Using time travel to force accelerated technological progress

[Bohandas]

Almost nothing, I imagine. About the only time I am aware of where the sciences had to create new maths to model the world was with Newton, gravity and the method of fluxions (or differential calculus as we know it today). And he still had to explain it in terms of regular maths (of the time) afterwards.

Most of the time the sciences need new tools in the maths toolkit, they are already there, waiting.

There's still problems with the Navier-Stokes equation

[SirKazum]

Quantum mechanics needed a lot of advances in linear algebra, operator math, etc... I was surprised at how modern matrix math is - the first stuff that looks like modern linear algebra is in the 1840s. Operator algebra was then in the 1910s.

That still puts advances in mathematics several decades ahead of the scientific advances that require them at least, in those specific cases, while in most cases the most advanced maths you use are from centuries ago (probably the 1700s, probably developed by Leonhard Euler to be specific, lol)... I don't see math having that much of a dramatic impact when brought back in time this way, unless you're talking really long timespans (like getting those ancient Indians who first used a fully positional number system up to speed with calculus), and then you run into all the problems with really long-term fiddling with history, i.e. it gets way too unpredictable by the point you're going to see concrete improvements over what we have today.

[NichG]

That still puts advances in mathematics several decades ahead of the scientific advances that require them at least, in those specific cases, while in most cases the most advanced maths you use are from centuries ago (probably the 1700s, probably developed by Leonhard Euler to be specific, lol)... I don't see math having that much of a dramatic impact when brought back in time this way, unless you're talking really long timespans (like getting those ancient Indians who first used a fully positional number system up to speed with calculus), and then you run into all the problems with really long-term fiddling with history, i.e. it gets way too unpredictable by the point you're going to see concrete improvements over what we have today.

Yeah it's probably not the most useful, but this was more the point that its not quite as stagnant as was suggested.

Honestly, something like ceramic and alloy compositions for good solar panels, superconductors, etc are probably a good time saver - expensive search spaces, very little help from theory to narrow the search. Also results of drug studies. Those have the advantage that 'show me' works, you don't need any particularly more advanced infrastructure to use them, etc. Also just in general stuff from the chemistry literature, a lot of that is very 'extensive' rather than 'intensive' in nature, e.g. trying different synthesis pathways and gradually optimizing the entirety of the route to making a particular thing from precursors.

There are a couple of gimmicks that panned out in things like industrial robotics you could transmit - some of the principles of soft robotics (I'm thinking grippers using non-Newtonian fluids to mold to what they hold for example as something thats really super gimmicky but ends up being kind of useful, and its very simple once you have the idea) for example would be pretty counter-intuitive in the 80s. That could be an overall industrial process accelerator, but probably only a few percent...

Possibly some stuff on design directions could save a few years in this or that industry. Knowing at exactly what scale Moore's Law for serial computation is going to end, getting modern automatic parallelization stuff in at the ground floor rather than having to be built on top, introducing automatic differentiation as readily available software a decade or two before AI takes off (and nudging graphics cards towards designs that will anticipate and better handle some of the scaling, memory, general computation, and bandwidth needs), etc might all be worth a bit here or there. Heck, even just tossing in a lot of the standard tricks to make networks easier to train - don't use saturating activation functions, things like batch normalization, use a history-normalized gradient descent method like Adam rather than SGD - would let someone save a factor of 10 or 100 in computational costs compared to what people of the time were doing, meaning you could get certain things going about a decade early, though the problem is you'd quickly end up waiting for hardware to catch up since earlier AI won't really help speed up hardware development. But that's only a very narrow, and very non-physical industry...

[Bohandas]

There are STILL issues with solving the Navier-Stokes Equation.

[Manga Shoggoth]

There are STILL issues with solving the Navier-Stokes Equation.

And yet they were created back in the first half of the 1800s, and are successful at what they do. The mathematical model does not have to be perfect to be useful, nor does it have to be developed to the nth degree to be useful.

