Marginal Revolution: 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?
This post is from a good while back. There is some fun reading at that link above and in this Kottke thread.
And if you are really up for it, here’s a free MP3, 1000 A.D. on the same topic. It’s from Hillel(?) over at Sugerfix (who, BTW, has one of the best “about” pages I’ve read in a while *).
Personally, I think I would need to bring out a whole lot of pirate and a lot less robot to live happily in ye olde Dark Ages.
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About
I often believe (or maybe hope) that technology will solve all the world’s problems. Peace in the middle east? A big middle east peace robot will solve it. Global warming? They’re inventing global cooling technology as we speak. Those may be a ways out, but technology has finally gotten to the point where I’m capable of producing songs that sound relatively close to what’s in my head. Thank you Logic for letting me turn my banging on the piano into something semi-reasonable. Clearly technology has decided to tackle the most difficult problems first.
Given this new advance, it’s time to start sharing those songs. On this blog, I’ll publish music periodically. I don’t know how often, but I’ll try to keep it to at least one new song a month. We’ll see how it goes. Your comments are welcome as always. That is, if anyone shows up.
If you’d like to get in touch, you can always e-mail me at: hillel (at) sugarfix (dot) net.
[site here, rolled]
And i wholeheartedly agree. Hopefully I can make my rants sound the same way.
Robot Pirate Ninja 
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