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Your point isn't coherent - your very same reasoning also shows that societies today regularly do things - orders of magnitude more things - that societies from

Your point isn't coherent - your very same reasoning also shows that societies today regularly do things - orders of magnitude more things - that societies from antiquity could not. You claim that we are unable to build structures that can survive the elements long term, only in a later post to point out and categorically dismiss tons of structures modern societies build that are likely to survive long term because those don't align with your value system. We are communicating on the internet. Let that sink in.

oldandtired 8y ago
What structures today are likely to survive long term? My point is that there is an attitude today that societies from antiquity are "primitive". This is the salient point. They were different and took a different technological path. Yes we can do many things they didn't and they did many things we can't. The point is the attitude of today towards the societies of the past. All we can really say is that they were different technologically. So what if we can communicate on the internet? That is a blip on the time scale. How long will that actually last? Is it a sign of "high technology" or is it just a different technological path? If one looks at the technology available in the 1930's to the 1950's, we use a completely different technology today and all one can say is that it is different. After looking at the subject for many years (decades in fact), all I can say is that we have travelled down a different technological path. Is it better or more advanced than another? I can't say since I can't see what could have been. Technological systems can be robust or frail. How would you classify the technological systems of today?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- abdullahkhalids 8y ago
  > What structures today are likely to survive long term? The structures today will not survive long term because we choose not to make them so they survive long term. Its not that we can't. Using modern construction equipment, we can replicate pyramids with a fraction of the labor and effort that the Egyptians expended IF we so choose. But we don't. Building pyramids or houses or even roads that survive greater than a few decades is not useful because we keep improving our construction know-how and can make more and more comfortable habitats every few years. Comfort and price is what we choose to optimize for, not suitability. > Yes we can do many things they didn't and they did many things we can't. This is categorically untrue. We can do pretty much anything and everything the ancients do, but rarely choose to do so, because we can do better than them. You can nitpick about how we forgot specific ratios of ingredients in some cement or something, but thats nitpicking because we can always find the best comfort/price cement ourselves.
  - oldandtired 8y ago
    As for choosing to not make structure to last, I know of various buildings that were intended to be available for a period of at least 50 years. These structures began to fail after only 25 years. If we design for a period of "x" and we have failures at half of "x", we have some serious problems to overcome. One of them is that as a society we are so short-sighted that we cannot think past today, let alone 50 to 100 years. If we are continually improving our construction techniques then explain why there are various research groups trying to work out what and how the ancients did things? Why do these research groups (in both private and public organisations) want to know this information? Is it because the techniques and materials used by those ancients are not known today? Is it because those techniques are superior to those we use today? As far as cement is concerned, there are a number of different research groups that are looking at why we cannot make long lasting cements. On interesting facet about cement is that steel reinforcing actual decreases the life of any structure that uses this kind of technology. You make a comment that we could replicate ancient structures "if" we chose to do so. You use the example of a pyramid as your example. Yet how they were constructed is an active research area because we don't know how it was done. There are lots of ideas, but no actual certainty on how they were constructed. Without knowing how they did and why they did what they did, it becomes very difficult to duplicate. As I said before, we use different technologies to them. I suggest that you read various histories of technological development, including the late 19th and early 20th centuries to see what was done and how we lost the ability to do today. Sometimes we have been able to recover specific technological pathways because we have been able to get access to those individuals who were involved in previous generations. I'll go back to my original comment that we, today, have an attitude problem when we consider earlier or ancient societies as being "primitive". It is an unfortunate fact of life that we do not care to preserve knowledge from the past. This is often done because we believe that we are more technologically advanced than we were even 10 years ago. Yet there are consequences to that attitude that will come back and bite us as a society and has already bitten us at various times in the last set of decades. When you say that the statement "Yes we can do many things they didn't and they did many things we can't." is categorically untrue, then I can only assume that you are not familiar with various projects that are trying to discover how the previous societies were able to achieve particular outcomes (in a technological sense) that we can't do yet, even with all of our vaunted technological skills.
