Stargate525

The trick, like I said, isn't to try to force the industrialization. It's to find the one spot in history where a massive dump of knowledge will cut out experimentation and do the most immediate good, and then you let the civilization develop itself. Sputnik will come, not because you're pushing society to do it for some religious ceremonial reason, but because someone will want to or need to do it with the technology they've built up on their own to get all the other luxuries that come with that spiderweb (like running water, sanitation, easy communication with cousin Telemachus in Syria, and the smoothest damn sheets you've ever slept on). You don't need to give the Roman blacksmiths the blueprints for a foundry (though that might help their grandkids out a lot). You need to explain to them that there's a way to mix coal and iron in such a way as to produce a much, much stronger metal, and this is the basic formula. They'll find uses for it on their own. And when their great-grandkids pour over the library of the man from the future, they'll come across a blueprint for a metal tower that can ride an explosion to the stars... That's blatantly untrue. Your average Roman forgemaster would know about brass, bronze, electrum, meteoric iron (though might not group it as such), pewter, sterling silver, wrought iron, pig iron, and steel (though the concept of making structural materials out of the metal of swords and blades might take explaining). The only thing you've got to teach them is that extreme heat or things other than metals can be used to make these kinds of metals.

Which would still have your first launch in the early 1000s. You guys are missing the big lack of limit here. Nowhere in the challenge does it state that YOU have to launch the rocket. Going back to 2000BC, even if the rocket takes a thousand years to build after all the bootstrapping, is still better than going to 500ad and doing it in ten.

If you think that the first of anything won't undergo significant design iterations during construction, you're insane. Even if you designed everything uptime, once that hits downtime you're in a new situation. Maybe the refined metal doesn't have the tolerances needed for the casing, or that deposit of that chemical turns out to be too deep to reach. And I'm curious what part of a 270 ton rocket you're planning on building out of wood. And how you're going to bootstrap the capability to generate 120 tons of high-grade kerosene and LOX. Or store it.

To get Steel: -You need to train the miners to find and utilize iron (and overcome the religious stigma attached to it). -You need to develop tools and methodology to effectively mine the iron. -You need to build suitable foundries and steel mills to be able to refine the iron into steel. -You need to train the workers on steel manufacturing and forging, as it is significantly different from lower-heat bronze. To get Arc Welders: -You need to train workers on electrical safety and principles. -You need to develop the capabilty to manufacture long, thin spools of copper wire. -You need to develop the ability to step up what will most likely be low volt, low watt power into something that can arc. -You need to develop the tools to build the welder itself. (and maybe the tools to build those tools). To get oil: -You need to develop and produce a way of harvesting and purifying the oil. -You need to develop the glass and chemical industries to be able to produce the equipment used in the dozen or so steps to refine it. Aluminum: -Train in finding and harvesting bauxite. -Train in high temperature chemical refinement processes. -Develop the equipment needed for that refinement. -Develop the equipment needed to MAKE the equipment for the above step. -Develop the equipment needed to make the chemical catalysts. -Train in finding, harvesting, and purifying the materials for the chemical catalysts. All of this you need to do without: -destabilizing the current economy. -upsetting or confusing the ruling bodies so they continue to go along with you. -sparking national tensions which will lead to war or subterfuge. -Failing. (as your method isn't really slowing down to teach anyone anything beyond bare necessities, you're essentially working magic. Fail after years of this, and you won't live long enough to get a second chance.) You have skilled laborers, yes, but they are experts at BRONZE AGE technologies. You're better off getting teenaged apprentices and training them up in what they need to know. But in order to do that with the hundreds or thousands you need, you need to be able to teach more people. So you need to teach the teachers... The biggest downside is that your steps have no USE to the Egyptians beyond some nascent idea of shooting their dead Godking into heaven. You're diverting a lot more of the economy than farmers who had nothing to do during the flood season anyway. Building a pyramid is a lot easier than puttering around with all this glass and strange metals, trying to turn farmers into miners in the sand.

Fun fact; can't actually hit orbit from a single velocity change at ground level...

Well, if you have to be ALIVE for the launch, then you're stuck with late 1800s at best. Nowhere else will be able to bootstrap an electronics industry quickly enough for your guidance systems. I chose the Roman empire because unlike the Babylonians, Greeks, and Egyptians, they were the ones with a large enough, URBAN enough economic base to support an industrial revolution. A major factor in their fall was that they stopped expanding and taking on slaves. No slaves, no manual laborers. If you were able to replace the farmhand laborers with even rudimentary steam engine tractors, or hell, even introducing bred strains of crops from the 1500s, and you won't have the economic implosion that led to the fall in the first place. Get some textile mills going to supply nice cheap linen and/or wool, and bob's your uncle. Then you've got the problem of planting the idea of shooting something into space in the first place, with enough of a cultural sticking point to last the few hundred years your Romans will need to get the guidance and electronics developed. Not sure how you'd do that, since you're unlikely to have the world war and global manhood-measuring contest that led to the space race at all. My first thought would be to slip a piece of false incentive into the reams of technical and historical info you bring back with you that would provide an incentive to get to the moon. Something on the dark side, preferably, so you have to get something up there to see.

THANK YOU! Finally, someone who realizes this... We actually made pretty solid advancement in medicine and agriculture as well. Assuming the immortality of the time traveler (or at least a few hundred years to alter the course of events), I would wager you could get it done by 1000 AD. Hijack the Romans around the time of Christ, industrialize and kick the agricultural revolution off, and you should be good to go.

