Trapped in a Past era...

[Jedi Marso]

Think of Bones in City on the Edge of Forever, or Rios in the 21st Century, and we actually sort of saw it happen with Picard in Inner Light.

Say you were a starfleet crewman who, through some mischance, was cast into the past of your own homeworld and forced to live out your life there. Without any sort of advanced technology or 'stuff' to ground your memory, do you think you would eventually begin to doubt your own sanity? That the future era you came from even existed at all, or was just an invention of your mind?

Think about it- Bones was a medical doctor, but could he build or create any of the technology he used on a daily basis? Of course not. So after 30 years, in the 1960's, would he still believe in the future he came from, or have come to think that it was all his imagination- a bad case of 'drinking from the wrong bottle,' as it were?

How do you think you would react? Thoughts?

 

[Richard S. Ta]

I think there would be at least some disconnect. I've spent the last thirteen years living thousands of miles from the country I was born in, within a culture wildly different to the one I grew up in. But there comes a line where the new starts to become the familiar and the past becomes a figurative foreign country. On the rare occasion I do go 'home' I find everything that was once second nature to be disorienting, whereas doing things as they are done in Vietnam is second nature to me now.

I'd imagine, being an officer from within an institution that teaches and knows way more science than we even know, that I would be able to old on to the rational knowledge that I had travelled back in time and that I once had a life in the 24th Century, but I imagine that if I'd spent 30 years in a time period and someone from the future showed up to take me 'home' I might feel mortified rather than relieved.

 

[Oddish]

It depends on the time period, and what I specialized in.

If I was a computer specialist, knocked back to the caveman days, I'd probably be in trouble. If I got knocked to the 1950's, when computers were in their infancy, I might have enough historical knowledge to adapt. An anthropologist who studied primitive cultures might manage further back. However, a person who normally works on warp cores having to suddenly work on horse drawn wagons or coal fired steam engines... some adjustments will be involved.

 

[Finn]

Imagine if Tuvok got thrown back in time on Vulcan, before Surak was even born, and there was an errant Talaxian who actually made their way to Vulcan in the distant past.....

 

[NewHeavensNewEarth]

Hopefully there's a support group where such people can get help. "Temporally Displaced Persons Anonymous," or something like that.

"Hi, my name is Bob, from the 24th century."
"Hi, Bob. Would you like some chocolate milk?" [Men in Black 3, anyone?]

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Hopefully there's a support group where such people can get help.

The Department of Temporal Investigations probably has a whole subdivision for just that purpose.

Indeed, in @Christopher's DTI novels (which, BTW, I highly recommend) they actually do.

 

[publiusr]

I’ve always feel as if I was born in the wrong era.

 

[maneth]

A very good question. I think that most of the "best of the best" Starfleet officers would eventually adapt. It seems to me that Federation members are generally very well informed and adjusted people, who could get by pretty much anywhere. Living in an era when scarcity is something people deal with on a daily basis would undoubtedly be a culture shock for them, though.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Think about it- Bones was a medical doctor, but could he build or create any of the technology he used on a daily basis? Of course not. So after 30 years, in the 1960's, would he still believe in the future he came from, or have come to think that it was all his imagination- a bad case of 'drinking from the wrong bottle,' as it were?

It sounds like you'd really enjoy David R. George III's novel Provenance of Shadows.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Hopefully there's a support group where such people can get help. "Temporally Displaced Persons Anonymous," or something like that.

"Hi, my name is Bob, from the 24th century."
"Hi, Bob. Would you like some chocolate milk?" [Men in Black 3, anyone?]

In one of the Shatnerverse Trek books (where Kirk is resurrected after Generations), Kirk goes to one such meeting and is shocked when hundreds of temporally displaced people show up.

 

[Forbin]

My parents were friends with a couple from Denmark. After living in the US for decades, they retired and moved back 'home' to Denmark. The woman wrote my Mom that she was having a hard time remembering how to speak Danish! She'd adapted so thoroughly that her original thought patterns had changed.

 

[Jedi Marso]

It sounds like you'd really enjoy David R. George III's novel Provenance of Shadows.

Read all three in that trilogy, quite a while back. I may have to revisit it.

 

[Jedi Marso]

My parents were friends with a couple from Denmark. After living in the US for decades, they retired and moved back 'home' to Denmark. The woman wrote my Mom that she was having a hard time remembering how to speak Danish! She'd adapted so thoroughly that her original thought patterns had changed.

