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Comments
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During a get together someone asked if you could go back in time, what one item would you take with you? My cousin said his cell phone so he could have unlimited knowledge with him. I was called an asshole for telling him it wouldn't work unless he downloaded it all on his phone and asking how would he charge it.
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A phone would be a bit much, but an ereader with a solar charger loaded up with Wikipedia and a chunk of Project Gutenberg would probably last with a bit of care.
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This is a good reminder, I need to upload my Kiwix backup to my eReader. I keep a Wikipedia essentials download, survival and medical encyclopedias, and a bunch of "from the ground up" engineering resources backed up offline.
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That's two items. The second one costs extra.
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No idea how well it would actually work, but having https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ (link to the book's website, not amazon, because fuck amazon) as a reference manual would probably not be a terrible idea.
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wikipedia without images is like 100gb, get rid of all the utterly useless things like art and sports and it's more like 40gb
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Electricity is a hard ask to even attempt to do in ancient times. Luckily there's a variety of other simpler things to establish yourself as a genius inventor - strirrups, wheelbarrows, magnetic compasses, the idea of a crank handle, and how to use triangular bracing to make a strong truss would be good options.
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i would say metallurgy was advanced enough for some very simple generators using a lodestone and copper wire, that could then at least used as a heater or establish electrolysis to advance chemistry quite a bit, but applications would likely stay niche or just a curiosity, carbon arc lamps would maybe be possible but hard.
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Washing hands before performing another surgery when you just finished patching some soldier's infectious wounds.
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That's a joke-turned-plot element from one of the Hitchhiker's Guide books. The protagonist, a human everyman stranded with a primitive culture on a distant world realises he has no idea how electricity, steam engines, medicine, etc works but he becomes a respected member of their community by making sandwiches.
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Mostly Harmless. I didn't like that one. It was somehow bleak and left me worrying that DNA was in a bad place when he wrote it. I'm going to be a heretic and say that I did like how Colfer continued the series.
In a Discworld novel, an off-hand remark mentions Ponder Stibbons wanting to build a Van-De-Graff-generator by tying cats to a wheel. I wish I could remember which book it was.
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I kinda liked the bleak. It felt like an ending. Drove home a fairly central theme
Never read Colfer's continuation, I read some of the Artemis Fowl books when I was younger and I didn't really expect him to match Adams' particular style.
I did listen to the radio adaptation though, and if it's true to the source then it was... okay? I'm not sure it added much.
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I have very few practical skills in the modern day.
But if you need to set up a society from scratch, I can get you electricity, steel, solid agriculture, and a handful of life saving medications depending on climate.
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wait what, that's incredible. Dibs on you when it comes to picking time travel buddies.
I offer: handy with a screwdriver and knows how to make good scary voices when telling ghost stories around a campfire.
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Have you actually smelted and alloyed useable steel from ores before? That's a choice skill to have practical experience with at a small scale.
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Y'all don't give yourselves near enough credit for what sounds "common sense" to you.
It would look more like this.
(Click image if resolution too low)
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The reaction in that picture is also bang-on though, because Semmelweis got a huge amount of pushback from the medical community at the time, who took offense at the apparent accusation that they were so dirty they were killing their own patients.
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imagine showing them the quadratic equation and they're just like "why does this matter" and just being like "idk I barely passed"
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The Babylonians had them figured out (for a certain definition of figured out) so you're not going to blow anyone's mind but you might convince a priest you'd make a good scribe
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Well i actually know how to produce electricity so...wait- i don't have magnets
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lodestone is a natural material, use that to build a shitty generator which powers a much more powerful electromagnet which you use to magnetize better permanent magnets, then use them to make better generators. bish bash bosh
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Huh. At first, I thought that was about rubbing the kitty with some amber.
"Thales of Miletus, writing at around 600 BC, noted that rubbing fur on various substances such as amber would cause them to attract specks of dust and other light objects." (Yes, that Thales.) It is still, or again, a popular demonstration, though we use plastic instead of amber. Amber in Ancient Greek is "elektron".
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Electricity works by moving electrons from point a to point b.
There are different ways of acomplishing this. Easiest is to have an electrolyte between zinc and copper. Kids use a potato for their science class. Volta used cloth soaked in saltwater.
Which is also why call it "Volt" and "Voltage"
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I actually read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court recently. It's one of those things where I knew the whole story going in because pop culture had remade it several times for both children and adults. I got Star Wars the exact same way. But I recently listened through the original on LibreVox.
