Ability of a Time Traveler from 1700 to Adapt to 2007

Factual Questions
21

[QUOTE=Alive At Both Ends]
I’m not aware of any country that’s so “backward” that they’ve never even seen or heard of any of the products of modern technology. That’s the situation with a person from 1700 - they’ve no knowledge of radio, TV, powered vehicles, computers, electric light, washing machines, refigerators, telephones etc. It’d take years before such a person could function even as well as a modern eight-year-old in our world, and in many respects would never catch up.
[/QUOTE]

One thing I dont’ usually see mentioned in these speculations is that most of us even today don’t understand how our technology works. We do know what it’s for, however, and I don’t think that part would be so hard to explain to someone who can read and write and understands some basic math. As for engineering, such a person is likely to have seen some machinery, even it it’s just water mills and so forth. They would have seen bridges and buildings being built, and even without seeing the process of building they could understand all sorts of things just by the way the building in their era were built–for example, arches are a good way of supporting a roof.

If the person grew up in a city, their father and uncles probably had some sort of occupation that might even translate well to our era, like that of a baker or glass blower.

Since the person understands basic symbolic processes–reading, writing, and arithmetic, I think they could easily learn enough about computers to use one.

22

I think a well-studied 17[sup]th[/sup] Century gentleman from Europe would probably have more in common, culturally, with modern-day Americans than some immigrants from real backwaters – who seem to manage, eventually. If (s)he were an English (or maybe Spanish, too) speaker – easier yet. I don’t think it would be as difficult as some people here seem to imagine.

Oh,and this?
[QUOTE=Johnny L.A.]
He may still believe … that the Earth is only 6,000 years old
[/QUOTE]
Which would be a real stumbling block, because nobody believes that, nowadays… :rolleyes: (not at Johnny… at the fact people still believe that)

23

[QUOTE=Noone Special]
Oh,and this?Which would be a real stumbling block, because nobody believes that, nowadays… :rolleyes: (not at Johnny… at the fact people still believe that)
[/QUOTE]

I meant to be sarcastic, but I became distracted.

24

Just a question - for this to be in GQ, would we not need to have someone from 1700 who traveled to 2007 answer it?

25

The culture shock would be enormous- the British Empire no longer exists (alas), the Spanish, French, and Dutch Empires have also long since collapsed, America is independent, women and poor people have the vote, and it’s possible to cross the planet in 25 hours by aircraft.

Trying to work out what the hell an iPod is or how come it’s not socially acceptable to go grouse hunting in Hyde Park/Central Park with a musket would be the least of his or her problems, I think… :wink:

26

Incredibly unlikey. We covered this to some degree in this thread.

The real challenge would be manners and social expectations. Anything beyond 100 years things would start becoming increasingly difficult. Manners, customs and modes of thought start to become increasingly alien. It would be very easy to make multiple gaffs in a single day conducting normal business. Without a lot of coaching it would be very hard to maintain a normal relationship with anyone at all.

Imagine if today you met a man who regularly referred to the proper place of niggers or pinched the bottoms of attractive women as a matter of course or used flying to the moon as standard of impossibility. They may not actually be arrested or beaten up, but you would certainly look at them as being extremely ignorant, odd and socially maladjusted.

And remember this person is a typical man of his day. He won’t understand basic economics, he believes that disease is caused by evil spirits, he sees nothing wrong with mutiliating people as punishment for crime, he believs in the existence of witches and so forth. And as others have said, that personality is fixed. He will alternate between revolting the peopl around him and being revolted. The chances of him managing to lead an independent life is very slim indeed.

Hell no. Would you employ someone with that sort of social outlook? Honestly, there are very few professional jobs where being totally socially maladjusted would be overlooked. He could probably get the qualifications he needed, but never land an actual job.

They could certainly learn to, but once again I think this glosses over the total cultural displacement. A 21 year old can’t just totally change the way he feels and thinks and feels about the entire world. he coudl go through the mechanical processes of life, but he is always going to be somewhat of a freak.

27

I don’t agree. Yes, there would be some culture shock. Would it be any greater than for, say, an Afghani tribesman? People emigrate to the U.S. all the time from cultures that are very, very different.

Think about what a huge hurdle not knowing the language is, and yet millions of people emigrate to countries where they don’t know the language, and they adapt and survive. Our 1700 traveler knows English, and he’s educated. Medical beliefs were primitive, simply because of lack of knowledge. What makes you think he wouldn’t just go, “Oh, I see!” when presented with the facts of modern medicine? He would have lived at a time when there were new discoveries being made all the time. Newton caused a revolution in thinking around that time, and people accepted it.

