If you woke up one day and discovered you'd time traveled backwards two thousand years...

If you woke up one day and discovered you'd time traveled backwards two thousand years, would you be able to use your knowledge of the future to invent anything useful?
>tfw I literally don't know how to build anything with material substance because I'm a software developer brainlet and in a world without electronic computers I would have zero utility for society

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tfw you couldn't even make an internal combustion engine for a caveman because he hasn't invented metal yet and you know f/a about smelting... or carburretors...fml

“The Vintner”

After getting horribly drunk on a radical new brew he made, a homebrewer ends up in the distant past (3,000 B.C.E.) and must time travel through various times to return to his own time.

Like Sliders and Quantum Leap mixed in a bottle, where the “hero” must get completely passed out drunk in order to advance to the next era in civilization. It will not work with the same brew twice. He must make a new brew that does not exist in that era for it to work. He becomes responsible for many of the more famous/staple brews in civilization. General exploits follow each episode in trying to create a new brew in that era with ingredients in whatever random location and time he ends up in. His drunken time traveling leaves him hung over and with a fuzzy memory between his time traveling trips. The story line focuses heavily on solving other people’s problems through alcohol and knowledge he attained when not hung over and asleep during college lectures.

He finally makes it back to his time, only to get drunk at a party after mixing up a new drink out of habit and ends up passed out, on a busy highway, while hover cars zoom just inches over him. That being the last scene of the last episode.

Regardless of what you were able to do, you would probably be put to death for being possessed because of speaking in tongues (as 'English' back then was completely different), and for creating things that could only be the work of the devil as far as they knew.

I would introduce them to the concept of the sandwich.

i have enough of a knowledge base to jump start the industrial revolution.

its like, 4-5 critical processes and a handful of fairly simple machines.

i could make a table and chair. sandwich bombs cannons. genital shaving

Europe wasn't Christian 2,000 years ago...

Tits or gtfo

Could you build a steam engine from scratch? Because that'd be pretty impressive.

Printing press. Literally changed the world and it's pretty easy to make without too much technical experience.

a steam engine is actually pretty trivial compared to the prerequisite infrastructure required needed to construct one.

a few modern agricultural techniques and a process for producing large quantities of quality steel would be more impactful.

I would invent Communism 1800 years early so it'd have more time to take root as the economic system of a one world government. That way we'd colonize the stars long before Marx would even be born.

Do engineers really know how to build anything or is all the information so dispersed that no one can really do anything?

Does anyone really know how to do anything? I heard most 'computer programmers' couldn't program a dog turd. Supposedly this guy went to this company once and was like hey how would you write this really easy program and apparently no one except for the old dude could even come up with a basic idea after thinking for like ten minutes.

Can physicists even physics?

Both yes and no.
While they may run into problems with their current knowledge being based around current technology, one that is intuitive and not just a robot (hard to find in a lot of engineers) could use the basic concepts of what they know to build amazing things for the time.

Well, I'd just say the basics:

>the earth is round
>all planets orbit the sun
>the sun is a star pretty much like all others in the sky
>evolution (Darwin)
>calculus and newtonian physics
>microscopic creatures / bacteria
>"there is land beyond the atlantic"

I think those things are "believable" at that point. If I start talking about atoms, electrons and neutrons people won't take it seriously I believe.

Uh, crop rotation?

...

Id tell the Romans to genocide every jew in Eurasia.

The problem is getting people to listen to you without cutting you down. If you were placed in a civilised area (Rome for example) found some clothes, fit in as a Roman citizen. Use your knowledge of record keeping to start writing down the prices of items in and around Rome. Begin your life as a merchant and build a reputation so that you can start convincingly high profile people of your inventions and ideas. Develop a labour force and start producing yout advanced tech whilst offering to the roman empire. Become the first mega corporation and take control of the roman empire. Prepare the Roman empire for the gun invasion by giving them fire arms.
profit by becoming a god.
Note that this assumes you know your roman history and latin well enough to do this without being killed.

