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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.” 🤷♂️
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.
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.)
What about wanting to fast forward right past the stupid ages?
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.
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 🤔
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)
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
I will be burned as a witch within five minutes if im not burned for being such an insufferable bitch within as many seconds.
insufferable about what though?
Most things.
In a social-justice-righting-a-wrong kind of way? Or, like, drama for the sake of drama?
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.
Not from ores, and not on my own, but if I spent a minute I could remember how to go from ‘chopped dowm this tree with a rock’ to that at least in theory. Would need help from like a good stone guy to build it.
I think the fault in this “in theory I know this” is that there’s a shitload of small issues that pile up when you try to do things in practise that need that accumulated (practical) knowledge to overcome.
Like trying to find food, shelter, clean water, not dying from literally everything. Then there’s not being killed by the local humans whose land you have just invaded - you obviously don’t fit in and likely don’t speak the language
With the language barrier i can kinda work on it, Romans talked Latin and i talk Italian, with a bit of time i could learn Latin
I would definitely need to try some bits a few times. Less with the biology and more organic chemistry, which is the stuff that sometimes fucks up even when you do everything right.
And there are little gaps. Like i could walk you through decent-ish steel but I don’t know fuck-all about copper alloys, and might have to fuck around woth implementation a whole bunch on a few steps. It wouldn’t be personally fast, but it would be civilizationally fast.
imagine showing them the quadratic equation and they’re just like “why does this matter” and just being like “idk I barely passed”
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
You were right, the style change is very noticeable, but id still say it’s a worthwhile read.
How do people in this day and age not know how electricity works? That’s like grade 3 science…
Well, most people here are American.
Without any research, please build a battery right now.
Sure, spare change, coin roll, salt water.
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.
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:
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.
Most people tend to forget stuff that isn’t important to them in their daily lives.
