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”.
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.
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.
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?
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 :)
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
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.
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:
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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?
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.
“Science” ≠ Technology!
If you give them the technology without giving them stuff like empiricism and cultural acceptance of critical thinking, they’ll just worship it like any other faith, and stagnate for the next thousand years.
Inversely, you don’t even need to give them too much technology, because if you just give them stuff like evidence-based medicine, the printing press, rigorous experimentation and reproducibility, and a couple institutes dedicated to the craft, plus a couple starting points, then they’ll figure it on their own soon enough (assuming an overall stable civilization).
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.
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.
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.
Go back in time with a 4th grade science book from 1997 and be a fucking wizard.
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!
We learn how to generate electricity in Secondary School, it’s pretty simple and fundamental to understanding electromagnetism, and it underpins our whole civilisation’s existence. Surely you’d remember that?
Yeh just gimme a cat fur and a plastic rod. I’ll demonstrate electrostatic on a balloon.
Or just almost touch a TV and your hairs will go there.
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!
You just gave Hari an idea…
Hail Seldon
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.
There’s a couple of books that do this: How to Invent Everything, and How Rebuild Civilization.
Clock of the long now
You’d still probably manage to get by offering services as an accountant. Illiteracy was the norm the world over for most of history, good math understanding was even rarer.
Yeah, but no one gave a shit unless you read Latin. Nobody cared if you could read and write in those weird grunts the Angles and Saxons made.
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One of the newest Brandon Sanderson books “The Frugal Wizard’s Guide to Surviving Medieval England” has a similar premise. It’s a novel so not a how-to guide so to speak, but parts of it are an in-world manual on how to survive in a medieval alternate dimension.
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Not my idea, but sometimes it’s just enough to listen to “crazy” people. They might not know what to do with wire seemingly spinning itself, but you will have much better idea what can be created with it. RIP Terry Pratchett
trebuchets now exist in 3500 BC
gun powder enters the chat
Fossil Fuels is typing…
