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[–] 30 points 5 months ago (2 children)

200 years isn't that long ago, but call it 2,000 years: If you go back with at least a cursory grasp of the scientific method, that might be enough to get things up and running, if not for you then for the more intelligent and scientifically-minded types around you. "Try to prove yourself wrong at every step of the process" isn't a natural impulse for most of us, but once taught and understood, it changes the game.

You could also drop a few tantalising nuggets even if you don't know what they mean:

  • E=MC^2^
  • Basic concept of evolution by natural selection
  • Germ theory of disease
  • Electromagnetism
  • Lenses for microscopy and telescopy, using the same lenses to start fires with the sun
  • Electrical conductivity of different materials (e.g. metal good, wool bad)
  • The basic components of a battery
  • Newton's first few laws
  • Radio waves
  • Calculus
  • Periodic table of elements

Those are all things you can read about in any library, so you could do a crash course and memorise the broad strokes or write them down, or just take the books with you if that's allowed.

If it were me, however, I'd just instantly kill myself.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    I'd say the only thing you need to get electricity started is a civilization with sufficiently ready access to copper and lodestone that they're not luxury materials.

    If you plop out in egypt or rome you can totally do it, it'll just be a matter of convincing people to let you try.
    Get some copper wire, some flat-ish bits of lodestone, and follow this: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Simple-Electric-Generator Then you crank that soulja boy and find some way to show off the electricity, maybe just have it arc between the wire ends or make a frog leg twitch or something (assuming that doesn't just horrify people). Or just make two of this setup and wire them to each other, so you can show that spinning one end makes the other end spin as well.

    Hopefully that'll make some people go "oh shit what if.."

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    Adding to this, Alessandro Volto invented the voltaic pile, the first true electric battery, in 1793, 233 years ago. Faraday invented the first electric motor in 1820. Neither built these entirely if their own creation, like all science they built them on the theories, discoveries, and work of those who came before. They progressed the application of all that knowledge into one new effort and are remembered because their creations took the process to the next level with inventions that reliably produced the intended outcome repeatedly.

    While the average modern person couldn’t built either of those from scratch even if the knowledge is accessible to them, it’s also not like most people 200 years ago were sitting around a fire in animal skins. There’s not that big of a gap in how most people live now and lived 200 years ago compared to 50,000 years ago.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago

    1826 sure looked primitive.

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  • [–] 25 points 5 months ago
    [–] 12 points 5 months ago

    200y ago electricity was already a known thing, though not something you got home yet.

    One thing you could do, however, is buy up "worthless" land around the Middle East for when oil starts being drilled

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    Your biggest issue with tech, even if you know how to make it, is getting the materials.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago*

    Everyone tends to forget the tools to make the tools to make the tools to make tools precise enough for half the shit we make. Or consistent enough. There's alot of steps between sticks stones and fire to pretty much anything today.

    Sure you don't need an industrial revolution for ALOT of stuff. But hot damn are you gonna run into issues without it, eventually

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    which is why you should learn about medieval technology, that's something you can generally make from scratch with a team of workers.

    Yeah if you only have stone tools it'll probably be shitty, but a shitty waterwheel that spins a shitty lathe is still plenty useful. It's kind of nuts how much luxury you can get in no time at all if you just know what's possible to make.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (11 children)

    I know how electricity works, but without any technology more advanced than flint tools I'm gonna just have to go with "magic."

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (10 children)

    You go fire - > kiln - > charcoal - > furnace - > steel and copper - > permanent magnets - > electric motor.

    The tricky thing is that you need a naturally occurring magnet (lodestone) to make the first steel magnet. If you happen to have a magnet on you you can do heat treatment of the steel, rub the magnet to align the atoms and get yourself a better magnet.

    After you got the electric motor you both have a generator and a motor easy peasy.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    I died of simple infection while building the kiln. No antibiotics.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    You can use chemical batteries to create electric current without magnets.

    You can also create weak permanent magnets by just hitting iron with a hammer.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    Looked it up, this looks the easiest to tech up. You still have to heat it up to a dark red color, align it north to south and then hammer. It uses the earth's magnetic field to magnetise.

    Then tech up to stronger steel magnets.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    The wire part of that isn't trivial. They were pulling wires in the middle ages for holding armor together, but high volume and specialization didn't come until the Renaissance. Good insulation pretty much requires plastics. Wax could be used before that but it's not as good. Your early motors will have shorts that reduce power or kill it entirely.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    Well yeah, definitely not practical to do it with zero tech, a water wheel is better in most cases. Even a bike with gears for an unmovable drill is nice.

