3 ms·

There's a bunch of youtube channels with various takes on "starting from scratch". It seems like a mix of things that are very hard to bootstrap (metal being a

There's a bunch of youtube channels with various takes on "starting from scratch". It seems like a mix of things that are very hard to bootstrap (metal being a big one!), and things that were more coincidental (lathes, saddles and riding gear, spinning looms). Having a modern high school math education would make you the greatest mathematician in history up to about Newton, but more practically speaking I'm thinking that if you understood the principles behind good charcoal, a wood lathe, and how concrete and mortar actually work you could probably kick civilization up at least a few hundred years. I'm envisioning something like this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IShxXtAev9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IShxXtAev9U although they do rely on 18th century metals there you could start from less. There's a great clickspring series where he thinks about what kind of knowledge and tools would be required to build the antikythera mechanism, I think that's a great example of "master tradesman that got surprisingly far by dedication to a few small areas, but then that knowledge was lost".

jaclaz 5y ago
Not the best example (IMHO): >how concrete and mortar actually work Would you tell Roman engineers how to deal with those? (they actually invented it, and - for certain applications - their concrete is still superior to modern one)
- showerst 5y ago
  I was thinking in terms of ancient Greece like the GP mentioned. That said, Romans invented and pioneered concrete, but they didn't really understand how or why it worked, it was just centuries of excellent trial and error. They also had problems replicating it out of base materials other than volcanic ash. Now that said I have my doubts that there are that many people on earth who could build better concrete for a given application than the Romans with no store to go buy pure materials from, I'm certainly not one of them. That's also why I didn't talk about modern steel -- In my head I vaguely understand that there's a chain from copper to wire to a rotor/stator to electrolysis to oxygen gas to the Bessemer process, but I'd be amazed if there's anyone on earth who could bootstrap it in one lifetime, even with an ancient king's resources.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    In general, as someone else mentioned in the context of agriculture, the low-hanging fruit are probably innovations that aren't especially complicated or require possibly uncommon elements and other material. Stirrups for example in Europe. Also mostly abstract (but possibly useful) scientific and medical knowledge. Anything that requires a long technology tree to implement effectively is going to be hard.

jaclaz 5y ago

Not the best example (IMHO): >how concrete and mortar actually work Would you tell Roman engineers how to deal with those? (they actually invented it, and - for certain applications - their concrete is still superior to modern one)

showerst 5y ago
I was thinking in terms of ancient Greece like the GP mentioned. That said, Romans invented and pioneered concrete, but they didn't really understand how or why it worked, it was just centuries of excellent trial and error. They also had problems replicating it out of base materials other than volcanic ash. Now that said I have my doubts that there are that many people on earth who could build better concrete for a given application than the Romans with no store to go buy pure materials from, I'm certainly not one of them. That's also why I didn't talk about modern steel -- In my head I vaguely understand that there's a chain from copper to wire to a rotor/stator to electrolysis to oxygen gas to the Bessemer process, but I'd be amazed if there's anyone on earth who could bootstrap it in one lifetime, even with an ancient king's resources.
- ghaff 5y ago
  In general, as someone else mentioned in the context of agriculture, the low-hanging fruit are probably innovations that aren't especially complicated or require possibly uncommon elements and other material. Stirrups for example in Europe. Also mostly abstract (but possibly useful) scientific and medical knowledge. Anything that requires a long technology tree to implement effectively is going to be hard.