http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1300

http://depletedcranium.com/?p=338

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death


http://kottke.org/08/06/survival-tips-for-the-middle-ages

On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 5:36 AM, Dale Swanson wrote:

After I read that last email about the selling the tech to the kings thing I started thinking a lot this weekend. First off obviously you would sell weapons and tech and not some crazy elevator system, I think that is assumed. But this is what I started to think about. What if you went back intime and had to live, what kind of things would you be able to do with your modern knowledge. Now I can think a few possible scenrios. You wake up and its the past, you had no prior knowledge that you were going to go back, so you are only armed with whatever you know off the top of your head. You have time to prepair, lets say a whole year. And last you had time to prepair and you could also take luggage. With the last one the luggage has to be small or else it really starts to take the fun out of it all. At first I said a carryon sized bag, but I decided on a cubic foot. It's an actual cubic foot, can't be 12"x6"x24", must be 1'x1'x1'. You are going back to the year 0 or so, and you are going to be the emporer of Rome, so you would have plently of resources and such.

First thing I'd do is post the situation on every forum in the world. Obviously as a hypothetical so people would post ideas and not just say yeah right dumb ass. You may doubt forums but I'm always supprised no matter how long I think about something as soon as a search it I find there are a million other ways of going about it that I didn't think about. It would be good just to read what people suggested first.

Next I would have to decide if I would be able to make power. I pretty much couldn't bring anything that would actually generate it back with me. At first I thought about flexible solar, but that would waste a lot of room, then maybe thought of something where I could provide a was to spin the turbine and it would make power. I could make a windmill or a water mill to spin it. But that would still be a pretty big waste of space. I think I could make a generator using tech of the time. Converting it to 60Hz AC would be the hard part. But I think I could figure it out. Then I'd bring a laptop and a 500 GB external HDD. Obviously that would greatly help things out. From there I think I could make some serious advancements and probably take over the world.