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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=958724

by metra • 17 years ago

17 37 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

The exact year is not so important.<p>With everything we know now, what would you tell the people in 100 BCE that would improve society?<p>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.

noonespecial• 17 years ago

"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.

pg• 17 years ago

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

Xichekolas• 17 years ago

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. ;)

patio112• 17 years ago

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.

GavinB2• 17 years ago

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.

patio112• 17 years ago

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.)

ugh3• 17 years ago

I think you should try not to talk to cartoon versions of past humans.

jonmc12• 17 years ago

Don't ingest lead.

bozmac• 17 years ago

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

nzmsv• 17 years ago

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

GavinB2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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

Todd• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

Do you know how to build a printing press?

ugh3• 17 years ago

Quote from the question: "With everything we know now ..."

inklesspen3• 17 years ago

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.

jbapple• 17 years ago

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.

SteveC• 17 years ago

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

gills• 17 years ago

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

Asa-Nisse• 17 years ago

Drip irrigation.

c1sc0• 17 years ago

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

herval3• 17 years ago

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...

teeja• 17 years ago

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

hyung• 17 years ago

Banzai10• 17 years ago

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.

cmars232• 17 years ago

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

BobNeumann• 17 years ago

"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.

Travis• 17 years ago

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!

anactofgod• 17 years ago

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

gabrielroth• 17 years ago

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.

herval3• 17 years ago

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.

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

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