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All you have to do is teaching intelligent people some math and tell them about experiments and that nature can be understood. The rest will follow.
Everything can be accelerated by adding the idea of the printing press.
The main challenge with inventing a working printing press would be the papermaking and level of metalworking required for the movable type.
Not to mention inventing an alphabet depending on where and when you go to. Or you could go with ConstantScript if you feel like being a gigantic troll.
Abugida might be workable if you reform it so that vowel markers can only appear above or below the modified consonant.
Did the Greeks not do experiments? They knew math. They even hypothetically knew about atoms.
Same can be said of all the ancient civilizations.
But the key insight is that all of nature is predictable and behaves according to natural laws that can be deduced through experiments.
That leads to the scientific revolution which leads to the industrial revolution.
In Sid Meier’s Civilization sure, but real history is a lot more complex than that. There were people who came to that conclusion since ancient times without it leading to a scientific and industrial revolution, because there were a lot more factors at play with those than just simply the idea of it.
An idea has to be widely accepted to be useful.
Just having one person think about it while the rest of society doesn’t is insufficient.
The actual reason science took off is that there was a plague leading to a worker shortage leading to a wealth boom, while a lot of rich people had access to coffee and nothing to do.
While I, too, am a big fan of the Coffee hypothesis, it should be noted that lots of civilizations had access to caffeine and other stimulants, including the Arabs, Chinese and Incas and probably the Roman’s, Greeks and Persians too.
And there were a lot of plagues, but most of them happened long before the scientific revolution.
Free time and the wealth to have that time is what I also think the catalyst is. Same with arts. You can’t do experiments or spend time on art if your entire life is consumed by labor.
So the time traveler needs to have been exposed to COVID, got it.
This book Tells you how to handle this, along with everything else you need to know to rebuild all systems in society from scratch should there be some sort of time machine based accident. It’s a good read!
This book tells you that it’s really, really fucking hard.
That looks fascinating! Pricey on the second hand market it seems. I’ll have to shop around. Thanks, great counterpoint.
I don’t have the book myself, but he gave a TED talk which I saw.
Probably on YouTube then, I’ll track him down :)
The fact that neither of these is the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy makes me weep for mankind. Where’s my overpass!?
There’s also [The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch](!wiki The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch) by Lewis Dartnel. Great book
I read this recently. It’s great, though I think it could give clearer instructions with more diagrams, and cover some subjects a lot better
Let’s see… electricity in a preindustrial environment. You’ll get into Factorio levels of invent a tool to make a tool to make a tool…
Copper wire existed at the time, (depending on the time period) but drawing it involved a person on a swing pulling it through a hole in a metal plate. So we need a metal plate. Surely there is a town blacksmith? We will need a few plates with gradually decreasing hole diameter. Enough wire for a demonstration would be difficult and expensive, but not impossible. Could also use copper busbars instead of wire.
Now that we have conductors, we have to figure out what method of generation we want. Rather than trying to make bearings, balanced shafts, and stacks of thin metal plates all identical and radially symmetrical so we can make a generator, we should first attempt a battery. For this we can get away with stacks of two dissimilar metals in a glass or ceramic jar, bathed in some sulfuric acid. Aqua Regia was a mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid, but it might dissolve copper and zinc plates. Could also use lead plates, those are easier to hammer out flat. With this we could get an output around 2v per cell, put a half dozen of them together in series and one could build a simple arc lamp.
After the proof of concept demonstration, hopefully you’d interest more smiths in the project, increasing your talent pool. With some mercury and wire you could build a version of Faraday’s homopolar motor.
After that I’d probably be burned at the stake.
We need some sorta optimal pathing tech tree.
Man if we could just find the user manual for the universe
There was a short story I read ages ago in some collection somewhere I’ve been dying to find. I think it was from the 60s or 70s, but a scientist brings a man from the future and the man is just a normal guy, so he can’t explain anything to the scientist’s satisfaction and the scientist gets more and more exasperated.
The dialogue was like:
“What is the dominant mode of transport in the future?”
“Oh, we fleem.”
“Fleem? What’s fleem?”
“It’s a kind of garbol but with more slimp.”
“Okay, never mind. How do you do it?”
“Oh, that’s easy, you simply merfingle the blem and you’re fleeming away!”
“WHAT IS THE BLEM?!?”
Yooo, this sounds funny as frickin heck. Anyone knows this?
I’ve been trying to find it again for like 2 years now and asked in a lot of places. No luck.
Reminds me of a short story I read in the 70s. I ended up having to go to the house I read it in (a decade ago) to find the book it was in, now everyone in my family owns copies of that book (Alfred Hitchcock’s Best in Suspense if I recall, not getting up to look) just so we can do Halloween readings of the story that made us all jump every time we saw anything move out of the corner for our eyes for like a week the first time we read it. They Bite by Anthony Boucher. Great story.
I feel like I definitely read that in middle/high school
You spin a magnet near a loop of wire
“What’s a magnet?”
Umm you go to the beach and something about certain grains will be different. Look mate, see how you boil liquid. Do that with milk until just before it boils and that’s the milk now pasteurised which means it will kill the things in it that make you ill. Also boil the water before drinking it?
That’s all I got. I guess sphagnum moss is good for absorbing blood/dealing with wounds?
“Get something bottle-ish, add a layer of charcoal, a layer of sand, hooray and a cheer! you just beat diahrea”
Rudementary magnets, in the form of lodestones, have been known since antiquity. Wire, on the other hand, is a modern miracle. You can’t hand-forge that.
Ooooh, tell me more about this mythical wire
A fucking miracle according to some
Is this a repost? Has lemmy already entered the repost phase?
I mean, could you imagine? The horror…
Say no more, ill repost it 1 more time in your honor
If you went back in time and tried this, most civilizations would probably burn you at the stake
Watch this Jim Al-Khalili documentary for the BBC, then jump into the time machine.
Love this documentary! My professor made my class watch this and I must say that all of it just clicked.
They should make a movie about this. An average guy accidentally time travels and feels embarrassed every minute
Business majors
Project manager: “Absolutely the developers can implement it!”
The developers: 😑😑😑
REAL
Just bring an encyclopedia with you, history of human advancements and history of human equality if you want to improve equality as well
You might want to check out this movie ; Idiocracy.
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
Go away, I’m ‘batin’
People always think about going to the past for their knowledge power-trip, when going to the future could be even dumber.
deleted by creator
“I don’t know, but let me tell you about how 5G activates the vaccines”
For anyone interested a simple way is to wrap copper wire around a magnet. Static electricity was also one of the first ways people started noticing electricity.
Parlor tricks might be able to get you far when you time travel to the ancient past.
Hopefully they have manufactured copper wire for you
My slaves will make it
