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I definitely appreciated this one, since I'm always wondering how I would explain the things around me to an imaginary caveman or alien.

It's not the same, though, man - Unlike a baby, ancient scientists already have a mental model of the world you can watch them overturn.

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So teach them wrong first so you can teach them correctly later and see their reaction?

I like how the second post has more upvotes

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I think the main point is really how all of us are born with the legacy of those who came before.

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Been looking for this comic recently, one of my favorites. Thanks for posting it.

2114240 Standing on the shoulders of giants, eh?

Instead of scientists, I would love to describe the modern world to political theorists over the years - Plato to Machiavelli to Marx. You could argue that unlike science, man has roughly organized himself in a similar fashion over the past 2000 years, so it would be interesting to see how they would view the world today and whether it has fundamentally changed for the better or worse.

(I personally think all of them would say worse, but hey, you never know )

I think this comic absolutely misses the point.

It's difficult to ever be amazed by stuff that's established as normal in our formative years; we have machines that fly and yet I wasn't amazed by this until I gained a historical, scientific and technological perspective on the subject - I was raised to see it as normal. Furthermore there is a necessary degree of intellectual sophistication to see why many of these things are amazing and in modern society it is extremely unlikely (and unethical) for them to develop that level of sophistication before knowing about these things. And it doesn't take culture into account; how even an ignorant westerner would react to something is completely different to how an ancient Greek would react to something. Nor is there any guarantee that the baby will grow up to have the mind of a great philosopher or similar, even if you manage to avoid these influences somehow, which also greatly changes things; they might not be interested or fail to see the significance - it's an absolutely terrible idea to have kids if you need them to be a particular type of person.

It is not the same in every way that counts. It's just romanticizing having children in an eyeroll worthy fashion. I'll continue not having kids and imagining to talk to the scholars of the past thank you very much.