Twain apparently wrote it to poke fun at a friend of his who wrote stories about noble knights errant, which is why he creates an ancient people who are perfectly ignorant and perfectly gullible, that stories of "rescuing maidens from a giant" were extremely embellished stories of buying pigs back.
Then there's the entire aspect of a modern engineer teaching a historical people new technology. Twain makes a BIG deal of "Arkansas journalism" and convincing knights to carry advertising billboards with them which would have been very modern and American to a 19th century man. But also he manages to set up a printing press in a land that doesn't understand pulp paper, a telephone network in a land that doesn't understand electricity...in apparently a couple years?
Me? I think I'm an above average candidate for this scenario, I'd die in a boiler explosion attempting to build a steam engine.
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Uhh... I'll give it a try. Let's first start by digging everywhere looking for this natural metal called "copper." We're gonna need that for conductivity. Then...um... I honestly don't know what happens after that.
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I'm pretty sure there was research done that showed that people who are hypothetically transported back in time, won't be able to make any meaningful contributions to the era they go to. They will just end up integrating in that the society of that era.
Basically if you go back in time to medieval Europe, you could introduce something like paperclips to society, but you won't be able to introduce things like computers even if you know how they work and how to use them.
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For a really easy demonstration of why, look at videos of WW2 era production machinery.
They are often amazingly, fascinatingly complex masterpieces of engineering that are still the result of generations of combined mechanical effort and discovery, and what we have now is as far above them as they are above a printing press. And building them required complex tools built by other, slightly less complex tools, you're not going right from anvil and hammer to a T-model production line.
You might be able to start the scientific revolution early and introduce key concepts but you do not know how to build even a 19th century cannery, much less a computer, and the team of engineers it would take to do it doesn't exist either.
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Just about everyone will be successful at some things.
Everyone knows how to make:
- Fire
- Lever
- Wheel
- Clay blocks
- Penicillium molds (antibiotics!)
- Wine
- Flatbread
- Can work out a very basic steam turbine (pot+wheel)
Quite a few also know how to make:
- Bellows and basic forgery tools
- Various simple fabrics
- Simple water pumps
- Simple carts, bicycles
- Galvanic cells, or maybe even alternating current sources (+wheel=hydro/steam power!), incandescent light bulbs
- Cheese and regular bread
- Beer, cider, moonshine
- Soap
You can also teach them the basics of proper hygienic procedures to keep their food safe, their hands free of pathogens, etc.
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Oh man, have you met an everyone? I might be pessimistic, but I think you might be overestimating by quite a bit. A lot of people know how those things work, but knowing enough to replicate even basics feels kinda rare. Even fire, most don't know beyond 'rub two sticks together'.
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However, if you end up in a Christian land, you'll be seen as a heretic or sorcerer and burned at the stake before you get the chance to try any of these.
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Not if you're a priest. This is the caveat plenty of people used to move science through the roughest of times.
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only if you try to spread it to the common man, offer it to the powerful people behind closed doors and they'll give you a nice box of communion wafers.
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I feel like unless you can make everything yourself, logistics would be a problem:
-Bring me Potassium Nitrate
- He is speaking in tongues, kill him!
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I think showing just a few simple tricks that you can do yourself would advance you quite high in ancient academia, and then you'll have some patient helping hands.
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I could make an electric generator/motor but I couldn't tell you how it works beyond "you spin copper around a magnet and magic happens." 🤷♂️
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Time travel to Earth's past would be cool to study history. But how to not accidentally ruin our timeline?
I think the real progress is to be made in space. Send a probe to a solar system 50 LY away but back in time to arrive the same day you sent it. It can travel really slow too, because time isn't a concern.
If there is a habitable planet, send settlers there at the earliest time in history possible. Settlers can be robots that just build infrastructure and plant stuff for 10k years. Then go yourself.
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Me at the 19thC Royal Society, all cocky like: Matter is energy, E=mc^2
Michael Faraday: interesting, how would I go about proving that?
Me: no fucking clue. Something to do with spaceships, or massive bombs?
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Go take a piece of uranium ore (they knew what uranium is), spin it up real fast, and collect separate fractions depending on how close they were to the wall.
Now, accumulate plenty of that lighter thing far from the wall, something like 50 kg, bake it in a sphere, and throw it in the water somewhere far from other people. Water will start boiling - this is energy released. After it stops boiling (this will take quite a while) measure the weight of the sample - it will be lighter.
