What are the skills and knowledge you could actually bring & fully realize at some point in the past?

And we’re taking this in the strictest, nerdiest, materialist lense. I don’t care how smart you are you ain’t making a steam engine the in bronze age, for instance.

So what could you create, with just your knowledge & period tools? What kind of institutional, technological, philosophical innovations could you realistically recreate? How would you interface with the social fabric of society to not be some crazed pariah who never positively influences the place they went?

    • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 years ago

      thats just a doohickey :the-doohickey:

      you need something that can outshine a mule or ox for it to be a useful transformative thing. and a kind of incentive structure that makes it exploding people every so often acceptable

      • RION [she/her]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 years ago

        It’s pretty trivial to make one or direct someone to make one if you already know it can be done (and, of course, have a common language)

        Even the layperson’s understanding of a steam engine could lead to crude trains being developed in the classical era provided access to necessary materials and engineers

          • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            2 years ago

            AFAIK, there were already sophisticated trade networks in place. To make bronze for instance, you need tin and copper, which are rarely found in the same place. The development of these alloys already required the extraction, smelting, and trade of these materials.

            • boboblaw [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              I meant the coal to use as fuel. I’d read that the industrial revolution happened where and when it did because of easy access to coal, and that coal wasn’t heavily used in Europe for like a millennium after the fall of the Roman Empire.

              • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                2 years ago

                The industrial revolution was centered geographically around rich coal deposits (in cities like Manchester for instance) because fuel was required in large quantities to keep the circuit of capital churning. These practically limitless (in the short term, and in terms of 19th century energy consumption) supplies of fuel were the catalyst which set the circuit of capital free. These colossal deposits of fuel required many developments in mining technology, geology, and lots of surveying and exploration to unlock, which couldn’t be relied on in ancient times.

                But fuel itself is not hard to come by, unless you require it in such vast industrial quantities. Trees are fuel. An average campfire can range in temperatures from 315C (600F) to 600C (1200F). If you apply a bellows, you can reach even hotter temperatures without the need for any refined fuels. From wood you can also produce charcoal, which burns at 1,100C (2000F), which is very close (but not quite) the melting point of iron. Hotter-burning fuels, or the use of a blast furnace would be required to take things further (Blast furnaces did exist in China around 100AD).

                So I suppose you are right that this technology would do very little to completely transform social relations the way it did during the Industrial Revolution, but mostly everything you need to flex on your ancestors is there.

          • RION [she/her]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            2 years ago

            Depends on time frame, but most places in the old world would have access to bronze from, well, the bronze age and onwards. New world would be trickier unless you know mining and metal refinement to teach, or rely on native metals.

            But yeah if I’m sent back to the stone age I don’t think I’ll be able to do too too much

            • boboblaw [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              I meant more access to large quantities of coal. I guess that would be easiest in the Roman Empire, but then you’d be giving the Roman Empire trains and that might just prolong it’s collapse.

              Edit: New idea! Teach Carthage how to build trains instead!

  • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    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.

  • probably the biggest impact i might be able to pull off would be some kind of irrigation improvement. like wind powered and/or muscle assisted (treadle-style maybe) pumping and storing at some moderate increase in elevation (~4 feet above crops) to a clay sealed pond. something i could pull off at a small scale as a proof of concept and communicate to others through demonstration for a larger scale project. besides slavery and shoulder buckets, flood and furrow was The Show for a long time, but it uses so much goddam water and salinity buildup collapsed whole civilizations. to be able to go deeper, have better flood protection, and build up an elevated reserve that could be more tightly controlled without a ton of labor time would probably be a major game changer in freeing up effort and protecting water resources, not to mention letting people farm reliably further away from rivers that are contested resources.

    also, probably something related to plowing. like basically getting people to not do it when it isn’t necessary, to protect top soil instead of just hammer it until it’s gone and dampen the “need” to expand into new lands, find new sources of fertility, etc. probably a lighter footprint plow/more of a cultivator, nitrogen fixing rotations, cover crops and conservation strips to prevent erosion. that might be harder to convince, because the science has been definitive for decades and people still go hard on tillage and absolutely kick the shit out of soils because they think it is cool and makes fields look “tidy”.

    the easiest thing that would probably change history would be to go back to pre-antiquity and bring knowledge of the location and size of massive, easily accessible salt deposits and how to navigate there by the stars.

  • DoubleShot [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • RION [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 years ago

    Inoculation is an easy one if I could get someone to believe it, as well as whatever basic medical knowledge I have on hand (cool it with the bloodletting maybe?). Might be able to make a simple battery if I thought hard enough.

    Could do a crude musket if I could figure out gunpowder (can remember saltpeter and ash(?) off the top of my head). That opens up cannons too. Assuming I’ve traveled to before these were readily available, whoever I swear allegiance to could have access to briefly unmatched firepower until the technology was copied. Crossbow should be possible as well, and also doesn’t need as valuable of resources

    Outside of the 20th and 21st century, I think most things should be replicable pretty far back, like into the classical age if you’re somewhere fairly “developed” like Rome. It’s hard to underestimate the importance of simply knowing that something is possible because it was done before.

  • Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 years ago

    I wonder if there’s something that one could teach Homo erectus 3 million years ago that would permanently fuck up the course of history that led to the emergence of modern humans.

  • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 years ago

    Going back to the early fifteenth century to tell indigenous people worldwide to use fire arrows against every European ship they see and to organize regular patrols to keep an eye on the ocean at all times. You can also inoculate people against smallpox just by sticking dried smallpox sores into their bloodstream. (The Chinese, Turks, and Africans already know about this at the time.) These two cool techniques could save tens of millions of lives and destroy the historical nightmare the world has been experiencing for the last five centuries before it even begins. Major issues are: organizing people and learning their languages.

    • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 years ago

      how would you convince them of that? killing all strangers isnt something many people are willing to do. or getting injected by a stranger to no perceived ill or positive effect

        • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.netOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 years ago

          i don’t think any population has permanently dedicated itself to ultraviolence on outsiders. i assumed you’d be innoculating before the euro diseases show up, but if they’re already there and killing people people would take it for sure

          • JuneFall [none/use name]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            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 I think they are actually joking (as it happened cause altered timeline?)

            • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.netOP
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              2 years ago

              they had decades of hostile colonial contact from the british with which to learn a relatively harsh policy toward outsiders, but even so it is not one universally enforced. and that’s a tiny group of people. i don’t think you could replicate it even on another bigger island like haiti

    • emizeko [they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      one key point is to tell them how the ships / settlements contain limited food, ammo, and other supplies, and that they can use siege tactics against them

      • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 years ago

        And how the Europeans will use divide-and-conquer to take advantage of indigenous divisions and either annihilate or enslave them.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 years ago

    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.

      • thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 years ago

      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

      • Kuori [she/her]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 years ago

        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”

        • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.netOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 years ago

          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

  • Hans_Bratwurst [none/use name]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 years ago

    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?