Who would have harder time adapting.

[The Marquis de Leech]

On 01/10/2017 at 0:40 PM, Lykos said:

1317 is a really bad year to adapt to in Europe.  It was the time of the Great Famine.

Damn it. I was going to point that one out.

The forward traveller (aka Catweazle): I have seen it suggested that pre-moderns would find modern society extremely sterile. Rather like putting someone in the proverbial white room (none of the familiar sounds and smells, but with lots of brightness). Unless your pre-modern is a monk, with an ability to communicate in Latin, AND they arrive conveniently near the History or Classics Department of a University, they will also have absolutely no idea how to talk to anyone, and according to some theories might even see the world differently. They would certainly try to derive meaning (religious or otherwise) from purely mundane objects.

The backwards traveller (aka Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis): Better chance at language preparation, though depending on the area, even that is problematic (Chaucer's English is just London dialect, so what we think of as Middle English will only get you so far). Having no sense of smell (like myself) would help as well. There exist the additional problems of nutrition (famine year!), getting hold of money, not being mugged, and the likelihood of dying from drinking water. There are also pre-modern diseases that simply don't exist any more (English Sweating Sickness came later, but it isn't hard to imagine other variants). 

In summary, one is going to go mad, the other is going to die of dysentery.   

[The Marquis de Leech]

On the subject of sending someone back though, for all the common idea about radical change being a modern thing - most of us would manage pretty well in 1967, issues like decimal currency aside. 1917 would be much trickier, and not just because of the War. Once you hit 1867 though, you really are getting into a different way of doing things.

[The Marquis de Leech]

4 minutes ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

How do you mean?

What we see around us is our brain trying to make sense of some very complicated stuff - and our brain is shaped by the cultural norms we grow up in. The idea is that a 1317 brain will "make sense" of a given object different from the way you or I would.

[Castellan]

On 26 September 2017 at 8:55 PM, Dr. Pepper said:

A 1317 person would probably fall over dead within a few days due to lack of immunity to today's diseases.  

Is there any reason to think we wouldn't fall over dead from theirs? I mean I don't think my ancestors surviving a particular flu outbreak or indeed the black death means I would be immune. I think our protected modern environments (sanitation) mean we might have lower immunity to all the shit (literally) they would have lived with. Maybe the babies who survived then were stronger than us.

 

[Castellan]

On 2 October 2017 at 8:44 PM, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

On the subject of sending someone back though, for all the common idea about radical change being a modern thing - most of us would manage pretty well in 1967, issues like decimal currency aside. 1917 would be much trickier, and not just because of the War. Once you hit 1867 though, you really are getting into a different way of doing things.

But 1867, its really the social norms that we haven't absorbed that would make things difficult for us. I mean they are objective difficulties, not just the fact our brains would be in shock. We wouldn't know 'how to go on'. Similar to some modern woman having no notion that in some countries they will be regarded as western sluts BY DEFINITION and that they cannot escape this definition. That nay woman travelling without a male relative or husband is by definition immoral. Or a child who is considered good in a modern school being sent back and finding they are regarded as a troublemaker in a 19th century school or perhaps as completely lacking initiative in a less-schooled age.

We wouldn't know how to find or keep a job or how to get information or find somewhere to sleep etc, - objective problems. Probably have great problems with accents and vocabulary.

[Yukle]

On 9/26/2017 at 8:55 PM, Dr. Pepper said:

A 1317 person would probably fall over dead within a few days due to lack of immunity to today's diseases.  

I was going to make the same point.

And the 2017 person would infect everybody around them with superbugs they've never been close to exposed to... or, alternatively, immediately catch the now extinct versions of the hyper-deadly bubonic plague, measles or smallpox.