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Time travel back to 1000 A.D.: Survival tips
Londenio, a loyal MR reader, asks:
I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random location in Europe (say for instance current France/Benelux/Germany) in the year 1000 AD (plus or minus 200 years). I assume that such transportation would leave me with what I am wearing, what I know, and nothing else. Any advice would help.
I hope you have an expensive gold wedding band but otherwise start off by keeping your mouth shut. Find someone who will take care of you for a few days or weeks and then look for employment in the local church. Your marginal product is quite low, even once you have learned the local language. You might think that knowing economics, or perhaps quantum mechanics, will do you some good but in reality people won't even think your jokes are funny. Even if you can prove Euler's Theorem from memory no one will understand your notation. I hope you have a strong back and an up to date smallpox vaccination.
Readers, do you have any other tips? Is there any way that Londenio can leverage his knowledge of modernity (he is, by the way, a marketing professor) into socially valuable outputs? Would prattling on about sanitation and communicable diseases do him any good?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 6, 2008 at 11:44 AM in History | Permalink
Comments
Bob is on the right track - all the other stuff is going to get you killed as a witch. What is your physical stature? Combine your relatively great height, good health and dazzlingly white teeth with some modern warfare theory (have you played any Call of Duty) and you should be sweeping across Europe like an avenging god in no time. Everything else you can learn by watching these videos.
Posted by: Tall Man at Jun 6, 2008 12:57:02 PM
Didn't Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi already answer this question in Army of Darkness? Just make sure you bring a shotgun, a chemistry textbook, and an Oldsmobile.
Posted by: max at Jun 6, 2008 12:59:59 PM
If you are early enough, introduce the Horse Collar.
Posted by: Paul F. Dietz at Jun 6, 2008 1:02:33 PM
The printing press isn't much use without paper. Parchment is so expensive that it is the main cost, the copyist was a smaller expense, the shortage of writing materials limited output. If you know how to make paper that should be a good job to get into, not too physically demanding and a product that has a large potential market.
Posted by: Brett Dunbar at Jun 6, 2008 1:08:04 PM
Learn to make black powder, it's actually very simple and you'll revolutionize warfare. Saltpeter, carbon, and sulfur are the only ingredients you need and all are easily found or made even in 800 AD. Saltpeter can be found at the bottom of piles of compost (it's the white stuff that leaches up from the soil), sulfur can be found at any hotsprings or other geological activity of that sort, and carbon can be made from burned wood (provided the fire is hot enough and the wood pure enough). See wikipedia for more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder
Posted by: Tim at Jun 6, 2008 1:08:20 PM
MOVE TO CHINA!
Posted by: Michael F. Martin at Jun 6, 2008 1:09:19 PM
First problem: you're unlikely to know the language, even if you speak modern European languages.
Second problem: if you're in Europe, you're not in a place where you're likely to get very far. Head for the civilized world, i.e. the Islamic world. They have decent metallurgy, they know basic mathematics, they have modern base 10 notation, and they're far more tolerant of people from strange places. You may not survive long enough to get there, of course.
It will likely be really hard for you to make more than one big contribution to the future -- even very basic machines will take enormous amounts of labor to produce in a world where you can't even buy lumber, let alone pre-cut lumber, and forget about machined metals. I'd try to go for one single important contribution -- invent the printing press and movable type, and from there, if you still have time after running your business (if you've survived that long at all), start writing and selling books with generic information that you have in your head, like as much modern mathematics as you know (that should be safe) and as much science and engineering knowledge as you can spew out without getting yourself killed.
Posted by: Perry at Jun 6, 2008 1:09:29 PM
Join a monastery and become a brewer. Do some easy home-brewing now, and you should be able to pick up everything you need in situ, since they were doing it anyway. But the knowledge of brewing that you could pick up on the Internet this afternoon were religiously-guarded secrets and recipes in 1000, or else completely unknown. Just some simple sanitation techniques would produce a revolutionary product, compared to the swill they had to drink back then.
