If we could send back any amount of written documents back to 1950, but nothing else, what technologies could we bootstrap faster? Lithium-ion batteries? Solar PV? Transistors? Photolithography?
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Data on medicine, climate change, psychology, human rights, miniturization, history, politics... Why not send some fiction back as well? You could really change things if it's unlimited.
Rather than technology directly perhaps conclusive evidence relating climate change to anthropomorphic behaviour... It may foster earlier developments of green technologies or, to be more pessimistic, could possibly be outright ignored
Horizontal drilling and slickwater fracturing. Then directional solidification to develop the gas turbines to fully take advantage of the abundant fuel. We don't celebrate the win today because of climate change, but the air pollution avoided would have saved a huge number of lives
This year’s Nobel Prize winning work in machine learning (plus back-propagation). ML was invented in 1957, but by 1970 it had been “proven” that artificial neural networks could not possibly compute.
Pretty much everything. The Earth didn't have a different resource base 70 years ago; you could move everything forward by not-seventy years, as there's stuff that would need to be built and people would have to learn the
new stuff to apply it, but maybe 50? DNA. Lasers. IC's, solar/batteries.
Now serious answer. Everything we know today about climate change. It could just be the data with extrapolated charts (hope that's the right word). Give them that many more years to start to fix it.
I mean, probably! But getting that info to people who can use it but don’t have a vested interest in suppressing it is a non-trivial problem! The whole hypothetical kind of depends on assuming what will be done with the future info, which allows for a lot of latitude in guessing what will help
Do you have any idea how many trans lives you could save and how much human misery in that group alone you could prevent? Technological advance is even more important in the realm of ideas than in gizmos.
"Go to the Congo Basin and just eat whatever bushmeat you can find. And don't waste any of that blood. In fact inject some intravenously. Just trust us."
Would the Solar PV docs even be that useful? How communicable is a manufacturing process like that (I used to work on manufacturing documentation and it seemed remarkably difficult)?
I really don't know! Photolithography seems to be based on many decades of incremental progress, but I don't know how much of that can be communicated back versus learning by doing, leveraging previous gen tech, etc...
A lot of the time you're trying to communicate some finicky stuff about steps and so often the steps are so dependent on the tools you have. So if you have a 1000 page limit I fear you'd spend the first 999 pages trying to describe all the tools!
Like I was talking to my friend who does some fairly esoteric manufacturing for aerospace parts from the 50s/60s and it's apparently pretty difficult to translate those procedures into our procedure today when you
1 know what you're making
2 can ask the last people who did it how it worked
Every time travel novel has warned us that sending advanced tech back to primitive civilizations results in disaster
We could however, send back documents showing how half the American people elected a Russian puppet into the Oval Office and a neo-nazi billionaire is shadow President
We could just send them the twilight books and blow their mind so society could develop around team Edward and team Jacob. Not everything has to end in disaster.
Really? Would it be how you produce them, a program to develop and test strains, or what? 1950s *already* saw the and most impactful vaccine rollout in history
Right like they had their shit together and national support and funding to do it. Give those folks that eradicated polio the last 70 years of research and let them get a years-to-decades jump on measles, HPV, chicken pox, bird flus, covid, whatever.
Honestly, there’s a lot that you could do by just cutting down existing 1950s research. I know people want to make the future come faster, but what if you gave every researcher their own published paper three to five years before they finish their research? We could jump a whole decade or more
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new stuff to apply it, but maybe 50? DNA. Lasers. IC's, solar/batteries.
DoorDash
What would be the most useless thing to send them? I'm thinking 5G specification.
1 know what you're making
2 can ask the last people who did it how it worked
We could however, send back documents showing how half the American people elected a Russian puppet into the Oval Office and a neo-nazi billionaire is shadow President
That was a brilliant idea...
Imagine what we could do by preventing time travel from screwing up this timeline!
I think any modern science paper could make anyone a quasi prophet.