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CommonShore posted:Know what would be super loving rad and make a big difference for modern historians? To introduce the methodologies and practices of of modern historians, archivists, librarians, and archaeologists. That would quickly run into "make my great grandfather related to Hercules or my men stab you to death" problems.
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Apr 20, 2017 20:09
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Cyrano4747 posted:Eh, I'd argue that even totally untreated AIDS kills you slower and has less obvious signs of infection (as well as less debilitation) for the first few years at least of the illness. The way it spread like wildfire through Africa even before the various charities got in there to start handing out medicine is an illustrative example. I just don't think we should expect it to gut the urban population either. There's no working blood transfusion/organ transplant system and extremely little use and especially reuse of hypodermic drugs (of the sort we'd consider illicit or otherwise) so you're only going to get it through loving or a particularly unfortunate fight where you end up drawing blood while also having an open cut on yourself. While there was plenty of the urban population that either themselves used prostitutes and had casual sex in general, or had a sexual partner who'd done the same, there'd also be a ton who didn't for any number of reasons. They'd be unlikely to get infected in the first place, and unlikely to spread it onwards. When we look at the hardest-hit countries for HIV today, we're looking at population infected at about 28.8% for the worst one (Swaziland), which we might take to be sort of a high bar for how far it can really penetrate without effective treatment.
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Apr 20, 2017 20:16
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aids might do more damage to places with large standing armies / port towns then anywhere else, at worst you might get a mini-bronze age collapse from trade route disruption, would be my uneducated guess whomever suggested scientific racism... that one's pretty dark. whatever effect it had on technological progress, i don't doubt it'd be a worser earth
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Apr 20, 2017 20:34
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OwlFancier posted:Marxism. Let me tell you about the Gracchi...
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Apr 20, 2017 20:49
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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I was an IK for a month, so I could teach them how to moderate their forums.
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Apr 20, 2017 21:30
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I'm not sure IK rules would be less orderly than a normal Roman forum. Also what does IK stand for because I don't see how inverse kinematics applies to anything?
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Apr 20, 2017 22:22
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OwlFancier posted:I'm not sure IK rules would be less orderly than a normal Roman forum. Idiot King, a not-mod with mod powers in a particular subforum.
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Apr 20, 2017 22:29
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Ah right, I know what it is but not what it stands for.
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Apr 20, 2017 22:36
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Not an admin but first among posters, with a grant of mod potestas.... The Internet Princeps will restore GBS 1.0 to the people
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Apr 20, 2017 23:39
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well, now we know why rome fell
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Apr 20, 2017 23:54
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Hogge Wild posted:If you started vaccinating Romans, they'd invent trains by themselves. Yeah but Vespasian would throw them into the Tiber to keep unemployment rates down.
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Apr 21, 2017 00:53
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Jerusalem posted:Yeah but Vespasian would throw them into the Tiber to keep unemployment rates down. Nah, he'd think of all the employment you could get from building and running railroads. Railroads are huge engineering projects that require shitloads of manpower, just the sort of thing the Romans loving loved.
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Apr 21, 2017 01:58
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Surprised no one's mentioned teaching the Romans about heavy metal toxicity.
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Apr 21, 2017 02:02
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Nah, he'd think of all the employment you could get from building and running railroads. Railroads are huge engineering projects that require shitloads of manpower, just the sort of thing the Romans loving loved. There'd be a hideous amount of labor needed just to keep replacing the rails and other such equipment yeah. Especially with the generally low quality metal available at the time.
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Apr 21, 2017 02:17
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okay but what is the best modern technology you can bring the romans provided you are restricted to technologies that are directly focused on producing and preparing cabbage
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Apr 21, 2017 02:18
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:okay but what is the best modern technology you can bring the romans provided you are restricted to technologies that are directly focused on producing and preparing cabbage I feel like Romans would be into Kimchi
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Apr 21, 2017 02:22
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Did Romans blaze for fun?
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Apr 21, 2017 02:27
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Hogge Wild posted:Did Romans blaze for fun? yeah they had hash too you get the impression that it wasn't very common but scythians came to rome fairly frequently and they smoked hella 
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Apr 21, 2017 02:50
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Hogge Wild posted:Did Romans blaze for fun? Smoking hemp is for Scythians. Real Romans do opium.
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Apr 21, 2017 02:50
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skasion posted:Smoking hemp is for Scythians. Real Romans do opium. Did they do opium for recreational purposes?
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Apr 21, 2017 02:52
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SoggyBobcat posted:Surprised no one's mentioned teaching the Romans about heavy metal toxicity. If you mean lead specifically, they were well aware of it. But it's a really good material to make pipes out of, and once it calcifies over you don't get any serious contamination. They did still use it as a sweetener though. Hogge Wild posted:Did they do opium for recreational purposes? I don't know if there's any specific record of it but they had opium so I'm 1000% sure they did.
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Apr 21, 2017 03:19
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Nah, he'd think of all the employment you could get from building and running railroads. Railroads are huge engineering projects that require shitloads of manpower, just the sort of thing the Romans loving loved. Okay fine.....so long as when they're done they run the trains once and then throw them in the Tiber, that's extremely important to me 
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Apr 21, 2017 03:27
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:okay but what is the best modern technology you can bring the romans provided you are restricted to technologies that are directly focused on producing and preparing cabbage Nitrate mining?
