hmm, i'd like to think that if you dropped me into islamic golden age, i could give them an insane boost in math and physics.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2023
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they'd be using the same numbers :very-smart:
they'd have enough already down for me to get somewhere without having to resort to geometry i don't know.
There's the time traveller cheatsheet, hopefully I'd remember it. https://i.imgur.com/dgJ7vHU.jpg
showing up in 1056 like "hello comrades i am here to teach you about aerofoils" and immediately being branded as a witch for trying to turn men into angels
thats cheating!
I could become a ship captain- armed with my knowledge that Vitamin C prevents scurvy, I could build a sextant and navigate the globe, striving to put right what once went wrong.
Yeah but where do you get the vitamin C? Isn't half the problem that it breaks down easily, and fruit can't be kept fresh for very long?
It's questionable whether this knowledge will spread or persist that well. The British navy figured out how to prevent scurvy and then forgot again.
I wouldn't tell anyone out of fear of accelerating imperialism or the slave trade. But I hear sauerkraut was the historic solution. It keeps and its full of vitamin c.
Dang, good answer. I'd never heard that about sauerkraut.
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I would build an astronomical telescope way before those nerds in the 1600s
Try and turn Napoleon into a Marxist
god damn this is a good one. he and L'Ouverture could have run the board if they teamed up
I wonder if there's something that one could teach Homo erectus 3 million years ago that would permanently fuck up the course of history that led to the emergence of modern humans.
:thinking-about-it: recreational CBT and volcel doctrines to prevent reproduction
Math, some simple tools like 19th century plows, better crop rotation and artificial selection, 17th century and later metallurgy. Basic but useful electricity, a motor can be made from wire and magnets.
Much much better medicine. I can definitely recreate penicillin and gramicidin, ether, basic surgery. I can make small amounts of aluminium, also a map of accessible high yield ore deposits.
Once super rich steam engines and telegraphs and better ships become possible, but the trick is giving people what they actually need and avoiding the "man who came too early" scenario.
I have spent several weeks at this point in my life fantasizing about what would happen if I were to introduce electric guitars and indie rock music to Weimar Germany.
Like, open up an actual underground club and start a band to play like, the Killers music or something in 1926 Cologne. I'm sure people would dig it, but how would it fuck with their lives and maybe history?
pro: raging 20s rock
con: hitler likes it :sweat:
Why do you think there were so many drag, trans and LGBTQ clubs in Berlin's Weimar period?
I spent all day reading about early suspensions on carriages and cars - it wasn't until the 16th century that they figured out you could make the ride smoother by suspending the body of a carriage with leather straps (as opposed to having it be attached directly to the frame), and it wasn't until the 19th that they figured out that you could make it even smoother with a leaf spring suspension. Leaf springs themselves actually date back to ancient times and can be made of metal or wood depending on what's available, so it's just a matter of applying them to a new purpose.
Depending on how far you get sent back, there's also a lot of very simple improvements you can make to wheels that were technologically possible for a long time before people thought to do it. Make wheels lighter by making them out of thin planks instead of an entire slice of tree trunk, stronger by reinforcing the rim with a metal band, more maneuverable by separating the axle into two sections. Inflatable tires are much harder, but people would use a solid band of rubber or cork around the outside of the wheel to accomplish the same thing before pneumatic tires were figured out.
If you're doing either of those things, then you're a stone's throw away from inventing a bicycle. Just a thought.
broke: doing communism with time travel
bespoke: ancient bicycle
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Trauma medicine and modern agriculture, the basics of modern scientific philosophy and dialectical materialism, I could probably draw a mostly-accurate map and chart a few of the notable dangerous currents, the dynamics of climate change/public health to get them away from fossil fuels.
I dont think industrial revolution is possible without fossil fuels
Fossil Capital writes a lot about this and it's definitely false. We moved away from water powered factories to coal powered factories not because of the energy (coal was actually more expensive) but because having to build factories in the rural countryside on rivers meant workers had too much power to strike and couldn't be replaced. Moving the factories to cities meant the reserve army of labor was much bigger and you could break strikes, but you needed coal rather than water wheels.
Water is a possible alternative in the case of factories and electricity generation but not in the case of metal smelting
Got any literature sounds interesting?
Haha, so all those people saying that a collapse of civilization would leave us technologically crippled forevermore is just wishful thinking on their part?
dynamics of climate change/public health to get them away from fossil fuels
i respect it but how i woukdnt know how to begin on explaining that to a peasant
i think at its simplest you'd essentially be saying "see this black rock? when it burns it makes you sick. you know how it warms your homes/makes heat in your forges/whatever? it also heats the planet, do this enough and it will be too hot to live"
i dont think thatd be exactly intuitive to people who have to burn stuff to survive. what about some kind of cult of ecology that can counterbalance industry & burning things?
✍️ every tonne of coal burned must have 180000 trees planted ✍️ in the first testament
Germ theory and using alcohol as a disinfectant. Even if you can't prove the science without microscopes or whatever, being able to make people not get infected wounds and die is both beneficial and doesn't require a huge baseline of technology.
soap & handwashing around open wounds, idk how well non distilled alch would work (if youre in some time before distilleries).
getting people to do it though... "powers" of healing often get mixed up in religion i wonder how to navigate that
If you were in a cold climate I imagine you could get somewhere with Freeze distillation where you just put your alcoholic whatever outside to freeze solid, then turn the container upside down over another container to melt slowly inside. The alcohols will be among the first things to melt.
You can do this several times but IIRC the best you can manage is about 45% or 90 proof. Hand sanitizer is only 60% alcohol so I imagine 45% would be fairly good for most applications.
you are you ain’t making a steam engine the in bronze age
The romans built at least one.
That was the Greeks, and it was regarded as a curiosity and certainly wouldn't actually be effective as an engine.
The Romans had something similar, too, but it was also just regarded as a curiosity since the rich asshole class couldn't see a way to turn an immediate profit off of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uqPlOAH85o
thats just a doohickey :the-doohickey:
you need something that can outshine a mule or ox for it to be a useful transformative thing. and a kind of incentive structure that makes it exploding people every so often acceptable
It's pretty trivial to make one or direct someone to make one if you already know it can be done (and, of course, have a common language)
Even the layperson's understanding of a steam engine could lead to crude trains being developed in the classical era provided access to necessary materials and engineers
provided access to necessary materials
That's going to really limit the kind of places you could do it.
AFAIK, there were already sophisticated trade networks in place. To make bronze for instance, you need tin and copper, which are rarely found in the same place. The development of these alloys already required the extraction, smelting, and trade of these materials.
I meant the coal to use as fuel. I'd read that the industrial revolution happened where and when it did because of easy access to coal, and that coal wasn't heavily used in Europe for like a millennium after the fall of the Roman Empire.
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