So, You Find Yourself in Ancient Rome

Culture
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How do you make optical quality glass?

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http://www.pbs.org/how-we-got-to-now/home/

That’s why I specifically went with the answer I did. The technology either already existed and just needed recombining, or the results are obvious when implemented.

Frankly, Pratchett nailed it on germ theory: lie to people. Convince them that it appeases a spirit or lifts a curse, instead. Eventually the scientific explanation will emerge and take over, but in the meantime, you’ve saved people from horrible deaths by encouraging the behaviour. Science may rule the world, but people do what you want with Headology.

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I think one way would be if you reinvent the printing press release something everyone wants. Popular plays, porn anything but include an appendix telling people how to make printing presses as well as primers on things like kinetic theory of gases, basic algebra, cartesian coordinate systems. Also plans for kites, sextants oil lamps etc. As well as two column bookkeeping and other stuff to poke people in the right direction.

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45

Seems like those are good ideas for making society better, but how does one use that to their advantage? That’s the question posed by the OP. By 1AD, Romans already had soap. And a strong bathing culture.

Food preservation tho, especially through canning and pasteurization, would be easy enough. I would think it would be best used in military applications - sending troops out with enough food that they didn’t have to plunder and scavenge. That’s what it was developed for in the first place, by Napolean, iirc. But how to monetize that? I suppose you’d have to convince the emperor and get a government contract.

Aside: maybe it’s just because I’m in a writing class at the moment, but I feel like this whole thread is designed to help @haystack come up with ideas for a novel…

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So, what we need to do now is convince people that the only way to appease the demons that cause drought, hurricanes and rising sea levels is to throw James Inhofe and Scott Pruitt into a volcano.

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47

Useful people are less likely to be killed.

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48

The printing press seems like jumping the gun to me, given that Rome was still using papyrus, and that the 2%-5% of the population who could read already had slaves to copy for them. There just wasn’t a mass market for it to serve. Although, you’re onto something with porn. Engravings of all sorts would have had wide appeal.

But I think people are underestimating the importance of the prerequisite wood or rag-based paper. It’s an easy technology to replicate and there’d be an eager market for it in Rome. A cheap writing medium, by itself, would do wonders for literacy.*

*China invented papermaking around 105CE, but I’m unable to find any data comparing their literacy rates to Rome

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I don’t know easy optical glass would be (I certainly don’t know enough to do it) but if you did that, eyeglasses would be a much more impactful and profitable business, I would think.

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Drips and drabs for the rest of your life. Useful people mustn’t tell secrets to our neighbors.

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51

It sounds like you need to start up this:

And there are so many things that could be ritualised like that. Boiling water before drinking it drives out evil influences, burning the bones of sacrificial animals and scattering the ash on the land is pleasing to the gods, who will reward you with better harvests, Lead is a cursed metal and it will drive people who drink from it mad, and so on.

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perhaps the real trick is to avoid being mistaken for a witch

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54

That’s easy. Just prove that you don’t weigh the same as a duck.

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I don’t think pre-Christian Romans would care if you actually were though? I mean, wouldn’t they just assume you’re either a member of one of the many cults in Rome or from somewhere that wasn’t Rome, following whatever your faith was?

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I mean… I guess I’d just want to satisfy my curiosity of what life was actually like back then?

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As long as you paid lip service to the Roman gods they really didn’t care for the most part what you did or even didn’t believe as far as religion went. The early Christians were unwilling to do that and we all know how well that worked for them.

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[quote=“mindysan33, post:56, topic:510, full:true”]
I mean… I guess I’d just want to satisfy my curiosity of what life was actually like back then?
[/quote]It’s a nice thought, especially as a historian and all. But you’re never going to find yourself back in a future horribly ruined by unanticipated consequences like that. Couldn’t you at least warn people about a few major disasters, inadvertently causing the Mediterranean slave trade to flourish into modern times, or something?

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I think the last thing I’d want to bring back to 1AD is a new religion, no matter how scientific it’s foundation. Though it would be interesting to come back to the present and see how it had been perverted over time. I mean, Jesus (AFAWK) basically said “let’s love one another and help each other” and look what people did with that message… :confused:

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Well, they weren’t incredibly tolerant of Jews, either. It seems like monotheism was something they couldn’t abide until Constantine.

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Monotheism was a rejection of their gods, that’s why.

As they say, Christians are the best atheists. They just have one more God left to go.

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