Thursday, November 30, 2006
Time Wasting
Have you ever had a time-travel fantasy? I think most people at some point or other have imagined themselves as pirates, knights, princesses, pharoahs and such.
This story in the news reminded me of an ancient Rome daydream I used to indulge when I was a teenager. It was actually more of a world domination fantasy, to tell the truth. The idea was that I would go back in time and take over the world by reinventing rudimentary technology. It was a sort of brain teaser for me that I pursued the way some people pursue crosswords or sudoku. On long road trips or sleepless nights, I would try to visualize the story in great detail. If I ran into anything that seemed fuzzy or improbable, I would go back and learn more about Roman history or basic technology.
Until now, I have never spoken to anyone about this. On the one hand, I suppose I felt a little foolish investing so much time and energy into such a pointless pursuit. On the other hand, I think in some irrational back corner of my mind I was afraid that others would steal my time-travelling-world-domination ideas if I revealed them.
Now that I am older and further along on my path to enlightenment, I find that I am less concerned about world domination than I once was and, in any case, I no longer regard time travel as the most feasible means to achieve it. So here, dear readers, for the first time ever, I give to you Mentok's Certified Ancient Rome World Domination Plan:
1. Create a back story. Remember that in ancient Rome anyone who looked or sounded funny had no legal rights and could be sold into slavery. To avoid this, when you first arrive try to convey through gestures, drawings and Latin-based English words that you are an ambassador from a previously undiscovered country. The Latin word for ambassador is "legatus". Mentioning mythical kingdoms, like Atlantis and Ultima Thule might help. Say "Caesar" a lot, but remember to say it the right way - 'Kie-saar', sort of like the German "Kaiser". There is no soft C in Latin and the letters "ae" create a "i-e" sound.
Hopefully, this will land you in the Imperial court as a guest. If not and you end up in slavery, be sure to emphasize that you know how to read and write and that you can do math (but remember to do it in Roman numerals.) This should secure your position as a well-treated house or office slave with the potential to earn or buy back your freedom while making valuable business contacts. This is a solid plan B that allows the remainder of the world-dominaiton plan to proceed unhindered.
2. Learn Latin. Given the strong Latin influence on English and the intense immersion environment, you should be conversant within a year and more-or-less fluent within two years.
3. Establish a wealthy patron. Roman society was built on an extensive system of patronship, so it shouldn't be hard for an exotic creature from a far-away land to find a sugar-daddy. Hopefully, Step 1 should provide you with such a patron one way or another.
4. Set a foundation for franchising. Before you go about reinventing technology, you will want to establish a distribution network in advance. Travel and communication in ancient Rome was very slow, so you will not be able to manage an empire-wide business on your own. Go on schmooze-and-booze trips to Athens, Alexandria and northern Italy to cultivate a network of potential cash-up-front franchise partners. Romans will be quite familiar with this concept, since their tax system was privatized and run, essentially, as a form of franchising.
5. Develop paper. Romans used papyrus, a natural form of paper which had to be laboriously pieced together by hand in Egypt where papyrus plants grow. Papyrus was therefore expensive and scarce, so Romans would be all too eager to buy a cheaper, domestically made product. Paper can be made from any cellulose-based organic substance, like wood-chips, sawdust, old cloth or used papyrus. Just boil the stuff up into a mash, pore it over a very fine sieve, smooth it out and let it dry. Once you have this down to an assembly-line routine, franchise it out quickly for big cash before someone steals it (remember, there were no patent laws in ancient Rome).
6. Develop the printing press. You'll need a carpenter and a metal-smith to do the detail work for you, but the basic idea is simple: create metal letters and put them in a wooden frame that has line-by-line vise grips to hold them in place. Once again, franchise this out for big upfront cash.
7. Experiment with assembly line production. Most ancient people had no clue about industrial efficiency. With your new pot of cash, try buying up a few manufacturing businesses e.g. shoe factories and see if modern assembly line methods help make them more productive. If you develop any systems that work, immediately franchise them.
8. Acquire a secret island base. By now you are fabulously wealthy and ready to plan your next phase of world domination. Set up a secure base where you can carry out further scientific experiments and train your army of world domination away from prying eyes.
9. Develop gunpowder and gunpowder weapons. The formula for gunpowder is 75% potassium nitrate, 15% sulfur and 10% wood ash. This sounds more intimidating than it is. Potassium nitrate (aka saltpeter) is a powdery crystalline substance that occurs naturally in caves containing limestone, which was a common building material extensively mined in ancient Rome. Sulfur was also easy to find in ancient Rome; it was the white powdery stuff left caked on to the walls of the urine pits of industrial dye makers (human urine was a chemical ingredient in Roman dye). Gunpowder weaponry will be trickier; you'll just have to work this out - carefully- through trial and error with the help of metalsmiths.
