Using time travel to force accelerated technological progress

[NichG]

We could have a side discussion as to whether a significantly charismatic bastard of a time traveler (or a sufficiently charismatic bastard of a local who stumbled across a time displaced gun) could leverage the technological advantage into a position as a tyrant to keep themselves safe. After all there are cases of real world tyrants who kept the position to a ripe old age, despite not having any technological advantage and indeed being surrounded by guards who are all themselves armed.

On topic, though, I'll repeat that it's hard to be a tyrant and to appreciably advance science at the same time. You can't make craftsmen suddenly better by pointing a weapon at them. Trying to show them how to make incremental improvements would likely undermine the persona you're trying to project as a tyrant, and image is pretty key if you want people to keep following you. And that's before you get into the part where the ideological control that dictators leverage on to help maintain their power is antithetical to the open exchange of ideas that helps drive scientific advancement. So while a time traveler with a gun might get his name into the history books, they're more likely to hinder advancement in their forked timeline than advance it.

My model of being a disruptive time traveller (especially one with an at-will ability to flit around in the timeline/into alternate timelines) is more lots of feather touches in lots of places rather than 'create a center of power for yourself in one place'. Wherever there are people, there are problems; find problems whose solutions mean an incremental improvement in the way of doing things, a slightly new idea, etc, and then just help those groups jump to those solutions, and then go as far away from those loci as quickly as you can. Inspire a folk remedy to use mold from moldy bread as an anti-bacterial. Teach a village of 20 people the basics of record keeping and purely graphical forms of statistical analysis like 'plotting and drawing a line through it' in the form of little rituals or traditions. Flit forward to see if it stuck, if not then try another village or another way of introducing the idea.

In a more modern context this would be trickier, but the key would be to use a few jumps to do a kind of sensitivity analysis and find the people who are kind of on a tipping point and tend to pursue different things in different timelines, and whose outcomes have a significant reach in at least some of those lines. Collect the information specifically relevant to accelerating those peoples' projects and seed them, rather than trying to think of big principles. Persuade one or two engineers to deal with storing dates and times differently and make the Y2K bug not a thing before its entrenched and save people a billion hours of labor downstream, etc.

[Gnoman]

You can print on pretty much anything. Plus, paper is VERY easy to make... not necessarily GOOD paper, but if you can wet and press sawdust, you can make passable paper.

This is a genuine example of a disruptive product. Producing paper from wood pulp is a surprisingly late invention prior to the late 18th century the primary source of paper was from cloth (which was inherently much more expensive). Since you don't need much extant technology to set up a paper mill, and only a bit more to set up a practical movable type press (while carved wood works, cast lead is vastly superior so you need a developed casting industry), you could get it going anywhere. That would allow a revolution in mass media and communication. This would spur a lot of science advancement as well by making it much easier for people to talk to each other and publish their findings.

They literally built one.

That's like saying "they sealed a pig bladder, pumped it with air, poked a hole in it! Since it flew off, that means they had a rocket engine!". It is fundamentally impossible to turn the aeolipile into a useful steam engine, because the instant you try using it to turn anything but itself it will stop. It was fairly useful in determining the properties of steam (and gasses in general), and made a great party trick, but it could not be turned into anything useful. You need significant amounts of pressure for even a low-pressure steam engine, and trying to get that with the metallurgy of the era would produce a bomb, not an engine.

The aeolipile isn't as bad an example of "ancient advancement" as the "Baghdad Batteries" (primarily because it actually is what people claim it was - the "Battery" notion is complete bunk), but it wasn't nearly as big a potential deal as people think it was.

[gbaji]

On topic, though, I'll repeat that it's hard to be a tyrant and to appreciably advance science at the same time. You can't make craftsmen suddenly better by pointing a weapon at them. Trying to show them how to make incremental improvements would likely undermine the persona you're trying to project as a tyrant, and image is pretty key if you want people to keep following you. And that's before you get into the part where the ideological control that dictators leverage on to help maintain their power is antithetical to the open exchange of ideas that helps drive scientific advancement. So while a time traveler with a gun might get his name into the history books, they're more likely to hinder advancement in their forked timeline than advance it.

I'd maybe even go further and suggest that technological advancement is often retarded by the acts of powerful leaders/governments through most of history and most locations. There are rare exceptions, but for the most part, prior to (and even up through a fair bit) the industrial revolution, most advances occured via private actions, not public ones. Usuallly individuals were patroned by some wealthy/powerful person and you can bet that their patron's objective wasn't pure science, but to gain and hold that power and wealth. Changing the status quo is just not often in the interests of those who hold power under the current conditions.

There are a lot of socio-economic conditions required for any new idea to actually make significant changes. And yeah, there's a reason why there were so many changes during say the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution, and it was a lot more about private businesses and corporations having interest in making process improvements to their businesses, than government leaders caring about "making things better" or something. It's almost always about money, so you have to also consider economic conditions in the tiime/place you target.

Governments pretty much only get involved in tech improvements when there's some form of arms race going on. Everything else? You need to have the economic conditions in place that put private money in a position to benefit from some advancement in order to be willing to invest in its development and productization. Otherwise, any new idea/invention will just sit around collecting dust.