(I never dealt with them when doing my degree - the focus was on different areas)

[Radar]

There are STILL issues with solving the Navier-Stokes Equation.

As with any other non-linear and inherently chaotic differential equation. It does not mean there are no ways of solving them to good enough precision for practical purposes - it is just computationally intensive. Other mathematical example of a very difficult to deal with equation is the tomographic reconstruction: there exists a well known analytic solution, but in practice it is awfully unstable with respect to noise, so the practical solving algorithms are significantly different.

[Tyndmyr]

Examples alone do not necessarily create a society of technology, that's your main problem.

Consider the case of ancient Greece, which invented a steam engine, the Aeolipile. It was a curiosity, a party trick. Industrial use of steam engines happened some 1400 years later, and were not in any way connected to it.

It isn't even just technology...there's no particular reason why the Greeks couldn't have pursued steam technology, but socially, they didn't really have a desire or a need for it. Society itself has to advance along with technology. Some techs require a critical mass of people to be reasonably adopted. One does not put in a railway unless there are enough people to make doing so worthwhile. Others rest on social values and the like. A steam engine that performs a lot of work cheaply is of great value to someone who would otherwise do that work. It is of much, much less value to the rich man who can simply have slaves or servants perform it, particularly if it is novel, untested, and expensive. The same is true of any advancement requiring mass literacy. Unless the population can read and write acceptably well, what use is anything that requires that?

So, it might be really hard to make large leaps in technology. Yeah, you could help a particular researcher by bringing him the exact solution he later thought up, saving him time as an individual, but in terms of making society as a whole advance far faster? Probably not going to happen, especially with a single trip.

But maybe following all those dead ends was - necessary. I don't think anyone expected floppy discs to last forever, but they didn't need to - they bridged a gap. And being able to describe a smartphone in detail would be - nice, I guess, but by approximately 1990 Steve Jobs already had that vision in his head and was working towards it just as fast as technology would go.

Well, the Blackberry was invented in '84, and some form of handheld computer/communicator had been a staple in science fiction for ages. The idea, I think, was well formed, and folks realized we were going that way, but miniaturization was a huge barrier requiring the previously referenced computer hardware advances. Information regarding capabilities, resolution, etc, doesn't grant the manufacturing base to make it.

Probably the most useful things you could do would be correcting information about information that is falsely known. Things like ulcers being caused by bacteria, or Alzheimer's being caused by dental issues would be incredibly useful things to have known long in advance. However, the problem there is in convincing people without being taken for a nutcase. In both cases, the misinformation took a massive effort to correct, even though the clues were there all along.

If you're asking yourselves, "why limit yourself to 40 years? Why not go to 3000 BCE with plans for agricultural advances, better writing systems and recording materials they could manage at the time, etc., and then travel to that world's 3000 CE?

Eh, we invented agriculture forever ago, but humanity kept bouncing off the same population ceiling until about, oooh, the 1700s? That's a strong indicator that it was not merely agriculture we needed. Oh, sure, that was necessary, but likely a bunch of other things were as well. There's a decent argument to be made that humanity was still evolving and getting smarter, and some advancements require a certain degree of intelligence. Humanity interacting with itself creates all kinds of situations where some win and some lose, so over time, humanity slowly edges forward in capacity.

If you're talking about bouncing back to 3000 BCE, yeah, people are probably not *extremely* different from today, but they are probably well adapted to the civilization of the era, not to the civilization of today. Giving them a good way to learn to read might not even be something they see as relevant to their lives.

The challenges are very significant, but if you allow repeated time travel, well...you at least open up a lot of interesting plot. I would suggest you read The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. which, while operating off a very different premise for the tech, has the sort of multiversal shenanigans and some strict limitations that makes for a fun thought experiment, and which you might enjoy considering.

Addendum: It always strikes me as interesting that people believe that creating major change is so easy that someone travelling into the past could do so even by accident. Yet, your present is the past from the perspective of others, and very few people believe it would be so easy to drastically change the world they live in.

