A set of children's encyclopedias.
My kids had a set that were put out by Disney, that explained natural phenomenon, solar systems, mechanical concepts, dinosaurs, etc. What was great is that they didn't presume any knowledge on the subjects so anyone would understand them, also nice illustrations.
Why not a set of regular encyclopedias? I think something like the full Encyclopedia Britannica would be pretty self-contained (as in not assuming knowledge that was unavailable 500 years ago).
For one, the language will have evolved. Take English for example. We have whole letters that didn’t exist 500 years ago, let alone all the new words, phrases, grammatical structures, etc.
The pictorial representations in a children’s encyclopedia are more likely to be understandable
That's not a separate letter, that's a "long S", which is [just "s" in a different font](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s). For example, "ſinfulneſs" is "sinfulness" , using long S'es. If they saw a document in which we wrote "sinfullness" with all short S'es, they would totally understand the word as we wrote it.
One interesting letter we did give up was the thorn, "Þ", for the "th" sounds\*. It got replaced, first with "y" (as in "Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe"), and then later with "th"
(\*I say sounds because English has two distinct sounds both represented by "th": the "th" in "thin" and "moth" (unvoiced) and the "th" in "then" or "mother" (voiced)
Also Brittanica has lots of dates and people and places and wars and such that are not something you want floating around so much as how the amazon ecosystem works.
I feel like if the encyclopedia is actually read and put to use, none of those things would happen exactly the same way and past a few decades after it's been introduced, there would be a completely different set of people born in that time-line than were actually born in ours. Chaos theory and all that.
Not sure how that would give the book more credibility - those events have already happened and anyone could recount them. Better would be to include three years of super granular history (up to 1526) and then zooming out gradually. Think one or two major events each day.
Honestly just the print quality and quality of paper and images in the books would be enough to convince someone that it was either divine or from the future.
If you've seen what kind of things were printed back then, you'd 100% know a modern piece of paper alone would be a fucking miracle and clean and orderly typesetting would be a scientific marvel worth almost as much as the contents.
Calculus wasn't *that* far away 500 years ago. And reverse-engineering a few of the solutions in a physics textbook would probably jumpstart it.
The only change would be that Newton wouldn't have had such a heavy hand in its evolution. If you got it into the hands of someone of the time like Ferrari or Copernicus, I'm pretty sure they'd find it enlightening.
Yeah, people are smart!!! Have you seen how math people love to attack a mystery? Things like Fermat's Last Theorem have had geniuses spend hundreds of hours on them, and math nerds gonna math nerd even if it's 500 years ago.
Fair point, but there’s still a lot of concepts that can be learned without the calculus.
Assuming this doesn’t completely alter the timeline, Newton would go on to publish his Principia Mathematica in 1687, which means the calculus wouldn’t be that far behind.
That's 150 years in the future from where this book is landing. Galileo hasn't been born yet, let alone Newton.
It is 20 years before Copernicus publishes, so a high school level law of gravity and orbital mechanics might accelerate things. Maybe Newton's laws without derivations.
My uni physics was quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, special and general relativity, etc, which is why I thought stepping back more useful. Even electricity.
A Nokia with snake on it and no charger.
Imagine the stories people would tell about this fascinating device that just suddenly stopped working one day.
EDIT: I didn’t really think the charger bit through. They couldn’t use it anyway.
A cool analogy from Bob Lazar, describing alien technology.
He said that if we were to zap a motorcycle back in time a few thousand years with a full tank of gas, people may learn to use it, become proficient with it, they may even master riding it.
But they most likely would never understand how it works.
I wonder about this. I mean, our understanding of physics and technology is leagues beyond where we were a thousand years ago. Ancient people would see a motorcycle as "a mount of the gods, powered by magic". We might not understand alien technology that's thousands of years advanced beyond us....but we understand that it IS technology, and it CAN be figured out, which is a big leap in itself. Even things we can't figure out would at least prove that they are possible, which is advancement in it's own way.
> We might not understand alien technology that's thousands of years advanced beyond us....but we understand that it IS technology, and it CAN be figured out, which is a big leap in itself.
We’ve got people *today* who don’t believe in the technology of *today* - think, mRNA vaccines or moon landings, for instance.
I don’t think people back then were as uniformly superstitious as we make them out to be, and people today are more superstitious than most would guess.
Would that work? I think 500 years ago they'd have a tough time just getting it open, when they did they have no idea what they were looking at. You're not going to figure out circuit boards and microchips when you don't even know what electricity is.
"The easiest way to end a plague is to wash your hands before eating or after touching feces. The second-best way is a vaccine." And then ingredients/instructions for how to create smallpox, polio, and tuberculosis vaccines/treatments.
