Bought his ore? Terry Pratchett dug his own ore from his estate when he smelted the iron for his sword, though he used a blacksmith after getting to the iron bar stage.
I think it's funny that in most of America, someone with a permit can carry a brace of automatic pistols and enough extra magazines to mow through a dozen preschool classes; but brass knuckles and spring-opening knives are still off-limits.
Many laws in the US regarding weapons were motivated by racial and economics tensions, as in people were worried about disenfranchised groups acquiring weapons and revolting. Maybe that has something to do with it?
> automatic pistols
Automatic guns are extremely expensive and hard to get because none manufactured after 1986 can be sold to civilians. They are rarely used in crimes. Automatic weapons are not magic killing machines. They are excellent ways to turn money into noise but have limited tactical use, suppression fire, etc.
I think your first guess is correct. Machine guns are owned by rich enthusiasts, brass knuckles are owned by poor thugs. It's implicitly discriminatory, although any rich switchblade enthusiasts are simply out of luck.
It reminds me of a Marcin Jakubowski talk at Ted about "Open-Source blueprints for civilizations"[1]
From TED: Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).
I'd like to see someone make a knife without using any modern technology precursors whatsoever. That means starting from using ones hands and what is available from nature in its natural form.
People already do this. Some only go so far as stone blades, or allow modern tools for certain steps. Others bootstrap the whole process from stone-age to steel.
I've never done it. It's incredibly time consuming but satisfying, from the first hand accounts I've read. You can cut hours or days off of your work time by using modern tools for some of the most seemingly trivial steps.
Search for Tai Goo, Tim Lively and Wayne Goddard. Primitive knifemaking is another good term to search.
<a href="http://www.aescustomknives.com/>Ariel Salaverria</a> doesn't do primitive as far as I know, but he does have some tutorials for making some things that most makers buy/outsource. Tutorials for resin impermeated handle materials, like denim micarta.
By "stop at steel", I meant to ask how far their bootstrapping went — did they bootstrap from stone-age materials to just, say, pre-medieval steel metallurgy? Or did they go on ahead to technologies like organic polymers, machine tools, bicycles, internal-combustion engines, vacuum tubes, semiconductors, digital computers, and heavier-than-air flying machines?
I wonder if Ariel Salaverria sells his work at handicrafts markets here locally. Maybe I could go apprentice with him :)
Just to follow-up. If you search for Tai Goo and Tim Lively you will get a lot of information, pictures, videos and such about making blades from found material. Some of the processes are pretty crude--making glue from pine sap and deer feces.
I'd like to see this taken one step further: a wiki that provides step-by-step directions for building anything from components. Links to the components and tools required would provide step-by-step directions for building them from more basic components, recursively until you're making things from absolute scratch by hand.
A wiki like this would let you jump into the process at any level, assembling something from pre-fabricated components, building it from absolute scratch, or anything in-between. I'd be curious to see how fast someone could use directions like this to start from the stone age and get to a microchip.
Fictional but a great read : in Jules Verne's Mysterious Island the heroes precisely have to make their tools, clothes, etc from scratch, up to a house, a telegraph and a boat :) a hacker's dream.
I sometimes wonder how long would it take for the civilization to re-create the current level of technology, if all the material artifacts disappear one day: books, computers, robots, factories, even hammers. If all that remains is the current level of knowledge in the heads of 7bln people, how long would it take from the stone age to Core i7, heart transplants and Boeing 787s? And how much different the world would be if we had to re-create this from scratch without the legacy of previous technological generations?
A question I've had about this is where are the ready supplies of materials that could be used in the recreation? Could we spread across the hills and still find iron and copper deposits? Aren't these all played out by now? We would need to shift to another economic base from new materials I think rather than recreate what we had before, because that's gone.
Well, if the artifacts actually disappeared, yes. But if they just got buried somewhere until they rusted into unusability, we could dig up the rust and smelt it.
Technology is also a sociological concept, it is in the minds of the people, it is not merely the products such as blades and core i7s. All those products of technology are the result of a specific culture, it is the result of specific societies and the interaction and relationships that people have with each other. For technology to happen a society requires permanent hierarchical organization (enslavement where the earliest examples) and strict divison of labor. Resources are merely a by-factor, which a society can workaround, when you dont have X to do Y, you make Z from A and do Y.
Its an interesting question, if you removed the artifacts, and kept the same organizations and relationships, my guess is that would mean almost no change. Instead of doing calculations with computers you would do computations with computers. (The first computers where human). If you removed the books and tax-software, still the tax people would walk around collecting their taxes and "inventing" bookkeeping. And we, fellow programmers, would still ponder of nice mind tricks and think of their solutions then apply them in society.
