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.
I’m pretty sure there was research done that showed that people who are hypothetically transported back in time, won’t be able to make any meaningful contributions to the era they go to. They will just end up integrating in that the society of that era.
Basically if you go back in time to medieval Europe, you could introduce something like paperclips to society, but you won’t be able to introduce things like computers even if you know how they work and how to use them.
For a really easy demonstration of why, look at videos of WW2 era production machinery.
They are often amazingly, fascinatingly complex masterpieces of engineering that are still the result of generations of combined mechanical effort and discovery, and what we have now is as far above them as they are above a printing press. And building them required complex tools built by other, slightly less complex tools, you’re not going right from anvil and hammer to a T-model production line.
You might be able to start the scientific revolution early and introduce key concepts but you do not know how to build even a 19th century cannery, much less a computer, and the team of engineers it would take to do it doesn’t exist either.
I could make an electric generator/motor but I couldn’t tell you how it works beyond “you spin copper around a magnet and magic happens.” 🤷♂️
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.
Washing hands before performing another surgery when you just finished patching some soldier’s infectious wounds.
That’s one with big potential but not one to lead off with, best to wait until you’ve ‘invented’ a few obvious game changers and established your philosophic credentials before attempting to introduce basic medical hygiene…
Maybe invent lenses and a microscope so people could see microscopic bugs.
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.
Time travel to Earth’s past would be cool to study history. But how to not accidentally ruin our timeline?
I think the real progress is to be made in space. Send a probe to a solar system 50 LY away but back in time to arrive the same day you sent it. It can travel really slow too, because time isn’t a concern.
If there is a habitable planet, send settlers there at the earliest time in history possible. Settlers can be robots that just build infrastructure and plant stuff for 10k years. Then go yourself.
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.)
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.
What about wanting to fast forward right past the stupid ages?
Well i actually know how to produce electricity so…wait- i don’t have magnets
Quantum electrodynamics, mostly.
Quantum electrodynamics, how do they work!
Huh. At first, I thought that was about rubbing the kitty with some amber.
“Thales of Miletus, writing at around 600 BC, noted that rubbing fur on various substances such as amber would cause them to attract specks of dust and other light objects.” (Yes, that Thales.) It is still, or again, a popular demonstration, though we use plastic instead of amber. Amber in Ancient Greek is “elektron”.
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.
Probably 2 of the biggest reasons the Greeks failed to become a technological civilization are that their various feuding city-states never united in cooperation, but primarily that they were super into slavery for all their labor. They didn’t want to make slaves work less, then they would have time and energy to rebel and slaughter their masters. No, scientific advancement was simply for curiosity’s sake, not practical applications.
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”
That’s a joke-turned-plot element from one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books. The protagonist, a human everyman stranded with a primitive culture on a distant world realises he has no idea how electricity, steam engines, medicine, etc works but he becomes a respected member of their community by making sandwiches.
Mostly Harmless. I didn’t like that one. It was somehow bleak and left me worrying that DNA was in a bad place when he wrote it. I’m going to be a heretic and say that I did like how Colfer continued the series.
In a Discworld novel, an off-hand remark mentions Ponder Stibbons wanting to build a Van-De-Graff-generator by tying cats to a wheel. I wish I could remember which book it was.
I kinda liked the bleak. It felt like an ending. Drove home a fairly central theme
Never read Colfer’s continuation, I read some of the Artemis Fowl books when I was younger and I didn’t really expect him to match Adams’ particular style.
I did listen to the radio adaptation though, and if it’s true to the source then it was… okay? I’m not sure it added much.
You were right, the style change is very noticeable, but id still say it’s a worthwhile read.
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.
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.
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.
In what format do you keep the backup on the eReader? Is it convenient to browse?
That’s two items. The second one costs extra.
Make them one by diy
Me at the 19thC Royal Society, all cocky like: Matter is energy, E=mc^2
Michael Faraday: interesting, how would I go about proving that?
Me: no fucking clue. Something to do with spaceships, or massive bombs?
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
