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Arglebargle III posted:
Pasteurized milk can handle a few days of unrefrigerated travel as long as it's not unduly hot out, and there were plenty of farms within proper distance to the cities that could handle supply - it'd probably end up being something the average masses couldn't afford though.
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Jun 29, 2014 05:55
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RPZip posted:A high school textbook on pretty much any subject would be completely invaluable. Praise the great sage Macmillan, greater than Aristotle. Rand McNally, the world's greatest explorer.
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Jun 29, 2014 06:03
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Ancient peoples' might be a bit put off by the fact that modern maps show cities and settlements that definitely didn't exist then, as well as a lot of coastlines that have shifted significantly.
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Jun 29, 2014 06:22
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What's the hardest part of making a hot air balloon? Fuel source? Something energy dense enough to be carried up and not take up the entire gondola? I don't mean using them in combat or anything, though it could be used as a vantage point. Useful for cartographers. Invent some semaphore and set up a network between cities and you've got primitive telecommunications. I'm on board with the penicillin guy though, if only because it's got such military utility.
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Jun 29, 2014 06:36
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RPZip posted:For some reason I'm thinking of the short story where the crowd that watches the crucifixion is made up entirely of time travelers. Yeah, I can't see time travel ever being available to the masses. There'd always be some dick who'd ruin it for everyone. It should be strictly limited to academics and scientists. 
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Jun 29, 2014 06:46
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Frostwerks posted:What's the hardest part of making a hot air balloon? Fuel source? Something energy dense enough to be carried up and not take up the entire gondola? I don't mean using them in combat or anything, though it could be used as a vantage point. Useful for cartographers. Invent some semaphore and set up a network between cities and you've got primitive telecommunications. I'm on board with the penicillin guy though, if only because it's got such military utility. Well basically you need to be able to properly figure out the amount of lift you'll need and how to sew together the whole shebang. Wood as a fuel source can take you up for about 3 hours in a practical balloon using just plain old hot air, you start getting better results when you replace some of the air in the bag with "coal gas" or other byproducts of first burning something else though those things tend to mean you're filling the flight bag with something that is itself flammable. Using coal itself as your heating source of course lets you stay in the air longer as you can get more heat for a longer time out of the same weight and all that. And refined petroleum based solid, liquid or gas fuels will also work even better but good luck refining that in 45 AD.
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Jun 29, 2014 06:48
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sullat posted:Short-sell slaves before the conquest of Gaul and Greece; grain futures during the conquest of Egypt? This got me thinking, and now if I ever find myself in the Roman Empire prior to the crisis of the third century, I will try desperately to publish a paper on how inflation works. Did the Romans have a concept of quarantine? I assume not; I doubt I could convince people of germ theory, but the general idea of sick-makes-sick might be possible. That could go a long way toward mitigating the effects of the great plagues if they didn't have that concept already.
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Jun 29, 2014 08:47
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Well I guess if you could make one of those old school microscopes you might have a chance to convince the old timers of causation. But then again, I've no clue how you would make the lenses.
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Jun 29, 2014 08:57
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Arglebargle III posted:I'm not sure pasteurization would solve any of those problems, since, you know, refrigeration doesn't exist. You could invent canning which would preserve milk and also any other thing. I think that's a bit more useful. Not quite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhchal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_house_%28building%29
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Jun 29, 2014 09:15
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Kopijeger posted:Not quite: I was thiking about saying this in one of the game of thrones threads. Night's watch should have been packing ice in the sawdust they were taking from the woods north of the wall.
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Jun 29, 2014 09:29
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Frostwerks posted:What's the hardest part of making a hot air balloon? The airtight envelope. According to Wikipedia, the Montgolfier brothers used sackcloth (which probably would be available in antiquity) and paper (which you'd have to invent first). Later they used taffeta, which is made from silk; that might be prohibitively expensive if you could even get enough silk. Hang gliders or even kites would be easier to build, and could still be used for things like military reconnaissance.
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Jun 29, 2014 09:53
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Hand to god I was thinking silk and the cost prohibition.
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Jun 29, 2014 10:01
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Frostwerks posted:Hand to god I was thinking silk and the cost prohibition. Tell the Romans to steal some damned silk bugs.
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Jun 29, 2014 10:06
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Third Murderer posted:This got me thinking, and now if I ever find myself in the Roman Empire prior to the crisis of the third century, I will try desperately to publish a paper on how inflation works. I think that's technically isolation - quarantine instead is to keep newcomers in their own area for a certain amount of time to make sure they aren't becoming sick, especially new ships coming into port before you let them unload. That innovation alone could probably save millions of lives if you could stop plagues and smallpox from spreading from city to city.
