Leave a Legacy

[sevenperforce]

11 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

it will burn together with temple. Sooner or later.
Not an artifact, but a mental system can survive. Ritual systems, superstitions, sacred systems enough easy to understand. Games for money. Enochian writing.

Foundations will remain.

If the following inscription can be made a spear-length deep in granite, it ought to survive. And anyone who has any sort of knowledge of physics will pick up on it.

[kerbiloid]

42 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Foundations will remain.

Probably.

Spoiler

Göbekli Tepe. 
The oldest or one of the oldest ones on planet. 11000 BCE.
As you can easily see, here are two T-shaped columns of fertility/solar twins, covered with animal figures or so.

 

Something self-reproducing is needed for better effect.

• Slider rule as a magic wand,
• Titius-Bode law (with slider rule it's binary log, so they go as a pair),
• derived astrological system,
• planet descriptions giving proper numbers and characteristics (not in kilometers, but descriptive ones: Jupiter has 4 great servants and a lot of minor minions, Io is dry an yellow, covered with sulfur, Venus is hot, crushing and toxic, etc.)
• fortune-telling system based on them, enough easy to be understood by any witch on the bog,
• arcane cards for this fortune-telling
• gambling with these arcane cards, to let any drunkard spread and reproduce your system, with enough easy and self-causing rules to stay unchanged as long as possible,
• holy myth to let the system be happily used by templars,
• initiation ritual for this myth, path of the adept through the planet horrors to the reborn
• heretic apocryphical myth, for those who couldn't find a seat, make them live in your coordinate system, too,
• holy myth-2 disproving the heretic myth, 
• clear algorithm to calculate a local stonehenge at any place on the Earth and to build it out of woods or clay, if there are no stones around

Additionally - these pictures on the temple floors, etc.
Circles for planets and their servant (hot, fast, lonely Mercury; hot toxic crushing suffocating Venus; Earth and Moon, cold red Mars with two servants; hidden crowd of invisible smalls (asteroids); Big fat Jupiter with Mighty Quad + unnamed Lesser Ones, etc )
Let the planet orbits stay round, but place their perihelions (place where they are hot and fast) and aphelions (where they are slow and cold). Explain that this place they pass faster, and that place - slower. Keep the angles more or less realistic, this is for astrology.
Make regular rituals reproducing the planets motion, with chalices of fire and other magic stuff, to have them want to reproduce them close to your scenery.

Match the stars close to these places and to significant moments of agricultural year. This will make the stonehenges not just ritual, but practical tools.
(That's how astrology was working before it was murdered by a brainless numerology)

Make//take a writing system, logical and compact, phonetical.
Use it also as a magic/sacral alphabet to have the clerics, mages, and witches, and anybody else reproduce it. Make it enough easy, because they will write with a random pen on a random piece of something.

Print the papers. Explain everybody how to make a simple printer. Let your knowledge and writing systems spread and stay unchanged. More paper - less misheard lyrics.

Let all of this self-sufficient. Better compact than full.

***

Don't forget about thalassocracy.

Edited June 1, 2018 by kerbiloid

[NSEP]

Quote

You cannot, of course, manage to effect full industrialization since that infrastructure would take a few hundred years to get up and running,

You don't have to see stuff happend to make it happend. You can simply make one stirling engine and the people do the rest of the revolutionizing. You don't need to build a big highly functional one either, you can just make a prototype engine so people know it works, and can improve the design. The only problem here is creating the actual engine, wich requires metal, but i don't think it will take me and my people over 50 years to make a few metal parts.

Quote

can't make predictions about the future, because you don't know the future any more.

*cough* astronomical events *cough*.

[kerbiloid]

5 minutes ago, NSEP said:

stirling engine

Afaik stirlings are overestimated. Poor scalability, poor efficiency outside of optimal scale.
Classic steam engines are required anyway. And they need iron melting, i.e. XVIII cent. level.

5 minutes ago, NSEP said:

but i don't think it will take me and my people over 50 years to make a few metal parts.

It took about 3000.
Melting point of iron ore is too high to melt it on wood.

Edited June 1, 2018 by kerbiloid

[NSEP]

8 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

It took about 3000.
Melting point of iron ore is too high to melt it on wood.

It took 3000 years for people to figure it out by themselves, but remember, im from the future and i know how to do it because i used to watch Primitive Technology before i traveled back in time.

I can easily make charcoal this way, no modern technology required. And thus, melting Iron isn't going to be that hard.

 

[kerbiloid]

19 minutes ago, NSEP said:

I can easily make charcoal this way, no modern technology required. And thus, melting Iron isn't going to be that hard.

