> One of the ideas I played with in The Knowledge was what would you most want to whisper in someone’s ear — like 2,000 years ago, or if someone’s having to go through this process again — that once you’ve told someone, it kind of makes immediate sense. ...
This is a fascinating idea.
> And for me, the one that stood out by far the most significantly was this idea of germ theory and how that links to the microscope. ...
There's what you'd want to whisper and what the person (and their community!) would accept. History has shown people to be extremely resistant to the germ theory of disease.
> And actually, one of my favorite maker projects when I was researching for The Knowledge was making some Robinson Crusoe glass from scratch. ... And there’s nothing stopping the ancient Romans over 2,000 years ago building a microscope, if only they’d known what to do.
I'm not so sure about this. A lot of societal and technological developments happened between the first microscopes and the connection to germ theory. From a different article:
> In 1676, Dutch cloth merchant-turned-scientist Antony van Leeuwenhoek further improved the microscope with the intent of looking at the cloth that he sold, but inadvertently made the groundbreaking discovery that bacteria exist. His accidental finding opened up the field of microbiology and the basis of modern medicine; nearly 200 years later, French scientist Louis Pasteur would determine that bacteria were the cause behind many illnesses (before that, many scientists believed in the miasma theory that rotten air and bad odors made us sick).
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-we-owe-to...
You whisper in someone's ear "Things you can't see cause disease. The key is making and polishing glass. Now, get busy."
Then, within a few decades, the person is dead. Depending on a lot of factors, that person is pretty likely to have taken the knowledge, and the drive to put it into practice, to the grave. Imagine the reaction to this revelation this unfortunate soul would be greeted with. Unfortunately, we don't need to imagine, because history tells us quite clearly what happens to people who are far ahead of their time.
So the trick is to reveal something just far enough ahead to be useful, but not too far ahead to upset prevailing views and power structures. Not easy at all.
Now, imagine the world as we know it has been destroyed by something that sets us way back. How long does it take us to revert to superstition and witch hunts? The sad truth is that we're already there, even at the technological high water mark of the species. I doubt it would take more than 10 years of sustained primitive living to turn the clock back 2 or 3 milennia.