- pharrington 8y ago
  Do not be intellectually lazy; if say two technologies differ, actually examine the specifics of those technologies so you can have something quantity to compare to. Otherwise, are you actually equivocating technologies that were developed via trial and error with technologies that can only be developed by first having accurate, reliable, and detailed understandings of several aspects of nature? Or are you claiming that ancient societies understood statistical dynamics and quantum physics? Or are you claiming that understanding nature does not, in fact, allow one to more easily and more capably predicate and manipulate nature? edit: One example: you say that technologies from the 30s and 50s (quite telling that you lump these two decades together) can only be said to be different from technology now, not that today's is comparatively high technology. As far as I am aware, fission weapons and energy were the most technology sophisticated tech developed in the 50s, requiring what was, at the time, the latest discoveries in what would later become quantum chromodynamics. Nuclear technology today is categorically more advanced: cheaper to build, higher energy yields, and smaller, all while no longer requiring the absolute top tier physicists to build. edit2: "Technological systems can be robust or frail. How would you classify the technological systems of today?" Again, we are communicating on a world wide information network that is both theoretically and empirically robust to physical and digital attacks and misconfigurations of critical nodes. The device you are typing your replies on contains a CPU with billions of transistors that are sensitive to the slightest electromagnetic phenomenon, yet it doesn't break. The electrical grid you're a part of might not be robust to local failures, but again, that is demonstrably a cost savings decision. Localities that have spent the money building power grids with the predicted appropriate level of redundancy do not have long term power outages.
  - dang 8y ago
    Your comments in this thread have broken the HN guidelines. "Your point isn't coherent" is already name-calling in the sense they ask you not to do; but "Do not be intellectually lazy" is worse; it's both uncivil and patronizing. If you'd please edit that kind of thing out of your posts to Hacker News, we'd appreciate it.
    - oldandtired 8y ago
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > What structures today are likely to survive long term? Most modern, underground vault structure will last far longer than the Pyramids. They won’t look as pretty as they do now. But the Pyramids were once adorned with marble.
- Chris_Jay 8y ago
  >What structures today are likely to survive long term? The Georgia Guidestones come to mind. I've been quite interested in the pre-ice age golden age theory lately but I think the part missing from your analysis is that we're farther ahead on a chemical/particle tech branch than on a social engineering tech branch. We've essentially scaled up competing warbands to a planetary scale - a class 1 civilization we are not, and seem more likely to develop one on Mars than Earth. Building the Georgia Guidestones probably cost much less in human terms than a comparably complex henge, but we lack the mindset to collectively see the value in it. To make a gaming analogy of your point, I would say we're objectively ahead on one branch of the tech tree but we overlook simpler technologies on branches we haven't explored yet, to the point of not realizing other civilizations were farther ahead in some regards while being behind in others.

oldandtired 8y ago

What structures today are likely to survive long term? My point is that there is an attitude today that societies from antiquity are "primitive". This is the salient point. They were different and took a different technological path. Yes we can do many things they didn't and they did many things we can't. The point is the attitude of today towards the societies of the past. All we can really say is that they were different technologically. So what if we can communicate on the internet? That is a blip on the time scale. How long will that actually last? Is it a sign of "high technology" or is it just a different technological path? If one looks at the technology available in the 1930's to the 1950's, we use a completely different technology today and all one can say is that it is different. After looking at the subject for many years (decades in fact), all I can say is that we have travelled down a different technological path. Is it better or more advanced than another? I can't say since I can't see what could have been. Technological systems can be robust or frail. How would you classify the technological systems of today?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
abdullahkhalids 8y ago
> What structures today are likely to survive long term? The structures today will not survive long term because we choose not to make them so they survive long term. Its not that we can't. Using modern construction equipment, we can replicate pyramids with a fraction of the labor and effort that the Egyptians expended IF we so choose. But we don't. Building pyramids or houses or even roads that survive greater than a few decades is not useful because we keep improving our construction know-how and can make more and more comfortable habitats every few years. Comfort and price is what we choose to optimize for, not suitability. > Yes we can do many things they didn't and they did many things we can't. This is categorically untrue. We can do pretty much anything and everything the ancients do, but rarely choose to do so, because we can do better than them. You can nitpick about how we forgot specific ratios of ingredients in some cement or something, but thats nitpicking because we can always find the best comfort/price cement ourselves.
