Posted on 04/12/2015 6:20:17 PM PDT by MNDude
If you time traveled back to 1015, would you have enough modern knowledge and education to improve your llfe?
I mean like could you invent gunpowder or serious medical advancements, etc?
Paper no paper..
I think you two need to work a few things out.
God gave the Israelites Crop Rotation and the rule for letting the land “rest” one in every seven years.
The Romans had all the necessary technology for a steam locomotive and a rail road.
I think a good general surgeon and a dentist going back one thousand years could make a big impact on society, but you’d have to come up with an anesthesia. Aspirin would be a powerful drug if you could find how to make it. With a little bit of time and effort you could probably come up with a simple antibiotic. I’m fascinated by the lack of simple wound care skills. You could use placenta for skin grafting. How did people deal with kidney stones? You’d really have to come up with some powerful analgesics but I imagine opium and cocaine were used long before then.
All you need is two Scotsman fighting over a penny. (^;
Nope. Just say your grand father did this, and fewer people got sick/infected, whatever. You could even say it drove away the vile humors.
Once it comes as punishment from a deity they no longer have reason to try to prevent it or cure it. That’s fighting against God’s will, which makes you next.
You're right. The Principle of Self-Consistency only requires that recorded history not be changed. So a "lost art" would not violate the Principle, as long as recorded history was not changed.
So I suppose you could discover penicillin in the year 1015. And you could cure folks. But you could not cure, say, a king who was recorded to have died at a certain time.
book one would be on general surgery.
Paper was around in Europe by the 10th century. You would have to speed things up by explaining how to use a watermill to create the mass production of paper. That would give a 400 year leap.
book two? How to Win Friends and Influence People.
If I went back to the year 1015 in the place where I am now living, I would hope to at least be able to bring my Boy Scout Handbook, a knife, a hatchet and a good supply of matches. Life would be quite primitive until Spanish settlers showed up 754 years later.
If I could choose a place to live in 1015, it would be the Constantinople or somewhere else in the Roman Empire, which was enjoying a few years of stability in the midst of its final comeback under the emperor Basil II.
Most likely all of us would be burned at the stake...
sad to say.
I think one mistake that we’re making is the assumption that we the time traveler would be the only one making the advances.
the people 1000 years ago were no less intelligent than us. They just lived in a more primitive time. If the time traveler were to spend a few years working with Leonardo DaVinci, I think he would succeed with a lot more of his inventions.
I think that if you were to spread your knowledge, others would come up with new ideas on their own. Invention is an evolutionary process. As knowledge spreads, people around the world tend to invent similar things due to necessity. Tesla and Marconi weren’t working together but they were working in the same direction which is how Marconi got credit for the radio till recently.
Which would itself create a paradox, because a person with an in depth, detailed knowledge of history would distinguish himself as a great seer or prophet of the, 'future'. i.e. imagine showing up at the US War Department on Friday, December 5, 1941. People might not take you seriously that day, but would probably want to talk with you at length the following Monday.
I heard once they didn’t invent the wheel because the circle his supposedly a religious symbol for them. I once also heard that they did not invent the wheel because they never had large animals like horses or oxen to pull carts. Not sure what the truth is.
Probably the best thing one could do for the Incas and Aztecs and other pre-Columbians would be to show them what a wheel is and how it works.
As I recall the American Indians did not have the bow and arrow. It was brought by the Europeans. The horse did not exist in the New World until it was introduced by the Spaniards.
I read that before the invention of anti-biotics, 90% of deaths were caused by infectious diseases.
Now it is something like 10% with cancer and heart disease being the big ones.
Aspirin would not be hard. You can extract insulin with 1900 kitchen tech, but you need hypo needles too.
Lots of drugs we use today started as plant extracts.
I agree, if you were careful not to step on toes or get branded a witch (often the same thing) you could go far.
In Mark Twain’s “a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” a visitor from Twain’s present saves himself from beheading by commanding that the sun go dark as a demonstration of his power. Conveniently, and however far-fetched, he knew the exact time and date that a total eclipse of the sun was about to occur.
Yes! What, this? We’ve ALWAYS done it this way!
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