What do you think would happen if someone from the past ended up in the present day?

[AGXStarseed]

A bit of a sci-fi question for you guys to ponder.

Accidental Time Travel is used a lot in media, with someone from one time period unintentionally traveling to another through one method or another - be it magical (such as messing around with a special clock or other mystical object), scientific (maybe a time machine experiment gone wrong), extraterrestrial (possibly investigating a downed/buried UFO while not been able to keep your hands to yourself), natural (waking up after a long coma/suspended animation) or supernatural (accidentally going through a time slip) among other reasons and examples.
In any case, the end result is that individual having to figure out how to cope in this alternate time period, while trying in turn to find a way back to their own time if possible.

Question is, if someone from the past ended up accidentally time traveling from the past (I'll use the early 1940's as an example as most of the world was "going nuts" in some way) and arrived in 2022, how do you think it would affect the individual in question and how would it affect the rest of the world if their existence became public knowledge?

 

[LadyS]

Probably ask to go back...

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

Then, there is Donnie Darko.

 

[AGXStarseed]

Probably ask to go back...

That'd depend on how they got to our present day, I suppose.
I'm reminded of the film An Angel for May where a young boy from the (then) present day ends up back in WW2 Britain during the time of the Blitz; the way this happens been that he unintentionally "phases" through some ruins during a storm. Furthermore, he can't get back until there's another storm as the wall becomes solid again.

On the flipside, the 2016 Hallmark film Journey Back To Christmas had an American Nurse from the end of WW2 end up in the present day due to a certain meteor passing over while she was sheltering from a snowstorm inside a garage, with her not been able to get back until the next time the meteor passes over.

 

[Judge]

Question is, if someone from the past ended up accidentally time traveling from the past (I'll use the early 1940's as an example as most of the world was "going nuts" in some way) and arrived in 2022, how do you think it would affect the individual in question and how would it affect the rest of the world if their existence became public knowledge?

Well, those sailors from Philly sure left a trail of debris behind them jumping from 1943 to the 80s. Too much for the government to keep a lid on it. But if it's classified as a national security incident, don't expect government to be particularly talkative.

It never happened! Must have been a weather balloon.

 

[Rasputin]

A bit of a sci-fi question for you guys to ponder.

Accidental Time Travel is used a lot in media, with someone from one time period unintentionally traveling to another through one method or another - be it magical (such as messing around with a special clock or other mystical object), scientific (maybe a time machine experiment gone wrong), extraterrestrial (possibly investigating a downed/buried UFO while not been able to keep your hands to yourself), natural (waking up after a long coma/suspended animation) or supernatural (accidentally going through a time slip) among other reasons and examples.
In any case, the end result is that individual having to figure out how to cope in this alternate time period, while trying in turn to find a way back to their own time if possible.

Question is, if someone from the past ended up accidentally time traveling from the past (I'll use the early 1940's as an example as most of the world was "going nuts" in some way) and arrived in 2022, how do you think it would affect the individual in question and how would it affect the rest of the world if their existence became public knowledge?

If someone from the distant past showed up here, they would think everyone had lost their mind.

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

Let's not dwell on this subject. Instead, let's just hope for and work towards a better future for everyone.

Yes! FTW

 

[Gerontius]

I think I can give a pretty good idea.

It's not relaxing. Our conception of time is mostly based on what's around us: a forest clearing is going to look pretty much the same no matter what the calendar says, but drop a candy wrapper there and automatically that fixes the scene in one particular era. A white canvas tent with a stand of arms in front of it--the Civil War. Same tent, but with a small folding table and a petrol lantern--it's now the twentieth century. Fast-forward and put that same tent up now and the guy in the new RV nearby is looking at you funny because you're camping in a tent and he doesn't want to see your tent from the window of a $300,000 RV.

Nothing from the early 1940s works in the 21st century: pick up the phone and call somebody and they may not even use the phone. Try going anywhere--Traffic is no longer 25mph, it's 60, 70, 80, and though you don't have to stop to change tires on a 100-mile trip, you also don't have the leisure of putting your windows down & seeing the countryside.

I grew up basically "backwards" in time. As I got older I realized I don't fit in here.

I hate everything about this century--Same old story of exploitation and greed, fewer and fewer places to escape it. Noise, noise, noise--Even the night sky is darkened by city lights, crisscrossed by satellites, ruined. The one thing I didn't think it was possible for us to bugger up, and we did.

 

[Progster]

I hate everything about this century--Same old story of exploitation and greed, fewer and fewer places to escape it. Noise, noise, noise--Even the night sky is darkened by city lights, crisscrossed by satellites, ruined. The one thing I didn't think it was possible for us to bugger up, and we did.

Yes - so a person coming here from 200 or even 100 years ago would get sensory overload. It would be completely disorientating and frightening.
H.G. Wells explores this idea in The Sleeper Awakes.

There's also the possibility that they would meet themselves as a much older person, or even dead and see their own gravestone, learn about the manner and date of death. Not nice.

On the other hand, I am curious about if and how humanity manages to solve many of the issues it faces now, or will face in the near future. Such as climate change, the prevervation of animal species. Will humanity finally find an alternative to plastics, alternative energy sources, food to feed the growing population, how will we manage without oil and fossil fuels? Will we switch to electric or even solar powered cars? Will more people go hungry? Will there be another pandemic? Will some parts of the Earth become inhabitable? Will there be more wars, extremists, terrorism? How will we cope with the ensuing humanitarian crises?

Will we cure cancer? Will people live longer? Or will that be offset by more pandemics, starvation, war...

