can go pretty damn far back. (username)
Without all the moddcoms of life? No more electric oven gas stove etc?
When did the cook stop doing the butchering of the animal?
If there’s one thing I know about chefs is that they’re still able to make a banger of a dish while out of half the ingredients, the oven is broken so they’re using a blowtorch, and Joey the kitchen bitch needs saved from getting eaten by the industrial mixer. I’m sure they’ll figure out using a wood stove while taking out their anger towards front of house by butchering a pig
There is always a need for dumb labor. I may not be good at it… yet…
Just don’t get involved with any pyramid schemes.
Look, I have a job opportunity, room and board provided nearish to a large river yes it’s I will Egypt but…
Bring in 5 guys and you can be their boss, then those guys each need to bring in 5 more guys, they can be bosses of those guys, you get to be the big boss…wait wait wait, the king is just gonna go grab some outlanders, maybe a cow or two.
Hey it you throw all the waste in the river it just goes d I wn the river… Take that Information as you want
I could possibly be a scribe? I took Latin classes ages ago - and most of the ancient scribes’ work was just copying an existing copy of the Bible.
I’m decent at philosophy but terrible at Ancient Greek so that’s out.
I’m pretty decent at basic/intermediate chemistry but that’s pretty modern. Same with basic life support.
All ya gotta do is transalchemutate lead into gold
Gonna blow Galileo’s mind with an equatorial telescope mount. Even more so when I attach a clock to it and make it automatically track the sky
Per the OP's post:
I don't mean go back and show the wheel or try invent germ theory etc.
This is true, but I don’t like deleting comments because everyone can see that I left one and deleted it, and I get self-conscious about that
So instead of deleting the comment I just added on some bullshit about unskilled labor
The day before yesterday with great confidence.
I’ll go way back and wow people with mayonnaise.
That’s basically every trash isekai anime.
That was the joke, actually.
Well-played.
I could probably only go as far back as the industrial revolution.
I work in materials testing, mostly for automotive and aerospace, but I could probably put that to work helping design early steam engines and rail systems.
I also play trombone. That design was more or less finalized around that same time.
Yeah it’s tough, I can explain electricity but sure don’t have the ability to make it. That’s why I figure steam engines and stuff someone else made i can repair and innovate on.
Creating electricity is surprisingly easy. Copper and Zinc were widely available for centuries before electricity and the only other item you need is an acid. Nitric acid was being made back in the 13th century. Arrange a copper bar and a zinc bar separated from one another with an insulator (glass, ceramic, or even wood) in a glass or ceramic jar. Pour in the acid submerging most of the bars with some expose above the acid. You now have a battery with the anode and cathode (positive and negative terminals) being the top of the bars.
Barely slightly more sophisticated batteries than this powered telegraph offices for powering Morse code sending keys.
And if you magnetized some iron using the electricity, you could create a small generator and turbine, creating a constant (and practically free) supply for further experiments
My computer skills? Not far. My house painting skills? I guess maybe 200 years, but I’m not excited about the prospect of using lead-based paint and wood ladders. As a jazz-trained musician, I guess to the 1940s.
House painting goes back to the 11th century according to this site
https://www.backthenhistory.com/articles/the-history-of-house-paint
How cool! Give me a time machine and some antibiotics and set me up with an English painter’s guild in post-plague 14th century!
Their knowledge in modern paints and techniques might not be applicable to 11th century technology
I feel like the further back I go, the better I would do. Send me to 65,000,000 B.C.
Just in time for the Chicxulub impact.
Baking bread goes back pretty far. Think I’d rather just jump of a cliff, though.
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.
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 oven wouldn’t be the worst part. Making do with a wood-fire stove 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.
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
Shhhh no talk only bake.
I imagine I’d make a not totally incompetent blacksmith, or some other equivalent allied trade. In fact, I’d probably have a better chance at that 300 or so years ago than now.
Yes, I do already have my own anvil. Jury’s out on whether or not I feel like lugging it with me, though. The fucker is heavy.
Yeah i imagine having an understanding of modern merttaluurgy could really serve you well 300 years ago.
maybe somewhere in the greek era where I could be a cynic messing around
Depends on the skillset in question.
On one hand I work with IT/Clusters and robotics for the geophysical exploration sector. 20 years, probably. Beyond that and it gets dubious apart from this one system that actually runs on MS-DOS to this day (because MS-DOS is surprisingly good at realtime stuff if you want it to do something very simple).
On the other hand I do a lot of digital I/O and automation which would probably be very useful in the 60s, maybe even before if I manage to join the pioneers.
On top if that, I grew up on a dairy farm, and learned a lot of that trade from my dad.
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.
I’m not even sure I can survive with my skills now.
that’s kind of what I’m thinking right now lmao
i could paint some kick ass cave paintings and field dress a deer.
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
I’m not sure how well they did in the past, but surely mathematicians / math teachers are a thing.
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.
