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”.
incredible
Submitted 2 years ago by neutralbipolar2@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/370baaee-385d-44b9-828a-dce34cc27bad.jpeg
Comments
FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 2 years ago
EddoWagt@feddit.nl 2 years 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
FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 2 years ago
The sooner it starts the sooner I can get back. :)
ramblechat@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
Zoboomafoo@yiffit.net 2 years ago
That’s true, it was cannon technology that allowed steam engines to be created
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 2 years 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.
GCostanzaStepOnMe@feddit.de 2 years ago
What is the ‘Carnot cycle’? - I don’t know
jarfil@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
LufyCZ@lemmy.world 2 years ago
They might have had it, but they didn’t use it right
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.
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.
db2@sopuli.xyz 2 years ago
Electricity is easy to make though… a couple magnets and some copper wire.
neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 years 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”.
Or, if you don’t have time, just print this out and keep it with you at all times:
llii@feddit.de 2 years ago
I don’t know if this helps. It’s enough to know you’re fucked.
marmo7ade@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
howsetheraven@lemmy.world 2 years ago
“Wrap some copper wire around a core”
Mr. Stegosaurus, please point out the nearest refinery so I can grab some copper wire.
30isthenew29@lemmy.world 2 years ago
I find this to be brilliant.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 2 years 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.
sumofchemicals@lemmy.world 2 years ago
I’ve been meaning to buy this! Does he have a section on how to handle no one speaking your language?
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
ramblechat@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Actually the floon goes inside the zargnix. Duh.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Aren’t you thinking of the floov compensation harpon? People typically get them confused.
dzervas@lemmy.world 2 years ago
where did read it? do you have a link?
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
Blasphemy@lemmynsfw.com 2 years 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.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
KevonLooney@lemm.ee 2 years 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?
Blasphemy@lemmynsfw.com 2 years 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.
atlasraven31@lemm.ee 2 years ago
I can’t even draw a bike.
Blamemeta@lemm.ee 2 years 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
Tavarin@lemmy.ca 2 years 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.
Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip 2 years ago
If you’re asking if I know how to rub 3 plates together the answer is yes!
burningmatches@feddit.uk 2 years 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?
atlasraven31@lemm.ee 2 years 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.
pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz 2 years 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.
CthulhuOnIce@sh.itjust.works 2 years 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
dx1@lemmy.world 2 years ago
If you couldn’t prove it, things probably wouldn’t go well for you.
Hallainzil@startrek.website 2 years ago
Even if you could prove it, it would still go badly in a lot of places in a lot of times.
Intralexical@lemmy.world 2 years 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).
frezik@midwest.social 2 years 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.
soran0allsmark@reddthat.com 2 years ago
Ayyyyy gotta love some quick typing typos lol
IWantToFuckSpez@kbin.social 2 years 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.
blanketswithsmallpox@kbin.social 2 years 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.
pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz 2 years ago
You’d kill them off before they’d get a chance, though
explodicle@local106.com 2 years ago
And all the germs we carry to which we’re already immune.
pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz 2 years ago
They’d actually kill off any would be time traveling conqueror pretty quickly with smallpox.
Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip 2 years ago
Man Makes Dynamite Out of His Own Pee (It’s Cody)
gatton@reddthat.com 2 years 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.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
satrunalia44@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
Intralexical@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
Chailles@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
madcaesar@lemmy.world 2 years ago
People were so moronic back then, even more than today, saying any one of those things would have you burned like a witch 😂
stingpie@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Non-historian detected
gayhitler420@lemm.ee 2 years 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.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Ok fine but the smallpox would have killed me before that happens
jarfil@lemmy.world 2 years ago
How do you make steel? And what’s a “lemon”?
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 2 years ago
They had citrus fruits. It wasn’t a mind bending concept.
art@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Go back in time with a 4th grade science book from 1997 and be a fucking wizard.
realitista@lemm.ee 2 years ago
I’m impressed at the strength of the guy’s forearm that he’s sitting on.
DingusKhan@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 2 years 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.
cyborganism@lemmy.ca 2 years ago
Just spin a magnet in a copper coil.
BOOM! Electricity.
jordanpeterson@lemmy.world 2 years ago
I, for one, would be able to explain it fully. They aren’t always sending their best back in time…
BilboBargains@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
Hazdaz@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Someone posted this book the other day. I haven’t bought it yet, but I love the premise:
obinice@lemmy.world 2 years 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?
perestroika@lemm.ee 2 years 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.
kemsat@lemmy.world 2 years ago
trebuchets now exist in 3500 BC
Gryxx@lemmy.world 2 years 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
HellAwaits@lemm.ee 2 years ago
They would probably kill you thinking you’re into witchcraft or something.
Sir_Simon_Spamalot@lemmy.my.id 2 years 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.
over_clox@lemmy.world 2 years 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!
pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz 2 years ago
Couldn’t you just rub something with wool and demonstrate static electricity that way?
HawlSera@lemm.ee 2 years ago
The deconstruction I didn’t know I needed
gothicdecadence@lemm.ee 2 years 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
chakan2@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Eh, grab a big fur and a metal rod of some sort…you get static electricity that way.
Pilkins@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
chetradley@lemmy.world 2 years 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.
orphiebaby@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Just finished it. Thank you!