"Distributable without a lot of other infrastructure, though? Not that it's at all obvious that should be a priority -"

"The very best stuff you need training to administer, but there's dramatically-better-than-nothing options that could theoretically be dropped with brief written instructions and little parachutes. It's not up there with malaria but it is kind of a big deal for social progress, honestly."

"I don't think most Muggles can read."

"Brief little videos, then, except they'd be censored instantly, likely as not... 2002 would be much easier than 1802."

"I am sure it's 2002 somewhere in the multiverse. What would they have, less censorious governments or -"

"Higher literacy rates too."

"We can fix all these things, I just don't have a feel for the best order of operations."

"Yeah, me either, for some reason I never entertained the hypothetical 'what if I meet a wizard from 1802'."

"And I put a fair bit of thought into taking over the world with less resources than this but there are probably a dozen other things like birth control that haven't even occurred to me -"

"Yeah, the up to date political controversies in 2002 would probably be unrecognizable, let alone 2179."

"Do tell."

"In 2002 I turned fifteen years old and some people had recently flown some hijacked aircraft into some New York City skyscrapers and as what approximates a result the US attacked some tangentially related countries in what was widely perceived as an attempt to collect more petroleum, the principal use of which is fueling vehicles, and security procedures around boarding airplanes were tightened and there were a lot of political cartoons about taking our shoes off... My mother was moderately active in a movement to get more general acceptance of the idea of same-sex marriage and the right to legally change one's gender on one's identification..." He consults his computer. "The former currencies of the European Union countries stopped being legal tender... an early version of what was eventually a very popular open source web browser was released..."

"Okay, you win. What's a skyscraper, what an evocative word..."

"A really really tall building! These ones were almost fourteen hundred feet high and were at the time among the tallest in the world."

"Wizards have flight, mostly on broomsticks but I take it the Muggles get it too -"

"An airplane of the early 2000s could get to Australia from the United States in a little under a day carrying several hundred passengers and by then this was accessible with a little budgeting to middle class people. Gets cheaper and faster later."

"What does it take to put those things in place -"

"As with my medical education my engineering education is very 'for demons' and you probably don't want me personally making every aircraft for an entire planet. But we can find out."

"How does the government end up being structured -"

"Representative democracies, tending towards sort of federated structures like the aforementioned European Union as various regions and groups bid for independence and then want to voluntarily participate in trade union sorts of things. And then there's Luna and Mars which do their own thing, I haven't looked into them very closely."

"That sounds hard to manage but not impossible - manage in the sense of having all the actual decision power, I mean, maybe that's the wrong thing to aim for -"

"Yes, they are not dictatorships, that's sort of the point."

"The question is whether they make good decisions often enough I can trust them to do that."

"Kind of aggressively low-variance mediocrity, which is also sort of the point."

"Are you super attached to doing it that way?"