- oldandtired 8y ago
  As for choosing to not make structure to last, I know of various buildings that were intended to be available for a period of at least 50 years. These structures began to fail after only 25 years. If we design for a period of "x" and we have failures at half of "x", we have some serious problems to overcome. One of them is that as a society we are so short-sighted that we cannot think past today, let alone 50 to 100 years. If we are continually improving our construction techniques then explain why there are various research groups trying to work out what and how the ancients did things? Why do these research groups (in both private and public organisations) want to know this information? Is it because the techniques and materials used by those ancients are not known today? Is it because those techniques are superior to those we use today? As far as cement is concerned, there are a number of different research groups that are looking at why we cannot make long lasting cements. On interesting facet about cement is that steel reinforcing actual decreases the life of any structure that uses this kind of technology. You make a comment that we could replicate ancient structures "if" we chose to do so. You use the example of a pyramid as your example. Yet how they were constructed is an active research area because we don't know how it was done. There are lots of ideas, but no actual certainty on how they were constructed. Without knowing how they did and why they did what they did, it becomes very difficult to duplicate. As I said before, we use different technologies to them. I suggest that you read various histories of technological development, including the late 19th and early 20th centuries to see what was done and how we lost the ability to do today. Sometimes we have been able to recover specific technological pathways because we have been able to get access to those individuals who were involved in previous generations. I'll go back to my original comment that we, today, have an attitude problem when we consider earlier or ancient societies as being "primitive". It is an unfortunate fact of life that we do not care to preserve knowledge from the past. This is often done because we believe that we are more technologically advanced than we were even 10 years ago. Yet there are consequences to that attitude that will come back and bite us as a society and has already bitten us at various times in the last set of decades. When you say that the statement "Yes we can do many things they didn't and they did many things we can't." is categorically untrue, then I can only assume that you are not familiar with various projects that are trying to discover how the previous societies were able to achieve particular outcomes (in a technological sense) that we can't do yet, even with all of our vaunted technological skills.
pharrington 8y ago
Do not be intellectually lazy; if say two technologies differ, actually examine the specifics of those technologies so you can have something quantity to compare to. Otherwise, are you actually equivocating technologies that were developed via trial and error with technologies that can only be developed by first having accurate, reliable, and detailed understandings of several aspects of nature? Or are you claiming that ancient societies understood statistical dynamics and quantum physics? Or are you claiming that understanding nature does not, in fact, allow one to more easily and more capably predicate and manipulate nature? edit: One example: you say that technologies from the 30s and 50s (quite telling that you lump these two decades together) can only be said to be different from technology now, not that today's is comparatively high technology. As far as I am aware, fission weapons and energy were the most technology sophisticated tech developed in the 50s, requiring what was, at the time, the latest discoveries in what would later become quantum chromodynamics. Nuclear technology today is categorically more advanced: cheaper to build, higher energy yields, and smaller, all while no longer requiring the absolute top tier physicists to build. edit2: "Technological systems can be robust or frail. How would you classify the technological systems of today?" Again, we are communicating on a world wide information network that is both theoretically and empirically robust to physical and digital attacks and misconfigurations of critical nodes. The device you are typing your replies on contains a CPU with billions of transistors that are sensitive to the slightest electromagnetic phenomenon, yet it doesn't break. The electrical grid you're a part of might not be robust to local failures, but again, that is demonstrably a cost savings decision. Localities that have spent the money building power grids with the predicted appropriate level of redundancy do not have long term power outages.
- dang 8y ago
  Your comments in this thread have broken the HN guidelines. "Your point isn't coherent" is already name-calling in the sense they ask you not to do; but "Do not be intellectually lazy" is worse; it's both uncivil and patronizing. If you'd please edit that kind of thing out of your posts to Hacker News, we'd appreciate it.
  - oldandtired 8y ago
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> What structures today are likely to survive long term? Most modern, underground vault structure will last far longer than the Pyramids. They won’t look as pretty as they do now. But the Pyramids were once adorned with marble.
Chris_Jay 8y ago
>What structures today are likely to survive long term? The Georgia Guidestones come to mind. I've been quite interested in the pre-ice age golden age theory lately but I think the part missing from your analysis is that we're farther ahead on a chemical/particle tech branch than on a social engineering tech branch. We've essentially scaled up competing warbands to a planetary scale - a class 1 civilization we are not, and seem more likely to develop one on Mars than Earth. Building the Georgia Guidestones probably cost much less in human terms than a comparably complex henge, but we lack the mindset to collectively see the value in it. To make a gaming analogy of your point, I would say we're objectively ahead on one branch of the tech tree but we overlook simpler technologies on branches we haven't explored yet, to the point of not realizing other civilizations were farther ahead in some regards while being behind in others.