Don’t forget to specify with soap and to do it after bathroom visits and before meals, otherwise they’ll just wash their hands once per month and use dirt to wash with.

The Romans had steam engines. But they couldn’t be used for anything but opening temple doors to impress people because they didn’t have the manufacturing tolerances to seal the steam chamber properly, nor the metallurgy needed to pressurize it without bursting.
That tech only became available much later during the industrial revolution.

A researcher in animal cognition said at a lecture I saw once: every time we look closer, we see more and more evidence of intelligent behavior in tinier and tinier creatures, behaviors we once assumed were limited to humans. He studied insects: bacteria have been shown to display “learning” behaviors.

How many beings are sapient? Wouldn’t be shocked if Future Being told me it was all of them

To my knowledge, the sapient population is the human population of Earth.

However, there are numerous sentient species that could conceivably be “uplifted” in the next thousand years. Plus, I consider it more likely than not that extraterrestrials do exist and that there’s likely another sapient species out there, though they are unlikely to be in our general volume of space

Hopefully the usb standard hasn’t updated too much.

Buger looking glob of DNA

I came back from the future to warn you, boobies are setting up a boobie trap. Save the ass!

I agree with all of that, but as a society, I would not say we “know” it until we remove it from our food supply in a significant way. Today, still in most countries much of our food is stored, sold, and prepared in substantial plastics. We rightfully “know” better with lead and asbestos, but societally were still ignorant of the real concerns of plastics.