"You see this book?"
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?
“Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen) is a good go-back-in-time story by H. Beam Piper. It’s fiction but he put a lot of thought into introducing new tech, gunpowder in particular. The “bad guys” were not using an optimum formula for their powder, Calvin had a better way and it shot better, harder, faster. So the bad guys spread the word that THEIR powder was expunged of evil spirits- but Calvin’s powder was not, and anyone using it was doomed to an unpleasant afterlife! The novel was originally called Gunpowder God
Or you could explain that a vigorous soapy baptism of the hands/wounds/etc, accompanied by prayer, could remove unclean spirits.
Reversing the question:
If the world’s technology went back in time 1,000 years, due to something like EMP that fried everything more advanced than hand tools and for whatever reason kept everyone from directly reconstituting today’s technology, what knowledge and education would we need to rebuild? How ugly would things get before we restored a stable level of technology? [Obviously pretty ugly because we couldn’t feed anywhere near 7 billion people for even one year without technology, chemical fertilizers, modern irrigation, modern harvesting and transportation.]
It would be like a city slicker moving to a farm. One wouldn’t make it at all (even for a short period of time).
"Draw a picture of what you ate for breakfast on this plank. Nail it to the front of your house. Spend the whole day wandering around the neighborhood, looking at your friend's drawings and writings. Argue about them sometimes. Tomorrow, different drawing. repeat, ad infinitum"
INDEX
Lamas baby!!!!
No way, too many unknown unknowns. I doubt if any of us would last more than a week; the obvious problem would be sanitation - we wouldn’t be able to eat the same food or drink the same water that the people of 1015 did. Montezuma’s revenge turned up to 11, and it would kill you, end of story.
Are you the Witness?
I think I would plagiarize popular songs like Gangnum Style, Achy Breaky Heart, and Funky Town and I would be come filthy rich!
"You see this book?"
Precisely the point. Steep learning curve. ;D
Good choice!
Just as I surmised.
Biff would start making wager after wager, eventually winning a lot of dough.
It wouldn't take long for someone to find out just HOW biff knows these things, and they'd forbid him from betting.
Like someone who makes a killing in the casinos.
You'd quickly be "invited" to never return.
One of my favorite time travel movies is Time After Time, with HG Wells coming from 1890 to 1979.
He finds out that girlfriend is going to be murdered in the upcoming week by Jack the Ripper and goes to her apartment with a gun to protect her.
The cops nab him and question him.
He explains over and over to the police who he is, and how he came to the future.
Finally he says: OK, I'll confess to ANYTHING! Just send a car!
The police do and find a dead body in the apartment.
In the movie, the cops just say "I'm so sorry, you can go now"
In real life, no WAY they would just "let him go".
They'd beat him with a rubber hose until he spilled his guts on just what ELSE he knows.
We got pretty precise with out black powder formula. My Dad made a balance scale with a sealed bearing and some metal rod. Once we got the ratios by weight (don't recall right now) we measured out aluminum foil and cut it ito 3 pieces by x-amount of square inches to use as the counter weights. We would put it in a tobacco can that was brazed to a fitting that allowed us to attach it to a motor held in the vise to do a some slow turning and let the homemade .45 slugs we put in it do the grinding process. When ready to test, we would put a small amount out and light it to see how it burned and check the residue. then we could fine tune it by adding what was needed to get the most complete burn. If we wanted a real fast burn, we would use a putty knife and a Masonite board to work the required amount into a talcum powder fineness - get a match any where near it and it would just go poof - made some nice cherry-bomb type devices with the real fine stuff....By mixture and how fine/coarse you made it, you could make it burn anywhere from instantaneous to a slow fuse fizzle.
(A) - C - G - D - E (2x)
CHORUS:
A
Black powder and alcohol,
D
When the states and the cities fall,
G E
When your back is against the wall;
A
Black powder and alcohol.
A
Gimme charcoal to the measure two:
F
Send the bullet where you want it to.
D
Gimme sulphur to the measure three:
A
Make the powder gonna keep you free.
G E
Gimme saltpetre, measure fifteen:
A
Sweetest shooting that you’ve ever seen! (chorus)
Gimme water, yeast, and veggie-trash:
Leave it sitting in the slurry-mash.
When it’s ready, put it in the still:
If you can’t heat it, then the sunlight will.
Draw the alcohol away, and then
Put the slurry back, and start again! (chorus)
Booze’ll clean your cuts, or run your car.
You can make it anywhere you are.
Black powder in your cartridge shell
Will send the robbers running clean to Hell.
You can make them if you just know how.
So kids, remember what I tell you now! (chorus & repeat
chorus)
“Black Powder and Alcohol”, Leslie Fish. Leslie was worried about, well, the fall of civilization and wanted to pass along two key technologies, BP and EtOH. A catchy tune!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGJ7E0TkVa0
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