People are more adaptable than you’re giving them credit for.

28

I don’t see how this would be so different than moving from a third-world country to the USA. Surely some have manged to move from war-torn or famine regions of Africa or slums in Brazil to the USA. They would need to deal with learning the langauge, dealing with all the technology, and learning the rules of society.

I don’t think he’d have such a hard time. He might walk around in a daze for a few weeks, but humans can generally adapt very well to changing situations.

29

[QUOTE=Martini Enfield]
The culture shock would be enormous- the British Empire no longer exists (alas), the Spanish, French, and Dutch Empires have also long since collapsed, America is independent
[/QUOTE]

The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, the Iron Curtain, and the Berlin Wall no longer exist. That change happened quite suddenly as I recall it, and a lot of us here (all of us over 30 or so) managed to adapt to it.

Non-white, non-Christian people can live in our neighborhoods. When my parents bought their first house in 1964, it was in a segregated neighborhood (black people weren’t allowed to buy there). There are many people living now, including some here on the Dope, who have adapted to that change. South African Dopers may have adapted to that change even more recently than US Dopers.

Also when my parents bought their first home, Mom was working but her income didn’t count toward the amount they could borrow for their mortgage- the woman’s income wasn’t counted, because everybody knew that the woman would get pregnant and quit her job. Dad actually had to take a second job and they had to get a second mortgage, because Mom’s income didn’t count. That’s changed now, and there are people alive now who have adapted to that change.

You can contact pretty much anybody by phone at any time. Those of us over 30 or so remember a time when that wasn’t the case. If you’re much over 30 or have technophobic parents, you even remember a time when you had to sit at home and not use the phone when waiting for a phone call, when there were no answering machines or voice mail. We’ve adapted.

You can look up anything online- facts, phone numbers, whatever. A lot of us are kind of lost without a reasonably high-speed internet connection (I just got back from visiting my technophobic parents who are still using dialup, so I’ve experienced this recently). If you’re over 30, you remember a time when that wasn’t so- you remember phone books, encyclopedias, and card catalogs in libraries. And we’ve adapted.

People who don’t see anything wrong with that kind of behavior do (sadly) still exist. Some of them manage to hold down decent jobs despite that- they don’t do or say those things in public, but they think they should be allowed to. Unless our time traveler has some problem where he can’t help saying or doing everything that pops into his mind, or he can’t tell when someone is shocked at something he’s done or said and not make that gaffe again, he should be fine.

There are people like that now. I, and probably lots of other people who have ever been in charge of keeping a computer or network secure and had to update for the third time in a week, have had days where I wished they cut off people’s hands for destructive hacking. There are people who don’t see anything wrong with killing hundreds of thousands of people who didn’t commit that crime as a punishment for a crime, and one of them is running for President. As long as he doesn’t try to mete out any vigilante justice, he should be fine.

I don’t understand basic economics. All I know is that you have to pay your taxes and bills, it’s better to earn more than you spend than the other way around, and saving as much as possible as soon as possible is a good thing. That’s pretty simple to explain to anyone who has a grasp on the basic concept of money. The change in currency might be difficult at first, but millions of people (immigrants and tourists) manage to use unfamiliar currencies all the time.

Credit cards and the like might be a little more difficult, but really the only thing you have to know is that even if you’re not spending cash, you’re still spending money, and you still have to pay for those things. All you really have to know is “not paying bills = bad” and “spending more than you earn = bad”. Our time traveler could even understand the theory of compound interest that’s in back of this- they had that in 1700, AFAIK, and the math is pretty simple.

Our time traveler couldn’t run for President or be the chair of the Federal Reserve, but there are lots of jobs where a very rudimentary understanding of economics will suffice. For most jobs, you just have to know how to deal with your paycheck.

But you weren’t necessarily allowed to go grouse hunting on somebody else’s property even then, so why is not being allowed to do it in a park so different from that?

I think driving would be one of the more difficult things to pick up- most of us ride in cars and are exposed to things like traffic lights and signs from a very early age, so some ideas of proper traffic behavior are pretty well ingrained by the time we start driving. But you don’t really need to drive to get along in modern society, at least not if you live in the right place- Mr. Neville almost never drives, and he manages to hold down decent jobs.