I'd say the biggest problem would be the lack of modern argicultural chemicals and fertiliser. Without them we can't feed 7 billion people. There'd be famine quickly and within a gereration the population would be down to middle ages levels
I wonder the same. I like to imagine the current population being transposed to an alternate Earth where humans never existed.
I guess the first most important step is for everyone to start documenting everything they know of science, creating a kind of ad-hoc paper Wikipedia (once we make paper, of course). If the current generations die before their knowledge is recorded or passed down, we're going to be held back hundreds of unnecessary years.
I imagine with some excellent leadership and coordination, we could be back to computers, complex medicine, and aircrafts within a century. Maybe even decades, if the culture shock doesn't trigger famine, disease, wars, and depression.
And provided a good number of people who can organise / lead the reconstruction, so it doesn't just get sidetracked and forgotten. Reminds me of the story from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where the wheel could not be invented, because marketing people couldn't agree on the colour...
I suspect progress would be really fast. Even if you can't find someone who has the right knowledge to do X, simply know that X can be done would make all the difference.
Very interesting. Makes me think if there is any knowledge or technology that we lost in the process? Is there something we knew but don't know anymore?
It's reasons like this, that I really wonder if someone from today were to time travel into the past if anything they know would be useful at all. Medieval people would probably think we're all idiots.
If you're into sci-fi I urge you to read Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep [1]. It doesn't have a lot to do with this except that it has a fairly primitive society that has high-tech dumped on it in two different camps and what eventuates is an arms race.
In the same vein is CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series [2], which tells the story of human colonists who end up lost, unable to find their way home. They instead find a habitable planet with a native population that roughly has 19th century technology and build their space station above it. The station isn't sustainable though so they end up getting stranded on the planet.
So while not time travel per se, the whole subject of vast technology differentials is a rich vein of sci-fi that I personally really enjoy.
As for someone transported to a medieval era, any person with a high school education would have what is, for the time, a highly advanced knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, physics, possibly chemistry, biology, etc to the point where they would be immensely valuable in the right hands I would think.
You dont need sci-fi to ponder what happens when a superior technological culture meets a less technologicaly developed culture.
Look at Europes "discovery" of the americas, and for that matter, look at how the nomads of the world react when they are even today being "discovered" by us civilized people. You could study anthropolgy if you are into this sort of thing, its not really sci-fi, this is the real deal.
Which me of another of my favourite books, Iain M. Banks' Excession [1], which is pertinent to your example. It's a great book but is probably best known for Outside Context Problem, which is the kind of problem which:
> ...most civilisations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.
Also:
> The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.
The entry also notes the similarity to black swan theory [2].
In the Foreigner universe it is my understanding that the technology was not 19th century. It reached 19th century after centuries of careful technology transfer. (And then things accelerated.)
Simple knowledge, such as the disease model of sickness and "microorganisms exist, keep things clean" would be useful. You could probably cobble together a water-drop microscope and demonstrate the difference between (say) clean wounds and infected ones. Fleas = plague. All that.
Knowing how to distill hard liquor would make you popular as well.
Making hard liquor worth drinking is surprisingly difficult. It's lot easier if you know how to make activated carbon, but making activated carbon is difficult with equipment of that age(possible though).
Read Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. I think someone educated in science and engineering would do quite well, a dolt fully addicted to the entertainment industry, probably not so well.
An average person would not be overly useful, but a skilled and knowledgeable individual would have much to offer. A chemist can make nylon, gunpowder, matches, or plastic from relatively easily obtained chemicals even in ancient times, for example. There are also lots of other little tricks that are just as or more valuable. Things like germ theory, medicine, cooking, electricity, etc. In roman times it would have been possible to build telegraphs, without much difficulty, imagine how that would have changed the world.
Science is older than you think. Science is making experiments, recording results, and trying to figure out what is going on.
The oldest clearest example of science is alchemy. Today we know it's impossible, but back then they reacted a tremendous number of compounds and carefully recorded the results.
The course of human history would be a lot different if the simple idea "Look for reasons why you are wrong, not reasons why you are right" could spread earlier and farther. Experimentation has occurred for the whole of human history, but I think that little tidbit is what was missing, distilled down to a single sentence, but one from which everything else can pretty much be derived once you accept it.
Come to think of it, the course of the human present would be pretty different too.
Is finding a way to turn dross into gold or purchase eternal life really science? Taoist alchemy may have been more philosophical in nature, but western alchemy was pretty goal oriented without much mindfulness about science as a higher level process. They weren't trying to understand how nature works, they were trying to enrich themselves. Very different.
You have a "Hollywood" view of alchemy. Most of the people who did it did not realistically expect to succeed. But they continued anyway.
History is full of people who did all sorts of experiments to try to understand how the world works.
