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RowanE comments on Open thread, Mar. 16 - Mar. 22, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think your last comment seemed to most readers like just a reminder of your idea that the future will be neoreactionary and then the cryopreserved from our time will see, which is something they really don't like for various reasons.
I don't think there's any reason the story wouldn't work, in fact I think most stories that feature cryonics send the protagonist into a future they find horrifying and dystopian, except it's often they heroically overthrow it instead of just adapting and surviving.
From memory, there's a story by Alfred Bester about people being punished (I forget for what) by being offered a choice of being thrown into the future or the past. No preparation either way.
It's a short story, and doesn't follow an individual person who's been time displaced. It just ends with a suggestion that some street people were thrown into the past and never figured out how to manage.
I recall a popular discussion topic on the 'net which essentially goes like this: we take you, a XXI century human, and throw you back in time, say into medieval Europe. Are you going to survive? Prosper? What knowledge that you have will be useful to you? Will you be able to recreate useful things like antibiotics? Or will the local peasants just stone you to death for being too weird?
Let's recreate that thread, I have ideas. I would offer body building training for the kings soldiers because isolation exercises were not invented yet, for example. It may not be very useful but they would look impressive. I would sterilize surgical implements with boiling them, implement basic medical hygiene, challenge the miasma model, lots of stuff could be done.
Heh. Well, first you need to survive. Remember that you barely speak the language which was quite different, you don't know proper social and -- very importantly -- religious behavior, you're not plugged into any social structure, and you don't have any starting resources like money. So you're probably starting as a crazy beggar. Getting to the point where the king's soldiers (or surgeons) will listen to you is a major task.
Also, your body doesn't have much immunity against prevalent infectious diseases and you probably don't have proper hygiene habits for the pre-antibiotics pre-sanitation everyone-has-parasites era.
Let's say I am allowed contemporary pilgrims / travellers attire and start in an international port where they are used to strangers looking and acting strange. London, 1200. Claim to be a pilgrim from a mysterious Christian kingdom (Prester Johns) in Africa. I don't think they would be worried that I am too white. Try hard to remember high school Latin, latinize English words back. A guy in pilgrims clothing and having some idea of Latin and having interesting stories - or at any rate can read or write - is not a beggar, lower-middle class status like an ex-friar turned scribe, can be a middle-class family's interesting guest. Claim we are a very pious folks and be very, very religious, to earn trust. Start, for example, linking up with the traders in the port who are probably fairly open-minded. Be the guest of a merchant who is interested in info about foreign markets (make it up). See if I can teach things, like accounting they find useful. Claim the Holy Ghost taught Prester John all kinds of marvelous things he then taught us. Don't try scientific explanations, bu also beware not to look like warlock, rather try to present all the knowledge as the good kind of magic, the church kind. Pick easy elements from this list: http://www.topatoco.com/graphics/qw-cheatsheet-print-zoom.jpg and claim it was all taught by the Holy Ghost to Prester John.
English did not develop from Latin. 1200 AD is only a century and a half after the Norman conquest and it means people are speaking early Middle English which you will have problems with.
Can you, now? Try reading this :-)
You will become one once you want to eat.
Getting used to "medieval" scripts is surprisingly easy. I've learned it before (and have mostly forgotten due to not using it) and the script of a specific age can be decrypted in about 30 minutes (faster with practice). Understanding the words is definitely a bigger barrier than being able to read it.
I wonder how hard it would be to get enough food to support bodybuilding in earlier eras. It would definitely be easier for a small group of guards than for a whole army.
My first idea would be lots of milk - but interesting how our go-to examples in Ancient Athens actually considered that barbaric. A cursory search suggests they largely got their proteins from fish. Well, definitely, if I have to get maximal amount of proteins with 1 day of labor with pre-modern tech I take a fishing net. One fisherman with two assitants, could, I figure, support 50 well-built guards.
They were quite possibly lactose intolerant.
Forget the ancient Athenians 2500 years ago, the modern ones are still lactose intolerant:
Yeah, but still Greek colonists in South Italy held so many cattle that it is where the name Italy came from. It doesn't sound very efficient to do it for the meat only. Better goats them, they are more suited for a hilly terrain anyway.
It sounds like we need to know more to see whether cattle made sense there-- maybe it's that cattle are easier to manage than goats.
You probably want cheese.
But in general, I don't think that the king's guards would have problems getting enough protein if they want it. A peasant army, of course, is a different matter.
There may be some reason why they aren't already catching those fish. Or they're already catching those fish and you need to find a way for those fish to go to your grow-a-bigger-guard project.
When you start looking into ecology it's actually remarkable how many of the agricultural and cultural quirks of old civilizations that have been through some boom and bust cycles actually line up with ways of protecting the productivity of the land and water...