30

An average student from 1700 would be functionally mentally disabled by the standdards of today. Regardless about what people say about kids of today, they are the brightest crop ever by anything we can measure. This holds true even if the person from the 1930’s instead of 1700. The world is much more complex today and filled with fast moving information. Many older people seem to have deficits in adapting to new technology even when it appears one piece at a time over years. There were billiant people in 1700 but that was at the far end of the curve. Your typical average student in 1700 just wouldn’t have the raw brain horsepower to keep up.

There would also be the issues of health and stature. The time-traveller may be potmarked from smallpox scars, have lingering problems from polio, have injuries that never healed correctly because of the lack of modern medicine. He would also likely be shorter and more slight or wiry than people of today and that would majke him stick out. His teeth may be in terrible shape as well and some of them might have even been pulled. He may also have problems from incomplete nutrition.

31

I Imagine the first time he saw an airplane his head would explode

32

[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
Many older people seem to have deficits in adapting to new technology even when it appears one piece at a time over years.
[/QUOTE]

That’s not because they’re stupid, it’s because they’re old. It gets harder to learn as you get older.

Irrelevant unless he wants to be a professional athlete or something.

Modern dentistry could fix his teeth or at least give him dentures.

There are lots of short people even today.

I said upthread he’d have trouble adapting, but not because he’s stupid - just because there’s too much to learn.

33

The complaints that such a person could never adapt, or could never figure out that they weren’t supposed to hunt in the park, or enslave negroes, or pinch women, spit on the floor, or suchlike, ignores the fact that people from third world countries come to the US all the time. Sure, there’s some culture clash. Some people from third world countries really do things that strike us as odd, but they quickly learn that some behaviors are not tolerated. They may never understand WHY, but they surely learn not to do certain things.

As for the bad teeth, short stature, disease scars, and all that, well, people from third world countries don’t get braces, often don’t get good nutrition, and often face terrible childhood diseases. You see these sorts of things in immigrants from Mexico today, they are usually shorter than people from the US, with worse teeth, and often have scars from diseases or accidents. There are places in southern Mexico and Central America where people live that are at least as poor as America of the 1700s, especially if they are non-spanish speaking. You take a subsistence farmer from an indian village in Oaxaca and plunk them down in New York City and they’re going to have trouble adjusting. But such people do end up in New York City. They don’t become lawyers or engineers or receptionists, but they aren’t running in terror from the magic boxes that roll around and eat people, or the strange noises and pictures that come out of the magic boxes. They don’t “fit in” in the sense that we mistake them for native US citizens, but they “fit in” in the sense that they manage to make it through the day without getting arrested, they can get a job washing dishes or some such.

In many ways that 1700s guy is going to have an easier time than an immigrant, since he already speaks an dialect of english. He won’t sound like a modern US citizen, he’ll be able to carry on a conversation but people will assume he’s some sort of foreigner. But he’s better off than the guy who only speaks an american indian language and a smattering of spanish.

34

[QUOTE=Nobody Special]
Would the person be able to pay their bills online and feel comfortable traveling on a big medal bird in the sky?
[/QUOTE]

Those are things you don’t actually have to do to get along in the modern world, though. All the bills that I’ve dealt with have still had an option to pay by check through the mail, so you don’t need to pay bills online. And there are lots of people around today who don’t feel particularly comfortable flying, including some Dopers.

There are people alive today who have teeth in terrible shape and have had teeth pulled- my dad is one of them. Getting our time traveller’s teeth fixed would be painful (though not by his standards of dentistry) and expensive, but it could be done, or he could just live with it as he had been doing.

I’ve never seen Citizen Kane or The Blues Brothers (never even heard of the latter), and I have managed to hold down a professional job.

There are people who don’t watch TV, and there are even more who don’t let their kids watch TV, or limit the amount of TV their kids watch. If not watching cartoons were that much of a handicap when looking for a professional job, parents wouldn’t do that- some of them would obsess about making sure their kids watch enough TV and watch the right TV shows, just like they make their kids enroll in all kinds of after-school activities.

There really isn’t a type of popular music that everybody listens to anymore, either. There might have been in the 1950s-1970s, but there really isn’t now. And there are probably people in professional jobs who listen mostly or only to classical music, at least some of which might not sound too weird to our time traveller.

Have a look at surveys of knowledge of history in adults or K-12/college students sometime. A lot of them don’t know much more history from the last 300 years than our time traveller would. And really, when was the last time you needed to know something about history for your job (assuming you don’t work in a museum or something like that)?