It is not necessary to have a goal "understand this" in order to do science, it's enough to have a goal "what happens if I do this". If I do an experiment and find an interesting result, and I publish it, that's still science - even if I have no idea why what I did works.
I'll ignore your undignified cheap shot. Without understanding this as a conscious goal then a directed systematic inquiry that becomes highly integrated into culture and the economic system will not develop. Inventing the printing press, for example, without a sufficiently rich ecosystem in which it can nurture and grow prevented any catalytic effects that might have otherwise formed.
- Better Bread? Historically bakers had extremely short lives because without mixers they had to breathe in the flour dust all day. And the bread would have been extremely unevenly cooked (no temperature-regulated ovens), as well as being extremely salty (no preservatives).
- Pasta? Pasta is absolutely amazing. It is an extremely dense source of calories, which doesn't rot, is super-compact, and only requires water and heat to cook. Great for armies on the march.
- Coffee? Coffee's been around a long time, but high-pressure espresso is relatively new.
Other fairly basic staples are newer than you might think, like Potatoes (16th Cent.), Or Tomatoes (17th Cent.)
Actually that's a terrible idea. You want lemons, not limes. Really.
See http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm for a discussion of where the myth to the contrary came from, and for the complex history of how the proper prevention of scurvy was discovered, forgotten, proved false, and only later rediscovered again. It also discusses why you really don't want to use limes.
Pasta is an amazing invention. It's functionally similar to hard tack except it can be prepared to an edible state very quickly with merely boiling water and also tastes much better.
Could you please clarify why whole grain flour pasta would not have nutrients? Unless you meant white flour pasta. And here is how to make it from scratch:
Some of these things would be helpful but you'd need to have them on you if you were dumped in the past. If you landed (now) in the Roman Empire how would you bring them potatoes? ("Just sail across the ocean, then go up the mountains on the other side of that continent and eat those root things there. Easy!")
Sorry, but you're wrong, and I think your racism is showing. Potatoes have been eaten for 7000 years, and tomatoes for 2500 years. They were introduced into Europe in the sixteenth century (and tomatoes weren't eaten there at first), but here in America, we've been eating them since well before medieval times.
Making sure to eat sources of vitamin C to prevent scurvy, having women who intend to get pregnant eat more folate to help their babies' brains...(Not to mention not drinking alcohol while pregnant!)
These might be practically difficult to realize just on brainpower alone.
For example: how do you avoid drinking alcohol if your only sources of drinking water are contaminated? You can boil the water — but you don't know a priori whether the pathogens or toxins in the water can be destroyed by boiling, or how much boiling is needed. If the toxins are things like arsenic, boiling the water will concentrate them, while various kinds of biological processing may filter them out.
And where do you get vitamin C? Tomatoes are a great source of vitamin C, but you can't just go around eating random local tomato-like plants; almost all of them are deadly. Plants like rhubarb have lots of vitamin C, but also lots of oxalic acid. Raw meat is also a good source of vitamin C, but raw meat can harbor many different pathogens. Are you going to build a microscope, synthesize some stains, and inspect a bunch of meat samples to see which ones bear pathogenic bacteria?
And once a couple of your human-subjects experiments go wrong, or just have coincidental unrelated deaths, you're a candidate for a witch-burning.
(Even in the best cases, modern hygiene is not without its drawbacks; the poliomyelitis epidemic is one example.)
Well, if you had had a couple years' worth of graduate-level math and physics courses, you would be an intellectual demigod. The introductory sequences in analysis / algebra / geometry / mechanics / electrodynamics / relativity are a distillation of what the best minds in history spent the past 500 years figuring out. When I have no other motivation to study these topics, I just remember that Newton, Euler, Gauss, et al. would have /killed/ to get a look at my textbook :-)
You'd be at a disadvantage whether you traveled back or forward in time, because you haven't yet internalized the world model of the destination time. Anyone who lives in a particular time takes for granted the ways to operate in that time, and doesn't have to think a) how do I do this, or b) is this even possible. They just do, or move on.
An interesting look into that idea is "The Cross Time Engineer" by Leo Frankowski. The main character is an engineer, so he has extensive knowledge, but it's interesting in how that knowledge is applied to medieval times. It ended up being a series of many books.
Helm by Steven Gould has a central premise where a colonization ship makes the choice to take more people at the expense of more technology. They land on the minimally hospitable planet with a society engineered to maximize knowledge transfer of things like germ theory and nutrition (they are taught songs as kids about it, etc.) and with comprehensive scientific information in printed form, but no advanced manufacturing capabilities.
What was most interesting to me were the people who denied that they had ever come from earth, that all the fantastical technologies of the past didn't exist, etc.
