If you could time-travel, what five things would you bring?

What five innovations will spur economic growth in 2009? New solar power tech? A cure for cancer? Cheap desalination?

One way to help think about this question is to ask another (sillier) question. If you could travel back in time, What five things would you bring?  Let's imagine we are travelling to meet Augustus Caesar or Marcus Aurelius, one of those relatively calm Roman Emporers. 

An interesting and related dialogue on time travel was started recently by Tyler Cowen at marginalrevolution.com:

You might think that knowing economics, or perhaps quantum mechanics, will do you some good but in reality people won't even think your jokes are funny.  Even if you can prove Euler's Theorem from memory no one will understand your notation.  I hope you have a strong back and an up to date smallpox vaccination.

Tyler is a time travel pessimist, but plenty of folks think a typical modern would thrive in a pre-modern economy (see his comments). I agree that we moderns lack practical skills that local economies tended to instill ... subsistence farming, slaughtering, hunting, digging a well, basic metallurgy and carpentry. Despite that and the loss of all our electric tools, I think our modern background knowledge is underappreciated: knowing that heat kills germs, the crudest sense of saving and banking and lending, optics, a horse collar. We also underestimate our IQ relative to the dunces of old (they with little nutrition and less literacy). If you travel back in time, you will be surrounded with ignoramuses and idiots, meaning the situation would be ripe with danger and opportunity all the time.

So Tyler thinks you would be lucky to survive. True. But once you survive the first 60 days, I say it would be difficult to avoid becoming a very important, wealthy, and celebrated person. 

But to me the more interesting question is what five things you think would make the biggest impact on pre-modern civilization? Keep in mind, there is no wrong answer, but I'm pretty confident there is a most insightful answer ...

Comments

[Remo]

Gunpowder.

[Dan Weber]

Can I bring five One-Laptops-Per-Child, each loaded up with data about the last 1000 years of inventions?

Otherwise, the trick is bring things that are useful and/or longlasting and/or can be replicated.

A good osmotic water cleanser would be awesome, but I'm not sure how long they last.

A single winding wristwatch, as in the original thread, would let a fleet of ships determine their longitude. It would probably be hard to build another from it, though. Would quartz crystals be better?

There are probably some good seeds or bacteria that you could replicate en masse once you were back there.

Some kind of weapon seems key. A gun would eventually run out of ammunition. Maybe something you could spend a few hours winding to "charge" that could fling multiple projectiles.

A camping tent could collapse pretty nicely and provide a lot of shelter from the elements.

[Charles Moore]

You can't take back an OLPC with 1000 years of data. That violates the meta rules of the riddle. It like getting three wishes and then using your last wish to wish for more wishes.

[Chris]

1.) A weapon and I go for a crossbow as it would be a mayor improvement that could be replicated nevertheless.

2.) A book about steam engines. If I could convince someone to finance the construction I would be the hero of the age.

3.) A chess set. The best game ever and it might impress the rich and mighty enough to get my finance for the steam engine.

4.) A mousetrap. I hate mice and I guess there would be demand for such a device.

5.) A telescope. I guess I could impress the hell out of people!

[Charles Moore]

Bah! the rest of my comment above got cut off. Probably from poor use of cut and paste. Here's the rest of what I meant to say (as well as I can remember it).

So, assuming I can't take back the sum total of accumulated human knowledge on a thumb drive jammed in an OLPC, here's the inventions I'd try to get passed the chrono-customs agents.

These aren't necessarily thing that I could fit in a backpack, but they sure would have an impact on society. I'm assuming that I get to pick where and when I go....so I'm headed to ancient Rome.

1) The Bessemer Process - cheap steel production could really stir things up in the Empire.

2) A Slide Rule - America went to the moon based largely on calculation performed using these wonderful tools. Imagine them in the hands of Roman engineers.

3) Corn. Combine this with the concept of the three crop rotation and that puts food in a lot of stomaches. Besides, who wants Bread and Circuses when you can get Cornbread and Circuses.

4) Refrigeration - Before the 20th century. The leading cause of death world wide was food poisoning.

5) The steam engine - I was going to put double entry bookkeeping here, but Chris is right. Steam power is just too useful. The combination of Steel + Steam = Railroads and Steam Ships. Give how the Roman loved to build roads, they be quick to jump all over the Railroad.

[Charles Johnson]

This challenge sounds eerily like something from Star Trek. Don't we have a temporal prime directive?

I think the really important question is whether or not you'd even want to go back in time at all. Everyday Americans enjoy standards of living now that rivals anything even the 19th century industrialists had.

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Survivalist handbook,Solar powered notebook.Compound Bow/with green laser sight,the metallurgist master craftsman book,a good saddle with stirrups.With survival book learn to find and collect for gunpowder.The bow can be replicated.metal smithing is the heart of all cities and towns.they were no saddles back then stirrups would be a nation building breakthrough.The pc with all encyclopedia is the power of knowledge use it wisely and protect at all cost.

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Although time travel has been a common plot device in fiction since the 19th century, and one-way travel into the future is arguably possible given the phenomenon of time dilation based on velocity in the theory of special relativity (exemplified by the twin paradox), as well as gravitational time dilation in the theory of general relativity, it is currently unknown whether the laws of physics would allow backwards time travel.

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Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space, either sending objects (or in some cases just information) backwards in time to some moment before the present, or sending objects forward from the present to the future without the need to experience the intervening period (at least not at the normal rate).

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