this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
58 points (96.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43936 readers
388 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Depends on the rules.
Round trip to a 'read only' version of the past? I'd like to see the dinosaurs.
Round trip that can make changes? Probably a few hundred or even thousand years ago, so I could give them modern technology, information about climate change, try to educate people on social issues, etc. I'd create detailed instructions and try to make a religion out of it. There's no guarantee it would work, but I'd hopefully return to a solarpunk utopia. Honestly not sure if I would try this, as it would basically overwrite everything I've ever known.
One way trip? I'd probably pass, unless I can de-age. I would definitely want to go back to being a child with all my current knowledge.
What tech would you take back if you could though?
I haven't really thought through the details.
It would probably take decades to prepare, and to figure out what the best approach would be.
It also depends on how much I could bring back.
If it's just me and what I can carry, I think I would just bring a few things to demonstrate the tech. Maybe a high power flashlight and solar charger. The important part would be a detailed guide on how to re-enginer everything we have today, as well as the science behind it. Really, I think scientific knowledge would be the most impactful.
If this was a huge operation with near infinite resources, I would send back a giant self sustaining compound with a general purpose factory. I think it would probably be possible to sustain a roughly 60s level of technology indefinitely on a small scale until the rest of the world caught up
Any further back than 2 or 300 years and you would definitely, 100% guaranteed be burned as a witch upon arrival.
True, I wouldn’t want to get Galileo’d, and I would definitely want to stay away from Salem, haha. I think ~1750 would probably be a good time. Someone like Euler would take it seriously.
You could visit late 1700s or early 1800s and start a company that makes renewable energy. Maybe something like wind power, wave power etc, should be achievable with the technology available at the time. If your company becomes successful enough, you could compete fossil fuels out of the market. Then, invest that money into developing energy storage technologies to outcompete the internal combustion engine.
That’s a good idea, and it could make a one way trip worth it if it meant becoming super powerful. I’d also focus on medical technology, and maybe computing.
Although I’m a bit unsure of whether I could really create enough broad social change just from that. My goal would be liberation for people of all races, genders, and sexual orientations, the dismantling of capitalism and power structures, etc.
The other option would be to do far back enough so that I could be some sort of god king, which would be a lot more work technologically, but might be easier to create a religion that would canonize my instructions.
Oh, in that case… I guess you might need to bring anthrax with you and eradicate the early humans when they were all still conveniently in one continent.