time travel

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Jeff_F_F 8/20/2007 3:59:38 PM

Armchair Private,
Good points. A rather intelligent man once opined that the four most important human inventions were language, writing, movable type, and computers, in that order. I think he was right, but I happen to think that you're more right; without agriculture we'd still be stuck with cavorting Druids and dung for dinner, as Edmund Blackadder would say.

It seems to come down to what you're trying to accomplish with your continuum-meddling. If your goal is personal power, weapons are generally the key- although I could probably make a fortune in the trade by introducing better ships around 500 B.C. If, on the other hand, you want to preserve or improve a society, information technology is the way to go. In my case I view pre-Imperial Rome as a good thing worth preserving, and certainly better than the mass of bickering fiefdoms which would take its place for so many years.

Then again, when I ran the original question by a coworker, he answered that he'd give Damascus steel to the Scots, just because.

Worse than that, without agriculture you don't even have druids. A very good book on this is "Guns, Germs and Steel". Pre agricultural cultures almost never have specialists such as druids, the exceptions would be those such as some plains indians that were nomadic but were able to gain many of the benefits of agriculture by following huge buffalo herds.

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Jeff_F_F 8/20/2007 4:06:11 PM

...or what if the Central American tribes had learned to cultivate and refine hemp (and other, ahem, "medicinal" herbs), to the point instead of being wiped out by the Spanish Conquistadors, they instead managed to get them, and consequently much of Europe, addicted to marijuana, or even cocaine, centuries ago on a widespread scale...

You just can't argue with disease : all that the conquistadors had to do was walk through an area and sneeze on people and within a few years 95% of the population was gone. Poof.

Cocaine requires not just growing but sophisticated processing to concentrate the extracts.

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doggtag 8/20/2007 4:16:01 PM

You just can't argue with disease : all that the conquistadors had to do was walk through an area and sneeze on people and within a few years 95% of the population was gone. Poof.

Cocaine requires not just growing but sophisticated processing to concentrate the extracts.

If the central American tribes worked gold (albeit limited smeltering) and had crude forms of glass, then teaching them the chemistry and distillations to extract cocaine shouldn't have been too much an issue.
Maintaining purity and potency, without advanced chemistry and more modern scientific instruments, may prove the difficult part.

...but after all, if I'm going back in time and taking things with me (knowledge, machines, tools, etc)...

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How about this one: introduce black powder and firearms (including cannon) manufacture to a pre-1000 AD Europe, and see just how long the "novelty" of castles and other walled fortifications lasts.

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buzzard 8/20/2007 5:16:24 PM

Well there is a Turdledove book called Guns of the South, but it doesn't extend much past the end of the civil war. In that book some time travellers give the South a bunch of AK-47s, and as one would expect they win the war handily. The North, after losing, eventually makes fair mockups of captured ones and conquers Canada. Also the slaves get freed anyway since R.E. Lee realized that they were an economic detriment.It might be that Turdledove wrote a sequel which covers what you are talking about.

buzzard

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Jeff_F_F Interesting scenarios... 8/20/2007 7:21:16 PM

I'm not so sure that going back in time with anything short of modern technology gives you enough of an edge to just walk in and act like you own the place. Until you get to repeating rifles, firearms aren't actually all that powerful in and of themselves. A longbow had better range and accuracy than early muskets, and a better rate of fire as well. The penetration of a musket ball wasn't all that much better than an armor-piercing arrow either, and many suits of armor both in Europe and Japan were shot by a musket, the charachteristic circular indentation in the breastplate was proof of their quality. But training a bowman takes years, and crafting bows is often time consuming as well. The power of early firearms was that they made relatively untrained conscripts in huge groups quite powerful. However to produce such a mass of armed conscripts you need industrialization. The two go hand in hand. The pyrotechnic effects of potassium nitrate had been known for centuries, possibly a millenium or more before gunpowder become a common weapon. Part of the reason was the need for the formula to mature, but a lot of it was simply that manufacturing a gun barrel is not an easy task, even on a small scale basis. Industrial manufacturing of such devices would be possible only with a lot of investement of time and effort. Not impossible, but definitely difficult and very time consuming. Possibly too much for a single human lifetime.

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TrustButVerify 8/21/2007 5:06:51 PM

Good points, Jeff_F_F, and I agree around 90%. (You're not the first to make that point about gunpowder trumping longbowmen because it makes a company of troops easier to put together.) Nevertheless there are certain advances which aren't really contingent on concurrent technologies, and I say this as a big fan of James Burke. Stirrups, for one; moveable type, too. I'm no smith but it seems that the Europeans had the metalworking skills ages before Gutenberg. One which is frequently overlooked is the mouldboard plow; introducing this or the three-field system earlier would give any society a big agricultural boost. Better agriculture is helpful in all sorts of ways- less disease, bigger population, more specialized tradesmen, etc.

I agree, on the other hand, that setting yourself up in a position of power, or wealth, would be much more difficult. We bandy gunpowder about a great deal, and I still think there's something to it. Leaving man-portable firearms aside, how about cannon? The early ones were pretty lousy in most respects but nevertheless their mere appearance could compel a town to surrender, and as another post pointed out you could change the face of European siege warfare if you did things right. So, my sophomoric and under-baked plan for personal aggrandizement still remains giving gunpowder to some Rhinelander lord (my execrable Pfalz Deutsch might even be helpful), allowing him to carve out a good kingdom, and then subverting and overthrowing said lord in the tradition of Carnahan and Dravitt.... But I digress; my point is that I still believe certain technological advances could significantly alter the course of history. If you can show me that mouldboards, horse collars, paper, bronze cannon, stirrups, etc. were technologically unfeasible in (arbitrarily) 600 AD, I'll concede the point and retire to my lair.

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andyf 8/21/2007 5:51:39 PM

the refining cocaine thing isnt so hard..

just an acid- base extraction

might even be possible to skip gunpowder and go straight to HE

give the romans big ballista bolts with a guncotton warhead?

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TrustButVerify 8/21/2007 8:24:35 PM

might even be possible to skip gunpowder and go straight to HE

give the romans big ballista bolts with a guncotton warhead?

IANC* but I don't know that it would be possible given the initial scenario of only bringing one advance. Where are you going to synthesize the nitric acid? That's the problem with a lot of advances- you can't build most cool stuff without lots of supporting technology, as Jeff_F_F pointed out earlier. Steam power is of limited use unless you've got the metallurgy to build high-pressure components, etc. Hence the utility of simple, straightforward technologies and techniques. Perhaps the Romans would do well if they glommed on to the concept of combined arms, for instance.

*I Ain't No Chemist

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Treadgar Combined arms & Romans 8/25/2007 10:31:19 AM

I'm not sure what you mean by combined arms and the Romans. The Romans were quick to plug in military elements of subjugated peoples into the legions. Roman cavalry often consisted of foreign troops, also there were archers, and others. Think also about Hannibal's elephants, wouldn't that be another example of combined arms from those times?

I agree that it would be difficult to import some technologies back in time. All the stuff we have needs too much specialized support. If I could travel back with a machine gun, my advantage in a fight would last only as long as I had bullets to fire. I still like the idea of bringing back some type of concept, one that could jump start technological innovation before it actually ocurred.

Treadgar

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