By Ryan North, the author of Dinosaur Comics! He based the book on a time travel survival guide he published and made into a T-shirt.

Just finished it. Thank you!

A great master plan to prevent climate change, although the industrial revolution will start 2000 years earlier, so I'm not sure it matters

I read they knew about steam power for a long time but couldn't make the engines / containers / doohickies strong enough to contain the pressure.

Yes, electricity would be magic for medieval (and prior) people. Spells trouble for you.

But no, Steam... the principle was known and seldom used by ancient greeces and egypts already, but they couldn't really utilize it, because metallurgy wasn't there yet.

And Sahara was almost green 1000+ years ago, lots of oases.

What is the 'Carnot cycle'? - I don't know

Is there a guide for DIY steam engines?

Go to steam power first. It can move things

They had steam power over 2000 years ago, they used it in temples and as toys to amuse the rich.

Slaves could move things, and were much cheaper.

The problem with this is that you assume that wood is the best fuel source for steam. Very quickly you would realize that coal is far more energy dense than just about anything except nuclear fission. Planting trees is still a good idea though, but wood as fuel is utter shite on any large application.

Easy materials to get from your local 1st century hardware store

Magnets, how do they work?

"Wrap some copper wire around a core"

Mr. Stegosaurus, please point out the nearest refinery so I can grab some copper wire.

I don't know if this helps. It's enough to know you're fucked.

I find this to be brilliant.

I've been meaning to buy this! Does he have a section on how to handle no one speaking your language?

My biggest issue with this is the flight part - it's a counterintuitive explanation that doesn't really explain how to make the flight work. It's not technically wrong, and if you trace that cross-section you will get a working aerofoil. However, you can't make the Wright Flyer on that explanation, or in fact any of the early aeroplanes that were constructed with simple fabric stretched between wooden frames.

A far more useful and intuitive explanation is that planes fly by flow-turning, basically the interaction between the aerofoil and the air turns the air in one direction, usually down, which pushes the aerofoil in the other direction, usually up. This also means the air below will end up slower than the air on top, which will create a pressure differential. Either of these methods can completely describe how flight works.

Also, a plane isn't just two aerofoils attached to a central body. Early planes were at least biplanes, and you need horizontal and vertical stabilisers to have full control. You need flaps that give you pitch, yaw and roll, and you need the centre-of-mass - the point where it balances - to be in front of the centre of pressure. That means you need the stabilisers to be at the back to keep the plane stable like a dart.

This isn't just a "well akshually", although it sort of is. If you tried to follow the advice as-written and didn't know this, there's a good chance you'd end up on the long list of people killed by their own inventions. Actually, I suspect most of these explanations give you plenty of information to kill yourself with but not really enough to actually make any of them work from first principles.

Actually the floon goes inside the zargnix. Duh.

where did read it? do you have a link?

If you couldn't prove it, things probably wouldn't go well for you.

"Science" ≠ Technology!

If you give them the technology without giving them stuff like empiricism and cultural acceptance of critical thinking, they'll just worship it like any other faith, and stagnate for the next thousand years.

Inversely, you don't even need to give them too much technology, because if you just give them stuff like evidence-based medicine, the printing press, rigorous experimentation and reproducibility, and a couple institutes dedicated to the craft, plus a couple starting points, then they'll figure it on their own soon enough (assuming an overall stable civilization).

Ayyyyy gotta love some quick typing typos lol

I can't even draw a bike.

Can you build a metal laythe? Can you build one precise enough for a pump?

Can you get rubber or silicone for gaskets?

There are a lot of problems

Steam engines are more complicated than people seem to think. There’s more to it than just boiling some water and voila! They’re pretty much useless without a governor. How many people know how to make this crucial component?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/...

This was the (side) plot of Army of Darkness

Then you have the resources and slaves to find... magnets and shit.

They already had magic in the old days though. They used to have to fight dragons and witches and shit back then.

And all the germs we carry to which we're already immune.

I don't want to type out that thing you said, because I don't want to end up on a list, but idk how to do that.

Man Makes Dynamite Out of His Own Pee (It's Cody)

anything about sanitary practices faces a massive barrier of getting people to accept and implement it. I could tell ancient doctors to wash their hands, but the first time someone tried that in actual history they laughed in his face.

That's assuming you don't either kill them all off with your 21st century germs and/or be killed because the church doesn't like you.

People were so moronic back then, even more than today, saying any one of those things would have you burned like a witch 😂

Steel, like the strong metal for weapons? You want how much of it, and throw it where? And what's a "lemon"?

We could send them to the end of the galaxy to compile an encyclopedia of all human knowledge but they'd secretly be there to start the next iteration of civilization through the foolproof strategy of not doing much and just letting the pre-calculated history take its course.

I want this for when climate collapse destroys modern civilization and the survivors are left to rebuild society without the benefit of global supply chains or information infrastructure.

There's a couple of books that do this: How to Invent Everything, and How Rebuild Civilization.

Clock of the long now

How do you make a magnet?

You could give people a mild shock. "Here. Hold these while I crank this thingy." Could be good for some lulz. Or get you burned as a witch.

Making an "ouch" device or basic heater is something I could do.

Even a battery I could make a simple alumium air battery cell. Or lemon battery. But I'd be viewed like a sorcerer asking for foreign ingredients like salt, aluminum, copper and zinc.

Joe Rogan had a good line back before he became... whatever he is now. Anyways, the line is "if I dropped you off on a deserted island, how long before you could send me an email?"

You can make a generator.. so then stretch wires to a distance and put a motor on the end of it (similar to the generator). Basically blow their minds in that you could transfer power over distance without a mechanical coupling.

How dare you not Starbucks their Walmarts! Google is going to Microsoft you!

Yeh just gimme a cat fur and a plastic rod. I'll demonstrate electrostatic on a balloon.

Yeah, but no one gave a shit unless you read Latin. Nobody cared if you could read and write in those weird grunts the Angles and Saxons made.

One of the newest Brandon Sanderson books "The Frugal Wizard's Guide to Surviving Medieval England" has a similar premise. It's a novel so not a how-to guide so to speak, but parts of it are an in-world manual on how to survive in a medieval alternate dimension.

gun powder enters the chat

Fossil Fuels is typing...

Any conclusive proof that this was used to produce electricity? Consensus seems to be that it wasn't.

I have nothing to add to this comment. I just want to make sure everyone knows that "the Baghdad battery" name goes fucking hard.

Master of never used science.

Before or after you cause a pandemic with our modern germs and illness?

Unlikely. It looks like this would be around the time when magi were about.

Hopefully they will understand modern day English

found the redneck.

And then what?

I think they knew about that already.

Only if you are sick at the time you go back. The occasional 1 1/2 viruses aren't going to survive long enough to infect anyone.

More likely you'd catch the bubonic plague and die within a few months

Tell your mom I said Hi btw.