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.
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. I’m skilled enough to construct one, assuming I can communicate with other laborers to have the parts made
As far as general labor skills go though, I could make a living just about any time with agriculture. Unskilled labor is timeless
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
i could paint some kick ass cave paintings and field dress a deer.
I’m not even sure I can survive with my skills now.
that’s kind of what I’m thinking right now lmao
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 are 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 only for about 500 years, then you’re a madman or a witch and things get really interesting.
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.
Baking bread goes back pretty far. Think I’d rather just jump of a cliff, though.
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
Shhhh no talk only bake.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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
Their knowledge in modern paints and techniques might not be applicable to 11th century technology
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!
The day before yesterday with great confidence.
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 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 don’t have any skills so I don’t think I could get really far back.
I’m barely hanging on now
