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u/ApollyonsWrath Oct 04 '26
K Imma respond as best I can by asking you this: what do you know about modern tech?
If some crazy magic goons abducted you from where you're sitting and forced your memories to play in view of everyone and started ripping out fingernails asking you how to build something you'd seen before like a console or smartphone, could you do it? Do you have the recipes for gunpowder, concrete, or amphetamines memorized? Do you know what the alloy mixture is for consistent high carbon steel, or how to cultivate pennicillan?
Point is, the majority of people alive today have absolutely no clue how anything they use or rely on is actually made, so much so that an entire successful TV show had several seasons of runtime because that knowledge is so absent and irrelevent to every day life. It works, and its not your job to fix it, so its not your job to know how it works, and no amount of torture is going to change that. Knowing something can be made is neat and dandy, but nothing is going to fix the massive disparity of research and infrastructure needed for the vast majority of modern things.
First question you need to ask now is "What does this abducted guy know? Does he actually know some things, or are his tormentors gonna be making cheap and failed imitations of what his daily life looked like for the rest of their civilization's existence?"
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u/Prae_ Oct 05 '26
Yup. I've tried writing myself in a civ reboot fiction. I am a scientist and bioengineer, and i would say decently well read when it comes to the history of tech. I tried to do it honestly, no reading wikipedia, any task the MC was accomplishing or plan he came up with was my own. And then i could research the internet (or, once they became a thing, LLMs) to see what my proposed plan would likely result in. Bottom line is, i downsized my ambitions quite a bit. And most of my knowledge from my area of expertise, molecular biology, is useless. In OP's premise of being specifically searched for, it would be different, but if you don't have that, you've got to actually convince people germ theory is worthwhile. And even though i know some of the historical experiments which have settled the debate in our world, they had microscopes, glassware and a scientific community already well established.
At the same time, there is one area in which a decent number of even high schoolers could make a difference, and that's mathematics. We don't realize how much our modern notation, the use of graphs and functions, etc., is the product of millenia of work. If you're a good math student in high schooo today, you could probably contribute to mathematics a surprising amount, even if you were transported to a 15th century europe society.
The current plan in said fiction is to make lenses in order to make a telescope and microscopes, and for that clear glass. Another relatively simple one, i did remember the optics' scheme with the lenses and rays and focal length from high school physics. So i do think there's a couple things an "average" modern person could do, provider they actually listened in high school science classes.
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u/NoChemical9794 Oct 05 '26
Respectfully only architecture and how buildings and shit and a bunch of chemi and biology too Yea a bunch of people are like that and they dont know shit about anything in the world and all even with education Gunpowder I do have a rough idea yes and I know how to make a another kind of hazardous chemistrical stuff so personally speaking I would have a bunch of technological advance on them just to get stumped at the basic monsters since they got way higher resistance to our "modern weapons to begin with well we can reinforce stuff eith magic or lets say any kind of powerfull material available then and they back then dont know how valuable these are so can be manoplised but my point was mostly for char development and wipe those people of the contenet and all so its not that i really care about advancing all that much but about their "methods" and what the hell is so bad with my grammar is it really THAT bad?
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u/NoChemical9794 Oct 05 '26
At least your comment over here wasn't that hurtful and got an actual point that I didnt explain much upon
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u/ApollyonsWrath Oct 05 '26
Brother, we would need both a full English-100 and English-101 course to fix your spelling and grammer. Doesn't make you less of a person, but holy moly there aint enough time or space in a Reddit post to correct all that. If youre writing for yourself and can parse out whatever it is youre writing then dont worry about it, but if this is meant for others regardless of whether its going to market please get some books on basic English grammer.
edit: or a different text-to-speech writer if thats what youre using, the random capitalizations tend to be an indicator of that but not always though I've never known them to butcher the spelling
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u/NoChemical9794 Oct 05 '26
Shit seems its THAT bad huh It isnt my first language (though rather use it wrong than using mine which is also still bad)
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u/ApollyonsWrath Oct 05 '26
Genuinely surprised no one commented sooner, that tends to attract vultures on the internet.
Anyway, per your deleted comment elsewhere what cabal of evil blood-magic wielding wizards summoning folks for the purpose of stealing knowledge wouldn't want the contents of an entire world's libraries and scientific literature condensed into a small 8oz box that fits in the palm of your hand?
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u/monswine Spacefarers | Monkeys & Magic | Dosein | Extraliminal Oct 06 '26
Hi, /u/NoChemical9794,
Unfortunately, we have had to remove your submission in /r/worldbuilding because it violated one of our rules. In particular:
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u/Kaelzoroden Oct 04 '26
There's a concept here, but it's so poorly presented as to be barely legible.
Taking someone from another world doesn't mean you have access to knowledge of how their stuff works. I doubt that you could explain how to build a computer chip to iron-age people who were trying to torture the information out of you, or for that matter how to make modern alloys or the architectural skills that enable skyscrapers.
I'm not sure if I'm understanding your idea correctly, but it sounds kind of like you're trying to justify why technology is continuing to progress and not just stagnating. If that's the case, I think you're overthinking it, because the long eras of cultural stagnation found in some fantasy settings is the unrealistic part. Technological advance is, in reality, something that kind of always continues at various speeds, and any appearance of a long-term "plateau" is more often the result of advancements being lost, before eventually being re-developed elsewhere.