[Gnoman]

It isn't even just technology...there's no particular reason why the Greeks couldn't have pursued steam technology

Yes, there is. They didn't have the materials science technology to build a useful steam engine that wouldn't explode. Even a low-pressure engine would be impossible for them to build.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Actually, based on Tyndmyr's post, if you could give ancient people a way to build useable printing presses, that might be an extremely disruptive technology. People having access to information with which they can make themselves good at their job is a fundament of democracy and education, it might allow for less strictly centrally led empires to arise thousands of years "early" (middle to late bronze age? Could that be feasible?). Would that lead to higher tech levels today? Don't know. Might be a cool experiment though.

"Just" enough people that can write/draw things like farmers almanac's might work too, but you would at least need paper or some equivalent...

(Do I even want higher tech levels? Doesn't that just lead to AI doing everything better than humans leading to new strictly led empires with the rich AI owners at the top? History is full of big questions.)

[Eldan]

Can you print on Papyrus? That would make things considerably easier.

[Batcathat]

I don't know a ton about printing technology (not the historic kind, at least), but I imagine the materials for the printing presses and types might also be an issue.

[Bohandas]

(Do I even want higher tech levels? Doesn't that just lead to AI doing everything better than humans leading to new strictly led empires with the rich AI owners at the top? History is full of big questions.)

There's no fundamental reason for AI to be run centrally or owned by a business. That's predicated on a combination of the existence of intellectual property law, the existence of a corporate system, and people having inadequete graphics cards on their personal computers at the time the technology comes out. All of these could plausibly be prevented if you go back far enough and speedrun history fast enough.

[SirKazum]

Can you print on Papyrus? That would make things considerably easier.

You can, but people are going to be upset about your font choice.

[Tyndmyr]

Yes, there is. They didn't have the materials science technology to build a useful steam engine that wouldn't explode. Even a low-pressure engine would be impossible for them to build.

They literally built one.

Was it cost effective/easy? Definitely not. That's kind of the point, though. If the materials/manufacturing is inefficient, nobody will bother, even when they know how. One piece of technology displaced out of time is a nifty trinket for one person, not a scientific revolution.

[Lord Torath]

I don't know a ton about printing technology (not the historic kind, at least), but I imagine the materials for the printing presses and types might also be an issue.

The type set masters could be carved from wood and 'cast' in clay. Not as durable as metal type, but certainly feasible. I don't know that the rest of the press really requires metal. I suspect with glue and flint/stone tools you could make a primitive wooden printing press. That said, I've never worked with flint/stone tools, so I'm open to being wrong.

[warty goblin]

The Egyptians had metal, I guarantee you can cast movable type in copper, to say nothing of lead. Like, I haven't done letters specifically, but I have cast things with equally fine features without difficulty in copper. Havent done lead, I don't mess with that stuff. Would be easier to cast and more durable, but pricier, in bronze.

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.

I feel like if step 1 in your plan is go to a place where you have no connections, social support, an at best awful grasp of the language and social customs, and then annoy wealthy people - up to and potentially including the ***god emperor*** you don't have a genius plan for hacking history. You have a convoluted plan that ends in starvation, enslavement, dying of dysentery, or if everything goes really well, getting some violent goons to come to your mud shack and beat you to death because you were successful enough to irritate the local despot.

[veti]

The type set masters could be carved from wood and 'cast' in clay. Not as durable as metal type, but certainly feasible. I don't know that the rest of the press really requires metal. I suspect with glue and flint/stone tools you could make a primitive wooden printing press. That said, I've never worked with flint/stone tools, so I'm open to being wrong.

Finding someone with the skills to do the job might be a challenge. That's some pretty fiddly crafting you're asking for, particularly with stone tools. By the time papyrus is available, you can do the carving on clay and cast the actual type in bronze.

In principle, at least. If you can persuade people to go along with your insanity, which seems like a big ask.

