Time travel

[Angilion]

Not an invention, but I'd go back to the times of the early pioneers of chemistry, and tell them that lead, mercury, radiation etc are actually quite bad.
I think Curie and Lavoisier would be quite open minded and receptive to a guy in jeans and a beer t-shirt, showing them Wikipedia screenshots on a Galaxy S9. [..]

That last part is a good idea - who you appeared to would make a big difference. I think the Curies(*) and scientists in general would freak out but be willing to accept evidence. A handheld computer would do the trick as evidence that you weren't just insane and maybe your wild tales of being from the future were worth considering as a possible explanation of the evidence.

But I wouldn't do it. Partly because I think it wouldn't be fair to the scientists ("Hi, there's this future in which loads more stuff is known and yeah, sorry, I can't answer any of your questions because I'm not a scientist in your field, kthxbye") and partly because of the same reason I wouldn't change anything in the past - I wouldn't assume I was wise enough to know all of the effects of my interference.




* 4 members of the Curie family were Nobel Prize winning scientists.

 

[Megahurtz400]

You'd probably be killed by the dogmatists for going against the prevailing (dogmatic) views of the time.

As an example imagine that the green/politically correct/woke brigade of today have got everything totally wrong and through their "progressive" vision end up almost destroying humanity, so some guy comes back from the 25th century to tell them today that everything they're promoting is going to lead a miserable future for humanity, how do you think he will received?

1> Dismissed as a hateful individual.
2> Censored from social media.
3> Cancelled for hate speech.
4> Smeared as far right.
5> Ignored.

The scientific facts don't matter they won't listen to them.

I suppose the difference between someone coming back today and someone going back from today to 1500 would be that the person coming back to today would easily be able to prove he's from the future due to the wealth of knowledge available to anyone all around the world now.

Just predict the next 8 weeks of lottery numbers (only example in my head now) which can be easily verified and your half way there.

 

[Donnie Fisher]

I was going to say something along the lines of instilling an eco ethos into development of science etc to try and counter the industrial revolution and all the Co2 stuff ... but things like coal were discovered thousands of years ago rather than just 500.

 

[Angilion]

Toilet paper

How would you make toilet paper in 1600 on a large enough scale and at a low enough cost for it to be available to enough people to have any significant effect on the world? Would it have much effect in 1600 anyway, even if everyone used it?

 

[Smokey Deza]

I don't think you'd really need to return with blueprints and stuff. Your general knowledge alone would turn on all kinds of lightbulbs with the boffins of the day.

Although didn't they all speak a bit weird back then?

 

[Mason-]

11 years old and placing bets? Your local branch of Ladbrokes needs investigating.

You could wait until you were 18.

 

[bainbridge]

You'll kill many people by spreading modern diseases which the people of old won't have any resistance to.

 

[englishpremier]

Batteries and electricity should be some of the easiest to do, and you could demonstrate these.

Hygiene and sanitary conditions would be useful. Perhaps others wouldn't be interested but you yourself could follow them.

1632 covers a lot of these, where a small US town is thrust back in time and planted in the middle of Germany during the holy roman war. They have a significant technological advantage, but struggle for man power and getting modern materials like stainless steel. The first book is a good read.

It's wroth remembering that people back then would be just as intelligent if not more so than people of today, so you may even be able to work some scientists and help develop all the ideas you have.

 

[wolfie138]

i'd go back and tell them we now had 72 genders.

 

[FortuitousFluke]

You could wait until you were 18.

But what 11 year old has that kind of patience? Counter suggestion, pay some bigger boys to place the bets for you and enter into a gain share agreement. Added bonus, when you run out of bets to place you have the bare bones of either a teenage boy band or, if the teens you've recruited lack boyish good looks and angelic voices, a County lines drug gang. Longevity through diversification!

 

[Angilion]

I don't think you'd really need to return with blueprints and stuff. Your general knowledge alone would turn on all kinds of lightbulbs with the boffins of the day.

I think the gap is too big and the knowledge of most people too superficial. On the whole nowadays people know how to use things but not how those things work in anything more than a very vague simplification. A modern scientist and a 17th century natural philosopher might be able to bridge the gap, but not a random person with general knowledge from 2021.

Although didn't they all speak a bit weird back then?

All the foreigners did, obviously

English in 1600 is classed as early modern English. Communication between that and contempory English would be possible. You'd sometimes need a combo of speech and writing to overcome changes in spelling and pronunciation, but I think there would be a usable degree of mutual intelligibility.

Here's an example from the earlier end of the early modern English period (it was written in 1527 and was probably slightly old-fashioned language as it was written by the king), with a best estimate of correct pronunciation from someone who knows what they're talking about:

For an example towards the later end of early modern English, you could try this video for an example. It covers important parts of the changes in English starting from reconstructed proto-Germanic to contempory English and including some of the major languages that influenced the development of English (e.g. common Brittonic, classical and vulgar Latin, Norman). It uses a section from The Lord Of The Rings as an example text, the same text in each language and each version of English. The modern English text is at both the beginning and the end. The early modern English version starts at ~9:15 in the video.

c1600 would probably be a bit closer to the latter than the former. Not too far off contempory English.

From those videos you might think the creator has a very strong West Country accent. That's not the case. It's more that what we now think of as a West Country accent is (as far as we can tell) how most people spoke English in those days.

If you went a bit further back you'd be in trouble language-wise, but I think c1600 would be workable.