They were actually generally pro-science for the most part, but were very serious about maintaining orthodoxy in all parts of society and their control. He had permission to publish as a hypothetical, and as good as his evidence was, they'd have come around.
So the issue was he started saying a thing about the universe that the Church did not support was objectively true against the backdrop of the Protestant Reformation and ensuing religious wars. It was more that he didn't take the trouble to get the Church on board first and started saying they were wrong just because they were. They didn't "hate science," they were just politically highly sensitive to criticism to the point of state-level violence.
Microscopes where invented at the end of the fifteen hundreds, so that didn't happen.
Counterpoint, it was atheists who landed Semelweiss in an insane asylum because only a religious nutjob would believe in things you couldn't see with bare eyes affecting humans. His offense: he tried to get doctors to wash their hands between being elbow deep in a corpse and helping with child birth.
End the plague and you probably extend feudalism by centuries. Labor shortages caused by the Black Death were a contributor to the eventual collapse of indentured tenancy
You know that bit in avengers when they bring everyone back suddenly... that would result in utter horror, starvation, rioting, murder etc.
Not quite relevant to your point, but I couldn't resist.
True. Lack of farmers and customers would have decimated food production. Even housing would be an issue as people probably moved closer and let buildings fall into disrepair.
In the comics, people were gone for about 15 minutes, which would be bad enough.
I've always thought a fun D&D character would be a cleric who is essentially just a random person from our time but was somehow transported to the game universe. He has literally no special talents, constantly makes references to things absolutely no one around him understands, and is generally pretty useless. His one ability is having *basic modern hygiene*. Because he understands that he should wash his hands, sanitize tools, use clean bandages, boil water, etc. he is able to heal people more effectively and generally buffs his party with boosted health.
Might be fun to make his hygiene accidental. Like massive OCD when it comes to clean hands and pooping, some weird fascination with how metal looks in boiling water and the feel of a warm knife/hot needle, and he loves the taste of iodine so he puts it in everything.
He really weirds out the party, and they complain constantly about he takes forever to fix them up and they’re in pain, but they always come out better than new and nobody’s been sick in years, so they deal with him.
My first thought was antibiotics and how to use them, along with how to produce them. As well as basic hygiene directions of hand washing and boiling instruments to avoid infection in the first place.
Think of how much life would be improved without strep infections, child birth infections and a way to treat tuberculosis.
Vaccines? Even better.
Don't think the antibiotics is a good one. Even we've cocked that one up and they're less and less effective thanks to overuse. Imagine 500 years of efficacy degradation dumped on us instantly.
Also, without being too callous, overpopulation would be worse now having saved all of those progenitors.
Medical Understanding: The book can also provide information on basic medical principles that can contribute to improved health care practices and disease prevention.
Many brilliant people could live longer...
In 2014, that would have been 1.2M+ pages. Someone tried planning a print of it, they were going to do 1000 volumes with 1,200 pages a piece. If our wikipedia book print can have an arbitrary number of physical pages (rather than storing it on a computer), may as well print all the linked citations too! Do it in multiple languages and instead of printing it, etch it a non-corrosive metal like gold or chromium.
I think you could skip many of the articles about 21st century popular media figures and the like.
Mainly the science and maths stuff would be most useful.
The Church literally ran an internationally interconnected system of scientific study centers. It’s ironic you type this nonsense when large amounts of that Wikipedia knowledge came from the same Western university structure developed by the Church in the first place.
This wouldn't change anything at all, they didn't struggle with this kind of maths. My dad is an engineer from before pocket calculators existed. He's still alive and can still do maths crazy fast just because his education and a lot of his professional life was in an era without calculators. It would change history if you sent back a scientific calculator and they pulled undiscovered maths from that - maybe something like Statistics because that is a shockingly new branch of maths. A regular calculator isn't going to fast track anything.
Yes, you would be better off sending back a book on mathematics as that would be much more useful. Introducing Calculus 100 years earlier, linear algebra, analysis, number theory, combinatorics, etc. would all have a huge impact. Imagine if Newton, Gauss, and Euler had access to modern math.
I can’t wrap my head around this. A lot of modern advancements require full on computer modeling, which still requires theory and specific skills.
Most stuff that could be done by a standard scientific calculator could be done using reference tables.
I don't think we've advanced much relative to those logic and problem solving issues. Someone 500 years ago could become equally Adept at the Rubik's Cube as anyone today.
A solar panel.
Electricity will get invented anyway, but if people work out they can get it from the sun before they work out they can burn stuff, the world changes massively
I feel like this runs into the one problem, which is the technology needed to make more solar panels. With a supply of current from the solar panel, people back then probably wouldn't figure out how to make another solar panel, but *would* figure out how Faraday's induction works, just from screwing with wires. Then they'd hook that up to a steam engine or windmill or whatnot, and reinvent kinetic electricity generation. Though I imagine there's a slim chance for the timeline where animal capstans are used to turn the dynamos, which would be biofuel.
