[HN Gopher] Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 's...
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Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist'
[video]
Author : justinzollars
Score : 260 points
Date : 2021-12-10 03:16 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| dandare wrote:
| Other "out-of-place" artifacts
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-place_artifact
| supperburg wrote:
| There was a point in time where Ancient Rome had plumbed, running
| water. And there wouldn't running water again for 2000 years
| later. I think people are obsessed with technology but in reality
| stability counts way more than anything else.
| rozab wrote:
| Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization'
| goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the
| Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more
| common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that
| Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting
| it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they
| adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.
|
| He compares this situation to the state of software development
| today. It's a sobering watch.
|
| https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk
| api wrote:
| I've been programming since... well... technically since I was
| a kid in the 1980s and professionally since 1998. I think
| several areas have regressed quite a bit. The biggest one by
| far is desktop GUI programming.
|
| From the late 1980s until the mid-2000s GUIs had all kinds of
| standardized visual cues, context sensitive help, UIs usable by
| both mouse and keyboard, standard interface designs across
| apps, data binding, and most of all WYSIWYG GUI design software
| that worked exceptionally well. We had this on 80286 CPUs with
| 1MiB of RAM and similarly tiny machines.
|
| Today's desktop UIs are a fucking disaster on both the
| developer side and the user side.
|
| For developers you have a choice between a hypertext language
| hacked endlessly into a UI and native UI tooling that's far
| less intuitive and much uglier than what we had back then.
| Compare the UI designer (not the language) in Visual Basic in
| the 1990s to today. You could not only design but data bind a
| complex app that looked decent in 30 minutes.
|
| For users you have no consistency, no keyboard shortcuts (or
| different ones for every app), no help or help that only works
| online, etc.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| That's not a problem of the craft however, it's a problem of
| the culture.
|
| We are perfectly capable of writing native GUIs, and we have
| powerful tools for it as well. QTDesigner comes to mind as a
| well known example.
|
| The problem is, about 12 years ago, application design went
| through a gameification and "toy-i-fication" phase, from
| which it has yet to recover, because suddenly, everything had
| to look like it was designed for tablets or gaming consoles.
| Then the "javascript for everythiiiing!" happened, and
| suddenly the tools and workflows behind all the bloated,
| inefficient, low-information-density apps were swept into the
| desktop world.
|
| But, since the modern definition of an "App" is basically
| everything that is displayed on a phone ever, and devices got
| so powerful that no matter how badly devs f* it up it still
| kinda-ish works (if we ignore the battery screaming for dear
| life), and this situation has generally been accepted.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The problem is when this culture extends a couple of
| generations the craft gets lost.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| Not really, because there is always a high demand for
| good software. Just because cookware nowadays is usually
| made from cheap, industrially pressed sheet metal,
| doesn't mean high-quality copper and cast-iron cookware
| is no longer made.
| jfengel wrote:
| It is a culture problem, but it goes back before phones and
| Javascript.
|
| Even before that, application design was usually terrible.
| Apps were almost universally ugly. Developers just aren't
| very good at it; it's not in their skill sets. They're good
| at making apps fast and small, but not at making them
| usable.
|
| Rare companies would hire separate designers, and the apps
| could be functional and attractive, but they were the
| exception. It was a lot of money for something generally
| considered ancillary.
|
| Browser-based apps get to leverage the work done by browser
| makers, who put in the effort to make toolkits that looked
| nice by default. They're not small or fast -- though
| Moore's Law has made them usable anyway. They also favor
| the things that designers like -- including not
| overwhelming the user with dense information. You can still
| use them badly, but by default any programmer can make an
| app that isn't awful.
|
| There never was a golden age when developers made good,
| small, fast apps. It was usually a "pick two" situation,
| except by spending a lot of money. I'm just as happy to let
| my battery scream and not cringe at every single app that
| comes up, and so cheaply that they can give it away or cost
| dollars rather than tens or hundreds. Others disagree, of
| course, but I think the market tends to show a heavy thumb
| on one side of that scale.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I disagree. Honestly since UI have become the primary
| domain of designers and "UX" experts they have regressed
| massively. 15 years ago you opened an application. The
| feel was consistent. I had a bar at the top which showed
| me the option in an straightforward manner which allowed
| to quickly explore and click through to relatively
| specialized things. Now, every app has it's own UI. And
| even worse everything is as hidden as possible in the
| name of being "clean".
| usrbinbash wrote:
| >They're good at making apps fast and small, but not at
| making them usable.
|
| I don't know which apps you are talking about, but I use
| apps built and designed by developers every day, and they
| all work great.
|
| My problems start when Apps are NOT designed by
| developers, but rather people who have seen 100 videos
| about color theory, and know all the latest fonts their
| social media du jour is excited about, but very little
| about hardware, programming, and the difference between
| _localhost_ and accessing a server over cheap WiFi from
| somewhere else on the planet.
|
| Because these are the "apps" which do something
| ridiculously simple, but somehow manage to eat up 2-3GiB
| of RAM and let the laptops fans spin out of control.
|
| >They're not small or fast -- though Moore's Law has made
| them usable anyway.
|
| Moores Law is over however, and there is no justification
| for an app that, say, plays locally stored mp3s to
| require 2GiB of RAM and 10% CPU. If an application thinks
| this is justified, it will get to know my good friend `rm
| -rf`, beacause I have vlc running in ncurses mode right
| now, playing my entire playlist, and its eating less
| memory than the terminal emulator it's running in ;-)
|
| The answer to bad software, and
| overloaded/overused/oversold frameworks is not "built
| more powerful computers" but "make better software".
|
| >There never was a golden age when developers made good,
| small, fast apps.
|
| Good != Beautifully designed.
|
| Good means small, fast, portable, reliable, easy to
| install, easy to learn, easy to remove, does its job.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I wonder where the notion that productivity software
| should be "attractive" came from. Were whole businesses
| not built on VisiCalc?
|
| The registers at B&H photo in NYC appear to be some DOS
| terminal system, but the employees know the keyboard
| shortcuts by muscle memory and the interface's reaction
| time is instantaneous. If that's not good software I
| don't know what is.
| jfengel wrote:
| _I wonder where the notion that productivity software
| should be "attractive" came from._
|
| From the people who make choices about where to put their
| money. You can get away with ugly software -- especially
| if you had something that worked 20 years ago and is
| still sufficient, and there is no alternative. But if
| users have the choice of something attractive, they'll
| pick it.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| That depends entirely on the use case and the user.
|
| I have the choice of many many many text editors and IDEs
| to manage my source code.
|
| What do I use? vim. In a terminal(-emulator).
|
| Why? Because I like my editor to be ready the moment my
| finger leaves the ENTER key, I like direct
| interoperability with the terminal, I like that I can
| hack together even the most absurd things in .vimrc, and
| I like that I have the same editor with the same settings
| on all servers I take care of, even when I connect to
| them via ssh.
|
| I also use vlc for playing audio and video. Are there
| players that have a more edge UX? Sure. Do they come with
| builtin-full support for almost all formats, have a tiny
| memory footprint, can be used to convert stuff, don't spy
| on me and can be controlled via a terminal (hello ncurses
| mode!)? Nope.
| sharemywin wrote:
| I miss VB. it was really easy to use. There are tools out
| there but you have to pay every month for them.
| pjmlp wrote:
| What is preventing you to use VB.NET with WinForms? Still
| out there.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Yeah. I know VB gets a lot of derision in these parts,
| but Visual Studio community edition is free, and .NET is
| free. So it's totally free to write applications with.
| kbr2000 wrote:
| Check Lazarus [0] for Free Pascal [1].
|
| Another viable option would be Visual Tcl [2] for Tcl/Tk
| [3]. Given the event-based nature of Tcl and Tk, I find it
| matches well for a methodology like VB provided.
|
| And it's far from the only one I remember (although you'll
| need to do some research here [4]). For example, Komodo IDE
| used to have a Tk GUI builder that provided for the same
| kind of methodology, which has been split off in [5].
|
| Enjoy!
|
| [0] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
|
| [1] https://www.freepascal.org/
|
| [2] http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/
|
| [3] https://www.tcl-lang.org/
|
| [4] https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/GUI+Building+Tools
|
| [5] http://spectcl.sourceforge.net/
| WalterBright wrote:
| Is it indeed annoying that every app isn't "cool" unless it
| attempts to reinvent the user interface.
| darkwater wrote:
| How comes that circa 2000 VB6 was the most hated and
| belittled programming language out there? I was there, I
| remember it. Now it's suddenly part of the golden age of
| desktop programming? I think you should put your nostalgia
| glasses off.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Because the language itself was terrible. The RAD
| tooling/UI designer was excellent. There was a product that
| had those but included a better language -- Borland's
| Delphi, but Borland and its successors squandered its
| initial success and didn't invest in improving it.
| cabalamat wrote:
| VB was good at some things (e.g. UI design) and bad at
| others (e.g. doing complex computation).
| pjmlp wrote:
| When the option was between VB 6 or doing COM in raw
| C++....
|
| Granted we still had MFC, but then the COM lovers at
| Microsoft started pushing for ATL, and everything that
| followed from there.
|
| On the other side we had (and still have) Delphi and C++
| Builder, but Borland's management killed the indie culture
| around them.
| ale42 wrote:
| I think that the most hated part of VB6 was more the BASIC
| language rather than the GUI design part... but maybe I'm
| wrong.
| darkwater wrote:
| I also remember DLL hell and all the issues to make
| safely run on every Windows installation a VB6 program
| and its runtime. But I agree with the other commenters
| that the IDE and the visual part was really nice (too
| nice for the average skilled developer of the time, VB6
| was the NodeJS of that time)
| bzzzt wrote:
| I think it had more to do with VB being so easy it
| attracted lots of inexperienced programmers who didn't
| care about performance or correctness as long as the job
| got done. Sort of like a pre-internet PHP ;)
| jjkaczor wrote:
| The language was crap - the IDE/designer was excellent.
|
| For me - the sweet-spot that I used for all of my own
| personal projects after outgrowing VB1-6 was... Borland
| Delphi.
|
| The IDE/designer was at least as good as VB - but the
| Object Pascal language was so powerful. It was truely
| object-oriented and if one wanted, one could work at a high
| level of abstraction. Yet it could also natively drop-down
| to low-level Windows API's, and handle pointer-based work
| if necessary.
|
| Unfortunately - for my professional career, Delphi never
| captured the large-scale Enterprise market - that went to
| .NET or Java and the rest is history...
