Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

I've just remembered a lengthy (genuine) 'critique' of a porn movie where the the individual went into great detail about how the tools in the 'plumbers' bag were all the wrong tools for a plumber and were better suited for a joiner.

The individual was probably not wrong, with the bag in question most likely 'borrowed' from one of the genuine set dressers/chippies in the film crew.

I found it all rather amusing at the time, because the majority of those watching the movie, would not be doing so for the plumbing tips. well, not those ones anyway ...

playing beach volleyball naked.

Disturbing thought: if you kick a guy in the balls, isn't it pretty much guaranteed to be a volley? :-)

AJ

Modern technology sits on the top of a very tall ladder representing 1000s of years of development. You can't come in at the bottom and get to the top by skipping rungs. Each rung is necessary to achieving the next rung.

You posted this whilst I was still typing my rant.

I disagree, see my above post. It took as long as it did because no one knew it was possible. Baby steps had to be made.

If a time traveller were to go back, they would know it was possible and could indeed skip development rungs because they already knew the end result was possible.

You only need one person to know what to do, everyone else only needs to be able to follow orders.

For instance, once you have the basis, and infrastructure, to send analogue signals, the jump from analogue signal down the wire to a digital one, is not that big a step if you know what you are doing.

Whilst the general populace would be too thick to comprehend the break neck speed of technological advance, the scientists of the time would be in a perpetual state of confusion as their 'fundamentals' would be continually shifting, probably leading to the mother of all mental meltdowns.

However, you still don't get to skip steps unless you bring the necessary physical infrastructure with you

Not sure about that. I think you could skip plenty of steps if you knew what you were doing.

I know next to nothing about engineering so feel free to correct and educate me.

Was basic metallurgy not done with charcoal and iron ore? If you had the education and the knowledge, could you not skip the whole charcoal thing and go straight to coal? That would save the better part of a century on its own. Early metallurgy was very labour intensive with mechanical mechanisms taking quite a few years (yet again, another century?) to evolve.

If your time traveller landed in say, Pictish times, and in Wales (England), then you have all the starting requirements to get out of the door running. All you need is hills, rain, trees, coal and iron ore. The trees provide the basics of shelter and structural integrity. You could use the trees to either damn or restrict a nearby river to provide head for water power. The trees you fell and carve into gears and drive shafts. A simple frame and some branches in the river will give you a basic waterwheel you can use to power two stone slabs and grind grain and limestone.

Mix mud and grass/hay for 'reinforced' mud and you are on the way to make your first kiln and bricks. Once you have made your simple wooden gears, knock the teeth off one quarter of a gear and you have the mechanism for a basic drop hammer.

Use that drop hammer to crush your iron ore. And you can also use that drop hammer to pound your (Pig?) iron and limestone (so the limestone can fit into your grain mill).

Using mud/clay with grass/hay as internal reinforcing, you can make large bore clay pipes. Using branches carved into vanes and attached to your water wheel, you have just created the world's first motorised fan. Stick the fan in front of your clay pipe and run the clay pipe to your furnace, and have you not just 'invented' the world's first rudimentary blast furnace?

Anyway, you are now making large amounts of molten iron, so you start pouring it into clay/mud forms you have made in the outlines of shafts and gears. You then start replacing your wooden shafts and gears with your cast ones, along with casting 'propeller's' which you already know to twist slightly to increase wind capture. With cast parts, you can increase the energy capture from your river source.

Now that you have increased the torque you get from the river and the fact that you now have cast gears, you can now cast solid iron cylinders. You attach your new iron gears to your new 'rollers' and the gears to your water mill and you now have a means of rolling out your molten metal into sheets.

Rivets are dead simple to make and with drive shafts from the water mill, you can now drill into those metal sheets and start to make (fluid) tanks and basic metal pipes. You are now well into steam power in the space of a month.

Your powdered limestone is dried at your furnace, and whilst I don't know how cement is actually made, I'm of the understanding that the main ingredient is dried limestone. So you are well on the way to make a cement factory.

You already know steam can power a train engine, so you save the centuries it took to learn that and go straight to making rails and steam engines.

Gunpowder is basically charcoal, finely ground, mixed in with a little bit of sulphur and a nitrate, which I think you can get from bird guano? So you now have rudimentary explosives to mine better and faster, therefore increasing you metal ore output, which allows you to smelt more and in turn, make more.

If you have the manpower, all this can be achieved easily in a month. The hardest and most time consuming part, is going to be the initial making of shafts and gears out of wood with basic tools made out of flint.

