Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Wandering Somewhen

I enjoyed this Respectful Insolence post about time travel (answering another post at Aardvarcheology), inquiring how well someone would do if dropped in a familiar city with no money or ID, 500 years ago, or 300 if we're in places that didn't have extensive cities 500 years ago.

There are lots of interesting answers in the comments, with some people coming up with practical plans to advance the sciences, and some others concluding that they would just immediately catch plague and die of general uselessness.

I'm going to put myself in the latter camp, having no very transferable skills. I mean, I'd say I could try to advance library science using the awesome bits of MARC Bibliographic that I manage to retain from one day to the next, but I doubt that society would be hanging anxiously on my words (especially since book-learnin' was not exactly admired in womenfolk back in the day). In all likelihood I'd just succumb at once to whatever flu was going around.

Or, as several commenters suggest, be executed as a witch.

I do have nice strong teeth for 300 years ago, but I don't know how far that would get me, beyond assuring that I could chew the food of the day.

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