• OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
    13·
    1 hour ago

    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”.

  • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
    8·
    1 hour ago

    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.

    • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
      4·
      38 minutes ago

      There are ways to communicate long distances without using sounds or visible light

      Somebody in 1826: “No shit, dumbass. It’s called a telegraph.”

    • turtlesareneat@piefed.caEnglish
      1·
      8 minutes ago

      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.

      • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
        2·
        43 minutes ago

        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:

        • 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.

        • 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.

        • 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.)

        • 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.

        • 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.