im not joking when i say that this meme single handedly got me invested in learning how the fuck electrical production works small scale so that i could explain it to somebody from a millennium ago
If that’s a thing that bothers you for more subjects then just electricity there’s actually a book for this! That I own! That is both very stupid and fairly useful! And entertaining!
How to invent everything: a survival guide for the stranded time traveler is the book for you, complete with flowchart about how to identify what time you’ve landed yourself in! It’s very funny and very fun and informative and starts with the production of written language and works it’s way forward through inventions of varying complexity, all framed in the way of “so you got into this time machine from our company and it’s broken, huh? Well tough fucking shit! Welcome to your new home!”
Man I keep seeing this post with all sorts of different resources/things about how to explain modern technology to ancient people, and every time I see it I want to write a long essay about exactly why and how none of this would work At All
There are some things where a modern person could conceivably get ancient people over a technological knowledge barrier (medical knowledge in particular), but in most cases? Knowing about electricity isn’t gonna do a damn thing, my guy.
The average person’s grasp of how technological advancement happens is completely wrong, okay, and some of it has to do with this thing called Colonialism
So there’s this concept called the “Great Man Theory,” right? It’s the idea that events in history are caused or driven mainly by the actions of a few “great men” who are the movers and shakers of history
And this idea isn’t taken very seriously by historians any more, but it still is pretty much how lots of regular everyday people think about history. And that’s how people think about technology. They think technology comes about because of “inventors,” who Figure Out the knowledge barrier stopping technology from happening.
But that’s not actually how it happens
For a type of technology to become a part of a society, several different conditions have to be met, and they’re all related:
Knowledge: People have to know how to create the technology.
Resources: The resources to create the technology have to be available.
Economic Feasibility: It has to be practical to obtain those resources.
Usefulness: It has to actually be useful for this technology to exist in the society it’s in.
Keep in mind that ALL of these things are a pyramid of conditions that have to be met before the technology can Become A Thing. Like, to collect resources in large amounts, you have to be able to mobilize large amounts of labor. To mobilize large amounts of labor you generally have to have centralized hubs of people and hierarchical societies where people can command other people, and so on.
Historians don’t just try to find explanations for “Why did X event happen?” They also try to answer “Why did X event happen at the time it did, and why didn’t it happen sooner?”
One major thing where people get this wrong is agriculture. People portray it like agriculture happened when people “figured out” how to cultivate plants and settle down.
But that’s wrong! Because hunter-gatherers KNEW everything that a farmer would need to know to farm. (They used the exact same tools to harvest wild plants as farmers did when they settled down.) It’s just that in prehistory, hunting and gathering was, for most groups of people, an objectively better way to live. In fact, a big archaeological sign that a people group were settled farmers is…malnutrition.
Why do you think writing emerged where and when it did? It’s not because the groups that developed it were the first to “figure it out.” It’s because writing things down was genuinely pointless or impractical for everyone else. People in supposedly “pre-literate” societies have hardcore systems of mnemonics and oral tradition to pass on knowledge.
If you’re a horseback-riding nomad, are you going to lug around clay tablets with you? If you live in a humid tropical forest, how long is anything that passes for “paper” going to last? If the utility of a writing system is very limited for your people, are y'all going to keep teaching your children how to write?
How does this connect to colonialism? Well…there’s this idea that societies “progress” through a linear series of “stages” of development, socially and technologically. And it’s still ubiquitous, even though it’s completely, laughably wrong.
When the Americas were first colonized, Europeans in some cases admired the Native Americans, but saw them as societies in an earlier “stage” of development, that had yet to “advance.” British colonizers compared them to the early ancestors of British people, and thought that Native Americans would happily accept speedrunning the next “phase” of their development, becoming just like Europeans.
But that’s not what happened.
Because American societies weren’t actually “less advanced,” they were just…different. The stressors, politics, and resources of their continent were different. And it created a very different type of society. Now, they were happy to borrow aspects of the Europeans’ culture and practices that were useful or just neat to them. But the colonizers were in for a rude awakening when they realized that the Americans weren’t falling over themselves to become European, and in fact thought that a lot of things about the European way of living…sucked.
Terms like “Stone Age” are useful for when you are in an area that had a clear progression from using stone tools to using metals, but describing a society that just…doesn’t use certain metals as “stone age” is bull-fucking-shit. Anyone who claims a modern society of indigenous people is “Stone Age” is being more than a little racist whether they like it or not. It’s a term that implies that all societies pass through these “ages,” and the people you’re talking about are still relatively in their infancy, when…maybe they just don’t live in a place where you can get at metal resources.
But that’s a little bit of a digression. The point is, it’s all well and good to know what steel is, but say your time machine drops you in, I dunno, southern Alaska, 6,000 BCE. You’re with a group of people that moves around hunting mammoths and stuff.
You don’t just have to know about steel, you have to find iron, and you have to be able to mine it and smelt it. And, crucially, you have to be able to convince the people around you that doing all that is worth it.
You know the ins and outs of how to make and run a steam engine. Great. You explain this to a nomad dude in western Asia sometime around 1,000 BCE. Your problem isn’t explaining the steam engine, it’s explaining why a steam engine is better than a horse.
You don’t just have to know about steel, you have to find iron, and you have to be able to mine it and smelt it. And, crucially, you have to be able to convince the people around you that doing all that is worth it.
Extracted and bolded for emphasis.
Also, I would assume this is why medical knowledge would be comparatively easy to convey? “This will get rid of this disease” being a more compelling motivation than “This will let you get somewhere faster* *with more restrictions and at greater cost and with greater work and after building all this infrastructure and also you don’t particularly need to be there that quickly anyway”?
if you’ve ever started a new world of vallheim (or any crafting game ever) it’s basically the same as early game bottle necking. sure you know how to get black metal, but you still need the higher quality tools to find it and collect it, let alone smelt it into something more useful.
and maybe you’re just playing the world differently. maybe one run was all about fighting, so it made sense to go for the top defense gear, but this round, you’ve decided to go for exploration, so it makes more sense to go for a stealth build.