It won't be hard, it will be impossible.

Until XVIII they didn't melt iron, they were just reducing it.
They put iron ore (mostly oxides, but with a lot of sulphide, and other admixtures) and charcoal in layers inside a kiln and began pumping air through it.
The charcoal was slowly burning, turning into carbon monoxide (that's why this should go slowly, and any change in process rate kills the result).
Carbon monoxide was floating up and taking oxygen from the ore.
At last there was a relatively soft porous thing consisting of bad iron, remaining ore, sarge, killingly bad sulphides and sulphates, random stone.
Then they were forging it with a sledgehammer for hours, to get a piece of very bad iron, breaking on any effort.
That's why they were fond of meteorite iron: it was not breaking, as it was not reducted by charcoal, but melted out inside another planet.

Only in XVIII they invented big furnaces where hard coal was used both as fuel and reducing agent.
Since then, they got a lot of cast iron and steel, using them everywhere, replacing medieval castles and palaces made of stone and wood, with reinforced concrete on steel beams..
Productivity raised up to 30 times, causing first crysis of overproduction, killing medieval guilds, causing mass migration of peasants into cities and mass unemployment between the citizens.

Edited June 1, 2018 by kerbiloid

[NSEP]

11 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

It won't be hard, it will be impossible.

Until XVIII they didn't melt iron, they were just reducting it.
They put iron ore (mostly oxides, but with a lot of sulphide, and other admixtures) and charcoal in layers inside a kiln and began pumping air through it.
The charcoal was slowly burning, turning into carbon monoxide (that's why this should go slowly, and any change in process rate kills the result).
Carbon monoxide was floating up and takng oxygen from the ore.
At last there was a relatively soft porous thing consisting of bad iron, remaining ore, sarge, killing bad sulphides and sulphates, random stone.

Makes sense.

The only true way to melt iron properly is to make a blast furnace, and to use this fuel called coke right?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_(fuel)

Im going to do a bit more research. I don't think its impossible to melt iron to make parts is impossible using materials from that time period.

[cubinator]

I would leave detailed pictures of just about all the scientific knowledge I can think of. Planets, dinosaurs, a depiction of a spiral galaxy with a circle around a tiny region off in one side. Atoms and molecules, maybe the double slit experiment. Four-dimensional shapes like the hypercube. The geysers on Enceladus, and the E ring which can only be seen from behind Saturn. Phobos and Deimos, the Valles Marineris. Maps of Earth in the Cambrian, and a series showing Pangaea breaking up. Pictures showing the Moon being formed after Earth is impacted by a planet. 

[sevenperforce]

1 hour ago, cubinator said:

I would leave detailed pictures of just about all the scientific knowledge I can think of. Planets, dinosaurs, a depiction of a spiral galaxy with a circle around a tiny region off in one side. Atoms and molecules, maybe the double slit experiment. Four-dimensional shapes like the hypercube. The geysers on Enceladus, and the E ring which can only be seen from behind Saturn. Phobos and Deimos, the Valles Marineris. Maps of Earth in the Cambrian, and a series showing Pangaea breaking up. Pictures showing the Moon being formed after Earth is impacted by a planet. 

One of my tattoos is a spiral galaxy wrapping around the schwarzschild radius of Earth with arcs representing the masses of the major elementary particles.

Edited June 1, 2018 by sevenperforce

[wumpus]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

It won't be hard, it will be impossible.

Until XVIII they didn't melt iron, they were just reducing it.

I'm less sure about the whole process, but I'm pretty sure that Damascus steel (wootz steel, not the fancy acid etchings now sold as "Damascus Steel") involved melting steel or iron.  Similar things were done in Southeast Asia.  I'm guessing the forges needed to survive the temperatures were pretty rare, but at least some of the steel they made is reasonably sure to come from such processes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucible_steel

Not sure if they used charcoal or real coal (or even coke).  I suspect a lot of bellows were used, and access to the right type of stone to make a forge.

- note: you never cast a blade, but you might melt enough pig iron to pour the stuff you start with, then hammer away (at least one claim to the "secret" of Damascus Steel is that the alloy included vandium, and vandium plus enough hammering made a blade like nothing else you could make with medieval tech).

- Anyone want to claim that the Antikythera mechanism is "proof" of time travelers/aliens/Atlantis?  Granted, I don't think that any *one* technology or scientific understanding of the solar system was needed to make this device, but it would seem pretty unlikely that we just happened to find the absolute highest example of Roman technology out in the middle of the Mediterranean (see Carter fallacy thread, this would be a good application for that math).

