Send an M60 and a few million rounds of ammo back to a random time and place on the far side of year 1 A.D. Whoever found it could literally single-handedly take over the world. Or possibly wipe out humanity.
Well, maybe take over a continent or two. If the M60 were in Asia, Australia and the Americas would be safe.
No, a single machine gun isn’t enough for a person to take over the world. Because that one guy has to sleep sometime, and then you bash his head in with a rock.
A single machine gun could be used by an organization as a tool to win battles. But even then, the machine gun can be present in only one place at a time. Pretty soon there’s going to be an accident, or a dispute over who controls the machine gun, and the thing is going to be wrecked.
If you want to revolutionize warfare, send a flintlock musket (with bayonet) back to somewhere in the Iron Age. Any earlier and they won’t have the metalworking skills to duplicate it. Once black powder was invented, the military applications were obvious. But figuring out the best way to transfer the chemical energy of the exploding gunpowder to the enemy took hundreds of years of refinement. You could bypass hundreds of years of tinkering with aiming and ignition systems.
The only problem is that it’s not obvious what a musket is FOR.
Maybe a better option is a simple telescope, back to the classical era. That would jumpstart all kinds of optics, even though glass was expensive back then. A refracting telescope can be taken apart and put back together easily, and the principles are easy to understand. The military applications for the telescope are obvious, and so it’s a technology that can’t be dismissed as a toy, but it has lots of other applications. The telescope leads to all kinds of other optical devices like microscopes and spectacles.
What about sending a quartz-based watch to c. 1650? They knew about clocks and the beginnings of how to create a small clock you could wear (cite) by that point. And it’s pretty obvious what the watch does - keep time, but once someone took it apart and found the crystal and the battery and the other insides, that knowledge might be able to be extrapolated into a deeper understanding of electricity, 100+ years before Ben Franklin’s kite.
Or it’d be written off as magic storied in a tiny disc-shaped box…
Oh, that M60. I was thinking about this one.
Never mind.
Let’s see…for a less world changing but radical item, send a grand piano back to…say…1580 or so. That’s quite a while before the actual invention of the piano, but late enough that they’d know what it was. That would change musical history quite a bit I’d guess.
For something a little more interesting, send a fully charged kindle back to 1946 Times Square. Now the problem is that you’d have to have something loaded on the thing for them to be able to use it. But it’s cheating to put on a bunch of technical manuals from the past 70 years or something. So I’m not sure what you could put on it that would help them understand how it works. But the battery would last long enough for them to play around with it a great deal, and the interface is simple enough that they could probably figure out how it works. Just have to have content on it for them to read.
I agree that the fantasy of people freaking out, calling you a witch, worshipping you as a god, etc. are unlikely.
People from extremely underdeveloped places encounter new technology all the time. I’ve been around people who live without electricity or running water the first time they see a computer. Generally, they think it’s kind of neat but don’t really see why it’s relevant to them. A few get into it and are quickly cranking out multi-fonted posters for the local village gathering. They don’t freak out over not being able to understand it any more than my grandma- who also has no idea how computer work- does.
People are generally pretty willing to accept whatever technology is useful- look at how cell phones have been picked up even in the poorest, most remote places. Meanwhile, technology that does not have an immediate use will be ignored or used in trivial ways- the Incas used wheels as toys, and we use the unbelievable power of the internet to make YouTube comments.
Look at the cargo cults. The knee-jerk view is to say “haha they didn’t know how planes worked so they made this bizarre religion out of it.” But if you think about it, the technology behind the planes or whatever was not the point at all. What they cared about was not the technology, but the things that were immediately useful to them- consumer goods. They wanted canned food and motorcycles. They knew canned goods and motorcycles came from planes and ships. They got a bit mixed about some of the details of the planes, but their focus was never the technology itself, but the material benefits they hoped it give them.
How about sending a wagon wheel to the Aztecs and/or Mayans? Think I remember reading somewhere they never invented a wheel. A wooden version ought to be easy enough for them to replicate…
Send Spartacus and his boys a 50 caliber machine gun and a million rounds. I hate that they lost their fight with the Roman Empire. Should turn things around quite nicely, given that they were kicking ass pretty good without it.
The Aztecs and the Mayans were a sick bunch. Pizarro was the best thing that could have happened to them. Except for the whole disease thing.
It’s not that they never invented a wheel. It’s that they never invented a good wheel. With all the mountain passes and everything, axles snapped like twigs. Better to use goats.
I may be misremembering, but I thought the issue was that they didn’t have anything to pull said carts i.e. suitable animals.
I should think that a big difference between now and certain periods of the past is, every one of us on this planet knows that technology exists, or has some vague concept of it. Even the villages that have never had electricity or running water know that “white man” is out there with a different way of life and different apparatuses.
But say in medieval Europe, the best technology might be a printing press, which is something mechanical, not magic, and instantly understood. If you come at them with machine guns or MacBooks or missiles or microwave ovens, I wouldn’t think that they’d be bound to accept that it’s just technology at first contact. You’d have to sit down with Leonardo or someone and explain everything that contributes to their operation.
I think sending an armed helicopter like an Apache back a couple hundred years would freak people the hell out. Post industrial revolution, people would likely recognize it as some sort of mechanical construct, but prior to that it would look like some sort of loud bizarre giant hovering insect.
In many ways, just sending something as simple as a graphite tennis raquet or carbon fiber golf club to 1946 would freak some people out. They would recognize it, but would have no idea what it was made out of or how it was manufactured.
They didn’t have goats.
Everyone in 1300 knew the Earth was round. The issue the Church had with a few people - mostly for reasons unrelated to science - was whether the Earth revolves around the Sun.
The impact a globe (or even just a map of the world, for that matter) would have had would have been that the Europeans would then know where everything was, rather than having to figure it out by trial and error.
I’m not so sure.
Firstly, note that it is not necessary to understand how devices work to use them, or to accept that they aren’t magic.
Secondly, as I said upthread, it’s all about whether you let others use / inspect a device. I’m sure if only you hold the gun, you could easily convince others that it’s magic. But if you let people hold it, remove the magazine, see the bullets…people would see it differently. Not to mention when they start shooting at different materials and start to see the limitations of the device.
I’m sure some might see it as an “ancient artifact”, say, and would believe it futile to try to explain how it works. But others would certainly attempt to understand it, and attempt to duplicate it.
How about we send a breeding pair of horses back to some Native American tribe, circa 1000 AD? Maybe even horses with saddles or plows, so they know it’s not just an animal they can eat for food.
Can I send a pregnant horse with an implanted embryo to pre-colonial north america? It would probably get eaten come to think of it, and inbreeding would make it useless.
The only single things I can think of that could really be made use of without instructions are things like a nice plutonium watch for Hitler or other ‘kill significant figure’ shenanigans which are cheating in my view. Similarly theres various ‘cure X’ options, but the person has to know how to use it, eg a course of penicillin for whoever died young, some Khan or whatever.
Most of the examples wouldnt do much in my view other than the nuke/save options.
The idea that ‘one invention would change history’ by jumpstarting things doesnt really work for me, most real advances need other things to support them, and there are any number of examples of things invented ‘before their time’ and languishing in obscurity until other technologies were able to make them into really practical devices, eg the machine gun before smokeless powder.
Maybe a well made stone spear that can be easily copied if you went waayyyy back?
Edit: I swear I never read the previous post, bah. At least mine is still technically ‘one’.
Otara
As the joke goes:
A flyswatter. To Noah.