|
| (Occasionally I noodle about with FreePascal for the
| nostalgia factor)
| mring33621 wrote:
| Visual J++ has entered the chat
| II2II wrote:
| It's for much the same reason that BASIC (in general) was
| maligned and people wax nostalgic for it today. A lot of
| people cut their teeth on it, may that be learning how to
| program or embarking upon a career in programming. In other
| words, they have much to be thankful for.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > how technology can regress
|
| Anyone interested in 'rebooting' society after a major collapse
| can check out:
|
| > _The thirteen chapter book starts off explaining how humanity
| and civilization works and has come to be and how this could
| possibly be altered in the event of worldwide disaster -- such
| as avian flu. Leaving us with the essential question of what
| knowledge would we need to rebuild civilization as we know it,
| which Dartnell answers by looking at the history of science and
| technology._
|
| > _Dartnell explains and realistically details a 'grace period'
| in which survivors can salvage food, materials and tools from
| the ruins of today's society. However, after a certain point
| this grace period would end, and humanity would have to produce
| their own food, make their own tools, practice hygiene and
| fight infection to maintain health, and develop energy stores
| for a new society to survive the aftermath._
|
| > _The book covers topics like agriculture, food and clothing,
| substances, medicine, and transport. Darnell points out that
| applying the scientific method to basic knowledge will enable
| an advanced technological society to reappear within several
| generations. Along with giving the history of scientific
| invention and how that applies to humans were they to recreate
| that, the book also offers anecdotal bits of information in the
| form of endnotes. Giving facts such as how carrots were
| originally white but grown orange in honour of the Dutch royal
| family, and how onions are the leaves of the onion plant.[3]_
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_...
|
| Full bibliography available if anyone wants to dig into a
| particular topic:
|
| * http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/
| paxcoder wrote:
| >most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had
| writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no
| writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the
| Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.
|
| [citation needed]
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| Technology can regress by idiotic initiatives like banning
| advanced math
|
| https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke...
| justinzollars wrote:
| Thank you for this talk, this is fantastic
| duxup wrote:
| We had a solution to scurvy in the late 1400s.
|
| And yet it was "lost" (for a variety of reasons) and was still
| killing people as late as 1911.
|
| https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
| chilling wrote:
| Really nice presentation. I think the bottleneck here is that
| developers creates tool for other developers to simplify their
| job and few decades later we end up with lots of handy and easy
| to use tools that just mask the real toughness of the problem.
| You can see it easily in web development with tools like React
| or even the CSS which is (IMHO) full of nasty hacks.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Not sure if it is a myth, but hadn't we forgotten to build
| Saturn V engines?
| m4rtink wrote:
| Not to mention there being a substantial advancements in
| engineering that make the F1 engines used by Saturn V
| basically obsolete.
|
| The Space X Merlins have a much better thrust-to-weight ratio
| in the same gas generator cycle class, the Russian RD-180
| powering the Atlas V is using oxygen rich staged combustion
| and is much more efficient.
|
| And the current trend seems to be clearly liquid methane and
| liquid oxygen, covered by the phenomenal Raptor engine from
| Space X, the BE-4 from Blue origin and many smaller ones.
|
| So hardly any regression on the chemical rocket engine front
| - pretty much the opposite, thankfully!
|
| On the nuclear thermal rocket front on the other hand - yeah,
| we really did regress there. :P From almost flight ready
| NERVA examples in the 60s/70s to basically nothing even
| remotely flight ready today...
| ihattendorf wrote:
| IIRC we have (at least most of) the drawings, but they don't
| specify tolerances like modern drawings do and were more for
| reference as parts were developed at specific factories with
| existing molds. It's more the fabrication knowledge that
| would need to be rebuilt.
| 0x138d5 wrote:
| In addition to that, a lot of stuff was crafted by hand
| with little or no documentation as to what was changed (no
| 'as-builts').
|
| e: How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 "moon rocket" engine
| back to life (https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-
| nasa-brought-the...)
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I've seen that talk but it feels like putting the cart before
| the horse. The risk isn't in programming, it's in the CPUs
| themselves.
|
| C and ASM are still some of the most popular languages in the
| world. But for a modern CPU, there are machines in the
| production process that only a single company in the world can
| make.
|
| We're infinitely more likely to lose the capability to make a
| modern CPU than lose the capability to know how to code in C.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| The machines at the very top are the only ones at the very
| top, yes. But there are dozens of manufacturers and fabs
| building useful ICs slightly shy of the bleeding edge. Lots
| of microcontrollers, general-purpose ICs, and special purpose
| ICs are still very frequently made on 22nm and 45nm scales.
|
| And most of the hard trial-and-error discovery and
| experimentation has been done already, so it should not take
| 50 years to recover 50 years of historical progress. A
| process from 1970 can be done in the garage with 'just' a
| microscope and projector (and a lot of skill and hard work!):
| http://sam.zeloof.xyz/second-ic/
| bmn__ wrote:
| > We're infinitely more likely to lose the capability to make
| a modern CPU than lose the capability to know how to code in
| C.
|
| I agree with this. I want to add that I think if the
| knowledge of modern CPUs is somehow lost, it won't be
| catastrophic, merely crippling, since there are literally
| tens of thousands of CS students every year learning how to
| build a CPU from electronic circuits.
|
| We will revert to slow and bulky CPUs, be able to run C on
| them, and in due time rediscover and reengineer
| miniaturisation, superscalar multithreading, etc.
| Balarny wrote:
| I was hoping if I asked my other half who is an academic in the
| Classics he'd say this is untrue and I could then reply "well
| ackshully...". Alas it is true.
| scj wrote:
| I'd add to his argument, that the problem with software and
| uptime is that every time we add a layer of abstraction or
| library, the five 9s factor may apply.
| Math.pow(.99999, 1) - One dependency. Math.pow(.99999,
| 2) - Two dependencies. ... Math.pow(.99999, N)
| - N dependencies.
|
| And that assumes everyone is aiming for 99.999% uptime. Which
| isn't true.
|
| There's other factors, but that's the one I'd point out.
| mc32 wrote:
| Do we have any contemporaneous record of this mechanism, or
| have references to the device not survived for some reason?
|
| If such a device was considered advanced or cutting edge or of
| note back then then wouldn't we expect some reference to the
| device?
| naikrovek wrote:
| very little from the past survives through to today.
|
| I don't think there is any record of this device existing
| other than the device itself, and mention of it after its
| discovery in the early 1900s.
|
| to some that will be proof that it is not truly an ancient
| device, and I think that is hogwash. most things just don't
| last that long, especially paper, which is where mention of
| the device would be found, if it ever is found.
| mc32 wrote:
| I don't doubt it's ancient. I'm not skeptic from that POV.
| I do find it curious that such an object would be exist but
| not have some fanfare around it. I'm sure there's an
| explanation that eludes me. Could have been developed in
| some secrecy for example because it have the people who
| used it some advantage?
| naikrovek wrote:
| or maybe it was just a fairly common thing, then?
|
| the math used in the device is not complex, nor is its
| construction. it is only impressive to us because of what
| we assume about cultures of that time: that they are
| dumber than we are, less intelligent.
|
| they were just as smart as us, but they were far fewer in
| number, and had many more limitations than we have when
| it comes to the library of technologies and skills they
| can call on to accomplish their goals.
| leephillips wrote:
| I think naikrovek explained it. We have but a few scraps
| of information from the ancient world. There might very
| well have been a fanfare; it might have been a huge deal
| --and we might still have no record of any mention of it.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Thinking of the most elaborate clockwork built today,
| those quarter million dollar wristwatches, there isn't
| much written about them, maybe a youtube sizzle reel at
| most. Their customer base is small and they have little
| reason to document the inner-workings.
|
| Could be this mechanism was just an exquisite commission
| for a wealthy dude to keep on his boat.
| adolph wrote:
| Darwin College Lecture Series: Decoding the Heavens: The
| Antikythera Mechanism by Jo Marchant
|
| "There are quite a few mentions of devices that sound a bit
| like the Antikythera mechanism"
|
| https://youtu.be/Iv-zWbxm2lY?t=2695
|
| _Jo Marchant is an award-winning science journalist and
| author of several popular science books including Decoding
| the Heavens: Solving the mystery of the world's first
| computer and the New York Times bestseller Cure: A journey
| into the science of mind over body (both shortlisted for the
| Royal Society science books prize). She has a PhD in
| genetics, and has worked as a senior editor at New Scientist
| and at Nature._
| mudita wrote:
| According to Wikipedia similar devices were mentioned for
| example by Cicero, Archimedes supposedly wrote a now lost
| manuscript on the construction of devices like the
| Antikythera mechanism...: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antik
| ythera_mechanism#Similar_...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| One of the interesting possibilities for the Fermi Paradox is
| the fact that we've wiped out the readily accessible deposits
| of iron, coal, oil, etc. A second go at the industrial
| revolution would be much harder, if we regressed that far.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Japan has very low quality iron ores. Yet they turned out
| (arguably) the best steel swords in the world.
|
| Constraints don't always lead to bad outcomes.
| WalterBright wrote:
| A sword is a tiny amount of metal compared to, say, a steam
| engine. Or a battleship.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Japan fielded armies of hundreds of thousands of men, all
| equipped with swords. I guess if you totalled the weight
| on metal on them, you could cobble together a battleship.
| But it's not really about quantity, more quality of the
| ore.
|
| And the point isn't about that. The point is that the
| constraint (bad ore quality) forced the Japanese to get
| better at metalworking. Resource constraints aren't as
| bad as we think, because we're used to making things
| without those constraints. But our descendants, having
| always had those constraints, will find better ways of
| solving them than we can think of.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Hundreds of thousands? The battles I read about maybe
| reached tens of thousands, and who knows how many had
| swords.
|
| Even in Europe, a large part of the armies were peasants
| with whatever comes to hand. Their resource constraint on
| metals wasn't the ore, but the availability of the
| enormous quantities of wood required to process it.
| bmn__ wrote:
| > arguably
|
| Experiment: <https://youtu.be/ev4lW0wbnX8?t=1245> (German
| audio track, machine translated subtitles in English
| available)
|
| The question is whether this settles the argument or stokes
| its flames.
| m4rtink wrote:
| The pre-modern/medieval Japanese iron industry was actually
| quite massive! We went to a museum in Izumo and there was a
| nice map showing the are in ancient times and now and the
| difference was pretty stark - there were just swamp where
| the Izumo city is today and the local lake Shinji was like
| twice as big as today.
|
| All the new land and end of the swamps is apparently the
| result of hundreds of years of iron ore mining in the
| nearby mountains. So even with primitive means and shitty
| ore, if you need the material and go at it for centuries,
| you can achieve substantial results. Not to mention reclaim
| some land as a result. :)
|
| Also in related (but much more recent development) there
| were coal mines in Japan _mining from under the seabed via
| tiny islands_!
|
| Hashima is the most extreme example, basically a piece of
| barely dry rock that has been converted to a concrete city
| housing many thousands of workers and their families:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashima_Island
|
| But there were other such mines, some of the local ones
| even connected to Hashima via the underground works!
