If you could send one person from today back in time to jump-start technology...

[Howard]

... who would it be?

 

[guyver01]

me.
altho i would only tell myself what stocks to purchase.

 

[Kadarin]

Probably a better question would be where to send that person, and with what?

 

[Patranus]

Steve Jobs

 

[SirStev0]

Wouldn't that require taking out religion? Because wouldn't a highly advanced technological wonder be seen by early civilizations as some sort of god?

 

[Ruptga]

I'd send Chuck Norris back to the old Roman empire. He'd stop the invasions before they started, then head on back to Rome to knock heads until they pulled theirs out of their asses and started acting like an empire rather than a bunch of children looking for amusement. Then he'd build a boat, go to America, and give the locals diseases so that they would have immunities by the time Europeans arrived.

That would at least put off the dark ages for a few centuries, while ensuring that the American civilizations would survive European contact instead of being steamrolled and thrust into cycles of poverty and economic/political/environmental collapses. All those centuries of lost productivity would be saved, and my alternate-future self would have a flying car that burns water and emits rainbows.

 

[zerocool84]

Steve Jobs

Everything would be dumbed down, white, and expensive with old hardware.

 

[Kadarin]

Wouldn't that require taking out religion? Because wouldn't a highly advanced technological wonder be seen by early civilizations as some sort of god?

What you would want to do, actually, is take Gutenberg with his idea for the printing press, and put him back into a non-theocratic pre-Christian civilization. Greece under Pericles, for example.

That would probably do an excellent job of jump starting technology.

 

[PM650]

Everything would be dumbed down, white, and expensive with old hardware.

Actually, we'd all have free ipods by now...

 

[Hacp]

Al Gore. He did invent the Internet after all..

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Donald Knuth.

 

[Bateluer]

What you would want to do, actually, is take Gutenberg with his idea for the printing press, and put him back into a non-theocratic pre-Christian civilization. Greece under Pericles, for example.

That would probably do an excellent job of jump starting technology.

All hail our Greek masters and their global republic!

 

[El Guaraguao]

dubya

 

[xalos]

I don't think one person would have that much impact. If evidence came to light that Nikola Telsa was a time traveler from the future, I wouldn't be extremely surprised. Tesla was involved in a lot of things and had a lot of great inventions. But, he was considered a mad scientist and was considered to be rather odd. If you take almost anyone from the future and stick them in the past, they're going to be considered a little eccentric in almost any period.