There’s a book called How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler that covers this stuff. Don’t think it’s comprehensive enough to actually invent everything from scratch, but still a fun read.
By Ryan North, the author of Dinosaur Comics! He based the book on a time travel survival guide he published and made into a T-shirt.
Just finished it. Thank you!
Skip electricity. That doesn’t matter until you can make reliable turbines with copper and magnets. Go to steam power first. It can move things. Which will speed up delivery of copper and magnets. But also teach them to plant trees. Every tree removed to smelt and power a steam engine needs to have three more planted. You could start greening the Sahara before umit even starts collapsing. “he sure had this steam thing figured out. I guess we will forgive him for all these useless trees”.
A great master plan to prevent climate change, although the industrial revolution will start 2000 years earlier, so I’m not sure it matters
The sooner it starts the sooner I can get back. :)
I read they knew about steam power for a long time but couldn’t make the engines / containers / doohickies strong enough to contain the pressure.
That’s true, it was cannon technology that allowed steam engines to be created
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Yes, electricity would be magic for medieval (and prior) people. Spells trouble for you.
But no, Steam… the principle was known and seldom used by ancient greeces and egypts already, but they couldn’t really utilize it, because metallurgy wasn’t there yet.
And Sahara was almost green 1000+ years ago, lots of oases.
What is the ‘Carnot cycle’? - I don’t know
Is there a guide for DIY steam engines?
Boil water in a closed system that uses steam to move a paddle on the inside that is on the same shaft as a wheel on the outside. That’s the basics. Everything else is just variations on the theme. The higher the pressure the faster it goes and more torque you get.
I guess I forgot to mention that once the steam moves the paddle the steam needs a place to cook down and go back into the boiler.
Nah, for a first step implementation in stationary applications, you can have a steam machine run an open circuit. Steam expands, performs work, exits through a valve. Just keep the water tank filled. Less efficient, but it would work. The return loop is an optimization for the next stage :)
For better efficiency the steam should be used twice, in a high pressure circuit first and on its way back to the boiler through a low pressure circuit.
I like my steam very well cooked. I let It cook down for a couple of hours.
You don’t find that it starts to taste like cardboard?
Pop Pop boats are really simple steam engine systems.
Go to steam power first. It can move things
They had steam power over 2000 years ago, they used it in temples and as toys to amuse the rich.
Slaves could move things, and were much cheaper.
They might have had it, but they didn’t use it right
They had no incentive to use it any better.
Without a printing press, which would increase the levels of literacy, and allow sharing knowledge orders of magnitude faster, there was no indication that a kettle could ever outperform a hundred men or a few dozen horses.
It’s a loop - they didn’t use it right, so it sucked, which is why they didn’t try to make it better = they didn’t use it right.
With the right knowledge, they might’ve just made proper use of it
Yeah. But, could a single person break that loop? It seems to me like it would still require centuries.
I’d say it depends on the person. I’m sure there are some that would majorly change the course of history and then some that would get killed within an hour
The problem with this is that you assume that wood is the best fuel source for steam. Very quickly you would realize that coal is far more energy dense than just about anything except nuclear fission. Planting trees is still a good idea though, but wood as fuel is utter shite on any large application.
When starting out you don’t need the most efficient. You need what’s available. And I’d rather not reinvent coal mining and whaling.
Electricity is easy to make though… a couple magnets and some copper wire.
Easy materials to get from your local 1st century hardware store
they’d probably have non-shitty copper by then, but magnets? thems witchcraft
And don’t forget that you need to demonstrate that it’s producing a current. Just get a light bulb, right??
probably go with a hand-crank zapper or something. it’s tricky to do much without resistors and capacitors.
Zap the royalty to prove your point and get flayed and executed for it
If you can make a generator you can make a motor, just connect them together and have one move when you spin the other
The could do the same with a belt, go away with your flash nonsense youngling
Plating a metal object with a different metal would probably be the simplest, impressive thing. Or just heating a thin wire?
Depends on if Ea-nasir was still in business.
Most people dont even know how to make wires.
really? isnt it just forcing/extruding hot metal through a die?
How would you buy copper with no money? It’s not like you can exchange your modern money to their currency. So first you need to find a job and any good paying job is probably protected by guilds and you don’t even speak their language so good luck finding a mentor who will offer an apprenticeship. You will be a peasant. Nothing more than a subsistence farmer who has to rent the land and give half his yield to the local lord. Hunting? Killing anything bigger than a fowl will get you in trouble since big game is property of the lord.