6 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

One of my tattoos is a spiral galaxy wrapping around the schwartzschild radius of Earth with arcs representing the masses of the major elementary particles.

Isn't the "schwartzschild radius of Earth" 1cm, or did I make a mistake on the back of my envelope?

[sevenperforce]

12 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Isn't the "schwartzschild radius of Earth" 1cm, or did I make a mistake on the back of my envelope?

Your envelope is correct.

Although apparently I cannot spell schwarzschild.

Edited June 1, 2018 by sevenperforce

[Wjolcz]

5 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Foundations will remain.

If the following inscription can be made a spear-length deep in granite, it ought to survive. And anyone who has any sort of knowledge of physics will pick up on it.

What is this? Organic molecules?

4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Afaik stirlings are overestimated. Poor scalability, poor efficiency outside of optimal scale.
Classic steam engines are required anyway. And they need iron melting, i.e. XVIII cent. level.

That's true but then there's this:

But I agree. I doubt you could do anything useful with a Stirling engine. A simple water wheel would probably have more energy.

3 hours ago, cubinator said:

I would leave detailed pictures of just about all the scientific knowledge I can think of.

Same.

2 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

One of my tattoos is a spiral galaxy wrapping around the schwarzschild radius of Earth with arcs representing the masses of the major elementary particles.

I'd like to see that.

Edited June 1, 2018 by Wjolcz

[StrandedonEarth]

Hmm, an interesting thought experiment to be sure. I agree leaving some sort of monumental representation of the entire solar system (including the non-naked-eye bodies and the latest discoveries like Sedna) would be the best way to confound future archaeologists. 

But for my personal legacy to bootstrap up the current technology, I have to ask: what would we be allowed to bring back? Would I be allowed to bring back a tablet computer full of technological steps in schematic form? Because that’s what I would want to take back to the Bronze Age, and start with building a small-scale hydroelectric generator to keep it charged. From there I would try to fork technology development into metallurgy and power generation: Wind being easier and solar when materials catch up (although solar-thermal would be easier than photovoltaic). Along with glass and other requirements for light bulbs  

So yes, my legacy, aside from astronomical monuments, would be a quick development of electrical tech, enabling independent research late into the night  

How long could a tablet computer  be expected to last, assuming a constant power supply? 

Ancient Egypt in the Bronze Age is near to the petroleum deposits to of Arabia. How long to get a plastics industry going, assuming  the how to is on the tablet?

 

 

[kerbiloid]

8 hours ago, NSEP said:

The only true way to melt iron properly is to make a blast furnace, and to use this fuel called coke right?

At least for mass production - yes. A fried mineral coal, called coke.
(Also is produced out of oil, but in lesser amounts.)

 

8 hours ago, cubinator said:

I would leave detailed pictures of just about all the scientific knowledge I can think of. Planets, dinosaurs, a depiction of a spiral galaxy with a circle around a tiny region off in one side. Atoms and molecules, maybe the double slit experiment. Four-dimensional shapes like the hypercube. The geysers on Enceladus, and the E ring which can only be seen from behind Saturn. Phobos and Deimos, the Valles Marineris. Maps of Earth in the Cambrian, and a series showing Pangaea breaking up. Pictures showing the Moon being formed after Earth is impacted by a planet. 

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_of_Achilles

Quote

Homer gives a detailed description of the imagery which decorates the new shield. Starting from the shield's centre and moving outward, circle layer by circle layer, the shield is laid out as follows:

1. The Earth, sky and sea, the sun, the moon and the constellations (484–89)
2. "Two beautiful cities full of people": in one a wedding and a law case are taking place (490–508); the other city is besieged by one feuding army and the shield shows an ambush and a battle (509–40).
3. A field being ploughed for the third time (541–49).
4. A king's estate where the harvest is being reaped (550–60).
5. A vineyard with grape pickers (561–72).
6. A "herd of straight-horned cattle"; the lead bull has been attacked by a pair of savage lions which the herdsmen and their dogs are trying to beat off (573–86).
7. A picture of a sheep farm (587–89).
8. A dancing-floor where young men and women are dancing (590–606).
9. The great stream of Ocean (607–609).^[5]

"Hey, look at this mummy. What a detailed and descriptive picture of the afterlife. Snakes with legs, spirals, volcanoes, a lot of atom-looking groups of circles."

