My only issue is turning spinning into power. I know we need spinning, and spinning is easy. Water mills are a thing and have been for ages.
Your biggest issue with tech, even if you know how to make it, is getting the materials.
Everyone tends to forget the tools to make the tools to make the tools to make tools precise enough for half the shit we make. Or consistent enough. There’s alot of steps between sticks stones and fire to pretty much anything today.
Sure you don’t need an industrial revolution for ALOT of stuff. But hot damn are you gonna run into issues without it, eventually
200 years isn’t that long ago, but call it 2,000 years: If you go back with at least a cursory grasp of the scientific method, that might be enough to get things up and running, if not for you then for the more intelligent and scientifically-minded types around you. “Try to prove yourself wrong at every step of the process” isn’t a natural impulse for most of us, but once taught and understood, it changes the game.
You could also drop a few tantalising nuggets even if you don’t know what they mean:
- E=MC2
- Basic concept of evolution by natural selection
- Germ theory of disease
- Electromagnetism
- Lenses for microscopy and telescopy, using the same lenses to start fires with the sun
- Electrical conductivity of different materials (e.g. metal good, wool bad)
- The basic components of a battery
- Newton’s first few laws
- Radio waves
- Calculus
- Periodic table of elements
Those are all things you can read about in any library, so you could do a crash course and memorise the broad strokes or write them down, or just take the books with you if that’s allowed.
If it were me, however, I’d just instantly kill myself.
That’s one thing that’s kinda bothers me a little bit in animes (Isekais).Like who the fuck knows exactly the chemical process on how to make everything and how every details gets done just by giving a vague description of something they only heard of.
1826 sure looked primitive.
I know about germs and the importance of cleanliness; I also know about what ACTUALLY caused the plague
Also while Alexander the great was himself from so long ago, he’s apparently attributed with having been the first to invent tactics, so if I go further back I can be the first to engineer tactics myself
If I go far enough back in Egypt, I’m scratching out messages in English in pyramids to really mess with archaeologists thousands of years down the line
Many physicians tried to promote hygiene and were laughed out the park, nobody believed them. Apart from the correct idea, you also need to be able to convince people and it’s not that easy
Actually, inventing writing and a phonetic alphabet would be pretty incredible.
Good job on that last one
Okay, first of all, 200 years ago was 1826, so why are we looking at a pic of cave men? They already had working telegraph machines in 1826. So, no, they aren’t going to be that confused by the concept of electricity.
Secondly, don’t sell yourself too short. Just knowing that washing your hands prevents the spread of disease could be a big benefit.
And thirdly, don’t revel in your ignorance – go out and learn some shit! You’ve got the entire internet at your fingertips right now. If you don’t know how electricity works, go learn how electricity works. You can do it right now. Seriously, close social media and search for “how does electricity work”.
Secondly, don’t sell yourself too short. Just knowing that washing your hands prevents the spread of disease could be a big benefit.
Or, more than likely, it’ll get you killed. The earliest proponents of germ theory weren’t really treated the best.
So tell me how you do it? I’m just testing you. I already know how.
Boil water, spin fancy rock
Exactly. All you need to know about power generation is that it is simply boiling water.
I spend way too much time thinking about this very topic.
I think I am somewhat well informed, so I’ve been thinking how well I would do in different eras. Of course in these scenarios I assume I can learn the language and communicate with the people of the past.
Anyway, I came to the conclusion than apart from some very specific advances, I’d do very badly. The vast majority of technological discoveries require an already well established base of knowledge and a society to carry it. You can’t singlehandedly kickstart the agrarian revolution early, it requires generations of plant knowledge. Same goes for stuff like metalworking, unless you can easily find soft metal ore and build a furnace out of primitive materials, you are boned - I could maaaaybe find iron ore in certain places, and maaaaaybe build a very basic bloomery, but at that level (amount of material and labor) it’s next to useless, unless I somehow get everybody to blindly follow my vision.
And it just follows like that, for ages on. Maybe I could get something like electricity going a hundred or two hundred years early (I know how to make a rudimentary magnet, or we could use a lodestone. With access to copper and other metals, I can work my way up. But sadlly, I know almost nothing about chemistry which was extremely important for early electric science), but that’s only if there is any actual interest for it - and I don’t really think there would be a lot of it back then, the main use would just be lighting for lords and rich people.