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| I thought Japanase steel wasn't all that impressive in
| absolute terms, rather it was impressive because of the
| very bad quality ingredients they started with. It also
| made ownership of a sword (katana) and accompanying
| paraphernalia only accessible to a small caste of elite
| warriors. Both the raw materials and the process were hard
| to come by.
|
| My understanding is that historically the best steels were
| made in India/Southern-India where wootz steel comes from
| and that for more than 2000 years the rest of the world was
| almost bargain tier in comparison. To the degree that
| samples of wootz steel were brought back to Europe even in
| the 18th century in an attempt to replicate the process.
|
| I'm only an amateur metalworker though so I hope someone
| more knowledgeable can correct any errors.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| There's a difference between "we have to do more refining
| to get usable metal" and "there's literally none around
| unless you go deep underground into a new deposit".
| PeterisP wrote:
| The buried and overgrown remains of any modern junkyard,
| port, railway depot or rubbish dump would be a decent
| shallow ore for many metals. During the industrial
| revolution we have consumed almost all of the shallow
| fuels, but we haven't consumed any metals, they're right
| here on the surface and more accessible than before -
| it's just that they're currently tied up in some products
| or structures we use.
| [deleted]
| isk517 wrote:
| Japan definitely produced some of the most beautiful
| looking swords, and they are extremely impressive given the
| quality of iron they are forged out of, but I don't think
| any sane person would choose one to take into battle given
| any other option.
| bostik wrote:
| Friend is a hobbyist blacksmith and he said it really
| well.
|
| Japan developed their hugely overdone turned-steel
| technique _because_ the ore they had to work with was so
| bad: hammering the garbage out was the only way to get
| the quality of the steel itself into acceptable levels.
| As a result, Japanese smiths developed something very
| close to what we 'd now call layered steel.
|
| European swordsmiths (think: Toledo) had access to
| higher-grade ore, and as a result never needed to develop
| techniques to work around fundamental problems with their
| source material.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| This is my point. Constraints sometimes take us to places
| where we otherwise wouldn't have gone.
|
| The world is (imho) a better place because Japan has bad
| iron ore. If that wasn't our reality, we would never have
| guessed it.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| I am confused. Are you saying that the quality of the
| iron makes them shit swords, or that guns are better than
| swords?
| fancifalmanima wrote:
| It would depend a lot on what time period you're talking
| about. I'm not an expert, but I do a bit of amateur
| forging and have learned a couple of things just reading
| about this craft. By the 14 or 1500s, spring steel had
| been developed in Europe. This would enable a sword to
| flex rather than break. Japanese swords from the time
| weren't flexible and were generally more prone to
| breaking. This had a lot to do with the raw materials
| that were available. They also tend to have softer mild
| steel core to help with this problem, with a very hard
| and sharp edge. If the entire blade were made of the same
| material as the edge, it would be extremely inflexible
| and brittle. They're kind of designed in a way where a
| part of the every hard and brittle edge can crack, but
| maybe it won't extend all the way up through the blade
| leaving it somewhat usable. The European longsword from
| the time might just flex in the same circumstance.
|
| That's not to say that European swords were better than
| Japanese swords in every way. This is one of many, many
| factors. And I'm sure there were plenty of crappy
| longswords at the time (and crappy katans), so you kind
| of also have to decide if you're comparing the best
| examples, average examples, or low quality items as well.
| The skill of the wielder is also important. If you're
| throwing out a bunch of random soldiers without a ton of
| training and giving them a sword, you might want to give
| them something they're less likely to break. My
| understanding that is there was a period in Japan where
| only samurai were allowed to carry swords (if my reading
| is to be believed), who were generally very skilled. They
| would probably know how to avoid putting their blade in
| situations where it would be prone to breaking.
|
| And Japanese traditional Japanese sword making techniques
| are extremely impressive and interesting to read about
| given the materials that were available at the time.
| isk517 wrote:
| From what I've heard and seen the quality of metal makes
| them prone to breaking, and you need skill to take full
| advantage of the razor sharp edge. I have seen a great
| video showing katana students cutting bamboo and
| struggling and then a master going clean through that I
| wish I could have found again. For the record I don't
| think they are shit swords, just they look really cool
| and that has lead to various media elevating their
| superiority to other swords beyond reality.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| I think it might be helpful to consider what happened to the
| dinosaurs. The same could happen to us if we fail to evolve
| in time...
|
| Asteroid hits. Wipes out almost all life. A million years
| later, the biomass around us will have all been converted to
| a black ooze (oil), covered by millennia of rock, sediment,
| and tectonic plates. Eventually future civilized beings who
| plunder the Earth for our biomass that has been converted to
| oil and coal discover uncanny hard-to-explain remnants of a
| past civilization of, get this, bipedal animals.
| kenfox wrote:
| Coal and oil formation would not occur due to lifeforms
| able to digest trees. It would be extraordinarily difficult
| to reset to those primordial conditions. I don't think an
| asteroid hit could do it.
| Vetch wrote:
| Are you sure about this? I actually looked into this not
| too long ago and that theory no longer seems well
| supported.
|
| Oil forms when sea plankton and algae are buried and
| exposed to high pressures and heat. Coal forms when dead
| plant material protected somehow from biodegredation (say
| by mud) forms peat and is then buried, and exposed to
| high pressures and heat.
|
| I was also surprised to learn that the inabality of
| fungus and bacteria to degrade lignin is unlikely to have
| been a key driver of coal formation during the
| Carboniferous period, instead it was _" a unique
| combination of everwet tropical conditions and extensive
| depositional systems during the assembly of Pangea"_.
|
| Source: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Delayed-
| fungal-evoluti...
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Are you suggesting if the dinosaurs had tried harder to
| "evolve in time", they could have better survived an
| asteroid hit? I don't think that's how evolution works. For
| humans either.
| ben_w wrote:
| One thing I sometimes wonder is: if there was a dinosaur
| species which had reached roughly our level of
| intelligence and society, would they have left enough of
| a mark on the world that we could even tell?
|
| If they got further than us, tried to capture an asteroid
| and mine it, could they have wiped themselves out without
| leaving behind technosignatures that would still be
| visible?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Humans left a ridiculous amount of stone tools which last
| basically indefinitely in the fossil record (and unlike
| bone fossils, don't require super special conditions to
| preserve them). So I think we'd have enough evidence from
| modern artifacts made of similar types of materials. A
| car buried under sediment would rust all out, but you'd
| be left with a big car-shaped bunch of rust as well as
| chunks of pure metal which better resist corrosion, like
| stainless bits or the platinum catalytic converter,
| various bits of glass and ceramic in very artificial
| looking shapes, etc.
| feurio wrote:
| Maybe the archaeologists of the future would weave
| scholarly narratives as to how these ferrous-based
| lifeforms lived, what their diet was and how they came to
| perish.
|
| Film-makers would use stop-motion techniques to depict
| battles between Fordusprefectops and Chevroletcamaro-Rex
| whilst their own early ancestors look on, clad in
| loincloths and bras made from footwell mats.
| bmn__ wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29302827 "cars are
| the dominant species, since so much of our world has been
| dedicated to them"
| jefurii wrote:
| Like in David Macaulay's "Motel Of The Mysteries".
| 7thaccount wrote:
| This is called the "Silurian hypothesis" and is named
| after the Doctor Who episode that showed an advanced
| dinosaur race called the "Silurians" that went into cryo
| millions of years ago.
|
| Some real geologists explored the idea (someone could
| find the paper and subsequent news articles) and I think
| the conclusion was that on geological time periods, there
| might not be much left for us to find.
| easygenes wrote:
| Pretty sure all the radioactive ore refining we have done
| is going to leave a mark for billions of years. Never
| mind how we've displaced large percentages of the readily
| available rare earths already.
|
| I doubt the dinosaurs shuttled away or buried all their
| geo-engineering marks.
| NateEag wrote:
| Schlock Mercenary is a sci-fi webcomic with a fun thread
| about sapient dinosaurs fleeing Earth pre-impact.
|
| There's no good way to read just those strips, but it
| starts here:
|
| https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2018-07-25
| Vetch wrote:
| Yep, the [paper's conclusion](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/c
| itations/20200000027/downloads/20...) was just as you
| said, there'd not be much of a record to find for civs
| older than 4 Ma. Also, there are past anomalous and
| abrupt events in the geological record that appear
| similar to byproducts from our anthropogenic activity.
| Evidence against is that timing for majority of such
| anomalous events can be matched to mundane geological
| activity in the record.
|
| The rate at which we're accumulating change compared to
| geological record is also a strong argument against,
| although they argue limitations in current dating methods
| reducing how much can be said with certainty about prior
| epochs.
|
| While there is precious little reason and evidence to
| believe a priori in a previous advanced dino civ, there
| are studies that could be done on sediment data that'd
| lend more certainty (such as looking for unusually rapid
| metal production).
|
| > Anthropocene layer in ocean sediment will be abrupt and
| multi-variate, consisting of seemingly concurrent-
| specific peaks in multiple geochemical proxies,
| biomarkers, elemental composition and mineralogy. It will
| likely demarcate a clear transition of faunal taxa prior
| to the event compared with afterwards. Most of the
| individual markers will not be unique in the context of
| Earth history as we demonstrate below, but the
| combination of tracers may be. However, we speculate that
| some specific tracers that would be unique, specifically
| persistent synthetic molecules, plastics and
| (potentially) very long-lived radioactive fallout in the
| event of nuclear catastrophe. Absent those markers, the
| uniqueness of the event may well be seen in the multitude
| of relatively independent fingerprints as opposed to a
| coherent set of changes associated with a single
| geophysical cause.
|
| My opinion is this ultimately boils down to how hard
| human level intelligence is to evolve, which is why the
| hypothesis is interesting in the context of the Fermi
| Paradox. Intelligence might be extremely difficult to
| evolve, it might require an unusual background
| environment set of condition or just might not be that
| useful in general.
| ninjanomnom wrote:
| While our time has been short on geological scales,
| that's a point in favor of being discovered later. So
| much has been deposited by us in the geological record in
| a stunningly short (by future geologists' viewpoint)
| timescale like plastics, temperature variations, and
| irradiated patches of land.
|
| To make things worse for a hypothetical advanced dinosaur
| species, if they were at the point they could capture an
| asteroid, they would be roughly equivalent or better with
| us but we could survive an asteroid extinction event just
| fine. Society as we know it perhaps wouldn't survive but
| an event that could genuinely end us as a species would
| need to be exceedingly destructive or long term.
| Otherwise the remnants will rebuild, give or take a
| couple 10s of thousands of years, which is basically
| nothing on the timescales we're thinking about here.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Humans could most certainly survive an asteroid if the
| humans worked at the technology and industrial capacity
| to do so. Including technology and industrial capacity
| involved in redirecting asteroids:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7zdeQ-Uw8k
|
| (To redirect Chixculub would require a MUCH larger
| capability, probably on the order of 10 million tons in
| orbit, but that's possible with a fleet of large reusable
| rockets capable of getting the cost to orbit down to
| around $10/kg, or equivalent development of in-space
| resource utilization capacity.)
| scionthefly wrote:
| You assume we would be able to organize the social,
| political, and financial impetus to take on a task like
| that in a unified way that has a chance to succeed.
| Recent events seem to say that we are at least as likely
| to just fight about it until the asteroid hits.
