What are the skills and knowledge you could actually bring & fully realize at some point in the past?
And we’re taking this in the strictest, nerdiest, materialist lense. I don’t care how smart you are you ain’t making a steam engine the in bronze age, for instance.
So what could you create, with just your knowledge & period tools? What kind of institutional, technological, philosophical innovations could you realistically recreate? How would you interface with the social fabric of society to not be some crazed pariah who never positively influences the place they went?
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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.
If you’re doing either of those things, then you’re a stone’s throw away from inventing a bicycle. Just a thought.
I’d argue it’s in the sense of da vincis first helicopter in that it’s like a fun novelty thing that wouldn’t get realized much, much later as anything but.
It’s sort of a pareto principle thing where 80% of a bicycle is pretty easy to manufacture out of whatever you have lying around and the 20% get nigh impossible without fairly advanced metallurgy I think.
A Balance bike or something like Karl Draisine’s dandy horse is feasible much earlier than it was invented, sure, but that was and would always be a rich people toy since it has very little use other than going zoom zoom for fun.
Sure, frame, wheels and such, sorted, someone just needed to put it together in like bicycle shape or thereabouts.
Drivetrains get pretty complicated though, unless you penny-farthing it you’re gonna need a chain of some sort or it’s just gonna be a novelty again. Sure you could do like leather band around wooden sprockets or some shit but you’re gonna be replacing these so often and they’d require so much craftsmanship you’re back to rich people toy. Without ball bearings and such it’s also gonna be a such a slog to ride it’s going to be pointless.
Once metallurgy is there, though, you could kickstart the fuck out of modern bicycle design by just “inventing” it and a load of other shit that was entirely doable way earlier. People were fucking around for a while there.
broke: doing communism with time travel
bespoke: ancient bicycle
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.
Depends on time frame, but most places in the old world would have access to bronze from, well, the bronze age and onwards. New world would be trickier unless you know mining and metal refinement to teach, or rely on native metals.
But yeah if I’m sent back to the stone age I don’t think I’ll be able to do too too much
I meant more access to large quantities of coal. I guess that would be easiest in the Roman Empire, but then you’d be giving the Roman Empire trains and that might just prolong it’s collapse.
Edit: New idea! Teach Carthage how to build trains instead!
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.
The industrial revolution was centered geographically around rich coal deposits (in cities like Manchester for instance) because fuel was required in large quantities to keep the circuit of capital churning. These practically limitless (in the short term, and in terms of 19th century energy consumption) supplies of fuel were the catalyst which set the circuit of capital free. These colossal deposits of fuel required many developments in mining technology, geology, and lots of surveying and exploration to unlock, which couldn’t be relied on in ancient times.
But fuel itself is not hard to come by, unless you require it in such vast industrial quantities. Trees are fuel. An average campfire can range in temperatures from 315C (600F) to 600C (1200F). If you apply a bellows, you can reach even hotter temperatures without the need for any refined fuels. From wood you can also produce charcoal, which burns at 1,100C (2000F), which is very close (but not quite) the melting point of iron. Hotter-burning fuels, or the use of a blast furnace would be required to take things further (Blast furnaces did exist in China around 100AD).
So I suppose you are right that this technology would do very little to completely transform social relations the way it did during the Industrial Revolution, but mostly everything you need to flex on your ancestors is there.
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 would build an astronomical telescope way before those nerds in the 1600s
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.
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.
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
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.
Haha, so all those people saying that a collapse of civilization would leave us technologically crippled forevermore is just wishful thinking on their part?
Got any literature sounds interesting?
Water is a possible alternative in the case of factories and electricity generation but not in the case of metal smelting
Inoculation is an easy one if I could get someone to believe it, as well as whatever basic medical knowledge I have on hand (cool it with the bloodletting maybe?). Might be able to make a simple battery if I thought hard enough.
