Can I bring potatoes back with me?
Guess they’ll have to build an engine or generator.
Magnets!
Simple tools would be a better idea to bring to the past.
The cotton Ginny, the loom, other textile based inventions. Corner the textile market and make sure that you pay people fairly. More importantly make sure to push workers and slaves have rights. Surround myself by well paid union workers
Change the world and take down kings and priests.
I feel like you would die.
You could probably get one step further:
“Spin magnets fast”
“How do you get magnets”
“I don’t know”
I feel like you would be able to describe the concept of a metal that seems to stick to other metals and you would like to be able to find a magnetic material they do occur naturally
magnets, you say? that sounds like magic.
Make thin copper wire. (Or other metal should work. Anything you can work into a thin wire. Copper is one of the easiest to make thin wire from, but gold would also work well if you can afford it.)
Coat the wire in a thin layer of wax.
Coil the wire.
Spin a lodestone rapidly inside the coil.
Electricity will then come from the ends of the wires.
Come on, people. Stop reveling in your ignorance and go learn something.
Then somehow out of your hands, the time machine takes you to the time of ea-nasir, and you wind up learning the language just to write a strongly worded tablet.
Except you end up before the Bronze Age with people asking “what is this metal you speak of?”, in whatever language you definitely would not know.
Well, yeah. In any case, the language barrier will have to be overcome first. No matter who you are or what you’re trying to do, if you go more than a few hundred years in the past, you’re probably going to need to learn a new language before you can communicate anything to anyone. Even if you know a very old language, it was probably spoken very differently in antiquity than the way people speak it now.
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The copper age did precede the bronze age
“Can you make very thin strands of copper and do you know what magnets are?”
No, but i do know the average velocity of an unladen swallow…
African or European?
what kind?
You also need chargeable batteries, so you need
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The Anode - Lead Dioxide, a mineral called Plattnerite yields it, or it can be obtained by heating lead metal in open air at 600 Celsius and then turning the resulting Lead Monoxide powder into Red Lead via calcination which is just heating it again. Do your best to turn it into a plate form, perhaps by smelting some conductive material like copper onto it, idk.
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The Cathode - Pure Lead plate
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Sulfuric Acid - You can find Sulfur as a mineral, then mix with saltpeter, and then burn it to create sulfur oxide which if piped into water will produce the acid.
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Glass fiber plates to place between the Anodes and cathodes so that they do not touch
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A container, likely a ceramic.
Notes: Saltpeter can either be mined or obtained by soaking bat guano until small crystals form and then filtered out. Since this is a liquid batter it has to always be kept upright.
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Tbf just the knowledge that it exists and is achievable would take us like 1000 years into future.
Had a thought about me being in a scenario like this.
My answer on what to teach would be early industrial mechanisms. Show them the concepts of machines that paved the way towards the industrial revolution. Water wheels, gears and cogs, powered tools like saws and hammers, pumps. Then I would lead them forward towards more advanced metal working.
All of these would be pretty easy to engrave into your memory without relying on lists of facts. I already understand a lot of them just by playing video games and watching stuff like How It’s Made.
Pretty sure you’re a witch.
- those ancient folks probably
The Qing empire concluded steam engines were “clever, but useless” to actively harmful, and thats after seeing them in the rest of the world. Rome built a steam engine, and didn’t particularly care as they had slaves for productive work. The Ottoman Empire used steam to turn kebab, and that’s it. Spain (and every other empire) actively sabotaged industrial development in the colonies, since that represented competition, and production of higher-value goods means less cheap labor and resources. Today we can feed everyone, but don’t because its not profitable. We could educate 10x more scientists, but choose not to.
The point is the bigger blocker isn’t scientific knowledge, but social development.
the bigger blocker isn’t scientific knowledge, but social development.
Welp, I’m an autistic woman and I’m not that good at masking. I guess it was good while it lasted, friends.
Social development doesn’t mean the development of social skills in this context lol.
[During the physical stage], society is preoccupied with bare survival and subsistence. People follow tradition strictly, and there is little innovation and change. Land is the main asset and productive resource during the physical stage, and wealth is measured by the size of land holdings. This is the agrarian and feudal phase of society. Inherited wealth and position rule the roost and there is very little upward mobility. Feudal lords and military chiefs function as the leaders of the society. Commerce and money play a relatively minor role. As innovative thinking and experimental approaches are discouraged, people follow tradition unwaveringly and show little inclination to think outside of established guidelines. Occupational skills are passed down from parent to child by a long process of apprenticeship.
Guilds restrict the dissemination of trade secrets and technical knowledge. The Church controls the spread of new knowledge and tries to smother new ideas that does not agree with established dogmas. The physical stage comes to an end when the reorganization of agriculture gives scope for commerce and industry to expand. This happened in Europe during the 18th century when political revolutions abolished feudalism and the Industrial Revolution gave a boost to factory production. The shift to the vital and mental stages helps to break the bonds of tradition and inject new dynamism in social life.
(Emphasis mine) I didn’t mean like that, lol. They’d just find me… undogmatic, to say the least.
Yeah, its a useful concept, but the writing is kinda dogshit idealism, focusing on social structures instead of their causes.
Yeah, I’m mostly considering the attitude towards difference, whether it’s because of the church or not is irrelevant. I mean, I already know that I’m not the ideal for any religion (except maybe Neoplatonism), whereas I only suspect that would be the case for any culture with low social development.
But, just to be clear, my original comment was related to being a loud, persnickety weirdo, which is generally punished by cultures with low social development, not with my personal “social development.” I brought up masking because I’m just not good enough at shutting up and blending in to fly under the radar.
Well that’s sucks lol
Eh, it just changes what your task is; social development is driven by the evolution of the means of production, which is largely influenced by technology; as a rule any progress is going to be opposed by any faction that would see its power decrease, and embraced by the group that stands to gain.
Weavers and kings aren’t going to embrace the automatic loom, but theres certainly some rich, lower nobility/merchants who want power over the peasants and upper nobility who will.
“One day you will be rich tech oligarchs and rule the world!”
Ruling class: “We already rule the world, that tech is going to fuck up the bag. Guards, stab him.”
Merchant: “I have 100 ships currently hauling <thing> from 10,000 farms, and you’re telling me anyone can make it anywhere? If this catches on, Ill be ruined. Stabbing you is basically self-defense”
Peasent class: “Wait so the lord will only need 1/10th us to do <thing>?? Fuck that shit, you want 90% of us to get drafted into some dumb war? We gotta stab him before the lord finds out.”
Alternative merchant route: “I could save the 100 ships worth while making all the money. … But he knows too much.” stabs you in the back.
Fewer people have 100 ships so there’s less competition, but here’s the weird part: The market doesn’t grow proportionally, so not only does the spread of this new invention require the capitalist invest more to remain competitive, it decreases the profit they get per dollar invested.
The highest reward:lowest memorization ratio has got to be introducing people to Pasteur’s spontaneous generation experiments, and it’s not even close. That kick started the modern understanding of germ theory and revolutionized healthcare, and all you need to demonstrate it is someone that knows how to blow clear glass.
I wonder what the best suitable substitute for agar would be
IIRC the original experiment used broth? Or maybe grape juice, I can’t remember. Anything that spoils would work.
Broth sounds like a good option
Meanwhile I’m just strapping slices of moldy bread to wounds and hoping for the best
There is a segment of a Dara O’Brien tour where he jokes you are about 3 questions away from being an idiot if you time traveled. Apologies for the YouTube link