 

7 hours ago, wumpus said:

I'm less sure about the whole process, but I'm pretty sure that Damascus steel (wootz steel, not the fancy acid etchings now sold as "Damascus Steel") involved melting steel or iron.  Similar things were done in Southeast Asia.  I'm guessing the forges needed to survive the temperatures were pretty rare, but at least some of the steel they made is reasonably sure to come from such processes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucible_steel

Yes, but according to Anosov (guru of iron casting, damascus steel was his special interest,) it requires special  very rare ores, iron oxide (II) FeO with no admixtures, especially with no sulfur. 
Then it required chemical preparations to solve and wash out minor admixtures, special melting process in melting pots (not in kilns), "more art than technology", and at last it gived minor amounts of carbonized iron, which is still worse than a modern steel.

Iron has to be melted not to shape it like in Game of Thrones and LOTR, but to purify, remove sulfur and excess of carbon, etc.
Industrially, they add CaCO₃, aluminium, etc, to bind and extract admixtures, while the steel is melted, then separate the purified part of liquid steel.

7 hours ago, wumpus said:

note: you never cast a blade

Industrially you always cast the slab, which this blade is made of.

Spoiler

Then you roll the slabs into sticks, pipes, sheets, etc. _{Of course, you make pipes out of those sheets or sticks.}
Then cut them in pieces and make blades.

7 hours ago, wumpus said:

Anyone want to claim that the Antikythera mechanism is "proof" of time travelers/aliens/Atlantis?  Granted, I don't think that any *one* technology or scientific understanding of the solar system was needed to make this device, but it would seem pretty unlikely that we just happened to find the absolute highest example of Roman technology out in the middle of the Mediterranean (see Carter fallacy thread, this would be a good application for that math).

Antikythera is amusing, but I'm mostly impressed by the Baalbek monolyths (leave pyramids alone for the moment).
They are this.

Spoiler

Estimated mass up to 1000 t each.

That's how they move 1000 t now.

Spoiler

That's how they suggest to move 1000 t in bronze age.

Spoiler

1000 t / 50 kg = 20000 people at once.
Try to imagine how 20000 people would get close to the monolith at once .

7 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

One of my tattoos is a spiral galaxy wrapping around the schwarzschild radius of Earth with arcs representing the masses of the major elementary particles.

Animated tattoo?!

7 hours ago, wumpus said:

schwartzschild radius

1. -rtzsch-
They say, Slavic languages have a lot of consonants sticked together...

2.
Frodo: "A word. 14 letters, only 2 vocals." 
Gollum: "Hate you, hate you, hate you, freaking hobbitses!"

Edited June 2, 2018 by kerbiloid

[cubinator]

8 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Hey, look at this mummy. What a detailed and descriptive picture of the afterlife. Snakes with legs, spirals, volcanoes, a lot of atom-looking groups of circles."

When they see I've drawn the major volcanoes of Mars, they will know something is up.

[kerbiloid]

11 minutes ago, cubinator said:

When they see I've drawn the major volcanoes of Mars, they will know something is up.

They will even not understand that this is a volcano, because on Mars they even don't erupt.

They will say:

"Look! This tattoo looks like a Martian volcano!"
"Oh, come on. Don't you know, that the Martian volcanoes don't smoke? This is a ritual tattoo of a hill, symbolizing connection between the land and the sky."

[cubinator]

24 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

They will even not understand that this is a volcano, because on Mars they even don't erupt.

They will say:

"Look! This tattoo looks like a Martian volcano!"
"Oh, come on. Don't you know, that the Martian volcanoes don't smoke? This is a ritual tattoo of a hill, symbolizing connection between the land and the sky."

I wouldn't draw them smoking, because they don't smoke. 

Gee, that's awfully similar to...

Edited June 2, 2018 by cubinator

[YNM]

Write the equivalent of Voyager Golden Plaque, but to encode 1 million decimals of pi. Cast them in a really good concrete dome.

18 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Until XVIII they didn't melt iron, they were just reducing it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_pillar_of_Delhi

Edited June 2, 2018 by YNM

[sevenperforce]

14 hours ago, Wjolcz said:

Spoiler

19 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

If the following inscription can be made a spear-length deep in granite, it ought to survive. And anyone who has any sort of knowledge of physics will pick up on it.

 

What is this? Organic molecules?

Circles on the left depict the relative masses of the 14 heaviest elementary particles. The three smallest particles (pulled out in the row on the upper right) are the electron, the up quark, and the down quark. Up quark and down quark combine on the second row to form a neutron and proton. Electrons, neutrons, and protons combine on the third row to form H¹ and O¹⁶. Hydrogen and oxygen combine in the bottom right to form H₂O.

