Walter Bright wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Walter Bright wrote:
Wouldn't the wheel be useless to a hunter-gatherer tribe?
Not for transporting the hunt.
Consider making a wheel (and corresponding cart) with nothing but stone
tools to work with, and your materials are rope, leather, and wood. No
fasteners. A workable cart with wheel would be very heavy. I think it
would be fairly useless without a road and oxen to pull it.
By and large, such mental exercises are indeed showing how dependent
everything in modern life is on infrastructure. Our major achievements
(electricity, automobiles, computers) cannot be fathomed absent a
major infrastructure.
Even writing has its problems. What are you going to write on? Bark?
Animal hides? How are you going to make paper? Ink? A hunter-gatherer
tribe may find it not worth the effort, and so the writing will not "take".
Yah, all the more argument to extend the time traveler an invitation to
dinner. In Hamlet's words, not where he eats, but where he is eaten.
Andrei
