Comment by alcoholicorn [comrade/them, doe/deer]@hexbear.net on Materialist Time-Traveller

What are the skills and knowledge you could actually bring & fully realize at some point in the past?

And we’re taking this in the strictest, nerdiest, materialist lense. I don’t care how smart you are you ain’t making a steam engine the in bronze age, for instance.

So what could you create, with just your knowledge & period tools? What kind of institutional, technological, philosophical innovations could you realistically recreate? How would you interface with the social fabric of society to not be some crazed pariah who never positively influences the place they went?

you are you ain’t making a steam engine the in bronze age

The romans built at least one.

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.

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.

I meant the coal to use as fuel. I’d read that the industrial revolution happened where and when it did because of easy access to coal, and that coal wasn’t heavily used in Europe for like a millennium after the fall of the Roman Empire.

The industrial revolution was centered geographically around rich coal deposits (in cities like Manchester for instance) because fuel was required in large quantities to keep the circuit of capital churning. These practically limitless (in the short term, and in terms of 19th century energy consumption) supplies of fuel were the catalyst which set the circuit of capital free. These colossal deposits of fuel required many developments in mining technology, geology, and lots of surveying and exploration to unlock, which couldn’t be relied on in ancient times.

But fuel itself is not hard to come by, unless you require it in such vast industrial quantities. Trees are fuel. An average campfire can range in temperatures from 315C (600F) to 600C (1200F). If you apply a bellows, you can reach even hotter temperatures without the need for any refined fuels. From wood you can also produce charcoal, which burns at 1,100C (2000F), which is very close (but not quite) the melting point of iron. Hotter-burning fuels, or the use of a blast furnace would be required to take things further (Blast furnaces did exist in China around 100AD).

So I suppose you are right that this technology would do very little to completely transform social relations the way it did during the Industrial Revolution, but mostly everything you need to flex on your ancestors is there.

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!

That was the Greeks, and it was regarded as a curiosity and certainly wouldn’t actually be effective as an engine.

The Romans had something similar, too, but it was also just regarded as a curiosity since the rich asshole class couldn’t see a way to turn an immediate profit off of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uqPlOAH85o

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