The novel Replay by Ken Grimwood sent its victim back to his youth, over and over again. My question draws its inspiration from this, with important differences.
Instead of going back some twenty-five years, you will go back a century or more. Instead of dying when you reach forty-two again, you are again reincarnated in the universe you have created, unlike the Replay character.
So this is the deal: Where would you like to start intervening in human history? Remember, it is a one way trip that will last forever. You will be transported to whatever time period you choose and will be reincarnated in the universe you just died in. I know that being a teenager again will be a drag but think of the advantages of being a baby again. : )
You could start deep in prehistory and guide humanity over the millennia before anyone has left Africa. You could start at the time of Christ and help spread His message with greater fidelity. You could start with Marx and help realize the communist ideal. Where do you think it all went wrong and where do you think the fulcrum point is?
Usually, when faced with this kind of question, I take the Cycladic civilization but my recent thinking has been revolving around Athens in the 5th century, perhaps because there are so many parallels. Athens tragically lost the Peloponnesian War through internal flaws and it is these that I yearn to fix. A warning about the coming plague with some advice regarding an certain foolish military adventure in a far away land of which the Athenians knew little.
Syracuse = Iraq?
or
vice versa?
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
I’ll include a poll though comments would be better.
and enormous influence. You keep on coming back, your memories intact.
Depending on where you go, what would you give the locals?
NOT crossposted.
There’s the part of me as a child who dreamt of this far too often, to the point of wanting to learn at a tender age how to build buildings, how plumbing worked, how to make gunpowder (hey, I was a kid!), everything. I wanted to be able to reproduce technology from scratch. Of course, I was taking apart old 8-tracks and the like, so that didn’t seem so implausible at the time.
Then there is the Star Trek: Next Generation and its lousy Prime Directive. Or the old Star Trek, and its classic episode with Joan Collins and how her fate prevented (well, don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, but it was Jurassic Park’s Butterfly Effect, but applied to History).
I admit to being no great history buff. I’m not sure when I’d like to go back to. Probably the 19th or 20th centuries, simply because the times before that seem so tumultuous that any good I might affect could more easily be crushed by large forces outside my control. At least there are areas I know of in the last couple centuries where I could rely on political stability and modern creature comforts while working to make a better world.
Then again, a chance to hobnob with Plato and Socrates or Michaelangelo or some of the great thinkers (or at least scribes) who cataloged ideas still very much relevant hundreds of years later. The joy of being learning details of physics I didn’t get in college from ancient people would be fantastic. Maybe I could contribute a little of my Statics learning, or boolean algebra.
Ah, but that’s the shame of it. These folks built off their predecessors and contemporaries to document fundamental concepts. Mostly I’d be able to offer them plagiarized things I’d learned from books now that otherwise would have been developed hundreds of years later.
Maybe that’s why I enjoy my field so much. I get to do things and build on knowledge, secure that the ideas really are mine, or that I developed them independently of anyone else, even if we did so simultaneously across the globe from each other or even right in the same town.
Which ones? Could you make a windmill or soap or steel? Which are the most important and simple ideas?
One simple one that came surprisingly late is the stirrup.
Ooh, I would not have guessed that. I’m sure there are others that would just jump out to a time-traveler, too, if they saw their absence.
I guess the ones I was most concerned with were the basics: Water and waste. I knew lye was used in Grandpa’s outhouse at the cabin, and that transporting waste away from living quarters and drinking water was important for disease control. I knew how to make paper from paper pulp (ya, I know that’s a bit of a chicken-egg thing) because I got my parents to buy me a kit (and later repeated the experiment in school).
Weapons for defense, that was pretty obvious. And since I knew the natives lost to the conquistadors because they didn’t have guns, gunpowder and metalsmithing. Maybe that was why casting aluminum in 7th grade was such a kick, even if we only made anchors on stands for paperweights.
I was on a big Egyptology kick as a kid, so math and construction (to help with the pyramids). Ramps, levers, pullies, simple machinery.
Wells. Grandpa and Grandma had an old pump well on the farm. When I saw pumpheads in antique stores I was fascinated that they were such simple devices, I couldn’t quite grasp how they worked. But I figured it was like the experiment with two buckets of water, and a tube, and how if you sucked on the tube to start a flow, you could get it to continuously flow from the higher bucket to the lower one.
Gee, its a bit amusing and frustrating that I can best think of time-travel by looking back at my own childhood. Is this what adulthood has done to me? Now I instinctively rationalize everything out, but then I was able to approach the world as a continual source of wonder, with a new discovery around every corner.
Distillation
Steam engines
Glass-blowing
and the scientific method.
Thanks for your excellent comments. Off to be now, it being 5:30 am.
: )
Excellent point.
Sometimes it’s not so much introducing technology as thinking of a new way to use it, which can sometimes be delayed by millennia even for maddeningly obvious, simple applications.
See my comment about testing sailing ship designs using a simple weight balance.
