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’m not even sure I can survive with my skills now.
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
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. 🤷♂️
deleted by creator
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…
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.
My skills travel pretty far. But with my gender id not be allowed to use them.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 of that, I grew up on a dairy farm, and learned a lot of that trade from my dad. I can milk a cow by hand, so if that was all I needed to do, I could go back all the way to Mesopotamia.
i could paint some kick ass cave paintings and field dress a deer.
As a software engineer, I’d struggle with the limitations of ten years ago.
But on the non-work side, I have no problems with maintenance on my house and hand tools haven’t changed much, so at least 80 years
That’s interesting - I wasn’t aware of how fundamentally we’ve moved on in the last 10 years. Presumably you went to uni, so that’s 4 years, so you’ll have the theory I guess? I did my Degree in ‘computing’ in 2003. Did some Java and Web design using Dreamweaver and a whole module on Lotus Notes. Yeah, not super useful!
Looking back ten years I used a different set of tools for a different set of programming languages for different purposes. This has been a general pattern as the industry has evolved over my career.
Yes I have a good depth and breadth of knowledge that would help me pick things up but I’m not sure relearning the technology would be different from learning a new one, and all the frustrations of old tech would be there.
As an example, I’d have to relearn the ins and outs of virtual machines and would be damn frustrated to lose the benefits of containers. All that fiddling around with networks, and being tied to specific component brands to get scalable performance. Having to relearn something like puppet or ansible or chef to build out the machines instead of a straightforward dockerfile. And the frustration of how slow it all is and not being able to run anywhere
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
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, no 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.
I 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. Steel 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.
We have a winner!
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…
I’m a structural engineer. I might not have all the materials needed, but I could probably still design old masonry structures if needed.
