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I often like to fantasize how would I fare if I found myself suddenly transported into medieval times or earlier (spoiler: poorly). Articles like this make me

I often like to fantasize how would I fare if I found myself suddenly transported into medieval times or earlier (spoiler: poorly). Articles like this make me appreciate even more how little difference there is between us and humans thousands of years ago. I wouldn't have figured out how to make a working wheel, and I've seen one. I have no idea where I picked up the idea that "ancient civilizations were dumb", but the more I read, the more I appreciate how little difference there was. BTW, if you haven't, you should definitely check the "Primitive technology" channel on Youtube.

derekp7 10y ago
Two really good literature treatments of your fantasy are Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Jules Verne's Mysterious Island. They both have as major plot elements a character who has a lot of knowledge of fabrication techniques, and recreate their technology in a primitive situation (one involves time travel, the other is stranded on a primitive island). On another note, I've heard that the first thing you need to fabricate (beyond basic hand tools) is a lathe. Once you have that, you can make a better lathe, which can make various other machine shop tools, etc. until you have a whole workshop created. Although this probably assumes that you still have access to modern (as in the last couple hundred years) materials to work with.
- evincarofautumn 10y ago
  I’ve heard of bootstrapping a machine shop from a lathe as well—apparently there’s a series about it, written by this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    Gingery did even better than showing how to bootstrap from a lathe. He showed how to bootstrap the lathe itself starting from building a charcoal foundry and chunks of raw metal. Be careful, though: this is a rabbit hole that draws maker-types like rare earth electromagnets. Once you read through Gingery's books, you can easily find yourself wandering down the library stacks and Net pulling up information about how to make more-precise machine tools from less-precise tools. It is information like this that makes you realize how incredibly fragile our civilization's tech stack is. Most of our physical tech stack is read-only executable code: there isn't a civilizational "source code" that shows from first principles how to build up to our current technology layer. For that matter, not even from first principles to turn of the 20th century technology level. We take a most of our tech stack for granted. This would matter if we had a civilization-wide energy crash, so if the catastrophic-scale climate change or oil crash predictions come true then this would be more than a passing interest for just the recreational primitive tech hobbyists.
    - mitochondrion 10y ago
      If you have a lathe now, how long will it take for that lathe to disintegrate into complete irreparable unusability? With a fertility rate of 1.3 among the intelligent (read: technologically capable) peoples of the world, we are far more likely to run out of people to maintain the technology than we are to run out of the energy to power it. Indeed, if you walk into any utility company or similar, who do you see doing all the work? Middle-aged-to-old working-class white men. What happens when those men retire? Who is going to hold the infrastructure together? Unlike a civilization-wide energy crash, this is not merely a rhetorical question.
      - robbiep 10y ago
        That assumes that technologically capable people must be the progeny of technically/technologically capable people, which I put to you is not in any way, shape or form true. Are you using the number of 1.3 from people with university education in the rich world? It seems a very narrow window through which to view humanity'a 'capable' people, who exist in all shapes and forms, all colours, on all continents, and often arise from deep poverty without any formal education, my grandfather for instance
        mitochondrion 10y ago
