10k years ago you can legit skip to making steel by making a charcoal furnace with bellows. Steam engine is also straight forward, animal husbandry could get you way more food per animal in a generation, and basic hygiene makes lives way longer.
I can go on but in short there’s loads of knowledge pretty much anyone can bring to 10k years ago that changes lives significantly.
I’m a bit skeptical about the stream engine just because it requires not just metal working but precision metal working where a piston needs to form a seal with the tube it’s in not just at one place but anywhere it moves in that tube, to spin a shaft without wobbling to the point that it comes apart at the intended speed. Even more difficult if it needs to be hardened, since a bit of warping is common during a quench.
I think it’s easy to take a lot of things for granted and miss that modern (or even just industrial age) things aren’t just the result of advancing a single tech tree but multiple tech trees coming together at the same time. Like I didn’t even go into the lubricants and gaskets a motor requires.
animal husbandry could get you way more food per animal in a generation
My dissertation chairman was involved in a research project in India back in the 1960s. Some agricultural extension folks had gone there because they had assessed Indian cattle as “weak” and “sickly” and were trying to introduce American breeds as a substitute. The locals wanted no part of these animals and eventually the researchers tried the radical approach of asking them why not. Turns out that while these cattle could plow 50% more land in a day, they ate twice as much food as the Indian breeds.
The light went on in their heads and they set about attempting to cross American cattle with Indian cattle and breeding the most efficient animals. Turns out they couldn’t get any more efficient than the original Indian breeds.
How do you get iron ore in quantities that would allow to build anything worth building & maintaining?
(And what would you possibly use a resource-extremely-hungry steam engine for that needs to be fed that a wooden watermill couldn’t do? You would need to build up society/economy even to justify a usecase for a watermill, otherwise you just build a monument.)
You could build an electric battery 10k years ago, but what for?
Where do you get species directly suitable for animal husbandry?
Or ppl to produce & use higiene products?
I can go on but in short there’s loads of knowledge pretty much anyone can bring to 10k years ago that changes lives significantly.
10k years ago you can legit skip to making steel by making a charcoal furnace with bellows. Steam engine is also straight forward, animal husbandry could get you way more food per animal in a generation, and basic hygiene makes lives way longer.
I can go on but in short there’s loads of knowledge pretty much anyone can bring to 10k years ago that changes lives significantly.
I’m a bit skeptical about the stream engine just because it requires not just metal working but precision metal working where a piston needs to form a seal with the tube it’s in not just at one place but anywhere it moves in that tube, to spin a shaft without wobbling to the point that it comes apart at the intended speed. Even more difficult if it needs to be hardened, since a bit of warping is common during a quench.
I think it’s easy to take a lot of things for granted and miss that modern (or even just industrial age) things aren’t just the result of advancing a single tech tree but multiple tech trees coming together at the same time. Like I didn’t even go into the lubricants and gaskets a motor requires.
My dissertation chairman was involved in a research project in India back in the 1960s. Some agricultural extension folks had gone there because they had assessed Indian cattle as “weak” and “sickly” and were trying to introduce American breeds as a substitute. The locals wanted no part of these animals and eventually the researchers tried the radical approach of asking them why not. Turns out that while these cattle could plow 50% more land in a day, they ate twice as much food as the Indian breeds.
The light went on in their heads and they set about attempting to cross American cattle with Indian cattle and breeding the most efficient animals. Turns out they couldn’t get any more efficient than the original Indian breeds.
How do you get iron ore in quantities that would allow to build anything worth building & maintaining?
(And what would you possibly use a resource-extremely-hungry steam engine for that needs to be fed that a wooden watermill couldn’t do? You would need to build up society/economy even to justify a usecase for a watermill, otherwise you just build a monument.)
You could build an electric battery 10k years ago, but what for?
Where do you get species directly suitable for animal husbandry?
Or ppl to produce & use higiene products?
I absolutely agree with that.