It is an amazing playlist.
There is also an 'antikythera fragments' playlist with the most recent video from September 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLBDKmFG90U&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
Surely that’s an oversimplification, but I always wonder.
I thin you’re right that they likely would not have had the clarity to make those smaller optics useful, but it feels interesting enough to add here.
they weren't stupid. they were as smart as we are, perhaps smarter.
they were far fewer in number than we are today, and the library of technology they could draw from to solve a problem was much smaller for them, is all.
nothing about the Antikythera mechanism is complex; the math is simple and the construction is that of a machine made many times and made slightly smaller each iteration, as sections are moved to fit into a more compact arrangement.
even coming up with the ratios to describe the motion of the planets would be easily done by one or more people who were dedicated observers who wrote their observations down.
nothing here is complex, yet we still consider new discoveries about the device which reveal unpredicted complexity to be "too advanced" to be made at the time it appears to be made...
I don't know why scientists do this. why can't we just admit that we don't know what ancient civilizations were capable of, rather than assuming they were incapable of simple tasks?
At the same time, if we discover some feat of engineering or scrap of insight that was heretofore thought unknown in the period it was created in, it's worth noting: it permits us to revise what we know about the investigators of the time and what they actually knew to begin with.
As I said, very nice rabbit hole to fall into. Randall Carlson and Paul Stamets are my two favourite bearded story tellers of our time, about our relationship to our home, our place in the universe & consciousness. They are our Gandalfs. They are perhaps not super accepted by mainstream science or all scientists, but they play a very valuable role.
Anyone else reading this, do you have any other Gandalfs that you can recommend?
* Don Norman
* Karl Pribram
* Wim Hof
A quirk of humans CS Lewis calls "Chronological Snobbery" - that what we know and generate now is obviously superior to what they knew and generated then - because if they were so smart like we were, they'd have invented the stuff we did.
It falls apart with the slightest interaction with actual history (even the known bits - Roman cement and aquaducts are obvious examples that stick out), but since we don't really teach history, and that which we do teach is a bit "religion of progress" biased ("From the caves, to the stars, through us, always onward and upward!" - again, doesn't match reality, but nobody seems to care).
The gizmos we have now are mostly a function of the energy resources we've cracked open in the past few hundred years, which were related to some quirks of a small island to the west of the European continent a few hundred years back, and so on back through time.
Human nature hasn't changed for much of recorded history, and neither has human intelligence. It's been used in different ways in different times, for different goals, but if anything, we've spent the past 30+ years finding ways to destroy the human ability to focus in pursuit of profits - look at any modern smartphone app. Great profit, for someone else, because it destroys your attention. Oral epics and such are just a different focus from what we currently value, which is mostly "How can I capture and process behavioral surplus to generate prediction products to sell advertisements?" (to paraphrase Zuboff).
Never underestimate what a bored machinist can accomplish in their spare time.
Put a bit broader, never underestimate what people can achieve and figure out in their spare time. I mean as a child I would build dams and channels out of stones and dirt at the beach or near rivers while on vacation, without any formal education or knowledge about waterworks. I can see how this play would end up in things like irrigation systems, aqueducts and sewage systems over time, if I were to live in a place or a time where those things were not present.
It's probably been the same with tools and art for tens of thousands of years. When people are not struggling for survival, they will experiment.
I know some are upset at certain recent SciAm op-eds.
But every issue has 2-5 gorgeous, beefy articles like this one that make me a happy paying subscriber.
Absolutely stunning visualization of the inner workings of this marvelous device.
The plaza’s terrazzo floor is actually a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.
https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/the-26-000-year-a...
Is anyone aware of such a project?
It sounds right up the alley of many HN readers.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/antikythera-mechanism/id989574...
The other one seems to be less favorably rated.
We just don't know how much has been lost due to decay or re-melting stuff. I mean just look around and see how much stuff from, say, 500 years ago is still around. Tools and household items, I mean. It's limited to a few museum pieces. And if you look at some big upheavals / iconoclasms (always wanted to use that word) from recent years in for example the middle east, or the cultural revolution in China, a lot of these historical collections end up destroyed or lost for one reason or another. I mean some people were doing book burnings in the US not long ago.
Also it seems like a major undertaking creating such a machine. Perhaps they had just a few of them like we have just a few big particle accelerators.
The article does not get into how much effort and wealth it would have required to build such a machine assuming you had the people who could a) create the gears with high enough precision and b) assemble it. If you ever took a mechanical alarm clock apart and tried to re-assemble it you know what I mean.
"If the insight of the Greeks had matched their ingenuity…we would not merely be puttering around on the Moon, we would have reached the nearer stars."
It's a little sensational but also makes me think of what could've been, if certain paths had been realized in past times, and also makes me put the technical knowledge of past civilizations in much higher regard.