    But the electric motor can tech up some interesting chemistry later on.

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  • [–] 19 points 5 months ago (8 children)

    Strong disagree.

    Put a guy back 200 years ago with the concept of things to come and let the great thinker of the time stand on the shoulders of an Everyman from today, we would be at least a hundred years ahead of where we are currently.

    There were some very intelligent people back then who just didn't know the rules of the game they were playing. They had to figure out the rules so future inventors could build off of them.

    Go back 200 years and say "everything is made of things from the periodic table, it has rows and columns" and you instantly revolutionize chemistry. If you know of acids and bases you're even further along. There are ways to communicate long distances without using sounds or visible light, boom twenty years later I guarantee someone will have figured it out, it's terribly obvious once you know it's possible, but why would you assume invisible communication is possible since it's so outlandish to our seemingly natural everyday rules?

    The only thing you need to do is survive being proclaimed a heretic, you need to get open minded thinkers to hear you, because the closed mindedness was even more entrenched in society than it is today.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (7 children)

    Credibility is your biggest challenge, if you go back and inhabit a big name thinker's body you'll accomplish things, if you go back as an outcast stranger who appeared in the woods one day, you're probably going to die in a cell somewhere, or just of exposure, before you get anyone's serious attention about "what makes up everything."

    Reminds me of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    you're not completely incorrect, but you seem to have a very pop-sci picture of how the past worked.

    If you suddenly appeared in the forest one day it's AFAIK perfectly possible that people would treat you as any immigrant, just go down to the church and get registered and everything will be just dandy so long as you can do some sort of work.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (4 children)

    Weren't there anti-vagrant and anti-spy laws?

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (3 children)

    i'm not quite sure how that would work since pilgrimages and other long-distance travel was pretty normal, and there was no way to transfer information faster than said travel (especially not just to get papers on a random pilgrim).

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    Gdamn it! Is everything I read the past decade just disinformation?

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago

    You'd speak practically a different form of English, you'd be unprepared for virtually every modern day hardship, you'd be unskilled at gaining resources and being gainfully employed. I think after about 3 days of interacting with people, they'd get really spooked by you, and that would be that.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    put lemon juice in shiny metal you found in cave put lot of it 5 lemons juice take shiny metal string attach to eachother make big big fire

    wash hand in fire boiled river water and do surgery with washed hand and washed utensil

    you know how make beer? ok now put hands and tool in beer when surgery

    dirty hand cause death .

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Lemon juice will be a problem. You'll have to make lemons first.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Alcohol in beer isn't strong enough to disinfect. Don't dip your surgical tool is beer.

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  • [–] -2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    make very strong beer. ferment longer

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    I don't think you can do it with beer. The yeast used dies from the alcohol they produce. I'm sure there is nasty bacteria that can survive in concentrations of alcohol above what yeast can.

    You could make vodka, or moonshine, but that requires distillation and is a more advanced tech.

    Soap (made from animal fat) and water should do fine for your hands. Use a fire to disinfect any tools before you use them (let them cool off first). That should majorly help with survival.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    My only issue is turning spinning into power. I know we need spinning, and spinning is easy. Water mills are a thing and have been for ages.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    You would at least know about penicillin, germ theory, how cells work, and about atoms. So much theory and philosophy would be skipped, for better or worse.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    That's one thing that's kinda bothers me a little bit in animes (Isekais).Like who the fuck knows exactly the chemical process on how to make everything and how every details gets done just by giving a vague description of something they only heard of.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    if you transported me 200 years in the past, i would just go to turkey and enjoy steam powered kebab. dudes knew what was up

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    Spin a copper wire between 2 magnets

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Okay. Make a copper wire. Make a magnet.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    Even thousands of years ago, you can find native copper in some places. If you're lucky this isn't that hard. Also, I'm not certain on the properties required, but I think you just need a decent conductor, not copper specifically. Copper is just conductive, pretty available, and easy to work with. Also, there are naturally forming magnets. You don't need to make one.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    I don't know. I know a lot of songs, and I'm a halfway decent singer, so I could probably do quite alright just being a traveling minstrel.

    Get my hands on a lute, or some sort of stringed instrument, and figure out the difference between that and a guitar, and I'm set.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    Maybe they would invent nothing, but at least we would get rid of the anti-vaxxx people.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    Making eletricity is easy! We just need magnets.

    Now to make magnets it's the hard part. We need magic!

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    Where dinosaurs ?

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  • False. I would invent the snuggie.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    Washing hands before surgery. Or germ theory in general.

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