Other than that, please don't try to invent the steam engine or the computer or whatever, as a favor to the rest of us here in uptime. It would be nice if you didn't change the entire course of future history. Isn't that Rule 1 of polite time-travel?
Posted by: Chet at Jun 6, 2008 1:10:43 PM
Many years ago, there was a thread on the usenet newsgroup soc.history.what-if, entitled shwi in the sea, in which participants (knowledgeable and otherwise) roleplayed a group time-trip to 1800.
Many of the posters in this thread have already recapitulated the Mary Sue heroic fantasy of the divinely chosen worldline changer that marked our earlier SHWI thread. The "kill Hitler's grandfather" reverie.
A consensus emerged (as various fantastic personal narratives were critiqued): a shirtsleeve 21st century timetraveler adrift on the sea of eternity outside the modern era (1800-present) would confront a tremendously hostile social environment. Language barriers, lack of social capital, personal poverty, and lack of physical strength/endurance would swiftly doom the traveler to death.
Marketing professor. Heh. Think of $cient010gy as one way the germ theory of disease can be creatively misunderstood. Now picture a crowd in a market fair common reacting to a ragged wretch ranting about tiny beasts, too tiny to see, that crawl inside to kill.
Like the cheese and the worms - a heresy.
Maybe two people have had the right thinking so far. Die in a week or a day, unless you are very very very very very lucky and get charity.
Posted by: The New York City Math Teacher at Jun 6, 2008 1:12:44 PM
If you are transported back in time, then it's already the case now (in 2008) that time slices of you existed in the past. Accordingly, we know already that you did not invent any amazing machines early, or, if you did, they didn't catch on. (See David Lewis's "The Paradoxes of Time Travel".)
However, from this no particular practical advice follows, except that if you try to change history, you won't succeed.
Posted by: J. at Jun 6, 2008 1:15:35 PM
Most of your modern education would do little good in the year 1000, except for your capacity to learn. You would need to learn to read and write Latin, and somehow get a job in the church. If you are a good marketer, you could attempt to influence other learned members of the church with some of the simple things you take for granted (and you learn in elementary school) that would improve the lives of the people on the year 1000; some of these are:
Rats: as a vector for disease and the importance of having cats where humans live to control the rodent population
Rabies: and the need to avoid animals that are acting strangely
Modern sanitation: to control water born diseases;
Germ theory: to control other diseases
Smallpox vaccinations: from the pustules of cowpox
Nutrition: and its role in some diseases
Medicine: I am thinking that the average person today has enough medical knowledge that they may know as much as the doctors in the year 1000. Basic stuff, keep the cut clean, how to set a broken bone, how to keep sick people isolated. Maybe have the people start identify plants as treatment for diseases; I know the bark of the willow tree has pain reliving ingredients in it.
Geography: You would know where things are in the world; not sure if you could get there but if you had some knowledge about the area you were in you might know of some deposits of minerals or other items that would be valuable to the people of that time
Weather forecasting: Possibility of creating a barometer from a cow bladder to get the general trend if barometric pressure of the atmosphere, additionally with the general knowledge that storms generally move west to east, and a knowledge of clouds would allow you to forecast the weather at some level.
Posted by: Bruce at Jun 6, 2008 1:16:13 PM
Become the world's first financial consultant. Advise local businessmen, such as smiths or taylors. You have a knowledge of marketing, at least basic economics (if you're often sold out, your prices are too low), and you know at least basic arithmetics.
If that doesn't work, try to capitalize on knowing how to read and write.
(offtopic: It would be nice if the blog actually remembered my "personal info". This works with other typepad blogs.)
Posted by: LemmusLemmus at Jun 6, 2008 1:18:02 PM
Your primary goal is to hook up with the clergy or the nobility. Everything else gets you killed or turned into a near-slave.
Once that's accomplished it might be possible to fool around with stuff like arithmetic, or boiled water, or booze, or science. On the other hand, just being entertaining becomes useful once some noble or priest thinks you're worth having around.
