• Pietson
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      287 months ago

      Probably the best answer in this thread, still a bit if a gamble. I certainly would have a hard time answering that for a person from 1024.

      • @BallsandBayonets@lemmy.world
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        87 months ago

        Don’t let anyone explore overseas to the west (if talking to a white person).

        Don’t trust white people (if talking to just about anyone else).

      • @Ironfist@sh.itjust.works
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        17 months ago

        Telling them how a steam engine works. That would start the industrial revolution earlier and it would end up speeding us up to a more advanced and better future… or to an early extinction by global warming… hmmmm

        Maybe explaining an electricity generator would be a better gamble, but it may be very hard to make one back then…

        • @KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world
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          17 months ago

          The Romans had steam engines. But they couldn’t be used for anything but opening temple doors to impress people because they didn’t have the manufacturing tolerances to seal the steam chamber properly, nor the metallurgy needed to pressurize it without bursting.
          That tech only became available much later during the industrial revolution.

          • @einkorn@feddit.de
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            7 months ago

            AFAIK even that wouldn’t have been unsolvable problems for Greeks and Romans.

            However why put all the effort into this machinery when you can simply put more slaves to work? One driving factor for the Industrial Revolution was the issue of having to pay people actual wages instead of being able to force them to work. This added incentives to reduce manual labor and replace them with something owners can force to work without paying it: Machines.

    • IninewCrow
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      7 months ago

      The answer would probably be something sensible, within our ability and something we would be capable of.

      We already know how to do this … we as a collective global civilization just actively refuse to do any of it unless we were forced to, either by war or by the realization that it will mean our extinction.

      It’s not that we are a thousand years dumber than our descendants … we are just as intelligent and insightful as our ancestors a thousand years ago … it’s just that our short sightedness and greed gets the best of us.

      In many ways we are still a lot like our prehistoric ancestors from 100,000 years ago who believed that our family should control all the unlimited amount of bananas in the jungle.

        • beefbot
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          67 months ago

          A researcher in animal cognition said at a lecture I saw once: every time we look closer, we see more and more evidence of intelligent behavior in tinier and tinier creatures, behaviors we once assumed were limited to humans. He studied insects: bacteria have been shown to display “learning” behaviors.

          How many beings are sapient? Wouldn’t be shocked if Future Being told me it was all of them

          • @radiant_bloom@lemm.ee
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            27 months ago

            I hope the being from the future answers with a number, because “all of them” could mean “one” and that’s the actual thing I’m worried about 😆

        • @CopernicusQwark@lemmy.world
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          17 months ago

          To my knowledge, the sapient population is the human population of Earth.

          However, there are numerous sentient species that could conceivably be “uplifted” in the next thousand years. Plus, I consider it more likely than not that extraterrestrials do exist and that there’s likely another sapient species out there, though they are unlikely to be in our general volume of space

  • @sntx@lemm.ee
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    277 months ago

    What would you tell a direct ancestor of yourself, living in the year 2024?

    • Rhynoplaz
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      97 months ago

      This is it. You don’t always know what you need to to know.

    • I was thinking about this yesterday… the kinda already have.

      I mean bots online have humans so addled we can’t decide whether to have a vaccination, or whether to elect a dictator.

      I don’t think we’re in fit shape to read Facebook and order from Amazon, and we’re going to have a real actual shooting war with robots?

  • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)
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    167 months ago

    What dangerous substances were unknowingly used by people in the past millennium?

    (Like radium, lead, asbestos, etc. seems for us now)

      • @xkforce@lemmy.world
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        57 months ago

        “Unknowingly”

        Most plastic that we use shows evidence of endocrine disruption activity and it isnt just BPA as a byproduct of the manufacture of certain plastics. We know it is bad for the environment too. Microplastics are pervasive and also known to have negative health and environmental consequences.

        • geogle
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          37 months ago

          I agree with all of that, but as a society, I would not say we “know” it until we remove it from our food supply in a significant way. Today, still in most countries much of our food is stored, sold, and prepared in substantial plastics. We rightfully “know” better with lead and asbestos, but societally were still ignorant of the real concerns of plastics.

          • @xkforce@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            We knew Lead was poisonous back in roman times. That didnt stop us from using its derivatives in paint, gasoline, solders (still used today), bullets and other common products. The disaster in Flint for example, was the result of the use of Lead and its alloys in the water pipes used there combined with poor decisions made in the name of cost cutting. Dont assume that people individually or as a society do dumb things only because they dont know any better. People do dumb things they know full well they shouldnt be doing all the time.

    • Waldowal
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      97 months ago

      “Dude, it was wood. Stay the fuck away from wood!”

  • SavvyWolf
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    147 months ago

    What do your history books say happened around 2030?

    • @BallsandBayonets@lemmy.world
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      147 months ago

      Actually in 2999 Gabe Newell’s consciousness uploaded to the Steam Cloud decreed that 3s were now illegal. The year is legally 2999 Episode 24.