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.
So on one side, I have a history degree, so I could probably navigate the world quite well up until about 1500 or 1600. I know that sounds relatively recent, but I would know a lot about my local area.
On the other side, I’m a trans woman, and history in my country is not too kind to gender variants, though that is not a monolith, a lot of people have been burnt alive or hung for gender variancy where I am back then.
I’m not even sure I can survive with my skills now.
that’s kind of what I’m thinking right now lmao
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
sometimes you gotta start from the ground floor
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.
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 copilot spewing slop.
That’s why every single update breaks some fundamental feature that had been working for ages.
And no one can fix it, because they fired everyone who knew anything about how their software works.
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…
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. 🤷♂️
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?
Being able to set a bone, sterilize a wound, and stitch it closed would make a huge difference for a lot of people. High proof alcohol and cauterization, and fine enough needles are the hardest parts on that list.
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 no need to pick things up, and definitely no putting them down
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.
But only for about 500 years, then you’re a madman or a witch and things get really interesting.
My skills travel pretty far. But with my gender id not be allowed to use them.
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.
I can learn new things, so any time in human history.
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 could paint some kick ass cave paintings and field dress a deer.
I could be an excellent prostitute, so checkmate motherfuckers.
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
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
Great question.
In culinary school there is an entire module on butchering - mammals, birds, fish, etc. I’ve always said my ability to cleanly and safely butcher all the things would make me very valuable in a post-apocalyptic scenario.
Creating and maintaining a fire isn’t easy but it also isn’t hard. Unrelated to culinary school, I’ve learned the skill to create charcoal from solid wood in a primitive low-oxygen furnace - that would be useful.
Even without metallurgy, I could probably cook on slates and stones, or create pottery solid enough to boil water. If I’m around during or after the Iron Age, I’ve got all the cast iron I could want.
Ingredients would probably be limited. My knowledge of food chemistry would definitely help. Without refrigeration I’d have to rely heavily on pickling and salting. If I could learn glassblowing, we could move on to canning as a preservative.