Best to be able to read, write, and speak in Latin to prove you are educated.
Learn lots of games of chance and be able to play and gamble well. Learn medieval chess and backgammon as that comes in handy with the nobility around 1000 ad.
Keep important dates and events fixed in your mind in case you get a chance to show the ability to "see the future."
But odds are, you're dead in a few days.
Posted by: jn at Jun 6, 2008 1:19:42 PM
Cats are actually not very good at killing rats. Rats are too big and vicious.
Cats are a good vector for catpox, which can protect against smallpox.
Posted by: Paul F. Dietz at Jun 6, 2008 1:19:58 PM
1. Steal a horse.
2. Head for Byzantium, Arabia, or China, as fast as said horse can carry you.
Posted by: Tel at Jun 6, 2008 1:21:35 PM
It will be difficult to pass as Christian if you are a man and you are circumcised.
Making use of your education is a great idea. Also, trying to invent a better plow, spacing the planting of seeds, and saving the best seeds to plant next year's crops (instead of eating them) should prove your usefulness to the peasant population. If you have any mathematical skills at all, you could probably be useful to a King as a cryptographer if you could make your way to a suitable court. If you wear glasses, you should try to learn lens-grinding from someone at the time, or you'll be impaired as soon as your glasses break or you need to change your contact lenses. Then you could invent the telescope. If you have a watch, then you can use it to tell longitude and that would be worth quite a lot, too.
Posted by: MostlyAPragmatist at Jun 6, 2008 1:21:37 PM
Max is right, Army of Darkness has all you need to know:
"Ok you Primitive Screwheads, listen up! You see this? This... is my boomstick! The 12-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart's top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That's right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about $109.95. It's got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger. That's right. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. You got that?"
Posted by: bh at Jun 6, 2008 1:25:56 PM
Don't step on any butterflies.
Posted by: bob at Jun 6, 2008 1:26:18 PM
Comments on how they would look at you are worthwhile. We'd all be abnormally tall, wear amazingly brightly-coloured clothes, have incredibly unblemished skin, and far, far more teeth than is usual.
You're 50/50 on "witch" versus "nobleman from a foreign land". If you can bumble through enough high school Latin to get taken initially for "nobleman" then you can probably get to an environment where your entertaining "magic" will keep you alive long enough to learn the language and set up shop as a financier/inventor/scientist type.
Posted by: Andrew Edwards at Jun 6, 2008 1:32:24 PM
He might be able to use his knowledge of probability theory to make a lot of money gambling
Posted by: James D. Miller at Jun 6, 2008 1:35:05 PM
Careful about going to the Muslims: they might castrate and enslave you.
Of course, a Univerity professor from the year 1900 would have an easier time - he'd speak Latin.
Posted by: dearieme at Jun 6, 2008 1:37:18 PM
If you had a year's warning to prepare yourself you might stand a chance, but if you were moved back without warning it would be pretty hopeless without that strong back.
Posted by: Robin Hanson at Jun 6, 2008 1:38:56 PM
I read and enjoyed this book a couple years ago:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Year-1000/Robert-Lacey/e/9780316511575/
The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium
Posted by: Speedmaster at Jun 6, 2008 1:39:32 PM
All the above suggestions are fascinating.
But the first thing I would do would be to tune into the current reality upon arrival. First things first. What's possible given the constraints I become aware of. Immediate needs: water, food, housing. Instead of grandiose plans, first do what you HAVE to, Then do what you WANT to.
Posted by: Hap Allen at Jun 6, 2008 1:44:18 PM
I would think basic wilderness skills would be important. If you can survive in a forest alone for extended periods of time, then you can spend most of your time away from people and it really wouldn't matter which century you were in. Furthermore, you might be able to catch/kill and sell wildlife and make some money that way. You wouldn't even need to speak much.
Posted by: A Berman at Jun 6, 2008 1:45:48 PM