The 1632 book series is about an American town transplanted back into Europe in 1632. Since it's a whole town they bring more than just knowledge, but it's still fairly interesting to read. In my opinion the first or maybe first two books are enjoyable, after that it turns into too many layers of "what if".
I think if random individuals from today were to go into the past, we would mostly look pretty stupid. However, I think if a large enough group traveled into the past, we would have enough useful knowledge to wow them/revolutionize their society.
I think you are dramatically underestimating the knowledge of modern farmers. Here are some areas that have changed: irrigation has changed radically in the last 40 years, fertilizers, companion planting, industrialized processes, storage and safer practices. Most farmers would make more difference than an engineer would make because in the past the majority of people were farmers. Don't forget that the main reason for migration to cities has been changes in agriculture (less labour needed, lower costs, globalisation).
Imagine the opposite: someone from the future were to time travel back to our present time. Certain knowledge the they bring would be useful. But a lot probably won't be until necessary technology becomes available.
The concepts would be invaluable though. If he/she were able to give of some of the base concepts for how those things worked, we could direct all of our energy towards those concepts rather than stumbling in the dark to increase our understanding.
Like: "I know we could teleport. No, I didn't see any massive power supplies, it was just a box about the size of your 'car' and it cost as much as a loaf of bread to use it." or "I called my sister on Alpha Centauri every Sunday, and we'd chat about the weather."
Just knowing it's possible, with gross engineering parameters, can be half the battle.
Even knowing some of the specifics would be helpful. Imagine a non-engineer from now going back to 1500s and talk about flying.
They can say that you need 2 wings on the side, and you need to go really fast in a straight line before you can take off. Sometimes you can see the little flaps on the edge of the wing move up and down. Though you can also do it with little planes. And if you want rotating blades then it has to be smaller than planes (helicopters).
This should help a clever person (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci) figure out how to fly.
That's kind of the same thing -- a person from the future would probably not really be able to guide us into the future any faster. He wouldn't even be able to show us how to build a time machine because the technology necessary to build the tools to build a time machine don't exist yet.
That would very much depend on the situation and the people involved of course.
Someone with a deep and practical (practical being the important part here) knowledge of chemistry at the right place and right time? Could be extremely useful - he should have a leg up on the local alchemist.
A doctor, again with a good practical edge. Just being aware of bacteria and it's dangers, and using cleaner techniques would have changed everything.
Discover antibiotics? Pure magic.
Joe average? Computer programmer? Probably fall into the "idiot" category unless you're good at killing people or politics.
This reminds me of the Heritage School [1], which teaches people skills such as blacksmithing, knifemaking, working with Damascus steel, and woodworking. I think it's great these skills haven't completely died out.
I remember a cooperative online game, with a mostly text-only interface, in which you could build smelters and tools and climb gradually the tech tree. It was very detailed and interesting but I lost track of its name and URL. Does it ring a bell for anybody?
Sounds like my own game, Shintolin (http://www.shintolin.co.uk). It was a mostly text-based multiplayer game set in the stone age, where players started from scratch but could gradually develop the tools to build a village and farm. I planned to have a whole technology progression through bronze and iron age technology, but I stopped working on it a while ago (it still has a few players though). Don't know if it's the one you're talking about.
"Charcoal has to be chopped to a specific size for the operation to run smoothly. I chopped mine during the days before the run in little chunks about a cubic inch or less."
Later on, he uses a forge, anvil, grinder, flux, chemicals for polishing, etc. He's not using cave-man technology. I think he built the smelter because you can't really buy them.
A really interesting melange. This is a Spanish guy, using Japanese metalworking techniques, and Imperial measurement units... (They use metric in Japan and Spain, don't they?)
For the purists: using modern technologies is OK, as long as you're fully aware of the alternative. There's no enlightenment in using a stone tool for days to achieve what a powered tool does in minutes.
Site was loading quite slowly for me and missing some of the pictures. The Google cache of the first part is here for those who want it http://tinyurl.com/6k2mxue
I may have missed something - My one curiosity would be if his decision to not fold, but just straight mash the bits of steel together was not skipping a crucial step - folding to ensuring uniformity. Would that not make the sword have weak spots here and there?
I might be wrong (search turns up nothing), I have seen this before though and thought it came from here (since this is usually where I find my quality reading material).
No need to get all downvotey, I wish I had the authors abilities.
Back in the past, we just made knives with what we had. Sticks, couple of nettle stems and a few minutes flintknapping and you had a perfectly good blade. I've actually done it myself.
Metal is way higher tech than is required to survive.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/terry-pratchett-creates-a-...
(Being a knight no longer conveys the right to carry a sword, it is a violation of the knife laws, so he keeps the sword hidden. Such days.)