[Gnoman]

I'd maybe even go further and suggest that technological advancement is often retarded by the acts of powerful leaders/governments through most of history and most locations. There are rare exceptions, but for the most part, prior to (and even up through a fair bit) the industrial revolution, most advances occured via private actions, not public ones. Usuallly individuals were patroned by some wealthy/powerful person and you can bet that their patron's objective wasn't pure science, but to gain and hold that power and wealth. Changing the status quo is just not often in the interests of those who hold power under the current conditions.

There are a lot of socio-economic conditions required for any new idea to actually make significant changes. And yeah, there's a reason why there were so many changes during say the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution, and it was a lot more about private businesses and corporations having interest in making process improvements to their businesses, than government leaders caring about "making things better" or something. It's almost always about money, so you have to also consider economic conditions in the tiime/place you target.

Governments pretty much only get involved in tech improvements when there's some form of arms race going on. Everything else? You need to have the economic conditions in place that put private money in a position to benefit from some advancement in order to be willing to invest in its development and productization. Otherwise, any new idea/invention will just sit around collecting dust.

This is utter nonsense.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

The issue is, you have a cheaper way to produce documents, kinda so what? The vast majority of the population are illiterate, and engaged in subsistence agriculture. They done have the time to read, the money to buy anything written, or enjoy much benefit from doing so.

That's the interesting thing about the middle to late bronze age in the rough Middle East region. If off season farmers have enough time to go build things like pyramids, they might have time to learn how to read. Their agricultural production, in a few select regions like the Nile flood plains, was off the chart.

What would the actual social, economic and stability fallout be? That's waaaaay beyond my expertise, not to mention pretty complex with much room for random chance. I don't even know if anyone could be convinced it would be better. If government people are telling you when to sow and when to harvest and that works, leaving you with enough time left over to go and build their pyramid, why would you want to try and upset that arrangement by trying to learn how to be a better farmer for yourself? The availability of information was a much better deal for late medieval farmers (to stick with that occupation group). They were left mostly to their own devices, and knowing how to find the right moments for sowing and harvesting immediately increased their production and odds of survival. With that in mind I might be better off trying it in a time when people don't have time to learn to read. But I still feel like this is a cool thought experiment.

[Gnoman]

The issue is, you have a cheaper way to produce documents, kinda so what? The vast majority of the population are illiterate, and engaged in subsistence agriculture. They done have the time to read, the money to buy anything written, or enjoy much benefit from doing so. The small elite that is literate isn't doing science so much as complicated things involving gods and hoarding personal power. Saving them 10% or 50% on document production isn't going to kickstart an industrial (or even agricultural) revolution so much as piss off the entire (relatively powerful) scribe/priest class. Who, remember, run/own most of the country.

Missed this post earlier.

Illiteracy rates tended to directly correlate with the difficulty of getting written material. Being able to read is if very little use when you have nothing to read in the first place, after all. Societies that have been given greater access to written materials universally have their literacy rates shoot up.

Another consistent historical trend is that societies with easy access to printing almost immediately start producing correspondence and ephemera - newspapers, broadsheets, advertisements, etc. These don't require universal literacy to be effective - lots of villages through history have had a "designated reader" to handle such things.

You're also doing a bit of disservice to the "elites" here. A lot of the "complicated stuff" you mention was things of extremely immediate use, and would eventually form the backbone of a number of scientific disciplines. In actual history, that is. Printing also would not fundamentally be a threat to their power, because scribing was adjacent to their real work, and plenty would still need to be recorded by hand anyway.

[gbaji]

This is utter nonsense.

Care to elaborate on that?

If you look at history, there are certainly cases of local rulers (city states usually) hiring/patroning people to build stuff for them (Achimedes is one of the best examples of this), but those situations were exceptions, were local, and tended to die off as soon as the one person doing work themselves died. While there were some jumps and improvements invovled, this rarely resulted in large scale changes or improvements that could be implemented and built on. Similar processes occurred all over the world (very much in the Eastern world), but tended to follow the same pattern.

It wasn't until the Renasaince, and the rise of a merchant class and private patronage that we started to see sustainable schools of thought really appear, with masters passing their knowledge on to apprentices, and learning actually being sustained over time and built on. And yes, in some cases the patrons were also rulers (The Mediccis and DaVinci are an example), but again, it's interesting that when the patrons were rulers, the inventions and improvements tended to die off after the death of any particular master. Progress was made in this era, but not really sustained over time. But it was enough to establish "schools of learning", even if funding for such things was still spotty and subject to the personal whims of their patrons.

Then we get to the industrial revolution, where we see a lot more private industry appearing. The conditions for sustained private patronage and "value from improvements" were just right. And that's when we see massive technological advance really begin, and more importantly remain present and built on year after year. Rulers wan't some cool thing that benefits them and only them, and are primarily concerned about how these things relfect back on their own power/wealth. A business, interested in profits, wants the new cool things because they make it faster/easier/better to build some product that they can sell and make a profit (and edge out their competition). This results in competition, which leads to everyone hiring from those schools of people who are experts in some field, and will therefore continously advance that field, resulting in broad universal advancement, while also promoting the schools themselves. It was this marriage of academia and business need that really pushed things along.

