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Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

• frankbreetz 7y ago
  If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive.
  • whatshisface 7y ago
    For that to happen our current civilization would have to be defined as every civilization on Earth.
    • mannykannot 7y ago
      That's pretty much where we are going, if we are not already there.
    • mcv 7y ago
      Only the civilization that uses the current hard drive standard and related electronic and digital standards. There are no hard lines between civilizations of course, but societies that agree on common standards for a number of things sounds like one of the better definitions I can come up with.
    • cookieswumchorr 7y ago
      there currently is one single civilization earth. All the cultural diffences between countries are far less than it would take to define different civilizations
      • ekianjo 7y ago
        > there currently is one single civilization earth. All the cultural diffences between countries are far less than it would take to define different civilizations What is your definition of a civilization then? As far as i know there is no "global" culture, you can live in many different places and have a totally different everyday life experience.
        • pygy_ 7y ago
          Science and technology (and maybe trade?) are our global culture.
          • ekianjo 7y ago
            I just said there is no such thing as a global culture. It's not because you have Starbucks in every big city that the experience of living in different places is the same.
            • pygy_ 7y ago
              There are local peculiarities, but we share a common core built around science an technology. You can learn to drive a car anywhere on earth. You'll learn the same maths, physics, chemistry and biology. You can use phones everywhere. That is culture, globally shared.
  • mc32 7y ago
    A lot more people are literate and we have lots of libraries everywhere. So for that to happen there would have to be a complete directed effort to abandon learning. By all countries. It’s highly unlikely even if we had a catastrophic natural disaster like an asteroid hit taking out or majorly degrading infrastructure. Such an event on the contrary would probably prompt the most able country left to seek to become the leader (technically and politically) by taking the opportunity to best those left in a worse state.
    • cameronbrown 7y ago
      The problem with that theory is theoretically you could wipe out most technical knowledge within a generation. All it takes is for a lot of books to be burned and a lot of engineers/scientists to die.
    • Kaiyou 7y ago
      Looking at what goes around inside schools, there seems to be an ongoing directed effort to abandon learning, already.
  • Tepix 7y ago
    We don't have an example of such a complete collapse in the world since the arrival of globalization. It's easy to envision that a lot of knowledge will be conserved somewhere.
    • YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
      Yes, in our hard drives.
      • kijin 7y ago
        No, in books and journals. We're still printing them by the billions every year. Software of various kinds might be lost, since we usually don't print them out. But the theory required to re-implement them are all available on paper, sitting in a library somewhere. A book on algorithms and data structures will be far more useful to a future civilization than raw source code for a hardware architecture that won't even exist anymore.
        • YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
          I often have to read articles published in the MLJ, or the proceedings of IJCAI and AAAI in the 1990's. That was the time when machine learning was predominantly preoccupied with modelling the world with logic languages, particularly propositional logic (and, less often, first-order logic). Although I have a background in logic programming and I study logic-based machine learning for my PhD, I find that I often have trouble to understand important terminology - and I mean "important" in the sense that entire papers are based around it, but take it for granted that the reader is very familiar with the terms, what they mean, and how they're used. For example, I recently struggled with the following terms: "finite axiomatization", "explanation-based learning", "constructive induction", "knowledge-level learning", "weakest preconditions", and others. I eventually managed to get on top of those terms, sufficiently to read and understand the papers that used them. I did this by searching online for an explanation ("finite axiomatization" is used in mathematical logic) and by digging in the literature for terms that were defined in previous works. I found all of that material online, of course- and where I couldn't find a copy online, I basically had to "wing it" and hope I grokked it right. Searching for anything published even in a major AI conference or journal before the 1990's is a big pain and even university libraries seem to lack physical or electronic copies. To conclude- yes, there are going to be various works left behind if civilisation collapses. But a lot of them are going to be like maps without the key. The people surviving us will be able to read them, but not able to understand them, because they will miss key knowledge, that is currently spread around hundreds of thousands of sources that only experts in niche sub-fields are even aware of.
  • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    A lot of modern resource extraction relies on easily available energy. The days of oil coming out of the ground or being able to dig for coal on the surface have long gone. My guess is you are right, once lost it won't be coming back.
    • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      There's Methane Hydrates underground too. More of that, than oil. Estimated 6X. So we have 6 more tries at civilization?
