You realllllllllllly need to get out of this semester, don’t you!

Anyway, if forced to choose one skill, I’d probably learn how to find iron ore — smelting should just involve liberal applications of charcoal, which can’t be THAT hard to work out. Though of course it depends on what era one is going to.

Some people would say that at least there wasn’t as much stress and time pressure as the modern work environment implies, but I’d say (1) the stress you did have was over little things like would you have enough food to last the winter; and (2) we’re kind of used to stress and information density. In fact, we like it. In fact, refer back to my post. So yes, while lording one’s advanced technical knowledge over the population would be good, on balance I’m very happy to be here.

As regards going back to living off the land, I’m not as optimistic as xaosseed. Sure, Rome had a few hundreds of thousands of people, and the Aztecs even had over a million in Tenochtitlan (which was larger than any European city when the Spanish conquered it). But that isn’t 16 million in Los Angeles, in the middle of a desert. Or 1.6 billion in China. Indeed, estimates are that, say, the world’s population was around 250 million in 1000AD. I really don’t think that returning wholesale to pre-industrial farming can cut it. At least, not unless we have some seriously GM’ed crops to work with.

And hurrah for biscuits, it looks like this ’simpler time’ is coming around the corner again. Yippity skip.

However - should this grim back-to-the-land scenario actually take place, then its entirely possible to sustain quite large cities on a pre-fossil fuel technology level - I mean look at medieval Europe or Rome at its height. These were not tiny places, and think what can/will be achieved when instead of having a self-sufficient perfect communist society dedicated to God (a monastery) you instead have such a society dedicated to technical crafts. The Brotherhood of Fridges would be popular, I’d bet.

As Adam very correctly points out, a really smart thing to do *now* would be to get some herbalism texts and particularly figure out how to do that ‘I boil down spiderwebs to get penicillin’ that McGyver and the Sliders always seemed to be at. ‘Cause everyone knows how to build a powerplant - I mean you just cobble together an AC/DC generator out of bits of steel and magnets and stick it in a windmill. Steady uninterrupted current could be a trick - but all you need for that is to use a windmill to refill a reservoir to drive a water wheel at a constant rate. Wind dies, get a bucket chain going, etc, etc.

As a kid I often got things like strep and bronchitis/sinus infections. The sinus infections, if untreated, can spread from the sinuses and if you are unlucky, result in bacterial meningitis. Strep throat, if left untreated, can turn into scarlet/rheumatic fever, which can be either crippling or fatal. My guess is that without antibiotics, I probably wouldn’t have made it to the age of 18. No, while the lifestyle in the past might have some nice points, the lack of modern medicine would be a deal-breaker for me.

What you say is all true, and certainly I would not lack for things to work on. I’m more concerned about things to do in one’s leisure time. There’s only so much I could stand to hear about iron smelting, when what I want is a good movie or computer game or website. Settlers of Catan is a good point, but even there we play for a while and then after a few months have another big “thing”.

Paul F: True, we’re very good at gathering and filtering information — but that’s developed in an environment where there IS lots of information to filter. With the Internet at hand, I could easily work out how to make a spinning machine; but if I had to wander the land searching for people with useful info, I would probably be a lot less efficient. Though certainly my knowledge that such a machine is inventable, and will prove useful, gives me quite a headstart.

And I’ve also sometimes speculated about being thrown back in the past and not being able to reconstruct the things we rely on. Not to mention that I’d probably have a pretty abysmal survival rate in any era without eyesight correction. One thing to point out about your hypothetical though, is that a lot of your presumable dissatisfaction would come from having memories of what it was like to be immersed to be an environment full of complex information (and more poignantly, the memory of the meaningful social ties to the people you’d have “left behind” in the future). The control would be having your memory erased entirely, perhaps even with some re-conditioning to believe you’d grown up in the simple environment, and then see how dissatisfied your complex modern mind would be. I think you have a good point about the pace of life and conversations; at the same time, I think there would be enough difficult mechanical challenges (tinkering with primitive farming technology and building materials, etc) to keep your problem-solving abilities busy. There would be a frustration from knowing how much more mankind had figured out, and not being able to advance the frontiers of theoretical knowledge as you knew them, but there would still be satisfying problem-solving challenges to engage in (even in terms of entertainment– Settlers of Cataan doesn’t require the internet, or even electricity). You would also likely find other artisan-types to consult with, some of whom could potentially have a lot to teach you conceptually, since they’ve specialized their minds to certain kinds of technological problems, while yours is specialized to others. So you could still have intellectual companionship, and a means of sharing your enthusiasm for mental challenges.

But on the whole, yeah, probably better to stick with the present :)

That said I think that due to that ability to sort information very rapidly, we would find ourselves remarkable adept at gathering the information very quickly to learn how to do all the tasks that are taken for granted. For example your story of the cotton weaving: you would know what the end product (fabric) was and by drawing on all the information you have gathered would most probably find yourself remarkably able to develop the machine.

Of course this topic could be related to your blog on the difference between a theoretical and practical PhD ;)