10. Develop advanced transportation. Any 21st century school child should be able to create a working hot-air balloon with enough time and resources. Balloons are useless for transportation but are very useful for gathering military intelligence. You should also try your hand at creating cattle-powered paddle-wheel boats, which would be much faster and cheaper to operate than Roman slave-paddled galleys. This is a relatively simple matter of hooking up oxen to a rudimentary system of revolving gears to spin a pair of paddlewheels.
11. Recruit and train an army of world domination. German tribes would make excellent recruits, since they were notoriously tough and had plenty of grudges against Rome. They were also technologically inferior, making it relatively unlikely that they could figure out how to make gunpowder and turn your weapons against you.
12. Invade Rome. At this juncture in history, an adequately supplied gunpowder army should be practically invincible. However, until you can absolutely prove this, stick to the old military rule of thumb of engaging the enemy only when you outnumber him 10 to one. Start with a few remote outposts in France to test the efficacy of gunpowder weapons against Roman armor and tactics, then move south into Italy once you are confident.
Following your conquest of Rome, you can pursue some secondary objectives, such as using your paddle-wheel boats to reach the riches of southern Africa and the Americas. Eventually, as your wealth and grip on power increases, you'll be able to consider conquering and colonizing further afield.
There you have it...easy as pie, eh? Now it's your turn. What are your time-travel fantasies? What periods in history are most attractive to you? Are there any historical figures you admire? Tell me your fondest historical daydreams, in as much or as little detail as you like.
posted by Mentok @ 11:34 a.m.,
8 Comments:
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At 11:42 a.m.,
Bathroom Hippo said...
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Wow...
My fantasy was simply to kill Mentok.
Now my fantasy looks stupid compared to yours! -
At 1:11 p.m.,
Grumps said...
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Had the day off, eh?
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At 5:40 p.m.,
FiL said...
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Mwmk..alkltpt...galkt...
*FiL picks lower jaw off floor, reaffixes it*
I'm stunned, Dear Mentok. And awed.
If ever I figure out the time travel bit, I'll give you a call. But if you want to draft the partnership documents in advance, I'll have my lawyers contact yours tomorrow. -
At 9:51 p.m.,
said...
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I'd just go back to the fifties armed with the best sports book possible and ala Back to the Future becoming wealthy winning bets on everything..
Who needs world domination. Too much work.. -
At 11:01 p.m.,
Bathroom Hippo said...
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I liked the photo! -
At 6:46 p.m.,
FiL said...
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I'd like to travel back to the summer of 1990, when on a day trip to Lubeck, Germany I stopped to chat with a bunch of Russians who were travelling around the Baltic on a 12-metre yacht. Ostensibly they were cruising to raise ecological awareness, but they also had on board a Russian avant-garde theatre group that was giving "psycho-erotic comedy" performances at each stopover. I ended up lunching with them and they invited me to join their voyage. I was tempted, but declined.
I've regretted that decision ever since, and would welcome the opportunity to go back and accept their offer... -
At 9:18 a.m.,
Mentok said...
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Hippo - in our house we avoid using the word "stupid" in favour of the less demeaning "silly". Silly hippo!
grumps - No, I didn't have the day off. This was just something I dashed off. Don't worry, after you've been in the writing biz for awhile you'll be able to produce quickly too, grumps ;-)
fil - Nice try! Obviously, no contract drawn up in the 21st century would be enforceable in the 1st century. Further, once the time travel had been carried out, the 21st century would be altered so that the contracts never happened. Lawyers would be useless to us in such a dispute.
happy and blue - I have similar schemes that are even simpler: just go back to the 80s with some stock charts. Selling short before the stock market crashes would be especially fun.
hippo - thanks. Here's the link if you'd like to make your own coin (only the site is German.)
fil - again, I have a similar fantasy: 1987, Dubrovnick in the former Yugoslavia, to the moment when two hot backpacker girls asked "We can't afford this suite we want to rent. Would you consider coming in with us? Only trouble is there is only one king-sized bed."
But in both your anecdote and mine, I would worry about it all being a set-up to the plot of one of those Hostel movies. Esp. considering it was a bunch of Russians, the trip could easily have turned out more "psycho" than "erotic". But I suppose its the not knowing that gnaws at a person. -
At 10:03 p.m.,
Suzan Abrams, email: suzanabrams@live.co.uk said...
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Hi Mentok,
Wondered if you had read The Time Traveller's Wife by debut American novelist Audrey Niffenegger.. It stayed on the bestseller lists in England for the longest time in 2005 and is being made into a film for 2008.
The novel worked because it placed such an intellengent perspective with travelling into time and back again.
To answer your question, I would have loved to have been a teen in Brtain in the 1960's. I would have liked to have gone to a Beatle's concert and screamed my lungs out and become a flower power child and also to indulge in the music that made Woodstock what it was. I think that was a special time for the world.
I'd also like to have been writing stories and poetry or painting in the time of Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury days in England. I'd like to go back to literary england at that time. But living somewhere in Scotland or the Lake District.
And I could travel back into time to a third place possibly to a club with friends, having a drink and swinging to Dave Brubeck's Take Five and watching Rosemary Clooney belt out a cabaret number in her lovely voice.