Math advanced a huge amount during the Medieval age. They simply didn't have good tools for calculations, and nearly all of the Modern Age's math was based on questions that they didn't even consider to ask by then.
There were huge advances on material handling during the Medieval and Modern ages. Not only the obvious ones on metallurgy, but on glass working and ceramics too. All of those were important.
And let's not underestimate the individuals. Had Newton not been born, our Industrial Revolution could be delayed for many decades too. Anyway, it's no accident that when he appeared, he was at England, there was basically no other place on the world where somebody like him could do what he did.
Is there a single technology, that if sent back in time, would have sustained their empire? (Steam engine? Hydropower improvements? Standardized measurements for tighter tolerances?)
The ancient Greeks had a steam engine. There were no mass printed books so barely anyone knew about it. Even if you knew you couldn’t exactly start a company.
For example if we had some crazy extinction event, the dark ages that would follow are pretty scary to think about. I would feel like the researchers trying to understand what I'm looking at, and they mention there's some sort of user manual inscription. If we are reduced to small tribes again, with no access to internet, electricity, running water, etc. I can't imagine us actually recovering to the current state without thousands of years. Most people have no idea how anything works, we just buy it on amazon and it arrives tomorrow or stream the latest movie. Just thought I'd throw my dumb question out there lol.
The only way a civilization at least as advanced as bronze-age humans existed 100k+ years ago is if it was visitors from a parent civilization on another world that died out. That's the only way you get advanced technology on a small enough scale that we wouldn't be able to find any clues because the clues would be localized to a tiny area we just haven't stumbled across yet (to be clear I don't think any such civilization ever existed).
And my favorite hypothesis: Antarctica. If there ever was a species which flourished there, it's a lot harder for them to colonize the rest of the world than it is for us to visit Antarctica. Clothes you can just wear, and heating is pretty straightforward - but having to venture in a place where portable aircon failure means death will pretty much guarantee you don't build a lot far from home. Which puts a pretty high limit on how far a civilization could have gotten there and still have all traces hidden in the ice.
Most people today are familiar with Aristotle and Plato because the early Christian church embraced Neoplatonism's "perfect design" - but there was a very popular school of philosophy frequently overlooked because it was declared heretical.
The Epicureans not only were the first we know of in history to theorize that light was made up of tiny quantized parts moving quickly (the experiment showing this is what Einstein won his Nobel Prize for), they also thought the reason life existed was that out of chaos there were a great many worlds out in the void many which didn't have life at all and we just happened to be on a world with life.
They even thought that the first living creatures didn't have any senses at all, and through intermediary "freaks" eventually beings like us came to exist.
So there were ancient minds pondering quantized light, the anthropic principle, and evolution.
They just didn't have any ways to demonstrate who was actually right, and the group that eventually seized power declared much of what ended up being correct heretical and banned it.
They had BOTH insight and ingenuity. What they didn't have was the security or indispensability to protect those qualities from the masses who had neither.
Sometimes I think about how I might present a progression from electricity and transistors to fully functional computers for a future society that somehow lost the knowledge. Most of our computing devices won't last 100 years. The ones that do might be older equipment with a little more "silicon redundancy" or even materials that are more resistant to corrosion... if they aren't mined for it first. Given that we store almost all of our current knowledge in electronic form, corroding/losing the ability to retrieve it will likely mean the end of the art.
Once to figure out how to make it, and again to film it.
So he may end up with two of each project, one to keep, another to give away.
Astrology and astronomy were pursued by the same figures, much as Newton pursued alchemy as well as physics.
This mechanism comes up a lot. Is there a TL;DR about what's new in this particular submission?
Perhaps more terrifying is the fact that it is not the first time we've regressed or collapsed. The mysterious Late Bronze Age Collapse is another example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse Or, the Classic Maya civilization collapse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Maya_collapse
It is inconceivable for us to imagine a rapid regression today. Our civilization seems invincible, the knowledge seems to be too widespread. But most of our knowledge is brittle. If you were to send a time capsule forward with the recipes to remake our modern world, including eUV technology. How would you do it? (using extant literature)
Research papers require years of study and background knowledge to fully understand and they fully fail to capture the science involved. Patents are even more inscrutable. We couldn't send our CAD drawings and specifications forward either, because they require specialized knowledge as well. After all, how would they build an iPhone if they don't know how to make screws or glue? Or, the multi-layer PCBs etc.
Another renaissance to recreate our civilization from our published work would be nearly impossible. Or, take centuries to accomplish.
It may be fruitful to imagine ways to fit civilization into a box that can last tens of thousands of years, so that future generations can find it —— post apocalyptic tragedy —— and rapidly recreate our world.