Once you are casting iron, you can start making hammers, saws, drill bits and chisels en masse and there will be no stopping you.

It's simply a case of scale. Once you have made smelting possible on a large scale along with the addition of cement, you can craft stronger dams, which allow for greater head and more power.

With the arrival of steam, you can make traction engines which not only will allow you to farm large scale, but will power your sawmills where running water is not available (Which given that it's Wales, is not going to be an issue!)

Your next goal would be to find copper ore. With that, you can start making electrical cables and motors out of the copper wire, since you already know that is possible. Stick your new copper motors on the bank next to your river/damn and you now have electricity. Electricity wasn't really discovered till the middle of the 1700's I believe, though I could be wrong.

All this is easily achieved in a year, so you have compressed over two thousand years of human innovation into one year. All that was required, was to know that it was possible in the first place, which you would do if you were a time traveller.

Nope. Ya canna build a factory without the foundation of general knowledge across the general population and especially the more intelligent people.

Chemistry. Advanced math. Physics. All of these and more are requirements to achieve any rapid advancement.

I politely disagree.

Having been in charge of individuals of, um, err, non existent education, you do not need to know applied mathematics to chop a tree down, or carry out complex tasks. You just need one individual to know what they are doing, to ensure that that the process is carried out in the correct sequence.

This is proven quite well by the internet and you-tube, where simple Google searches will show you some men, in bare feet, in some third world country, melting down scrap and pouring the molten metal into forms dug out of the ground. Very few of these individuals can read, write and have no education other than they started off in these foundries as kids and simply learned by "monkey see, monkey do".

If you read my example, you will see that there is no need for chemistry (of any level), maths (of any level) physics (of any level) required to carry out the work as described. All you need is one individual to say "Put that funny looking stone (ore) in that crusher till I say stop" or keep that fire at that colour via the bellows till I say stop" etc etc. Pretty much in the same way that I do not need to know how a computer computes to access the internet, or even know how the internet works to use the internet"

In fact, the most 'mathematical' task in my example is the creation of cogs, but again, you don't need to know maths to make a cog, you just need a wooden disc and some charcoal to outline the teeth in a fairly regular symmetrical pattern, which you can give to someone with the instruction "Cut out the black bits", once the first cog is made, you simply place it down on the next wooden blank and trace out the teeth on the new blank with your charcoal. You need absolutely no education to watch that process and carry it out yourself, after all that's basically how every basic apprenticeship in the world is carried out.

Do you honestly believe that the children in sweat shops in India, China, Malaysia etc etc have degrees in STEM to carry out the tasks of assembling the components of your electrical goods? Of course they don't, they can barely read or write (if at all). They have no idea as to why the components they assemble do the things they do, they just know that that bit goes in that whole.

Eventually, come the digital age, education will be important, but at the initial stages, the only requirement is strong muscles, a stable food supply and (as any assembly line worker will attest) the ability to shut off your mind for long periods of time as you carry out the repetitive monotonous task.

I think you may, in fact, be overthinking the problem. Yes, if you are creating something brand new, then applied sciences is definitely a help, but we are not creating anything new in this scenario. What needs creating, has already been created and it's a simple case of production, not design. The design has already been done in the future and carried back to the past by your (the) time traveller.

Or to put it another way, think about the Romans and the Egyptians. They built their pyramids, roads and aqueducts using large amounts of uneducated slaves under the control of a foreman. The foreman is your time traveller, versed in STEM, the slaves (the 'populace' in this scenario) that do all the work have absolutely no comprehension of gravity and physics other than if they fall off the top, they are probably going to die, and yet lacking any education, they still managed to build structures that last to this day.

Okay. Let me try and phrase this in a slightly different way. Could you tell me what qualifications are needed to follow a charcoal line on a piece of wood with a simple saw? Accuracy is not that important as you are not creating a cog for a timepiece.

The Egyptian analogy was probably a bad one to start with as that requires the presence of thousands, where in this scenario you are looking at around twenty or so people (workers) max. A number easily looked over by one learned individual (in this case the time travelling protagonist) after an initial period of a week if more people can be gained, then the work force will grow with the existing workforce mentoring then new comers. Since it is simple manual labour of chopping down tree's and digging holes/collecting rocks, I don't see a need to mentor of more than a day. When technology advances to the level of say, a water powered saw mill, or water powered mill with two stones for the crushing of grain and stone, again, I don't see a mentoring time needed of more than a day.