It's hard not to see the difference between private vs public funding of invention here. Maybe you see things differently? But then maybe back that up with... you know... something?

[Gnoman]

It is Not Even Wrong - the premises of the argument are fundamentally, critically broken.



There was plenty of real progress in the periods you're talking about. A fair part went into ultimate dead ends (alchemy, for example, was very seriously studied and thought to be a science for a long time - that it fundamentally wasn't and had no real value other than providing some baselines for chemistry is something you can only know in retrospect), others are overlooked because they're now so basic that we don't even recognize them as important - it wasn't until the Middle Ages that the concept of "zero" was fully accepted, for example.

You mention Archimedes, without realizing that most of his discoveries did not die with him - his work is the foundation of many forms of mathematics and engineering. Several of his inventions have been in continuous use since his own era (the Archimedes Screw was a critical tool in Roman times) The aspects that "died with him" are those of very limited use or ideas that were complete nonsense when they were developed. Crazy inventions like the Claw of Archimedes or the (scientifically impossible) Heat Ray Of Archimedes are the things people remember, but they represent a tiny, tiny portion of his work.

Leonardo's work is similar - most of his famous ideas simply could not be done with the science of his own era. Things like his flying machine sketch were innovative, but could not lead anywhere. His work on anatomy and similar subjects had little effect because they were personal musings of his that nobody read because he never bothered publishing them. A large number of things he worked on did go into use - he was quite important in the building of several canals - but that's simply not what he is heralded for, because public attention is on his Before His Time Genius.

The fact is that slow, steady advancement in ideas and technology was the human norm for the entire period of history you're dismissing. There is no period where the status quo you're claiming existed.

[Bohandas]

It is Not Even Wrong - the premises of the argument are fundamentally, critically broken.



There was plenty of real progress in the periods you're talking about. A fair part went into ultimate dead ends (alchemy, for example, was very seriously studied and thought to be a science for a long time - that it fundamentally wasn't and had no real value other than providing some baselines for chemistry is something you can only know in retrospect), others are overlooked because they're now so basic that we don't even recognize them as important - it wasn't until the Middle Ages that the concept of "zero" was fully accepted, for example.

I keep saying to send back mathematical knowledge

[Tyndmyr]

And a lifetime supply of ammunition.

(Any amount would be a lifetime supply if you go that route.)

And in response to gbaji, while I agree that the aeolipile was far from being a useful source of power, I must point out that the typical 19th century steam locomotive used an open cycle and made no effort at recondensing the steam.

Indeed. It does sound like we largely all agree on the end point, which is that a single item or knowledge dump is insufficient to cause a great leap forward without all the various enabling technologies, social constructs, and so on.

I think that, conceptually, it demonstrates that the idea was there, and fairly well understood, and that those involved with it likely could have constructed a better one if they lived in a time where it made sense to do so, but none of those things are true. Criticizing the aeolipile itself as merely a toy is sort of correct, but doesn't really dispute that the knowledge was there, and the underlying message that carrying knowledge backward is not a sufficient condition to change history to an appreciable degree.

I think the number of people would be a bigger issue than the number of bullets. Even someone with functionally infinite ammunition could be overwhelmed by numbers fairly easily in most situations and even if that didn't work (getting soldiers to attack someone with a futuristic super weapon might be tricky), a single person would probably be fairly easy to ambush one way or the other.

Honestly, disease might be the biggest practical problem. Especially far in the past, the diseases we have today differ greatly from the diseases they had then. You could get sick from something they had. You could bring a tidal wave of death from the future. Maybe both, depending on luck.

Perhaps if you quarantined for a couple of weeks before meeting anyone at your destination, at least the latter could maybe be avoided, but the reverse is fairly challenging in some cases.

We could have a side discussion as to whether a significantly charismatic bastard of a time traveler (or a sufficiently charismatic bastard of a local who stumbled across a time displaced gun) could leverage the technological advantage into a position as a tyrant to keep themselves safe. After all there are cases of real world tyrants who kept the position to a ripe old age, despite not having any technological advantage and indeed being surrounded by guards who are all themselves armed.

If memory serves, the average length of rule of a dictator is something like six or eight years. It ain't nothing, and we remember those who vastly outperformed the average, but it's not actually terribly safe or reliable. And outcomes for an overthrown dictator are remarkably negative on average. Lots of people dead. Lots of people fleeing imminent death, and remaining functionally exiled. Dictatorship does not offer a great deal of stability as a system.

In addition, successful tyrants tend to rely on systems in society, not merely personal power. Being the strongest guy on earth maybe gets you a medal or an entry in the Guinness book of records, not a leadership position. The past is mostly the same. You need to somehow gain followers and people to enforce your laws and so on. If you're writing a book about such, you'll need to have these elements to have any kind of plausibility for a group of any significant size.

The true question is, what kind of things of value you could get in that medieval world that could be traded for anything in ours. Gold and silver was even more scarce than now, but in case of that anime I guess that balance is somewhat shifted.

