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So a few weeks back the subject of time travel came up and for some reason it got me thinking about ancient technology. So assuming you were sent back to Rome in the first century AD, and assuming instead of a normal person you were like an expert in historical industrial processes and therefore could recreate anything given the right materials, what could you actually do that would be new and useful? I mostly used this as a prompt to look at how technology was changing over time and like reading about how looms work and what kind of work people had to do in their daily lives. So there are a lot of innovations I think you could take back, especially in fields like metallurgy and textiles. However chemistry really stands out as a field where a time traveler, starting with little to nothing, can quickly apply modern knowledge in a way that will be obviously useful and valuable to ancient society. Saltpeter is the crucial starting point for doing a ton of interesting chemistry, because you can make it just by fermenting pee-pee and poo-poo. Making it into gunpowder is going to a bit difficult since you'll have to get elemental sulfur somehow, but that was mined and traded in some quantity from Sicily in antiquity so it shouldn't be too hard. If you can get sulfur though forget gunpowder, now you can start doing real interesting chemistry. At this point you'll start to need glass vessels for distillation, but I think what they were already producing in Egypt in this period would be sufficient. Saltpeter, aka potassium nitrate, is a powerful oxidizer that makes all kinds of cool reactions possible. Burn it with the sulfur and run the fumes through steam and you can produce sulfuric acid. Now you can mix the sulfuric acid with more saltpeter and distill nitric acid. Soak hemp or flax fibers in a mixture of sulfuric and nitric acids and you'll get nitrocellulose, aka gun cotton, a powerful explosive. You could do all this pretty much anywhere, with no expensive ingredients and minimal equipment. Going further you can use the sulfuric acid to extract extra copper from discarded mine tailings from Spain. It can also be used in the Leblanc process with lime, coal, and sea salt to produce lye and soda ash. Lye is useful in the wool industry and for soap making/cleaning, while soda ash is needed for making glass among many other things. Combine iron and sulfuric acid and you can make ferric sulfate, which you can combine with potash (saltpeter might work here) and blood to produce the first modern synthetic dye, Prussian Blue. Or you can use it to construct a battery and start electroplating and compass making, or even charge a generator to start producing unlimited quantities of electric current. Chemistry is cool because with just a little bit of knowledge there's tons of powerful and cool stuff you can do. Reading about alchemy and stuff though and its also obvious why it took so long for people to work it out: it requires you to do tons of stuff that takes a ton of work and has no logical justification if you don't already understand the theory. Before the Haber process and the opening of the Chilean mines, doing any interesting chemistry requires you to spend months mucking about in poo poo just to get a little nitrate.
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Oct 28, 2019 23:13
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| # ? May 10, 2024 00:21 |
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Recreate Viagra become deified as a sex god.
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Oct 28, 2019 23:23
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Somewhat related, I was reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series and the variety of sailing rigs seems near-infinite, and I have to wonder just how much of a difference they really make. If a modern rig like the Bermuda rig was introduced to, say, the Norse during the Viking era, or the ancient Greeks, would it really make a difference in what they could do versus with the more simple sails they used?
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Oct 28, 2019 23:24
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once you have distilling you can make whiskey or brandy
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Oct 28, 2019 23:25
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Introduce germ theory. Specifically the idea that there are little bugs and weird tiny demons that cause most sickness. Introduce the idea that combining fats, friction, and water can wash a shitload of the worst off of someone’s gross human hands. Introduce the idea that already-existent chemicals can kill some of the horrible bugs and demons outright and that’s the most important part of treating an open wound. Combine with your 6th grade knowledge of human anatomy. Become founder of modern medicine, be unsurpassed until the late 19th century, enjoy the new Goatse Oath that all doctors take
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Oct 28, 2019 23:39
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Germ theory was first proposed by a Greek philosopher iirc and was maintained as one of many competing theories of disease (and not the most popular one) until microscopes got powerful enough to look at them. That said, since you have knowledge of how to actually fight germs you might be more convincing. Speaking of medicine, isn't a primitive smallpox vaccine super easy? I remember reading somewhere that the Chinese would gather the diseased scabs of victims, crush them into a powder, and inhale. If you do it right the dust has a bunch of dead/dying smallpox viruses your immune system can train against, same principle as modern vaccines. cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Oct 29, 2019 |
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Oct 28, 2019 23:46
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Kylaer posted:Somewhat related, I was reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series and the variety of sailing rigs seems near-infinite, and I have to wonder just how much of a difference they really make. If a modern rig like the Bermuda rig was introduced to, say, the Norse during the Viking era, or the ancient Greeks, would it really make a difference in what they could do versus with the more simple sails they used? It’s not just the configuration it’s the technology behind the sails and line.