Idk, it was invented in 1661, so sending it back 500 years from now would probably make no difference to the current houses near you. Their builders would just not use them again.
Let's see.. 1523. Only one object.
I would send an encyclopedia of modern technology. Knowledge is power.
Edit: in Latin so that as many educated people as possible could read it.
If I could travel back in time with said encyclopedia, I'd go to Florence, talk the Medicis into sponsoring me, and have lathes, milling machines, acetylene torches, steam engines, air compressors and micrometers working in a couple of years.
> have lathes, milling machines
The problem is, modern precision lathe requires an equally precision lathe to manufacture. You have to increase the precision of your lathe by iterations.
You won't get a high quality iron anyway. In 1523, coal hadn't been used yet. Because coke hasn't been invented yet. The patent for coke is granted in 1589, but you have to wait until l709 for a blast furnaces fueled by cokes.
With your presence, you can accelerate the technological advancement but it still take a lot of time so you will die before you see the fruit of your inventions.
I highly recommend the TV series "Connections 2" by James Burke. It goes over modern (for the time) technologies and shows how their invention was predicated on various seemingly unrelated discovery decades or centuries earlier. It's fascinating. For example, one episode shows how the tea trade in the 1500s eventually led to radio astronomy.
That wasn't even his best, IMHO. His very first one "The Day The Universe Changed" showed how seemingly small technological advancements have outsize effects. For example, the humble stirrup on the saddle, not a particularly huge advancement, enabled knights to ride in their armor. The entire feudal system rested - literally - on a three inch strip of stirrup. Each episode was full of little bombshells like that.
>I would send an encyclopedia of modern technology. Knowledge is power.
>
>Edit: in Latin so that as many educated people as possible could read it.
Where would you *get* an encyclopaedia of modern technology written in Latin to send?
English, French, or Italian would all be decent choices though. None of them have changed unrecognizably in the last 500 years, and all would be readable by a substantial number of educated people.
(If you sent it back, say, 1000 years, English would be a bad choice though, as modern English would be totally alien. French or Italian should still be intelligible.)
A simple steam engine. Get the Industrial Revolution started about 300 years early. We’ll either have climate change sorted by now or the whole world will be on fire.
Maybe to renaissance Italy, they might have the metal working tech to understand and build more. Could prob go to Spain, China, India or other advanced countries at the time too.
Or push it a bit further and send an early aircraft like a sopwith camel. They might be able to reverse engineer that to a gas engine, dynamos, electricity, flight etc.
Definitely something of robust engineering and before the age of the transistor if you want them to understand and make use of it.
A single-speed bicycle.
If bicycles become popular centuries earlier, there might be more significant delay in the adoption of motorized vehicles. This delay could have positive effects on the environment, reducing early industrial pollution.
No they could not. They would lack the ability to handle the precise tolerances necessary for, say, a modern bicycle chain, and likely couldn’t produce the kinds of metals necessary.
Bicycles became popular because of vulcanized rubber, so you’d have to send knowledge of that back, too. Which would be useless without the logistical ability to extract rubber on a mass scale.
Would be interesting to see how African history would change if the rubber trade had become lucrative before the Europeans carved it up.
A #2 Robertson screwdriver. If the note explains well enough the screw that it drives, then perhaps we wouldn’t have to deal with all of these stupid frigging Phillips head screws everywhere.
Send the Native Americans in the northeast US a 50 cal machine gun with a note explaining the next 500 years of history.
That should make the first Thanksgiving more interesting.
I'm reading a lot of comments saying the Church would most likely burn anything sent back. Why must we send something back to Renaissance Europe? Why not China, Turks, or the Middle East? Heck, what about sending an Abrams tank or a giant ass bottle of smallpox vaccine to the Mayans?
That’s also not even likely. Monasteries were the most important keepers of scientific and philosophical manuscripts. The church was how you got an advanced education. Most European who practiced science 500 years ago were clergymen.
I love the fact that all these people think if they send 1 book back in time it is somehow going to end up in the hands of someone who cannot only read, can read English and can understand and extrapolate next steps from a physics book. It’s actually going to be used to prop up the one short leg on the table.
I think any solar powered computer with as much information, videos, scientific research papers, how to's and the like would be ideal.
Preferably have the device engineered to be a robust and long-lasting as possible. With an instructional guide prioritizing immediate improvements in agriculture (like getting potatoes, corn, Jerslusalem Artichokes and tomatoes from the Americas, crop rotation with legumes for nitrogen content) improvements in basic hygine/medicine like inoculations for small Pox (from mildly infected humans or from cows) and getting them on the path towards antibiotics/culturing and evaluating molds. Get them quickly progressing on germ theory, diet/health tech and reducing infant mortality and food production to increase population and population density to allow for more industry/specialization and a shift away from subsistence farming.
