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?
Germ theory and using alcohol as a disinfectant. Even if you can’t prove the science without microscopes or whatever, being able to make people not get infected wounds and die is both beneficial and doesn’t require a huge baseline of technology.
soap & handwashing around open wounds, idk how well non distilled alch would work (if youre in some time before distilleries).
getting people to do it though… “powers” of healing often get mixed up in religion i wonder how to navigate that
If you were in a cold climate I imagine you could get somewhere with Freeze distillation where you just put your alcoholic whatever outside to freeze solid, then turn the container upside down over another container to melt slowly inside. The alcohols will be among the first things to melt.
You can do this several times but IIRC the best you can manage is about 45% or 90 proof. Hand sanitizer is only 60% alcohol so I imagine 45% would be fairly good for most applications.
There’s the time traveller cheatsheet, hopefully I’d remember it. https://i.imgur.com/dgJ7vHU.jpg
I could become a ship captain- armed with my knowledge that Vitamin C prevents scurvy, I could build a sextant and navigate the globe, striving to put right what once went wrong.
Yeah but where do you get the vitamin C? Isn’t half the problem that it breaks down easily, and fruit can’t be kept fresh for very long?
It’s questionable whether this knowledge will spread or persist that well. The British navy figured out how to prevent scurvy and then forgot again.
Trauma medicine and modern agriculture, the basics of modern scientific philosophy and dialectical materialism, I could probably draw a mostly-accurate map and chart a few of the notable dangerous currents, the dynamics of climate change/public health to get them away from fossil fuels.
dynamics of climate change/public health to get them away from fossil fuels
i respect it but how i woukdnt know how to begin on explaining that to a peasant
i think at its simplest you’d essentially be saying “see this black rock? when it burns it makes you sick. you know how it warms your homes/makes heat in your forges/whatever? it also heats the planet, do this enough and it will be too hot to live”
Fossil Capital writes a lot about this and it’s definitely false. We moved away from water powered factories to coal powered factories not because of the energy (coal was actually more expensive) but because having to build factories in the rural countryside on rivers meant workers had too much power to strike and couldn’t be replaced. Moving the factories to cities meant the reserve army of labor was much bigger and you could break strikes, but you needed coal rather than water wheels.
Haha, so all those people saying that a collapse of civilization would leave us technologically crippled forevermore is just wishful thinking on their part?
hmm, i’d like to think that if you dropped me into islamic golden age, i could give them an insane boost in math and physics.
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.
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