I know as a fact I could recreate the basic motor and a battery, as well as take a crack at recreating nuclear fission (albeit that would be much more difficult in practice).
I'm an Automotive technician, and not even I know how to recreate something like the steam engine.

>curse myself for not learning Latin in high school
>learn Greek
>go to Judea
>meet up with 22 year old Jesus
>get sent back home
>continue to be a NEET

First I would find out how to build a transistor out of wooden cogs and floodgates. Then I would build a pipelined CPU, and memory using flip-flops, not bothering with efficiency because it would be the first implementation of the concept in that world anyway. I guess I'd just make the instruction set whatever I remember about MIPS.
The prototype OS would just be a simple text editor, and a C compiler, which I would use to write an actual OS that can load and unload processes, enabling me to run user-created programs without touching the hardware anymore.
At that point, I would write
void main() {
printf("hello world!\n");
}

and upon running this program, I would be revered as a god.

I'd write philosophy and math. Write down the standard model etc.

people wouldn't understand and they would probably kill you

I'd die immediately from now extinct pathogens

>dude they just killed people 4noraisin back then lmao
do you have any concept of how a civilized human being acts?

I think it's more likely they would die from your future pathogens.

Maybe maybe not. Depends on specifically where he ends up.

>lol past people were stupid because they would think modern technology is magic
>i'm really smart because i think God is magic
I'm not saying this is your reasoning, but it is the prevalent one among people who assume what other people would assume.

I think this only happened if you managed to really really really piss off the local people somehow. Envy is a powerful thing, user, for instance.

Hey didn't imply it would be 2,000, you equivocating retard.

You'd need to make a charismatic and feel-good philosophy to accompany that first, user. Maybe write a book about it in the most casual and positive way possible and it might fly.

No, we're all just cogs in a machine we learn, and thus assume, was built by us.

Yeah, some things are more direct, for example, the sun being the center of the solar system (this would correct the messy "equant" of mars).
Calculus is math, so no prob. Newtonian physics would be a little more complicated because it deals with the nature of things.

But overall I'll have to be charismatic/smart as fugg so I can convince people and the authorities don't screw me.

>2000years ago
>living in rome
>they already invented lots of cool stuff

the first thing would be building a bycycle with wood and steel. normal soldiers are now faster without giving them horses. pimping their weapons would be next. maybe gunpowder if i could corectly remember how to make it. other medival weapons too. because all of your ideas you become a general in caesars army. you go out and conquer the world.
that would be awesome

>2000 years
>cavemen

2000 ago.
Absolutely jack shit happening on my continent. I die alone.

Aussie?

>Find Jesus
>Teach him math
Boom, science and religion become one

>doesn't tell you how to build a microscope
its fucking worthless

But user, starvation already existed 2000 years ago

I'd watch it.

I spent a while doing survivalism/survival skills plus basic trades like brewing, woodworking, ceramics etc... so very yes.

saltpeter and sulfer

basic sanitation

basic mettalurgy

ezpz

fuck a lot of bitches in Rome

Quid novi? Pedicabo vultis?

That's easy

Stirrups

cute. any particularly useful resources?

with all this north korea, putin and trump going on, seems a good time to invest in survivalism

Make and sell logarithm tables to merchants.

/thread

youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA

Of course you know something. You can teach people the scientific method

Write the origin of the species 2000 years earlier. Start my own state-sponsored eugenics program, without hitler to screw things up in the future. Super-humans in a few centuries.

Hitler is more like an idea or a social niche than a person. As soon as you make organized state eugenics a thing some other lad from that time will emerge to fill the Hitler role.

I don't know. Seems a bit extreme. Maybe make it a voluntary program, no need to go around exterminating people. If you want extreme results, maybe sterilize populations you don't want growing after they go to a hospital or whatever is there at the time to get the baby out. If hitler does or doesn't show up will depend a lot on the institutions at the time and the justice system. I don't think there is a necessary causative logic behind the idea of eugenics, maybe someone will have extreme ideas, but they won't necessarily be in a position to exert power with them.

I spend about ten years developing photography. I then move to a certain middle eastern country, learn the local language, and take some selfies with Jesus.