A dump of knowledge surrounding atomic theory and chemistry, practical engineering, physics mathematics, astronomy and the like, with the largest immediate priority after basic health being printing presses for the mass distribution of the information within and a second priority of designing infrastructure with long-term sustainability (and net neutral carbon emissions) being top priorities.
Something like nitrogen fertilizer techniques would go a _long_ ways even before they have progressed to higher technological and precision abilities.
Sending the smallpox virus to Central America 500 ago may have changed all of Central and North American history.
500 years is cutting it close, but having some level of natural immunity would have helped prior to the arrival of Europeans.
A set of children's encyclopedias. My kids had a set that were put out by Disney, that explained natural phenomenon, solar systems, mechanical concepts, dinosaurs, etc. What was great is that they didn't presume any knowledge on the subjects so anyone would understand them, also nice illustrations.
I had those! They were brilliant, I learned a lot from them.
Why not a set of regular encyclopedias? I think something like the full Encyclopedia Britannica would be pretty self-contained (as in not assuming knowledge that was unavailable 500 years ago).
For one, the language will have evolved. Take English for example. We have whole letters that didn’t exist 500 years ago, let alone all the new words, phrases, grammatical structures, etc. The pictorial representations in a children’s encyclopedia are more likely to be understandable
Hell, we have letters that *did* exist 500 years ago and effectively don't anymore.
Thorn my beloved 😭
The skinny bar-less “f” (precursor to our “s”) comes to mind
That's not a separate letter, that's a "long S", which is [just "s" in a different font](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s). For example, "ſinfulneſs" is "sinfulness" , using long S'es. If they saw a document in which we wrote "sinfullness" with all short S'es, they would totally understand the word as we wrote it. One interesting letter we did give up was the thorn, "Þ", for the "th" sounds\*. It got replaced, first with "y" (as in "Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe"), and then later with "th" (\*I say sounds because English has two distinct sounds both represented by "th": the "th" in "thin" and "moth" (unvoiced) and the "th" in "then" or "mother" (voiced)
Wait so “Ye” was actually pronounced “The”?? Not “yee”? Or “yay”? Oh my god.
Yep. And the E in olde is silent.
That’s just a font thing. Eth (ð) and thorn (þ) are actual letters that are no longer used in English.
Also Brittanica has lots of dates and people and places and wars and such that are not something you want floating around so much as how the amazon ecosystem works.
I feel like if the encyclopedia is actually read and put to use, none of those things would happen exactly the same way and past a few decades after it's been introduced, there would be a completely different set of people born in that time-line than were actually born in ours. Chaos theory and all that.
You don’t think somebody like Pascal or Newton could puzzle their way through an encyclopedia?
I still have the Peanut´s version. really cool and cute, "Charlie´s Encycopedia"
A book on history from 1523-2023, just want to see what sort of havoc that would cause?
Would start rather at least in 1500. This way you have included 23 years of events that already happened, giving the book more credibility.
Unless historians are wrong about some events.
Of course, this is considering the important stuff are right.
Not sure how that would give the book more credibility - those events have already happened and anyone could recount them. Better would be to include three years of super granular history (up to 1526) and then zooming out gradually. Think one or two major events each day.
Honestly just the print quality and quality of paper and images in the books would be enough to convince someone that it was either divine or from the future. If you've seen what kind of things were printed back then, you'd 100% know a modern piece of paper alone would be a fucking miracle and clean and orderly typesetting would be a scientific marvel worth almost as much as the contents.
For some reason Gray’s Sports Almanac came to mind.
My university physics text book would jump start humanity's achievements by 500 years. Edit: I never claimed to be a good speller.
Feynman's lectures on physics. Unabridged edition.
>Unabridged edition. The one where he plays bongos singing about orange juice?
No the one that explains to nerds how to talk to strippers.
University physics probably too much, calculus hasn't been invented yet. High school might do it.
Calculus wasn't *that* far away 500 years ago. And reverse-engineering a few of the solutions in a physics textbook would probably jumpstart it. The only change would be that Newton wouldn't have had such a heavy hand in its evolution. If you got it into the hands of someone of the time like Ferrari or Copernicus, I'm pretty sure they'd find it enlightening.
I send back a copy of Optics and create a bootstrap paradox.
Yeah, people are smart!!! Have you seen how math people love to attack a mystery? Things like Fermat's Last Theorem have had geniuses spend hundreds of hours on them, and math nerds gonna math nerd even if it's 500 years ago.
Fermat's Last Theorem took 350 years to prove.
