Technologically Useful

By | July 17, 2007
6 Comments

That’s the nicest thing anybody has said about me for some time. Now, we’re not just talking about handyman skills. Who cares about that? Let’s address a serious scenario — say you got sent back in time 2000 years and you wanted to push civilization along like that guy did in Lest Darkness Fall? Could you do it, or would you be like the business man in that Twilight Zone episode who thought he would make a fortune by traveling into the past and inventing all the technology that the world would need — only to realize that he didn’t have the technological chops to pull it off.

Well, you don’t have to wonder about how well you would fare in that scenario. There’s a quiz that can help you evaluate how you would do, so — should the opportunity present itself — you’ll know whether it would be worth the trip.

My results were as follows:

Techscore.jpg

Hey, 19th century. Not bad!

Via GeekPress, where Paul scored an impressive 10 out of 10.


UPDATE FROM STEPHEN:

Well, I didn’t get 10 out of 10, but I’m happy to report that I’m also useful!

stg useful.JPG

  • Michael S. Sargent

    Scored 9 of 10 myself, though I had a couple of quibbles with question wording.

    Looks like the past’s future would bee in pretty good hands.

  • http://triticale.mu.nu triticale

    I scored 8/10, but knowledge ain’t chops. I have handyman skills, and I’ve read both basic metallurgy texts and home foundry hobby web sites, and if dropped on an island in the sea of time I’d have a lot of experimenting to do to get past late 18th century iron-making.

    It would be nice if my library came along. I collect (or at least accumulate) old engineering texts. Even the strength of materials books ready to hand would be helpful, but somewhere around here I have texts sufficient to start at the Civil War level and build from that to at least 1930s technology.

  • Stephen Gordon

    Triticale:

    It would be nice if my library came along.

    Don’t touch that! Your primitive intellect wouldn’t understand things with alloys and compositions and things with… molecular structures.

    Hail to the King, baby.

  • Karl Hallowell

    If it were long enough ago yet with some infrastructure, I’d start a university. With my knowledge of mathematics and physics, I should be able to train a cadre of engineers, accountants, scientists, and mathematicians to get it going.

    Long term, I’d also attempt to put down and propagate various ideas on society, government, legal system, art, etc for future consideration. Fund the creation of public health infrastructure like hospitals, sewers, and personal hygene memes.

  • http://beyondwordsworth.com Kathy

    I scored 5 out of 10 and I think that’s impressive for someone who hasn’t reviewed that kind of stuff since high school.

    I would bring information on nutrition, hygiene, child development…

  • Stephen Gordon

    Kathy:

    Yeah, there’s plenty other things this quiz left out. We’d also be able to tell them about a “new world” on the other side of the ocean, explain that heat rises – even when you try to hold it in a balloon.

    Of course there are a lot of things we’d have to be careful about. At year 0, there’d still be sun worshippers in Rome, so maybe a heliocentric model of the solar system wouldn’t get you killed, but you’d have to be careful what you revealed and to whom.

    - Stephen