Also copper ore doesn’t lie freely on the ground. You need to mine for that shit and be lucky that there is a source in the vicinity, since you can’t travel very far. Can’t buy a horse with no money.
And if you found a source you need to convince an entire community to help you mine for copper. You sure as hell can’t do it alone. Good luck convincing them when everyone is busy tending their crops to prepare for the winter. And you don’t even speak their language.
I imagine that the best way to make money would be if you manage to build a rm rudimentary still.
I feel like moonshine would be relatively easy to do and a great way to make profit of no one kills you before.
Distilled alcohol is quite rudimentary to produce but only appeared late in history. Plus it is great for leisure application, food conservation or medicine.
How do you get the materials for a still with no money?
There’s always the world’s oldest profession…
Good luck convincing them when everyone is busy tending their crops to prepare for the winter.
Just sprinkle some bird poop or bat guano or whatever other nitrogen and phosphorus-rich gunk onto it
when they aren’t looking.i guess that if we’re going to go the fantasy route, then I’d just steal everything I needed - the strong do as they please and the weak submit, after all. violence is the only language I’d need to speak
How do you make the die?
1st century? probably with diamonds.
Big-ass piece of cast iron with a little hole in it.
If you can convince them you know the end product I’m sure the king can point you to his metal workers and in a lot of cases come up with a solution.
Also, it’s labor intensive but I think you can beat it into wire or use some other methods.
If the king says to the blacksmith “make that copper long ans skinny” he can probably make it happen.
What tools do you use to precisely work cast iron into a small hole to create your die?
Don’t forget it’ll need to be covered with an insulator, else your coils would short circuit and not producing any current. So you’ll need some chemistry to produce insulator thin enough to create your generator.
It is, but the ancient method is tedious as fuck. It was basically just pulling a piece through dozen of gradually smaller holes, by hand. I dont think you could do one pass extrusion without all of the precision machinery needed to manufacture such machine. But I aint a blacksmith, I just saw the process in some documentary a while ago.
No :)
Probably easier to use a lemon and copper plates. Not sure what you’d connect to it though
Use it for electroplating/etching, that’s cool as shit
lodestones lol, people have known about those for aaaaaaaaaages
Copper wire: yes. Magnets, get lodestones
You can literally mine lodestone and copper. Ancient people have mined those two things since antiquity. Where do you think it comes from now? Fairies?
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Bring a live translation device, and program it with whatever the expected language is. That alone would be magic to them. And you don;t need to go to a copper mine, there were markets for processed copper. Pulling it into wire is just a case of roughly forming it into a cylinder, then pulling that cylinder through successively smaller holes. A local smith could help you with that.
And then hope they don’t kill you for being a witch.
You literally could just go dig some yourself while they’re away and procure it that way.
What do you think copper ore looks like? What tools would you use?
Ancient mining was a punishment, generally a death sentence. It’s hard work often overseen by a slave master.
Copper ore isn’t concentrated copper either a lot of ore goes into a little copper. There’s a reason only the really wealthy had copper items.
It’s amazing what some people here think would be such a simple task in the ancient world.
Well, in this scenario we’d presumably have our electronic devices with us anyway, so it’s honestly a moot point.
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You can induce voltage on more than just copper you know. Or maybe you don’t know. You probably don’t know.
Ever wonder why it goes bronze age and then iron age? It’s because it’s a minor miracle humanity discovered how to smelt iron. Iron requires temperatures higher than you can achieve with just wood. Iron absorbs carbon and sulfur making it worthless (in the wrong mixtures).
The process is complex and resource intensive.
Assuming a bronze age civilization, copper or tin is the best you can hope for. Finding a magnet is going to be difficult because there’s not really ferromagnetic materials available. In the modern era the most common material is iron.
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Magnets, how do they work?
I read a sci-fi short story about that once. A scientist brings back a guy from the future, but the guy either can’t explain how things work or does so using a vocabulary the scientist doesn’t understand.
It was like:
“How do you make a teleporter?”
“Well you take a zargnix and put it on top of a floon.”
Actually the floon goes inside the zargnix. Duh.
Aren’t you thinking of the floov compensation harpon? People typically get them confused.
Nah, it’s floon, the “n” stands for non-“v” which is definitely what you want if you wanna know where you’re teleporting too…
Oh sure, if you have one of those carglaian models. But only a total marspopple would have one of those.
