Could a time-traveling Roman understand the modern world?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Rather than asking how modern day people traveling back in time could survive, I was wondering about whether someone traveling forward in time to the present day could be made to understand modern technology.

For example, a roman soldier falls through a vortex and ends up here. I reckon it wouldn’t be too hard to explain a lot of stuff eg cars - I’m sure they had oil lamps back then so they understood the basic concept of oil being flammable. The rest is just explaining to them the mechanics of how burning the oil turns a wheel that powers the engine. A car is just a mechanical chariot. OK it also requires electricity but he’s seen lightning before and felt static, so the rest would just be details.

People always say that if an alien civilisation visited us then they would be so far advanced that we wouldn’t understand their technology but I dunno if that’s true. The only real world comparison we can make would be to look at our own planet. If we took someone from 2000 years ago and brought him here, I reckon, you could explain most of today’s technology to him in terms that he could understand. And 2000 years is quite a long time.

2

I’m unconvinced. I’m not at all sure that you could explain today’s technology to the average person of today in terms that they could understand. How many people have anything but the vaguest notion of how an iPhone works, what an integrated circuit is, how a nuclear reactor works, what the Large Hadron Collider does, etc…?

And that’s not even getting into modern scientific theories. Again, most people today have difficulty with things like general relativity, quantum mechanics, or even the theory of evolution.

That’s not to say you couldn’t teach someone from 2000 years ago how to use the technology of today, even if they didn’t really understand it. Understanding is not a prerequisite for participation in the modern world.

3

People from cultures that were, literally Stone Age in their level of technology have consistently shown their ability to master the skills of modern weapons. The Roman could probably function, but would have no more idea of how a cell phone worked than the average Valley Girl. The real trick would be to get them to go easy on the polytheism.

4

An intelligent person from then could learn anything we have today, given enough time. People from past weren’t at all stupid… misguided or misinformed sometimes, but not stupid. So long as they were willing to abandon many of their notions about how things work, they could learn pretty much anything we know.

Also, they have much less worry about being killed due to local superstition, which helps. :smiley:

5

While I can see a Roman being able to understand our technology once explained, I would readily accept that alien technology would likely be many orders of complexity beyond the faintest human comprehension as we would be talking about an entirely different, spacefaring species and not merely the same species 2000 years (not very long) farther down its own evolutionary line.

6

I’m skeptical. Look at how most of today’s older people have problems with today’s technology, and we’re only talking about one or two generations, not 2000 years. And today’s older people have the advantage of not having been just plopped down from 1950, but have seen the evolution of the technology. Sure, you could explain how something works to a Roman, but you’d have to explain every little thing that he might encounter, involving principles that we take for granted. Even if he were of superior intelligence, it would be overwhelming.

And don’t forget, he’d have to *unlearn *a lot of things, as well.

7

I think the vast majority of them would crawl up into a fetal position and reside in perpetual terror, suffering irreversible psychological trauma. They would probably believe they were in some otherworld hell, punished by whatever deity they assumed, they would probably attribute it to pluto and hades… He would probably believe he were dead.

8

I think the technology he’d take in stride after a couple of weeks – after all, how many of us (honestly, now) can explain how, say, a flat-screen TV works?

That’s not to say that how he explains it to himself will bear any resemblance to what we’re used to. There’s an entertaining passage in The Sand Pebbles where a Chinese coolie explains how he figures out the functioning of a steam engine, where the power comes from a mighty dragon being fed by a bucket brigade of farmers, who can speed up or slow down the rate at which they pass buckets along to feed the dragon and thereby modify how strongly he flaps his wings, or something along those lines.

Which is not to belittle the Chinese coolie, or the Roman soldier – it just goes to show that people explain cause and effect to themselves according to paradigms they can visualize. And as far as that goes, the alien visitors would probably fall down laughing when they hear how in elementary school we’re taught that electrons “orbit” around a nucleus that looks like a bunch of grapes.

I think the Roman would have a far harder time grasping how social relationships work.

9

Restaurants and brothels haven’t changed all that much, so there are a few things he’d probably understand very well. Throw in an evening ringside at WWE and I’m sure he’d be quite happy.

10

Papua-New-Guinea is a real-life lab where this experiment has taken place repeatedly. People born and raised in literal Neolithic Stone Age seem to be quite willing and able to adopt 20th century Western technology, like how to operate a backhoe, or an AK-47. That’s a lot bigger stretch than a Roman entering today’s world.

11

What about people still living in stone-age conditions today, someplace in the Amazon or on Papua New Guinea. There must have been instances in which some deluded colonial brought them to the big city, and there might have been anthropologists there to observe. How did they (the stone-age people, not the anthropologists) fare?

ETA: from what Toxylon tells us, quite well, it seems…

12

That’s a rather big if, though. I think it’s going to depend very much on the individual Roman’s personality. We all know that some people in today’s world are more willing to adapt to new technologies and new ways of doing things than others. I can’t think of any reason why there wouldn’t be similar variation among Romans. Some Romans are going to be set in their ways more than others, just like some people in today’s world are more set in their ways than others.

How much self-selection is going on there? Are the New Guineans who adapt to modern technology ones who chose to do so, or are they all forced to adapt? If it’s only the ones who want to use new technologies who are doing so, the ones who choose to do that are probably going to be the ones who aren’t very set in their ways. They might not be representative of a randomly chosen New Guinean.