      • dredmorbius 7y ago
        Oil came shooting out of the ground, and even now generally flows. Methane hydrates largely seem to be frozen in tundra and on the seafloor. Even accessing them tends to precipitate release. Liquids are far more fungible than either solids or gasses, and methane hydrates tend to be the latter transforming wantonly to the former with very little in-between. Sort of the worst of all possible worlds. Also a tremendously worse greenhouse gas, though not quite so long-lived as CO2. Centuries rather than millennia.
        • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
          Oil that fuels our civilization comes from 2000ft down, and takes sophisticated drilling rigs to capture. The days of 'shooting out of the ground' is a century gone, and never fueled much. Methane Hydrate can be 'harvested' by drilling, then pumping a little warm water down the hole, then piping the gas into the harbor where the city enjoys endless free natural gas.
          • dredmorbius 7y ago
            Note the use of past tense in my comment. And oil still flows, as a liquid, from wells. Sometimes thicker, sometimes more volatile. But liquid. The most productive wells and fields tended to be heavy initial producers. Among the most prolific single wells I'm aware of is the First Oil Well of Bahrain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Oil_Well,_Bahrain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Oil_Well,_Bahrain Drilled in 1931, initially flowing at 9,600 bbl/day, peaking at 80,000 bbl/day, and (as best I can make out still producing at 35,000 bbl today, 89 years after first oil. Contrast with stripper and marginal oil wells, producing 10-15 bbl/day, or less. But even a stripper well produces a liquid, which stays a liquid (modulo condensate and NGLs). You can pump liquid from the ground, and store it in loosely-covered tanks. It will flow through nonpressurised or lightly-pressurised pipelines. Methane hydrates are solids which sublime to gas. You can't pump solids. You can't store gas in unenclosed containers. Piping requires pressurisation, cooling, or both. This is done, yes, but gas remains generally more problematic than oil. Whilst not an intractable problem, it's a more technical, constrained, limiting, and expensive prospect. Something tells me that "a little warm water" becomes a more complex prospect at deep-sea depths, pressures, and temperatures.
  • rnernento 7y ago
    Why? There's sooooooo much electronic equipment in the world right now. Huge datacenters, landfills filled to the brim with electronics. I think it's a stretch to assume that would all just evaporate. You could load the entirety of Wikipedia onto an e-reader and power it with almost no electricity. Data centers are basically bunkers and there is a tremendous amount of replication occurring. If anything I think we're likely to leave by far the largest accumulation of knowledge in history, regardless of how bad things get.
    • gdfasfklshg4 7y ago
      > Data centers are basically bunkers and there is a tremendous amount of replication occurring. All encrypted at rest. Lose those keys and the data is gone...
      • rnernento 7y ago
        I think there are plenty of unecrypted copies of Wikipedia floating around. Good point though.
    • dredmorbius 7y ago
      The supply chain is long and fragile. With interruptions in the provisioning of everything from the electricity required to parts for power management, cooling, air handling, networking, memory, disks, CPU, etc., the half-life of such centres would likely be on the order of a few years, even assuming local power. Talent is probably the biggest factor. Even absent greater civilisational collapse, a multi-billion-dollar-a-year income company such as Google can barely keep the lights on for a given project for 5-8 years, if that. Many startups fail even faster.
      • rnernento 7y ago
        I'm imagining the equivalent of our archaeologists finding their way into one of those data centers and figuring out what to do with a hard drive. I wonder what a datacenter would look like 10,000 years from now if no one did anything to it. obviously it wouldn't be powered but I'm thinking there would be recoverable data.
  • ekianjo 7y ago
    > If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive. A collapse is never binary (unless you are talking about planetary collapse where life does not recover at all anytime soon). It's actually very hard to even imagine circumstances where the whole body of knowledge we have would be completely lost. Even with 10% of the knowledge and existing machinery left, we could pretty much rebuild everything in a matter of centuries.
    • baybal2 7y ago
      A fictional universe of battletech illustrates that quite realistically. They have fusion reactors for every housewife, godlike metallurgy and rocket engines, but they can't make advanced computers no matter how hard they try after an interstellar nuclear civil war put an end to interstellar trade and, thus, complex economies and long supply chains. Such things require enormous societal organisations to work, and that requires period of civility, prosperity, and material security to make people with brains to do things like that and not to scramble to work on better bomb shelters. After few generations of people living caring about only basic necessities, the society went into downward spiral because the less scientists and engineers there were, the less were available to teach the next generation of them, and maintain advanced manufacturing equipment. Despite the basic knowledge of science still being there, there were nobody with hands on skills and material capacity to make complex manufacturing equipment even after a period of relative prosperity 300 years later. It's like asking a average random engineering or physics PhD to make AMSL 3500 EUV scanner. He will have a basic idea how the thing works, but it will take him more than a lifetime just to make a single part of it if he were to work alone without societal and material facilities for making something so complex.
