Think “you wake up in the woods naked,” Dr. Stone-style tech reset. How could humans acquire a 1-gram weight, a centimeter ruler, an HH:MM:SS timekeeping device, etc. starting with natural resources?

My best guess was something involving calibrating a mercury thermometer (after spending years developing glassblowing and finding mercury, lol) using boiling water at sea level to mark 100 ° C and then maybe Fahrenheit’s dumb ice ammonium chloride brine to mark -17.7778 ° C, then figuring out how far apart they should be in millimeters on the thermometer (er, somehow). I can already think of several confounding variables with that though, most notably atmospheric pressure.

I feel like the most important thing to get would be a length measurement since you can then get a 1 gram mass from a cubic centimeter of distilled water.

That’s as far as I got with this thought experiment before deciding to ask the internet. I actually asked on Reddit a while back but never got any responses.

  • m0darn
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    1 year ago

    10 000 km from the pole to the equator?

    I think it would be a huge amount of work to get something more accurate than my guess.

    I don’t know, if America sends us all back into the stone age with nukes I think I’ll also agree to use the imperial system.

    I’ve heard of this book which you may find interesting