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Oct 28, 2019 23:48
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cheetah7071 posted:once you have distilling you can make whiskey or brandy You can also collect pine sap and use fractional distillation to make high quality rosin and turpentine. And if you can find a natural tar seep in Britain or the mid-east it wouldn't be that difficult to crack it and make asphalt and crude kerosene. Apply dry distillation to some copper ores already mined in parts of the Hellenistic world and you could start producing zinc metal. Historically asphalt and zinc were only first mined in industrial quantity in like the 11th century. Zinc was called false silver by the Greeks who had observed it sometimes precipitated on the walls of their smelters, but they just threw it away. Indian metalworkers also observed it in antiquity and in the Middle Ages were the first to develop a process for refining it. Europe meanwhile wouldn't work out how to get pure zinc metal until the 18th century.
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Oct 28, 2019 23:48
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Kylaer posted:Somewhat related, I was reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series and the variety of sailing rigs seems near-infinite, and I have to wonder just how much of a difference they really make. If a modern rig like the Bermuda rig was introduced to, say, the Norse during the Viking era, or the ancient Greeks, would it really make a difference in what they could do versus with the more simple sails they used? A Bermuda rig sails better on the wind and requires fewer hands, but ultimately every rig is at the mercy of the wind. Rig is mostly about how handy you want the ship to be versus how fast and how stable in certain wind conditions. A lot of the rigs described in the series are worse in every conceivable sailing quality than ship rig or a sloop rig or a topmast schooner, but they are much easier to operate with a small crew. When all you do is durdle from your coastal village to the fishing grounds and back again, speed doesn't matter but ease of sailing matters a lot. When you are a warship that has a huge crew and doesn't need to make a profit, ease of sailing doesn't matter but speed matters a lot. With Viking and Greek ships, you're looking at a whole different kettle of fish because longboats and greek warships were designed around large crews and wanted to have the option to row a lot of the time. The qualities that make a good rowboat and the qualities that make a good blue water sailing ship are quite different. Longships and greek warships are much narrower than a true ocean-going sailing ship because drag is a much bigger concern for rowing than it is for sailing. Also small ships that will mostly be navigating calm waters like rivers or day trips (literally) on the Mediterranean don't need as much longitudinal stiffness as a sailing ship, so they can afford to be narrower and more lightly built. Rowing is way more expensive than sailing because you have to support a much larger crew and the crew has to work a lot harder. Most civilian ships would have been designed for minimizing cost, and therefore minimizing crew labor. When you look at ancient Greek trading vessels they are designed for sailing most of the time, because it's much cheaper to sail than to row. They are fatter and shorter ships with very simple square rigs and possibly a lateen yard to hoist when sailing close to the wind. A bermuda rig would probably have been better, but it's hard to say whether it would have caught on. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Oct 29, 2019 |
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Oct 28, 2019 23:56
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Introduce germ theory. Specifically the idea that there are little bugs and weird tiny demons that cause most sickness. Introduce the idea that combining fats, friction, and water can wash a shitload of the worst off of someone’s gross human hands. Introduce the idea that already-existent chemicals can kill some of the horrible bugs and demons outright and that’s the most important part of treating an open wound. Could you not synthesize bleach from salt water? Dilute bleach would be an effective water treatment chemical, I believe. Ditto with penicillin. You might need to come up with an explanation for why the wonder drug helps some diseases but not others. e: The sailing rig talk reminds me of an argument in an RPG thread where someone said it was inconceivable that you could cross a two-thousand mile ocean voyage in a sailing vessel, simply impossible. Nessus fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Oct 29, 2019 |
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Oct 29, 2019 00:01
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Kylaer posted:Somewhat related, I was reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series and the variety of sailing rigs seems near-infinite, and I have to wonder just how much of a difference they really make. If a modern rig like the Bermuda rig was introduced to, say, the Norse during the Viking era, or the ancient Greeks, would it really make a difference in what they could do versus with the more simple sails they used? On the whole, the Bermuda rig's still a fairly simple sail design, which is why it's so utterly common for small time sailing these days. But a lot of its advantages are disadvantages in other contexts. If you just want to haul a ship along fast with the wind going in the direction you want, older square rigging styles will generally harness that most efficiently and that was something the Vikings preferred to use, with their rowing crews on hand to provide additional maneuverability when winds were unfavorable. Various triangular otherwise related designs that eventually evolved into the basics behind Bermuda rigs were known for a very long time in many different civilizations, including for purposes of this discussion the Mediterranean itself going well back into Roman Empire days, which Northern European civilizations were aware of but didn't consider useful enough for their purposes to switch until we get well into the Middle Ages on the timescale. So this would be more of a situation of presenting people with a highly refined version of designs they were aware of, rather than making radical changes. It's the kind of thing that certainly adds up over time, but isn't neccesarily going to give an immediate tangible advantage.
