WayneLigon
Adventurer
Part the first:
The concept of a modern-day person seeming like a "wizard" when thrown back in time is a bit of a trope in fiction. But what would really happen?
Say you were thrown back in time, at least 100 years, would your modern skills and knowledge be helpful to you? Would you thrive in such a scenario? Or are your modern skills and knowledge pretty much a waste in a time before electronic technology? How about 1,000 years?
'Thrown back' seems to imply something that happens suddenly and without consent. In that case, I'm likely screwed without a substantial bit of luck. If I emerge in 1913, I'm basically unskilled labor, excepting the ability to read and write at the post-grad level. I know about a lot of stuff but I have few practical skills. Sure, I know the basics of Relativity and a bunch of other stuff but I don't have the mathematical underpinning to actually put it to use or prove what I 'know'. At best, I might get a publisher interested in pulp stories or something and only in my dotage would I be hailed by geeks around the world as the 'guy who really predicted everything we know'.
Given, say, a year of prep time, though? Or the ability to carry even modest amount of cargo other than my skin and bones? If luck broke my way and I didn't die from a primitive doctor fooling around in my insides, I'd have a level of wealth that would beggar the imagination and the power that such a thing brings.
1,000 years in the past? Dead within hours, most likely.
Part the second:
Say you were going to travel to the future, (suspended animation, a time machine, whatever mechanic you want), how far into the future would you have to go to reach something "futuristic," something truly alien to what you live in now?
If the promise of the biological revolution pays off, about 150-200 years. Even if not, in 200 years our culture might well be something unrecognizable.
Part the third:
If you were going to reach back in time and yank someone, (at least of average or better intelligence, and middle aged), forward to this day and age, how far back-to-forward would you have to bring someone to have them completely out of their world? Would someone from 1913 (100 years ago) be able to come "up to speed" with our world today? How about someone from 1813?
I think anyone reasonably intelligent and intellectually flexible could come up to speed within a year or so and be able to do pretty much anything a modern human can do, language barriers aside. Take a kid from the Ice Age and plop him down here, inside of a year he'll be fussing about his iPod and showing girls the cool scar from when a sabertoothed cat almost got him.