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> Then I realized that I don't know how to build the systems that I was relying on for my supposed superiority, or even how some of them work.

I used to have this joke(?) with my friends: remember Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King's Arthur Court"? The titular Yankee basically upends the (faux) medieval society he gets transported to, "inventing" all sorts of technological miracles.

Well, I'm a software developer but don't come from an engineering background (I mean actual engineering, not programming). I don't even understand how electricity or the telephone work (I mean, old fashioned telephones, let alone current mobile networks). If I was transported to 2 or 3 centuries to the past, I wouldn't be able to explain modern technology to other people, let alone actually build it.

I sort of understand how steam machines work, and I could "invent" the printing press. I guess. But anything related to circuitry, electricity, chemistry, engineering of any sort, I wouldn't be able to even begin explaining them to King Arthur.

My introduction to the knights of the round table would go something like this:

"We are questing for the Holy Grail, oh noble stranger from a far away land! How can you help?"

"Depends, which version of Python are you running?"

A light, enjoyable read along these lines is Leo Frankowski's "high tech knight" series, starting with The Cross-time Engineer. The main character -- a real engineer -- gets transported back to medieval Poland, and he knows that he's got ten years either to bug out, or help Poland defend itself from the coming Mongol invasion.

[I only liked the first four books, but that's enough to cover the original story arc]

"Deathworld 2" by Harry Harrison has a plot along those lines. Apparently the original name was "The Ethical Engineer".

Also on a similar theme: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil (it's intended to be about free market economies, but you can also read it as something about knowing how even simple modern marvels work at all).

Inventing the printing press was more difficult than it seems at first. In addition to the idea of unsing movable type significant development of the correct alloys for the types was necessary. The alloy needs to be able to be cast easily and at the same time be durable to be reused for a large enough number of print runs. In addition the proper ink needs to be developed...

Right, let me amend my statement: I understand how the printing press with movable type works and I would be able to explain it to King Arthur, but I probably wouldn't be able to actually craft the types, inks, etc, and so the annoyed King would have me beheaded.

Cheap durable paper also helps.

Fun fact: printing rates increased from about 120 sheets/hour to over 1 million over the course of the 19th century. Those began with wooden screw presses that differed little from Gutenberg's to cast iron, rotary, steam and later electric powered, and web (continuous paper feed) presses, and from matrix plates (with individual type set in blocks) to offset Linotype (in which the entire print block was cast as a single sheet through multiple stages from the original matrix characters).

Thought just occurs: the falling characters of the iconic Matrix screen somewhat resemble the individual type elements flowing and falling through a Linotype machine. I don't know if that is a deliberate or incidental reference, but it's an interesting one.

Do i have the T-shirt for you:

https://topatoco.com/products/qw-cheatsheet

And the T-shirt's companion bandana and spin-off book:

This shirt annoys me. I get that it is a joke, but the explanations are just so woefully over-simplified, and don't get at the main problem -- materials and manufacturing technology in the past was poor enough that even if you knew the basic physics you'd have no chance of getting, like, material to build a wing out of.

What, not even pinewood and gelatin for ribs and stringers, and some linen cloth plus pine resin and alcohol for doping? Seriously, that's like 1000BC tech level.

Wing is no problem as long as one can calculate how to make it stiff enough and of a right shape.

Even if you knew what to do, convincing the naturally suspicious people back then to trust a strange outsider would be tricky. Then you have to get the right materials.

If I were a bit more clever, or maybe if I was 50 years older and had played with this kind of stuff growing up, I'd probably try to make a spark-gap transmitter. That seems to be in a sweet spot of not requiring too many super clever bits, and having obvious applications.

At a very general level once you move past subsistence farming you become reliant on society to provide your needs. And in turn provide some value that can only come from spending your time on things other than farming. And that is I suppose how civilization advances. Its kind of funny to work backwards though, because even subsistence farmers are reliant on society for protection -- they are farmers not soldiers after all. I think about this a lot, how important trust is to going anywhere in modern life. And how little choice there is anyways. I also think about how most people don't think about it at all, or very much, and wonder if knowing how fragile we are makes me happier and more productive, or less so.

There's an interesting misconception that humans developed agricultural societies because they achieved better outcomes as individuals. Research shows that hunter-gatherers were healthy and better nourished than humans in early agricultural settlements.

What's probably closer to truth is that many humans were forced to join farming communities. Stronger individuals or tribes probably enslaved others, and then forced them to build and produce.

The patterns of inequity and the march toward hyper-specialization we still see today make sense in that context.

As a tangent, if anyone is interested in that "cavemanness" deep in our DNA, check out the idea of primitive camping. That was my first experience camping, and I expected an idealized tv-ad experience. The trip was not framed as "primitive camping" to me.

I was dealing with intense burnout, stress, ADHD symptoms, immune problems, trouble sleeping... And I was thrown into the desert in the summer with a tent and some beer. It fucking sucked sooo bad. It fucking sucked sooo bad that I forgot every stupid problem I had, because I spent the entire time in survival mode. Setting up camp. Hauling equipment up and down dunes. Staying hydrated in the 100f+ heat. Making food. Making sure my wife and friends were ok. Strategizing how to defend our camp from bugs and psychos.