 

[adolf hamster]

the logical starter would be steam power, getting the ball rolling on that earlier would be a good start and require materials and craftsmanship that should be reasonably accessible at the time.

given they had cannons back then you should be able to get steam power explained without being burned as a witch, although securing funding might be tricky given you'd need to either convince a lord to sponsor you (without them locking you up as a madman) or work to earn the money yourself which would mean having some set of skills applicable at the time (which is going to be unlikely for a lot of people)

 

[The Running Man]

the logical starter would be steam power, getting the ball rolling on that earlier would be a good start and require materials and craftsmanship that should be reasonably accessible at the time.

given they had cannons back then you should be able to get steam power explained without being burned as a witch, although securing funding might be tricky given you'd need to either convince a lord to sponsor you (without them locking you up as a madman) or work to earn the money yourself which would mean having some set of skills applicable at the time (which is going to be unlikely for a lot of people)

Wouldn't that lead to faster deforestation and reliance on fossil fuels?

Skipping to hydrogen power wouldn't probably be better.

 

[Rroff]

If you went a bit further back you'd be in trouble language-wise, but I think c1600 would be workable.

I'd have to look it up but IIRC there is quite a big change around 1400 to 1600 or so - a bit before 1600 and you'd need a good understanding of older German type languages and even then some words would be difficult to understand. From the Tudor period onwards it is largely possible to figure it out though.

EDIT: Oh I see you mentioned proto-Germanic, etc.

 

[Angilion]

the logical starter would be steam power, getting the ball rolling on that earlier would be a good start and require materials and craftsmanship that should be reasonably accessible at the time.

given they had cannons back then you should be able to get steam power explained without being burned as a witch, although securing funding might be tricky given you'd need to either convince a lord to sponsor you (without them locking you up as a madman) or work to earn the money yourself which would mean having some set of skills applicable at the time (which is going to be unlikely for a lot of people)

You wouldn't risk being burned as a witch. Especially if you did it in England, where nobody was ever burned for being a witch. Nor would you risk being locked up as a madman. Steam power wasn't unknown 500 years ago. It wasn't of any practical use, but it was known as a means of powering novelty devices and a few people were at least considering the possibility of making devices using steam power that could do useful work. So your first sentence is spot on in that respect - you'd be getting the ball rolling on it earlier. But not too much earlier. Not early enough to be so wildly out of place that it would be running the risk of being deemed to be madness or magic.

But would it change the world for the better? Or for the worse? Or not make any significant change?

 

[Rroff]

But would it change the world for the better? Or for the worse? Or not make any significant change?

Or maybe we've been doing it forever - the first time it took the human race 100s of thousands of years to reach an advanced technical level, then some travelled back in time to boost things along, repeat as advances go at an ever faster rate - maybe it is some kind of speed running challenge to see who can change the timeline so much that the calculator is invented 3 days after the timeline begins.

 

[Angilion]

I'd have to look it up but IIRC there is quite a big change around 1400 to 1600 or so - a bit before 1600 and you'd need a good understanding of older German type languages and even then some words would be difficult to understand. From the Tudor period onwards it is largely possible to figure it out though.

EDIT: Oh I see you mentioned proto-Germanic, etc.

I agree. That's why I said what you quoted me saying - "If you went a bit further back you'd be in trouble language-wise, but I think c1600 would be workable." The great vowel shift (not entirely over by 1600, but getting there) certainly wouldn't help, but the changes were deeper than that even before you'd get far enough back to get to the full monty Germanic stuff. If you went back as far as the time when English was unequivocally Germanic, you'd be right out of luck. With Old English you'd have some recognisable words but not many. Not enough. More in speech than in writing, but not enough. Not just vocabulary, either. Basic grammatical stuff was different. It's a different language, really.

Modern English is like a car welded together from bits of several different cars with some random bits of bodywork from some other cars stuck on it and then enthusiastically and apparently randomly hit with hammers for quite some time. It's not really any of the original cars any more. There's some aspects of them in it, but it's a new thing in itself. And it's strange.

 

[Angilion]

Or maybe we've been doing it forever - the first time it took the human race 100s of thousands of years to reach an advanced technical level, then some travelled back in time to boost things along, repeat as advances go at an ever faster rate - maybe it is some kind of speed running challenge to see who can change the timeline so much that the calculator is invented 3 days after the timeline begins.

That sounds...weirdly possible

In that spirit, I'd go back maybe 50,000 years and show people how to make pottery. They had the technology to do it - earthernware in a pit kiln was something they could have done if they knew how.

 

[adolf hamster]

Wouldn't that lead to faster deforestation and reliance on fossil fuels?

Skipping to hydrogen power wouldn't probably be better.

No different to the existing timeline of humanity, just rolled forward a couple of hundred years, it could be argued that locally developing it faster and skipping some dead-end areas of development would potentially see more modern developments occurring before the worldwide industrialisation takes off and thus facilitate modern technologies being discovered before climate change is so badly affected.

No way in hell are you building a fuel cell on 1500's tech though.....

 

[Rroff]

I agree. That's why I said what you quoted me saying - "If you went a bit further back you'd be in trouble language-wise, but I think c1600 would be workable." The great vowel shift (not entirely over by 1600, but getting there) certainly wouldn't help, but the changes were deeper than that even before you'd get far enough back to get to the full monty Germanic stuff. If you went back as far as the time when English was unequivocally Germanic, you'd be right out of luck. With Old English you'd have some recognisable words but not many. Not enough. More in speech than in writing, but not enough. Not just vocabulary, either. Basic grammatical stuff was different. It's a different language, really.

Modern English is like a car welded together from bits of several different cars with some random bits of bodywork from some other cars stuck on it and then enthusiastically and apparently randomly hit with hammers for quite some time. It's not really any of the original cars any more. There's some aspects of them in it, but it's a new thing in itself. And it's strange.

I was skim reading your post didn't realise you'd covered it quite as thoroughly at first.