I would like to take this opportunity to tell everyone about the fantastic book How to Invent Everything by Ryan North. It's framed as a survival guide for stranded time travelers and goes into detail about many foundational technologies, how they build on each other, and how to make them yourself from scratch. It's truly a fascinating read.
that reminds me of the show Connections, not so much the time machine but how technology was built on eachother in such strange ways, it always starts off with some randome thing then you get sucked in and end up who knows where by the end of the episode, its so good
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series)
I love that show - it and The Twilight Zone are probably my all time favorites. The production is amazing and it's just so fun and interesting.
This is a great book. I read it a few years ago and I still think about it. The breakdown of how everything is built on each other was interesting.
Get a specific rock, refine it and draw specific patterns with anoter refined rock, add some sort of tamed lightning.
"Witchcraft!'
If you squeeze enough runes it and write the correct spells it can mimic humans. Now we can't tell who's human and who's a pile of rocks.
fun fact there's an antique chinese/southeast asian fairytale about it
the original human, the buddha, was lonely and thus wrote faces on rocks. the rocks became "alive", at least they looked alive. They were automatons. That is the explanation why today, there are people who are more or less machines (very superficial, only useful for work, no deeper soul), and people who have a much deeper soul (the buddhas).
Guess calling people NPCs is a timeless tradition, even if the terminology has changed.
If I went back in time at least 200 years ago and I wasn't burned for witchcraft the world would be a much different place.
200 years ago was 1826 and firmly in the industrial/modern era, they were not executing anyone for witchcraft at that time.
Witch trials were more a 1400-1700s deal.
I learned this when I took a class in university 13 years ago. I got a b- so keep that in mind.
Yeah, it was a populist concession to the protestant Reformation. The high middle ages would leave you just being seen as a cunning person or a lunatic depending on charisma and reproducibility.
Kepari Leniata was burned alive in 2013 in Papua New Guinea over accusations of witchcraft.
If I could go back in time my contribution would be electric motors/dynamos. I'd also teach basic battery technology, but with basic motors and wiring you can drastically jumpstart anywhere in the Eastern hemisphere starting really fucking early. I'm talking shitty transports in early Rome and streetcars in 11th century China.
You get massive labor saving devices early on and the basics to move forward and invest in more metallurgy.
But most importantly I understand how they work, how to demonstrate their usefulness, how to build them from ancient materials, and how to explain exactly why they work. Only problem is I won't speak the language and Romans ain't listening to a galla explaining engineering.
Just be aware that precision metalworking wasn't invented until the renaissance, so you might need to invent that first or your motors will wobble badly.
Edit: that might have even been the industrial age instead of the renaissance. It might have been what really kicked off the industrial age, though the invention itself was for more reliable guns iirc.
I'd invite you to watch a bit of the YouTube channel "Clickspring" and ask if you'd like to revise your statement. π As a spoiler, he starts off with a blank desk, builds a lathe, and then an entire antikythera mechanism - by hand, using essentially bronze-age technology. And, he does that while making it look so very mesmerising and elegant. Time well wasted!
Forget cellphones, let me tell you about Linux and my favourite distro.
I'll be honest, looking at how stupid people are today, I absolutely have no curiosity in seeing how stupid people were 300 or 400 years ago
Okay I don't wanna sound too cynical, but let's even forget complex physics, how are you going to even teach basic physics, and how likely are they are to even listen to you? Yes every action has an equal and opposite reaction, what's a peasant gonna do with that knowledge? Unless you bring a real piece of technology with you, I feel it would be very hard to get their attention.
Yeah I don't see how much chance you'd have with trying to share all your future knowledge, you might get really lucky and meet some scholar that takes you under his wings but chances are much higher of getting burned at the stake/beaten to death.
You might have a slightly better chance just trying to fit in acting dumb and using your knowledge to get ahead, but of course for that we have to conveniently ignore that you'd get utterly fucked by the new-to-you bacteria and infections and probably will die from some paper cut.
Shepherd is surprisingly fluent. I would have expected something more like "αΊαΉα«α? αα³ αΎα α©αΎα·ααααͺαΎ"
That was clearly before that Babel tower thing.
Were I to time travel, I'd like to piss into the primordial soup so we'd get everyone ready for microplastics early on.
i think i could explain some things. not everything but some things. especially fundamentals of physics as that's what i'm focusing on.
Even if you could explain these things, could you prove them and provide a practical application that relies on them?
yeah. take the voltaic pile for example. it generates a continuous current. pretty fascinating in itself, but i could also build an electromagnet with it, build a simple electromechanical generator, and power a lightbulb with it. if you give me enough money and time to buy all the ingredients and figure stuff out in detail.
There's a great Rest is Science podcast episode about this very thing: https://youtu.be/6AvDME9Ti2E
Nate Bargatze had a joke about this, where he says if he went back in time knowing everything he knows now, he doesn't think he'd make any difference or even be able to prove it at all.
Michael Vsauce has a solution for that last part: slap bracelets with the locations of things that were lost for centuries. Whenever you end up*, the bracelet has a couple things on there that are lost and could be found.
How to prove you're a time traveller - The Rest Is Science (45:27)
*) In the last couple centuries at least, the further back you go, the fewer things are lost.
If you could go back that far, you'd actually be better off taking the knowledge of a much simpler invention - soap.
While there are fancier ways to make soap nowadays, the easiest way is just mixing lye into water (slowly), add in melted animal fat or oil, mix for a while until it thickens into "trace", add whatever fragrance you want, then pour into a mould and leave to cool.
Sure you could sell this as a way to reduce disease, but you could just as easily sell it as a way to launder clothes, or clean dishware (as oil was notoriously difficult to clean back then). Your hardest chore would be getting your hands on lye, and convincing people its not witchcraft.
I have no idea what lye is or how to make it. All I have to fall back on are some sandwich making skills.
imagine being the inventor of sliced bread, youd get so much credit
Almost everything we have is so fragile... sometimes I wonder how back in time we go if a production chain collapse happens
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