24 hours from now the earth will be demolished by some advanced alien race for reasons incomprehensible to the mortal mind (but not local officials) - they are an order of magnitude smarter and more technically advanced.
And they can spit green stuff. The world is doomed.
But humanity has one last, best hope for victory. A lone elderly genius has done the unthinkable and created a time machine, trouble is he hasn’t had time to calibrate the flux capacitor and it can only send you, yes you, over two thousand years into the past, but past that you can choose when and where.
Your task is to ensure that humanity is ready for the alien threat and using only what you can fit in the time machine (the size of a small van) to increase the pace of human scientific advancement enough so that us in the year 2007 can fight of our foes.
What technology would you take with you? Where would be the best place to start? How would you go about getting natives to accept your help and not just abandon what you’ve taught when you die, is it possible to shape a society so it adopts stuff seemingly not to it’s immediate benefit. How important are principles such as the scientific method and the rule of law? Science can’t advance without supportive political, religious and economic grounds.
NB; You won’t carry any diseases with you, as you will be decontaminated and you will be able to talk to who ever you want, just because.
Really? Wasn’t that thread about whether the mutant registration act should be enacted in Great Debates? Ah well, I posted this because a mate seems to think that if we just dumped all the textbooks we had now to some time in the past they would be able to develop as quickly as us now.
I’m saying that institution’s and political environment in large part determine how swiftly scientific advancement continues and that without those all the knowledge in the world isn’ going to do much good.
There was a story in Analog called Ben Franklin’s Laser that had a take on this, although IIRC it was the sun going unstable and not aliens. They chose Franklin because he was influential, scientifically educated enough to grasp what could be taught, seemed to have the right mindset to accept future knowledge, and they couldn’t send more people farther back.
The basic idea, which I’d steal for this scenario, is not necessarily to advance humanity far enough to deal with the problem - aliens, in this case - but to advance them far enough that when the zero hour comes they will be enough more advanced that they can send back more time machines, farther back with more advanced knowedge. And if necessary, do it again, and again, and again . . . until the aliens who thought they we going to stomp a primitive bunch of low tech primates run into a bunch of posthuman demigods armed with exotic physics doom cannons; the result of subjective centuries or millenia of time looping.
The weird thing with this though, is that assuming the plan works and the aliens are driven off, the culture which is saved is not the culture which was originally threatened. Your messing with the timeline already killed off that culture. Sure the human race has won, but at what price? Who fought the aliens, the new imrpoved third reich, the holy byzantium empire, etc etc…
True; that’s why it would be a reasonable choice only if the alternative was something approaching total annihilation. I recall this coming up in Spider Robinson’s The Free Lunch, in which future time travellers go back to alleviate the conflicts and problems that have damaged things to the point where humanity is on an irreversible (even with their tech) downward spiral toward extinction.
I’d give the aliens the plans to your time machine. They’ll no doubt try to use it, and be catastrophically destroyed by the effects of the Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis. See Niven’s “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation” based on Frank Tipler’s paper of the same title.
Well, supposedly, Emperor Elagabalus promised half of the Roman Empire to any physician who could outfit him with female genetalia, circa 220 A.D.
If, with modern medical technology, you could pull that off, you might have a fighting chance at gaining a political/industrial beachhead in one fell swoop.
Presumably, as per Der Trihs’ suggestion, before the Praetorian Guard kills you, you can await further time travelers from the now altered timeline(s) to come from the future to help back you up. (A suitibly encoded message for future generations might get them to pick the right time and place. Like renaming yourself Gaius Marcus Timetravelerusexfuturisfleeingfromgreenspittingalienitesblowingupterraininyeartwothousandsevensendscientistsgunsandmoneyius. The First.)
I think you’d want to go back in time as far as possible, and just start teaching basic stuff, like agriculture, animal domestication, textile weaving, writing, maybe metalworking, etc. One small group would pass such useful stuff on to others, and it would spread. Within a generation, you’ve managed to skip several thousand years of development, giving humanity as a whole a several-thousand-year jump on technology.
Ideally, you’d want to add some scientific theory and a better understanding of how the world works, but as you said in the OP, it probably wouldn’t last beyond one lifetime.
From what I’ve heard from the History Channel (I know, I know), that the Library of Alexandria held a working steam engine. A small one that couldn’t really do anything, but it was one nonetheless.
If that place hadn’t burned down, who knows where we’d be.
I disagree. You could advance certain things by a great amount of time, but society could end up stagnating at some particular level. There’s no guarantee there will ever be an Industrial Revolution, or an Enlightenment. The people from primitive times wouldn’t be able to understand the more advanced things, let alone implement any of the technology, and you have no idea what they will do with your books after you’re gone.
I would pick some time after the Elightenment. Or, possibly back in classical times, but that would be a big gamble. You can’t predict history.
you couls set up wards, like in the thomas covenant books. They can only work out the clue to find the enxt pile of books when they have sufficiently advanced.
To avoid the some of the paradoxes that time travel brings, lets just assume that you get one trip only, and you don’t get to bring the machine(or information about the machine) with you.