I really have not had such an existentially-dense experience as that one. And no, I didn't take any mushrooms, as the rest of the group did. I wanted to be lookout. Maybe I come from a long line of hyperaware sentries.

Forced labor was absolutely the norm for the pre-modern state, and provided the bulk of the workforce [1].

AFAIK humanity is yet to produce a society where the majority of farm laborers are fully free to leave the land they work on (whether via having their papers confiscated, their wages held until the season ends, by having transport provided to a remote farm but the trip back withheld etc). We've seen improvements in the degree of freedom, particularly over the past century and especially the past 50 years, but it's still very low compared to urban dwellers.

1: "Against the Grain", James C Scott

Not to mention that when the power goes out, the illusion fades fairly quickly. Learned that lesson myself in the Texas snowstorm early this year.

I lived in Miami during hurricane Wilma and spent like a week without electricity. You realize how quickly things go south without electricity flowing.

Third world country here.

Commit and push often.

Absolutely. My wife and I lived for a year in an off-the-grid cabin in some mountains in Mexico.

We had solar panels and a generator we used only when absolutely necessary. We were never without power, but we lived with the constant anxiety of optimizing our energy consumption. Some stuff we could only do during the day and at night we only used devices with batteries.

For a couple of weeks we didn't have running water in the cabin because we were rebuilding our water deposit tower. We used buckets for everything.

That was almost a decade ago and I still feel grateful at having unlimited energy or running water on demand.

I also feel guilty at times when doing power hungry stuff like playing video games, knowing electricity production is by far the biggest driver of climate change.

Absolutely. My wife and I lived for a year in an off-the-grid cabin in some mountains in Mexico.

I think everyone ought to do a week in an RV with no connections to utilities. Not to take away from your story, but a similar scenario comes up when we "dry camp" (no water or electrical connections): resources are not unlimited. We have solar panels, big-ass inverter and big-ass battery to go with it. But if we want lights at night, best not run that 1100W microwave for too long, because the panels won't keep up and the battery isn't that big. We have a built-in generator, but unlike most RV owners, we are loathe to use it. It's almost like a game, and if that generator fires up then we've lost.

You want to let the water run while you brush your teeth? Go right ahead, our water tank is plenty big...oh, wait, but the holding tanks aren't. Shut that tap off before there's dirty water coming up through the shower. Speaking of showers, use the outside shower, as the holding tanks won't hold enough for your 30 minute, piping-hot shower.

Point of it all is that it one quickly learns that it all has to come from somewhere, and it has to go somewhere after you've dirtied it. I'd like to think that it has made the both of us more conscious of our usage.

Very similar experience with sailboats.

There's nothing like being at sea, 100+ miles from civilization, reliant on the limited capacity systems on your vessel. You manage your food, you manage your water consumption, fuel, electrical usage, you're closely attuned to the weather, the sea state, the charts. There are no other visible people or people-made objects out to the horizon in all directions. If something breaks, you'd better know how it works and be able to fix it, or go without. It feels very freeing, but also provides a "back to basics" accountability.

Standing under a hot water shower with unlimited water in a spacious home shower afterward feels luxurious.

Or even better, go backpacking in the wilderness. Slightly different set of constraints: you can usually find water (at least where I hike), but carrying all your equipment and food on your back gives you a new perspective on what's "essential".

The most impressive thing to me is toilets. Just click a button and your waste disappears. Don't know where it goes or how it gets there and pay almost nothing for the privilege.

Toilets are amazing and I feel privileged every time I use one. Girlfriend thinks I'm nuts.

Well, you didn't just find a cave, it was made for you by other people. Interdependence is a hallmark of social species such as Homo Sapiens. Even your caveman ancestors were probably reliant on one another in many ways.

>It seems that someone asked the great anthropologist, Margaret Mead, “What is the first sign you look for to tell of an ancient civilization?” The interviewer had in mind a tool or article of clothing. Ms. Mead surprised him by answering, “a healed femur (thigh bone)”. When someone breaks a femur, they can’t survive to hunt, fish or escape enemies unless they have help from someone else. Thus, a healed femur indicates that someone else helped that person, rather than abandoning them and saving only themselves.

At least the cave man could go out and get water. Or have some reasonable expectation of finding food. Good luck!

Great for you, I hope you enjoy your cave.

> Then I realized that I don't know how to build the systems that I was relying on for my supposed superiority, or even how some of them work.

I'm sure if you just sat down with a pen and paper you could come up with a DIY solution.

Not to mention that many of the skills needed by the original cavemen to survive are gone in today's society. In other words, if we were to compete with the original cavemen in their environment, we would most likely fare rather poorly, at least in the short term.

Not trying to glorify off-the-grid living or anything, but I think it's interesting to think that in some (very specific) ways, the cavemen were actually superior to us.

> I'm really just a cave man that found a nicer cave.

You aren't really - most cavemen didn't even understand that fire is possible, and wouldn't be able to consistently operate a lighter if they found one (it'd probably be put on an altar and worshipped instead, as it should). You might not be able to build your entire cave, but your education alone is a _huge_ advantage!