Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Walt from the Discord server asks If you were suddenly teleported back in time to the year 0 and appointed to a position of power in any society, how far do you think your current knowledge could advance society? Could you spark the Industrial Revolution?

Putting aside the fact that there was no year zero, the answer to your question is no, I don’t think I or anyone else could spark an industrial revolution.

Maybe, at best, I could speed things along such that it would take place centuries earlier, but it certainly couldn’t happen within my lifetime.

Telling people 2000 years ago about the modern world would be the equivalent of telling them science fiction stories. I don’t think you can jump ahead that far.

Let’s take, for example, the steam engine. To make a working steam engine, you first and foremost need fuel. Wood simply wouldn’t work. It doesn’t have a high enough energy density, and within the span of years or decades, you will have chopped down all the forests around you.

The Industrial Revolution didn’t take off until coal started to be mined as a fuel source.

The other thing you need for an industrial economy would be some sort of organized civilization.

Returning to year 1, we find such organized civilizations in China, India, Persia, and Rome.

Of those, Rome had little in the way of coal deposits. The biggest deposits were just outside of the borders of Rome in Germany. Later, they conquered Britain, where there was also coal, but being on an island made it difficult to use.

Likewise, there was little coal in Persia or India. China has lots of coal, and it would have been the best chance of an Industrial Revolution 2000 years ago.

I think you’d need to introduce mathematics and science first before you get into engineering. To do that, you’d need to introduce mathematical symbols and probably the base ten system of numbers, and maybe Indo-Arabic numbers as well, to really speed along mathematics. You’d also have to teach people that the world is made of atoms and the germ theory of disease, as well as generally trying to convince intelligentsia of the period of the scientific method.

To do all that, you’d probably have to demonstrate that these things work, create tools such as lenses, and simple inventions that could be used immediately by people so they would believe you. Maybe if you could pull that off, and there is no guarantee that you could, you might light a spark that will catch fire several generations after you.