>>krazy glue is C5H5NO2
>>progesterone is C20H26O2
oh boy now I have to spend a lifetime just figuring out the structure of krazy glue and progesterone all from atom counts

Well nobody in the present day ever takes my ideas seriously even if I've backed it up with maths and I've had a couple where some big company ended up doing it for real. I find that people are really resistant to new ideas, litereally everything taken for granted today was trashed by critics when it was first invented.

A good example is automatic fire, go back in time, think you're offering an innovation that will be immediately snapped up, nope generals will bitch that it wastes bullets and makes soldiers lazy.

Why would they trust your tables?
Good luck manufacturing the chain, sprockets and ball bearings for cheap, good luck convincing the general to spend time teaching 50k troops how to use the thing, good luck using it on basic Roman roads
Good luck finding powerful enough magnets, good luck synthetsizing the chemicals for a decent battery
Metallurgy wouldn't be good enough, it would blow up

ITT: autists who think they could be lone autist supergeniuses with their college knowledge. You idiots fail to understand that a lot of technologies require prerequisite technology to already be in place. And no-one would listen to you anyway because they were doing fine without it.

I would want to start in a remote village with a tribal structure. I would just come up with really basic helpful shit first to gain their trust. Irrigation, hygiene, brick furnaces etc. Then I'd start getting into mathematics and engineering if the chief doesn't kill me. If I'm accepted we'd become advanced artisans and trade our shit to other villages spreading knowledge and shit.

I hope in this scenario I can choose where to appear though, cause we don't have much historical record of anything going on in the western US 2000 years ago. Best case scenario the local American tribes would think I'm a god or something since I'm white and then I make it down to one of the organized civilizations in central America.

anyway, I'm also a programmer, so there'd be limits, but at least I could get the industrial revolution rolling sooner.
I'm fairly sure I could recreate at least a simple prototype of steam engines, printing presses, and basic firearms.

I think you guys are overestimating the "killed for blasphemy" thing though. Back then, just like now, controlling knowledge was a key factor to maintaining power, the churches will only pull that card if they consider you a threat to their power.
People really weren't much dumber back then than we are now, they just lived in a world without free exchange of knowledge, whoever was in power had almost total control over ideas and thought.
In pretty much any civilization in history, as long as you invent weapons, you've got a nice comfy life in the king's court and no one will touch you.
...although I would probably save the questionable stuff like the solar system for later in my life, just in case

Hmm let's see... steel making, black powder, penicillin, steam engines, sailboat design, basic chemistry, electricity... yeah, I think I know enough to get myself burned at the stake.

hello uber? yes, i'd like to rent an ox cart to go to greenland so i can get some cryolite so i can make some aluminum siding for my cave.

>do you have any concept of how a civilized human being acts?

how could he, he's got no examples around him

>Maybe write a book about it
back then, the way you wrote a book was you wrote a book. a book. as in 1 copy at a time. later on, they got really efficient, and had these things called scriveners. where they got a whole room of people listening to one dude saying the book and everyone else writing it down.

>make it down to one of the organized civilizations in central America
make it your life's goal to make contact with civilized people who perform human sacrifices. your very short life.

It's stupid to think you could recreate the information age within a generation from scratch, anyway. The best you can do is introduce the core concepts - the principles of transistors and logic gates, for example - and let them be locked away in some cloistered library for the exclusive benefit of some educated elite. And even then, the social structures of ancient monarchies may prevent these ideas from gaining traction. Lack of literacy, lack of technological infrastructure, lack of manpower and urbanization etc. mean that it'd be hard to jumpstart an industrial revolution. The conditions for it weren't just technological, but social as well.

The useful and easily applicable bits of knowledge would probably concern agriculture (anything from genetics to fertilizer chemistry), materials science (steel, concrete, fabrication techniques) and warfare (tactics, explosives, guns).

If you are into materials (especially metallurgy) and chemistry, yes

The bigger problem would be to convince somebody you're not a magician/devil dealer

Underrated.jpg

>germs spread disease
Where did you hear such a strange fairy tale, user? Who would believe in some microscopic living things you can't even see? This is complete nonsense.

