Imagine you’re suddenly in the dream of a historical personage. You have the opportunity to promulgate one idea or concept to them. The idea or concept must be simple - I’ll define that as something taught today before a child is 16 (GCSE standard).
So, what would you reveal and to whom?
I’m torn between revealing America to Caesar Augustus and telling Archimedes about Newton’s Laws of Motion.
Suicide; to George W. Bush.
Jesus of Nazererth: How about an autobiography?
I’ve toyed with this idea before (posted on it, too); not sure how well it would come across.
Explain the binary system to, say, Benjamin Franklin. Even if not done with electronics, it’s still a pretty interesting idea that we might sooner start using machines for our record-keeping and calculating. I might try to sell it to Ben as a better way of enciphering military codes.
Still, new ideas are dangerous. The idea might be rejected after all, get me burned at the stake or something. Or tossed out of the dream (on re-reading the OP).
By the time Ben Franklin was born, the binary numeral system developed by Gottfried Liebnitz was already more than thirty years old.
[Insert name of any mass murderer here]: Do not kill.
Cartesian geometry to Pythagoras.
The idea I would try to promulgate is religious tolerance – I’m not sure who to start with, though. Maybe Caesar Augustus? Someone earlier still? Who did Moses and the Jews escape from?
A world with a global tradition of religious tolerance would be a very different place. I’m thinking this is worth a thread of it’s own.
The Romans already had a pretty fair grasp of religious tolerance. So long as you recognized the divinity of the emperor, you could go and worship whoever the hell else you wanted.
Okay, if you didn’t recognize the divinity of the emperor, they got a bit reactionary, but they mostly had it down.
Is this a whoosh? If not, the answer is Egypt.
I’d rather see the germ theory of medicine and illness promulgated to some Greek natural philosophers. I’m thinking Hippocrates, or maybe later on, Galen. With strong hints about the implications for public sanitation affecting public health.
No, it wasn’t a whoosh, but I knew it was Eqypt – I was asking for the name of the king or emperor or whoever.
Okay. Sorry I misunderstood. Unfortunately, the Bible doesn’t name the Pharaoh who ruled Egypt during Moses’ lifetime. There’s speculation that it was Rameses II but that’s probably not correct. Known facts about Rameses’ life contradict events described in Exodus. He was probably identified with the biblical Pharaoh because he was one of the most famous historical Pharaohs. But it would be kind of embarassing to travel back thousands of years and tell Rameses he must set his Hebrew slaves free and have him say “What in the name of Ra are you talking about? Grandpa set the Hebrews free fifty years ago.”
Forgive my ignorance on biblical things – but I was under the impression that Moses and his ilk snuck out, I dunno, during a storm – or maybe they got the guards stoned. Were they set free and deliberately released?
The printing press to Alexander The Great.
We’d be colonizing the Alpha Centauri System by now…
Boyo Jim, AIUI, when you start talking about the Egyptian Captivity there are a lot of differing theories about what really happened, ranging from the strict interpretation of archaeological remains, which seems to say that if (and the evidence for it is damned scarce) there were a Jewish population within Egypt as a distinct minority, far from being persecuted they seem to have been better off than most of the peons in the country; to a litereal interpretation of Exodus as a completely factual and unbiased report; to the theory that the Hixos (sp) invaders and rulers of Egypt were actually Hebrew. And anything in between those theories seems to be up for grabs, as well.
The general concensus that I’ve read/heard is that the Egyptian Captivity didn’t happen, or if it did, the report in Exodus is about as even handed and unbiased as, say, Caesar’s reports on the Gallic Wars. Which isn’t that surprising, I don’t think. The idea of history as a record of what really happened, with all the nuances of it, is a relatively modern idea. Herodotus’ history was as much a philosophical and propaganda exercise as anything a modern historian would recognize as a history.
Here’s a couple of threads that touch on the question, and a link to the SDSAB articles written a few years ago about “Who Wrote the Bible.”
And now that I’ve stuck my neck out, I’m sure someone more informed than I will be along any minute to show me where I’m confused, misinformed, and generally off-base. Please note that this post represents my understanding, gleaned through a rather eclectic reading habits, not based on any serious or in depth study of the question.
Probably the biggest advance we could give in a short amount of time is geographic information. In which case, the existence of decently advanced European societies and a pair of nice continents to the east, to Zheng He or the Yongle Emperor. Besides the technological advantages to be enjoyed by both West and East, there would probably be more surviving Native Americans today.
Which leads me to the idea of what would the world be like if we popped back to the new world around 1200 or so and given them some more information on metal working and a hint or 2 about gun powder. How would our history be different if the New World colonizers had been met by people just as well armed as the new folks?
I would try to get birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger to change her ideas on eugenics and euthenasia.