|
| For greatest success I think there would need to be two
| but probably not many more than two major efforts going
| on simulatneously, in much the same way that CMS and
| ATLAS experiments at CERN were independently looking for
| the Higgs. If one fails for some unforseen technical
| reason, the other might not if they took a different
| approach.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > Are you suggesting if the dinosaurs had tried harder to
| "evolve in time", they could have better survived an
| asteroid hit?
|
| Well, yes. It's not fair to the dinosaurs, I admit. They
| hardly had a chance to develop language and mathematics.
| They were still too busy ripping each other's faces off.
| And not having opposable thumbs, of course, really put a
| damper on technological development. Maybe in a another
| million years things would have been different, but the
| asteroid had a different idea.
|
| We, on the other hand, are at least on the precipice of
| the capability to divert asteroids. Hopefully we don't
| get an asteroid visit too soon.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I think it's a misconception that we can somehow speed up
| or direct "evolution", no matter what language and
| mathematics we have.
|
| Diverting an asteroid, however, is not evolution.
| Tossrock wrote:
| Of course you can speed up and direct evolution, it's
| called artificial selection and it's how we got dogs,
| cattle, and almost all crops.
| akira2501 wrote:
| I doubt that. There's plenty of Iron that doesn't require
| mining to find, and it naturally accrues in the environment
| over time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_iron
|
| We stop mining coal when it is no longer economical to do so,
| not when the mine is entirely depleted. There's a bunch of
| coal at or near the surface and will be for quite some time.
|
| The same goes for Oil. We extract that which is easiest to
| extract and fraction into the products we desire, preferring
| to leave things like the energy intensive and more polluting
| "Tar Sands" behind.
| gpm wrote:
| Coal, yes. Iron, wouldn't the iron we moved to the surface be
| even more accessible? We didn't destroy it, just rearranged
| and concentrated it?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Guess what we do most of our iron smelting with?
| mas147 wrote:
| What?
| x1f604 wrote:
| Primitive iron smelting was done with charcoal, I
| believe. Correct me if I'm wrong.
| f00zz wrote:
| Yeah, I think we switched to coke during the Industrial
| Revolution not because it's a better fuel than charcoal,
| but because we were running out of trees.
| stan_rogers wrote:
| Coke was Abraham Darby's doing (around 1709-1710), and
| that was mostly to corner the market for cheap pots and
| kettles. There was no way for the charcoal crowd to
| compete on iron, and the bronze bunch - the norm for that
| sort of thing up to that point - was left forever in the
| dust.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yes. Being stuck at that point would be the problem.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Would it? Most new smelting plants today in the US (any
| built in the last few decades) use a mixture of hydrogen
| and carbon monoxide as the reducing gases (natural gas
| primarily as feedstock, but no reason it couldn't be
| about 90% hydrogen produced via, say, hydroelectricity or
| wind).
|
| Coal didn't overtake charcoal for smelting iron in the US
| until the latter half of the 19th century, well after the
| first industrial revolution.
|
| Melting down scrap iron is one of the main sources of
| steel in the US, and that is done straight with
| electricity in arc furnaces.
|
| Coal accelerated the second industrial Revolution, but it
| was not essential. Far more important for enabling the
| first industrial Revolution was some of the early
| scientific knowledge about steam and pressure, such as
| the work of Robert Boyle, a lot of that based on a sort
| of reaction to the classics that had been revived in the
| Renaissance. The biggest argument for coal is indirectly
| in that it helped the viability of British society (after
| the island had most its tree cut down over the previous
| 500 years) which played an important role in the
| Scientific Revolution (Robert Boyle was Anglo-Irish)...
| although by the time Britain was playing an important
| role, the scientific Revolution was already underway on
| the mainland of Europe. As long as our books are not all
| destroyed, I think we'd have no problem bootstrapping
| from charcoal the second time around.
|
| (I think a lot about long term data storage... writing in
| stone or fired clay still seems like one of the best
| methods for writing that needs to last 10,000 years... it
| was, after all, preserved Greco-Roman classics that
| enabled the renaissance and therefore the scientific
| Revolution.)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I think that vastly underestimates the dependency tree in
| modern society. Storing hydrogen in useful quantities is
| tough, requiring fairly sophisticated metallurgy and
| cryogenics.
|
| Finding out we've got a hard to replace left-pad module
| somewhere far up the tech tree wouldn't be fun.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| The dependency tree of 19th Century or early 20th century
| society is a lot more straightforward, however.
|
| And no, you don't need such sophistication for storing
| useful amounts of hydrogen. Storing large amounts of
| hydrogen (in this case, also mixed with poisonous CO) was
| solved in the beginning of the 19th Century (well, late
| 18th century) in Britain and Germany by using very large
| near-atmospheric storage vessels called Gas Holders:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_holder
|
| Salt caverns can also be used for greater volumes, i.e.
| for seasonal storage, as are already used for hydrogen
| storage in a few places in the US and elsewhere. https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_hydrogen_storage
| Retric wrote:
| Except the Iron Age started around 2000 BC, so the world
| would largely be without iron for a _very_ long time.
| mcguire wrote:
| That gas holder article says they contained methane or
| coal gas. Methane's density is 0.657 kg/m3; hydrogen's is
| 0.08375 kg/m3.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Coal gas is a mix that (by energy) is about half
| hydrogen, as I said. And hydrogen gas a specific energy
| of 142MJ/kg vs 55.5MJ/kg for methane.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| Or instead of stone tablets you could simply build a
| 10,000 year clock.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/everything-you-need-to-
| know-...
| masklinn wrote:
| > Coal, yes. Iron, wouldn't the iron we moved to the
| surface be even more accessible? We didn't destroy it, just
| rearranged and concentrated it?
|
| Might depend how long it takes: because rust is porous and
| friable, rusting iron should eventually degrade to nothing,
| and the rust would be difficult to re-concentrate then
| reduce back to iron.
| gpm wrote:
| Would whatever the rust turns into be any less accessible
| (ignoring availability of coal) than what we started out
| with though? I don't pretend to know the entire "iron
| cycle", but it seems like it ought to just be turning
| back into the same sort of minerals that we originally
| extracted it from?
| evilduck wrote:
| The problem will be a lack concentrated deposits making
| post-collapse (and new) industrial efforts much harder. A
| pile of rust from one tractor in someone's back yard is
| not going to be worth the effort to mine and refine.
|
| Possibly an analogous situation is the history of steel
| in Japan and their efforts to extract iron from sand,
| since they don't have significant iron ore to mine on
| their island.
| gpm wrote:
| The pile of rust that use to be a tractor, sure, that's
| not worth much. The pile of rust that use to be a city
| though... surely that's more concentrated than the rust
| mixed with rock (or clay) that we originally extracted it
| from?
| evilduck wrote:
| Most likely not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_ore,
| it's almost 50% iron in the worst case and can be up past
| 70% in the best case. The geological processes that form
| this ore in the mantle do a pretty good job of
| concentrating iron by density but it takes geological
| scales of time to do so and have it lifted back up
| through the crust. We might have to excavate a lot of
| earth to get to the concentrated vein of ore but when we
| find it it's relatively easy to chase and turn into
| usable iron once you know a little bit about mining and
| smelting as a society.
|
| A city decayed to rust is going to be a thin layer of
| iron spread out over miles with some hot spots like where
| a building once stood (but presumably without a map of
| the city in this distant future scenario), but there
| won't be a vein of concentrated ore. Distributed rust can
| definitely be turned back into pure iron but the energy
| requirements are going to be substantially higher to do
| so since you're going to have to sift through much more
| material to collect it, more material to separate and
| concentrate it, more material to smelt off, and your
| operations will have to be more mobile to retrieve it
| over a larger area. That's why I think retrieving iron
| from our society will be more like extracting iron from
| ironsands (2-20% iron), and it will have similar effects
| on that subsequent society that sits between us now and
| some future point where geology has re-supplied it to the
| surface millions of years from now.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Most likely not:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_ore, it's almost 50%
| iron in the worst case and can be up past 70% in the best
| case.
|
| FWIW those are the ratios for the oxides themselves but
| the formations are not necessarily huge piles of pure
| oxides, if you go a bit lower to the "sources" section
| the lowest-concentrated formations viable for
| exploitation are
|
| > Banded iron formations (BIFs) are sedimentary rocks
| containing more than 15% iron composed predominantly of
| thinly bedded iron minerals and silica (as quartz).
|
| However that's only for post-industrial societies, at
| least if you have alternatives, as it requires churning
| through ridiculous amounts of materials.
|
| When you _don 't_ have alternatives the ironsand article
| (which would be used in places with no good or accessible
| ore deposits e.g. japan, famously) quotes
|
| > Sand used for mining typically had anywhere from 19%
| magnetite to as low as 2%.
|
| though much like gold panning the ironsand would be
| sluice-separated to a concentration of 30-50% before it
| was further processed.
|
| Most ironsands deposits are not considered financially
| exploitable to this day though, with the exception of
| NZ's where the iconic "black sand" beaches of north
| island are extremely rich in magnetite (up to 40%).
| mikewave wrote:
| Sure, if you have a billion years to wait for it to all
| run through the rock cycle again.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The process that concentrated the iron ore we rely on
| does not operate anymore.
|
| Fortunately, despite millions of tons of production every
| year, we are nowhere near using up the ore.
| masklinn wrote:
| Iron rusts over historical timescales, metal deposits
| form over geological ones.
| gpm wrote:
| Am I wrong to think of metal deposits as just "rust mixed
| with rock"? It doesn't seem like the rock part (i.e. the
| details of what it is mixed with) should be critical for
| the extraction process?
| masklinn wrote:
| > Am I wrong to think of metal deposits as just "rust
| mixed with rock"?
|
| They're _concentrated_ rust mixed with rocks, otherwise
| it 's not economically viable to extract.
|
| Like, iron is ridiculously common, relatively speaking:
| on earth as a whole it's more common than oxygen, for the
| crust it ranks 4th at 5% by mass, meaning if you went at
| it randomly you'd need to sift through 20kg of materials
| to get 1kg of iron.
|
| Currently, we exploit formations as low as 15% iron
| (banded iron formations / taconite), that's the lower
| limit of the economically feasible, and those results in
| absolutely enormous amounts of tailings (waste
| materials).
|
| Pre-industrialisation, unless you had no other choice
| (e.g. only had ironsands to work with) you really wanted
| to exploit natural (or "direct-shipping") ores, in the
| 60~70% range, the extraction is way too much work
| otherwise.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Stone coal could be, at least partially, substituted by
| charcoal - and often was in the past, where reachable
| underground coal reserves were not available.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _So by weight charcoal and anthracite coal have an
| energy density of about 30 MJ /kg, while poorer kinds of
| coal range down to half of that._" (https://www.reddit.co
| m/r/askscience/comments/udjl5/charcoal_...) However, the
| density of charcoal is much less than that of coal: 200
| kg/m^3 vs 1500 kg/m^3 (for solid anthracite).
|
| Producing 1kg of charcoal requires 3-4kg of wood.
