incredible

Comments

• Pilkins@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  There’s a book called How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler that covers this stuff. Don’t think it’s comprehensive enough to actually invent everything from scratch, but still a fun read.

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  • chetradley@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    By Ryan North, the author of Dinosaur Comics! He based the book on a time travel survival guide he published and made into a T-shirt.

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  • orphiebaby@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Just finished it. Thank you!

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• FauxPseudo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Skip electricity. That doesn’t matter until you can make reliable turbines with copper and magnets. Go to steam power first. It can move things. Which will speed up delivery of copper and magnets. But also teach them to plant trees. Every tree removed to smelt and power a steam engine needs to have three more planted. You could start greening the Sahara before umit even starts collapsing. “he sure had this steam thing figured out. I guess we will forgive him for all these useless trees”.

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  • EddoWagt@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    A great master plan to prevent climate change, although the industrial revolution will start 2000 years earlier, so I’m not sure it matters

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    • FauxPseudo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The sooner it starts the sooner I can get back. :)

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  • ramblechat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I read they knew about steam power for a long time but couldn’t make the engines / containers / doohickies strong enough to contain the pressure.

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    • Zoboomafoo@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That’s true, it was cannon technology that allowed steam engines to be created

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  • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yes, electricity would be magic for medieval (and prior) people. Spells trouble for you.

    But no, Steam… the principle was known and seldom used by ancient greeces and egypts already, but they couldn’t really utilize it, because metallurgy wasn’t there yet.

    And Sahara was almost green 1000+ years ago, lots of oases.

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  • GCostanzaStepOnMe@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What is the ‘Carnot cycle’? - I don’t know

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  • jarfil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Go to steam power first. It can move things

    They had steam power over 2000 years ago, they used it in temples and as toys to amuse the rich. Slaves could move things, and were mich cheaper.

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    • LufyCZ@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      They might have had it, but they didn’t use it right

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  • Illegal_Prime@dmv.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The problem with this is that you assume that wood is the best fuel source for steam. Very quickly you would realize that coal is far more energy dense than just about anything except nuclear fission. Planting trees is still a good idea though, but wood as fuel is utter shite on any large application.

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    • FauxPseudo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      When starting out you don’t need the most efficient. You need what’s available. And I’d rather not reinvent coal mining and whaling.

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• db2@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Electricity is easy to make though… a couple magnets and some copper wire.

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• neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Pretty much everyone in this thread needs to go read Ryan North’s book “How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler”.

  www.amazon.com/…/0735220158/

  Or, if you don’t have time, just print this out and keep it with you at all times:

  Image

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  • llii@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t know if this helps. It’s enough to know you’re fucked.

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  • marmo7ade@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I love this chart. Because pasteurization is a result of capitalism, not food safety. The EU doesn’t pasteurize their eggs because their chickens are vaccinated against salmonella. The USA does not vaccinate their chickens because it would hurt Big Agriculture and all their egg pasteurizing factories.

    We have to pasteurize milk because of the awful conditions of factory farming - where disease is rampant. Again, this is a result of capitalism. And again, you can see drastic difference in the products in the EU vs the USA. Some EU cheeses are required, by law, to use raw milk. It’s safe there.

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  • howsetheraven@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    “Wrap some copper wire around a core”

    Mr. Stegosaurus, please point out the nearest refinery so I can grab some copper wire.

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  • 30isthenew29@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I find this to be brilliant.

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  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    My biggest issue with this is the flight part - it’s a counterintuitive explanation that doesn’t really explain how to make the flight work. It’s not technically wrong, and if you trace that cross-section you will get a working aerofoil. However, you can’t make the Wright Flyer on that explanation, or in fact any of the early aeroplanes that were constructed with simple fabric stretched between wooden frames.

    A far more useful and intuitive explanation is that planes fly by flow-turning, basically the interaction between the aerofoil and the air turns the air in one direction, which pushes the aerofoil in the other. This also means the air below will end up slower than the air on top, which will create a pressure differential. Either of these methods can completely describe how flight works.

    Also, a plane isn’t just two aerofoils attached to a central body. Early planes were at least biplanes, and you need horizontal and vertical stabilisers to have full control. You need flaps that give you pitch, yaw and roll, and you need the centre-of-mass - the point where it balances - to be in front of the centre of pressure. That means you need the stabilisers to be at the back to keep the plane stable like a dart.

    This isn’t just a “well akshually”, although it sort of is. If you tried to follow the advice as-written and didn’t know this, there’s a good chance you’d end up on the long list of people killed by their own inventions. Actually, I suspect most of these explanations give you just enough information to kill yourself but not really enough to actually make any of them work from first principles.

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  • sumofchemicals@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’ve been meaning to buy this! Does he have a section on how to handle no one speaking your language?

