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!!
Bought it too, it really looks interesting.
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.
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.
ETA: I stand corrected. I was focused on Salem, but didn’t mention. Oops
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
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.
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?
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
Linux? Like a cat?
There’s a great Rest is Science podcast episode about this very thing: https://youtu.be/6AvDME9Ti2E
cool
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.
Also, I think your knowledge might be hard to apply and wouldn’t be very useful in getting you ahead, while the others have skills that are useful in their time and you don’t (languages and societal norms, for a start)
Were I to time travel, I’d like to piss into the primordial soup so we’d get everyone ready for microplastics early on.
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.
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.
Michael Vsauce has a solution for that last part: slap bracelets with the locations of things that were lost for centuries. Whenever you end up*, the bracelet has a couple things on there that are lost and could be found.
How to prove you’re a time traveller - The Rest Is Science (45:27)
*) In the last couple centuries at least, the further back you go, the fewer things are lost.
If you could go back that far, you’d actually be better off taking the knowledge of a much simpler invention - soap.
While there are fancier ways to make soap nowadays, the easiest way is just mixing lye into water (slowly), add in melted animal fat or oil, mix for a while until it thickens into “trace”, add whatever fragrance you want, then pour into a mould and leave to cool.
Sure you could sell this as a way to reduce disease, but you could just as easily sell it as a way to launder clothes, or clean dishware (as oil was notoriously difficult to clean back then). Your hardest chore would be getting your hands on lye, and convincing people its not witchcraft.
What? There are recipes for soap that date back to ancient Sumer
How about showing them how to make sandals?
Nah nah you gotta introduce them to the concept of beer
I have no idea what lye is or how to make it. All I have to fall back on are some sandwich making skills.
imagine being the inventor of sliced bread, youd get so much credit
Your hardest chore would be getting your hands on lye, and convincing people its not witchcraft.
Isn’t that leached from wood ash or something?
Ah right, there was this survival video about making soap from ash with a simple gravel filter.
And some of the better isekai Manga making cement by burning clams. Would that work?
The person who made this must assume everyone is time travelling to the 1700s
I dislike that the chemical formula for progesterone provided here is ambiguous; there are plenty of molecules with that formula as written.
Cool
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!
This is nearly verbatim a Nate bargatze joke.
Douglas Adams made the very same joke (but better) in HGTTG when Nate was still a baby.
He could at least teach them how to make sandwiches.