 

[AGXStarseed]

Apparently TV tropes has an entire page dedicated to this that I missed:
Fish out of Temporal Water - TV Tropes

Here's what it says about a person from the past ending up in the present day:

Someone from The Past ends up in The Present Day: The humor will result from the "fish" attempting to relate to The Present Day with only the knowledge of a previous time. Naturally, they will make mistakes and/or be awed by things which the audience has come to take for granted. The Values Dissonance between the two eras may come up. This is now its own subtrope — The Future Is Shocking.

If they're from any time after about the midpoint of the Industrial Revolution (when people first began to take for granted that the future will be different from the present), the "surprised by a future that's strange in an unexpected way" trope will probably apply.

If they're from far enough back, their first encounter with a motor vehicle will involve the words "metal demon", or alternately "horseless carriage". They will also be completely unfamiliar with the word "computer" in spite of this being a common retooled word, which once meant someone who does calculations or 'computes' for a living. Not knowing the word "accountant" would be just as unusual.

If the character is from one of the more romanticized time periods, such as the Middle Ages, Antiquity or any age dominated by warriors, princes, kings and Old-School Chivalry, they will regard the people of the present as soft, weak, and uncultured (especially the men) and will often upstage and shame the modern men, winning the present day women over with gallant or gentlemanly behavior. In more recent works, this has however, become more subverted due to the influence of feminism and the historical fact that these time periods look better in fiction than they did in reality.

A character who isn't literally from the past, but somehow deludes himself that he's still living there anyway, is a Disco Dan. A character who neither literally from the past nor holds no delusions that he's living there, but is just more comfortable with the attitudes, mindsets and styles of the past than the present is Born in the Wrong Century

 

[SusanLR]

The TV series The 4400 is about this very subject.
4400 people were taken from different time periods in a beam of light and all dropped off in the present
at the same place.

It is interesting how they all have differing reactions.
Some want to return to their time and family, some like it better here and now, some say they have
no one or anything in the time they came from that they want to go back for, they all have the same
thing in common though...HOW did it happen?
And the other thing in common is the government wants to keep them captive or under their control,
of course.
Yes, @Judge , I guess they all dropped out of the sky when the weather balloon they were in busted!

If it were me in that position, I would be amazed, scared and most of all want to know what
happened to me to be teleported through time.
Other than that, I would just go with it.

 

[AGXStarseed]

Interestingly enough, the "Fish out of Temporal Water" page I linked to has several real examples of people "arriving" to a "future world" - albeit through more natural means such as waking up from a coma, getting out of prison after a long stretch, etc.
Here's the list (be aware that there are some political references here, but lets keep this thread on-topic as it's not the place for political discussion):

• A Polish man named Jan Grzebski fell into a coma in 1988 and woke up from it in 2007, by which time Communism had long since collapsed. Of the experience, he said "When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere. Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin."

• Charles Robert Jenkins, an American soldier, defected to North Korea in 1965 and remained cut off from the Western world. He made it out in 2004, finding that the U.S. had changed a bit since the 1960s.

• Just about all of North Korea itself has become this thanks to its isolationism. Apart from a small handful of spots, mostly where a facade was erected to feign modernity and advancement, the country is very firmly entrenched in the 1950s from a cultural and technological perspective. Those who make it out or the rare tourist who makes it in face some serious shock at just how alien life on the inside and outside is.
  • On the flip side, North Koreans who defect to South Korea or even China are essentially traveling forward in time by 50 or 60 years, and are often bewildered by a half-century's worth of new technology and changing customs. South Korea even has a school, Hanawon, where North Korean refugees are taught how to function in South Korean society.
  
  
• Some Japanese soldiers were stranded on some remote Pacific islands during WWII, and unaware of the fact that their side had lost until they were discovered in the '60s and '70s. For example, Lt. Hiroo Onoda continued fighting WWII for 30 years on the island of Lubang. He wrote a book entitled No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War. He was reportedly very disturbed by what he saw in changing traditional values.

• A man named Salomon Vides fled to the jungle during the 1969 "Football War" between El Salvador and Honduras. He finally "surrendered" to a group of lumberjacks he mistook for enemy soldiers more than 30 years later, telling them he was tired of running away. The saddest part is that the actual war lasted a total of four days.

• Prisoners who serve long jail sentences (over 15 years, usually) sometimes find themselves confounded by modern technology and culture when they leave prison. For example, there was an ex-convict who tried to steal a car shortly after getting out, having missed the invention and application of car alarms. Sadly, there are more than a few cases of released prisoners committing new crimes specifically to get caught (or outright killing themselves) as a result of this. They simply cannot cope, and there are no social services to help them adjust. Explored in The Shawshank Redemption (story and film) with Brooks and, to a lesser extent, with Red.

• Similar to prisoners, expatriates can find themselves out of step with the culture of their home countries when they return if they've been away for a long time. Fortunately, the internet makes it easier to keep up with what's going on back home these days.

• The Space Jam website used to be this for a long time. When Space Jam came out this website was made for it and has been left untouched since 1996. Yes, children, when the Nintendo 64 was the hot new thing, when the Berlin Wall had freshly been torn down, mobile phones were luxury items owned only by the rich, and the Internet was still new and scary thing made accessible by squealing modems and AOL, there was the Space Jam website. It was left unaltered until 2021, the year where the sequel would be released.

 

[Tuffsy]

One practical but boring thing that might happen is the person from the past wouldn't have our level of viral immunity and would probably catch something and die, bummer! Just like the original HG Wells book "War of the Worlds" (not the current TV series) where the aliens just die for that very reason.

 

[AGXStarseed]

One practical but boring thing that might happen is the person from the past wouldn't have our level of viral immunity and would probably catch something and die, bummer! Just like the original HG Wells book "War of the Worlds" (not the current TV series) where the aliens just die for that very reason.

True - that can't be ignored.