[Bohandas]

In principle, at least. If you can persuade people to go along with your insanity, which seems like a big ask.

I feel like if step 1 in your plan is go to a place where you have no connections, social support, an at best awful grasp of the language and social customs, and then annoy wealthy people - up to and potentially including the ***god emperor*** you don't have a genius plan for hacking history. You have a convoluted plan that ends in starvation, enslavement, dying of dysentery, or if everything goes really well, getting some violent goons to come to your mud shack and beat you to death because you were successful enough to irritate the local despot.

Bring a gun

[gbaji]

They literally built one.

Was it cost effective/easy? Definitely not. That's kind of the point, though. If the materials/manufacturing is inefficient, nobody will bother, even when they know how. One piece of technology displaced out of time is a nifty trinket for one person, not a scientific revolution.

They built the motive part of the engine. That's honestly the easy part though. It's attaching it to something that performs some useful "work" *and* attaching some maintainble heat source sufficient to make the resulting work less work than maintaining the heat source and water in the engine. What they made was basically a steam powered top. Great. But you can't move much with that, it had limited function due to just boiling the water out of the vessel as steam. You could attach some string to it and use the spin to move something, but when you add up the work used to fill the vessel with water, then gather materials and make a fire under it, then wait for it to boil and start moving, you've spent more work doing that then you get from the resulting spinning motion.

It's a great party trick, but takes more time effort to set up than you get. To build a useful steam engine you have to have some form of steam recapture/recycle in your boiler, and sufficeint fuel source to manage the correct heat level, all of which requires some pretty significant amounts of improvements in metalurgy and frankly probably 80 other things I'm not even thinking of right at the moment.

For something to be useful from an industrial point of view, you must get more work out of it than you put in, with the only net "cost" being the materials you are consuming. Otherwise you'd have been better off having all those people obtaining heating materials (coal miners and all transport) and building your engine, and maintaining it, filling it, operating it, etc just do the work you need them to do directly. The value of moving X mass Y distance in Z time has to be greater than you spend doing that in the first place. And no, the Greek steam engine wasn't even remotely close to that.

That's not to say that going back far enough in time can't work. But you have to start with what is there at that time, and build a bit from that. So for most of human history, that would be metalurgy and simple labor saving machines. Building better tools to make one civilization a bit more productive and efficient than another would likely be all that was needed. Having foreknowledge of where various materials lie and can be easily obtained/mined, and designs for things like irrigation tools, mill designs, metal working technigues, etc could result in pretty significant jumps. Um... Trying to control what is done with that stuff though? Probably nearly impossible. Most likely you'd just result in your chosen kingdom/whatever having more people, being better fed, with better weapons/armor than their neighbors, and it's pretty obvious where that would likely lead.

Read the Cross Time Engineer series. It's a bit wishful thinking at spots, but at least does restrict things to the somewhat reasonable (although there's some future intervention that occurs along the way too). And yeah, in that series it was almost entirely about building a better military. Real improvements in overall technology took far far longer than a single lifetime to accomplish. The main character just set things in motion. And again, the vagarities of history are... well... vague. Stuff happens. Knowledge is gained and lost. Empires rise and fall. It's just as likely that going back in time and making changes like this would result in some minor improvements for a short time, until some calamity came along and wiped it all out or something, leaving nothing but a minor ripple of change in the long term.

So yeah. I think you could absolutely make changes, and improvements. The trick is that it would be nearly impossible to accurately predict the outcome of those changes over time. Of course, if you've got a time machine like this, and multiple timelines to examine/change, eventually you'll see results, right? It would require a heck of a lot of trial and error though.

[DavidSh]

Bring a gun

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.

[gbaji]

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.

Fair enough. Wasn't sure. Um. Which means they were lugging around a lot of extra weight in the tanks of water to maintain pressure as well. And infrastructure to replace lost water (which I now recall was a major thing as well, with water tanks along the route, which I apparently completely forgot about, doh!).