I’d want to go to pre-human era just to see it and follow the whole course of things! Don’t think I’d be able to do much to influence the course of our evolution though.
Great concept–I’m going to think about it. But tell us more of what you would try to change!
Getting surgeons (read butchers) to wash their hands before delivering babies increased the population growth rate enormously. If you transmitted some basic concepts to our pre-human ancestors, I bet you could change history dramatically.
As for what I would change…
Just think if Athens had won the Peloponnesian War and gone on to empire.
And imagine that empire is guided behind the scenes by someone who knows where the continents are, the principles of the steam engine and the printing press, the concepts of paper and gun powder.
I submit that Athens in the fifth century is not a bad fulcrum from where to change human history decisively.
Sagan pointed out that it was the custom of owning slaves that destroyed the ancients’ scientific endeavors. I think one could change that and their attitude to women.
… how do you get people to listen to the idea without getting burned at the stake or something? I can’t imagine them taking too kindly to being told they had invisible bugs on their hands.
I read Replay and liked it, but found the notion quite horrifying!
which should make introducing new ideas easier, especially if you can make a profit. One instant money-maker is distillation. Give the Greeks ouzo a couple millennia sooner. You’ll die rich and will be able to cache money for your reincarnation.
I also found Replay horrifying but also scintillating. : )
and you knew that it was being run in a stupid manner.
Like Izzy, i think you’d need to be pretty shrewd to escape having your throat cut. But if you keep going back, well… live and learn, eh?
I submit that Athens in the fifth century is not a bad fulcrum from where to change human history decisively.
I concur.
Where would you like to start intervening in human history?
Now. Because striving to realize a better world is a constant. Learning from the past is a constant. And because I can’t think of a single time or human-caused event in history that – over millenia – has changed our behavior. The fulcrum point is never static.
Resurrection with intact memories will give you an edge in any era. You may choose the 19th century. Only a lifetime or two away.
As for historical crossroads, they are many. If the Greeks had lost to the Persians, the world would be different today.
If Alexander the Great had not died, the world would be different today.
If the Turks had taken Vienna, the world would be different today.
If Jesus had not been crucified (due to a lack of Romans), the world would be different today.
If the pastoral male god had not superseded the nomadic older female gods, the world would be different today.
Etc.
I understand what you are saying, but play with this.
Done, but so much for flip answers. Now I have to think…. <wry smile>
the Peleponessian wars? That was the tragedy. That they were so militaristic and craved empire. Of course, Sparta was even more militaristic.
the Peloponnesian War over the summer as I am reading Thucidides again for the first time since high school. As usual who started the war is disputed but again that is one of the things that I would like to argue with the Athenians.
My wife and I drove around the Peloponiassian area last year…seems like there is an ancient fortress or theatre every half hour…amazing place. We stayed a week with friends in a house in an olive grove overlooking Monemvasia, the Greek Gibralter/fortress, that has existed as a city/state since 700ad. I will go back to Monemvasia, very special. Can see your interest in that history…
first, I’d try to end slavery without a civil war, then I’d stop that horrible supreme court decision that is the basis for personification of corporations, then I’d persuade TR to get constitutional amendments – not just laws – that trust-busted and set aside national parks and forests, and such. While I had a few breaths left, I’d invent solar energy so that by now it would be mature and efficient enough to do the job. And I’d like to have lunch with Einstein in 1905 just before i died….
What would you use for leverage? In the novel Replay the main character is always able to set himself up with some money because he remembers certain unlikely sports scores which he bets on. If you go back to 1840 what will you do to amass wealth and/or power?
I like your vision, especially the bit about Einstein. : )
What would you do in the next lifetime when you are reincarnated in 1906?
Well, I guess I’d choose to claim and discover the entire Comstock Lode a few years early! Think that’d be enough wealth/power to pull off my plan?
sounds perfect. : )
It is also the kind of thing I need to look up for my Athenians. Not so much silver (though wealth is never to be sneered at and it is associated with lead, another useful metal) but iron, tin and copper.
I was fooling around thinking about introducing Japanese sword making techniques to the Athenians. : )
Future. Definitely the future. I want my flying car and my holodex.
This is my favorite science history fiction problem. I thought of it myself but surely some greater minds have considered it before me.
Some time in the 1800’s, American shipbuilders began experimenting with a radical new hull shape. For centuries the west had been building ships like the whales, seals, dolphins and fish that also travel the waters: round in front, pointy in the back. “Cod’s head and mackerel tail” construction it was called.
In any case, an early public splash for the pointy-bow innovation was the racing yacht “America” which won her famous cup in 1851.
It turns out that the streamlined shape of swift sea animals is backwards for ships because, although ships do travel through the water, they do it at the surface. The surface is the boundary between two fluids, and whenever anything travels near that boundary, it makes waves. Making waves adds a huge extra amount of drag on top of the friction drag all objects make. It’s an inescapable fact of life that imposes a speed barrier on ships, surfaced animals, even human racing swimmers. That’s why swimmers stay below the surface as long as possible after diving in.