        Technological capability is more or less intellectual ability. IQ is substantially heritable. A child's IQ is (more or less) the average of his four grandparents. The IQ of his four grandparents is largely the result of cognitive assortment within a breeding population with a certain mean IQ. If a population's mean IQ is 70, the percentage of people with an IQ above 130 is 0 (out to four decimal places). If 85, 0.1%. If 100, 2.2%. If 115, 15.9%. The mean IQ of the white race is about 100. The mean IQ of SS Africans is about 70. The mean IQ of Arabs is about 85. The mean IQ of Chinese is 105 or so. The mean IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 110-115, depending on how you measure it (they are a special case). There are probably more people possessing IQs of 130 or above in Israel than in all of Africa. The number 1.3 comes from a rough average of the fertility of the white nations and of the high-end Asian countries, namely Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and to a somewhat lesser extent mainland China.
- bobcostas55 10y ago
  Another good take on the idea is Lest Darkness Fall, which features time travel to 6th century Rome.
  - angersock 10y ago
    The introduction of stills and proper accounting/math is still one of my favorite bits from that book. :)
  - david-given 10y ago
    I can second this book: written in 1939, but it hasn't dated at all. Apart from being hilarious and great fun, it's also a suprisingly serious study of just how much technology, and I'm not talking about the modern stuff, is based on a huge pyramid of other skills and technologies which you simply can't leapfrog. Mild spoilers follow: Our hero, after being flung back in time to Rome in the year 535, is trying to prevent the fall of the late Roman Empire when it gets conquered by the Byzantines (actually the story's a lot more complex than that, so that's simplified). He tries to reinvent all sort of different pieces of military technology, and fails utterly --- turns out reliable gunpowder is really hard to make. His clocks won't keep time, his lenses aren't round, and he doesn't even both with electricity. The innovations he eventually ends up successfully introducing? Distilled spirits (a great money-maker!), Arabic notation, double-entry notekeeping, and semaphores.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Based on the old wooden wagons I've seen, lathes played no part in their construction. The spokes on the wheels had been spokeshaved (gee, maybe that's the etymology of that tool's name?) rather than turned on a lathe. The wheels as a whole were pieced together by hand so they'd be round automatically (i.e. spokes and rim segments were all the same length, held together by an iron hoop that just took shape around them when cooled). Sure this is just one example, but it is what comes to mind given TFA's subject matter. Without access to iron-working, I suppose a less durable rim material like e.g. hemp could be used, which would introduce some more complications involved in tightening. If solid rather than spoked wheels were acceptable, an out-of-round wheel on an axle can be marked with a piece of chalk-rock held in place while spinning the wheel, and then abrasive stones can be used to true the wheel to the chalk mark.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    If solid rather than spoked wheels were acceptable, an out-of-round wheel on an axle can be marked with a piece of chalk-rock held in place while spinning the wheel, and then abrasive stones can be used to true the wheel to the chalk mark. That is a rudimentary lathe.
KineticLensman 10y ago
The "what would I try to invent?" question one is fascinating. If I found myself transported back to Roman times, I'd aim to make a lens. The Romans had glass so the raw material is there. With a lens you can fairly quickly go a telescope, which has immediate military application, so would perhaps be widely adopted. Astronomy might then follow, heading off the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held back modern thinking. You can also make a microscope, which fairly quickly leads to the discovery of microscopic organisms, and perhaps the germ theory of disease. For bonus points I'd give them the decimal number system.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  Greeks had no telescope yet some of them had already devised that the Earth was orbiting around the Sun and also calculated the diameter of the Earth with reasonable accuracy.
- nine_k 10y ago
  Telephone or at least telegraph are also easy, and may be even more valuable in a military setting.
  - angersock 10y ago
    Maybe easy, but you'd need to create lots of long insulated wire--while not impossible, very expensive. Telescopes and semaphores would get you very far at a fraction of the cost.