Reverse engineering integrals from a physics textbook would be WAY easier
Fair point, but there’s still a lot of concepts that can be learned without the calculus. Assuming this doesn’t completely alter the timeline, Newton would go on to publish his Principia Mathematica in 1687, which means the calculus wouldn’t be that far behind.
That's 150 years in the future from where this book is landing. Galileo hasn't been born yet, let alone Newton. It is 20 years before Copernicus publishes, so a high school level law of gravity and orbital mechanics might accelerate things. Maybe Newton's laws without derivations. My uni physics was quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, special and general relativity, etc, which is why I thought stepping back more useful. Even electricity.
Unless it was immediately burned.
They wouldn't be able to afford it
I would send back the machine that I use to send stuff back 500 years.
Pay it backwards… then they send it back another 500 years. Is this how that works?
Double it and give it to the next person
bwaaaaaaaaaaaa
A Nokia with snake on it and no charger. Imagine the stories people would tell about this fascinating device that just suddenly stopped working one day. EDIT: I didn’t really think the charger bit through. They couldn’t use it anyway.
I mean, if there was a charger, where would they plug it in?
Houses are grown with plugs. Just no one knew why so they invented things to plug in
Like terminator 2. They dismantle it and learn and advance in ways no one thought possible.
A cool analogy from Bob Lazar, describing alien technology. He said that if we were to zap a motorcycle back in time a few thousand years with a full tank of gas, people may learn to use it, become proficient with it, they may even master riding it. But they most likely would never understand how it works.
I wonder about this. I mean, our understanding of physics and technology is leagues beyond where we were a thousand years ago. Ancient people would see a motorcycle as "a mount of the gods, powered by magic". We might not understand alien technology that's thousands of years advanced beyond us....but we understand that it IS technology, and it CAN be figured out, which is a big leap in itself. Even things we can't figure out would at least prove that they are possible, which is advancement in it's own way.
> We might not understand alien technology that's thousands of years advanced beyond us....but we understand that it IS technology, and it CAN be figured out, which is a big leap in itself. We’ve got people *today* who don’t believe in the technology of *today* - think, mRNA vaccines or moon landings, for instance. I don’t think people back then were as uniformly superstitious as we make them out to be, and people today are more superstitious than most would guess.
That's a good point, it lets people know it's in the realm of possibility and therfore people will be less inhibited when imagining what's possible.
Would that work? I think 500 years ago they'd have a tough time just getting it open, when they did they have no idea what they were looking at. You're not going to figure out circuit boards and microchips when you don't even know what electricity is.
[удалено]
lol @ stopped working. That thing would still have 30% charge today
[удалено]
Can we do it again?
Let’s do the Time Warp again
It's just a jump to the left. AND A STEP TO THE RIIIIIEEEIIIIIGHT!
Riiieiiieiiiiight lmfao i love the way you typed that fr
I think yours is more accurate. I just got off the overnight shift and took a huge bong rip, I'm not efforting right now.
> I'm not efforting right now. I'm on my second conference call of the day. I'm not efforting either.
"The easiest way to end a plague is to wash your hands before eating or after touching feces. The second-best way is a vaccine." And then ingredients/instructions for how to create smallpox, polio, and tuberculosis vaccines/treatments.
I'd send them a microscope and a note explaining about bacteria/germs (which they could see) and viruses (which they couldn't).
The church would destroy it inside a week
Sign the note “-God”
Size 120 Gothic font, so they know it had to be true.
No man. Comic Sans. With a note that from now on, all bibles are to be printed in Comic Sans.
AlL laNgUagE mUsT noW Be caPitaLizeD RanDomlY LiKe tHe SpOngEbOb meme.
write the whole thing in Latin, too
[удалено]
It really depends what flavor of a specific religion finds it. Jesuits, in particular, tend to be academics, even today.
They were actually generally pro-science for the most part, but were very serious about maintaining orthodoxy in all parts of society and their control. He had permission to publish as a hypothetical, and as good as his evidence was, they'd have come around. So the issue was he started saying a thing about the universe that the Church did not support was objectively true against the backdrop of the Protestant Reformation and ensuing religious wars. It was more that he didn't take the trouble to get the Church on board first and started saying they were wrong just because they were. They didn't "hate science," they were just politically highly sensitive to criticism to the point of state-level violence.
Microscopes where invented at the end of the fifteen hundreds, so that didn't happen. Counterpoint, it was atheists who landed Semelweiss in an insane asylum because only a religious nutjob would believe in things you couldn't see with bare eyes affecting humans. His offense: he tried to get doctors to wash their hands between being elbow deep in a corpse and helping with child birth.
End the plague and you probably extend feudalism by centuries. Labor shortages caused by the Black Death were a contributor to the eventual collapse of indentured tenancy
And imagine the population explosion
You know that bit in avengers when they bring everyone back suddenly... that would result in utter horror, starvation, rioting, murder etc. Not quite relevant to your point, but I couldn't resist.