Dahmer would be annoying, since his kill count is 17, and Manson is nine... It's hard to find a mass murderer who has a) killed an even number of people, b)is well known enough to have the unit named after them, and c)is US. If we wanted to be even worse, we could call them PHs (Pearl Harbors) or TTs (twin towers)...

Thank ye. Though you're pretty darned evil if you're approching centiHitlers. Most of the worst non-political figures barely make it to milliHitlers.

The Hitler is presupposed on the notion that Hitler knowingly committed 10 million murders and nothing else (for simplicity's sake). Thus, complete genocide of the human race would be around 740 Hitlers. Smallpox had accumulated around 50 Hitlers before we stopped it. You can, however, estimate the relative evil of lesser crimes by equating their punishment in a given justice system. Thus, if you killed them in especially horrible ways, or trespassed to get to them, you can increase the number of Hitlers you've committed.

One of the proprietary programs I have to use in my work looks like it was last touched in 1998, and takes about five clicks to do anything of use.

There's a big one not listed on there; the Hitler as a measure of evil/moral wrongness. I once did a paper on comparative harshness of various criminal systems based on this unit. (A murder was either ten microhitlers or a tenth of a microhitler, I can't remember right now) When I was in high school, my friends and I made a unit of speed and distance called the horsepace. One horsepace was around 1.5 feet, and pi mph.

By that logic, there should be a single species on this planet. If natural selection impacts these devices, then there will at some point be two species of Neumans. They would compete. Bacteria replicate exponentially, and we can still successfully stop those.

I've actually looked at getting them for my house. unfortunately, my house's roof angles east/west, so they're a REALLY inefficient idea for me.

I also love the implied notion that roadways are somehow wasted space, as if the major arteries that keep entire continents fed and clothed and powered somehow need a secondary function to truly be useful.

A grey goo scenario is a cancer of a galaxy, almost literally. Unchecked, improper growth. Any sane society which detects something of this sort would immediately wage war upon it in an attempt to check or at least control it. If it is intelligent, it could very well decide to ignore significant gravity wells and potential annoying life, contenting itself with taking the rest of the loose matter in the galaxy. There is no evidence against the hypothesis that we are IN such a galaxy, and the neumans sit dormant in asteroid belts and trans-newtonian orbits, dark to our methods of detection. Which is a fine conclusion to make (and it IS a conclusion that you're making), just one supported by flimsy evidence. We simply do not have enough resolution or sample size to conclude what you are without taking a large number of things on faith. And let's check some things here. You never said barren and deserted. You said not majorly edited by intelligent life. Besides the anomalous oxygen content of our atmosphere, there is nothing detectable at the range-resolution we're currently looking that would posit our OWN existence. To go back to the island analogy, the only sign of other cities we can see is bonfire smoke. It is simpler to conclude that there are a) no other people on the islands at ALL, despite the lush environs, b) they don't use bonfires and we can't see their tents, or c) we're too busy looking at the islands and aren't looking for guys in canoes.

Counter-conclusions: -Fast FTL is possible, but has not been abused in the method you state, or attempts to do such have been otherwise curtailed. -Fast FTL is possible, and the resulting galaxy/universe is what a post Neuman machine environment looks like. -Fast FTL is possible, but there is a second higher speed limit we have yet to determine. -Fast FTL is possible, but we are the first occurrence of intelligent life within range. You are making a number of false assumptions which do not logically follow from the observation. Your post is akin to a man spying an island from his shore from afar and stating "This land does not appear to be majorly edited by intelligent life. Ergo, it is impossible to reach that island, as any life over there would have conquered us long ago."

Counterpoint: Han Solo. Stark might have the armor, but RDJ can kill Stark pretty easily.

Andy Weir wrote a piece of flash fiction for popular science a few months ago; the first FTL test works, but accidentally sends the crew back in time. I want a novel based on THAT.

At least in my area, there's a pretty good reason for it: Snow. Get a big enough fall, and you'll be in serious risk of collapsing the entire structure. Reinforce it to prevent that, and now you're essentially talking about building all roads enclosed in a shed. It'll cut visibility, you'll need to make them big enough to accomodate trucks and wide loads (in residential areas, that'll mean encroaching a good three to five feet into peoples' property and in ag areas they'll need to be able to clear farm equipment). If you want to use 'wasted' space, stick em in the medians of highways with breakaway structure, the insides of cloverleafs, and bolted onto the sound barriers in urbanized areas. Plenty of dead room there without having to multipurpose something like a road.

I digest the latinum and store it in my secondary stomach. It's okay, though, I already lost most of my hair. I'll give away six hours of my next workday.

I kinda agree with the registration act in that SOMEONE should know who the hell these people are. On the other hand, there's a metric ton of nuances that are never hashed out about the act. In favor of the concept, but not necessarily the implementation. Team Spidey.

Pretty much my point. And you're going ten times faster than the shuttle (again, twice the speed of the concorde's cruising speed). Time to correct an error is nil.

And as we all know the human body is perfectly capable of surviving a 1km/s landing onto regolith, but has an unfortunate lifespan of five days...?

Okay, then you can chalk 'is usable by people without killing them horribly' onto the list of benefits of an elevator.