Quote Originally Posted by Ramses II CP View Post
What would a human being revived from even as little as a hundred years ago be to us today except a curiosity to be gawked at and subtly mocked on talk shows for their fifteen minutes before inevitably being forgotten and relegated to an incomprehensible life of futility. No useful skills, no foundation for understanding our world, no family, no friends, and no future. Don't spend your money struggling to be that guy.

This I can't agree with at all. 100 years ago was 1908, a point where the first cars had been built, trains were everywhere, radio had been invented, heavier-than-air flight was 5 years old and lighter-than-air flight even older.

The only thing a person from a developed nation of that time wouldn't recognise today is a PC, a TV, a microwave and mobile phones. Everything has a pre-cursor in their time, or would be self explanatory. Nor do you need to recognise or understand something to use it or live with it - with 10 minutes explaining of it, all you need to is learn what buttons to push and what it does. Do you know how a TV functions as any other than a vague intellectual fact you learnt in secondary school, or do you just how to turn it on - I'll bet its the latter.

If Julius Ceaser re-incarnated in my living room tomorrow morning then I'm sure he'd be able to 'understand' that the fridge keeps food and drink cold and the TV shows moving pictures 'sent' from a central location, with only a brief explanation needed. I've got a friend who comes from Southern Sudan. His home region for the most of his life was a place more backwards than Britain or USA was in 1908 in many ways. Some experience and education is all you need.

As for no skills: what skills do 90% of humanity have that a person from any time period couldn't have? Secretaries, burger flippers, sales staff, office managers, etc; these people either don't have any skills at all or are using generic human traits that any person could have. In fact the further back your time-traveller, the more likely they would have useful skills, as the further back the more likely they'd be a physical worker who was used to regular hard physical labour and self-survival in a less developed environment. A woodworker, a blacksmith, any sort of woodsman - they'd all potentially be employable in certain specialist modern work environments.