It was their knowledge and intellect that allowed the construction to proceed at a timely pace. They're the ones that saw some portion could be more efficient if done a slightly different way. And then did it.

I agree full heartedly, in this case the knowledge comes from the time traveller and the 'locals' could well see a more efficient way of doing things in relation to the tech level they are used to and the tools they currently posses. After all, history has proved our very distant ancestors to be very good at improvisation.

Those thousands need to be at least minimally educated

Actually, they weren't. Most were non educated slaves. The only 'craftsmen' were the ones doing the painting and the stone carving.

One protagonist going back can educate a few and in turn they can educate more and in turn those dozens can educate more dozens and in turn the dozens educate many.

Full heartedly agree. One can easily train ten. Those ten can train ten each and on you go exponentially. Since the tasks are simple ones, like this how to fell a tree with a wedge, this is how you work a mill stone, these are all easily taught tasks within a day.

But how many will be injured as they learn the nuances of their tasks? How many uneducated are you willing to sacrifice?

That depends on the quality of the initial training and the dangerousness of the task. The fatality level and the amount the protagonist is willing to lose, is up to the writer and would be a good plot point carrying the story forward.

Ignorance and superstition have to be overcome in more primitive societies. How much of a speed bump will that be?

No idea, that would be up to the writer and how much of a plot point they wish to make it. It also depends on what time point the traveller is sent back to. If you were to use my example, it would be before the rise of Christianity and the Catholic church. I can't remember, but wasn't the church the main antagonist for a Baen series? Safehold or something by David Weber, I think it was. But it's not really an issue with pre Christianity as it was mostly singular shamans that were in control. Simply kill the Shaman and the religious problem basically goes away.

Then... let's not forget religious interference. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo are just two of the more well known polymaths that were persecuted by religious zealots that could not let go of their dogma.

I touched on that in an earlier post.

Success will build on success. Willing participation will increase when people see the benefits. But that increased participation will not be 'snap the fingers' quick

Agreed, but given the time frame, quality of life was pretty terrible in those days and not much would be needed to attract people to your cause. Literarily regular food and a roof over your head was counted as the height of luxury in those days. Actually, now that I think about it, that state of affairs still exists for many people even in this day and age.

Pouring molten metal and have some catastrophe occur will start the rumors of witchcraft and evil no matter the previous successes.

Also agree. I purposefully never mentioned the dangers of overly moist moulds (made out of mud that's not properly dried) leading to steam explosions and subsequent molten metal everywhere for the sake of brevity. There is a famous saying "History is written by the winners" and it exists for a reason. Also, humans like to be led and are easily led. So there could be problems with 'withcraft'. History has shown that these rumours were normally fuelled by charismatic individuals. It's up to the writer whether the protagonist tries to get that individual onto their side or just kills them. Personally, these individuals are in that position because of the power it gives them (over the naive populace) and my personal preference, were I to be ever in that situation, is to kill them as quickly as possible with the excuse that the 'shaman' offended the god and was punished for it.

Mine cave ins. Coal dust explosions from the exposed flames of the lanterns. A bazillion different scenarios of failure abound.

Agreed, though one expects the protagonist to know that and act accordingly (since they already know about basic metallurgy).

How does our time traveler teach people to identify ore bearing rocks? How far away is the lode? Is there a road or trail? Are carts strong enough to carry away the ore?

No idea. That sounds like a good plot driver to me. Given the time-frame of my example, these would all need to be built. Romans gave the UK the gift of roads and since the time frame of the example is/was before the time of the Romans, the T-traveller would be the one to introduce the natives to the art of road building. Not that it would be too much hardship as they would use the detritus of the quarrying operations. Again the theory of road building is remarkably simple and the principle could be taught over a few days with experience gained 'on the job'. I don't know about now, but the history of the Romans and how they built roads was taught to all Primary school children when I was of that age. I don't what the USA equivalent of the UK primary school is. Elementary school? Basically it was taught to kids under ten years of age.