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Oct 29, 2019 00:04
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I assume that if penicilin were invented 2000 years ago there would be no humans today at all
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Oct 29, 2019 00:05
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I would bring medical tech to help women and children and then information on climate change only.
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Oct 29, 2019 00:08
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Senior Dog posted:I assume that if penicilin were invented 2000 years ago there would be no humans today at all  e: Also explaining climate change in the ancient world would both require an advanced train of explanations (if with useful side inventions) but also make people go 'it'll be warmer? that sounds good, let's go set these rock seams on fire' Nessus fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Oct 29, 2019 |
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Oct 29, 2019 00:09
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poo poo what if we just write a prophecy explaining why loading livestock with antibiotics is bad? Then a disclaimer about how antivaxx crazies and other assorted lunatics will tell you it’s bad for the wrong reasons but they’re right in this one area
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Oct 29, 2019 00:12
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cheetah7071 posted:Germ theory was first proposed by a Greek philosopher iirc and was maintained as one of many competing theories of disease (and not the most popular one) until microscopes got powerful enough to look at them. That said, since you have knowledge of how to actually fight germs you might be more convincing. one thing with trying to introduce germ theory is that, a huge proportion of the sicknesses people get aren't caused by germs. Cancer isn't a germ. Lead poisoning isn't a germ. Rickets and beriberi aren't caused by germs. Knowing that a germ causes malaria isn't very useful in the abstract, because it spread by mosquitoes rather than direct contagion. To get anyone to listen to your medical advice, they're going to have to trust you first. By contrast, a gun-cotton hand grenade is going to kill someone dead whether they believe it will or not  Convincing someone that its bugs and not foul vapors that spread disease is going to be really hard if you can't provide hard evidence. One reason I think Romans were able to develop excellent surgical procedures for stuff like cataracts, are you can actually see what's wrong, and get feedback from your patient. Ancient doctors couldn't see what causes diseases though, and without statistics or scientific method they had no way to compare different treatments and theories. but yeah, vaccination is pretty simple. You just have to convince people to do something gross. Nessus posted:Could you not synthesize bleach from salt water? Dilute bleach would be an effective water treatment chemical, I believe. I was trying to figure out how to make bleach and ammonia and its surprisingly difficult. However if you can build a battery then it's pretty easy to make chlorine gas via electrolysis, although I'm not sure how easy it is to make in quantity. edit2: you can make it from the soda ash I described earlier (conveniently making soda ash also produces a lot of hydrochloric acid) by pumping chlorine gas through it, but I don't know how complicated it would be. All the chemistry I described in my first post could be done with little more than two glass vessels and some copper tubing. Anything requiring high pressure vessels or complicated piping is going to be limited by ancient metalworking Squalid fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Oct 29, 2019 |
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Oct 29, 2019 00:15
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Thanks for the sailing answers, all. Pretty much everything I know about sailing is from that series plus some Wikipedia articles, I'm otherwise very ignorant on the topic.
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Oct 29, 2019 00:23
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Electromagnetism seems like it would be a promising avenue of inquiry.
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Oct 29, 2019 00:28
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Squalid posted:one thing with trying to introduce germ theory is that, a huge proportion of the sicknesses people get aren't caused by germs. Cancer isn't a germ. Lead poisoning isn't a germ. Rickets and beriberi aren't caused by germs. Knowing that a germ causes malaria isn't very useful in the abstract, because it spread by mosquitoes rather than direct contagion. To get anyone to listen to your medical advice, they're going to have to trust you first. By contrast, a gun-cotton hand grenade is going to someone dead whether they believe it or not :metal: You might also run into oddities that your medical knowledge wouldn't work on... isn't one of the reasons why leprosy is less of a thing these days that the great majority of humanity is genetically immune to it now?