| (Producing the 900degC for the process is an exercise for
| the reader.) (https://www.fao.org/3/y4450e/y4450e11.htm)
| api wrote:
| I'm not sure I buy this. The main driver of the industrial
| revolution was intellectual: the emergence of science,
| classical liberalism, mercantilism, and modern economics. All
| this was in place before anything really took off.
|
| Industrialization without fossil fuels would scale much more
| slowly with wood being used at first and then probably crops
| being grown for energy (biofuel). Once we figured out
| electricity we'd have large scale hydropower and wind power.
| Then we'd figure out either photovoltaics or nuclear fission,
| at which point we'd be off to the races. My guess is we'd be
| almost 100% nuclear and hydro powered right now with use of
| photovoltaics growing.
|
| Stable power grids would probably take longer to emerge, but
| we figured out simple rechargeable batteries (lead-acid)
| fairly early. People would probably have banks of these in
| their homes to power minimal lighting and things like radios,
| TVs, etc. at night and run their appliances at specified
| times when the grid was at high power. You'd probably see a
| food system less dependent on refrigeration until stable
| grids emerged.
|
| On extremely long historical timescales I suppose depletion
| of other elements is possible, but things like iron are
| incredibly common in Earth's crust. I'd be concerned more
| about rare elements.
| Conlectus wrote:
| I found this to be a compelling counterargument to Blow's
| alarmism about forgotten knowledge in tech
| https://www.datagubbe.se/endofciv/
|
| A related point: numerically there are far more low level
| developers now than there were in past he idealizes. No such
| knowledge is being forgotten, it is used and innovated upon
| regularly. It may be in less frequent use, but is still there
| if needed.
| Vetch wrote:
| Yeah, there is necessarily more specialization because there
| is vastly more knowledge than ever before. As a fraction of
| expertise, low level knowledge might be less but low level
| experts are more numerous than ever before. Rather than
| forgetting, the real risk might be knowledge production
| extending beyond our collective capacity to keep up and make
| sense of it.
| hnmullany wrote:
| Same way - the extended 3rd century crisis in the Roman Empire
| led to a loss of sculpting expertise. No art was commissioned
| for so long that skills weren't passed on.
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| I was just reading an article on a nuclear power plant built
| (in Norway?) recently that mentioned how it was a
| considerably more difficult/costly project due to the fact
| that there was not sufficient expertise left in the West
| since so few reactors had been built over the past
| decades....
| bobthechef wrote:
| An example closer to home, though perhaps not as stark, is
| the loss of expertise in various industries that have been
| outsourced. The US is a good example. This is one (of many)
| arguments against outsourcing your industry just because it's
| cheaper and increases the profits of the outsourcing company.
| The tradition and culture that allows a certain industry to
| flourish is interrupted and destroyed and rebuilding that is
| no small task.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| I had a summer job one year working on space stuff. I was
| in the clean room and the first day they took me back
| there, white suit and all, and took some ball bearings off
| a wire rack. They were maybe a foot in diameter. My job
| that summer was to test to see which were the least noisy.
| (Basically, they rotated very slowly, and there was a phono
| needle resting on the outside with a strip chart measuring
| the vibration caused when balls hit each other, etc.) The
| best ones were going up.
|
| They told me to be careful. These were the rejects from
| another project, but this project was legally required to
| use only US tech and the US no longer had the ability to
| manufacture bearings this large, since we had outsourced
| for some time and everyone who could do it got out of the
| business. So we needed these exact ones. (This was the late
| 70's.)
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, this is a massive strategic blunder of historical
| scale.
|
| While the US and western countries are asleep at the switch
| and think that they are exploiting cheap Chinese labor, the
| Chinese have a 100- and 500- year plan and are exploiting
| our myopia for short-term profits to gain manufacturing
| expertise and military advantage. It may not be too late to
| reverse, but it is close.
|
| It is really the result of not thinking ahead and letting
| the business lobbies have what they want _today_ , instead
| of putting long-term strategic considerations first.
| Different incentives, different results, tragedy of the
| commons all over again.
| wpietri wrote:
| An important factor here is not so much the business
| lobbies, but how we reward the decision-makers. CEOs make
| most of their money from short-term stock price numbers,
| something that also determines how long they last in
| their jobs. Combine that with declining CEO tenure [1]
| and the incentives are really clear: Do anything that
| will make the numbers look good in the 1-5 year time
| frame, get maximum money, and GTFO.
|
| A lot of these problems would go away if CEOs were paid a
| modest amount of cash to live (say, $1m/year) and then
| the rest of their compensation was in stock that was
| locked up for at least 20 years.
|
| [1] https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-
| releases/2019/ceo-...
| ch4s3 wrote:
| A 100- and 500- year plan is ludicrous on it's face. They
| don't even credibly hit their 5 year plans a lot of the
| time. The idea of planning something so large and complex
| so far into the future seems like wishful thinking at
| best.
| toss1 wrote:
| "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans
| are useless, but planning is indispensable." -- Dwight D.
| Eisenhower
|
| "No plan survives the first shot of the battle".
|
| So, sure, the plans will likely not survive in any detail
| even a decade from now.
|
| But the fact that they are making plans, attempting to
| understand the considerations of those future
| generations, understand what strategic goals need to be
| worked on now to help that, and more -- this is critical.
|
| I contrast, western politics and decision making tends to
| focus on considerations that are at best hot for the next
| election cycle.
|
| And notice that the US is not now trying to return
| manufacturing home because of long-term plans, but
| because the people noticed that the bargain of cheap
| goods from China doesn't mean much when you exported the
| job. The fact that China now makes and has access to key
| components in some key military systems and that needs to
| be reversed barely enters the mind of the electorate.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > And notice that the US is not now trying to return
| manufacturing home because of long-term plans, but
| because the people noticed that the bargain of cheap
| goods from China doesn't mean much when you exported the
| job
|
| Most of those jobs outside of a few narrow categories
| were lost to automation. We make more steel, aircrafts,
| and cars than ever but with far fewer people.
|
| China's history of planning has led to tons of
| misallocation of resources, and I'm not sure I'd want to
| emulate that.
| scrumper wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with that. Misses on short-term
| plans are a different concern to progress on a multi-
| century plan. Pig iron production might've missed its
| forecast for 2020, but it'd undeniable that China is
| building tremendous expertise in advanced manufacturing -
| and at a similar rate to that at which the west is
| shedding it.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Th narrative of "the west doesn't manufacture anything"
| is greatly oversold. The US makes more steel than it did
| 40 years ago, for example. Sure, we make fewer hairs and
| t-shirts, but it's natural for that stuff to chase lower
| labor costs. We're also an agricultural powerhouse.
|
| Now, for sure we have fallen a bit behind in making
| chips, but that may change.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| So we are the Romans. We can make swords and bread! We'll
| do great in WWIII!
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Because we hit max depth, I'll respond to your bizarre
| fever dream about the Millennium Challenge and some
| hypothetical war with China. The only things that matters
| in a war between nuclear states is that both sides view
| it as too terrible to entertain. Nuclear subs mean that
| the US always has the option to deal a killing blow even
| if everything else fails. And if it comes to that,
| nothing else matters anyway, so why worry about it?
|
| They can go on fancifully pretending to plan for 500
| years from now, and we'll continue to innovate, live well
| by comparison, and at the end of the day there's
| relatively little reason for us to have a major conflict.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| That's ridiculous. We're churning out new ideas in
| biotech, medicine, media, finance, automobiles,
| airplanes, batteries, some solar stuff, and on and on. We
| have a huge, dynamic economy that does a lot of things
| really well. We've uncovered some major issues in the
| last two years but we've done better I think than one
| might have expected under the circumstances. I think in
| particular the rapid development and production of
| multiple vaccines in record time displays our capacity to
| innovate and manufacture complex goods.
|
| It's impossible to know what's coming in the distant
| future, but it doesn't feel like any of our problems are
| insurmountable.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| When WWIII happens it wont matter how many weapons you
| have at the start of the war. What will count is how fast
| you can make more weapons. That's all that matters. The
| war ends one one side runs out of weapons (or soldiers
| but China has a _bit_ of a lead there). We can 't even
| make new _cars_ when supply from China is _reduced_. If
| you think having aircraft carriers is going to matter
| then you 've not been paying attention. [1] The future is
| technology. Technology requires chip manufacture. That
| happens about 100 miles off China's coast, or rather, in
| China's opinion, on a Chinese owned island 100 miles off
| the mainland. [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
| [deleted]
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| Just think abput all the knowledge that was lost over the
| centuries and millenia of human civilization.
|
| Who are we to think that _our_ technology is the greatest and the
| most advanced on this planet? We have no conclusive evidence to
| claim such titles.
|
| Ancient people have drawings of strange creatures and devices
| that descend from the heavens. Even the Pyramids show signs of
| advanced engineering, such as deep tunnels and chambers beneath
| layers of limestone and rocks. These structures were neccessary
| for survival under the scorching sun during the summer. During
| winter's cold nights, rocks provided good thermal isolation. We
| now know of huge chambers and hallways carved deep into the
| Pyramids. Maybe they were used as gathering places, with many
| chambers providing shelter and comfort?
|
| Who knows. Only couple of years earlier we thought to know
| everything about ancient Greece. Then this happened.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| You're aware that it's perfectly possible to live on the
| surface in Egypt without air conditioning, right? Like you can
| just go there and put up a tent if you want.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Only couple of years earlier we thought to know everything
| about ancient Greece
|
| I don't think any historian would claim that, or would ever
| have claimed that. Knowledge of the ancient world is extremely
| limited and patchy.
| darkerside wrote:
| This is generally considered a dangerous line of thinking, but
| I believe society has become too soft. We're so frightened of
| mystical thinking and being wrong that people aren't willing to
| entertain "dumb" ideas.
|
| Just don't make the mistake of thinking it's anything more than
| speculation.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| Plenty of people were afraid of "dangerous thinking", so we
| stagnated as a species during the middle ages.
|
| That's why some civilizations were more advanced thusands of
| years ago than, say, Britain during the 1200's.
| ZanyProgrammer wrote:
| > We're so frightened of mystical thinking and being wrong
| that people aren't willing to entertain "dumb" ideas.
|
| As the pandemic has showed, quite the contrary we embrace too
| many "dumb" ideas.
| darkerside wrote:
| This is what I'm talking about, folks!
| retrac wrote:
| Unconventional might be the word you want, more than "dumb".
|
| In a way, despite our general tolerance and diversity of
| thought, I've come to believe we're an extremely orthodox
| culture. As a general rule, there is a right way to do
| something, someone has almost certainly already discovered
| it, and your job as an artisan, engineer, or anyone else, is
| to look that correct way up in a book, and do it that way.
|
| Just inventing your own take on something considered settled
| is thought to be extremely eccentric, possibly even a sign of
| madness.
| darkerside wrote:
| Yep. It's ironically very unscientific.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| Who is claiming this you fucking idiot?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Add "Antikythera" to the title.