Yes, progress is possible at an accelerated rate from what we understand of our collective history but it will be at a pace that the locals of that time are able to absorb and deal with

Agreed. I, no doubt like you, have been on many training courses over the years and every course has individuals that just soak up the knowledge like a sponge and ones that are as porous as granite. Alas, I tended to be in the later group :( But as I have frequently mentioned, the level of technology and the learning required is not complicated, it's basically swinging axes and pick axes. I suppose one way to look at it, is WW2. In the UK, we ran out of working age men pretty quickly and had to resort to using unskilled and uneducated women to do many jobs they had previously never attempted from working farm machinery to working in ammunition factories. The change of jobs and the requirement to suddenly learn complex skills was pretty brutal for the time and the dangers of poor training and simple mistakes was also pretty brutal. Especially for the women who worked in the ammunition factories. Many of whom had never done anything so fastidiously technical before in their lives. They didn't have years to learn their new trades of milling and engineering. They had days. They also had a very good impetus in which to learn. This would obviously prove to be an issue when the war was over and many men returned to find their previously 'highly skilled' jobs taken over by cheaper paid women who had never spent the years of apprenticeship that they had.

my experience strongly suggests education and understanding of basic physical principles will speed the entire process, but there is no magic that will make it instantaneous or without physical injury to the many that are actually doing the tasks.

Again, you are looking at it from a position of modern technology and training requirements. Take another leaf out of the book of history. In WW2 if you wanted to fly a fighter plane, you said so and you were given a week or so of theory and stuck in a plane, no previous experience or knowledge required. Several of the UK fighter aces in the Battle of Britain, for instance, could not read nor write, but were still damn good at flying. Nowadays, if you want to fly a plane you have to learn so much and have several hundred hours of flying with an experienced pilot before you are allowed to fly solo. Much of what you have to learn, isn't actually required to fly a plane, but is required to satisfy all the rules and regs that are required these days. In fact, this is why developed countries lose so much industry to third world countries, because we require workers to be familiar with a myriad of rules and regulations that aren't particularly pertinent to the job at hand. It was not that long ago the UK happily sent children down the mines. The job didn't entail anything they couldn't easily grasp. These children were barely educated and not to far apart, education wise, from the average worker of 300AD.

Modern society is remarkably risk adverse and that is having a profound effect on how we do things, and also on the level of skill we think our distant ancestors required to do things.

I shall look at the links you have kindly provided, but I'm basing my opinion on my own life skills and experience of what is actually required to the tasks I have mentioned.

Does your time traveler know how to find coal seams?
Does he know how to mine coal?
Does he have the tools needed to mine coal?
If not does he know how to make the necessary tools?

Absolutely no idea. That depends on the individual who writes these types of stories.

Personally, I have absolutely no idea as to how to recognise iron ore, or how to determine where a coal seam lies under the ground. In fact, I would make a rather shit time traveller and a rather useless protagonist. But that's not really an issue, as my understanding of the matter, is that the type of individuals that end up going back in time, tend to be ... I forget the term, Mary Sues?

All I did, was look at the scenario given, from a semi educated point of view.

In fact, afterwards, I thought how simple it would be for a semi literate person sent back in time to distil alcohol, which would help kick start a new society almost instantly (in historical terms) into the era of the combustion engine, completely skipping oil and it's vastly more complex distillation process.

from a semi educated point of view

The more STEM advances, the more the practitioners insist you need all sorts of degrees and certificates before you're capable of practitioning, thus making it a closed shop :-(

I've seen too many companies insist you must have a degree before you're deemed capable of writing a computer program.

AJ

It could be a degree in basket weaving

Hey, basket weaving might become a necessary skill after the wokerrati get all plastics banned :-)

AJ

The more STEM advances, the more the practitioners insist you need all sorts of degrees and certificates before you're capable of practitioning, thus making it a closed shop :-(

Unfortunately, I have had many a run in with Health and Safety officials who have thrown their degrees in my non-educated face (I was 12 when I learned the months of the year and 14 when I finally learned the alphabet) as the reason why they were right and I was wrong. In every single case, I have stood my ground and refused to adhere to their 'recommendations' because I knew their 'recommendations' to be dangerous. Every time it went higher where the situation was looked at by people with actual experience in the matter and the decisions went my way.

It's an absolutely bonkers situation and only getting worse.

For instance, in the UK, you pass your drivers licence and theory test and that's you till your like 70 or something and then you need medicals. If you want to drive a digger, dumper, crane or whatever, you need to sit a requisite 'driving' test and theory test for that item of equipment, which lasts for five years and then you have to sit another theory test and operator test. Every five years. I bet the operators of those pieces of equipment spend more time operating that equipment every day than they do driving their cars.

no skipping steps is possible because each of the steps are necessary

You miss understood the point I was making. I wasn't talking about skipping the parts of the process to make items, I was talking about skipping the parts required to find out how to make the parts of the process.

Humanity didn't know how to make iron off the bat, it learned by trying different recipes, ie different ores and materials to see what happened, you know the bits where they added bark and flowers to see what, if any, affect it had on the process. That all takes time and that 'testing' process was the bit I meant about skipping.

