Right off the bat, you propose buying a plantation, but those things are pretty expensive. Where will you get the money ?
We were granted "enough money to live as a patrician for a year". I made an assumption about what that meant, since in those days all wealth beyond jewelry was in the form of real property (land) anyhow. Agriculturally Spain was traditionally relatively crappy. Land would be cheap and plentiful because it wouldn't be seen as a viable resource for crop harvesting. (I'd only be able to pull it off because of modern agricultural knowledge.)
You attempt to get around this with your death-watch guards, but who death-watches the death-watchers ? If I told one of your guards, "nine out of ten gods agree, you should allow me to sneak in one of my smiths to talk to one of your smiths, and BTW here's a purse containing MXXIV gold pieces with your name on it", what motivates the guard to refuse ?
Nothing. Well, except that I'd be rotating the guards and so on. Plus; nobody would want what they were selling, at least for the first few years. And by then it really wouldn't much matter -- I'd already have the ramp-up I needed to maintain first-mover advantage. If "the secret" got out... they'd get girardoni air rifles. I would then simply move on to bootstrapping again w/ explosive weapons and revise the tactical rulebook on the generals of the day all over again.
It takes, remember, FAR longer to retrain already-trained soldiers to use new tactics, and they tend to be socially conservative about even wanting to do so. Two total revolutions of military tactics in a ten year window? It would take an genius just to stay competent. (And such rare individuals are very susceptible to assassination. A problem I would also face.)
This practically ensures that your competitive advantage will be stolen by your rivals very quickly. You avoid gunpowder for this very reason, but is it really that much harder to steal pulleys ?
Individually I fully-well expect a number of the techs to be stolen relatively early on. I'm alright with that, actually. A first-mover advantage traditionally lasts about five years. That's also one additional reason why I'd chosen a "backwater" or "rural" area to bootstrap in: there will be far fewer 'educated' men to deal with, and I will be able to ramp up -- initially -- in relative isolation. So while I'm bootstrapping up; they must A) discover my bootstrapping, B) uncover the methods used, C) adopt them for themselves. Each of these individually takes time.
Horse collars, pulleys, and a-frames are all individually relatively low-hanging fruit. The leaf-springs necessary for conastoga wagons are far less so. The technical know-how to construct a working turbine engine to proper tolerances is even moreso.
Merely training your smiths (who, according to the scenario's setup, lack your intelligence as well as your education) might take a couple years in and of itself.
A few months per project at most. Task specialization would be used. As would cast-forging and other modern industrial techniques. Metal lathes, apprentices, and so on. Figure also that I'd only have to train three or four such people, over the course of a few months (to each specific project) -- and they in turn could also retrain others. Use of casting would also increase their productivity. I wouldn't need very much.
As to the raw resources; that's why I focused so much on trade.
I believe you also underestimate the social inertia involved.
I was counting on it being extreme. Otherwise, my technological advantage would be far, FAR harder to maintain. The schools -- the part where I mentioned '"skepticism, falsificationism, logic, mathematics" and birth control' -- are not vital or even very contributive to the plan as described.
what makes you think that you'll be any more successful in these endeavors in the pre-Enlightenment Rome ?
Nothing, really. But at least the civilization would have an 1800 year jump-start on making it work out. (Plus, we got many of those ideas from classical -- traditional grecoroman -- thought anyhow.)
That "I am the chosen of Vulcan" gambit can only get you so far, and might in fact backfire, because priests tend to take exception to their power structures being disrupted.
Cults and mystery cults were a dime a dozen in those days. If I didn't have my own I'd be looked upon strangely, and disadvantaged politically. Also, I wouldn't be interfering with the power structure of any other religious group, so that's pretty much a total non-concern.
Land would be cheap and plentiful because it wouldn't be seen as a viable resource for crop harvesting.
Wait... where else would they harvest crops, if not on land ? They don't have hydroponics...
That said, it's entirely possible that I overestimated the value of land as compared to a patrician's salary, so you could have a point.
Nothing. Well, except that I'd be rotating the guards and so on.
That's just a recipe for more leaks, IMO.
...Plus; nobody would want what they were selling, at least for the first few years. And by then it really wouldn't muc
A recent discussion post has compared the difficulty of an AI destroying modern human civilization to that of a modern human taking over the Roman Empire, with the implication that it is impossible.
The analogy has a few problems: first, modern humans don't have much greater raw intelligence than the Romans, only a bit more knowledge and tools; an AI would have a genuine intelligence advantage. Second, a high-tech civilization like ours offers many more ways for a genius to cause chaos than existed in classical Rome: it's more plausible that you can throw a few existing technologies together to create a superweapon than that Ptolemy could have done likewise, and there's no ancient Roman equivalent to hacking a nuclear launch system.
But taking over ancient Rome might serve as an interesting upper bound on the difficulty of an AI taking over modern civilization. And it's a theme of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that rationalists should be able to come up with creative solutions to seemingly hard problems. So if Professor Quirrell offered it as an extra credit assignment, how would you take over Rome?
Here are the rules:
- You are thrown back in time to the year 1 AD. You can choose to arrive anywhere in the world, but your method of arrival cannot itself give an advantage (you can't appear in a flash of light in the middle of a religious ritual or anything).
- You do not start with Roman citizenship or any other legal record of your existence.
- You keep your original physical characteristics, including sex, height, and fitness. You will appear in period-appropriate dress of your choosing, and can't carry any artifacts with you. You may start with enough money to live a patrician lifestyle for a year.
- You are intellectually near-perfect. You know all human knowledge as of 2012. You speak fluent Latin (and all other languages of the day) and can orate as eloquently as Cicero or Demosthenes. You are a tactical genius of the order of Caesar and Napoleon. And you have infinite willpower and goal-directedness: aside from human necessities like sleep or food, you need never rest.
- You win if you either become Roman Emperor (and are acknowledged as such by most Romans), or if a state you control conquers the city of Rome. You lose if you die, of old age or otherwise, before completing either goal.