35

[QUOTE=Johnny L.A.]
He might be shocked at the amount of skin that women show
[/QUOTE]

Probably no more so than any older person who complains about the clothes that “kids these days” wear. Probably less so than someone who grew up in a conservative Muslim society, and people immigrate from those to the US or Europe and manage to adapt.

36

About the short stature thing: It’s not until Victorian England that you start seeing substantially shorter heights. According to The Tudor Tailor, based on research done by the Museum of London on burials, the average height of adult men was 5 foot 7 1/4 inches in Georgian London and 5 foot 5 1/2 inches in Victorian London. In 1998, the average height was 5 foot 9 inches.

We’re not talking midgets, people. The range of heights on the Mary Rose (a ship that sank in 1546; the average height for Tudor/Elizabethan men was 5 ft 7 1/2 in, close enough to Georgian) was from 5 ft 3 in to 5 ft 11 in. The 5 ft 3 in guy would probably make people go, “Hey, he’s short,” but he wouldn’t be uncommonly so.

The source for these figures is:

Werner, A (1998) London bodies: the changing shape of Londoners from prehistoric time to the present day, London: Museum of London, 108

should anyone want to track it down.

Bottomline: The image of our ancestors as some sort of tiny, stupid folk is basically a myth. There have tall and short people throughout history. Men taller than 5 ft 6 in is not a modern phenomenon.

Surely someone who was able to afford the equivalent of a liberal arts degree today would be able to eat well enough to not be shrunken or mentally handicapped by malnutrition. I’d be more worried about brain damage from alcohol, but then I think about how people I know in college drink, and figure he’d probably be OK there.

As for being disfigured by disease: 1) pox scars aren’t all that uncommon today; unless he’s absolutely riddled with them, I think he’ll be in the clear, 2) if he’s had higher education, he’s probably not going to be a cripple and/or insane, and 3) if he’s made it to 21, he’s probably pretty healthy to begin with. Men in young adulthood were more likely to die/be injured by accident/misadventure than disease.

Also, on a personal note, I’m only 5 ft 2 in and nobody looks at me like I’m a freak, and yet I’m substantially shorter than the average height for American women (somewhere between 5 ft 4 in and 5 ft 5 in). I’m also able to navigate perfectly well in modern society, despite being too short to safely depress the clutch on our Allis Chalmers tractor – built in 1934 (people were shorter then, I hear).

37

Have no idea what the GQ answer to this would be, but FWIW:

Samuel Pepys comes close to being the guy described in the OP. Go to his Diary and read awhile. I have trouble believing that he couldn’t look after himself once he had some time to get oriented.

38

[QUOTE=Miss Purl McKnittington]
I’m only 5 ft 2 in and nobody looks at me like I’m a freak, and yet I’m substantially shorter than the average height for American women (somewhere between 5 ft 4 in and 5 ft 5 in). I’m also able to navigate perfectly well in modern society
[/quote]

I’m 5’3", and have the same experience. I managed to live by myself for several years before I married Mr. Neville, and there wasn’t much I had to do that I was too short to do. Things today are, for the most part, designed so women as well as men can use them, and a 5’2" or 5’3" woman isn’t too uncommon. Presumably, a 5’3" male time traveller wouldn’t have any more problems with being short than I do. Well, he might have trouble buying men’s clothes off the rack at stores, but he could shop in specialty catalogs or stores, or have things altered.

He might not even miss being able to buy clothes ready-made off the rack- ISTR reading somewhere that that was something that only started being common in the Victorian era.

My guess is that, at the time, they might have assumed women wouldn’t be driving the tractor.

39

I agree with Sam Stone.

I think the guy would have no problem and could succeed in anything just like anyone else, even interpersonal.

His biggest issue is disconnect from family/support/friends. That will be the biggest challenge…but that would affect anyone.

Now…2000 years ago? They might have more issues (like language), though I bet less than you would think. Take a Roman from 2000 years ago? I bet he has much less problems than you think.

40

[QUOTE=BlinkingDuck]
I agree with Sam Stone.

I think the guy would have no problem and could succeed in anything just like anyone else, even interpersonal.

His biggest issue is disconnect from family/support/friends. That will be the biggest challenge…but that would affect anyone.

[/QUOTE]

That’s what I think. He’d have to be a friendly and adventuresome person to make it. He’d have to make friends, get help and guidance. Your first problems would be food and shelter. Maybe he could start by selling some of the rare 1700’s currency in his pocket.

This thread reminds me of an Adam Carolla bit: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JzvYtvY_aEM