      • rleigh 7y ago
        I think there's one key flaw in this, as well as it being fiction. There's a difference between being able to do something once or at very low volumes, and then doing it at scale for production. So long as you understand the basic principles, you could make an integrated circuit using hand-drawn acetate or glass sheets and some really simple optics. Or ignore integrated circuits and make stuff from discrete components which you made yourself. You only need to care about making complex EUV scanners much, much later on. In research labs around the world, we make stuff almost completely from scratch all the time. It's costly in terms of labour, and it's doing low volumes with lower tolerances. But it is making real, working stuff. In thousands of companies, research findings are developed into manufacturable products, with a lot of additional development work, optimising and refining. We already know you can go from most concepts, to research, development and production. We've done it, and will continue to do it, in every field we can think of. I think to assert that we couldn't reinvent every one of the technologies humanity has discovered and developed fails to recognise just how resourceful and ingeneous we can be if we have the drive and opportunity. It might be that some technologies would be harder to reinvent, or would take longer to reinvent, but we're a capable lot and I'd bet we could get up to speed quite quickly given a few hints about what was possible. There are thousands of manufacturing techniques from the last century which we have lost the capability to use. Material quality changes, loss of knowledge and skills through retirement, fires, water damage etc. But we could regain each of them if the need was there. Look at FOGBANK for a recent example of a capability which was lost and regained. It takes time, money and resources, but it's possible. The main thing we have in today's world which a collapse would eliminate is effectively limitless energy, and redeveloping that would be far harder than any individual technology. They would lack the more easily exploitable resources we already exhausted, and it would take time to overcome that hurdle through additional technological advances. But that is not a hard barrier. They would have to develop alternative sources and work out different strategies. This might delay things, but it wouldn't stop them entirely. We had sophisticated civilisation before the discovery of coal and oil, and electricity. Wind, water, solar and wood were widely used for mechanical and heating purposes long before electricity was discovered.
  • imtringued 7y ago
    There isn't a lot of essential technology beyond energy, agriculture and mining. The biggest driving factor is actually making a society that rewards technological progress. Give that society half a millenia and it will invent computers again. If you wanted to let a society recover from technological collapse then you would merely need a list of possible inventions ordered by the date of their invention. 3D CAD models with micrometer tolerances are not useful to such a society anyway.
    • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      Oh you could shortcut tremendously. Once photography was invented (1830s) we could have had integrated circuits. If we had known they were possible. Which we do now. There's ideas that can survive long after devices turn to dust. The germ theory of disease. The Staff system. Ops planning. Cross-fertilization and hybridization. Optics. With these ideas, the devices can be recreated, and in a better sequence that we accidentally created them the first time.
      • monocasa 7y ago
        On the other end, we might not be able to reinvent nuclear technology. Quite a bit of that was based on the Shinkolobwe mine which had 65% uranium ore deposits. These days finding 1% uranium ore is a lucky find.
        • comicjk 7y ago
          That is a fascinating story. It makes fictional countries based on hidden mines, like Wakanda, seem much more plausible.
    • ergl 7y ago
      Given that we've depleted most easily accessible mines as well as easy coal and oil sites, I very much doubt that any future civilization will be able to reach our technological level ever again.
  • pygy_ 7y ago
    Alternatively, assuming the current automation trend holds on, our technology may survive the collapse of humanity...
• jordanbeiber 7y ago
  On this topic - Oswald Spenglers observations on the topic of civilizational collapse are an interesting read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West > Spengler's model of history postulates that any culture is a superorganism with a limited and predictable lifespan.
  • jstewartmobile 7y ago
    Now the superorganism is global. Who will be left to carry the torch?
    • platistocrates 7y ago
      Civilizations don't die, they fragment and reform. The analogy of an organism is being stretched too far.
    • adamrezich 7y ago
      That is quite the claim.
  • ekianjo 7y ago
    > Spengler's model of history postulates that any culture is a superorganism with a limited and predictable lifespan. A superorganism, yes, with a limited lifespan, yes, if you stretch it until the extinction of humans, but a "predictable" lifespan, that's laughable at best: the more information is transformed into data, the longer a culture will last, and the less predictable its lifetime will be.
    • jordanbeiber 7y ago
      I’m just saying the observations are interesting, not stating what a historian and philosopher wrote 100 years ago as an absolute fact. The article reminded me of ”the decline of the west”, which in turn makes me connect to Asimov, for some reason.
