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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.
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.
There's the time traveller cheatsheet, hopefully I'd remember it. https://i.imgur.com/dgJ7vHU.jpg
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.
kimchi gang rise up
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
I would build an astronomical telescope way before those nerds in the 1600s
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?
Why do you think there were so many drag, trans and LGBTQ clubs in Berlin's Weimar period?
pro: raging 20s rock
con: hitler likes it :sweat:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Haha, so all those people saying that a collapse of civilization would leave us technologically crippled forevermore is just wishful thinking on their part?
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
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.