Introducing the scientific methodology would be a good start. Without that, any invention is doomed, either nobody will understand its usefulness or you will be burned at the stake. (it will happen anyway)

Post-apocalyptic survival is about socializing though, not about the ability to make a ceramic pot

Don't you remember how that episode from Star Trek ended? The one where Data gets amnesia in a midi-evil village and has to save everyone from radiation poisoning, without even knowing what radiation is? He saved the town, but they literally tore him limb from limb and buried his body parts.

>>It's stupid to think you could recreate the information age within a generation from scratch, anyway.

If you have all the knowledge to start with, you could do it.

It doesn't take much in the way of materials to start up organic chemistry. One can make early dyes from coal tar. These would be worth their weight in gold. Scaling up the process would be relatively easy. This would allow one to become very rich.

a water powered, coke fueled blast furnace would allow you to pump out a shit ton of iron. Add some bessemer conversion and you can now mass produce steel.

Add a steam engine and now you aren't limited by water power. Get to the point where you can make a locomotive and you can transport more resources.

Somewhere along the line, you make a lathe, which lets you bootstrap your way to precision machine tools.

you can make a self exciting alternator for electrical power. At this point you can pretty much make anything.

TNG - Season 7 Episode 16, Thine Own Self

>not being a geologist
>not tricking chinese emperors into drinking the strange liquid metal that comes from cinnabar for their health

t. Time traveler

idiot, capitalism provides the necessary material base for communism

nah man, you'd be in Roman times. The Romans were cool. 2000 years ago the library of Alexandria was still a thing. They had academics back then. They invented an early steam engine and used it for fun.

Shit, just look at all the things Hero of Alexandria did:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_of_Alexandria

2000 years ago is probably the best time you could be sent back too.

>Who would believe in some microscopic living things you can't even see?
It would maybe be difficult to believe if you didn't invent a microscope first.

>The bigger problem would be to convince somebody you're not a magician/devil dealer
I don't understand why you wouldn't want to identify as a magician.

>implying they weren't always one and the same

Sounds neat.

>I think those things are "believable" at that point. If I start talking about atoms, electrons and neutrons people won't take it seriously I believe.
Only if you're a poor teacher and don't actually understand your own beliefs. Repeated subdivision is simple to show, and a given end result is at least logically possible.

base 12 numerical system and arithmetic

where would you have to go to not be burned as a witch?

Even if I couldn't invent anything useful, I would write a lot of books about "how things are going to be in the future and why". Just lots and lots of information using a shallow reasoning, barely able to make it look like I had some incredible logic power to predict stuff, and then be praised in the future as someone smart as fuck

your books will disappear/ be destroyed / burned in 100 years and you will be forgotten.

Why?

Not him, but I agree that's obviously what would happen since there are probably many more writings from thousands of years ago that didn't survive vs. those that did, and I doubt the deciding factor for which was which was how accurate the writings were. It's probably somewhat random whether your ideas get preserved or not in a pre- printing press era, and there are many more ways your ideas could fail to get preserved than ways where your ideas do get preserved since it's easier to lose track of something than to keep track of something.

I would be the richest blacksmith of the time and known as a wizard for bringing electric light in the night for all of Rome.

>by Jupiter's command, you shall feel the power!

err, I think that you think that the guy you're replying to was replying to somebody else

Depends. If I can bring back reference materials, I could do lots of things. Biggest is heat treating steel as that was pretty much figured out by trial and error over centuries. Making good steel means better weapons.

Really, the biggest bang is going to be in mass production of different materials. Steel would be priority. Making smelting furnaces and improving mining techniques would be priorities. Reciprocating pumps for water pumping are pretty simple to make in concept and can be controlled to some precision with basic materials. You can now mine coal on a vast scale and improve furnaces and coking.

Other than that, I could do basic refining/oil extraction. I could do basic lighting, but I don't know if you could live long enough to complete before getting steel smelting right. Hygiene would be simple for most people to teach and would improve. If you could make chlorine, then you know have vastly improved living standards.