Yes, it's common for expats who live in a country where a different language is spoken eventually begin to think and dream in their new language. My sister just did a single semester in Germany back in high school, and when she came back she said she'd been starting to think in German.

 

[Qonundrum]

Think of Bones in City on the Edge of Forever, or Rios in the 21st Century, and we actually sort of saw it happen with Picard in Inner Light.

Say you were a starfleet crewman who, through some mischance, was cast into the past of your own homeworld and forced to live out your life there. Without any sort of advanced technology or 'stuff' to ground your memory, do you think you would eventually begin to doubt your own sanity? That the future era you came from even existed at all, or was just an invention of your mind?

Think about it- Bones was a medical doctor, but could he build or create any of the technology he used on a daily basis? Of course not. So after 30 years, in the 1960's, would he still believe in the future he came from, or have come to think that it was all his imagination- a bad case of 'drinking from the wrong bottle,' as it were?

How do you think you would react? Thoughts?

Our own civilization is so different compared to 40, 50, or 60 years ago - never mind anything longer. But I have often fathomed what it was like, hundreds if not thousands of years ago, with groups of humans generally near water areas doing their human things in their strange world surrounding them - even if the answer was hidden in plain sight, they just didn't have any microscopes invented back then. No electricity, no car (so when your friend's 9 year-old is proud of walking 1/2 mile, tell stories of how you walked 4 more as a kid, or far longer your older relatives had done), the next human settlement being tens or hundreds of miles away if not more but generally taking a lot longer to get there, and once they got there it added a new array of complexities... everything they didn't understand labeled some attribute, either good or bad or anywhere in between... even the constellations looked different. Even our own moon is moving away from Earth at a rate of one inch per year, a distance which is both phenomenal and minuscule simultaneously... the next time the Enterprise calculates the destination, I hope their processors' FPUs aren't buggy, because floating point precision would be of paramount importance...

I’ve always feel as if I was born in the wrong era.

It's odd, isn't it, how we feel like we don't fit in. Maybe not for the same reasons; we're all part of the same community and such and yet we feel so different in other ways?

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I have a friend who grew up in India and when he goes back can no longer stand the heat and pollution.

You’d definitely start to feel like your current time is the natural one. I don’t think you’d doubt the future timeline is real. It’d just start feeling like something abstract and alien.

 

[at Quark's]

I might react like Picard did in 'the Inner light'. At first refusing to believe I was in a different era, and gradually coming to terms with it, until my 'original era' would have become something of a distant memory.

That is assuming that I can adapt sufficiently in the first place, and don't get myself killed by some disease, war , social misunderstanding. (e.g. not giving a noble the deference he expects), or lack of general skills suitable to survive in that era.

 

[maneth]

Yes, it's common for expats who live in a country where a different language is spoken eventually begin to think and dream in their new language. My sister just did a single semester in Germany back in high school, and when she came back she said she'd been starting to think in German.

I grew up speaking Finnish and Swedish, learned English in my early teens when we lived in the UK for a year, and spent 6 months each in France and Spain as a college student, living exclusively in a French and Spanish environment. I've lost most of my fluency in French and Spanish, but each time I learned a new language, I realized that I'd gained some fluency when I started dreaming in that language. You can't be truly fluent in a language until you can think in it.

My parents were friends with a couple from Denmark. After living in the US for decades, they retired and moved back 'home' to Denmark. The woman wrote my Mom that she was having a hard time remembering how to speak Danish! She'd adapted so thoroughly that her original thought patterns had changed.

My parents were friends with an Englishman who moved to Norway to live with his Norwegian wife. After 30 years in Norway, he spoke English with a Norwegian accent.

 

[ScottJ85]

My parents were friends with an Englishman who moved to Norway to live with his Norwegian wife. After 30 years in Norway, he spoke English with a Norwegian accent.

I used to work with a guy who moved from the US to Australia just after high school. He'd been here long enough that he picked up all the local slang but never quite lost the accent. Imagine a guy saying "G'day mate!" with a strong New Jersey accent, it's as weird as you're imagining.

 

[WarpTenLizard]

I mean, you might just as well ask about any one of us getting stuck in the Middle Ages. Would I start to doubt my sanity? Maybe, but I'd be more likely to think the past I was trapped in now was the delusion, rather than the place I'm used to.

 

[Forbin]

I went to South Carolina for a weekend in July, and the local accent had worn off on me before I finished checking into the motel.