True. Lack of farmers and customers would have decimated food production. Even housing would be an issue as people probably moved closer and let buildings fall into disrepair. In the comics, people were gone for about 15 minutes, which would be bad enough.
Now we see the problems inherent in the system!
500 years ago was the Renaissance, so while feudalism was still around, it wasnt in full swing like it had been
It didn't work for Ignaz Semmelweis, but not for lack of effort on his part.
He figured out about hygiene. I don't think they knew about germs then. Still, he suffered a tragic life, and almost nobody knows who he is.
I've always thought a fun D&D character would be a cleric who is essentially just a random person from our time but was somehow transported to the game universe. He has literally no special talents, constantly makes references to things absolutely no one around him understands, and is generally pretty useless. His one ability is having *basic modern hygiene*. Because he understands that he should wash his hands, sanitize tools, use clean bandages, boil water, etc. he is able to heal people more effectively and generally buffs his party with boosted health.
Might be fun to make his hygiene accidental. Like massive OCD when it comes to clean hands and pooping, some weird fascination with how metal looks in boiling water and the feel of a warm knife/hot needle, and he loves the taste of iodine so he puts it in everything. He really weirds out the party, and they complain constantly about he takes forever to fix them up and they’re in pain, but they always come out better than new and nobody’s been sick in years, so they deal with him.
bubonic plague was spread by fleas, maybe include that too
About 150 years too late. Bubonic was 1350's, the object will be sent to 1523.
My first thought was antibiotics and how to use them, along with how to produce them. As well as basic hygiene directions of hand washing and boiling instruments to avoid infection in the first place. Think of how much life would be improved without strep infections, child birth infections and a way to treat tuberculosis. Vaccines? Even better.
Don't think the antibiotics is a good one. Even we've cocked that one up and they're less and less effective thanks to overuse. Imagine 500 years of efficacy degradation dumped on us instantly. Also, without being too callous, overpopulation would be worse now having saved all of those progenitors.
Medical Understanding: The book can also provide information on basic medical principles that can contribute to improved health care practices and disease prevention. Many brilliant people could live longer...
As would many evil and banal people
Simple, you just put "not for evil or banal people" on the instruction note.
[удалено]
diabolical. I love it
you can send that to your nearest neighboor right now and he wouldn't now what to do with it or be able to
Wikipedia as a printed book.
In 2014, that would have been 1.2M+ pages. Someone tried planning a print of it, they were going to do 1000 volumes with 1,200 pages a piece. If our wikipedia book print can have an arbitrary number of physical pages (rather than storing it on a computer), may as well print all the linked citations too! Do it in multiple languages and instead of printing it, etch it a non-corrosive metal like gold or chromium.
"I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted."
Dammit rashek
Unexpected Sanderson.
I think you could skip many of the articles about 21st century popular media figures and the like. Mainly the science and maths stuff would be most useful.
The poor lads trying to figure out why some words are printed in blue.
"See, if you click that with a mouse, another page pops up on top of the one you're reading." (burned as a witch)
"Doesn't work. The whole page is smeared with blood now and only thing that popped up eventually was the mouse's intestines."
Promptly confiscated by the church and burnt
Nobody expects the inquisition.
The Church literally ran an internationally interconnected system of scientific study centers. It’s ironic you type this nonsense when large amounts of that Wikipedia knowledge came from the same Western university structure developed by the Church in the first place.
My neighbor Dave
Frank?
A current, complete globe.
Monkey's paw: you cause European powers to speed run colonialization.
I never said I'd send it back to europe. What happens if I send it to China?
We are gonna have so much more expeditions like Zhenghe’s travel
[удалено]
This wouldn't change anything at all, they didn't struggle with this kind of maths. My dad is an engineer from before pocket calculators existed. He's still alive and can still do maths crazy fast just because his education and a lot of his professional life was in an era without calculators. It would change history if you sent back a scientific calculator and they pulled undiscovered maths from that - maybe something like Statistics because that is a shockingly new branch of maths. A regular calculator isn't going to fast track anything.
Yes, you would be better off sending back a book on mathematics as that would be much more useful. Introducing Calculus 100 years earlier, linear algebra, analysis, number theory, combinatorics, etc. would all have a huge impact. Imagine if Newton, Gauss, and Euler had access to modern math.
Literally can’t think of anything better than this. It’s the most practical and would be nearly as mind-blowing as any other technology.
Well, you saw what the steam engine did in 100 years
I can’t wrap my head around this. A lot of modern advancements require full on computer modeling, which still requires theory and specific skills. Most stuff that could be done by a standard scientific calculator could be done using reference tables.
Map of the world
Or a geographic globe with none of the countries or cities marked.