So if the fish shape is turned around at the surface, the vessel makes smaller waves, which resets its speed barrier measurably faster. Nautical historians like to argue who to “credit” with this discovery–but I like to wonder who and what on earth to blame for its collossal late development.
The dawn of civilization is generally put around the development of weights and measures. I mention this because that’s the moment we became able to test ship designs! All you need are:
So the west missed building significantly faster ships for 10,000 years after it had everything it needed to discover a better way. All that time we built them backwards.
I leave it to you historians of politics, commerce and war to work out the implications of faster ships appearing suddenly at various points in the past.
My favorite guess is that if the British had had the increased boatspeed, the trade and contact between New York and London may have been increased enough that we’d never have broken apart in 1776. The merchants would have had so much trade to lose that they’d have crushed rather than launched the revolution.
Earlier empires; settlement of the new worlds; trade with the far east; the Plague and the Rennaissance. I think that anywhere along ancient to medieval history where faster shipping would have appeared, history could have been significantly altered.
Personally, I’d go back in time and introduce this to the British sometime in the early to mid 1700’s to see what came of its relationship with the colonies.
Travel from Europe to North America at the beginning took over a month. Look at the Mayflower – talk about leap of faith.
Come to think of it, i wonder how long the Vikings took to cross. I think i saw somewhere that they didn’t come straight over but sailed from Greenland in the Summer.
Come to think of it again, the Vikings’ longships were pretty sleak. Guess that’s why they get the claim for first (European) steps.
I’ve also been thinking along these lines but with more of an emphasis on sail rigging. If you introduce the idea of the lateen sail to the Ancient Athenians along with the compass I bet that they could have crossed the Atlantic some two thousand years before Columbus.
The Greek trireme is extremely well streamlined with a pointy bow, so at least some of the ancients knew about this idea. I wonder why it never caught on. Maybe a bit like the Incas and the wheel.
there’s a number of times and places I can think of being in…but the California Coast, between 1780 and 1820…very quiet, garden of eden-like multi-cultural world (except for the Missions treatment of the Native Californians, which I’d do what I could to improve). Selfish, I realize…but what first comes to mind…
Yeah, it’s fun to think about returning to other cultures. My dream was brought up short when I realized that I might have to go as a woman. I ended up in this society as a woman, and that is not always wonderful. At least in this case I can get away with believing in such things as reincarnation, and not believing in the president’s version of god. So I’ll stay until this life is over.
each time you are reincarnated as is the social status of the family you are born into. Over several cycles you might be a poor female slave or a rich prince. Thus you have a strong incentive to work towards a free and egalitarian society.
It is geographically restricted though. Once you choose a spot you keep on getting reincarnated there.
Because I can’t find my keys…
: )
Did you look on the floor next to the dresser?
That’s where they were…
In 1839, Edmund Becquerel, the French experimental physicist, discovered the photovoltaic effect while experimenting with an electrolytic cell made up of two metal electrodes placed in an electricity-conducting solution–generation increased when exposed to light.
In London, Michael Faraday was experimenting with the dynamo (or electric generator), a device converting the energy of motion to that of an electric current.
I would, after standing next to James Marshall in California, stake a claim, grab the gold, cash out and take a boat to England. There I would finance a joint venture “marrying” Becquerel’s & Faraday’s theories into non-carbon-based energy systems. I would simultaneously publish details of the system at symposia worldwide.
Because this type of system could have been produced in factories of the time, and because automobiles had not yet been manufactured, there would be the potential to radically alter the world’s economies, as well as energy production and transportation systems.
The fuel used to produce manufactured goods would have migrated from coal to solar, wind, and hydro (DC). Because mass production reduces costs, investment capital – and therefore research – would be devoted to ever-increasing efficiencies in those combined technologies.
No oil, and no trail of wars, economic consolidation (monopoly), and destruction of the environment.
[Postscript: this little fantasy has a basis in today’s reality. The Freeplay Foundation, and now it’s commercial arm, is developing dynamo-powered systems in a variety of applications:
Recognising a need for alternative energy sources amongst the world’s poorest communities, the Freeplay Foundation was founded in 1998 by the Freeplay Energy Group (FEG) as an extension of the group’s commitment to development and empowerment. ]
I wonder how far back one could go with this idea. Could one start this in antiquity?
One of my thoughts was to introduce both distillation and the steam engine to my Athenians and begin the ethanol economy in the fifth century BCE.
ethanol economy
Yes. Perfect. If memory serves, BTU-in/BTU-out ethanol is a net gain.
[Anhauser Busch plant in Fairfield, CA, runs an anhydrous still to both power their plant, and clean up their waste stream. Underpublicized: any internal combustion engine with a 9.5:1 compression ratio can run on ethanol @ 160 proof or above. Less efficient perhaps, but definitely “home grown”. WARNING. Do not do this at home. It WILL void your engine warranty.]