Which is only possible if the person that goes back has that knowledge.

Which is the whole point of this thread!!!! Glad to see you were paying attention ... 😛

The discussion is on how a time traveller will effect the speed of technological advance with the knowledge they posses.

just one person to be able to bring a civilisation up quickly by skipping steps just isn't possible.

Of course they would. Invention is all about trying things to see if they work or not, or to see what happens. Someone going back in time knows that trying to turn lead into gold will not work, yet humanity spent centuries wasting time trying to make it work.

As I said repeatedly before, I'm not skipping the steps in the actual physical process of manufacturing an item, I'm skipping all the steps that were the failed experiments involved in the many attempts to reach the finished product. Take for instance WD40. The 40 relates to the previous 39 failed attempts. Each of those attempts took months and the whole process took years before the final product reached the shelves. A time traveller can go back and say "This is the formula that works" the product is made in a couple of days and several years have been skipped. Now picture that happening in every advance up to the steam age and instead of it taking a thousand years as it did in reality, it takes ten, because of the fruitless testing is skipped, because the time traveller knows that square wheels don't work, that a circle is the optimum shape for a wheel etc etc. That is the point I am obviously failing to make.

The discussion is on how a time traveller will effect the speed of technological advance with the knowledge they posses.

This is an argument that nobody can win since, unless someone has a time-machine and a willing guinea pig, there's no scientific way to test it.

Knowing what's possible might facilitate developing new, improved technology that's actually better or simpler to manufacture than what the time-traveller is familiar with because they're unconstrained by commercial competition.

AJ

It's all well and good knowing what's needed to make a finished car, but then you need all of the components that go into that finished car.

Oddly enough, there's something of a fad for making modern objects out of retro technology. For example, I seem to recall an article about cars made with wooden bodies in India.

AJ

Poured cement is not usable in 24 hours

Umm, depends on the cement. The British army uses poured cement that cures so quickly you can land a fighter plane on it within ten minutes and fully laden cargo planes within the hour.

As to time travel and people dragging the dark ages into even darker ages within a year or two. Well, one of the major inhibitors to technological progress is actually knowing whether or not the technology is even possible. Naysayers have been one of the biggest hindrances to technological innovation and continues to be so. In fact, one of the biggest hindrances in human history was/is actually religion.

Human history has also proved that once humans know something is possible, nothing stops it's adoption. Various country's in the world have 'invented' something and once the rest of the world finds out, adoption is very fast. Whether it be shipbuilding or Chinese 'black powder'.

A person transported back in time from present day is going to know flight is possible and the rough mechanics of it, so all they have to do is create the manufacturing process. How quickly that is done, depends on the knowledge base of the time traveller.

Humans are very adaptable and given the tools, they can achieve much in very little time.

But that society is not going from early bloomery iron that produces a few pounds of pig iron to furnaces that produce tons of steel in just 2-3 years

Nothing about that process is inherently difficult. In fact, many materials and ores were discovered before humanity worked out a use for them. If given a mental leg up by, say a metallurgist from today, I would reckon that you are right in being sceptical that your quote would be achieved in 2-3 years. It's more likely to be done in months, not years, because you are skipping all the theory, all the failed experiments, the derision from other 'academics' of the time, the continual claims of "It's not possible", the self doubt, the doubt that the product is even worth producing in the first place.

A perfect example of this is Da Vinci. He created designs whose conversion from parchment to reality was only hindered by derision, ignorance and a lack of money. Many of his designs never saw the light of day because the society of the time saw no use for them, nor could they comprehend the use for his ideas. Flight? What a preposterous idea! Humans have no need to be able to fly through the skies like a bird.... Quite.

What could have been if some of his 'imaginations' were actually constructed and he saw that his ideas were actually possible. What would he have gone on to design? With hindsight, we now know that many of his designs were theoretically accurate and even possible, if the society's technological level had been on par with his genius.

Like I said, one of the biggest drags on technological innovation has been ignorance. Whether it's been because the Earth was flat, or that one nuclear device would set the world on fire. Which was a big concern before the test of the first nuclear bomb.

The next biggest drag to technological advancement is protectionism. We have stayed on many technological levels long past what we should have, because companies and individuals bought up rival, superior technology and sat on it to maximise their own profits. This still goes on today.

Interestingly, the door swings both ways. We like to think of ourselves as 'technologically advanced' yet we still can't agree on how the pyramids were built, or Stonehenge. Or how Roman concrete self repaired and continues to do so to this day.