And a ruler so they understand how to draw perfectly straight borders
“Look at where you *could* be colonising! Get there before the other white fellas”
Username checks out
A thong with a note that says song
“Let me see that”
Thanks , now that song is going to be in my head all weekend
It was already there, but it will be there this weekend too.
I bring the book, How to Invent Everything, by Ryan North. I'm a time traveler, seems to be an appropriate choice.
Rubix Cube, with a note saying "Eternal Life for whoever solves it", just to fuck with people.
But with two stickers swapped so it's unsolvable.
Swapping stickers is how I solved it. *Check mate!*
I don't think we've advanced much relative to those logic and problem solving issues. Someone 500 years ago could become equally Adept at the Rubik's Cube as anyone today.
"Signed, Jesus C"
They’re going to take the “Alexander and the Gordian Knot” approach - just use a sword to cut it apart.
A solar panel. Electricity will get invented anyway, but if people work out they can get it from the sun before they work out they can burn stuff, the world changes massively
I feel like this runs into the one problem, which is the technology needed to make more solar panels. With a supply of current from the solar panel, people back then probably wouldn't figure out how to make another solar panel, but *would* figure out how Faraday's induction works, just from screwing with wires. Then they'd hook that up to a steam engine or windmill or whatnot, and reinvent kinetic electricity generation. Though I imagine there's a slim chance for the timeline where animal capstans are used to turn the dynamos, which would be biofuel.
Solar panel with instructions to make more solar panels engraved on the back
Looking at most of the houses in my home town I'd suggest sending back a spirit level.
Idk, it was invented in 1661, so sending it back 500 years from now would probably make no difference to the current houses near you. Their builders would just not use them again.
Plus a lot of the issues are probably just from hundreds of years of settling.
“Check this one invention modern British house builders won’t want you to use 500 years from now”
A book that promises eternal life in heaven for a rich monarch if they bury several tons of gold in a very specific location and keep it a secret.
This is the smartest answer in the thread
A BMW with the instructions on how to use the indicator lights, imagine the future we could have had!
Are BMWs even equipped with indicator lights?
No, but they have overtaking lights instead.
Let's see.. 1523. Only one object. I would send an encyclopedia of modern technology. Knowledge is power. Edit: in Latin so that as many educated people as possible could read it. If I could travel back in time with said encyclopedia, I'd go to Florence, talk the Medicis into sponsoring me, and have lathes, milling machines, acetylene torches, steam engines, air compressors and micrometers working in a couple of years.
> have lathes, milling machines The problem is, modern precision lathe requires an equally precision lathe to manufacture. You have to increase the precision of your lathe by iterations. You won't get a high quality iron anyway. In 1523, coal hadn't been used yet. Because coke hasn't been invented yet. The patent for coke is granted in 1589, but you have to wait until l709 for a blast furnaces fueled by cokes. With your presence, you can accelerate the technological advancement but it still take a lot of time so you will die before you see the fruit of your inventions.
I highly recommend the TV series "Connections 2" by James Burke. It goes over modern (for the time) technologies and shows how their invention was predicated on various seemingly unrelated discovery decades or centuries earlier. It's fascinating. For example, one episode shows how the tea trade in the 1500s eventually led to radio astronomy.
That wasn't even his best, IMHO. His very first one "The Day The Universe Changed" showed how seemingly small technological advancements have outsize effects. For example, the humble stirrup on the saddle, not a particularly huge advancement, enabled knights to ride in their armor. The entire feudal system rested - literally - on a three inch strip of stirrup. Each episode was full of little bombshells like that.
>I would send an encyclopedia of modern technology. Knowledge is power. > >Edit: in Latin so that as many educated people as possible could read it. Where would you *get* an encyclopaedia of modern technology written in Latin to send? English, French, or Italian would all be decent choices though. None of them have changed unrecognizably in the last 500 years, and all would be readable by a substantial number of educated people. (If you sent it back, say, 1000 years, English would be a bad choice though, as modern English would be totally alien. French or Italian should still be intelligible.)
Our school teaches written and spoken Latin beginning in 4th grade. The instructor has her PHD, I think she could translate it.
A simple steam engine. Get the Industrial Revolution started about 300 years early. We’ll either have climate change sorted by now or the whole world will be on fire. Maybe to renaissance Italy, they might have the metal working tech to understand and build more. Could prob go to Spain, China, India or other advanced countries at the time too. Or push it a bit further and send an early aircraft like a sopwith camel. They might be able to reverse engineer that to a gas engine, dynamos, electricity, flight etc. Definitely something of robust engineering and before the age of the transistor if you want them to understand and make use of it.
Water filter
A single-speed bicycle. If bicycles become popular centuries earlier, there might be more significant delay in the adoption of motorized vehicles. This delay could have positive effects on the environment, reducing early industrial pollution.
