

Ask HN: Back in time to 100 BC, what knowledge would you impart to the people? - metra

The exact year is not so important.&#60;p&#62;With everything we know now, what would you tell the people in 100 BCE that would improve society?&#60;p&#62;Reason I ask is because this question frustrates me as to how little I could actually benefit the world in 100BCE. Best thing i could think of is washing your hands. So I come to the bright minds at HN to redeem myself.
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Todd
By 100BCE the Greek classical period had already passed and Rome was on the
rise. A high level of culture existed in places and sophisticated thought was
commonly expressed in written form.

Metallurgy was sufficient. Many of the works of artisans and craftsmen haven't
been duplicated. A great majority of this knowledge was lost to time (c.f.,
the fire of Alexandria) because copying texts was an enormous amount of work.

Also, even if a great body of knowledge were imparted to people in that
period, who's to say that it would be disseminated? The knowledge that went
into the construction of the Antikythira mechanism--even the knowledge that
such knowledge existed--was lost.

So I would push up the invention of the printing press by 1.5 millenia.

Even without imparting any additional knowledge, the sheer volume of written
material that would have been passed down through the centuries would
guarantee more rapid advancement of civilization, as well as preservation of
history. We would have the works of Sappho, for example. And history would
still progress naturally, without artificial interference.

~~~
metra
Do you know how to build a printing press?

~~~
inklesspen
At its most basic, you need a couple of alphabets worth of letters and a rack
to set them on. These can be carved out of wood -- they'll need replacing
fairly often, but if you get a couple of apprentices to carve out more, you
can get a decent start with printing. Don't worry about books at first; start
with smaller texts.

Of course, to truly make it scalable you'll need metal type. If you're not
lucky enough to remember how to make a hand mould or invent lost-wax casting,
you'll want to make friends with the nearest goldsmith and see if you can
adapt some of his methods.

Around this time, if you're lucky, you might remember enough of mechanics to
invent the escapement and the sun and planet gear, to kickstart the
clockmaking industry. Sailors will thank you, as will the merchants they
supply. And if you live long enough, you might be able to combine these two
inventions to form the world's first Linotype machine.

~~~
jeffbradberry
There's a great little story by L. Sprague de Camp called "Lest Darkness Fall"
that is almost exactly this. An archaeologist from the 1930s gets stuck back
in the 6th century A.D., and "invents" the printing press (among other
things).

~~~
inklesspen
Yeah, I've read that. Also "The Man who Came Early" by Poul Anderson and a lot
of similar stories.

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noonespecial
_"I am, probably was, the sandwich maker for a small tribe. It was a bit
embarrassing really. When I first arrived, that is, when they rescued me from
the wreckage of this super high-technology spacecraft which had crashed on
their planet, they were very nice to me and I thought I should help them out a
bit. You know, I'm an educated chap from a high-technology culture, I could
show them a thing or two. And of course I couldn't. I haven't got the faintest
idea, when it comes down to it, of how anything actually works. I don't mean
like video-recorders, nobody knows how to work those. I mean just something
like a pen or an artesian well or something. Not the foggiest. I couldn't help
at all. One day I got glum and made myself a sandwich. That suddenly got them
all excited. They'd never seen one before. It was just an idea that had never
occurred to them, and I happen to quite like making sandwiches, so it all sort
of developed from there.'_

I'd tell them the same thing I tell people now. What you think you know, you
don't know. There is more to learn than you can possibly imagine, and, most
importantly, there's nothing like a good sandwich.

------
patio11
Boil water before you drink it. Water has evil spirits in it. They kill more
people than anything else and will for the next two thousand years. Fire
spirits chase the evil water spirits away -- you can tell because when they
leave the water, it bubbles.

~~~
GavinB
Pasteurization is likely to have a more visible effect. It will make the
treated milk last longer before spoiling, which is a benefit that can be
easily demonstrated. At a basic level, you just bring the temperature close to
boiling but don't actually let it boil.

~~~
patio11
I think animal milk is sort of like the tomato: a wonderful, wonderful food
which we think is long established and universally appreciated but which is,
on historical and global scales, _rounding error_ in terms of the human diet.

Widespread consumption of animal milk is like Things White People Like, 1850
AD Edition. (Really. Most milk sold at the time was buttermilk, a biproduct of
the consumption of butter. The rest was considered agricultural waste and fed
to hogs.)