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      Telescopes reduce the number of relays, if terrain is conducive, but don't seem transformative if you have flags already?
      - Houshalter 10y ago
        As far as I know, the romans never used semaphore. Maybe for practical reasons like not having telescopes, but maybe the idea just didn't occur to them. It would be pretty low hanging fruit for time travelers to introduce.
maxerickson 10y ago
The trick might be to try to leverage the knowledge of the contemporary craftsmen. Not sure how you establish the credibility to do that, but you don't actually need to know how to fit a wheel to utilize the concept.
Razengan 10y ago
> I often like to fantasize how would I fare if I found myself suddenly transported into medieval times or earlier I wonder the same. If I was suddenly teleported to the middle of a forest, without anything, not even my shoes and clothes, and no chance of any contact with civilization again, what SHOULD my first few tasks even be?? Imagine a modern human, ideal in health and strength and faculties, and immune to disease or aging, teleported butt-naked to a copy of the planet Earth where there never had been any humans — so no chance of radio, or rescue choppers seeing your smoke signals, or finding any technology that you didn't make yourself. The only thing that person has is a version of Wikipedia in their brain, so they know how everything is built and how nature works. How long will it take for them to resch current levels of technology, and be able to construct a device like the one you're reading this on? Would two people make a significant difference? How would you fare in that situation?
- rwmj 10y ago
  If it was one human, they'd die off before reaching any significant technological level. However someone who's been on a survival course should be able to survive for the length of their natural life (minus modern medicine), the first few days being the key. Transporting a man and a woman doesn't help much either because there probably wouldn't be sufficient genetic variety to produce a viable species. I think I read you need thousands of humans to do that, and then there's enough spare capacity beyond mere survival to ensure that knowledge gets passed on. There is a book about all this (a rather depressing book actually): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/knowledge-how-to-rebuild-our-world-from-scratch-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/knowledge-how-...
- knz 10y ago
  I'm not sure I would have the goal of the "modern world" in mind if transported to a pristine planet! Millions of people want the technology but not the stress and pollution of the rat race. A small remote coastal settlement in a temperate climate with some technology to make life easier (fishing nets, agricultural tools) sounds ok! Of course the daily grind there is probably food production and medical issues.
michaelbuckbee 10y ago
You recommended "Primitive Technology" which I thought of as well while reading the article. It would be really neat if he did an episode on making a more complicated wheel and axle structure. Also, I would highly recommend "The Cross Time Engineer" series as it's this same scenario but works through how he's able to apply his modern knowledge as leverage to work up from a boatman earning pennies to running the country. 1 - https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad-Stargard/dp/0345327624/ref=la_B000API2VY_1_4 https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad...
ronald_raygun 10y ago
I would try to do math and finance earlier. I think calculus is usually underrated when people consider "most important inventions", and the idea of investing for fractional ownership in an enterprise turned out to be non-obvious but really really useful.
- wycx 10y ago
  Also cartesian coordinates. No one drew graphs until Descartes.
a3n 10y ago
> spoiler: poorly And vice versa. We spend most of our time either learning to be a cog in society's machine, or being that cog. Most of today's cogs are useless in ancient times. "What is this 'full stack' you speak of, stranger?" Most of the past's cogs are useless today. "So you're good with sticks on wet clay? Cool story bro." Either stranger could adapt to the times, but they'd be very inefficient because they'd never be fully integrated to the larger machine, having to relearn every interaction that a native just takes for "the way things are."