I could see something like that being potentially useful in a static setting (operating steam powered equipment in a workspace, for example), but still really far away from something like a locomotive. Either way though, it still ulitimately comes down to how much work you get out versus how much work (in equivalent manual labor) you put in. I suspect that watermills (and windmills?) were found to be more useful for that purpose, and we see lots of them historically, while steam took a lot longer to develop.

It's actually interesting to consider industrialization as a concept. There's a lot of bootstrapping involved.

[Batcathat]

And a lifetime supply of ammunition.

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.

[Anymage]

Fair enough. Wasn't sure. Um. Which means they were lugging around a lot of extra weight in the tanks of water to maintain pressure as well. And infrastructure to replace lost water (which I now recall was a major thing as well, with water tanks along the route, which I apparently completely forgot about, doh!).

I could see something like that being potentially useful in a static setting (operating steam powered equipment in a workspace, for example), but still really far away from something like a locomotive. Either way though, it still ulitimately comes down to how much work you get out versus how much work (in equivalent manual labor) you put in. I suspect that watermills (and windmills?) were found to be more useful for that purpose, and we see lots of them historically, while steam took a lot longer to develop.

It's actually interesting to consider industrialization as a concept. There's a lot of bootstrapping involved.

If you could make a good show of how a piece of technology might be useful, you could direct technological development. Although given how that might draw attention from other advances that people at the time might have been working on, it might be less about resulting in better tech and more about getting different tech. Or just taking a different route and winding up similar to where we are now.

If I had a time machine, some training and a desire to significantly shape history, I'd try to hop back to somewhere like ancient greece when they had a society that was open to learning, and try to drop some simple ideas that had massive long-term implications. Scientific method, germ theory of disease, and evolution by natural selection being ones that a person at the time might reasonably consider but that also took a long time to see reasonably widespread adoption. You could then bring slight improvements in other areas - not enough to be disruptive, just enough to be useful so that people will have reason to listen to your crazy ideas - and you can get your ideas out there. Once they're talked about by other learned people and recorded somewhere, you increase the odds of people following up on really basic ideas. And avoid wasting time on reasonable sounding but ultimately wrong interpretations. Although chaos being what it is, I have no clue what that alternate world would look like.

Then again, if you really wanted to give a giant middle finger to our history you could just send back a squad of people with tools and training to help jump start a colonial level of technology, and send them back far enough that they could use their technological and other advantages to subjugate any local small tribes and build an empire from there. I think that an active and hostile colonization of the past is a rather different discussion than sending ideas back and seeing how well the locals can embrace and learn from them.

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.

The locals wouldn't necessarily know about the limits of firearms, so there'd be a good chance of people overestimating your abilities and remaining cowed that way.

However I'm hard pressed to see that causing a major technological change, simply because it's hard to simultaneously be a tyrant and push the envelope of science at the same time. Plus the part where guns are not video game objects that can be kept a hammerspace-stasis inventory forever. You'll have to leave it somewhere that it isn't handy from time to time (not to mention that everybody is vulnerable while they sleep), and there are no guarantees that you'll have all the stuff you need for ongoing maintenance as the years go by in the past.

[Radar]

Fair enough. Wasn't sure. Um. Which means they were lugging around a lot of extra weight in the tanks of water to maintain pressure as well. And infrastructure to replace lost water (which I now recall was a major thing as well, with water tanks along the route, which I apparently completely forgot about, doh!).

I could see something like that being potentially useful in a static setting (operating steam powered equipment in a workspace, for example), but still really far away from something like a locomotive. Either way though, it still ulitimately comes down to how much work you get out versus how much work (in equivalent manual labor) you put in. I suspect that watermills (and windmills?) were found to be more useful for that purpose, and we see lots of them historically, while steam took a lot longer to develop.

It's actually interesting to consider industrialization as a concept. There's a lot of bootstrapping involved.

