Way overused joke.
Not in the past, it isn’t!
Forget cellphones, let me tell you about Linux and my favourite distro.
First you’ll need to build the first computer from raw materials.
And solve the enigma
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.
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.
Bought it. Thanks for the rec!!
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.
Not me, I’m definitely a pile of rocks, oh ah, uh… I-I-I mean human, yeah totally that’s what I meant.
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).
Well, I’m not superficial, and my crippled ass sure isn’t useful for work… so that must mean I’m a buddha! Woohoo?
Guess calling people NPCs is a timeless tradition, even if the terminology has changed.
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.
Almost everything we have is so fragile… sometimes I wonder how back in time we go if a production chain collapse happens
Stone Age, or some form of Scavenger-age in not much better shape than stone age.
Almost all of the accessible surface minerals have been mined. That means if the production chain collapses everything goes to shit. We cannot mine and refine the materials we need without heavy and specialized machinery. No reboot. The minerals are inaccessible. That machinery’s production relies on a huge amount of materials, from energy to electronics, and the logistical network to put it all together.
Our production chain is very discrete in a lot of ways. Electronics made one place, smelting another, fuel by ships, food over here, lithium someplace, copper somewhere else, iron from far away, medication over there, clothing someplace else. If the global network fails, that’s it. People starve. The specialized knowledge is lost to make things. Systems fail rapidly. The manufacturing of electronics quits, along with the rest of the supply chain. People probably eat all the seeds for crops. Lack of pesticide and fertilizer, plus climate change, wipes out yields for many. No way to harvest enough or transport it anywhere. Small pockets of humans might survive, but it’s gonna be hand-to-mouth or subsistence farming at best.
You’d go back in time quite a ways pretty quickly. People living tribally in the more remote parts of the world would maybe survive depending on how nasty climate change gets.
Something tells me we’re going to experience that collapse & regression soon!
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. 🙂 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!
Yeah, I’ll check that out… I was thinking that primitive builder guy would do well going to the past but I wasn’t sure how much he could teach people, so it’s cool to hear about a someone doing higher tech from scratch.
Also, that ancient puzzle box/lunar calendar/whatever it was is a counter example showing that some artisans were capable of precision work. The industrial revolution might have been more about scaling precision work to mass production levels. Like adopting standard units of measurement was a big part of it, which isn’t really technology but just getting everyone on the same page. Before that, a foot could have a different length depending on where you were, if that region even had a reliable and reproducible definition for what a foot was exactly.
i’m pretty sure the vikings has fine metal ornaments. and they were centuries earlier than the renaissance.
Not fine metal, precision metal. Those ornaments didn’t have to fit something perfectly and if one person’s was slightly bigger than another’s, it didn’t really matter other than maybe for their pride.
I’m talking about making 50 barrels with the exact same measurements (within some small error range) so that they will all fit the same receiver perfectly and can handle a standard sized bullet.
Or, in the case of motors and machines, bearings that spin smoothly, gears that fit together without slipping, the ability to align things well enough that spinning wheels on an axle won’t add a force that wants to rip the axle apart.
Not that electric motors are completely useless without that precision, but there’s only so far you can take them with more maintenance required without that precision.
How to you make electrical motors and batteries from ancient technology and raw materials?
Lodestone carved into a cylinder in a wooden housing with copper wire coiled around it. Batteries would be copper and zinc bar in vinegar in a clay pot that holds them apart from each other. It isn’t much but it’s enough to start moving towards water wheels
Can you make copper wire and zinc bars?
No, but if I’m in a time and place with writing someone there can, and if not I guess I’m teaching writing
Ez pz
Where do you get the electricity for your motors?
a generator is a motor operated in reverse (mechanical -> electrical). you apply external mechanical force and it produces electricity. neat, isn’t it?
I understand that but it’s not useful in this context, is it? You make an electric motor to power something, and then you have to use a mechanical generator to power the motor. How is that helpful? Unless you also know how to make batteries.
Coming up with a stream machine isn’t that difficult
For sure, and much more doable, though still relies on being able to make a metal vessel that can hold pressure.
If you can somehow craft a motor that runs somewhat smoothly, I think building a basic windmill wouldn’t be too difficult, perhaps that could be used to power a little cart doing some plowing or some shit
So then you have copper cables covered in something to insulate them that are long enough to cover a whole field, which by itself would likely be problematic at the time.
For most applications, I’m guessing the windmill directly to the machine is going to make more sense, though of course that has to be a stationary machine.
I was thinking to put them in rope or something and let a machine drive in circles, tightening the cable and making the circle smaller
Okay, but you still need to get electricity to the electric motor. How would you so that?
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.
Crazy people have always existed (yeah sorry I know that’s a harsh and reductive description mental illness), and most times and places throughout history if you were spouting stuff people didn’t understand they’d most likely just chalk you up as a crazy person and ignore you, not put you on trial for being a witch. Unless you were threatening to upset the social order, then you might get in hot water, otherwise you were just another lunatic.
Kepari Leniata was burned alive in 2013 in Papua New Guinea over accusations of witchcraft.
Wow, I hadn’t heard of this.
Twenty-year-old Kepari Leniata was stripped, tied up, doused in petrol and burned alive by relatives of a boy who had died following an illness in the city of Mount Hagen. The attackers claimed Kepari had caused the boy’s death through sorcery.
Apparently it wasn’t an isolated incident, either.
Amnesty International has received reports of girls as young as eight years old being attacked and accused of sorcery, and children being orphaned as a result of one or both their parents being killed after accusations of witchcraft.
Yeah. I don’t know why people are downvoting a verifiable fact. Western arrogance and ignorance I suppose. Can’t fathom that if something doesn’t happen in their narrow window to the world it must not happen anywhere.
