Try and turn Napoleon into a Marxist
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2023
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Maybe some math. People were really interested in tracking movement stars, planets etc. So if you learned their system of notation you might be able to speed up the development of certain mathematics since they'd see the "practical " value in it for astrological or religious purposes.
Edit: just realized Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee is pretty much an answer to this question. Not sure it holds up to materialist analysis though.
just binge-watch Cody's Lab first
Math, some simple tools like 19th century plows, better crop rotation and artificial selection, 17th century and later metallurgy. Basic but useful electricity, a motor can be made from wire and magnets.
Much much better medicine. I can definitely recreate penicillin and gramicidin, ether, basic surgery. I can make small amounts of aluminium, also a map of accessible high yield ore deposits.
Once super rich steam engines and telegraphs and better ships become possible, but the trick is giving people what they actually need and avoiding the "man who came too early" scenario.
hmm, i'd like to think that if you dropped me into islamic golden age, i could give them an insane boost in math and physics.
they'd be using the same numbers :very-smart:
they'd have enough already down for me to get somewhere without having to resort to geometry i don't know.
I would build an astronomical telescope way before those nerds in the 1600s
There's the time traveller cheatsheet, hopefully I'd remember it. https://i.imgur.com/dgJ7vHU.jpg
thats cheating!
I could become a ship captain- armed with my knowledge that Vitamin C prevents scurvy, I could build a sextant and navigate the globe, striving to put right what once went wrong.
Yeah but where do you get the vitamin C? Isn't half the problem that it breaks down easily, and fruit can't be kept fresh for very long?
It's questionable whether this knowledge will spread or persist that well. The British navy figured out how to prevent scurvy and then forgot again.
I wouldn't tell anyone out of fear of accelerating imperialism or the slave trade. But I hear sauerkraut was the historic solution. It keeps and its full of vitamin c.
Dang, good answer. I'd never heard that about sauerkraut.
kimchi gang rise up
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you are you ain’t making a steam engine the in bronze age
The romans built at least one.
That was the Greeks, and it was regarded as a curiosity and certainly wouldn't actually be effective as an engine.
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Trauma medicine and modern agriculture, the basics of modern scientific philosophy and dialectical materialism, I could probably draw a mostly-accurate map and chart a few of the notable dangerous currents, the dynamics of climate change/public health to get them away from fossil fuels.
dynamics of climate change/public health to get them away from fossil fuels
i respect it but how i woukdnt know how to begin on explaining that to a peasant
i think at its simplest you'd essentially be saying "see this black rock? when it burns it makes you sick. you know how it warms your homes/makes heat in your forges/whatever? it also heats the planet, do this enough and it will be too hot to live"
i dont think thatd be exactly intuitive to people who have to burn stuff to survive. what about some kind of cult of ecology that can counterbalance industry & burning things?
✍️ every tonne of coal burned must have 180000 trees planted ✍️ in the first testament
I dont think industrial revolution is possible without fossil fuels
Fossil Capital writes a lot about this and it's definitely false. We moved away from water powered factories to coal powered factories not because of the energy (coal was actually more expensive) but because having to build factories in the rural countryside on rivers meant workers had too much power to strike and couldn't be replaced. Moving the factories to cities meant the reserve army of labor was much bigger and you could break strikes, but you needed coal rather than water wheels.
Water is a possible alternative in the case of factories and electricity generation but not in the case of metal smelting
Got any literature sounds interesting?
Haha, so all those people saying that a collapse of civilization would leave us technologically crippled forevermore is just wishful thinking on their part?
I have spent several weeks at this point in my life fantasizing about what would happen if I were to introduce electric guitars and indie rock music to Weimar Germany.
Like, open up an actual underground club and start a band to play like, the Killers music or something in 1926 Cologne. I'm sure people would dig it, but how would it fuck with their lives and maybe history?
pro: raging 20s rock
con: hitler likes it :sweat:
Why do you think there were so many drag, trans and LGBTQ clubs in Berlin's Weimar period?
I don't know how true this is but I think a lot of seafaring cultures didn't understand how you can sail into the wind (tacking). I mean you could probably go back in time thousands of years and show folks how to add a keel and how to point your sail correctly, no real "tech" needed.
Germ theory and using alcohol as a disinfectant. Even if you can't prove the science without microscopes or whatever, being able to make people not get infected wounds and die is both beneficial and doesn't require a huge baseline of technology.
soap & handwashing around open wounds, idk how well non distilled alch would work (if youre in some time before distilleries).
getting people to do it though... "powers" of healing often get mixed up in religion i wonder how to navigate that
If you were in a cold climate I imagine you could get somewhere with Freeze distillation where you just put your alcoholic whatever outside to freeze solid, then turn the container upside down over another container to melt slowly inside. The alcohols will be among the first things to melt.
You can do this several times but IIRC the best you can manage is about 45% or 90 proof. Hand sanitizer is only 60% alcohol so I imagine 45% would be fairly good for most applications.
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