Sending places back in time

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Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba
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Sending places back in time

Post by Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba »

I was just thinking recently about S.M. Stirling's Nantucket-verse, about modern island of Nantucket getting thrown back to the Bronze Age. The first book I really enjoyed, but then the Mary Sue Samurai Lesbians overpowered it and... whatever. I'm aware also of a series called 1632, about an American small town getting sent to Reformation-era Germany.

I was just thinking - how would, realistically, small areas behave and survive when transported back in time? Which ones would survive the best? What do you think would be the coolest location to send back, and where should it be sent back to?

Basically, any ideas you have even vaguely related to the topic are welcome. Tangents wanted and all that. I don't know.
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Post by Zor »

In my opinion coastal settlments would have the biggest advantage by far. Coastal towns would have the advantage of fishing as well as fishing boats and a few anglers, which should help sustain the population. Grain is going to be a problem, invision the mass levying of nantucket's population to harvest grain with sickles being an annual event for the first few years. Hopefully somewere tropical so they don't have to face something like the Siberian/Canadian Winter.

A big thing to avoid, however is something adressed in both the Grantville and the Sea of Time series' respectively, the Oligarchy. Bringing in locals for labour is most likely going to be inevetable and one thing that could easily emerge is a class system, a very large population of natives at the bottom doing all the dirty nasty jobs and at the top is an small elite of uptime desendants, which is needless to say, is going to cause a shitload of problems.

In my opinion (assuming 400 years or more in getting sent back) the best place would be in either coastal New Zealand and Australia (including Tasmania). The natives are primitve and should not be much of a threat, nor is there going to be any civilization that tries to take over Australia until comparitively late thanks to marine barriers. Assuming a starting population in the 5,000-10,000 range, within a century it is likely you could have 30,000-50,000 on reproduction alone.

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Post by Chris OFarrell »

Australia.

Hey its an island... :)
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Post by Surlethe »

It really depends on how self-sufficient they are. Realistically, a modern small city will have between ten and thirty thousand residents, almost all of whom rely for their food on outside sources. Very few of them will be able to farm and produce their own food. Moreover, transportation will die very quickly because suddenly oil-derivative imports, just like everything else the town imports, will disappear.
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Post by Admiral Valdemar »

It would be better for a state to be sent back and displace the previous area. A city or settlement of smaller size is either not self-sufficient, or too small to make any difference. Australia would be a great example, or the UK or Japan, because they are isolated and don't change the previous global scenario as much as replacing a whole continental shelf.
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Post by Zor »

Surlethe wrote:It really depends on how self-sufficient they are. Realistically, a modern small city will have between ten and thirty thousand residents, almost all of whom rely for their food on outside sources. Very few of them will be able to farm and produce their own food. Moreover, transportation will die very quickly because suddenly oil-derivative imports, just like everything else the town imports, will disappear.
Petrollium distillents could be substituted with alcohol and filtered vegitble oil. However and much more importantly is spare parts and replacements. Even if the vehicles are all state confiscated and a scrapyard is present, eventually the engines will wear out and break down.

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Post by Surlethe »

Zor wrote:
Surlethe wrote:It really depends on how self-sufficient they are. Realistically, a modern small city will have between ten and thirty thousand residents, almost all of whom rely for their food on outside sources. Very few of them will be able to farm and produce their own food. Moreover, transportation will die very quickly because suddenly oil-derivative imports, just like everything else the town imports, will disappear.
Petrollium distillents could be substituted with alcohol and filtered vegitble oil. However and much more importantly is spare parts and replacements. Even if the vehicles are all state confiscated and a scrapyard is present, eventually the engines will wear out and break down.