You don't need things to be objectively plentiful to have profitable trade, you just need a relative advantage. For instance, until about the 1890s, aluminum was considered a precious metal. We figured out how to process it around then, and it became relatively commonly used. In the mid 1800s, aluminum went for $500/lb, and silver was in the $2/oz range. Today aluminum costs about $1/lb, and silver about $24/oz. You could bring aluminum ingots back, and trade them for silver with a massive gain for both you and the trader you are working with.

I'd maybe even go further and suggest that technological advancement is often retarded by the acts of powerful leaders/governments through most of history and most locations. There are rare exceptions, but for the most part, prior to (and even up through a fair bit) the industrial revolution, most advances occured via private actions, not public ones. Usuallly individuals were patroned by some wealthy/powerful person and you can bet that their patron's objective wasn't pure science, but to gain and hold that power and wealth. Changing the status quo is just not often in the interests of those who hold power under the current conditions.

Consider also that the vast majority of human history had far, far lower percentages of people in government than is common in the modern era. This is a result of relative wealth, they simply could not have afforded it. The rich and powerful patronized intellectual people in many areas, but often in very, very small numbers. Until relatively recently, most people were engaged in the process of providing basic needs. However you structure it, if 80% of your population is busy making clothing or tilling fields, the remaining 20% are split between everything else, with relatively few scientists or the like.

We also have a larger population now in addition to a wealthier average for humanity. That also increases the absolute number of scientists.

A lot of problems end up being very tied to scale. Advancements in one area can enable advancements in very disconnected areas, even if only because additional workers and resources are freed up.

The fact is that slow, steady advancement in ideas and technology was the human norm for the entire period of history you're dismissing. There is no period where the status quo you're claiming existed.

There is progress in the broader strokes, yet in some places and times, progress has stopped, or even regressed. War is perhaps the most common of causes for this, but natural disasters also frequently posed a problem.

These, unfortunately, are hard for a time traveler to remedy. If you can convince everyone not to have a war, cool, but this is a problem that exists in all eras, and a stranger who has difficulty speaking your language is perhaps the least effective person to convince a tyrant not to invade.

Heck, some areas still have people living in relatively primitive tribes with little technology. Almost every technological level that has ever been achieved still exists somewhere on earth now. Steady advancement is not a universal human norm, but advancement instead proceeds in small periodic jumps when conditions are right for it. Our past might contain uncounted people with potential for genius who simply died young in a war or famine that they had no part in starting.

[gbaji]

It is Not Even Wrong - the premises of the argument are fundamentally, critically broken.

Linking to something someone else wrote doesn't an argument make.

You mention Archimedes, without realizing that most of his discoveries did not die with him - his work is the foundation of many forms of mathematics and engineering. Several of his inventions have been in continuous use since his own era (the Archimedes Screw was a critical tool in Roman times) The aspects that "died with him" are those of very limited use or ideas that were complete nonsense when they were developed. Crazy inventions like the Claw of Archimedes or the (scientifically impossible) Heat Ray Of Archimedes are the things people remember, but they represent a tiny, tiny portion of his work.

Leonardo's work is similar - most of his famous ideas simply could not be done with the science of his own era. Things like his flying machine sketch were innovative, but could not lead anywhere. His work on anatomy and similar subjects had little effect because they were personal musings of his that nobody read because he never bothered publishing them. A large number of things he worked on did go into use - he was quite important in the building of several canals - but that's simply not what he is heralded for, because public attention is on his Before His Time Genius.

There's a difference between "ideas" and "usable technological advancement". Don't get me wrong, the ideas were important, but those don't create technology that is sustained and built upon. We're specificallly talking about how you might make changes to a timeline to result in faster "modern" technological development. I'm simply pointing out that there are socio-economic conditions that also have to be considered before any level of "dump new ideas on someone" will be likely to have much effect in the long term.

IThe fact is that slow, steady advancement in ideas and technology was the human norm for the entire period of history you're dismissing. There is no period where the status quo you're claiming existed.

Except it wasn't "steady" by any means. There are long gaps of time where technology was learned and used in an area, and then lost and disappeared for often centuries, only to be re-discovered again. Just on the metalugical side of things, the sheer number of times different qualities (and methods) of steel were invented, used, then lost, copied and used somewhere else, lost there, regained, etc, is staggering.

I'm merely observing the socio-economic conditions and how they pertained to sustained technological development and seeing a very strong correlation. And I'm speculating that said correlation is due to the state/patron aspect of funding for such things, and how they tended to be "secret knowledge" sorts of things that tended to die off when the inventor or patron died (or lost power, or war came along, state toppled, etc).

Only when there were purely private sources for such developments *and* economic conditions for the value of those developments to be high outside/across state boundaries do we see a true strong and steady rate of compounded technological development. And this in turn requires quite of bit of "bootstrapping" to occur. Which is where I started this entire line of thought.

Indeed. It does sound like we largely all agree on the end point, which is that a single item or knowledge dump is insufficient to cause a great leap forward without all the various enabling technologies, social constructs, and so on.

I think that, conceptually, it demonstrates that the idea was there, and fairly well understood, and that those involved with it likely could have constructed a better one if they lived in a time where it made sense to do so, but none of those things are true. Criticizing the aeolipile itself as merely a toy is sort of correct, but doesn't really dispute that the knowledge was there, and the underlying message that carrying knowledge backward is not a sufficient condition to change history to an appreciable degree.

