Wouldn’t he just join the Amish?
Or just say “here’s some of that shit Benjamin Franklin was working on in 1752.”
So give him a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776).
This isn’t a freakin caveman. He’s not going to drop to his knees and start worshiping the first aircraft he sees or try to hunt a yellow cab for food. They had math and economics and alloys and whatnot back in the day.
Now clearly the first thing that needs to happen is someone has to explain to this guy WHY he’s here in 2007 Manhattan.
Next step…pub.
After that, we can easily spend a week just walking around the city getting this guy used to sheer volume of people and noise. That alone can be overwhelming to people from this century and country.
I’d say it wouldn’t take more than a year to get this guy used to living in our time:
“Ere now wot’s this contraption?” “It’s called a ‘television’, it shows moving pictures and sound, you turn it on like this, select which channel you want to watch like this, and off you go. Don’t try to crack it open and let the people out.”
“Those are ‘cars’. The big ones are ‘trucks’. They’re kind of like wagons but don’t use animals to pull them. You don’t need to know how they work right now. All you need to know is they are big, fast, and heavy and don’t get in front of them.”
“This is a phone. You use it to project your voice somewhere else so you can talk to them. Here’s how it works. Once again, don’t break it open.”
You really should see it. It’s quite the classic comedy.
We’re on a mission from God.
There’d be immediate culture shock. Things like fashions, technology, cars, planes, coping with pollution, and other things that are completely alien to him, would immediately send him into paroxysms of confusion.
But after a few weeks, especially with access to some education from helpful souls, he’d get over it and fit in just fine.
That’s something I’ve always thought was missing from time travel movies - the culture shock never seemed to be handled realistically, and instead of initially being a total mindfuck, it is looked on as being a wondrous voyage of discovery.
I think that would be fascinating to explore in a story, though. I’d love to see a movie where someone from the 18th Century ends up in the 23rd Century, so that we as an audience would be seeing unfamiliarity at both ends of the scale, and could semi-relate to the culture shock they’d be experiencing.
I just started thinking that maybe I am doing a bit of the reverse. My colonial house was built before 1760 and the pre-1700 ones around within a few miles of here look almost identical. The room that I am typing this from is almost untouched as is all of the main house except for new wallpaper and electricity so that I can get this computer to run. We have indoor bathrooms here now plus a modern kitchen but some time-traveler that was a previous occupant of this house could come here and learn about some new inventions but be in perfectly familiar surroundings. We still have the cooking hooks in some of the original fireplaces so that he could have a familiar meal. Thousands of feet of stone walls are right were they left them as well over 200 years ago.
Likewise, I could go back in time and experience the Revolutionary War and the Civil War just sitting in a chair exactly in the same place I am now with the same walls, floors, and ceilings. It would be a real mindscrew and maybe I could write my future self a tiny message somewhere (maybe I did :dubious: . I will look for it in a minute). I guess it is true that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
A recent (within the last three months) National Geographic article on indigenous persons included the estimate of about 40,000 indigenous people living in places like Brazil and New Guinea that have never been contacted by modern cultures at all.
There’s some culture shock I hadn’t thought of – he’d be curious about why the wife and daughters of the house didn’t sew everyone’s undergarments and knit their socks, while the outerwear was sewn by outside sources. I’m sure he’d be horrified by how disposable we find our clothing, too. If it’s stained, most people just throw it out, instead of finding some way to conserve the cloth.
I should have used a smiley! I’m pretty sure if I was about two inches taller it wouldn’t be an issue. My point was that it’s silly to assume that our ancestors were some sort of munchkin race, which soared to dizzying heights along with electricity and rubber tires. A man who was about 5 ft 5 in shouldn’t have any problem navigating in any time in recorded history.
I think even the Amish would be a bit circumspect for a man of some means from 1700. There would be an odd mixture of culture shock from both the new technology (farming equipment rigged to work with horses, clothing) and conservative behavior (unless he was a Puritan). And then the “German” might confuse him a little.
That really isn’t terribly likely to come up in daily life. It might be a few degrees warmer (especially considering that 1700 was during the Little Ice Age). But the water in streams in inhabited areas wasn’t safe to drink then, and isn’t safe to drink now, so that’s not going to be culture shock. There might be days with poor air quality, but the dangerous days like that tend to be very hot days, and our time traveller is probably used to minimizing strenuous activity on days like that, particularly if it’s someone from the middle or upper classes (as someone with a university education would be). The longer-term stuff (carcinogens and the like) probably won’t be noticeable on a day-to-day basis for a time traveller, just like it isn’t for a lot of us.
Actually, the lack of pollution is likely to be striking. Where’s all the horse manure and the smell associated with it? If the time traveller is an urban dweller who came to a modern city, he’d probably be surprised that there was no sewage or garbage in the streets, no stink from butcher shops, no smoke from everybody’s wood stove or coal furnace, and so on.
You are basically right about that. The lack of pollution in everyday life would be the striking thing. We have trees just because we like them and nice plants and good soil thanks to better farming practices. Those earlier settlers could clear-cut land like nobodies business and set the scene for terrible erosion and soil nutrient depletion through over-farming land. Wood fires were needed everyday then and that certainly doesn’t make for good air quality.
Hmm, perhaps you’re right about the pollution. When I’ve considered this idea before now, I’d always imagined someone from the country, from a few hundred more years further in the past, having to deal with exhaust fumes, so I figured a pollution issue was quite likely. But perhaps I’m wrong about that even then.
I just could not disagree more, and have to go back to what Sam Stone pointed out; that people go through essentially the same transition when they migrate from Third World shitholes to First World countries. I see Somalian people all over Toronto and they seem to be adapting just fine.
Would it take a bit of instruction to get them to understand how to use stuff? Sure, but that’s no big deal. If I went forward 400 years I’m sure they’d sort me out soon enough.
The Flynn effect says IQ scores have been rising three points per decade, or 30 points per century. Logically, we can extrapolate this backwards to 1700 with no problem. It appears our time traveling friend will have the IQ of a carrot. That could present a challenge.
On the plus side, this should not handicap his ability to be elected to high office.
I recommend the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy - probably as realistic a portrayal as has ever been captured on film. Mrs. Flex and I love this film and find that most people either laugh themselves sick or hate it - not sure why the disparity of opinion.
I think you’re both seriously overestimating the guy from 1700. Or rather misunderstanding what it then meant to have a ‘good’ education.
Let’s take up Rube E. Tewesday’s suggestion and consider the example of Pepys. By the standards of the time, Pepys had an excellent education, attending one of the best schools in England, St. Paul’s in London, and then going up to Cambridge, where his time almost overlapped with that of Newton. Like Newton, he was a future President of the Royal Society, he was certainly familiar with the Principia Mathematica (which was published under his imprimatur) and he corresponded with Newton on mathematical subjects. Yet until he was in his late twenties he was unable to do multiplication. And he learned that then, when he was already a middle-ranking government official, only because he paid someone to teach him.
Nor was Pepys alone (even if he is the example always cited on this point). As Sir Keith Thomas pointed out twenty years ago, knowledge of what we would consider basic arithmatic was not taken for granted in late-seventeenth century England, even - or especially - among bright university graduates. Few schools taught it and being able to do more than adding and subtracting was still relatively unusual. A tradesman in 1700 would actually have been more likely to have had such knowledge than a graduate.
Not that this would prevent such a graduate adjusting to life in 2007. After all, plenty of people who are illiterate, innumerate or ignorant of how most technology works manage to get by. And let’s remember that people from 1700 were familiar with, and fascinated by, the idea of encountering exotic, alien cultures entirely unlike their own.