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Jun 29, 2014 10:12
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Kopijeger posted:Not quite: Well refrigerator trucks certainly didn't exist. Oh yeah paper would be a good one to invent too. Stuff that has all the available materials at the time would be useful. Playing the ancient markets would be less useful because a) you need capital to make these transactions and b) there isn't exactly a Ye Olde Stocke Market of Rome where everyone can go and get access to these markets anyway. Imagine how much the Roman legions would pay you to set up and operate a food preservation plant once you proved you could keep food unspoiled in a bottle for months or years. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 10:22 on Jun 29, 2014 |
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Jun 29, 2014 10:16
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I like this game. I'm also glad I'm not the only one that day dreams through "waking up in X period of history what the hell do I do" sort of things. One thing that I always realize though is that no matter what you're involved in, short of some really obscure ancient stuff we have no idea about because people stopped doing it 2000 years ago, you can probably make great strides in that field. You've got 2000 years of latent knowledge in you, sure you might not know exactly how to create a good suspension system for carts, but you know it is a thing that can be done. You might not know exactly how to make tinned & canned food but you know it is a thing. Knowing something is a thing is a huge step, you can figure out the details later as long as the thing is somewhat in range of the society your in. You'd probably be able to get some help as well. Take milk pasteurization, you know it happens, you know it involves heat, but that guy thought it was boiling when its actually just below. How many attempts would it take for a reasonably smart guy to figure it out? A lot less when you know exactly what you're aiming for then when you're experimenting blindly in the dark. As for my easy winner idea, agriculture. Didn't it take till somewhere in the 1700's for people to first realize you can manually pollinate and aggressively select for qualities you like in plants, peas I think he did it with? Get making some super crops. Cast_No_Shadow fucked around with this message at 10:54 on Jun 29, 2014 |
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Jun 29, 2014 10:51
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Yeah, the intentional selective breeding thing could be useful, but anything useful like stronger warhorses would take a few decades to produce anything close to visible results.
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Jun 29, 2014 12:08
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Atlas Hugged posted:Yeah, the intentional selective breeding thing could be useful, but anything useful like stronger warhorses would take a few decades to produce anything close to visible results. People were doing this already; Mendel's innovation was to give a certain style of account of it, not to do it. Think of how easy it is to breed dogs, and how long humans have kept them, to get an estimate of when selective breeding started.
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Jun 29, 2014 13:10
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Actually how common was pickling/bottling as a method of food preservation? I'm guessing lack of knowledge of sterilising was a serious impediment in terms of consistent results but if it wasn't a huge thing (especially the bottling) I'd probably change my answer to a method of bottling (urning in Rome?) with proper sterilisation techniques. Prove to a general or higher up officer that this will provide them the ability to take large amounts of food on campaign when away from easily sourced areas (or set up proper supply lines to get them from back home) and I can imagine you'd have a technology with easily verifiable results and immediate benefit. Once your position is set you can start trying to convince people about germs and that algebra is totally a thing. Actually solving quadratic equations with algebra in an easy manner would probably impress the hell out of people, as well as graphs and calculus, though those are much less obvious in terms of practical benefits.
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Jun 29, 2014 14:14
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MrNemo posted:Actually how common was pickling/bottling as a method of food preservation? I'm guessing lack of knowledge of sterilising was a serious impediment in terms of consistent results but if it wasn't a huge thing (especially the bottling) I'd probably change my answer to a method of bottling (urning in Rome?) with proper sterilisation techniques. Prove to a general or higher up officer that this will provide them the ability to take large amounts of food on campaign when away from easily sourced areas (or set up proper supply lines to get them from back home) and I can imagine you'd have a technology with easily verifiable results and immediate benefit. Once your position is set you can start trying to convince people about germs and that algebra is totally a thing. That's why salt was important enough to fight wars over, and control of the salt trade was the foundation of early roman power. Musa I of Mali (Ok, medieval) was the wealthiest person in history - he had the better part of a trillion dollars in todays money (if you believe such numbers) - because Mali produced most of the western worlds salt. People have been using salt curing to preserve food for a very long time. edit: No idea how long jams and steam sterilization has been around for though Captain Postal fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Jun 29, 2014 |
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Jun 29, 2014 14:25
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Captain Postal posted:That's why salt was important enough to fight wars over, and control of the salt trade was the foundation of early roman power. Musa I of Mali (Ok, medieval) was the wealthiest person in history - he had the better part of a trillion dollars in todays money (if you believe such numbers) - because Mali produced most of the western worlds salt. It wasn't only because of salt. He also had massive gold mines. Should there be new thread for all the time travelling and what-ifs?
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Jun 29, 2014 14:56
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They knew about pickling but not canning. You're right, if you demonstrated canning technology to the military minds you would be set for life. Romans were already incredibly good at logistics and valued it immensely, they'd be all over that poo poo. I think this can go a little while longer, it's fun.
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Jun 29, 2014 15:03
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If you tried to go back and teach modern scientific theories, you'd have to prepare to debate with some of the best academics of the time in a language you're not familiar with. It's the same deal if you just want to go back and teach mathematical concepts which should theoretically be universal constants; be prepared to convert all your formulae to ancient numeral systems and abacuses. You'd be better off just going back and beating someone to the punch for an invention, like Archimedes' screw oreven just going to ancient China and start cranking out some glass.