Yeah. Part of what I was saying (most of it, actually). There also has to be, for lack of a better term, a "market" for the technology. And that requires economic conditions in which "market" means more than "some rich/powerful person will pay you to satisfy their personal whims".

IConsider also that the vast majority of human history had far, far lower percentages of people in government than is common in the modern era. This is a result of relative wealth, they simply could not have afforded it. The rich and powerful patronized intellectual people in many areas, but often in very, very small numbers. Until relatively recently, most people were engaged in the process of providing basic needs. However you structure it, if 80% of your population is busy making clothing or tilling fields, the remaining 20% are split between everything else, with relatively few scientists or the like.

Yeah. Absolutely. Hence the need to "bootstrap". You have to have sufficient technology in your system to allow for a smaller percentage of your workers to be able to provide the "basic needs" of food, shelter, and clothing, before you can advance any further. Showing up with plans and materials for a fully functioning Ford Motorcar facility in an otherwise agrarian economy will do nothing, because if you removed sufficient people from the workplace to provide for all the needs of your factory, the entire system will collapse and folks will starve to death (and how would enough people ever buy the cars anyway?). You must *first* develop better irrigation, farming, road/bridge building, food storage and transport, and then a host of other non-infrastructure only jobs that could be benefited by having faster means of personal transport let's say, and a method of currency to allow for sustained assets by private citizens, and probably a dozen other things I'm not thinking of, and *then* maybe you can actually build cars.

Otherwise, you have some one off novelty that a few rich people might be interested in, until the fad passes and it all falls apart. And sure, maybe personal cars isn't a great example here, but we can make similar arguments for textile factories, or paper factories, etc. There's an economy of scale required for industrial production, and that absolutely requires a large number of "normal people" who are purchasing whatever you are making. Relying only on a market of the "uber rich and powerful" isn't a great long term sustainable model.

IWe also have a larger population now in addition to a wealthier average for humanity. That also increases the absolute number of scientists.

A lot of problems end up being very tied to scale. Advancements in one area can enable advancements in very disconnected areas, even if only because additional workers and resources are freed up.

I would argue they are required for advancements in other areas. You have to have a very broad set of advancements to move forward in any sigificant way. And (as we're discovering here) there's a ton of disagreements that already exist on exactly what things were required for what other things to happen just in our own timeline. Tring to predict this in a way so as to be able to reliably push changes into a different timeline? Super difficult.

And again, the one positive we have here, is presumably we can try different things over and over until we "get it right".

IThere is progress in the broader strokes, yet in some places and times, progress has stopped, or even regressed. War is perhaps the most common of causes for this, but natural disasters also frequently posed a problem.

These, unfortunately, are hard for a time traveler to remedy. If you can convince everyone not to have a war, cool, but this is a problem that exists in all eras, and a stranger who has difficulty speaking your language is perhaps the least effective person to convince a tyrant not to invade.

Yeah. Doubly so when you may very well be introducing new potential conflict points with any introdution you make. I'll point out (again) that for most of human history, any new development/invention/whatever will almost certainly be used for warfare long before it's used as some sort of common household commodity. Political leaders just aren't going to see the relative value of "we can improve our people's quality of life" over "we can use this to defeat our enemies". At least not through most of history.

[Bohandas]

Regarding needing intermediate technologies, it seems to me that that's just a matter of preparation. You just bring back the plans for the intermediate technologies as well. "Here's how you make the thing. And here's how you make the special alloy that you need to make the thing. And here's how you make the other alloy that you need to make the crucible to make the alloy to make the thing" and so on

[veti]

Regarding needing intermediate technologies, it seems to me that that's just a matter of preparation. You just bring back the plans for the intermediate technologies as well. "Here's how you make the thing. And here's how you make the special alloy that you need to make the thing. And here's how you make the other alloy that you need to make the crucible to make the alloy to make the thing" and so on

Even if you can identify all the required steps to progress from donkey carts to Donkey Kong, you still need to find people with the skills, resources and time to actually do the work. And then persuade them to work for you.

"Significant numbers of skilled artisans with time on their hands" is a resource that would be very hard to find at most points in history. To say nothing of the other resources you need. For very large reaches of the past, even if you had effectively infinite money, there's no plausible way to gather those things.

[Tyndmyr]

Regarding needing intermediate technologies, it seems to me that that's just a matter of preparation. You just bring back the plans for the intermediate technologies as well. "Here's how you make the thing. And here's how you make the special alloy that you need to make the thing. And here's how you make the other alloy that you need to make the crucible to make the alloy to make the thing" and so on

Until about the 14th century, the seven kinds of metals were: Gold, Silver, Copper, Iron, Tin, Lead and Mercury

Half these techs would require teaching almost all metallurgy discovered. Yknow, just for that one particular field.

The same is true for every other field. Even if you *could* carry back all the plans, significant translation would be needed. Even if going to somewhere that is English speaking, the dialect they speak is different than yours. They don't use metric measurements. They may not even use the same imperial measurements.