So, in the end, it turns out development IS kinda dependant on material conditions.
The biggest thing an average person might introduce is something like germ theory, which could be pretty massive - but in order to get people to take your advice of washing hands and boiling water seriously, you would have to rise through the ranks of the medical establishment as it exists, which depending on time and place probably means climbing the ladder of whatever is the dominant religious institution. Only after decades of accruing social capital would you have any hope of being seen as anything but one of about a million cranks with your wild and untestable theory of “tiny animals that can’t be seen”.
The genius of a Séguin, a Mayer, a Grove, has certainly done more to launch industry in new directions than all the capitalists in the world. But men of genius are themselves the children of industry as well as of science. Not until thousands of steam-engines had been working for years before all eyes, constantly transforming heat into dynamic force, and this force into sound, light, and electricity, could the insight of genius proclaim the mechanical origin and the unity of the physical forces. And if we, children of the nineteenth century, have at last grasped this idea, if we know now how to apply it, it is again because daily experience has prepared the way. The thinkers of the eighteenth century saw and declared it, but the idea remained undeveloped, because the eighteenth century had not grown up like ours, side by side with the steam-engine. Imagine the decades that might have passed while we remained in ignorance of this law, which has revolutionized modern industry, had Watt not found at Soho skilled workmen to embody his ideas in metal, bringing all the parts of his engine to perfection, so that steam, pent in a complete mechanism, and rendered more docile than a horse, more manageable than water, became at last the very soul of modern industry.
Every machine has had the same history — a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.
Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle — all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.
- conquest of bread
Where dinosaurs ?
I don’t know. I know a lot of songs, and I’m a halfway decent singer, so I could probably do quite alright just being a traveling minstrel.
Get my hands on a lute, or some sort of stringed instrument, and figure out the difference between that and a guitar, and I’m set.
Strong disagree.
Put a guy back 200 years ago with the concept of things to come and let the great thinker of the time stand on the shoulders of an Everyman from today, we would be at least a hundred years ahead of where we are currently.
There were some very intelligent people back then who just didn’t know the rules of the game they were playing. They had to figure out the rules so future inventors could build off of them.
Go back 200 years and say “everything is made of things from the periodic table, it has rows and columns” and you instantly revolutionize chemistry. If you know of acids and bases you’re even further along. There are ways to communicate long distances without using sounds or visible light, boom twenty years later I guarantee someone will have figured it out, it’s terribly obvious once you know it’s possible, but why would you assume invisible communication is possible since it’s so outlandish to our seemingly natural everyday rules?
The only thing you need to do is survive being proclaimed a heretic, you need to get open minded thinkers to hear you, because the closed mindedness was even more entrenched in society than it is today.
There are ways to communicate long distances without using sounds or visible light
Somebody in 1826: “No shit, dumbass. It’s called a telegraph.”
Credibility is your biggest challenge, if you go back and inhabit a big name thinker’s body you’ll accomplish things, if you go back as an outcast stranger who appeared in the woods one day, you’re probably going to die in a cell somewhere, or just of exposure, before you get anyone’s serious attention about “what makes up everything.”
Reminds me of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Magnets and some copper wires baby! How do we mine up and create these wires and magnets? Lol we’re so boned. (Actually I’ve watched enough primitive technology vids that I might be able to resolve that one too!)
Real talk I actually think it’s not a horrible idea to have like… a book on how to do permaculture on hand. While I doubt being sent back in time will happen, society collapsing enough that knowing how to sustainably farm food is actually a distant possibility. More than likely you’ll be dead in that scenario anyways
Spin a copper wire between 2 magnets
Okay. Make a copper wire. Make a magnet.
Even thousands of years ago, you can find native copper in some places. If you’re lucky this isn’t that hard. Also, I’m not certain on the properties required, but I think you just need a decent conductor, not copper specifically. Copper is just conductive, pretty available, and easy to work with. Also, there are naturally forming magnets. You don’t need to make one.
