[HN Gopher] The Universal Tech Tree
___________________________________________________________________
The Universal Tech Tree
Author : mitchbob
Score : 40 points
Date : 2025-06-02 18:25 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (asteriskmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (asteriskmag.com)
| jessep wrote:
| I absolutely love this.
| pizzooid wrote:
| same
| acenturyandabit wrote:
| The link to the actual tech tree is buried In the article:
| https://www.historicaltechtree.com/
| NamTaf wrote:
| I was waiting for the inevitable _Connections_ reference. It took
| longer than I expected.
|
| I like the idea and I like the article describing the background
| and rationale. I look forward to poking around in it. However I
| have a little bit of a hang-up with calling it a "tree". Namely,
| a tree conjures the image of it being a 1-to-N graph, i.e. a
| single idea leads to several new ones, and so on, when it is very
| much not.
|
| Ironically _Connections_ was really what rammed this point home
| for me. It really is more like a social media graph, where ideas
| from all over, old and new, coalesce into a new epiphany that
| leads to a new invention. Burke constantly demonstrated this in
| his examples, and explicitly rejected the linearity of
| inventions.
|
| But then again, the concept of a 'tree of tech' is rather poetic
| :)
| garrettgarcia wrote:
| I see your point about it not being a strict tree. It is tree-
| like, however, in the sense that the branches/edges only point
| in one direction: forward in time.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| But it's a reticulating structure; yes, the graph is directed
| / partially ordered, but it's certainly not tree-like.
|
| The key property of real trees is that they _branch_ and the
| branches don't recombine.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Which is why the article points out that it's a directed
| acyclic graph, not a tree.
| garrettgarcia wrote:
| Au contraire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inosculation
|
| I do agree that branches staying separate is the essential
| property of a tree data structure.
| jlcx wrote:
| Speaking of Burke, I believe his book The Pinball Effect has
| notations in the margins directing the reader to other pages
| that mention the same node in the graph (whether that's exactly
| how he thought of it or not). It seems like an interesting
| attempt to express this non-linear structure in the form of a
| book.
| garrettgarcia wrote:
| I've been wishing that this existed for a long time, and am
| thrilled to see that it does now!
|
| Something that fascinates me about early technology is that a
| significant amount of it was invented prior to Homo sapiens.
| efm wrote:
| Thanks for doing this research!
|
| The information is organized clearly by date, technology and
| predecessor/descendant.
|
| But,technology continues to improve, and this site has no
| database or github for continuing to update with new tech or to
| fill in the gaps.
|
| This website format also makes it difficult to do other forms of
| analysis.
|
| I wonder if the authors would make the data available in a
| knowledge graph form.
| tunesmith wrote:
| One of my favorite things to wonder about is if our historical
| tech tree has ever been truly limited by anything other than
| human ingenuity. Like, if not for the random placement of smart
| people in the right places, who's to say we might not have
| started launching rockets 500 years ago, or 500 years from now?
| And how disjoint can branches of a a tech tree really be; are
| there branches of our tree that could conceivably be completely
| dark ages and undiscovered given where we are in the other
| branches? But it's the first question that is most fun: have we
| ever been _externally_ gated, like where a certain idea or
| technology was just completely impossible to invent discover
| until something external happened like a meteor hitting the
| ground, or a volcano erupting, etc?
| vkou wrote:
| It's not the placement of smart people, it's the political
| climate.
|
| When an idle ruling class of parasites siphons all the
| productive surplus of society, there's not a lot of room for
| innovation... Unless they come up with a gentleman's compact to
| dabble in gentleman scholarship.
| garrettgarcia wrote:
| I don't know why you're being downvoted. The political
| climate, and more broadly the culture of a society, is the
| crucial component to whether or not technological progress
| happens. Evidence of this is all around us, even today. Look
| how much more progress there's been in South Korea vs. North
| Korea over the last 75 years. That is a direct consequence of
| the differing cultural and political climates.
| nradov wrote:
| Sure. Someone could have invented gunpowder at pretty much any
| time. It's not particularly complex, just no one figured it out
| until (probably) some Chinese monks discovered it accidentally
| in the 9th century. But in some plausible alternate history the
| Roman legions were using explosives and cannons to conquer the
| world a millennium before that.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > ... if our historical tech tree has ever been truly limited
| by anything other than human ingenuity.
|
| I feel more like our tech tree was pretty much directed by
| resources availability and human ingenuity didn't play much
| role at all and any species of roughly 50-150 human IQ would
| follow pretty much the same path when placed in similar
| situation, only perhaps slower or faster.
|
| Another interesting idea that I'm not sure if I believe in is
| that rate of our technological progress might be mostly
| explained with population growth, as if technologies didn't
| really accelerate progress on future ones.
| diggan wrote:
| > tech tree was pretty much directed by resources
| availability and human ingenuity didn't play much role at all
| and any species of roughly 50-150 human IQ would follow
| pretty much the same path
|
| Huh? There are inventions that happened by mere coincident,
| or two "right" humans at the same place and the same time.
|
| Penicillin, superglue and microwave ovens are just some
| examples from the top of my head, that probably wouldn't have
| happened if they weren't "accidentally" discovered. It would
| seem many inventions are driven by "Hmm, what happened
| there?" accidents, and since the right person actually paid
| attention, they dove into it rather than dismissing it.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I doubt we'd be able to avoid discovering microwave heating
| across 200 years of using RF in the relevant frequency
| area. Once discovered, applying it to a countertop
| application seems inevitable.
| celim307 wrote:
| I'm being pedantic but while external factors definitely can
| cause big jumps in tech, everything is always interconnected.
| We can't discover rocketry without previous leaps in material
| science, those were impossible without manufacturing and mining
| infrastructure, those not possible without agriculture and
| sociological structures and organization, not to mention all
| the associated advances in mathematics etc
| diggan wrote:
| Very coincidental as I've been building my own "technology tree"
| for a game I'm doing, but currently just at ~50 technologies. It
| would be amazing if this universal tech tree would also publish
| its data under a permissive license, I'm sure it could be useful
| to more folks than just me, and would make it even more
| universal!
| jlcx wrote:
| For something related that takes a very different approach:
| https://causegraph.github.io/causalaxies
|
| In contrast to the author's decisions here, I decided to
|
| -go for an "everything tree" even if that will contain many more
| errors
|
| -use DBpedia/Wikidata, and address issues discovered by editing
| Wikipedia/Wikidata
|
| -use a 3D visualization tool, due to the size of the graph
|
| I think it reveals an interesting overall structure, and some
| interesting details for those who zoom in despite the issues with
| the data.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-06-05 23:00 UTC)