13

I’d bet that after an initial phase of shock and maybe fear, he’d adjust very quickly and embrace much of modernity; certainly an ancient Roman would adjust to modernity better than virtually anyone else from his time.

Things like indoor plumbing would be not so utterly unfamiliar to him, although the superficial appearances and such would be very strange. I wonder if he’d warm to showers right away, or continue taking baths indefinitely. Given the Romans’ appreciation for hygiene and shaving, he’d certainly come to love the modern razors, soaps, shampoos, deodorants, aftershaves and such. Another thing our soldier would certainly be quick to embrace, given his extensive marching, would be modern socks and shock-absorbing sneakers, as well as the modern asphalt roads and smooth cement sidewalks. Modern lighting, HVAC systems and refrigerators are basically improvements, however revolutionary, upon ancient precedents, as books are over the scrolls from his time.

You could, with little effort or imagination, point out to him how influenced our world is by his… from the classic architecture of many government buildings (I’d hold off on showing him anything by the likes of Frank Gehry), to the extensive road network (built largely along the classic principles of the ancient macadam roads), to the cosmopolitan character of the greatest modern cities and the pervasive effects of mostly free global trade. For bonus points, chauffer him around town in a Mercury or Saturn, offer cereal for breakfast and a Caesar salad for lunch, and take him on a tour of a police station and get an officer to show him how a stun gun works. (Any civ whose army auxiliaries/Praetorian guards can tap into the power of Jupiter to subdue hoodlums would be all right by him, I’d bet.) Then you could take him to see a game at any of the nation’s “Coliseums” (preferably at one actually named “The such-and-so Coliseum”), although at this time of year it’d be a hockey game instead of a football game (a USC football game would be ideal, though).

One thing he might relate to better than us moderns might be the Segway transporter. Those things still amuse and freak many people out, but to the ancient Roman, it’d be a lot like a horseless chariot platform. Still freaky, but maybe a bit less so to him than to us.

He’d probably think a TV was like some sort of oracle or Olympian communications portal, and that it was Mercury who was responsible for the visions contained within… at least until he saw something like Billy Mays on it. The flatscreen is no match for a sword or spear.

14

What is there to “figure out”? I assume one of us is his guide and can communicate with him, right? So let’s assume we are showing him around New York. He’s Roman so while the scale and architecture will be completely foreign, he’ll get the concept of a “city”. Car’s and trucks will be really unafamiliar but he will eventually understand they are analogous to his wagons and chariots. They are just propelled by some mechanism he doesn’t understand. I don’t think he’ll try to stab them.

He may have some trouble grasping what all the electrical lights are about. But all he really needs to know is “flick this switch” and you get light.

Show him around Chelsea.

15

I’ve just driven down to Rome for the Champions League Cup Final…

I can assure you that even 21st century Romans haven’t yet grasped the concept of automobiles or how to drive them!

:slight_smile:

16

What’s the real question here? Could a Roman be taught enough to be self-sufficient enough to survive on his own?

Sure… except perhaps the habit of killing his inferiors or anyone he argues with will get him in trouble. It wouldn’t be technology that would be the trouble, or a holding a job. It would be protecting the rest of us from him.

17

Nap Chagnon did that with a Yanomamo tribesman. I read his book over fifteen years ago but one thing sticks out in my memory. He said that the thing that freaked him out the most was the elevator. Imagine going into a closet, having the door close and then when the door opened again you were in a totally different place.

18

Which is, in fact, about the level of knowledge the average modern person has about the logistics, engineering, manufacturing, and physics behind power generation and electric lighting. Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke wrote that, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but except for the tiny minority of people trained in a broad array of the physical sciences, this point passed about the time of the Industrial Revolution. Uses of modern technology–say, the internal combustion engine or the digital microcomputer–do not need and will gain little or no advantage from understanding the underlying kinematics, thermodynamics, digital logic, et cetera that drives the machine; all they need to know is where to push the button that goes, “Bing!” Any sufficiently mature technology will be indistinguishable (in terms of complexity) to fire.

I think the ancient Roman would have more difficulty with modern commerce and finance, particularly the notion of exchange currency not based on either on imperishable commodities (stocks of precious metals or metal coins of intrinsic value) or absolute governmental fiat but rather by the whims of currency trading markets. And while the idea of direct investment in companies via stocks and bonds is pretty straightforward, modern “investment tools” would be nearly impossible to readily explain.

Stranger

19

I think eventually our time traveling friend would be up to speed, at least as much as everyone around him. However I think it will be harder than analogies between his technology and ours make out, mostly due to the suddenness of the change.

It is one thing to be introduced to one automobile and have the progression of fire to internal combustion engine explained to you as you inspect the idle device. It is quite another to suddenly find yourself standing on a bridge over a highway watching eight lanes of metallic devices with no visible propulsion mechanisms whizzing at great speed underneath you. The connection between that and the internal combustion engine is not going to be obvious. This is true of most of our technology - we have gotten so good at engineering that the link between how something works and how you use it and the underlying technology that makes it work is often quite abstract.

If this guy is going to be thrown into our modern world, a far more jolting prospect then running into white men with guns, then I think there is going to be a huge adjustment.

20

There are plenty of people now who have trouble with that. Check out the current gay marriage and concealed carry threads for evidence of people just not getting a culture (or subculture, if you prefer) other than their own.