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• FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I read a sci-fi short story about that once. A scientist brings back a guy from the future, but the guy either can’t explain how things work or does so using a vocabulary the scientist doesn’t understand.

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  • ramblechat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Actually the floon goes inside the zargnix. Duh.

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    • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Aren’t you thinking of the floov compensation harpon? People typically get them confused.

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  • dzervas@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    where did read it? do you have a link?

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    • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Years and years ago in some anthology or other. Sci-fi short stories are my favorite literary medium, so I’ve read far more than I could count. I wish I could tell you the name or the author.

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• Blasphemy@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I think it would actually be easier to wow people than people think. You’d just have to focus on older technology rather than completely modern stuff. If you know that steam engines are a thing, and even vaguely how they work, you can build the king a pump to get running water without having to run massive aqueducts, or a crane to build his massive projects, or any number of directly useful things. An understanding of basic germ theory could set you up to be the best doctor in the world. Or even just a bicycle would probably be quite useful to get around without a horse, and I’m sure anyone could make a rough mockup of a bike.

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  • MotoAsh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I think you underestimate what it takes to get modern plumbing water tight and easy to manage. Threading, clean threading, teflon, and easy to manage plastic pipes, have all been invented within the last 200 years. Mostly, the last 80.

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    • KevonLooney@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah, even electricity is easy to explain. You just rotate a high quality magnet within a coil of thin high quality copper wire. Easy.

      Problems are:

      • How do you make a high quality magnet?
      • How do you purify copper fine enough?
      • How do you make a spool of the copper wire?
      • How do you make the bearings for the shaft?

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    • Blasphemy@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      But it doesn’t have to be up to modern standards, and certainly doesn’t have to be with modern materials. Get the local cooper to make your pipes and reservoir with pitch-sealed wood. Or make it out of stone, or cast copper, or whatever they use to store water anyway. If it’s Roman or post-Roman, they’ve already had some experience with running water anyway, that wouldn’t be the impressive bit.

      Threading and such is mostly useful for mass-manufacturing standard pipes and using it everywhere, but at least at first you’d just be doing it for a rich/powerful person or two, where you could do something labour-intensive and unscalable.

      I’m not saying that you would get a perfect, modern system straight away, but if you can convince the people to give you the benefit of the doubt through a prototype or two, you could make something that works well enough. That would be what I’d be concerned about, even if you can magic away the language barrier, they’d likely just think you’re mad.

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  • atlasraven31@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I can’t even draw a bike.

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  • Blamemeta@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Can you build a metal laythe? Can you build one precise enough for a pump?

    Can you get rubber or silicone for gaskets?

    There are a lot of problems

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    • Tavarin@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You don’t need to be super accurate for a basic pump. If you know the design you can get medieval blacksmiths to make the parts for you with close enough accuracy.

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    • Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If you’re asking if I know how to rub 3 plates together the answer is yes!

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  • burningmatches@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Steam engines are more complicated than people seem to think. There’s more to it than just boiling some water and voila! They’re pretty much useless without a governor. How many people know how to make this crucial component?

    en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor

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• atlasraven31@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Me: The opposite of B, the opposite of B, plus or minus a square root…"

  Them: What does that mean?

  Me: I have no idea.

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  • pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    X equals negative b, plus or minus the square root, of b squared minus 4 a c, all over 2 a

    Thanks a lot. Now that song is stuck in my head.

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• CthulhuOnIce@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I feel like you could still give science a head start by giving them rough ideas of how things work, like penicillin and whatnot

  Even if you don’t know all the ins and puts you can give them something to go off of to develop the technology faster

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  • dx1@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If you couldn’t prove it, things probably wouldn’t go well for you.

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    • Hallainzil@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Even if you could prove it, it would still go badly in a lot of places in a lot of times.

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  • Intralexical@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    “Science” ≠ Technology!

    If you give them the technology without giving them stuff like empiricism and cultural acceptance of critical thinking, they’ll just worship it like any other faith, and stagnate for the next thousand years.

    Inversely, you don’t even need to give them too much technology, because if you just give them stuff like evidence-based medicine, the printing press, rigorous experimentation and reproducibility, and a couple institutes dedicated to the craft, plus a couple starting points, then they’ll figure it on their own soon enough (assuming an overall stable civilization).

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    • frezik@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Most likely, people would consider you to be another wacko shouting at passersby.

      Or even more likely, you drink some stanky water that your body doesn’t know how to deal with and die within the first week.

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  • soran0allsmark@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Ayyyyy gotta love some quick typing typos lol

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• IWantToFuckSpez@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Probably can make explosives from manure. Use that to conquer a small community and make yourself the leader. And start a rebellion against the local lord.

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  • blanketswithsmallpox@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Then you have the resources and slaves to find... magnets and shit.

    They already had magic in the old days though. They used to have to fight dragons and witches and shit back then.