  • wsy 7y ago
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• ddxxdd 7y ago
  This feels reminiscent of the current issue of long-term data storage. Flash drives are volatile and can lose your data any minute. Solid State drives are slightly less volatile, and a hard disk has magnetic fields that will last decades, but nothing will keep our gigabytes of data alive and intact for future archaeologists. If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. On a side note, I enjoy reading John Baez's answers to common physics questions: http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/
  • 24gttghh 7y ago
    >but nothing will keep our gigabytes of data alive and intact for future archaeologists Not so, it seems: https://www.archmission.org/5d-optical-memory https://www.archmission.org/5d-optical-memory
    • cadence- 7y ago
      This sounds great. I’m wondering if this technology will ever be available for cunsumer use, similar to CDs or DVDs. The article didn’t mention current costs of this technology.
  • ekianjo 7y ago
    > If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. There is no form of storage that cannot be destroyed. Even stone scriptures eventually erode and fade away. The best thing we can do is duplicate everything as much as we can and hope to reduce the loss over time.
    • ThomPete 7y ago
      Agree, Which is exactly what we do.
    • dredmorbius 7y ago
      All knowledge is a palimpsest, I'm increasingly convinced.
    • 7y ago
• mtrovo 7y ago
  Maybe a silly question but how well connected was the world during Greek and Persian civilisations? Shouldn't their ideas and works survive on neighbours empires that we have a good track record? I wonder if it's possible that some of the inventions attributed to China and India today could be tracked to works lost on one of these civilisations collapses.
  • arethuza 7y ago
    I guess one question there would be which Greek civilisation - there was a significant collapse of civilisation (the "Late Bronze Age collapse") starting around 1200BC or so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse The works of Homer, written down much later, are probably based on oral histories of the times before this collapse. There still seems a lot of debate as to what caused this widespread collapse. What I find fascinating is that there are vast ruins like Gla that aren't even mentioned by Homer that appear to date from just before this time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gla
  • wickerman 7y ago
    Before the late bronze age collapse, they were very very well connected: regular commercial trade between the entire mediterranean is attested through massive numbers of letters found. And it wasn't just Greece: Egypt, Mitani, Hitites, Cannaanites, etc etc were all regularly interchanging knowledge, tech and commercial goods. You can find temples in Egypt decorated in Mycenean styles. Mycenean style pottery got everywhere. It was very modern.
  • netsensei 7y ago
    Alexander of Macedonia conquered a vast empire right up to the Indus River. Then there's the Silk Road who connected the Eurasian continent economic, cultural and political influence for centuries. So, the spread of ideas across cultures is pretty much established. The problem is that the survival of specific historic records across centuries or millennia is tenuous at best. First hand accounts are extremely rare and most of what we know about those times was handed down by copying what was deemed relevant throughout time. Lesson number one each historian learns is to ask critical questions about the source material. Who wrote this? What do we know about the contemporary context? Does other material corroborate with what we are reading now? How about our own hindsight bias when reading records today? What about other biases that played out at the time? Oftentimes, it's not possible to ascertain a theory or a hypothesis, how things actually went down, simply because we lack the source material. And just as often we may get caught unaware by our own assumptions that were handed down to us by teachers, authors, movies, art,... As such, most historians will tell you that while it's plausible that the origins of some technologies root back further in time, there's little point in looking for evidence as there is simply no historic or archaeological record available. That's where you'll find that a falsifiable theory turns into mere speculation. A historical researcher therefore only builds on top of verified sources. Much like a criminal investigator trying to establish the raw facts that support a given narrative.
• john_minsk 7y ago
  If something happens in the world able to cause a collapse of our civilization - the preservation of knowledge will be the least of our problems. I see little point in trying to solve this issue. But while we are here - we can make copies of useful knowledge and try to have them as in tact as possible...
  • interfixus 7y ago
    In the land of collapsed technology, an accessible copy of Wikipedia may be a priceless gem.
• abs221 7y ago
  I think populism took hold of United states politics at some point in the last 30-40 years and since then we've been looking inwards ever since and stopped looking outwards and expanding our presence. Such a shame.
• abhishekjha 7y ago
  Isn't spacetime an all time storage system? You can't burn it, chafe it, erode it. Its is going to be there forever. Even if there's something that you think has been lost(like the library of Alexandria or the Roman empire) is waiting to be seen again. It is never lost. These `movies` of spacetime is being saved on a forever store.
