• webghost0101
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    1 year ago

    Fools as i carry with me all of human knowledge, right here in this fragile tiny black slab. I can tell you all once you tell me what your wifi password is.

  • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    All you have to do is teaching intelligent people some math and tell them about experiments and that nature can be understood. The rest will follow.

    Everything can be accelerated by adding the idea of the printing press.

    • yata@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      The main challenge with inventing a working printing press would be the papermaking and level of metalworking required for the movable type.

      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        pretty sure you can just use wood or whatever for the lettering, sure it might be kinda shit and tend to break but it should work. having to make new letter stamps every now and then is better than painstakingly writing every letter for hand.

        • yata@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          The main problem with that is that you can’t make the types very small with wood, and the singlemost expensive ingredient in this whole printing press concept is the paper.

          So you would end up having books with very little text on each page, and especially in a slave economy, it would just be much cheaper to make handwritten copies, since you could cram a lot more words on each page.

          And again, this is not adressing the issue of even having the skill to make paper in the first place.

      • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Not to mention inventing an alphabet depending on where and when you go to. Or you could go with ConstantScript if you feel like being a gigantic troll.

        Abugida might be workable if you reform it so that vowel markers can only appear above or below the modified consonant.

    • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Did the Greeks not do experiments? They knew math. They even hypothetically knew about atoms.

      • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        The Greeks held themselves back because most of their intellectual elite considered abstract thought as more noble than hands-on experimenting.

      • alvvayson@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Same can be said of all the ancient civilizations.

        But the key insight is that all of nature is predictable and behaves according to natural laws that can be deduced through experiments.

        That leads to the scientific revolution which leads to the industrial revolution.

        • yata@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          In Sid Meier’s Civilization sure, but real history is a lot more complex than that. There were people who came to that conclusion since ancient times without it leading to a scientific and industrial revolution, because there were a lot more factors at play with those than just simply the idea of it.

          • alvvayson@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            An idea has to be widely accepted to be useful.

            Just having one person think about it while the rest of society doesn’t is insufficient.

            • HardlightCereal@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              The actual reason science took off is that there was a plague leading to a worker shortage leading to a wealth boom, while a lot of rich people had access to coffee and nothing to do.

              • alvvayson@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                While I, too, am a big fan of the Coffee hypothesis, it should be noted that lots of civilizations had access to caffeine and other stimulants, including the Arabs, Chinese and Incas and probably the Roman’s, Greeks and Persians too.

                And there were a lot of plagues, but most of them happened long before the scientific revolution.

              • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                Free time and the wealth to have that time is what I also think the catalyst is. Same with arts. You can’t do experiments or spend time on art if your entire life is consumed by labor.

  • Squeezer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This book Tells you how to handle this, along with everything else you need to know to rebuild all systems in society from scratch should there be some sort of time machine based accident. It’s a good read!

  • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Let’s see… electricity in a preindustrial environment. You’ll get into Factorio levels of invent a tool to make a tool to make a tool…

    Copper wire existed at the time, (depending on the time period) but drawing it involved a person on a swing pulling it through a hole in a metal plate. So we need a metal plate. Surely there is a town blacksmith? We will need a few plates with gradually decreasing hole diameter. Enough wire for a demonstration would be difficult and expensive, but not impossible. Could also use copper busbars instead of wire.

    Now that we have conductors, we have to figure out what method of generation we want. Rather than trying to make bearings, balanced shafts, and stacks of thin metal plates all identical and radially symmetrical so we can make a generator, we should first attempt a battery. For this we can get away with stacks of two dissimilar metals in a glass or ceramic jar, bathed in some sulfuric acid. Aqua Regia was a mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid, but it might dissolve copper and zinc plates. Could also use lead plates, those are easier to hammer out flat. With this we could get an output around 2v per cell, put a half dozen of them together in series and one could build a simple arc lamp.

    After the proof of concept demonstration, hopefully you’d interest more smiths in the project, increasing your talent pool. With some mercury and wire you could build a version of Faraday’s homopolar motor.

    After that I’d probably be burned at the stake.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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    1 year ago

    There was a short story I read ages ago in some collection somewhere I’ve been dying to find. I think it was from the 60s or 70s, but a scientist brings a man from the future and the man is just a normal guy, so he can’t explain anything to the scientist’s satisfaction and the scientist gets more and more exasperated.

    The dialogue was like:

    “What is the dominant mode of transport in the future?”

    “Oh, we fleem.”

    “Fleem? What’s fleem?”

    “It’s a kind of garbol but with more slimp.”

    “Okay, never mind. How do you do it?”

    “Oh, that’s easy, you simply merfingle the blem and you’re fleeming away!”

    “WHAT IS THE BLEM?!?”

        • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Reminds me of a short story I read in the 70s. I ended up having to go to the house I read it in (a decade ago) to find the book it was in, now everyone in my family owns copies of that book (Alfred Hitchcock’s Best in Suspense if I recall, not getting up to look) just so we can do Halloween readings of the story that made us all jump every time we saw anything move out of the corner for our eyes for like a week the first time we read it. They Bite by Anthony Boucher. Great story.

  • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    It isn’t so hard really, to make electricity even in the olden days.

    A dynamo is just a copper wire with a magnet spinning inside.

    Making a copper wire you can accomplish by having a hole at the bottom of a kiln that drops directly into a big vat of water. Or even just drawing a line in the sand and pouring it in there.

    Getting your hands on a natural magnet might pose more problems, but ultimately those are found in nature. So they should have already been dug up by someone.

    Using the electricity usefully is harder. Since creating a light bulb needs access to gasses. What could we even use the electricity for?

      • Borkingheck@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Umm you go to the beach and something about certain grains will be different. Look mate, see how you boil liquid. Do that with milk until just before it boils and that’s the milk now pasteurised which means it will kill the things in it that make you ill. Also boil the water before drinking it?

        That’s all I got. I guess sphagnum moss is good for absorbing blood/dealing with wounds?

        • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          Do that with milk until just before it boils and that’s the milk now pasteurised which means it will kill the things in it that make you ill.

          Imagine being Louis Pasteur and finding out that your research success is already being done in a technique with your namesake for thousands of years.

  • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    For anyone interested a simple way is to wrap copper wire around a magnet. Static electricity was also one of the first ways people started noticing electricity.

    Parlor tricks might be able to get you far when you time travel to the ancient past.

  • hlqxz@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    They should make a movie about this. An average guy accidentally time travels and feels embarrassed every minute

  • x4740N@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Just bring an encyclopedia with you, history of human advancements and history of human equality if you want to improve equality as well