| pkpioneer wrote:
| 8 Ways to Make Your Old Laptop Feel New Again
|
| A good computer is understandably expensive, but it sometimes
| feels like it isn't worth the sticker price. After a few years of
| use, many laptops and PCs start to run slow; typical tasks are no
| longer as easy as they once were, and you find yourself eyeing
| the new computers on the market. But before you drop $2,000 on
| one of Apple's new MacBook Pros, it's worth figuring out if you
| can turn your old computer into a new one. Or at least, one that
| runs a lot more like a new one.
|
| https://pkpioneer.blogspot.com/2021/12/8-ways-to-make-your-o...
| nathias wrote:
| Technology can stay 'inert' even if it is invented, for example
| the Romans already knew steam machines but didn't find a use for
| them, probably because they had slaves to do all that cheaper.
| Until recently solar power tech was the same ...
| rsynnott wrote:
| This is a _bit_ of a myth; the main reason that Roman-era steam
| engines went nowhere was that they didn't have the metallurgy
| to make them practical. Like, they had _watermills_; the idea
| that they were uninterested in mechanical power because they
| had slaves doesn't really hold up.
| nathias wrote:
| Interesting, what metallurgical skills were they missing?
| Wouldn't even a very crude steam machine be better than
| animal harness? Maybe the missing part was coal, burning wood
| would be very inefficient ...
| jccooper wrote:
| Romans had bloomery-made wrought iron only, which was a
| hand-made process of uneven quality, and made only in small
| batches. The role of carbon (and how to introduce it) was
| only vaguely known, so quality would vary. It would be
| quite difficult to make a boiler with bloomery iron. The
| blast furnace only showed up around 1100.
|
| The Romans could certainly have made a Newcomen-style low-
| pressure steam engine; the first boilers were made of lead
| and copper (though they quickly switched to iron). However,
| those are of only mild usefulness. Perhaps they would have
| found employment in the Roman world in the same place they
| did historically: de-watering mines. However, it would have
| to compete with slaves and mules, and there's not a lot of
| coal in the Mediterranean world, so fuel costs would be
| substantial, especially for such an inefficient device.
|
| A more useful high-pressure Watt style engine could perhaps
| be made of bronze, but the cost would be fairly
| astronomical. The Romans could pay it, of course, if they
| wanted to; huge quantities of bronze would be used in ship
| rams and statues. But they didn't know they could, and it's
| uncertain that they'd want to if they did.
| nathias wrote:
| Couldn't there be ceramic boilers? Roman steam-punk
| legions of amfora-powered siege weapons ...
|
| > Perhaps they would have found employment in the Roman
| world in the same place they did historically: de-
| watering mines.
|
| It could be that the coincidence of coal mining and coal
| being good steam power source was what was required to
| kickstart it.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Romans knew about steam power? Never heard that one before,
| have a good place to read about it?
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| Look also at Heron's automatic door, 1st century AD.
|
| Lighting a pyre changed the water pressure in a container,
| which then used basic hydraulic concepts to open a temple
| door. It is imagined that it would be used to imitate magic.
| Light the fire after a sacrifice and suddenly a higher power
| would open the door to the temple.
|
| "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
| from magic"
| WJW wrote:
| The first steam "engine" was the Aeolipile
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile), but it was more a
| toy than a useful tool. IIRC there was also a temple
| somewhere that used steam to open its doors as a cool trick
| to impress the masses.
| tzs wrote:
| I think we tend to underestimate what ancient technology could
| produce because we forget that in ancient times they often
| operated on longer timescales than we do.
|
| With our technology for example we could make all the parts for
| the Antikythera mechanism in a short time. The ancient Greeks
| definitely had no technology that would have allowed them to do
| that, so we see the existence of the Antikythera mechanism as a
| great mystery.
|
| But I don't see any reason to believe that the Greeks built it in
| a short time. It could easily be the lifework of the builder, or
| even the lifework of successive generations of a family of
| builders.
|
| If you need to make a very precise gear in a day you need our
| technology. If you need to make a very precise gear in 50 years
| you just need someone with an abrasive that is harder than the
| material you are making the gear from.
| bsder wrote:
| > The ancient Greeks definitely had no technology that would
| have allowed them to do that
|
| Sure they did. Bronze is not that hard to work with. Simple
| silica (sand) abrasives cut through it quite well. Lapping
| makes things nice and flat. Accuracy is defined by your skill
| with tools.
|
| Hand sheet metal layout is a real skill even in the modern
| world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DypIDbAVTc
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| There is also this implicit form of -ism built into it, in that
| certain groups of people were "obviously" less intelligent so
| it is unlikely they could ever build something magnificent or
| intellectually obscure. Whether it is a belief that aliens must
| have built Mayan or Egyptian Pyramids because of a bias that
| they were dumb savages, or whether it is dismissal of alternate
| forms of successful government and social organization in
| "uncultured" parts of the world.
|
| It is easier to assume something like "this mechanism shouldn't
| exist" if you (general "you") think a group of people are
| already beneath you due to your implicit biases.
| PostOnce wrote:
| nobody thinks Einstein was beneath us because he didn't have
| an iPhone
|
| if something "shouldn't exist" in a time period it has
| nothing to do with judging those people as inferiors, its
| simply the timeline of the development of technology (or our
| misconception thereof)
| darcys22 wrote:
| Einstein is a bad example cause he was very recent also.
| darcys22 wrote:
| This is a very interesting thought to explore! We have this
| cultural default to assume that people back then were less
| smart than us. But we really are exactly the same but we have
| a better starting point then they did to build interesting
| things.
| anyfoo wrote:
| That some things in history took the span of multiple
| generations to finish was quite the revelation to me. The
| Cologne Cathedral took over 600 years to finish. As another
| example, this amusing video [1] tells the story of how King
| Louis XIV wanted a map of the entirety of his kingdom from
| Cassini, and how it was apparently Cassini's great grandson (4
| generations over 120 years) who finally concluded the project.
|
| For some generations in the middle of such projects, I can
| imagine that their huge undertaking is just "something they
| do", essentially just their job, and from their point of view
| it has always been there, and will always be there to the
| extent of their lifetime.
|
| Do we still have anything like this?
| lapetitejort wrote:
| > Do we still have anything like this?
|
| In The Expanse series of novels, essentially every citizen on
| Mars is working towards terraforming the surface, something
| they know will not be achieved in their grandchildren's
| lifetime. This will probably be a goal very near in the
| future. Let's just hope it goes better than the novels.
|
| Quantum physics was worked out for the most part within a
| person's lifespan. We've since slowed down, and it may take a
| few generations to make another great leap. In the meantime
| theorists and experimentalists will be formulating hypotheses
| and collecting data that may not be usable in their lifespan.
| Just look at how long we had to collect data on Mercury's
| orbit before we could use it to help prove General
| Relativity.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Do we still have anything like this?
|
| There are multi-generational scientific experiments e.g. the
| pitch drop or (hopefully) LTEE.
|
| Most significant archeological sites are multi-generational
| as well though I don't know if we can describe them as a
| single work.
|
| One thing that'll be interesting if we actually manage more
| than one generation is the software projects, the early
| luminaries have been passing for a while, the early
| architects of still extant software projects are going to
| start retiring or (sadly) passing en masse pretty soon.
|
| I don't look forward to the obituary of donald knuth but I do
| wonder how tex and metafont will carry on.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > There are multi-generational scientific experiments e.g.
| the pitch drop or (hopefully) LTEE.
|
| Are they building something, especially of scale? The pitch
| drop experiment in particular is extremely passive as I
| understand. You essentially wait for the pitch to drop,
| with occasional maintenance (which I imagine being minor,
| maybe I'm wrong). LTEE though I think qualifies, because
| when I watched a documentary about it, I had the impression
| that it's quite some work.
|
| Even still, an entire Cathedral or traveling through all of
| France (and organizing people to do so) seems much larger
| in scope. Though maybe those are just more extreme examples
| themselves?
|
| > One thing that'll be interesting if we actually manage
| more than one generation is the software projects
|
| Anything UNIX is a good example I think. I'm not entirely
| sure if there is a common UNIX descendant out there that
| still even has one original line of code from one of its
| early ancestors[1], but there's certainly building and
| maintenance going strong around it.
|
| TeX and Metafont I'm less sure, but there seem to be so
| many developers of very elaborate packages, that I would be
| surprised if TeX itself was left rotten.
|
| Generally, it seems that many software projects have
| changed maintenance teams many times, with no involvement
| of the original authors anymore... but that's also more
| maintaining something existing (and building upon it), not
| something with a clear completion goal several generations
| down.
|
| [1] Though I would not be surprised if you pointed to, say,
| some terminal code in a BSD variant and tell me it's from
| the original BSD.
| nosianu wrote:
| Oh yes!
|
| Our cities and mega-structures, including things like roads
| and fields.
|
| Or more broadly, our terraforming of the planet.
|
| When you look at time lapse videos of human developments it
| looks pretty similar to watching swarm insects construct big
| structures over long periods.
|
| We started it a long time ago and it sped up a lot over the
| last few centuries, and it's still going on.
|
| No need to look at individual pieces opf technology, all you
| need is to "zoom out" in both space and time to see the human
| _swarm_ busily at work on a project that not a single
| individual understands.
|
| If you _do_ want to look at individual smaller pieces, things
| like the space station or (space /air/road) vehicles in
| general: We keep tinkering and changing them through space
| (in parallel across the world) and time (across many
| generations).
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Do we still have anything like this?"
|
| In terms of buildings, the longest one might be
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia
|
| Otherwise I would say science in general.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Oh wow, did not know about that cathedral. Yeah, that
| definitely qualifies.
| colordrops wrote:
| Same goes for the perfectly fitted stones in Inkan walls in
| Peru. They weren't built by aliens or telekinesis, but rather
| unoccupied workers that rubbed on the stones all day for
| decades. There is plenty of evidence that these walls and
| cities were never in a "finished" state, but always in
| progress, with partially complete stones and scattered pieces
| not yet near the wall in many sites.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Then there are projects like Colosseum which took only 7-8
| years to build. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum or
| Parthenon that took 9 years.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon
| bsder wrote:
| Most things in the ancient Greek world needed to be
| completed in less than a generation because a generation
| tended to be the recurring timeframe for wars (funny that).
| beamatronic wrote:
| What's remarkable to me is to think about the infrastructure
| that must have existed, even to support this basic labor. All
| these stones had to get quarried and moved around. All these
| workers had to be fed, housed, and clothed. Whatever tools
| and simple machines they used, would have required constant
| maintenance.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Recently a group finished a stone block of the size in the
| Egyptian pyramids in just a few days.
|
| Another group hauled a Stonehenge sized block of stone from
| area the stones came from to the site of Stonehenge in about
| two weeks.
|
| Estimate is that, using existing tools of the time, 100
| stonemasons could have done the Sphinx in about five years.
|
| And we have medieval and classical buildings in Europe where
| the building methods are fully known and there were no flying
| saucers or other magical methods.
| ds206 wrote:
| Do you have a link or more information regarding the
| pyramid block formation?