If you take a quick glance around the world even today, consumption of liquid
animal milk is still not the norm outside of the West. (Japan is changing but,
even in the mid-twentieth century, "smells like butter" was one euphemism to
refer to the Americans.)

~~~
netcan
What about Africa?

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Xichekolas
Your question made me think of this:

<http://www.qwantz.com/fanart/timetravelling.jpg>

All useful information, but you have a point about the receptivity of the
world in 100BCE. If you start talking about germs spreading disease, people
are going to assume you are talking about demons and are possessed.

I'd probably try to find some leading scientific minds of the day (Jing Fang,
Marcus Pollio, or the people that created this:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism>) and work with them to
'discover' new ideas. They would probably be eager to learn, and could take
your ideas and put them in the context of the age. Of course, you'd have to
learn some ancient Greek and Chinese first. ;)

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Travis
I would tell them the benefits of standardization and assemblage. Making
things to specification is a little appreciated, but very useful, concept.

E.g., a component of America's success in many wars (although I've read the
disparity between her forces and the enemies were greatest during the
Revolutionary War) was the fact that the gunsmiths made parts to spec. So I
could buy my gun in NY and have it repaired with off the shelf parts down in
Virginia.

For all the printing press folks, I think a big part of the success of the
Gutenberg press was the fact that it was one design, could be build and
distributed, and could be fixed from standard parts. Don't ever underestimate
the influence of maintenance!

------
bozmac
I'd tell them all about the metric system so we don't have to deal with inches
today

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pg
You're probably right. Hygeine would probably be the single most useful thing
you could tell them about.

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gills
I know we look different, but really, we're all about the same; this is
electricity; this is called a lens; this is the scientific method; keep your
animals further apart; prosperity through trade, not war and looting; drink
hot tea and beer; mix tallow and ash.

Oh, and of course: e^ix = cos x + i sin x

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nzmsv
Hand washing would be a difficult sell, even as late as the 19th century:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis>

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GavinB
You almost certainly know whatever level of mathematics is above the one
available. In the Mediterranean at this point in history, they're just
circling around the idea of integration, but won't actually make it there.

Here's a protip: download wikipedia to your phone today. As soon as you
realize that you've been trapped in the past, _turn it off_. Turning it on
briefly will allow you to access stores of vital information before the
battery runs out.

Unless this is Terminator rules, and you're naked . . .

~~~
protomyth
Well, if your prepping (and this isn't the Terminator rules), get a hand crank
or solar charger for your phone.

------
gabrielroth
If you could explain evolution (and get them to believe it), you'd change the
course of intellectual history in some interesting ways.

Once you've done that, you could start on the germ theory of disease. Those
are both scientific breakthroughs that you probably understand well enough to
explain.

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herval
I'd make some gunpowder (charcoal, bovine poo and a couple of other easily
found ingredients) and become a self-proclaimed god (with special effects and
stuff). Then I'd teach my minions Klingon and we'd all be using a single
language (with less than 6k words) today.

------
BobNeumann
"In about a hundred years, there'll be a kid named Jesus born in Nazareth.
Listen to him, he really knows his stuff. Do what he says, and you'll have the
greatest society in history.

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c1sc0
There are no gods, but humans can achieve god-like feats with rational
thought. Not sure how to convince them of that though ;-)

~~~
herval
I'm pretty sure someone's probably trying that since the dawn of religion.
It's still hard to make the vast majority of people believe that (in different
levels), even TODAY, though...

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SteveC
The printing press. The cause of scurvy and how to deal with it. Canned food.
How to use cowpox as a vaccine for smallpox.

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teeja
You're on the right track there. Knowledge about staying healthy and avoiding
conflict has helped the most.

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cmars232
I'd hasten the spread of coffee cultivation, production & distribution.
Productivity boost!

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Banzai10
I would teatch them to learn from different cultures, I think it was a waste
of time destroy everything they found in each civilization they conquered like
Incas, Mayans and other civilizations in europe. Probably there were a lot a
writing documents that would be very useful to our society today.

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anactofgod
This -- "0" -- is the number "zero". Here is how you use it...

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jonmc12
Don't ingest lead.

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Asa-Nisse
Drip irrigation.

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hyung
42

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jbapple
I would teach them about quicksort and mergesort.

Little known fact: most of the technological stagnation of the dark ages was
time wasted in bubblesort.