You can hack it by bypassing the torrax with a blaqu’ue injection, then you can easily teleport, even with the carglaian model by putting a zargnix on a floon
Oh, yeah, with the torrax you could do that, but if you just upgrade your porz ejector, you can make the whole system cleaner than a Triceptian Fo.
where did read it? do you have a link?
Years and years ago in some anthology or other. Sci-fi short stories are my favorite literary medium, so I’ve read far more than I could count. I wish I could tell you the name or the author.
Pretty much everyone in this thread needs to go read Ryan North’s book “How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler”.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Invent-Everything-Survival-Stranded/dp/0735220158/
Or, if you don’t have time, just print this out and keep it with you at all times:
I don’t know if this helps. It’s enough to know you’re fucked.
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I find this to be brilliant.
“Wrap some copper wire around a core”
Mr. Stegosaurus, please point out the nearest refinery so I can grab some copper wire.
I’ve been meaning to buy this! Does he have a section on how to handle no one speaking your language?
My biggest issue with this is the flight part - it’s a counterintuitive explanation that doesn’t really explain how to make the flight work. It’s not technically wrong, and if you trace that cross-section you will get a working aerofoil. However, you can’t make the Wright Flyer on that explanation, or in fact any of the early aeroplanes that were constructed with simple fabric stretched between wooden frames.
A far more useful and intuitive explanation is that planes fly by flow-turning, basically the interaction between the aerofoil and the air turns the air in one direction, which pushes the aerofoil in the other. This also means the air below will end up slower than the air on top, which will create a pressure differential. Either of these methods can completely describe how flight works.
Also, a plane isn’t just two aerofoils attached to a central body. Early planes were at least biplanes, and you need horizontal and vertical stabilisers to have full control. You need flaps that give you pitch, yaw and roll, and you need the centre-of-mass - the point where it balances - to be in front of the centre of pressure. That means you need the stabilisers to be at the back to keep the plane stable like a dart.
This isn’t just a “well akshually”, although it sort of is. If you tried to follow the advice as-written and didn’t know this, there’s a good chance you’d end up on the long list of people killed by their own inventions. Actually, I suspect most of these explanations give you just enough information to kill yourself but not really enough to actually make any of them work from first principles.
Me: The opposite of B, the opposite of B, plus or minus a square root…
Them: What does that mean?
Me: I have no idea.
X equals negative b, plus or minus the square root, of b squared minus 4 a c, all over 2 a
Thanks a lot. Now that song is stuck in my head.
I feel like you could still give science a head start by giving them rough ideas of how things work, like penicillin and steam power and whatnot
Even if you don’t know all the ins and puts you can give them something to go off of to develop the technology faster
If you couldn’t prove it, things probably wouldn’t go well for you.
Even if you could prove it, it would still go badly in a lot of places in a lot of times.
What do you mean by that? You sound a lot like a witch
Always as been
Ayyyyy gotta love some quick typing typos lol
This reminds me of Dara O’Briain’s bit about going back in time and thinking you’ll impress the greatest minds in history with your future knowledge but it falls apart quickly.
Go back in time with a 4th grade science book from 1997 and be a fucking wizard.
This was the (side) plot of Army of Darkness
He basically was a wizard in Army of Darkness. He made a robot hand in a blacksmith’s shop.
You could probably make explosives from manure. Use that to conquer a small community and make yourself the leader. And start a rebellion against the local lord and become the king. Then you have the resources and slaves to find copper and magnets and shit. Problem is the massive language barrier. Their language is just gibberish to us and vice versa.
Then you have the resources and slaves to find… magnets and shit.
They already had magic in the old days though. They used to have to fight dragons and witches and shit back then.
You’d kill them off before they’d get a chance, though
And all the germs we carry to which we’re already immune.
They’d actually kill off any would be time traveling conqueror pretty quickly with smallpox.
Definitely take your smallpox vaccine before time traveling. They still make them, so it shouldn’t be too much hassle.
Aren’t those only available in developing countries and via the military?
You can get it in Canada. You need to give a good reason to get it, but I’m sure time travel would qualify. If not, just say you’re a laboratory worker researching Smallpox, and they’ll give you the vaccine.
Man I gotta move to Canada. The US government gives me jack squat for time travel.
The IRS sends you a letter reminding you that time travel counts as being abroad and any earnings you make are still taxable.
