if you had a time machine and could go to any period in history, what would be a valuable piece of information could you give the people, in order to rev up progress? I had thought of public health and "germs" but my husband thought the Bessemer process for making stainless steel for ploughs etc. That would free up people to study other things, rather than the production of food. Germs, on the other hand would be thought a delusion.
Basically you're making the decision to alter history in order to get to our glorious future of Iphones and corn syrup quicker. What is the advantage of that?
Perhaps we could steer civilisation in a better direction- avoid the mistakes and end up with something better than the venal, corrupt, diseased mish mash we have now. Perhaps other decisions would have led to earlier space travel, eradication of all disease, a world government. The possibilities are endless.
Well if your team of time travelers are trying to go back in time to establish some sort of despotic world government, my team of time travelers will have to go back in time to stop you. Time Wars!
Eradication of all disease. Great, now we introduce mass famine earlier in history. One thing about disease, it is the best way over time to control the human population. Since we have not had a major predator for thousands of years, that is the only thing that kept our population in check. And to be honest, I think the lack of a major pandemic in almost a century is telling with the resource shortages and population stress the planet is facing now. In short, we need a good plague. World government? Uhhh, no thank you. I despise Marxism. Earlier space travel? What for? We have not even explored the capabilities we have now, and have done nothing significant in that area in almost half a century. So what would be the point of doing nothing sooner? And unless they find a way to disprove Einsteinian Physics, it will never be more than a curiosity for popping to our closest planets for no major benefit.
And world government doesn't have to mean Marxism. Many countries have had plans which didn't come to fruition-imperial Japan, nazi germany etc.
I’m not convinced there is any single piece of information that could significantly alter the development of the human race. Most of the key fields we might think of developed on the basis of small steps building up on each other, often cross field as well. People at any given stage wouldn’t have the ability or resources to leap over too many steps in that process. You kind of touched on that about people accepting ideas about germs – it really took developments in glass making leading to better magnification lens before microbiology could advance and there was probably a series of other discoveries and inventions required to allow that. It could also be that the process of trying and failing led to other things. False assumptions will still have led to other discoveries or ideas that remained valid even after the initial assumptions were corrected. Artificially skipping over that process might risk delaying as many discoveries as it increases. Anyway, whatever you did, one of your party would inevitably step on a butterfly and you’d come back to a world where everyone talked backwards and the Nazi’s won or something.
Send Columbus east to fight the turks, give native Americans and South American tribes antibiotics to fight the diseases the Europeans brought with them, introduce gun powder to the tribes. See what happens.
Totalitarianism under a different name. But none of the countries you listed had any kind of plan for a "World Government", that exists largely only in Marxist philosophies. Germany, Japan, Italy, etc, they had more of a mega-Colonialism in mind, never actual global domination. Antibiotics would have done absolutely no good. The majority of diseases that the Indians died of were virus, like Chicken Pox. Antibiotics do absolutely no good against them. And inoculations in a virgin populace would likely have been almost as fatal as the original disease would have been. Indians had almost no immunities because of low population density and limited interactions with outsiders. One of the many theories on the rise and collapse of so many Central American "empires" is disease. It seems that every time an empire got to the point where it would make the jump to the next level, it suddenly collapsed.
Any world government would have to be a totalitarian dictatorship in order to govern. And how would a world government be in any way progress. That's why my team of time travelers would have to stop you from establishing your dark regime that would stomp on a human face forever. We need a good name though...Time Rangers?
there was a book"gladiator at law" where a ? Time traveller taught Ancient Rome triple entry book keeping. It was very beneficial apparently. I may be wrong about that book. The wiki entry doesn't look like it.
Introduce slowly? A virus? Are you even aware that the one thing that killed most Indians was chicken pox? That is estimated to have killed off almost 30% of the pre-Columbian population. You do not "introduce slowly through the water", there are only 2 ways to introduce such a resistance. Either you infect the population so those who lack the immunities die off, or you increase the population density multi-fold for a millenia or so. In the first case, the majority die off, but the survivors are stronger. In the second, you also have huge death rates as the same thing happens, but each successive generation gets stronger as they have contact with more diseases at a younger age (increasing infant mortality but extending life spans of those who survive). This has repeated many times through history. It happened to Europe as their cities started to grow bigger, then got caught in ever increasing waves of plagues from the more heavily populated East. And in the US when Europeans first contacted the Indians. Oh, and a virus does not live in water, you are thinking of bacteria. A virus must have a living host in order to populate itself, they are very fragile and are killed very easily outside of a living host.
Why on earth would you want to do that? Are you aware that even in a healthy population that has regular exposure to communicable diseases, kinepox has a 3% fatality rate? Even taking the best guestimate of a population somewhere around 54 million pre-Columbian, that is over 2 million dead even at the lowest fatality rates (and more likely it would be 2 to 3 times that amount if not more). And that would only protect them from Smallpox. Does not a thing about chickenpox, measles, or any of the other diseases. When Lewis and Clark traveled to the North-West, they took with them some live cowpox pustules, at the direction of President Jefferson. And at many places along the route they inoculated the native populations. However, that was over 200 years after roughly half the native population had perished to earlier waves of diseases.
And how would space travel or world government eliminate venality or corruption? But if I could go back in time, I would give gun powder to the Romans who could then have nipped Islam in the bud and avoided the Dark Ages by fending off the barbarians. The fall of the Roman Empire was the greatest setback to civilization in history. But who knows really. Other civilizations (China, India) tended toward stasis and perhaps it was the mixing of civilized but effete Europeans with the barbarian will to power which propelled Western civilization past an early stasis.
You answered my question, but I was not aware that there was any mortality assoc. with cowpox. I thought the dairymaids only got blisters on their hands. Do we know what effect the Lewis and Clarke inoculations had? (I thought I was the first to think of it. Darn!)
It is fun to speculate. If the Roman Empire were intact through the 16th C. the Silk Road would not have been controlled by Muslims. There would have been no incentive for Columbus or Vasco Da Gama. Europeans would have stayed in Europe and the colonization of the New World and Africa delayed, perhaps for centuries. Or perhaps Christendom would have expanded East, into India and China.
Yes .. there's something to the idea of a continuation of the Roman Empire. They were remarkable people. Really out of their own time, in so many ways. Meantime, I'd use my time masheen to visit the 1920s. I wouldn't change anything though, I'd go for the fashions and the partying. I'd take modern medications with me, just in case.