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Sorry, I don't. I just so it in passing and didn't book
| mark it.
| smitty1e wrote:
| "Simply shouldn't exist"
|
| Pyramids were wonders of the ancient world long before the Python
| web framework.
|
| The condescencion of the modern age toward those who came before
| use never ceases to amuse.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an article
| and rush to the thread to complain about it. Find something
| interesting to comment about instead._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| yarky wrote:
| They shouldn't exist if the null hypothesis hold true, so this
| is evidence against the null hypothesis, aka the official
| history.
|
| This shouldn't surprise you neither, but that depends on your
| null hypothesis ;)
| luma wrote:
| All they're saying is that the technology represented in this
| device has no equivalent in the historical record anywhere near
| that time and that place. It's not to say that it literally
| cannot exist, rather, our historical understanding of these
| peoples is clearly incomplete. These are the sorts of findings
| that change our understanding of history which makes it pretty
| exciting to me.
|
| The Clickspring series on this mechanism was mentioned
| elsewhere and is some of the finest content on YouTube, I'd
| strongly recommend checking it out.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I think that's gp's point: rather than saying "An ancient
| computer that we don't understand is making us realise how
| little we know about the ancient world and challenging our
| assumptions about ancient technology" the headline is "An
| ancient computer that shouldn't exist".
| rozab wrote:
| There are actually several descriptions of similar devices in
| the literature.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Similar_.
| ..
| luma wrote:
| Oh for sure and I think that's an important point: this
| device didn't pop out of nowhere.
|
| Something of this complexity strongly suggests an existing
| school/guild/etc which developed the knowledge and crafts
| around designing and building "clockwork" devices like
| this. China had discovered the geared wheel centuries
| previous so gears were known. It's the integration of the
| basic underlying technologies that is surprising, and I
| don't think it's a huge leap to presume that there must be
| more of these devices out there waiting to be discovered!
| rsynnott wrote:
| And the Antikythera mechanism gave a lot of credibility to
| those descriptions. Without it, they might well be
| dismissed as fantasy; Roman and Greek writers, even
| historians, were generally pretty credulous by modern
| standards and the literature contains references to all
| sorts of things which couldn't possibly have been true.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > our historical understanding of these peoples is clearly
| incomplete
|
| That's the point being made.The conventional wisdom lens
| frames _them_ as inferior, instead of us being the ones who
| are flawed.
|
| There's a difference between "They couldn't have done
| that..." and "We didn't realize they could have done it."
| Joker_vD wrote:
| I've seen people claimed that, e.g. the polished granite
| columns common across European palaces and even some
| cathedrals, could not have been a) polished so well without
| laser technology, b) could not be moved and then erected
| without modern engine-powered equipment. So all of it was the
| work of ancient aliens or something, and the history as we're
| taught it is completely falsified, for some reason.
|
| Because obviously, if _you_ can 't imagine how to do
| something then it _must_ be impossible.
| coldtea wrote:
| Because obviously, if you say impossible, you mean
| impossible, and it's not a figure of speech (since unless
| we're talking about 'alien technology' conspiracy
| theorists, the people calling it "impossible" already know
| that e.g. the polishing clearly has been done and is thus
| possible without lasers).
| agumonkey wrote:
| That's why I like videos of handtools techniques. People
| splitting massive rocks. Levers and pivots to manipulate
| them. Mechanics are not recent.. we just do it faster
| thanks to modern energy storage and transfer.
| luma wrote:
| I've often wondered if the people making these claims ("you
| need lasers to make something that flat") are people
| working in archeology or are actual civil engineers or
| machinists etc. Talk to a master machinist about how to
| make a large stone flat with access to ancient technology
| and I suspect you'll get a handful of plausible answers.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| I've seen exactly blue-collars workers arguing for
| impossibility: it's hard enough to do with modern
| technology ("I know it first-hand!"), how would you even
| do it without it?
| beowulfey wrote:
| That's perhaps a testament to our dependence on modern
| machinery, if the skills did exist once.
| svachalek wrote:
| It's fairly simple to construct a way to see your own
| face. All you need is a high-grade color LCD or OLED
| display, a high-resolution digital camera, a power
| source, a few controls and a logic board. Too bad none of
| this was available before 2010, those poor ancients must
| have always wondered what they looked like.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| You jest, but I've heard a tale from a local engineering
| college: they regularly give to the graduating-year
| students a task to design some system which, after you
| remove all the fancy wordings, is basically insides of a
| toilet cistern/tank. Year after year, the students keep
| producing _astonishingly_ convoluted designs.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I once re-invented the whistling teapot while deeply
| engrossed in using Arduino for anything and everything. I
| had only saucepans to boil water with and wished they
| could alert me once the water reached temp, perhaps
| optically sensing the turbulance of the surface.
|
| My roommate could not roll their eyes enough.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Well, if you put a lid on a saucepan (and you should, it
| conserves energy and makes water boil faster) you can
| detect it clattering when the water starts to boil! So
| you don't need any optical input, a microphone will
| suffice -- which is cheaper, too. Filter out the low
| frequencies of water humming, amplify the rest, and you
| got a (not-so-nice-sounding, because it rattles, not
| whistles) boiling point alarm!
| cruano wrote:
| It's hard only because you don't have hundred of slaves
| you can put to work 12+ hours until they pass out
| WJW wrote:
| "Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy" is the text I see
| referenced most often in this context. On the pdf at [1],
| from page 24 onwards it describes the procedure to create
| a flat surface accurate to single digit micrometers "from
| scratch" with nothing but a scraping tool and some dye
| (and a whole lot of patience).
|
| [1] https://pearl-
| hifi.com/06_Lit_Archive/15_Mfrs_Publications/M...
| buildsjets wrote:
| Thank you for posting that, you beat me to it. FOMA is a
| classic. Here's a video illustrating the process of
| creating a microscopically flat surface from three unflat
| surfaces. It can be done with ancient technology, if you
| have enough time.
|
| https://youtu.be/5m_Opf3nhQU
| aeonflux wrote:
| Haven't watched yet, but I always wonder, what would be
| their reason to do so? I assume it takes huge amount of
| time and effort. They would get pretty similar effect by
| stopping much earlier. No need to polish two stone to
| death, just to fit one onto another. Whats even weirder,
| many times they seem to care much more about the
| connecting sides, not the eye-facing one. I don't buy the
| slavery-argument. Even with access to "free labor" there
| is no point in over-expending the time and effort.
| WJW wrote:
| They wouldn't grind down the stones to micrometer
| flatness for construction work, just a mm or so.
|
| The type of buildings where you see extremely precise
| stonework tend to be cathedrals and palaces, where
| spending insane amounts of labor is kinda the point. It
| demonstrates to the masses how grand, rich and powerful
| the inhabitant of the building is. Spending lots of money
| on a building is a way of showing off.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| from one angle, the church spends money for monumental
| purposes. But I'm not of the opinion that you can just
| spend your way to those cathedrals: the workmen
| (freemasons in the original sense) have to believe they
| are giving glory to god.
|
| Here's a great video [0][17min] documenting the Met
| Museum's commissioning of moroccan mosaics, by the end
| you can see the craftsmen taking great pride in their
| work, above and beyond what they're paid to do, carving
| "allah" over and over out of religious dedication.
|
| (just want to push back on the notion that religion is
| all about manipulating people with your power, the crimes
| of the vatican notwishstanding)
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/Og6cTlwBTrk
| aeonflux wrote:
| This argument can work both ways. Some people claim
| everything in Egypt could be done with hands, patience
| (or by forcing someone). But there are many other clues,
| suggesting that civilization had access to some very
| sophisticated tools or machinery. Maybe not lasers, but
| not hand saws either. Check this short clip for example:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Oe1--ss51Q&t=917s It
| describes a sarcophagus was ditched mid-production,
| because the cut was made in the wrong way. I am not
| saying that the conclusion is valid, but it's an
| interesting data point.
| varelse wrote:
| I've worked for people who think anything they can't do
| themselves is impossible. It's not an uncommon outlook.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > Because obviously, if you can't imagine how to do
| something then it must be impossible.
|
| Yep, this is known as the "argument from incredulity".
|
| https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity
| fsloth wrote:
| "The condescencion of the modern age toward those who came
| before use never ceases to amuse."
|
| Well, it's also a bit sad testament to the fact that in general
| people have very little experience of how far they could go
| from starting from first principles, instead of just reading a
| single plausible answer from textbook.
|
| A single human can be quite inventive and achieve quite a lot
| if they focus their energies.
|
| The bayesian interpretation could be also that "it's pretty
| easy to progress this far in mechanical computation if you
| guess the correct route to take".
| digbybk wrote:
| If a web framework in the Pyramids was discovered, it would
| defy our understanding of the history of technology and "simply
| shouldn't exist". It's a dramatic way of putting it, but it's
| really just saying that our understanding was wrong. It
| shouldn't exist given our model of the world, so our model is
| wrong.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Taken another way, we're condemning our own current lack of
| imagination, understanding.
| bserge wrote:
| Seems like the ancients were much better at making tools than
| they were at marketing them.
|
| Granted, their market was much smaller to begin with, who needs
| a calculator when their whole existence consists of farming and
| having kids.
|
| A small group today could prototype a very advanced set of AR
| glasses, but if they don't try to sell it, it would never be
| "discovered" by society. Future archeologists would say "this
| shouldn't exist".
|
| On that note, there are so many people these days and so much
| information that the chance of someone else creating the same
| thing and successfully popularizing it is much higher.
| rsynnott wrote:
| There's nothing _particularly_ surprising about the Pyramids,
| though; they were fairly obviously possible at the time and
| made sense in context. The Antikythera device was more
| surprising; if nothing else, it's the oldest known example of
| clockwork in that part of the world, by _centuries_.
|
| There's no magic here; it clearly did exist. But it's
| surprising that it did; it feels out of time in a way that most
| artifacts don't.
| [deleted]
| gus_massa wrote:
| In case you have not seen it, there is a very interesting video
| series by Clickspring about building an Antikythera Mechanism
| with tools that were abailable at that time.