🤔 Not a bad plan.
I don’t know if they would be willing to give you the smallpox vaccine in order to go back in time and totally change history so none of the people involve in giving you the vaccine would ever have been born.
Couldn’t chickenpox vaccine suffice?
I don’t want to type out that thing you said, because I don’t want to end up on a list, but idk how to do that.
The Anarchist Cookbook can show you the way.
Ibic Manda.
(This is The Way)
I said I don’t want to end up on a list.
Man Makes Dynamite Out of His Own Pee (It’s Cody)
If you paid attention in high school you could bring mathematics up to about the 17th century, if you really paid attention you could even grab some stuff from the 20th (wtf vectors why did you take so long to figure out?) and the 19th.
Plus there is just so much basic stuff you know. Used boiled and sealed water to clean a wound. Bleeding a person only makes them feel good for a bit and does nothing else. Steel in cement makes cement better. Or in the case of this picture zinc and copper and lemon.
anything about sanitary practices faces a massive barrier of getting people to accept and implement it. I could tell ancient doctors to wash their hands, but the first time someone tried that in actual history they laughed in his face.
Monarchs cares about power. Give the ruler some more metallurgy or siege engines first, so you have their favour. Then split the Royal Court’s physicians into two groups, one that washes their hands, and one that doesn’t. Do the same for leeches, bloodletting, hydration, etc. It’ll be hard to argue with the resulting death rates. And in the long run, you’ll have a much bigger impact by introducing empricism/A-B testing/evidence-based medicine than any one thing specific thing you could have done.
But on the other hand, there’s a decent chance of you worked hard enough, they could probably get there at least a century or two after your death.
That’s assuming you don’t either kill them all off with your 21st century germs and/or be killed because the church doesn’t like you.
Yes, most of my plans for myself run on the unspoken assumption that I am not dead.
I scoff at your suggestion! We must compulsively dissect those unspoken assumptions. This is the internet, you see, where the most brilliant of minds gather to squabble about peripheral details so that no fun can ever be had. Yuck having fun!
Or drown because the Pythagoreans hate your guts
People were so moronic back then, even more than today, saying any one of those things would have you burned like a witch 😂
Non-historian detected
Steel, like the strong metal for weapons? You want how much of it, and throw it where? And what’s a “lemon”?
They had citrus fruits. It wasn’t a mind bending concept.
Depends on where and when you’d go.
They had “citrons” since 4000 BC or more, which came in many different shapes, some with no pulp and no acidity, which wouldn’t work for making electricity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citron
Lemons were introduced in Europe around 200 AD, and were pretty rare and expensive.
If you went to biblical times and asked for a lemon, they’d likely not know what you meant, then maybe gave you a citron, which could be of the low acidity kind, then beat you up for being a liar.
Steel reenforcement of old European concrete would have been disastrous. They used limestone in the aggregate and cement and it would have eaten the steel in a decade or two.
Ok fine but the smallpox would have killed me before that happens
You know, a fun project would be compiling an instruction book for elevating/fast forwarding technology just in case someone does get sent back in time.
We could send them to the end of the galaxy to compile an encyclopedia of all human knowledge but they’d secretly be there to start the next iteration of civilization through the foolproof strategy of not doing much and just letting the pre-calculated history take its course.
Or we could just fly around in space on a religious drug trip until we find a planet with some worms that make some freaken killer drugs.
That sounds like it would cause a major succession crisis and a galaxy-wide jihad.
We will need one against those sentient mitosis using beings from another dimension. The Kinnison bloodline won’t be enough!
Hail Seldon
You just gave Hari an idea…
I want this for when climate collapse destroys modern civilization and the survivors are left to rebuild society without the benefit of global supply chains or information infrastructure.
Download wikipedia. Its not only possible, but its actually easy. There are some apps for it, see Kiwix and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download. Just bring a couple phones and some solar panels for when they run out of charge.
I’ve put a bit of thought into this and I feel that even if you could bring every blueprint for every technology ever made onto a computer with 10 backups, you would still need to be extremely lucky on whether you get people skilled enough to recreate those technologies.
You’d need the social skills to demonstrate technological improvements (say, a better axe) without causing everyone to freak out and call you a demon. You’d also have to keep your phones and charging devices secret until after you’ve recruited a few technophiles because otherwise someone is going to break them accidentally when they confiscate them for one reason or another.
