Ask HN: Back in time to 100 BC, what knowledge would you impart to the people?
The exact year is not so important.<p>With everything we know now, what would you tell the people in 100 BCE that would improve society?<p>Reason I ask is because this question frustrates me as to how little I could actually benefit the world in 100BCE. Best thing i could think of is washing your hands. So I come to the bright minds at HN to redeem myself.
39 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 73.0 ms ] threadI'd tell them the same thing I tell people now. What you think you know, you don't know. There is more to learn than you can possibly imagine, and, most importantly, there's nothing like a good sandwich.
http://www.qwantz.com/fanart/timetravelling.jpg
All useful information, but you have a point about the receptivity of the world in 100BCE. If you start talking about germs spreading disease, people are going to assume you are talking about demons and are possessed.
I'd probably try to find some leading scientific minds of the day (Jing Fang, Marcus Pollio, or the people that created this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism) and work with them to 'discover' new ideas. They would probably be eager to learn, and could take your ideas and put them in the context of the age. Of course, you'd have to learn some ancient Greek and Chinese first. ;)
Widespread consumption of animal milk is like Things White People Like, 1850 AD Edition. (Really. Most milk sold at the time was buttermilk, a biproduct of the consumption of butter. The rest was considered agricultural waste and fed to hogs.)
If you take a quick glance around the world even today, consumption of liquid animal milk is still not the norm outside of the West. (Japan is changing but, even in the mid-twentieth century, "smells like butter" was one euphemism to refer to the Americans.)
Here's a protip: download wikipedia to your phone today. As soon as you realize that you've been trapped in the past, turn it off. Turning it on briefly will allow you to access stores of vital information before the battery runs out.
Unless this is Terminator rules, and you're naked . . .
Metallurgy was sufficient. Many of the works of artisans and craftsmen haven't been duplicated. A great majority of this knowledge was lost to time (c.f., the fire of Alexandria) because copying texts was an enormous amount of work.
Also, even if a great body of knowledge were imparted to people in that period, who's to say that it would be disseminated? The knowledge that went into the construction of the Antikythira mechanism--even the knowledge that such knowledge existed--was lost.
So I would push up the invention of the printing press by 1.5 millenia.
Even without imparting any additional knowledge, the sheer volume of written material that would have been passed down through the centuries would guarantee more rapid advancement of civilization, as well as preservation of history. We would have the works of Sappho, for example. And history would still progress naturally, without artificial interference.
Of course, to truly make it scalable you'll need metal type. If you're not lucky enough to remember how to make a hand mould or invent lost-wax casting, you'll want to make friends with the nearest goldsmith and see if you can adapt some of his methods.
Around this time, if you're lucky, you might remember enough of mechanics to invent the escapement and the sun and planet gear, to kickstart the clockmaking industry. Sailors will thank you, as will the merchants they supply. And if you live long enough, you might be able to combine these two inventions to form the world's first Linotype machine.
Gutenberg's breakthrough was his method for making metal type. That's why I gave tips for that transition. But even without it, you can use wooden type to start a society on the road to literacy.
Little known fact: most of the technological stagnation of the dark ages was time wasted in bubblesort.
Oh, and of course: e^ix = cos x + i sin x
E.g., a component of America's success in many wars (although I've read the disparity between her forces and the enemies were greatest during the Revolutionary War) was the fact that the gunsmiths made parts to spec. So I could buy my gun in NY and have it repaired with off the shelf parts down in Virginia.
For all the printing press folks, I think a big part of the success of the Gutenberg press was the fact that it was one design, could be build and distributed, and could be fixed from standard parts. Don't ever underestimate the influence of maintenance!
Once you've done that, you could start on the germ theory of disease. Those are both scientific breakthroughs that you probably understand well enough to explain.