To the contrary, I'm finding it increasingly likely that I will see the collapse of civilization within my lifetime, and I'm 57. I see two prospective tipping points on the horizon: the collapse of democracy in the U.S. leading to nuclear war, and climate change leading to world-wide food shortages. The former seems likely within 5-10 years, and the latter within 20-30.
(And BTW, I am not feeling anywhere near as sanguine about this as the text above makes it sound.)
I remember the late 90s doom and "oh no millenium 2000" gloom predictions, and 2012 nostradamus end of the world maya calendar the end is near. I read about the 80s cold war "will go hot nuclear any time" and can be seen in movies like Terminator.
US will not collapse, no nuclear war will happen, climate change is not even the biggest fuckup we are doing (cutting down the amazon is, biodiversity loss overall), but we post-pone the imminent danger from a scheduled Ice Age.
Another renaissance to recreate our civilization from
our published work would be nearly impossible. Or,
take centuries to accomplish.
We've long since used up the "easy" sources of energy on this planet - all of the fossil fuels conveniently located near the earth's surface have long been depleted. By the time they could possibly be replenished, the Sun will be nearing the end of its life. So we probably won't be bootstraping our way back to an advanced society via a second fossil fuel-powered industrial revolution similar to the first one.
The remaining energy sources are generally pretty tricky to harness.
For example, even if the knowledge to build nuclear reactors or solar panels is not lost during a civilization collapse, it will be awfully tough to actually get those power sources back online without an existing industrial infrastructure to mine/refine/transport all of the necessary ingredients.
If we get a "second chance" at this civilization thing, the road there is going to be insanely hard even if we're lucky enough to start out with all of the science-y stuff that our first civilization figured out eons ago.
What? No. You're making shit up and passing it as fact.
>Most anthracite and bituminous coals occur within the 299- to 359.2-million-year-old strata of the Carboniferous Period, the so-called first coal age.
>Astronomers estimate that the sun has about 7 billion to 8 billion years left before it sputters out and dies.
There are several other completely made up things in your post.
Is it evidence of widespread technological regression, or "this small group with strong leadership did amazing things, too bad nobody can do that anymore", or just people not wanting it anymore?
For centuries after it was built, there was no large scale collapse that could bring a widespread regression (there were many localized ones, including on the place that built it), and clockmaking was never considered a lost art or anything like that.
Just as a mass produced pencil isn't just a pencil, it is the capacity to produce the pencil.
They had the capacity to create precision gearing, which suggests a level of mechanical prowess that isn't matched until a century or so before the dawn of the industrial age.
Mahabharata a short distance from Jodpur in India, which Oppenheimer commented on.
Mohenjo Daro in Pakistan
Nuclear destruction of Sumer linked with the Anunnaki.
Pyramids in other places around the planet besides Egypt, its possible mainstream history isnt telling us everything or we have a sanitised version of history.
Also, is your name a reference to the Mars trilogy? Reading that now (:
We are actually performing early versions of such recreations as we speed towards both destroying ourselves and developing a lifeform that makes us obsolete, and yet many still don't examine the present moment against the past and future.
As for the Bronze Age collapse - in Alexandria around the 2nd century BCE following the conquest of Alexander the Great you had a ton of cultures of the Mediterranean comparing notes on their respective histories.
Most of those notes have been lost to us, but we have the general conclusions they drew which was that an Exodus from Egypt had occurred, it had been many different people and not just one, and they had conquered most of the Mediterranean.
And indeed, there's striking parallels between Ramses II, the Lybian appearing Pharoh with 50 sons, and stories like the Lybian king Danaus as part of Diodorus Siculus's Exodus fleeing Egypt from Aegyptus, his brother with 50 sons.
We know Ramses II captured many different peoples in battle, and that many of the groups captured later appeared as sea peoples, initially allied together with Lybia against Egypt during Ramses II's successor.
It only remains a mystery because of the reluctance of one group to think things occurred at all different to what's written in a single book scribed centuries later, and the reluctance of anyone not in that group to entertain that aspects of what's written in that book are a continuation of an oral history of actual events (though notably altered).
Acknowledging that I'm being edgy here...
"What do you get the man who has everything? Might I suggest a gravestone inscribed with the words: so what?” — Simon Munnery
I think I probably just wouldn't do it. In part because I suspect the main motivation is our existential angst more than a genuine desire to help unknown future persons.
"Seldon explains that his science of psychohistory foresees many alternatives, all of which result in the Galactic Empire eventually falling. If humanity follows its current path, the Empire will fall and 30,000 years of turmoil will overcome humanity before a second Empire arises. However, an alternative path allows for the intervening years to be only one thousand"
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series#Foundation_(...
Science!
(Clarification: it all sounds very narrative-fallacy to me. Hey, but feel free to downvote the opinion of a contrarian!)