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Apr 21, 2017 03:46
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The Lone Badger posted:Nitrate mining? man you go back in time to do a wee bit of technological bootstrapping and somehow you just end up getting even more slaves killed, damnit I thought cabbage of all things would be safe
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Apr 21, 2017 03:48
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Cyrano4747 posted:I would bring AIDS. The CIA first managed to grow the AIDS virus in the 70's, I don't think ancient rome would have the related lab technology etc to do it even if you told them the recipe.
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Apr 21, 2017 13:17
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Send back a trained historian to an era we know to be relatively civilized, where rich patrons might take an interest in a talented eccentric, and where we have at last a working knowledge of the language, ie Rome, and give him a portfolio of modern historical work relevant to poo poo they'd be interested in. Include a bit where The Current Emperor is related to Hercules amongst the real history. Blammo a true Father of Modern History. Do the same for an artist trained in a hyperrealistic style, and give him materials and portfolio with instructions to try and get a painting school going of photographic-style portrayals of everyday life. Make sure they're trained in enough broken latin, classical chinese, early modern french, or whatever to bumble through claiming to be from some mythical-but-believed-in place to the natives. Think "Greetings, Prester John sent me, Your Grace!"
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Apr 21, 2017 14:13
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Painter would be useless. Romans did loads of paintings and many were quite realistic, but panel painting just doesn't last that long. Even if you tried to innovate painting on canvas I wouldn't expect it to last from antiquity to the modern day. However, going by the examples of mummy portraits we have from Fayum (which certainly were not made by the most acclaimed panel-painters of their age) Romans didn't need anyone to teach them how to paint realistically.
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Apr 21, 2017 15:13
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Yeah but somebody could go back and teach them how to paint people in hosed up unrecognizable ways. You'd need to be good at convincing rich people it's valuable but hey, if it can happen once it can happen before.
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Apr 21, 2017 15:25
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skasion posted:However, going by the examples of mummy portraits we have from Fayum (which certainly were not made by the most acclaimed panel-painters of their age) Romans didn't need anyone to teach them how to paint realistically. there is a shitload of stuff they could be taught. the mummy portraits are cool as hell but not up to renaissance or modern standards at all, and once you get into full figures and environments that goes double. although yeah I don't see it being terribly helpful
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Apr 21, 2017 15:49
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They could have painted/carved realistic scenes depicting everyday life, they just had no apparent interest in it. Or if they did none has survived. It is an interesting blind spot. They wrote histories and clearly were intending certain things to be preserved for future people to understand them, but we don't have anything like an attempt at an encyclopedic guide to the entirety of Roman culture.
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Apr 21, 2017 16:01
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It's like the cookbook thing. You don't record stuff everybody knows. So you're not going to find much on like how to wear a toga, because everybody who needs to wear one already knows how and will teach their sons. Plus, when it's a society that doesn't have printing, and the people who are writing are either rich themselves or dependent on the patronage of the rich, they're going to write about things of interest to the rich, which isn't mostly about how average people live.
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Apr 21, 2017 17:05
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Arglebargle III posted:Yeah but somebody could go back and teach them how to paint people in hosed up unrecognizable ways. You'd need to be good at convincing rich people it's valuable but hey, if it can happen once it can happen before. Just pick up Picasso in this hypothetical time machine and have him teach Romans to paint in his style.
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Apr 21, 2017 17:06
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Hamlet442 posted:Just pick up Picasso in this hypothetical time machine and have him teach Romans to paint in his style. That already happened we just call it the eastern empire.
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Apr 21, 2017 17:12
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Epicurius posted:It's like the cookbook thing. You don't record stuff everybody knows. So you're not going to find much on like how to wear a toga, because everybody who needs to wear one already knows how and will teach their sons. 1500 years from now archaeologists will wonder how people were pants. Assuming belts were mere waist decorations they'll wonder how the pants stayed up.
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Apr 21, 2017 17:14
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FAUXTON posted:That already happened we just call it the eastern empire. people keep on talking about going back in time and giving the romans gunpowder like that wasn't something they had anyway  Ynglaur posted:1500 years from now archaeologists will wonder how people were pants. Assuming belts were mere waist decorations they'll wonder how the pants stayed up. I hate to break it to you but I think you might be the one confused about pants?
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Apr 21, 2017 17:27
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Hamlet442 posted:Just pick up Picasso in this hypothetical time machine and have him teach Romans to paint in his style. Ah, but which Picasso? This one?  Or this one?  Or this one? 
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Apr 21, 2017 17:28
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Ynglaur posted:1500 years from now archaeologists will wonder how people were pants. Assuming belts were mere waist decorations they'll wonder how the pants stayed up. Every little common detail like that of modern life has at least 3 articles online on WikiHow and the 1000 websites that just copy all the data off WikiHow et al to serve their own ads over. Their problem will be that most of the articles like that are written by real weirdos.
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Apr 21, 2017 17:31
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Syncopated posted:The CIA first managed to grow the AIDS virus in the 70's, No they loving didn't.
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Apr 21, 2017 17:54
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:No they loving didn't. I think that was supposed to be a joke, but in case anyone is uncertain HIV has probably been circulating in humans since the 1920s, with likely but not confirmed cases in the US going back to the late 50s.
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Apr 21, 2017 17:58
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Ein Sexmonster posted:I think that was supposed to be a joke, but in case anyone is uncertain HIV has probably been circulating in humans since the 1920s, with likely but not confirmed cases in the US going back to the late 50s. The CIA wasn't around then. So what, by Army Intelligence during WWI? That strikes me as unlikely.
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Apr 21, 2017 18:09
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