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0...
|
| The tl;dw is that it was possible to build it with tools that
| were probably available, but some tools are specialized enough to
| guess that they had already build other similar devices. The
| final IRL reconstructed device is very nice. It's a long serie
| (10 episodes of 15 minutes each + some additional videos with
| even more details in other playlist) but it's worth watching.
| fho wrote:
| Did I miss that he finished the mechanism? From what I've seen
| he went into hiatus and has been only posting ClickSpring
| "clips" for a while now?
| db48x wrote:
| He hasn't completely finished his reconstruction, but he
| hasn't entirely been on a hiatus either. He co-authored a
| paper on the calendar ring of the mechanism:
| https://bhi.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BHI-
| Antikythera...
|
| But he hasn't made many videos the last year or two.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Some of his videos are only available via Patreon.
| stan_rogers wrote:
| That series still isn't over. It just got interrupted a couple
| of times. The first interruption was explained in Episode 10 -
| that was the discovery that the way one of the wheels was
| divided in the remaining teeth likely indicated that the
| mechanism was based on a lunar rather than a solar calendar,
| and that part needed to wait for the peer review and
| publication of a paper before the series could continue. The
| next interruption had more to do with Chris's real passion of
| watch and clock making - he had access to a couple of
| decorative engines (a straight-line engine and a rose engine),
| probably temporarily, since they would in no way both fit into
| the little closet he has for a shop, and he did some rather
| impressive guilloche and enamel work with those. When the
| series picks up (if it does), the hard parts are yet to come,
| like the planetary dial and its crapload of pointers.
|
| One thing Chris _has_ done that people like Michael Wright didn
| 't was to assume that anyone who was building something like
| that, with its obvious signs of not being a rough prototype,
| would have made some sort of jig for some of the parts rather
| than, say, laboriously walking off tooth spacing for every
| single gear, and that some sort of lathe, which was known to
| exist and be used for wood from illustrations both contemporary
| with and far preceding the device, would have likely been used
| to make round things out of soft metal.
| vmception wrote:
| Because of the backwards things occurring on the other side of
| the Mediterranean?
|
| Weird standard. Its like a historian researching Iraq in the year
| 4,050 AD and also finding a ancient semiconductor factory in
| Austria saying "huh, that shouldn't exist"
|
| On today's timeless news, group of wandering nomads hopes for
| religious nation state, more at 11!
| kanzenryu2 wrote:
| The thing that really gets me is just how densely the whole
| mechanism is packed together. What a masterpiece. The techniques
| must have been developed incrementally over many revisions of the
| machine, perhaps over several lifetimes by various machinists
| and/or designers.
|
| Sadly I read somewhere that the "slop" between the gears (the
| mechanical imperfections that add or multiply together over many
| gears) would overwhelm the more complex calculations that some of
| the machine was intended to perform.
| 6nf wrote:
| From the Clickspring reconstruction, it seems clear to me that
| the 'slop' in the gears won't be a problem in the final
| mechanism.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| The presumption that other people aren't smart enough to do what
| you can or imagine has a name: bigotry. The "shouldn't exist" is
| bigotry.
|
| It's also evidence that we see even today that knowledge is
| fragile and easily lost when it has a large tacit component. Most
| things technological are highly fragile because half of the
| knowledge required to create them is tacit.
|
| See also: "FOG BANK".
| simonh wrote:
| It has nothing to do with assumptions about how smart people in
| the past were, we have every reason to believe they were just
| as smart as us. In fact we have direct evidence from surviving
| mathematical texts, treatises on philosophy, etc that they
| could be highly original and insightful thinkers. Smarts is
| simply not at all the issue and frankly you describing diligent
| scholars who clearly have huge appreciation and admiration of
| the people they study bigots is highly offensive and uncalled
| for.
|
| The real bigots are the conspiracy nuts who think ancient
| civilizations we know of couldn't have achieved the many things
| we evidence of, and think it must have been aliens or other
| advanced civilizations on implausible magic islands.
|
| The question is simply one of technology. We can't simply
| assume that people at a certain time had technology we have no
| evidence for, no accounts of, and no evidence of similar or
| near precursor technologies. The Antikythera mechanism was a
| shock because there was no evidence any such thing could exist
| at that time. We also don't have evidence such things existed
| in Babylon a thousand years previously, or in Egypt 3,000 years
| before that. Equally we have no evidence they definitely didn't
| have them. So should we assume they had such things? We simply
| make the best estimates we can and adjust when we find
| wonderful surprises like this one.
| codegladiator wrote:
| I can understand why the op was down voted, but just assuming
| that a civilization was "not smart" simply because we cannot
| find evidence feels dumb.
|
| > The real bigots are the conspiracy nuts who think ancient
| civilizations we know of couldn't have achieved the many
| things we evidence of, and think it must have been aliens
|
| You are not presenting any evidence that it was otherwise. I
| am not saying that this device was presented by aliens, but
| neither you are that it was not.
|
| > So should we assume they had such things? We simply make
| the best estimates we can and adjust when we find wonderful
| surprises like this one.
|
| We have evidence that they had it. How they had it is a
| separate question.
|
| I assume the next "civilization" might not be able to figure
| out how/what out machines are doing and they would have a
| similar discussion.
| nefitty wrote:
| Presumably you're talking about the classified nuclear
| material: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
| ncmncm wrote:
| "Shouldn't exist" simply means that nothing else like it has
| ever been found, and (almost) nothing like it has even been
| described in surviving literature.
| throwawayay02 wrote:
| It is absolutely not a computer, though. They observed the
| observable astrological phenomena was cyclical and made a system
| of gears for their periods to predict it's state. It's
| interesting, but for context it is centuries younger than the
| first Greek geared clocks, so it's definitely not something we
| should be too surprised that existed.
| db48x wrote:
| It is absolutely a special-purpose computer. Of course it's not
| a general-purpose programmable computer such as the ones we use
| today, but it is still a computer.
| throwawayay02 wrote:
| What is your dictionary definition of computer then? Is a
| sundial a computer because it tells the time? Is an abacus,
| or a Genaille-Lucas ruler, a computer?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Right, it is an algorithm, coded in analogue hardware. It can
| _compute_ certain astronomical outputs for a range of inputs.
| samsin wrote:
| I had a similar thought and I noticed it wasn't referred to in
| the video as a computer, only the title. I'd describe it as a
| model although I think it fits the common definition of a
| computer too.
| userbinator wrote:
| I guess the definition of "computer" you have is "stored
| program machine", but a lot of other machines were called
| computers back then.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15108965
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4
| russh wrote:
| "Computer" was not limited to machines
| https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/women-nasa/
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Citation needed? First time I'm hearing anyone say that this
| mechanism is not an anachronism based on current historical
| timelines.
| xibalba wrote:
| Previously on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Antikythera+mechanism
|
| I am curious, is this device as fascinating to the average person
| as it is to the average HN'er? I suspect not, but I don't really
| understand why. I myself have read quite a few articles/posts and
| watched a few videos about it. Every time I re-encounter it, I
| get sucked back in.
|
| See also:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire
| nefitty wrote:
| It seemed like a near-mystical piece of technology when I
| encountered it as a kid watching The History Channel. Tech-
| minded people probably self-select here anyway...
| stabbles wrote:
| I realize how much I miss the #dislikes for videos like these.
| The title sounds clickbaity and #dislikes would confirm that. I
| guess it is not clickbait given that it's on hackernews and by
| the BBC, but if this context was missing...
| walterbell wrote:
| Would YT remove comments which posted the dislike count from
| Archive.org?
| nefitty wrote:
| Automate it!
| sersi wrote:
| Another very good related video about the Antikythera mechanism
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv-zWbxm2lY
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Anything new in this that isn't in all the many posts from back
| in March or so?
|
| Lots of discussion:
|
| _9 months ago_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435416
|
| _5 months ago, around the time this video was originally posted_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27934684
| ninjamayo wrote:
| For anyone interested, this museum in Thessaloniki Greece:
| https://www.noesis.edu.gr/en/ancient-greek-technology/ has a lot
| of very interesting items. If you ever visit the city, worth
| going there. I was particularly impressed with Syracusia, the
| giant ship/castle designed by Archimedes
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syracusia
| dang wrote:
| Maybe a good time to do this:
|
| _The Antikythera Mechanism_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27934684 - July 2021 (29
| comments)
|
| _The Antikythera Mechanism_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27915777 - July 2021 (3
| comments)
|
| _Scientists Have Unlocked the Secrets of the Ancient
| 'Antikythera Mechanism'_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26482765 - March 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _Scientists Have Unlocked the Secrets of the Ancient
| 'Antikythera Mechanism'_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26469609 - March 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _Scientists solve another piece of the puzzling Antikythera
| mechanism_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26444311 -
| March 2021 (1 comment)
|
| _A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera
| Mechanism_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435416 -
| March 2021 (130 comments)
|
| _The Antikythera Mechanism - Evidence of a Lunar Calendar_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25440018 - Dec 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _Antikythera Mechanism: Evidence of a Lunar Calendar_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25412576 - Dec 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _Hacker's Discovery Changes Understanding of the Antikythera
| Mechanism_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25408405 - Dec
| 2020 (5 comments)
|
| _2000 Year Old Analog Computer - Decoding the Antikythera
| Mechanism_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24247667 - Aug
| 2020 (2 comments)
|
| _Decoding the Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculator: Antikythera
| Mechanism_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195196 - Oct
| 2019 (24 comments)
|
| _Antikythera Mechanism_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20543223 - July 2019 (35
| comments)
|
| _Was the Antikythera Mechanism the world's first computer?
| (2007)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18642978 - Dec
| 2018 (56 comments)
|
| _Missing piece of Antikythera Mechanism found on Aegean seabed_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18455764 - Nov 2018 (3
| comments)
|
| _Missing Piece of Antikythera Mechanism Found on Aegean Seabed_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18446622 - Nov 2018 (1
| comment)
|
| _Antikythera Mechanism_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18276098 - Oct 2018 (3
| comments)
|
| _Human skeleton found on famed Antikythera shipwreck_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12538876 - Sept 2016 (6
| comments)
|
| _The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11902342 - June 2016 (66
| comments)
|
| _The Antikythera Computer, Circa 205 BC_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10546474 - Nov 2015 (1
| comment)
|
| _Marine Archaeologists Excavate Greek Antikythera Shipwreck_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280722 - Sept 2015 (1
| comment)
|
| _Divers return to famous Antikythera wreck to hunt for
| treasures_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10274733 - Sept
| 2015 (2 comments)
|
| _The 2000 Year-Old Computer - Decoding the Antikythera Mechanism
| (2012) [video]_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10192082 -
| Sept 2015 (5 comments)
|
| _Famed Antikythera wreck yields more treasures_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8438996 - Oct 2014 (8
| comments)
|
| _Reconstruction of planetary gearwork in the Antikythera
| Mechanism (2012)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8329647
| - Sept 2014 (1 comment)
|
| _The Two Thousand Year Old Computer_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4878859 - Dec 2012 (1
| comment)
|
| _Apple engineer uses Lego to rebuild Antikythera mechanism_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1993988 - Dec 2010 (42
| comments)
|
| _Lego Antikythera Mechanism (video)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1991557 - Dec 2010 (2
| comments)
|
| _Antikythera Machine built out of Lego_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1990493 - Dec 2010 (3
| comments)
|
| _Lego Antikythera Mechanism (oldest known scientific computer)_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1988818 - Dec 2010 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Antikythera Mechanism: Animation and Analysis [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1948365 - Nov 2010 (1
| comment)
|
| _Beautiful phyiscal model of the Antikythera Mechanism_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1871202 - Nov 2010 (3
| comments)
|
| _Antikythera Reborn - The Hackers of Ancient Greece_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101701 - Jan 2008 (2
| comments)
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| As a kid I was really into the whole 'ancient mysteries' thing
| and wrote about the Antikythera mechanism in gushing / awed tones
| in my English O-level ! Luckily the examiner was kind, but years
| later I realise it must have come across as all a bit Von
| Daniken.
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