Basically you need to recruit a few smart people who can be trusted and get them on your side. You might even want to funnel all your “inventions” through them to keep the heat off you, and this is assuming you end up in a culture that would even value technological advancement.
this is assuming you end up in a culture that would even value technological advancement.
People value their friends and family not dying, and the murdering raiders from neighbouring tribes being kept at bay. And people that don’t value that don’t tend to last very long.
You’d need the social skills to demonstrate technological improvements (say, a better axe) without causing everyone to freak out and call you a demon.
…Starting with an axe would be nice. The lumberfolk would appreciate it, surely. But then what happens when the old blacksmith blames your witchcraft for the crops failing next year, or for the village chief’s child falling ill? So maybe teach the blacksmiths too, so they also benefit from you— I’m sure they’ll love having some upstart come in and tell them how to do their jobs.
You’re an outsider, no matter what, and you’re never going to completely look like them or sound like them or act like them— Can we really think that any amount of social skills will be enough to keep you safe, when they might just be determined to hate you for what you are?
Maybe start with a combination of military and medical technology. Show them a crude crossbow; when they see the next raid of Goths or Aztecs or Mongols or Vikings or Peloponnesians or whomever being repelled before they even reach the gates, they’ll come to appreciate it sooner or later… Their enemies are against their gods, so if you helped defend them from their enemies, you must be sent by their gods. Disgustingly, hating the same out-group is a great way to keep yourself safe in any given in-group, whether at work or at war. Medicine’s probably trickier, because if you fail to save somebody then some people will probably blame you for their death. But if you make it clear that you can’t stop fate from running its course, and you start with some basic stuff, they’ll probably come to appreciate that their friends aren’t dying as much from infections anymore too.
Fear of death has always been sadly the strongest motivator for embracing technological change. Modern aviation, computing, and nuclear science all came after WWII; and “anti-vax” movements only thrive in countries that have already essentially eradicated the concerned diseases. It’ll be harder for them to crucify somebody whom they can see is standing between them and death.
There’s a couple of books that do this: How to Invent Everything, and How Rebuild Civilization.
Clock of the long now
I don’t know why they put just one zero in front of years. That just makes the clock slightly longer, and it’s still insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
02023 in years only is good until 99999, then you’d need to prepend another zero.
It’s a constant symbolic reminder, and still a 10X scope increase.
If you want to be pedantic about making “the clock slightly longer”, you might as well say “I don’t see why they don’t write their dates out in base 62. Then they could make the clock shorter by writing
wDinstead of2023”. The point is that everyone who sees “02023” can have a bit of an “oh shit” moment where they instantly understand what it means.
I’m impressed at the strength of the guy’s upper arm that he’s sitting on.
I’d actually be able to teach them how to make it if they have copper and magnets, since I know how to make a simple generator. They’d be SOL on how to use it though, because I don’t know how to make something entirely from raw materials that would require electricity. Which means they also wouldn’t know I am creating it with the generator… 🤔 Uh… Shit.
This is actually kinda wild to think about and I hadn’t considered it before. Making electricity is easy! Using it is actually more complicated.
You could give people a mild shock. “Here. Hold these while I crank this thingy.” Could be good for some lulz. Or get you burned as a witch.
Making an “ouch” device or basic heater is something I could do.
Even a battery I could make a simple alumium air battery cell. Or lemon battery. But I’d be viewed like a sorcerer asking for foreign ingredients like salt, aluminum, copper and zinc.
I swear the Americans remove another letter from the word aluminium every time I look away
Yanks are a sneaky bunch.
it’s all the uranum from the atomic bomb tests
Aluminum would be nearly impossible to obtain, it’s actually my preferred grab in a hypothetical “You’re going back in time and can take one thing” situation
Yep, it was worth more than gold before modern methods made it easy to isolate.
Depends on how far back and where you went. Whoever made the Baghdad Battery probably wouldn’t even be impressed.
Joe Rogan had a good line back before he became… whatever he is now. Anyways, the line is “if I dropped you off on a deserted island, how long before you could send me an email?”
Why is email the metric?
Well you’d need to invent mining, metallurgy, machining, manufacturing, radio waves, computing, computer programming, electricity, and a slew of other technologies that took thousands of years and millions of people to create.
Forget mathematics, logic and philosophy. Teach them about Jeebus and establish a solid patriarchy. After that make a shitload of McDonald’s and Facebook.
How dare you not Starbucks their Walmarts! Google is going to Microsoft you!