You would need to show them where and how to locate many kinds of natural resources they had previously not even known existed, or cared about in any way.

Unless the protaganist is going to have seven college degrees and also the powers of the Flash to get all of this actual work done, I don't think "bring back all the plans for every technology" is realistic.

[NichG]

Until about the 14th century, the seven kinds of metals were: Gold, Silver, Copper, Iron, Tin, Lead and Mercury

Half these techs would require teaching almost all metallurgy discovered. Yknow, just for that one particular field.

The same is true for every other field. Even if you *could* carry back all the plans, significant translation would be needed. Even if going to somewhere that is English speaking, the dialect they speak is different than yours. They don't use metric measurements. They may not even use the same imperial measurements.

You would need to show them where and how to locate many kinds of natural resources they had previously not even known existed, or cared about in any way.

Unless the protaganist is going to have seven college degrees and also the powers of the Flash to get all of this actual work done, I don't think "bring back all the plans for every technology" is realistic.

On the other hand, these are maybe examples of things where you can be disruptive, by taking stuff that some people of the time did know - but which was largely secret or entangled with unnecessary steps due to the accident of how it was discovered - and spreading it around. Especially things which were optimized via trial and error over centuries. Things like recipes for Wootz steel or other blended steels, extraction of phosphorous, etc. Also, not specific technologies, but general approaches to testing and standardization could give a big impact in a more subtle way. Soil pH testing is just a red cabbage away, and things like systematically testing and amending soil could easily double or triple yields, which directly translates into more free time and more labor for those other endeavors. Soil testing is a pretty modern invention - late 1800s basically - but the actual infrastructure needed to do it (outside of information infrastructure, e.g. determining the ideal conditions for each particular crop) is not really that sophisticated.

[Gnoman]

The same is true for every other field. Even if you *could* carry back all the plans, significant translation would be needed. Even if going to somewhere that is English speaking, the dialect they speak is different than yours. They don't use metric measurements. They may not even use the same imperial measurements.

That brings up a rather plausible potential idea - pushing a consistent system of measurements as a private person would be possible in many eras if you had the proper connections. There's plenty of eras where most people nominally used the same system, but pegged to a different standard. Convince some prominent merchants with wide networks to use Tyndmyr's Precision Weights And Measures, and market it heavily, you could produce standard measurements (which has massive benefits to trade) far earlier than in history.

[Anymage]

Regarding needing intermediate technologies, it seems to me that that's just a matter of preparation. You just bring back the plans for the intermediate technologies as well. "Here's how you make the thing. And here's how you make the special alloy that you need to make the thing. And here's how you make the other alloy that you need to make the crucible to make the alloy to make the thing" and so on

Let's assume a nigh magical oracle-android who can carry all our modern information in its head, live long enough to shepherd the past society up to modernity, and be strong/tough/vigilant enough to never be brought low by accident or other mishap. If the past society does come to see the oracle-android as the source of all knowledge, that sounds much more likely to engender rigid dogmatism than the sort of curiosity and experimentation that leads to new breakthroughs. Once the society catches up with where we are now and the oracle-android has shared everything it has to share, I don't think they'll be primed to start building new knowledge to advance past that.

[gbaji]

That brings up a rather plausible potential idea - pushing a consistent system of measurements as a private person would be possible in many eras if you had the proper connections. There's plenty of eras where most people nominally used the same system, but pegged to a different standard. Convince some prominent merchants with wide networks to use Tyndmyr's Precision Weights And Measures, and market it heavily, you could produce standard measurements (which has massive benefits to trade) far earlier than in history.

That's a viable idea. But it would have to start out small scale, and would only spread as the technology to actually build consistent scales/weights spreads. Starting from a point where everything is built by artisans, by hand, even if you have an exact defintion of what a liter is, or a kilogram, or a degree celsius, everyone using those common measurements would also have to have the ability to consistently construct the tools to measure those things exactly (and make sure their tools are calibrated the same as everyone else's). That's a lot harder than it sounds.

But yeah. That's one of those things that would have to be included within the bootstrap process itself. Because "pegged to a different standard" is entirely about "a pound in our town is based on that weight we use over in the corner of the shop" kind of thing. The next town over? Different weight, and almost certainly not going to actually weigh the same amount. Same deal with size/volume measurements as well. Both of those are actually much much easier than temperature though, which for most of history relied on visual observation of various materials changing color/shape (and other properties) within a oven or flame. There's a lot of "art" involved in a lot of these processes. So setting some common standards can definitely help move the whole process foward, but has to be itself developed along the way.

[NichG]

That's a viable idea. But it would have to start out small scale, and would only spread as the technology to actually build consistent scales/weights spreads. Starting from a point where everything is built by artisans, by hand, even if you have an exact defintion of what a liter is, or a kilogram, or a degree celsius, everyone using those common measurements would also have to have the ability to consistently construct the tools to measure those things exactly (and make sure their tools are calibrated the same as everyone else's). That's a lot harder than it sounds.