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Jun 29, 2014 15:07
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What about the modern stirrup? Some equites would certainly appreciate that.
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Jun 29, 2014 16:24
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Stirrups are useful but their effect has been grossly overstated. Ancient cavalry had large saddles that went up your back and had multiple horns, which kept you steady quite well. You could fight on horseback and do lance charges no problem. A stirrup is better (there is a reason why those old saddles vanished), but there's a popular myth that cavalry were largely useless in hand to hand combat before it and it's just not true. It's not as much of a revolution as some of these other things would be.
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Jun 29, 2014 16:28
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Grand Fromage posted:They knew about pickling but not canning. You're right, if you demonstrated canning technology to the military minds you would be set for life. Romans were already incredibly good at logistics and valued it immensely, they'd be all over that poo poo. The toughest part of canning would probably be finding suitable material for creating and sealing your containers. For obvious reasons you'd want to avoid the lead sealing that was used for the first mass-production canning in our world. You'd also want to combine it with teaching the right ways to cook stuff before going in to prevent nasties growing in it.
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Jun 29, 2014 16:57
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Octy posted:Yeah, I can't see time travel ever being available to the masses. There'd always be some dick who'd ruin it for everyone. It should be strictly limited to academics and scientists.
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Jun 29, 2014 17:21
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What? Cook stuff "before going in"? You wouldn't use a metal can, ceramics or even waterskins might be best. Sealant that could survive boiling would be the main thing to work out.
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Jun 29, 2014 17:26
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Arglebargle III posted:What? Cook stuff "before going in"? Some things we can today are partially or fully cooked before you seal them up, because it just works better that way.
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Jun 29, 2014 17:28
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my dad posted:Tell the Romans to steal some damned silk bugs.
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Jun 29, 2014 17:46
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How amenable would mathematicians in, say, classical Athens be to the concept of Cartesian coordinates and things like vectors?
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Jun 29, 2014 18:57
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Hedera Helix posted:How amenable would mathematicians in, say, classical Athens be to the concept of Cartesian coordinates and things like vectors? It's trivial to infer a kind of coordinate system from Archimedes' and Apollonius' works about conic sections, so the idea of an indefinite plane of coordinates wouldn't have been strange. (It's been a while since I studied that, so it might not even be an inference.) The problem with Cartesian coordinates in particular for the ancients would have been the three quadrants that involve negative numbers, which they thought were a mathematical absurdity. For instance, you could give them a problem like 3x + 12 = 0 (though obviously not in that form) and they'd understand the idea of it but think you were having some fun with them, like if you showed a kid a 1 = 0 fallacy or tried to prove to GBS that 0.999... = 1. I think they'd understand the idea of a simple vector but might wonder why it's important.
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Jun 29, 2014 23:07
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Tao Jones posted:tried to prove to GBS that 0.999... = 1.  Did the poster survive?
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Jun 29, 2014 23:10
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my dad posted:
I'm pretty sure there have been multiple threads about it, to the point where mods got angry. 
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Jun 29, 2014 23:12
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It upsets me that people can't accept that it's true.
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Jun 30, 2014 00:27
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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And so the cycle continues.
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Jun 30, 2014 05:03
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Isn't there a pretty simple way to make ice at room temperature? I seen it in a movie I think, so it might be bullshit. If true you could corner a very niche market in Rome and make tons of money.
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Jun 30, 2014 05:33
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Ego-bot posted:Isn't there a pretty simple way to make ice at room temperature? I seen it in a movie I think, so it might be bullshit. You could freeze water by dissolving lots of ammonium chloride in it! This will also help you as you also introduce the thermometer and the Fahrenheit temperature scale. 
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Jun 30, 2014 07:15
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Ego-bot posted:Isn't there a pretty simple way to make ice at room temperature? I seen it in a movie I think, so it might be bullshit. If you can find some way to generate a vacuum, all you have to do is expose water to that. As pressure drops, some of the water will turn into a vapour, and it'll take all the heat with it. But I have no idea if a simple vacuum pump is even possible.
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Jun 30, 2014 07:50
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Arglebargle III posted:Drinking milk was kind of not a thing because it was perishable. If you lived on or literally within walking distance of a dairy farm you could drink milk, but there's only so much milk those people could drink. Like fresh produce, the main limitation on how much people can consume (and thus how much a farmer could get paid for!) is transport to population centers. Some lightbulbs today use krypton instead of just having a vacuum. I don't know how to find krypton in nature, though. A time traveller could use radon (another noble gas) as a substitute. That stuff is everywhere down below. It tends to make old cellars quite the hazard, since radon is slightly radioactive. Now you only need platinum or coal filament and you're set. (Or you can use tantal, I think that's also easier to handle than osmium and tungsten.) Problem solved, until the first people using your radon-lamps start developing cancer, I guess. 
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