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Oct 29, 2019 00:29
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Basic (modern) sanitation is extremely demonstrable if sacrificing human lives is allowed
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Oct 29, 2019 00:31
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Kylaer posted:Somewhat related, I was reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series and the variety of sailing rigs seems near-infinite, and I have to wonder just how much of a difference they really make. If a modern rig like the Bermuda rig was introduced to, say, the Norse during the Viking era, or the ancient Greeks, would it really make a difference in what they could do versus with the more simple sails they used? Convincing them to bring along some lime juice would probably make a bigger difference.
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Oct 29, 2019 01:39
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Squalid posted:So a few weeks back the subject of time travel came up and for some reason it got me thinking about ancient technology. So assuming you were sent back to Rome in the first century AD, and assuming instead of a normal person you were like an expert in historical industrial processes and therefore could recreate anything given the right materials, what could you actually do that would be new and useful? I mostly used this as a prompt to look at how technology was changing over time and like reading about how looms work and what kind of work people had to do in their daily lives. I don't think introducing gun powder earlier would be of particular benefit to humanity as a whole. Penicillin is the gimme for what a time traveller should be able to make, imo.
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Oct 29, 2019 01:42
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Scurvy wasn't a big deal until long haul trips across the Atlantic and around the cape. It takes a long time to set in. It's funny how we associate pirates with "scurvy dogs" since scurvy was practically unknown in the Caribbean.
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Oct 29, 2019 01:43
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Scurvy definitely wasn't a problem in the Mediterranean, it's easy to resupply with fresh food. I was thinking more like, would commerce have been easier, would coastal travel have been more common had the sailings rigs been different? And apparently the answer is no, which seems reasonable.
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Oct 29, 2019 01:52
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Nessus posted:If you're willing to be brutal you could do A/B testing demonstrations for the Emperor with some slaves, like the story of when they fed two slaves a big meal, had one of them run laps while the other rested for two hours... and then cut them both open to compare the digestion of the food. The biggest reason by far is that it's trivially treated with post-1950s antibiotics, and with the mass treatment of leprosy cases (and relatively small amount of wild animals that it can live in besides humans) this allows us to neutralize its prevalence and potential spread. The UN has been performing long term global treatment of leprosy: http://www.searo.who.int/entity/global_leprosy_programme/topics/factsheet/en/ including actual free availability of the best antibiotics to treat leprosy cases. According to them, in 1983 there were still 21.1 cases per 10000 people globally, by 2000 it had been reduced to under 1 case per 10,000 and by 2015 had reduced it to 0.2 cases per 10,000. That works out to there being a bit over 150,000 cases of leprosy left in the world, down from a peak somewhere in the millions in the 50s before effective treatment. There's still millions of people living with the effects of injuries suffered while afflicted with long term leprosy before they got cured of course, and that's going to remain an important thing to keep track of. We also currently have around 200,000 people around the world getting freshly exposed and infected with leprosy each year but the majority of those known cases are getting treated in short order and so don't tend to end up with any disfigurement or other problems afterwards.
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Oct 29, 2019 02:14
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Kylaer posted:Scurvy definitely wasn't a problem in the Mediterranean, it's easy to resupply with fresh food. I was thinking more like, would commerce have been easier, would coastal travel have been more common had the sailings rigs been different? And apparently the answer is no, which seems reasonable. If you want to reduce scurvy through sailing technology, speed is the answer. Scurvy takes a month or so to set in and requires very little Vitamin C to stave off, which is why it only appeared on months-long voyages. The best way to reduce scurvy without just forcing the idea of antiscorbutics on everyone would be something like steam power, which lets an Atlantic crossing take only 2 weeks and dramatically shortens the effective distance between ports of call. You could also give them canning technology earlier, so people can now carry fresh food everywhere.
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Oct 29, 2019 03:04
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Canning requires mass production of metal sheet. And if you want it to be practical you need pressure vessels.
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Oct 29, 2019 03:34
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The Lone Badger posted:Canning requires mass production of metal sheet. And if you want it to be practical you need pressure vessels. And steam power requires consistent high-quality iron casting along with precision machine tools and the skills to use them. Also a sophisticated fuel acquisition and distribution system. It's not something a single time-traveler could bootstrap into existence.