But yeah. That's one of those things that would have to be included within the bootstrap process itself. Because "pegged to a different standard" is entirely about "a pound in our town is based on that weight we use over in the corner of the shop" kind of thing. The next town over? Different weight, and almost certainly not going to actually weigh the same amount. Same deal with size/volume measurements as well. Both of those are actually much much easier than temperature though, which for most of history relied on visual observation of various materials changing color/shape (and other properties) within a oven or flame. There's a lot of "art" involved in a lot of these processes. So setting some common standards can definitely help move the whole process foward, but has to be itself developed along the way.

There are a lot of tricks people have come up with over the years to solve the general problem 'how do I make an exact copy of a property of a physical object?', and a lot of those are simply matters of cleverness. Bluing in engineering to copy surface geometry (and the need to use three objects rather than two if you want to make it a flat surface in particular - a consequence of subtle mathematics, but easily conveyed as just do it this way). Using the triple point of water to calibrate temperature. Lists of easily accessed natural calibrations and ways of copying the artificial ones would be a good resource to take back.

Scales let you copy a weight accurately. A mold lets you copy units of length accurately. Time is maybe the tricky one, but if you can copy length you can use a pendulum for that...

[Gnoman]

That's a viable idea. But it would have to start out small scale, and would only spread as the technology to actually build consistent scales/weights spreads. Starting from a point where everything is built by artisans, by hand, even if you have an exact defintion of what a liter is, or a kilogram, or a degree celsius, everyone using those common measurements would also have to have the ability to consistently construct the tools to measure those things exactly (and make sure their tools are calibrated the same as everyone else's). That's a lot harder than it sounds.

But yeah. That's one of those things that would have to be included within the bootstrap process itself. Because "pegged to a different standard" is entirely about "a pound in our town is based on that weight we use over in the corner of the shop" kind of thing. The next town over? Different weight, and almost certainly not going to actually weigh the same amount. Same deal with size/volume measurements as well. Both of those are actually much much easier than temperature though, which for most of history relied on visual observation of various materials changing color/shape (and other properties) within a oven or flame. There's a lot of "art" involved in a lot of these processes. So setting some common standards can definitely help move the whole process foward, but has to be itself developed along the way.

The way to do that would be to use whatever your startup resources are to create a weights and measures company selling marked weights (with all appropriate tricks to counter defacement), calibrated measuring tools, etc. Then convince a number of prominent people to use them. If the biggest merchant houses measure everything with gbaji Certified Weights, that will gradually create a de facto standard.

Temperature's actually one of the easiest, because you can give easy written directions to create thermometers.

[Bohandas]

Even if you *could* carry back all the plans

Was there something in the scenario forbidding bringing back smartphones and/or solar panels and/or Micro SD cards?

Let's assume a nigh magical oracle-android who can carry all our modern information in its head, live long enough to shepherd the past society up to modernity, and be strong/tough/vigilant enough to never be brought low by accident or other mishap. If the past society does come to see the oracle-android as the source of all knowledge, that sounds much more likely to engender rigid dogmatism than the sort of curiosity and experimentation that leads to new breakthroughs. Once the society catches up with where we are now and the oracle-android has shared everything it has to share, I don't think they'll be primed to start building new knowledge to advance past that.

Maybe things could be arranged so that examples of the next technology up from the current standard would be "coincidentally" stumbled upon ny people smart enough and curious enough to reverse engimeer them (Like Hactar from Life, The Universe, and Everything). That would at least foster a culture of reverse engineering

[Gnoman]

There's three big issues you're simply ignoring.

First, the volume of data you'd have to take back with you would be enormous - forget the paltry size of Wikipedia, that doesn't give you anything close to what you'd actually need to carry most things off. You'd need massive quantities of storage.

Second, and related, disseminating that information will be very difficult. Ignoring the issue of language, of finding a sufficient number of people that are not only literate but educated enough to understand what you're showing them, and the sheer difficulty of moving information from place to place, the literal time it would take for your new workforce to read and understand the material would be a matter of decades, not mere years. Not to mention, of course, that you'd have to set up large scale duplication of your material, which is a laborious process if you don't have things like laser printers.

Third, and this is very important, reading about how to do a thing doesn't magically impart the ability to do it. To use a famous example, the Manhattan Project took six years (genesis was in 1939, the bomb was ready in 1945), and very little of that was spent figuring out the fundamental physics of an atomic bomb - they knew most of that going in. Show up at Fermi's door in 1939 with every last page of the research data, and you might be able to shave off six months by pure knowledge, and maybe an additional year if your information is enough to get the project thrown into high gear. We have a certain degree of proof of this - the Soviet A-bomb project didn't kick into high gear until 1945 (it was started earlier, but war demands kept it at the espionage level), had effectively unlimited resources, and espionage had given a nearly complete How To Build An Atomic Bomb manual. They set their bomb off in 1949 - a four year project. This is because setting up the infrastructure takes time, physically learning how to do it takes time, and solving engineering problems specific to your individual setup takes time even if you don't have to invent anything.

[Tyndmyr]

Was there something in the scenario forbidding bringing back smartphones and/or solar panels and/or Micro SD cards?

No, but the point is not merely to have these in the past, but to distribute them and get them into common usage.

If you have to additionally teach each person how to use a smartphone, electricity and solar panels, you have made it harder, not easier, for them to access the plans.