The energy released is directly related to the mass lost, and they relate to one another through this equation. If you manage to condense steam back to water and analyze it through any means available at the specific point of 19th century, you'll be able to show that the mass lost is greatly higher than the mass of uranium dispersed in steam. Through this, you can prove it is the mass that converts to energy. The results may not be accurate to ascertain the dependence is exactly speed of light squared, but you'll make a point for further research.
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spin it up real fast, and collect separate fractions depending on how close they were to the wall.
btw don't die of fluorine poisoning. Also build hundreds of high-speed centrifuges that are resistant to UF6.
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I’m fairly sure that “spin up a piece of uranium ore” is covering a ton of stuff that you’d have to Google (and possibly get put on a list for).
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Time travel is exclusively a cis white guy fantasy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-WHAISI02w (Anyone else would be shunned and probably killed as some sort of witch/demon.)
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This is kinda funny. It's like "Jesus was a white guy" mixed with "cis whites need to check their privilege"
The idea that you could go back in time as a nutritionally giant white guy speaking gibberish and fit in because white is a bit anti history.
If we're sending people back in time it's going to be Dwayne Johnson.
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there are so so so many things utterly wrong about this, primarily the fact that "white people" (a fundamentally racist concept) weren't particularly advanced until very very recently.
You know where the big advanced civlizations were, historically? The middle east TWICE, egypt, FUCKING CHINA, and the Mediterranean.
Civilization started in modern day Iraq, somehow i think they'd be more likely to react to a light-skinned person than someone with brown skin 🤔
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What about wanting to fast forward right past the stupid ages?
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How do people in this day and age not know how electricity works? That's like grade 3 science...
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Go back to a time where material quality and manufacturing processes couldn’t produce consistent quality and quantity of things needed to build a basic generator.
Where will you get the permanent magnet, for instance? What will you demonstrate once you’ve assembled a basic generator? Going to make a light bulb? How about a voltage regulator? Think about the manufacturing processes involved in that, like pulling a vacuum for the bulb? I mean, it’s one thing to know that spinning a magnet in a coil of wire makes electricity, it’s an entirely different thing to actually build such a thing correctly and to convince ancient peoples to even help you and not kill you for witchcraft or something.
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Copper and lodestone were some of the first materials refined from ores. You can also create a permanent magnet by getting a piece of iron struck by lightning.
Once you have copper and a magnet you can use the electricity to make additional magnets out of iron.
It's also possible to make a magnet with a compass, a piece of iron, and a striking hammer:
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Well, a simple thing to do once you have a coil and magnet is to hook it up to another coil.and magnet some distance away. You can then transfer the spinning action. Something simple to set up would be a fan.
As for not killing me for witchcraft, plenty of folks want to kill me now for much more tangible reasons, so there really isn't much to gain here.
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Most people tend to forget stuff that isn't important to them in their daily lives.
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Without any research, please build a battery right now.
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Sure, spare change, coin roll, salt water.
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Well, most people here are American.
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Yeah, you can't just lay down electricity, especially not practical electricity it requires a ton of diverse knowledge from many different studies. What I would do is give them the concept of using steam to power to spin wheels or create an engine. Then use gear ratios to show them how to scale it up. Idk if they had found neodymium magnets back then, but teach them how to use them to heat iron by spinning them on the end of a steam engine and you're starting to cook with electricity.
Again, getting to electricity from there is still a whole fucking chore. But hopefully you could rely on science to advance way faster from your advances than if you weren't there.
Actually, the most important thing you could give the greeks is the concept of the modern scientific method. That shit was invented so late and just skyrocketed science (literally) the moment it was refined.
Just write a book about everything you remember about a null hypothesis, randomized blind trials, control experiments, variable control etc. if you can squeeze any bit of statistics out of your brain, even if it's just making a graph, you probably advance the world by thousands of years.
They definitely didn't have neodinium magnets, as neodinium being a lantanide metal was discovered only recently (1700s or 1800s) and requires extremely advanced (for the time) metallurgy and chemistry to extract from minerals.
Probably 2 of the biggest reasons the Greeks failed to become a technological civilization are that their various feuding city-states never united in cooperation, but primarily that they were super into slavery for all their labor. They didn't want to make slaves work less, then they would have time and energy to rebel and slaughter their masters. No, scientific advancement was simply for curiosity's sake, not practical applications.