Are you saying copper wire and magnets weren’t a thing 100 years ago? Ørsted discovered that electrical fields can affect a compass needle in 1820.
Same with 20000 years
Idk about that. Inventing pottery, agriculture, and permanent structures seems pretty easy even for an idiot of our time.
Nomadic hunter/gatherers probably would have known how to make pottery and permanent structures – they just chose not to, because pottery is generally too heavy and fragile to haul along on long nomadic journeys, and permanent structures are a waste of time and effort if you’re not going to live there permanently.
Really, agriculture is the key to making pottery and permanent structures practical.
But you might not find agriculture to be as easy as you’d think, especially if you’re not already an experienced farmer/gardener. Subsistence farming can be tricky and risky at the best of times, and those are not the best of times. You’ll have several challenges to inventing agriculture:
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Modern domesticated crops haven’t been domesticated yet. Which means you’re stuck cultivating the shitty wild versions, which generally have much lower crop yields. Eventually you could begin domesticating crops yourself, but that takes many years, and you’ve got to eat in the meantime. Most animals haven’t been domesticated yet, either, so if you’re trying to raise animals, you’re going to be dealing with smaller, leaner ones that are more difficult to handle and control.
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No weather forecasts or almanacs to work from. It will probably take you a few years just to get a good feel for the local weather patterns (which may be different back in that time than they are now). Which means a higher chance of crop failures due to unexpected bad weather.
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Wild animals haven’t been decimated as much yet, which means you’re more likely to have problems with wild animals eating your crops before you can harvest them. (You’ll also need to spend a lot of time making pottery, to keep wild animals – especially rodents – out of your crops after you harvest them.)
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You don’t have modern fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Fertilizer can be locally made easily enough (though it still won’t be as good as the processed modern stuff). But your only substitute for herbicides will be to laboriously go out there and manually remove weeds. And the lack of pesticides might really hurt you if you’re unlucky enough to get a bad infestation and bugs eat all of your crops. A swarm of locusts rolling through at the wrong time could doom you to starvation.
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You may have difficulty fending off other hunter/gatherer tribes who have no concept of land ownership and see your crops as just more wild plants to gather and eat whenever they want. And if you try to stop them from doing that, you might end up looking down the pointy end of a pointy stick.
Especially when first getting started, before you’ve managed to create a stockpile to fall back on, just one or two failed crops – for any of the reasons listed above, or for a dozen other reasons – could mean starvation and death in the winter. Inventing agriculture isn’t as simple as just having the idea of ‘Hey, let’s stay in one spot and grow stuff there.’ It’s an entire system that needs to be set up. And it’s a system that will be very fragile in the beginning, when you haven’t yet had a chance to build up a stockpile that could carry you through bad years.
If, like in the picture, you got accepted into a tribe, you could work incrementally while following along their migration path.
Everywhere the tribe typically sets up a camp, dig a cache and store tools, non-perishable food, pottery, etc. there. You can even purposefully plant seeds for edible plants around those areas where they might have a chance to grow on their own.
It’s true we won’t have mass production crops and most grains are going to be tiny at this point in time, but the plants will be hardy. If they grow in an area naturally, chances are they’ll grow there if you pamper them a little too. You can even start domesticating plants this way by purposefully planting the seeds of the better fruit in better places or weeding out the undesireable ones.
Assuming the tribe follows a regular migratory pattern every year or follows it closely enough, you can slowly build up the caches and natural resources every year.
If you can show off how useful it is to have stored stuff, the other members of the tribe might start assisting you which would allow for better production. Fermenting food while you’re away seems like a good way to show off the usefulness of pottery.
You can also build the walls and floor of some basic dry-stone structures as you go along the route without immediately using them. Seeing how they’ve fallen apart by the time you make it back would also give you insight into how bad the weather gets or if there are destructive tribes who also frequent this area.
Once you have enough supplies to hold you through winter at one of the cache sites and a basic permanent shelter, you decide to stay there through winter.
When your tribe comes back around and finds you still alive, I’m sure some will probably want to stick around with you. A viola, you have a somewhat permanent settlement.
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“the fuck we do with this shit? We don’t stay in one place so long. Fuck off”
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