A smartphone that works only in Chinese does me little good, for all the technology in it. They would be in a similar place.

[Bohandas]

The point wasn't bringing back smarpthones, The smartphone with a bunch of SD cards was just an example of something you could clearly carry all the plans back in

[Lord Torath]

Can we grab the Photonic guy from the that Time Machine movie?

Spoiler

Show

The photonic guy is an AI connected to a library that has everything, and was still working 800,000 odd years after people stopped maintaining it.

[SirKazum]

On a side note, I've been dreaming about plot points from the story this is for, so maybe I should get on that...

[gbaji]

The way to do that would be to use whatever your startup resources are to create a weights and measures company selling marked weights (with all appropriate tricks to counter defacement), calibrated measuring tools, etc. Then convince a number of prominent people to use them. If the biggest merchant houses measure everything with gbaji Certified Weights, that will gradually create a de facto standard.

And no one thought of that prior to your time traveler arriving in the past? The trick is the logistical problem of actually getting more than a small handful of people in the immediate area to adopt your standard instead of one they are already using. And I'll point out that having "companies" and "merchant houses" also requires a degree of cross border privatized trade (trade where the interest is the house/company and not the kingdom/state/whatever they exist in) as well. Don't get me wrong, as I previously mentioned, you would need this for these sorts of things to work. But that's the point. You have to build up an economic structure capable of having the standards both accepted and enforced in some way *prior* to them being useful. That's part of the bootstrapping process I've talked about already. And yeah, you could do this solely inside one kingdom or something (using the state as patron), but that will trend any developments you make towards becoming "state secrets", and not lead to the wide spread tech growth and development we're presumably trying to achieve.

It's just not as easy as dropping a one pound weight somewhere and saying "Ok. Everyone use this to measure weight now".

Temperature's actually one of the easiest, because you can give easy written directions to create thermometers.

Temperature when measuring things like water, air, and people? Sure. But that's a fairly narrow range of temperature, and not terribly useful for developing newer/advanced technologies. I was speaking about accurately measuring the heat in a kiln or forge for consistent manufacturing of various materials. That's a *lot* more difficult to do. And itself requires some advancements that you can't just drop into say an bronze or iron age civilization.

There's a lot more moving parts involved than just technical knowhow invovled in this. That's not to say that it can't be done, but it's a lost more difficult than just assuming that introducing a new idea or methodology will just grow and spread rapidly becuase it's a great new idea or methodology. We live in an industrialized world, so we see things this way. You come up with a new/better way of doing things, and it's just a matter of showing that it's actually new/better. But the condition only works because we already exist in an environment capable of taking advantage of any new/better thing that comes along. You have to create those conditions first, and that takes a lot of small steps to do.

[NichG]

And no one thought of that prior to your time traveler arriving in the past?

Standardizing measures to things that can be derived from nature rather than something like 'the king's foot' is a shockingly late idea. Quick search suggests 1799(!). Even things like decimals/powers of ten was as late as ~1200, and wasn't standardized or widely adopted until ~1500.

[Bohandas]

Having just re-read Mostly Harmless, what if we brought back recipes?

[thethird]

So, assume you have a form of time travel. Don't worry about paradoxes; assume, for simplicity's sake, that the time travel deposits you in a parallel universe identical but unconnected to your own at the designated timeframe, so that whatever happens there has no bearing on your own timeline prior to the travel. Assume also that you can take pretty much anything you could reasonably carry on your person on this trip. Final assumption, the time travel should be kept secret from the people at the destination, or at least not be public knowledge.

So, with all that in mind, your goal is to create a timeline where technology has progressed a lot further than in our own, so that you (or your compatriots) can visit it further down chronologically and reap the rewards of ultra-advanced tech. A couple more parameters for the sake of discussion: say that only 1 person travels, that this person is knowledgeable enough though not necessarily a genius (say, a Masters in engineering, whichever field you consider most suitable), and that they travel to 40 years in the past (so, early 1983 in our case). What could they do to make sure that this other timeline's 2023, say, is as technologically advanced as possible? Again, they can take with them whatever they can reasonably carry. I have some ideas of my own, but I'm curious to hear what you guys might come up with!

I would actually send a 50+ year old cryptobro with enough knowledge in finance and engineering to know which companies make it big. And enough knowledge in shady business to be able to set a list of paper/fake companies in Panama or Bahamas or somewhere so he can stay private. Send him with lists of big winning lotery/bets for enough seed money and then have him invest.

Most companies are plubicly traded knowadays and he doesn't need to know how to make things better, as long as he knows who can make those things better and puts enough money in their pockets and nudges them in a proper direction. Use the dot com bubble to poach whomever you want in tech and put them to do whatever you want.

Also with that seed money set a company, of "hey this are the biggest achievements of the last 40 years, how could we make them with tech from 1980". Use that to iterate.

---

As for technology to send to the real real far past that I could actually teach the locals...

Stirrups? The chinese, maybe, used them but it took the west a VERY long time to invent them. And they are easy. And they surely help with communication, a lot. And better communications seems something you want to improve technology.

(Also seconding printing, because, yeah, communication, but stirrups are way easier)