Industrial machines are labor multipliers in the same way as tools or for example oxen. In medieval times there were a lot of important machines developed and introduced with windmills and waterwheels being prominent as power sources, but being able to use that power for something also required some new ideas. Man-powered machines have also improved at that time.

[Batcathat]

The locals wouldn't necessarily know about the limits of firearms, so there'd be a good chance of people overestimating your abilities and remaining cowed that way.

Sure, I don't doubt that they could be kept at bay in the short term, but I don't think it would keep them from overwhelming/ambushing the time traveler eventually (if nothing else, they will probably notice that even the guy with the doomsday weapon needs to sleep on occasion). Especially since their reaction is likely to be 60 percent terror but 40 percent "Wow, I really want that weapon for myself".

[gomipile]

Sure, I don't doubt that they could be kept at bay in the short term, but I don't think it would keep them from overwhelming/ambushing the time traveler eventually (if nothing else, they will probably notice that even the guy with the doomsday weapon needs to sleep on occasion). Especially since their reaction is likely to be 60 percent terror but 40 percent "Wow, I really want that weapon for myself".

There's an anime this season which looks like it'll deal with a very similar problem. "Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement"

The main character gains the ability to teleport back and forth between our world and a generic medieval otherworld. So far it isn't clear if the other world has magic yet. The only supernatural phenomena shown so far are her dimension hopping, healing factor, and babel fish language ability she acquired at the same time, and some abilities of the godlike being that caused her to get those abilities.

Anyway, the second episode has her buying guns and training from a private paramilitary contractor of dubious morals but reasonable competence for fiction.

So, the issues you and others raised seem to stand a chance of coming up in this story.

[Anymage]

Sure, I don't doubt that they could be kept at bay in the short term, but I don't think it would keep them from overwhelming/ambushing the time traveler eventually (if nothing else, they will probably notice that even the guy with the doomsday weapon needs to sleep on occasion). Especially since their reaction is likely to be 60 percent terror but 40 percent "Wow, I really want that weapon for myself".

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.

[Radar]

There's an anime this season which looks like it'll deal with a very similar problem. "Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement"

The main character gains the ability to teleport back and forth between our world and a generic medieval otherworld. So far it isn't clear if the other world has magic yet. The only supernatural phenomena shown so far are her dimension hopping, healing factor, and babel fish language ability she acquired at the same time, and some abilities of the godlike being that caused her to get those abilities.

Anyway, the second episode has her buying guns and training from a private paramilitary contractor of dubious morals but reasonable competence for fiction.

So, the issues you and others raised seem to stand a chance of coming up in this story.

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.

[Bohandas]

Saltpeter production would have to be instituted under the cover of it being a fertilizer and a preservative.

(On a related note, does anyone here know how saltpeter potassium nitrate was made prior to the haber process? Like really know? I've been able to find a few articles but they all read more like magic spells than a proper explanation of the processes; they're completely opaque and tell nothing of what's actually going on chemically, which makes it impossible to tell what aspects can be swapped out. In particular straw and horse manure may not be readily available in many places and times; I'm sure that there are many things that could be substituted in for them but to know exactly what I'd need to know what these things are actually doing)


EDIT:

Then again, if you really wanted to give a giant middle finger to our history you could just send back a squad of people with tools and training to help jump start a colonial level of technology, and send them back far enough that they could use their technological and other advantages to subjugate any local small tribes and build an empire from there. I think that an active and hostile colonization of the past is a rather different discussion than sending ideas back and seeing how well the locals can embrace and learn from them.

You know I was considering suggesting going full on Toclafane but I wasn't sure how it would go over, so I'm glad someone else brought it up first.

You might even take it further, to the level of House With A Clock In It's Walls or Restaurant At The End Of The Universe and preempt the natural evolution of humanity entirely.

Or equivalently you could just go back to a time and place thay whatever humans already exist haven't reached yet.


EDIT:

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.

In terms of teaching people how to actually think, what I keep coming back to is mathematics

[LibraryOgre]

Can you print on Papyrus? That would make things considerably easier.

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.