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.)
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 🤔
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.
During a get together someone asked if you could go back in time, what one item would you take with you? My cousin said his cell phone so he could have unlimited knowledge with him. I was called an asshole for telling him it wouldn’t work unless he downloaded it all on his phone and asking how would he charge it.
A phone would be a bit much, but an ereader with a solar charger loaded up with Wikipedia and a chunk of Project Gutenberg would probably last with a bit of care.
This is a good reminder, I need to upload my Kiwix backup to my eReader. I keep a Wikipedia essentials download, survival and medical encyclopedias, and a bunch of “from the ground up” engineering resources backed up offline.
No idea how well it would actually work, but having https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ (link to the book’s website, not amazon, because fuck amazon) as a reference manual would probably not be a terrible idea.
wikipedia without images is like 100gb, get rid of all the utterly useless things like art and sports and it’s more like 40gb
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.
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.
Electricity is a hard ask to even attempt to do in ancient times. Luckily there’s a variety of other simpler things to establish yourself as a genius inventor - strirrups, wheelbarrows, magnetic compasses, the idea of a crank handle, and how to use triangular bracing to make a strong truss would be good options.
i would say metallurgy was advanced enough for some very simple generators using a lodestone and copper wire, that could then at least used as a heater or establish electrolysis to advance chemistry quite a bit, but applications would likely stay niche or just a curiosity, carbon arc lamps would maybe be possible but hard.
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.
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.
Well i actually know how to produce electricity so…wait- i don’t have magnets
lodestone is a natural material, use that to build a shitty generator which powers a much more powerful electromagnet which you use to magnetize better permanent magnets, then use them to make better generators. bish bash bosh
How do people in this day and age not know how electricity works? That’s like grade 3 science…
Without any research, please build a battery right now.
Sure, spare change, coin roll, salt water.
Most people tend to forget stuff that isn’t important to them in their daily lives.
Just about everyone will be successful at some things.
Everyone knows how to make:
- Fire
- Lever
- Wheel
- Clay blocks
- Penicillium molds (antibiotics!)
- Wine
- Flatbread
- Can work out a very basic steam turbine (pot+wheel)
Quite a few also know how to make:
- Bellows and basic forgery tools
- Various simple fabrics
- Simple water pumps
- Simple carts, bicycles
- Galvanic cells, or maybe even alternating current sources (+wheel=hydro/steam power!), incandescent light bulbs
- Cheese and regular bread
- Beer, cider, moonshine
- Soap
You can also teach them the basics of proper hygienic procedures to keep their food safe, their hands free of pathogens, etc.
However, if you end up in a Christian land, you’ll be seen as a heretic or sorcerer and burned at the stake before you get the chance to try any of these.
only if you try to spread it to the common man, offer it to the powerful people behind closed doors and they’ll give you a nice box of communion wafers.
I feel like unless you can make everything yourself, logistics would be a problem:
-Bring me Potassium Nitrate
- He is speaking in tongues, kill him!
I think showing just a few simple tricks that you can do yourself would advance you quite high in ancient academia, and then you’ll have some patient helping hands.
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