Zor
Where, exactly, will our transplanted city get the alcohol and vegetable oil production and refining capability? You're right in thinking that the vehicles will eventually run down, but getting effective substitutes for oil derivatives is probably as difficult as milling new parts for a given engine.
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Post by Howedar »

Well, it's plenty easy if you see the problem ahead of time and prepare for it. However, if you've literally only got as much energy as is in everybody's personal gas tank and whatever is at the local gas stations, you won't have enough lead time to matter. You'll burn all that gas just trying to figure out what the fuck has just happened.
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Post by Zor »

Surlethe wrote:Where, exactly, will our transplanted city get the alcohol and vegetable oil production and refining capability? You're right in thinking that the vehicles will eventually run down, but getting effective substitutes for oil derivatives is probably as difficult as milling new parts for a given engine.
Ethenol can be made via repeated distillation from pratically any staple crop and stills are not that hard to set up (hence why prohabition failed). Vegetable oil production is more diffucult, but if Canola, soybeans or sunflower seeds are present and the area is cultivatable for any one of them it is doable within a few years. Both are likely to be top priorities in setting things up, and in this scenario planned Economics are going to be a big part of society for the first few years. And these needs are going to be limited as Vehicle use is going to be limited to farm vehicles, defense (pick up trucks and SUVs carrying riflemen against primitive natives), heavy transport of heavy things and possibly public transit.

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Post by Coyote »

The thing is, a certain amount of "too much coincidence" has to be allowed for. I mean, to an extent, it always seems that disasters, downfalls, and setbacks never happen to those careful families that learn how to hunt, grow their own food, tan hide, and have a brace of Honda generators that run on ethanol which is made from a still in their own garage. No, those guys never seem to get hammered. It's always the unprepared, oblivious types that get hit by survival situations.

It can be argued that the "prepared group" is boring to send back in time since they'd adjust and drive on, perhaps even enjoy it, while the "unprepared group" is more challenging as they come to grips with the situation. But the thing is, eventually the do come to groups with it, and they end up just like the "prepared group" started off, just a little behind the curve.

So when you send back a whole community, you've got to have-- what a coincidence!-- at least one family or small power team of survivalist types that step in to guide the n00bs into the gentle art of brutal survival. The thing I liked about the Nantucket series was that a lot of their conflict and trouble came not only from within, but from the one hyper-liberal stereotype chick that wanted to apply all the squishy-soft New-Agey ideals to the natives and loudly put the brakes on every real development plan the others wanted. It was a nice enough twist, to me, that I could overlook the part where she was in many ways a cutout.

So you need the "people prepared to rough it" to serve as guides, and you should have a "misperceptions of the modern age retroactively applied" angle covered as well.

Another thing to consider is guns. We have 'em, the primitives don't. Or they have nasty old flintlocks or something. Again, in Nantucket, the loonies blew up the storehouse with the guns in it, removing them from the situation. With guns, the moderns can fairly easily assrape the locals even after the gasoline is gone. Especially if you're dealing with a military unit that goes back. Leave a few guns around to keep the moderns from getting overrun, but not so many guns that it becomes Conquistadore-redux.

In Nantucket, Stirling did something clever by having the cars leaf springs become bow parts of crossbows. Not bad. And they also happen to have --what a coincidence!-- a lathe. Of course, with a whole community going back, a lathe is almost certainly going to be found somewhere.

As for settings, I agree with the consensus that a coastal community is best. How about some other offbeat ideas? Maybe a Antarctic research station-- very isolated, already set up for partial self-sufficiency, and it can displace without much of a fuss, even without the researches themselves knowing it! And of course you have the old angle of finding a mysterious alien device in the ice, fucking with it, it releases a blast of something, and the researchers go about their business unaware that they've been displaced in time. No radio contact? Storm is coming. They could go for weeks without knowing.

This gives them limited resources, very few firearms to overbear the natives, and a hidden base to operate out of (from the pov of any locals). They also have some interesting equipment to start out with-- say, a Russian nuclear icebreaker on a stopover, providing you with -- what a coincidence!-- power supply, ship's machine ship, your handful of guns, a couple helicopters, a medical facility, as well as mobility.

Research stations elsewhere can be useful, too-- a Pacific island or a Caribbean island for meteorological data gathering, or for exploring for alternate sources of fuel, or what have you...
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Post by Duckie »

Depending upon how far back the modern day people are sent, if, say, to pre-industrial europe, they could potentially all die of diseases.

Modern sanitation has let us forget that we used to just a few hundred years ago live in conditions that would eat us alive nowadays.

And forget about the Dark Ages or the like.
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