derekp7 10y ago

Two really good literature treatments of your fantasy are Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Jules Verne's Mysterious Island. They both have as major plot elements a character who has a lot of knowledge of fabrication techniques, and recreate their technology in a primitive situation (one involves time travel, the other is stranded on a primitive island). On another note, I've heard that the first thing you need to fabricate (beyond basic hand tools) is a lathe. Once you have that, you can make a better lathe, which can make various other machine shop tools, etc. until you have a whole workshop created. Although this probably assumes that you still have access to modern (as in the last couple hundred years) materials to work with.

evincarofautumn 10y ago
I’ve heard of bootstrapping a machine shop from a lathe as well—apparently there’s a series about it, written by this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  Gingery did even better than showing how to bootstrap from a lathe. He showed how to bootstrap the lathe itself starting from building a charcoal foundry and chunks of raw metal. Be careful, though: this is a rabbit hole that draws maker-types like rare earth electromagnets. Once you read through Gingery's books, you can easily find yourself wandering down the library stacks and Net pulling up information about how to make more-precise machine tools from less-precise tools. It is information like this that makes you realize how incredibly fragile our civilization's tech stack is. Most of our physical tech stack is read-only executable code: there isn't a civilizational "source code" that shows from first principles how to build up to our current technology layer. For that matter, not even from first principles to turn of the 20th century technology level. We take a most of our tech stack for granted. This would matter if we had a civilization-wide energy crash, so if the catastrophic-scale climate change or oil crash predictions come true then this would be more than a passing interest for just the recreational primitive tech hobbyists.
  - mitochondrion 10y ago
    If you have a lathe now, how long will it take for that lathe to disintegrate into complete irreparable unusability? With a fertility rate of 1.3 among the intelligent (read: technologically capable) peoples of the world, we are far more likely to run out of people to maintain the technology than we are to run out of the energy to power it. Indeed, if you walk into any utility company or similar, who do you see doing all the work? Middle-aged-to-old working-class white men. What happens when those men retire? Who is going to hold the infrastructure together? Unlike a civilization-wide energy crash, this is not merely a rhetorical question.
    - robbiep 10y ago
      That assumes that technologically capable people must be the progeny of technically/technologically capable people, which I put to you is not in any way, shape or form true. Are you using the number of 1.3 from people with university education in the rich world? It seems a very narrow window through which to view humanity'a 'capable' people, who exist in all shapes and forms, all colours, on all continents, and often arise from deep poverty without any formal education, my grandfather for instance
      - mitochondrion 10y ago
        Technological capability is more or less intellectual ability. IQ is substantially heritable. A child's IQ is (more or less) the average of his four grandparents. The IQ of his four grandparents is largely the result of cognitive assortment within a breeding population with a certain mean IQ. If a population's mean IQ is 70, the percentage of people with an IQ above 130 is 0 (out to four decimal places). If 85, 0.1%. If 100, 2.2%. If 115, 15.9%. The mean IQ of the white race is about 100. The mean IQ of SS Africans is about 70. The mean IQ of Arabs is about 85. The mean IQ of Chinese is 105 or so. The mean IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 110-115, depending on how you measure it (they are a special case). There are probably more people possessing IQs of 130 or above in Israel than in all of Africa. The number 1.3 comes from a rough average of the fertility of the white nations and of the high-end Asian countries, namely Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and to a somewhat lesser extent mainland China.
bobcostas55 10y ago
Another good take on the idea is Lest Darkness Fall, which features time travel to 6th century Rome.
- angersock 10y ago
  The introduction of stills and proper accounting/math is still one of my favorite bits from that book. :)
- david-given 10y ago
  I can second this book: written in 1939, but it hasn't dated at all. Apart from being hilarious and great fun, it's also a suprisingly serious study of just how much technology, and I'm not talking about the modern stuff, is based on a huge pyramid of other skills and technologies which you simply can't leapfrog. Mild spoilers follow: Our hero, after being flung back in time to Rome in the year 535, is trying to prevent the fall of the late Roman Empire when it gets conquered by the Byzantines (actually the story's a lot more complex than that, so that's simplified). He tries to reinvent all sort of different pieces of military technology, and fails utterly --- turns out reliable gunpowder is really hard to make. His clocks won't keep time, his lenses aren't round, and he doesn't even both with electricity. The innovations he eventually ends up successfully introducing? Distilled spirits (a great money-maker!), Arabic notation, double-entry notekeeping, and semaphores.
jessaustin 10y ago
Based on the old wooden wagons I've seen, lathes played no part in their construction. The spokes on the wheels had been spokeshaved (gee, maybe that's the etymology of that tool's name?) rather than turned on a lathe. The wheels as a whole were pieced together by hand so they'd be round automatically (i.e. spokes and rim segments were all the same length, held together by an iron hoop that just took shape around them when cooled). Sure this is just one example, but it is what comes to mind given TFA's subject matter. Without access to iron-working, I suppose a less durable rim material like e.g. hemp could be used, which would introduce some more complications involved in tightening. If solid rather than spoked wheels were acceptable, an out-of-round wheel on an axle can be marked with a piece of chalk-rock held in place while spinning the wheel, and then abrasive stones can be used to true the wheel to the chalk mark.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  If solid rather than spoked wheels were acceptable, an out-of-round wheel on an axle can be marked with a piece of chalk-rock held in place while spinning the wheel, and then abrasive stones can be used to true the wheel to the chalk mark. That is a rudimentary lathe.