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Oct 29, 2019 03:46
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Stringent posted:I don't think introducing gun powder earlier would be of particular benefit to humanity as a whole. Penicillin is the gimme for what a time traveller should be able to make, imo. is it tho? I think to some extent people had recognized blue molds could be antibiotic all the way back in ancient Egypt. However if you can't purify the penicillin, you are at serious risk of poisoning someone with micotoxins introduced by undesirable molds. What I found most interesting about looking at ancient technology was just seeing how interrelated everything is. Chemistry is limited by industries ability to build stuff like pressure vessels or precise temperature control. Metallurgy is limited by access to powerful machines and good ores. Ores are limited by geography and the power of your water pumps. Like you'd think you could revolutionize agriculture by introducing fertilizers, but without mineral nitrates it's just impossible. Either you sail to Bolivia or you find a way to generate huge amounts of electricity, and even then you probably won't be able to produce pressure chambers big and strong enough to synthesize reasonable quantities of ammonia. Now if you want something that will really help people, after the kind of medical stuff Edgar Allen Ho mentioned, the best inventions I think you could give people in classical antiquity would be the turnplow, the spinning wheel, and the horizontal loom and shuttle. Or just doing like everyone suggested last time and make paper and a printing press, still hard to top that.
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Oct 29, 2019 03:50
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Canning only requires glass, wax, and a heating vessel that closes enough to get some pressure. Anything else is nice but not required.
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Oct 29, 2019 03:52
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convincing people to do a three-crop rotation with a nitrogen fixing crop is a pretty big agricultural development that the ancients would have had the full ability to execute but wasn't discovered until the middle ages (to my knowledge at least)
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Oct 29, 2019 03:54
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Squalid mentioned it, but your biggest problem with introducing new ideas, be it germ theory or what have you is going to be getting people to listen.. If you just show up with no qualifications, no contacts, and nobody to vouch for you, then how do you even get to the people who matter? And if you do, how do you convince them in the face of the establishment saying you're talking nonsense? I mean, Semmelweis's ideas about the germ theory were rejected in the middle of the 19th century, to the extent that he had a nervous breakdown, even though he was a doctor of medicine, a trained obstetrician, and had done a study showing that patients of doctors who washed their hands between delivering babies had a much lower rate of childbed fever than those who had doctors who didn't. How are you going to do it?
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Oct 29, 2019 04:06
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Go back in time to visit Galen in the middle of the night, pretend you're Asclepius explaining germ theory to him in a dream.
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Oct 29, 2019 04:10
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Grevling posted:Go back in time to visit Galen in the middle of the night, pretend you're Asclepius explaining germ theory to him in a dream. *bedsheet toga, grotty santa beard and two rubber snakes stapled to a tennis racquet VV edit: and shoddily assembled Saturday Night special Elissimpark fucked around with this message at 05:15 on Oct 29, 2019 |
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Oct 29, 2019 04:29
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Epicurius posted:How are you going to do it? see this is why you have to start by making gunpowder
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Oct 29, 2019 04:50
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I'll be in Florence soon and 2 days later in Rome. Any recommendations what to see there?
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Oct 29, 2019 05:29
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For time travelling just buy a cheap 20 year old Furby off eBay, go back in time to 1-3rd century Alexandria, set yourself up as the religious leader of a new cult. "I am the only one who can interpret the speech of the God." Then you'll have the money and clout to do whatever you want.
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Oct 29, 2019 05:30
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Power Khan posted:I'll be in Florence soon and 2 days later in Rome. Any recommendations what to see there? The Roma Pass is a great deal. It looks like they made it a bit worse since I was there but it still seems great.
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Oct 29, 2019 05:32
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Elissimpark posted:*bedsheet toga, grotty santa beard and two rubber snakes stapled to a tennis racquey Totally volunteering for this if anyone has a time machine.
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Oct 29, 2019 05:33
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I'm absurdly terrible at this legionary game and I regret the 10 hours I spent on it. Speaking of games, I was browsing r/askhistorians lately, and I noticed a large number of threads of people asking questions about the "accuracy" of crusader kings, which naturally got r/askhistorians folks riled up about the complexity of medieval social and political formations. That led me to threads about "feudalism" and how problematic the term is and how the received narrative of homage/land grants, etc. defining the medieval political structure is simply inaccurate. Naturally, nobody was willing to explain what the middle ages were actually like, but they were eager to write enormous, pedantic word salads charting the genealogy of the idea of "feudalism" itself and summarizing all the 70s-90s historians involved in the concept's refutation. So maybe one of you could be a bit more normal about this and help me out without treating an informal, simple question like it's on your quals: If feudalism is an inaccurate framework to analyze medieval western Europe, what was the social and political structure actually like? The r/askhistorians basic answer that it was complex and that each situation was unique is just not satisfying.
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Oct 29, 2019 05:36
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