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You can ask one question from a person from the year 3024. What are you asking?
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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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...
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.
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.