Could do a crude musket if I could figure out gunpowder (can remember saltpeter and ash(?) off the top of my head). That opens up cannons too. Assuming I’ve traveled to before these were readily available, whoever I swear allegiance to could have access to briefly unmatched firepower until the technology was copied. Crossbow should be possible as well, and also doesn’t need as valuable of resources
Outside of the 20th and 21st century, I think most things should be replicable pretty far back, like into the classical age if you’re somewhere fairly “developed” like Rome. It’s hard to underestimate the importance of simply knowing that something is possible because it was done before.
gotta have some metallurgy to make gunpowder give you muskets though I think
just binge-watch Cody’s Lab first
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?
Maybe some math. People were really interested in tracking movement stars, planets etc. So if you learned their system of notation you might be able to speed up the development of certain mathematics since they’d see the "practical " value in it for astrological or religious purposes.
Edit: just realized Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee is pretty much an answer to this question. Not sure it holds up to materialist analysis though.
Going back to the early fifteenth century to tell indigenous people worldwide to use fire arrows against every European ship they see and to organize regular patrols to keep an eye on the ocean at all times. You can also inoculate people against smallpox just by sticking dried smallpox sores into their bloodstream. (The Chinese, Turks, and Africans already know about this at the time.) These two cool techniques could save tens of millions of lives and destroy the historical nightmare the world has been experiencing for the last five centuries before it even begins. Major issues are: organizing people and learning their languages.
how would you convince them of that? killing all strangers isnt something many people are willing to do. or getting injected by a stranger to no perceived ill or positive effect
It wouldn’t be easy, but I know it could be done, since it was done.
i don’t think any population has permanently dedicated itself to ultraviolence on outsiders. i assumed you’d be innoculating before the euro diseases show up, but if they’re already there and killing people people would take it for sure
Maybe some math. People were really interested in tracking movement stars, planets etc. So if you learned their system of notation you might be able to speed up the development of certain mathematics since they’d see the "practical " value in it for astrological or religious purposes.
Edit I think they are actually joking (as it happened cause altered timeline?)
they had decades of hostile colonial contact from the british with which to learn a relatively harsh policy toward outsiders, but even so it is not one universally enforced. and that’s a tiny group of people. i don’t think you could replicate it even on another bigger island like haiti
one key point is to tell them how the ships / settlements contain limited food, ammo, and other supplies, and that they can use siege tactics against them
And how the Europeans will use divide-and-conquer to take advantage of indigenous divisions and either annihilate or enslave them.
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.
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.
I don’t know how true this is but I think a lot of seafaring cultures didn’t understand how you can sail into the wind (tacking). I mean you could probably go back in time thousands of years and show folks how to add a keel and how to point your sail correctly, no real “tech” needed.
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
probably the biggest impact i might be able to pull off would be some kind of irrigation improvement. like wind powered and/or muscle assisted (treadle-style maybe) pumping and storing at some moderate increase in elevation (~4 feet above crops) to a clay sealed pond. something i could pull off at a small scale as a proof of concept and communicate to others through demonstration for a larger scale project. besides slavery and shoulder buckets, flood and furrow was The Show for a long time, but it uses so much goddam water and salinity buildup collapsed whole civilizations. to be able to go deeper, have better flood protection, and build up an elevated reserve that could be more tightly controlled without a ton of labor time would probably be a major game changer in freeing up effort and protecting water resources, not to mention letting people farm reliably further away from rivers that are contested resources.
also, probably something related to plowing. like basically getting people to not do it when it isn’t necessary, to protect top soil instead of just hammer it until it’s gone and dampen the “need” to expand into new lands, find new sources of fertility, etc. probably a lighter footprint plow/more of a cultivator, nitrogen fixing rotations, cover crops and conservation strips to prevent erosion. that might be harder to convince, because the science has been definitive for decades and people still go hard on tillage and absolutely kick the shit out of soils because they think it is cool and makes fields look “tidy”.
the easiest thing that would probably change history would be to go back to pre-antiquity and bring knowledge of the location and size of massive, easily accessible salt deposits and how to navigate there by the stars.