KineticLensman 10y ago

The "what would I try to invent?" question one is fascinating. If I found myself transported back to Roman times, I'd aim to make a lens. The Romans had glass so the raw material is there. With a lens you can fairly quickly go a telescope, which has immediate military application, so would perhaps be widely adopted. Astronomy might then follow, heading off the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held back modern thinking. You can also make a microscope, which fairly quickly leads to the discovery of microscopic organisms, and perhaps the germ theory of disease. For bonus points I'd give them the decimal number system.

ekianjo 10y ago
Greeks had no telescope yet some of them had already devised that the Earth was orbiting around the Sun and also calculated the diameter of the Earth with reasonable accuracy.
nine_k 10y ago
Telephone or at least telegraph are also easy, and may be even more valuable in a military setting.
- angersock 10y ago
  Maybe easy, but you'd need to create lots of long insulated wire--while not impossible, very expensive. Telescopes and semaphores would get you very far at a fraction of the cost.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    Telescopes reduce the number of relays, if terrain is conducive, but don't seem transformative if you have flags already?
    - Houshalter 10y ago
      As far as I know, the romans never used semaphore. Maybe for practical reasons like not having telescopes, but maybe the idea just didn't occur to them. It would be pretty low hanging fruit for time travelers to introduce.

maxerickson 10y ago

The trick might be to try to leverage the knowledge of the contemporary craftsmen. Not sure how you establish the credibility to do that, but you don't actually need to know how to fit a wheel to utilize the concept.

Razengan 10y ago

> I often like to fantasize how would I fare if I found myself suddenly transported into medieval times or earlier I wonder the same. If I was suddenly teleported to the middle of a forest, without anything, not even my shoes and clothes, and no chance of any contact with civilization again, what SHOULD my first few tasks even be?? Imagine a modern human, ideal in health and strength and faculties, and immune to disease or aging, teleported butt-naked to a copy of the planet Earth where there never had been any humans — so no chance of radio, or rescue choppers seeing your smoke signals, or finding any technology that you didn't make yourself. The only thing that person has is a version of Wikipedia in their brain, so they know how everything is built and how nature works. How long will it take for them to resch current levels of technology, and be able to construct a device like the one you're reading this on? Would two people make a significant difference? How would you fare in that situation?

rwmj 10y ago
If it was one human, they'd die off before reaching any significant technological level. However someone who's been on a survival course should be able to survive for the length of their natural life (minus modern medicine), the first few days being the key. Transporting a man and a woman doesn't help much either because there probably wouldn't be sufficient genetic variety to produce a viable species. I think I read you need thousands of humans to do that, and then there's enough spare capacity beyond mere survival to ensure that knowledge gets passed on. There is a book about all this (a rather depressing book actually): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/knowledge-how-to-rebuild-our-world-from-scratch-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/knowledge-how-...
knz 10y ago
I'm not sure I would have the goal of the "modern world" in mind if transported to a pristine planet! Millions of people want the technology but not the stress and pollution of the rat race. A small remote coastal settlement in a temperate climate with some technology to make life easier (fishing nets, agricultural tools) sounds ok! Of course the daily grind there is probably food production and medical issues.

michaelbuckbee 10y ago

You recommended "Primitive Technology" which I thought of as well while reading the article. It would be really neat if he did an episode on making a more complicated wheel and axle structure. Also, I would highly recommend "The Cross Time Engineer" series as it's this same scenario but works through how he's able to apply his modern knowledge as leverage to work up from a boatman earning pennies to running the country. 1 - https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad-Stargard/dp/0345327624/ref=la_B000API2VY_1_4 https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad...

ronald_raygun 10y ago

I would try to do math and finance earlier. I think calculus is usually underrated when people consider "most important inventions", and the idea of investing for fractional ownership in an enterprise turned out to be non-obvious but really really useful.

wycx 10y ago
Also cartesian coordinates. No one drew graphs until Descartes.

a3n 10y ago

> spoiler: poorly And vice versa. We spend most of our time either learning to be a cog in society's machine, or being that cog. Most of today's cogs are useless in ancient times. "What is this 'full stack' you speak of, stranger?" Most of the past's cogs are useless today. "So you're good with sticks on wet clay? Cool story bro." Either stranger could adapt to the times, but they'd be very inefficient because they'd never be fully integrated to the larger machine, having to relearn every interaction that a native just takes for "the way things are."