Okay, here’s the deal. You are allowed to send ONE book back in time. The goal is to have the maximum positive effect on mankind.
Which book would you send, and to what era? (i.e. you wouldn’t want to send a calculus text back 3000 years, because other fundamentals of learning weren’t in place yet).
Obvious candidates might be Grays Anatomy, sent back 1000 years or so. Or an engineering reference guide.
A book about the halocaust to the early ninteen thirties?
Darwin’s Origin of Species to the beginning of the Rennaisance
Would the people receiving the book know it was from the future?
Or would they think it was from their present? This is an important detail.
I would send 1984 back to the 1950’s. If people had read that book way back then, maybe things like government cameras on street corners and extreme political correctness would not be a reality.
I’m not sure if this an attempted “whoosh”, but sending a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four back to the 1950s would be kinda pointless, since the book was published in 1948.
Sending some of Louis Pasteur’s work on germ theory back to pre-Black Death Europe might have allowed them to bypass that whole icky Dark Ages thing.
I’d send Seneca’s piece on the destruction of the Library of Alexandria back to about 310 b.c.
I wouldn’t want to interfere too much by introducing advanced technologies, but I’d love to see what would have happened to civilization if that trove of information had survived.
MrVisible wrote:
To hell with that.
I’d send back a complete manual on gunpowder making and firearms construction. And I’d send it to the ancient Phoenicians, so that Rome would lose the Punic Wars, just to see what happens! Ha!
I’m shocked, shocked, that none of you has suggested sending back the Holy Scripture.
Heathens.
I might send a recent book about government back to the Founding Fathers, so they could see how well various aspects of their Constitution worked. Then they could write a different Constitution that worked even better.
I was being sarcastic at our present state of society.
I would send a book telling the story of the whole alien/ govt. conspiracy regarding Rosswell to July 1, 1947. This would give American’s about a week to go and check it out first hand. Two results: 1) the whole story is out in the open now. OR 2) a bunch of dead Americans in the desert that we now are trying to get to the bottom of. You chose.
Send a copy of The Two Towers back to a young JRR Tolkein with a note: “Hey, J, this is gonna piss people off. Call it ‘The Buildings that were Far Apart and Totally Opposite’.”
Hey, good idea.
Let’s send it back to when some Jews said something like:’ Hmm, maybe we should start writing some of this stuff down.’ (around 600 BC ?)
They might be thouroughly shocked,shocked , to see what they started has turned into.
Maybe a copy of the Koran would do even better.
So many choices, so much time.
Six place trigonometry tables to Kepler?
A good set of navigation charts to Eric the Red?
Translate the SAS survival manual into Celtic? Oh, no, wait, they didn’t have a written language.
The further back you go, the harder it is to provide a book that anyone would recognize as a source of important information. Give the Picts a book on archery, they might have thrown it at the Celts, but they certainly wouldn’t have used to make bows and arrows.
The information in a basic practical nursing course would revolutionize almost any Paleolithic tribe, but writing is not going to give them the information, and even having it falls a bit short of believing and using it.
Latin texts would be readable in much of Europe, over a very long time, but the reception of the information is still a highly variable thing. Translating the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics into Latin is probably a whole thread.
A good basic electronics text, sent to Benjamin Franklin is an interesting thought, though. He had the type of mind that would use it for a starting point, and slog on through for years. You wouldn’t have to translate it, although he might have some trouble with modern American English.
Just saying “a book about germ theory” isn’t really enough. Which book? A twenty-first century text about infectious disease doesn’t spend much time on the concept of microbe existence, or the methods of identifying microorganisms. In the time of Pasteur, there were damned few people to whom it would not be incomprehensible.
I suppose if you could ignore the translation problem altogether, a basic high school hygiene course delivered to almost any small early tribal culture could be the most effective in achieving major change, but it would be almost impossible to predict the nature of the change.
They Boy Scout Manual could have made a difference, in a lot of times and places.
Tris
I’d send a copy of Harry Potter back to a teenage yojimbo so I could publish it and make a fortune.
Latro, you have been “whoooshed” but good. Click the link.
Hehehe.
I’d send the Handbook of Chemistry & Physics back three, four hundred years. Give the Scientific Revolution a bit of a boost.
MEBuckner wrote:
The Teeming Millions coffee mug?
This is a really great question because the decision is so tough. There could be unforseen ramifications when your book arrives. It might arrive, or somehow make its way, into the wrong hands. A copy of Gray’s Anatomy or The Origin of Species sent to the wrong people at the wrong place could bring disasterous results. I mean, you think the Inquisition was bad before, imagine that it’s underpinned by sure knowledge that men in the future will be uncontrollably heretical. As is so often true, mere knowledge might not make the world a better place.
So, if it’s okay, I’d like to add a specific person to send it to, and I think what I’d do is send the New Testament to Jesus when He was, oh say, twenty-eight years old.