If someone recognized it, it would be far, far beyond any possibility of coincidence.

14 hours ago, Wjolcz said:

16 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

One of my tattoos is a spiral galaxy wrapping around the schwarzschild radius of Earth with arcs representing the masses of the major elementary particles.

I'd like to see that.

Here:

Spoiler

• The double spiral is a logarithmic curve to represent e. The two spirals together form the same shape as the Milky Way from a viewing distance of one million lightyears.
• Straight lines show τ and π relative to the diameter of the circle subtended by the spirals. They are offset from the terminus of the spirals by the value of α.
• Straight lines together form λ, representing wavelength, and their thickness is 1.063mm, the wavelength at the peak of the CMBR spectrum.
• The circle at the center is 8.87mm, the Schwarzschild radius of Earth.
• The three solid dots represent the relative masses of the electron, up quark, and down quark; the arcs connecting them represent segments of larger circles corresponding to the relative masses of the proton (and neutron), the W boson, and the Higgs boson.
• The electron rests over the position of Sol relative to the spiral arms of the galaxy.

 

12 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Hmm, an interesting thought experiment to be sure. I agree leaving some sort of monumental representation of the entire solar system (including the non-naked-eye bodies and the latest discoveries like Sedna) would be the best way to confound future archaeologists. 

Bonus if you can actually carve out spheres depicting the general topography/appearance of the planets and their moons. Hard to be sure that will last, though.

12 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

But for my personal legacy to bootstrap up the current technology, I have to ask: what would we be allowed to bring back? Would I be allowed to bring back a tablet computer full of technological steps in schematic form? Because that’s what I would want to take back to the Bronze Age, and start with building a small-scale hydroelectric generator to keep it charged.

Let's say you can take back a Kindle with a solar panel attached to the back, carrying on it text-only versions of all the pages on Wikipedia.

All you need to build an AC generator is a windmill, magnets, and copper wire. The former is simple enough; the latter two......not so much.

9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

"Hey, look at this mummy. What a detailed and descriptive picture of the afterlife. Snakes with legs, spirals, volcanoes, a lot of atom-looking groups of circles."

That's why it has to be simple enough that everyone will see it and look at it and examine it.

The other option is to give the ancients something they CAN understand, but in far greater detail than they would be able to know at the time. Like detailed topographical reliefs of portions of the globe. They'd recognize that it's a map, and preserve it for that use, but future archaeologists would see that it was something they couldn't have figured out on their own.

You need signposts like a detailed map to get people thinking "how did they know that?" and subsequently looking more closely at some of your other inscriptions.

1 hour ago, cubinator said:

When they see I've drawn the major volcanoes of Mars, they will know something is up.

If they recognize you're drawing Mars and not a fantasy world.

 

34 minutes ago, YNM said:

Write the equivalent of Voyager Golden Plaque, but to encode 1 million decimals of pi. Cast them in a really good concrete dome.

Someone will steal it.

And even if they don't, the conclusion will be "Wow, they must have figured out a way to calculate many digits of pi using some expansion we haven't yet discovered! Probably with a bunch of mathematicians working in parallel!"

[YNM]

8 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Someone will steal it.

Fine ! It'd be even more puzzling then XD And by "plaque" I mean stone (or in the plan, concrete) engravings.

8 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Probably with a bunch of mathematicians working in parallel !

You realize they didn't know about irrationals back then... Like, 1 million is really unneeded.

[kerbiloid]

34 minutes ago, YNM said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_pillar_of_Delhi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_pillar_of_Delhi#Scientific_analysis

Quote

The pillar was manufactured by the forge welding of pieces of wrought iron.

 

[YNM]

2 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

The pillar was manufactured by the forge welding of pieces of wrought iron.

Still, an impressive work.

[Lisias]

It's completely unrelated (and off topic), but I just could not help. I had to post this. :-)

Spoiler

 

 

[kerbiloid]

4 minutes ago, YNM said:

Still, an impressive work.

Yes. And was never repeated. This demonstrates the practical possibility of making something of good steel in medieval.

Durandals were having personal names for reason.

[sevenperforce]

14 minutes ago, YNM said:

27 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

...the conclusion will be "Wow, they must have figured out a way to calculate many digits of pi using some expansion we haven't yet discovered! Probably with a bunch of mathematicians working in parallel!"

You realize they didn't know about irrationals back then... Like, 1 million is really unneeded.

Well, we know that, but the archaeologists of the alternate future (alternate present?) would simply conclude that irrationals were discovered much earlier.