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    • pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You’d kill them off before they’d get a chance, though

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  • explodicle@local106.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    And all the germs we carry to which we’re already immune.

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    • pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      They’d actually kill off any would be time traveling conqueror pretty quickly with smallpox.

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  • Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Man Makes Dynamite Out of His Own Pee (It’s Cody)

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• gatton@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This reminds me of Dara O’Briain’s bit about going back in time and thinking you’ll impress the greatest minds in history with your future knowledge but it falls apart quickly.

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVxOb8-d7Ic

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• afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  If you paid attention in high school you could bring mathematics up to about the 17th century, if you really paid attention you could even grab some stuff from the 20th (wtf vectors why did you take so long to figure out?) and the 19th.

  Plus there is just so much basic stuff you know. Used boiled and sealed water to clean a wound. Bleeding a person only makes them feel good for a bit and does nothing else. Steel in cement makes cement better. Or in the case of this picture zinc and copper and lemon.

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  • satrunalia44@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    anything about sanitary practices faces a massive barrier of getting people to accept and implement it. I could tell ancient doctors to wash their hands, but the first time someone tried that in actual history they laughed in his face.

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    • Intralexical@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Monarchs cares about power. Give the ruler some more metallurgy or siege engines first, so you have their favour. Then split the Royal Court’s physicians into two groups, one that washes their hands, and one that doesn’t. Do the same for leeches, bloodletting, hydration, etc. It’ll be hard to argue with the resulting death rates. And in the long run, you’ll have a much bigger impact by introducing empricism/A-B testing/evidence-based medicine than any one thing specific thing you could have done.

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    • Chailles@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      But on the other hand, there’s a decent chance of you worked hard enough, they could probably get there at least a century or two after your death.

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  • madcaesar@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    People were so moronic back then, even more than today, saying any one of those things would have you burned like a witch 😂

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    • stingpie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Non-historian detected

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  • gayhitler420@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Steel reenforcement of old European concrete would have been disastrous. They used limestone in the aggregate and cement and it would have eaten the steel in a decade or two.

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    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Ok fine but the smallpox would have killed me before that happens

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  • jarfil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    How do you make steel? And what’s a “lemon”?

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    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      They had citrus fruits. It wasn’t a mind bending concept.

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• art@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Go back in time with a 4th grade science book from 1997 and be a fucking wizard.

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• realitista@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m impressed at the strength of the guy’s forearm that he’s sitting on.

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• DingusKhan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  You know, a fun project would be compiling an instruction book for elevating/fast forwarding technology just in case someone does get sent back in time.

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• Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Id actually be able to teach them how to make it if they have copper and magnets, since I know how to make a simple generator.

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• cyborganism@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Just spin a magnet in a copper coil.

  BOOM! Electricity.

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• jordanpeterson@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I, for one, would be able to explain it fully. They aren’t always sending their best back in time…

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• BilboBargains@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Forget mathematics, logic and philosophy. Teach them about Jeebus and establish a solid patriarchy. After that make a shitload of McDonald’s and Facebook.

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• Hazdaz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Someone posted this book the other day. I haven’t bought it yet, but I love the premise:

  www.amazon.com/dp/0735220158/?coliid=I3TDLFW5C61V…

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• obinice@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  We learn how to generate electricity in Secondary School, it’s pretty simple and fundamental to understanding electromagnetism, and it underpins our whole civilisation’s existence. Surely you’d remember that?

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• perestroika@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  No problem, guys in ancient Baghdad already knew how to make electricity. :) A jug of wine or vinegar, one electrode of iron, another made of copper, voila… the Baghdad battery.

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• kemsat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  trebuchets now exist in 3500 BC

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• Gryxx@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Not my idea, but sometimes it’s just enough to listen to “crazy” people. They might not know what to do with wire seemingly spinning itself, but you will have much better idea what can be created with it. RIP Terry Pratchett

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• HellAwaits@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  They would probably kill you thinking you’re into witchcraft or something.

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• Sir_Simon_Spamalot@lemmy.my.id ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  But first, you need all the guns (and other modern weaponry) to gun down anyone trying to kill you. Might be useful to make them listen to you as well.

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• over_clox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I take these two completely different looking rocks, dig a small hole between them, and pee in the gap.

  Electrolytes! It’s what every caveman craves!

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• pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Couldn’t you just rub something with wool and demonstrate static electricity that way?

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• HawlSera@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The deconstruction I didn’t know I needed

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• gothicdecadence@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This is kinda the premise of Brandon Sanderson’s new book The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook to Surviving Medieval England lol, I recommend it! It’s one of the secret project Kickstarter books so it might not be on regular shelves yet but it should be soon, and the audiobook is out for sure

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• chakan2@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Eh, grab a big fur and a metal rod of some sort…you get static electricity that way.

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