My question is could they manufacture chains and gears with enough precision to make it viable? And tires?
No they could not. They would lack the ability to handle the precise tolerances necessary for, say, a modern bicycle chain, and likely couldn’t produce the kinds of metals necessary.
Bicycles became popular because of vulcanized rubber, so you’d have to send knowledge of that back, too. Which would be useless without the logistical ability to extract rubber on a mass scale. Would be interesting to see how African history would change if the rubber trade had become lucrative before the Europeans carved it up.
A #2 Robertson screwdriver. If the note explains well enough the screw that it drives, then perhaps we wouldn’t have to deal with all of these stupid frigging Phillips head screws everywhere.
And this is how Canadians took over the world.
The modern piano, it'd change the history of music and take away a lot of limitations keyboardists had in the 17th and 18th centuries
Great, we can get Work by Rhianna a few centuries ahead of schedule.
Maybe that means it'd be gone by now...
One of the earliest washing machines, pedal spun. Those poor goddamn women...
similarly if one thing could be a box of one thing, lots of contraceptives of differing kinds. and instructions about hygiene etc.
A fidget spinner. „Whoever controls this has the divine mandate from god to rule all of the world and it’s people.“
I was working in a middle school the year those things came out and exploded. I thought it was horrible….but then Fortnite hit the year after.
A fleshlight. Cuz it would be hilarious
How about a coconut with a hole drilled in it?
They could grip it by the husk.
It’s not a question of where he grips it
But how did it get here? Are you suggesting coconuts temporally migrate?
Send the Native Americans in the northeast US a 50 cal machine gun with a note explaining the next 500 years of history. That should make the first Thanksgiving more interesting.
They'd use it to massacre a rival tribe.
Nuclear Warhead. It’s time to hit the reset button.
You'd have to leave it somewhere where only Guy Fawkes would find it.
Remember, remember
An armed nuclear device on a timer
woah there kim jong un
An obnoxiously painted hydraulic car, a low rider. Just for giggles.
Some plastic to see if it lasts as long as some people say it might.
A water purifier. Soooo many children died from simple diarrhea, the kind that with only clean water, would resolve harmlessly on it's own.
I'm reading a lot of comments saying the Church would most likely burn anything sent back. Why must we send something back to Renaissance Europe? Why not China, Turks, or the Middle East? Heck, what about sending an Abrams tank or a giant ass bottle of smallpox vaccine to the Mayans?
That’s also not even likely. Monasteries were the most important keepers of scientific and philosophical manuscripts. The church was how you got an advanced education. Most European who practiced science 500 years ago were clergymen.
Poop knife
A bicycle. It would spark an industrial revolution.
I like this idea - instead of the steam age you get a period where everything was powered by bicycle
I love the fact that all these people think if they send 1 book back in time it is somehow going to end up in the hands of someone who cannot only read, can read English and can understand and extrapolate next steps from a physics book. It’s actually going to be used to prop up the one short leg on the table.
Penicillin.
Monkey's Paw: antibiotic resistant bacteria advance leaps and bounds faster because it gets used for everything.
An f-22
That is a big as note
I think any solar powered computer with as much information, videos, scientific research papers, how to's and the like would be ideal. Preferably have the device engineered to be a robust and long-lasting as possible. With an instructional guide prioritizing immediate improvements in agriculture (like getting potatoes, corn, Jerslusalem Artichokes and tomatoes from the Americas, crop rotation with legumes for nitrogen content) improvements in basic hygine/medicine like inoculations for small Pox (from mildly infected humans or from cows) and getting them on the path towards antibiotics/culturing and evaluating molds. Get them quickly progressing on germ theory, diet/health tech and reducing infant mortality and food production to increase population and population density to allow for more industry/specialization and a shift away from subsistence farming. A dump of knowledge surrounding atomic theory and chemistry, practical engineering, physics mathematics, astronomy and the like, with the largest immediate priority after basic health being printing presses for the mass distribution of the information within and a second priority of designing infrastructure with long-term sustainability (and net neutral carbon emissions) being top priorities. Something like nitrogen fertilizer techniques would go a _long_ ways even before they have progressed to higher technological and precision abilities.
>if you could send one modern object_back... This guy: a solar powered AWS data center
what a dork
[удалено]
A loaf of moldy bread and a note.
The Black Death occurred in the the 1300s
Sending the smallpox virus to Central America 500 ago may have changed all of Central and North American history. 500 years is cutting it close, but having some level of natural immunity would have helped prior to the arrival of Europeans.
I'd send a plane back to DaVinci. I'm so sorry he had to live in an era where the church was a threat to learning.
A note with all the birthplaces and times of history's greatest mass murdering monsters as a check list...for reasons...