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.
This bookTells 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!
There’s also [The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch](!wiki The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch) by Lewis Dartnel. Great book
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!”
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.
Something that people miss though is that they do hit some roadblocks that if not for some extremely lucky coincidences, they wouldn’t have any way to do it. Specifically for various materials that just so happen to be around them.
If you could find a jeweller and had an understanding of basic electrical systems, you could probably get a rudimentary capacitor and engine going. From there, who knows what you could do. Maybe even lightbulbs.
You could fill it with co2 .put an animal bladder on the mouth of a clay bottle where something is fermenting like wine or beer. The yeast will produce a fair ammount of c02 and fill the bladder. Use the bladder to fill the bulb. It wont last long but it will be longer than just air
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.
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.
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.
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.
speaking of health, wouldn’t you die to some disease you are not immune to? or even more likely you would cause a plague that their bodies don’t lnow how to fight off, like imagine bringing back some covid variant with you.
I mean, us bringing back something to kill them seems more likely, despite our comparatively weak immune system’s. Be it COVID-19 or an STD. Hell, even our metal/plastic ridden bodies would be a potential issue for their environment if we died.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Rudementary magnets, in the form of lodestones, have been known since antiquity. Wire, on the other hand, is a modern miracle. You can’t hand-forge that.