pretty sure you can just use wood or whatever for the lettering, sure it might be kinda shit and tend to break but it should work. having to make new letter stamps every now and then is better than painstakingly writing every letter for hand.
The main problem with that is that you can’t make the types very small with wood, and the singlemost expensive ingredient in this whole printing press concept is the paper.
So you would end up having books with very little text on each page, and especially in a slave economy, it would just be much cheaper to make handwritten copies, since you could cram a lot more words on each page.
And again, this is not adressing the issue of even having the skill to make paper in the first place.
Not to mention inventing an alphabet depending on where and when you go to. Or you could go with ConstantScript if you feel like being a gigantic troll.
Abugida might be workable if you reform it so that vowel markers can only appear above or below the modified consonant.
In Sid Meier’s Civilization sure, but real history is a lot more complex than that. There were people who came to that conclusion since ancient times without it leading to a scientific and industrial revolution, because there were a lot more factors at play with those than just simply the idea of it.
The actual reason science took off is that there was a plague leading to a worker shortage leading to a wealth boom, while a lot of rich people had access to coffee and nothing to do.
Free time and the wealth to have that time is what I also think the catalyst is. Same with arts. You can’t do experiments or spend time on art if your entire life is consumed by labor.
While I, too, am a big fan of the Coffee hypothesis, it should be noted that lots of civilizations had access to caffeine and other stimulants, including the Arabs, Chinese and Incas and probably the Roman’s, Greeks and Persians too.
And there were a lot of plagues, but most of them happened long before the scientific revolution.
speaking of health, wouldn’t you die to some disease you are not immune to? or even more likely you would cause a plague that their bodies don’t lnow how to fight off, like imagine bringing back some covid variant with you.
I mean, us bringing back something to kill them seems more likely, despite our comparatively weak immune system’s. Be it COVID-19 or an STD. Hell, even our metal/plastic ridden bodies would be a potential issue for their environment if we died.
All you have to do is teaching intelligent people some math and tell them about experiments and that nature can be understood. The rest will follow.
Everything can be accelerated by adding the idea of the printing press.
The main challenge with inventing a working printing press would be the papermaking and level of metalworking required for the movable type.
pretty sure you can just use wood or whatever for the lettering, sure it might be kinda shit and tend to break but it should work. having to make new letter stamps every now and then is better than painstakingly writing every letter for hand.
The main problem with that is that you can’t make the types very small with wood, and the singlemost expensive ingredient in this whole printing press concept is the paper.
So you would end up having books with very little text on each page, and especially in a slave economy, it would just be much cheaper to make handwritten copies, since you could cram a lot more words on each page.
And again, this is not adressing the issue of even having the skill to make paper in the first place.
Not to mention inventing an alphabet depending on where and when you go to. Or you could go with ConstantScript if you feel like being a gigantic troll.
Abugida might be workable if you reform it so that vowel markers can only appear above or below the modified consonant.
Paper making is not that hard if you use cotton fibers instead of wood pulp
Did the Greeks not do experiments? They knew math. They even hypothetically knew about atoms.
The Greeks held themselves back because most of their intellectual elite considered abstract thought as more noble than hands-on experimenting.
Also Aristotle accidently killing atomic theory for over 2000 years
Same can be said of all the ancient civilizations.
But the key insight is that all of nature is predictable and behaves according to natural laws that can be deduced through experiments.
That leads to the scientific revolution which leads to the industrial revolution.
In Sid Meier’s Civilization sure, but real history is a lot more complex than that. There were people who came to that conclusion since ancient times without it leading to a scientific and industrial revolution, because there were a lot more factors at play with those than just simply the idea of it.
An idea has to be widely accepted to be useful.
Just having one person think about it while the rest of society doesn’t is insufficient.
The actual reason science took off is that there was a plague leading to a worker shortage leading to a wealth boom, while a lot of rich people had access to coffee and nothing to do.
Free time and the wealth to have that time is what I also think the catalyst is. Same with arts. You can’t do experiments or spend time on art if your entire life is consumed by labor.
While I, too, am a big fan of the Coffee hypothesis, it should be noted that lots of civilizations had access to caffeine and other stimulants, including the Arabs, Chinese and Incas and probably the Roman’s, Greeks and Persians too.
And there were a lot of plagues, but most of them happened long before the scientific revolution.
So the time traveler needs to have been exposed to COVID, got it.
An offline version of Wikipedia would be handy though.
Just pack a cheat sheet:
https://i.imgur.com/dgJ7vHU.jpg
Holy shit that’s so crunchy, can I get a version with less pixels?
https://i.imgur.com/O6vSrvq.jpg
speaking of health, wouldn’t you die to some disease you are not immune to? or even more likely you would cause a plague that their bodies don’t lnow how to fight off, like imagine bringing back some covid variant with you.
I mean, us bringing back something to kill them seems more likely, despite our comparatively weak immune system’s. Be it COVID-19 or an STD. Hell, even our metal/plastic ridden bodies would be a potential issue for their environment if we died.
That was a nice educational read.
You can download it, without images it’s just a couple GB.