Fortunately, no one was burned for witchcraft. That said, still harassed and killed.
Nobody was burned in the Salem witch trials, but I thought burnings still happened in other, previous locations. Is that wrong?
Witch burnings were absolutely a thing.
It might even have started in Valais/Wallis, Switzerland ;)
The area was poor and dumb back then.
It still is xd
Well, true.
I’m seeing the word “burned” a lot on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_executed_for_witchcraft
Shepherd is surprisingly fluent. I would have expected something more like “ᚺᚹᚫᛏ? ᛁᚳ ᚾᛖ ᚩᚾᚷᛁᛖᛏᚪᚾ”
That was clearly before that Babel tower thing.
I wouldn’t expect middle eastern shepher to speak futhark
I took the extreme liberty of assuming they were from 1000 years ago and Saxon rather than 2000 years ago and Aramaic, if only so that I might have any chance of producing something even close to what they might have said.
I think it’s good general knowledge to understand how a computer works.
I really like this video about transistors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pqfjer8-O4
Were I to time travel, I’d like to piss into the primordial soup so we’d get everyone ready for microplastics early on.
There’s a great Rest is Science podcast episode about this very thing: https://youtu.be/6AvDME9Ti2E
cool
i think i could explain some things. not everything but some things. especially fundamentals of physics as that’s what i’m focusing on.
On a serious note, most of physics would just sound like witchcraft to them.
" You know the tides you see are caused by the gravitational pull by the moon "
" What is a gravity?"
" It’s a force that’s exerted by large bodies on each other "
" So is it like magic?"
“…”
" What other gods do you believe in?"
Correction: tides not waves. Thank you @gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
now i can upvote it :)
btw waves are caused by the wind, not by the moon. the tides are caused by the moon.
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.
Can you make a lightbulb?
Specifically, a lightbulb that is bright enough to be useful but doesn’t burn out so fast that candles aren’t more economic / convenient.
Gotta invent glass blowing and vacuum pumps first.
Well we’re starting from scratch here so I think we’ve got to invent the universe first.
And discover tungsten
Eh, there were other filaments that worked well enough, I think (carbonized string or something, maybe?). It’s the vacuum that’s the real trick to keeping it from burning out too quick.
building a lightbulb is trivial, building an efficient lightbulb is more difficult. you just take a wire and embed it in glass.
and obviously i would need the assistance of some kind of goldsmith for that. (goldsmith = a smith that is capable of producing fine-grained structures)
also once people see it’s possible, somebody else will invest a whole lot of work into making it better until it is better than candles, yes, i think so. especially considering that candles used to be expensive before the modern times.
Is building a lightbulb really trivial? Glass has been around for millennia, but transparent glass wasn’t. If you didn’t have transparent glass, would you know how to make it?
When you say “embed it in glass” do you mean just wrap glass around a wire so the two are in contact? I don’t know what the advantage of that would be. You can get a wire to glow without glass, just pass enough current that it heats up to over 1000C. It would even be visible at about 600C in a completely dark room. If you have the wire in contact with glass you need to keep the temperature below the melting point of glass, which is between about 1400C to 1600C. That probably wouldn’t be better than a candle. Also, that “bulb” wouldn’t last long because of the difference in thermal expansion between metal and glass.
A typical light bulb has two things: space between the glass and the filament, and either a vacuum or something other than oxygen inside. There are 2 reasons for that. One is to allow the filament to get to a temperature that would melt glass. If there’s a space between the two, the filament can get white hot while the glass stays below its melting point. The reason for the argon or vacuum interior is that if you had an oxygen atmosphere the filament would corrode and/or erode quickly. There wouldn’t really be any point in building the “bulb” part of the light bulb without also changing the atmosphere inside the bulb. You probably couldn’t get argon gas in antiquity. You could probably get a partial vacuum, however.
IMO, the “white hot glowing wire” wouldn’t be too difficult if you could build a big enough battery. The “light bulb” would be significantly more challenging.
Don’t you need to vacuum the air out of that glass so the wire doesn’t just burn up?
candles used to be expensive before the modern times.
Well, candles that don’t stink at least.
I think oil lamps were more common?
Also expensive.
The history of technology is basically the history of light getting cheaper and cheaper.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-price-of-lighting-has-dropped-over-999-since-1700
You’d also need to invent a power grid to make a lightbulb useful, otherwise it’s nothing more than a curiosity.
yeah i know how to build a transformator
Would you know where to find the relatively pure zinc and copper that you’d need for a voltaic pile?
Like that idiot genius Dr. Stone and after nobody uses it?
I think the hard part would be finding someone to explain things too, you’d probably have to travel to spread the news or something
Gods, I’d try so hard to figure out how to explain how to make a basic diode… Like how do you explain silicon to people who have no reason to believe you and don’t know that air is a soup of a bunch of different gasses, and from there doping it with the elements on each side of it?
I’d probably just stick to electromechanics. Any time after the invention of permanent iron magnets I can do a lot of cool stuff.
Because yeah it’s not enough to say it. Try explaining the periodic table to Trajan and you’re going to sound like the time cube guy. You have to demonstrate the veracity of each step. If anything, the best place to start might be the scientific method.
The scientific method itself would be massively useful. It’s amazing how long it took humanity to get there, and how much it changed things. Even in the 1700s astronomy and astrology were basically both considered equally important fields of study. The queen of England had important advisors who took the alignment of celestial bodies into account when deciding policy.
What I think would be the most useful thing to know how to build isn’t electromechanics, it’s just plain mechanics.
In WWII US warships calculated firing solutions using purely mechanical, analog computers. If you knew how to build a shaft, a gear, a cam and a differential you could do pretty astounding calculations. Even just knowing how to build and use a slide rule would be pretty mind blowing for a lot of people in ancient times. Or you could just be the guy who invented zero.