  • tim333 7y ago
    Though kind of lost from the perspective of our bit of space time even if there's scope for historical recreation.
  • petters 7y ago
    > Isn't spacetime an all time storage system? I don't think it is? What does "storage" mean? It refers to something that keeps something else invariant over time. Spacetime is time itself and can not be considered "storage".
  • typon 7y ago
    Not if black holes lose information.
  • isoprophlex 7y ago
    Storage is useless without retrieval. Good luck implementing a system to replay your movies of spacetime...
  • polyterative 7y ago
    If you can find a way to retrieve the info, yes
  • dredmorbius 7y ago
    Storage requires retrieval, as well as well as an encoding and preserving mechanism. Much as users don't want backups, they want restores, authors don't want books, they want readers. There's an interesting parallel between transmissions and recordings I'd noticed some time ago, that doesn't seem to be much commented on in discussions of information theory, though I'm not sure if it's because it's obscure or obvious: A transmission utilises variations in time in a low-noise channel to deliver information over space to a receiver which does not have to move or sweep relative to the signal. A recording utilises variations in space in a low-variance medium to deliver information through time, to a reader which must move or sweep relative to the encoding. Each further relies on encoding, decoding, is subject to noise or deterioration, and may be subject to context or inference. Probably other factors as well. Recordings can, of course, be moved through space (though a single recording can be in only a given location at a given time). Transmissions also travel through time at some rate, not exceeding the speed of light. There are systems which combine transmission and recording (notably computers). Transmission and recording each play a role in virtually all message chains. And there may be some forms of encoding (possibly holographic?) which either combine both methods or utilise others (though I'm inclined to see holograms as forms of recordings). "Spacetime" as an all-time storage system, by itself, either doesn't make sense or is so vague as to be meaningless. Perhaps you could clarify. Also: there's no inherent conservation law of information. Quite the opposite.
• chrisco255 7y ago
  This quote: "Ecologically, these Archaic hunters and gatherers had moved one entire link down the food chain, thereby eliminating the approximately 90-percent loss in food value that occurs when one feeds on an animal that is a plant-eater." This is just completely false. All meat consumed is bioavailable protein and nutrients. Even more so when it's cooked. Plants have reduced bioavailability due to high oxalate, phytic acid, and lectins. Humans would have never evolved the ability to eat meat if it didn't confer a natural advantage over foragers.
  • solotronics 7y ago
    Also, animals can digest many forms of plant that are useless as human food such as plains grasses and tree leaves. Vegetarianism is elitist in that many people on earth cannot afford to foregoe any availible source of protein and food, there are starving people already and telling someone in Africa they shouldn't eat a chicken that forages near their house is pretty narrow minded. I tend to eat vegetarian on my own but this is only possible because I am privileged in my income.
    • bilbo0s 7y ago
      I agree with everything you said vis-a-vis elitism. Having mentioned that, I just wanted to point out that for the poor in certain parts of Africa, meat is pretty hard to come by. There are a lot of people on this planet who have to eat plants or fish not for any perceived health benefit, but literally because it is the only food available to their families. It's certainly gotten much better in Africa, when I was younger there were certain places where there was no food, and you'd bring in aid that was basically all plant and legume based. Over time, I came to realize this practice probably did more harm than good but that's orthogonal to the point. Point is, there are a lot of non-elite vegetarians. Lots of people who eat such a diet simply to survive.
    • HNcantBtrustd 7y ago
      Vegetarian is lower cost and better for the environment. Protein per calorie doesn't seem comparable.
• nvahalik 7y ago
  When reading about what Physcon, I reminded me of an interview[0] I recently listened to with Drs. James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian. They bring up some of these very ideas and how they are encountering them today in our society: i.e. people who see science and reason as "master's tools" of "oppression". It seems that everything old is new again. [0]: https://youtu.be/YDFL3xwEEG8 https://youtu.be/YDFL3xwEEG8
  • devoply 7y ago
    There is a logic to that and the logic is partially found among Luddites and will continue to "annoy" us. In that technology in a hierarchical civilization like ours is highly dis-empowering and supports those at the top of the hierarchy. Not to mention all the science which is bullshit and simply made as justification for funding. And the culture that goes with it which is often parodied on Reddit on /r/iamverysmart. The Sociology of knowledge and science in our civilization leaves much to be desired in terms of distribution of power. All the various -isms are each their own religion with their own power dynamics. Their truth is in many ways questionable and its a question as to whether its power structure is not mostly make belief propped up by power and money to further its own agenda. Scientism, new atheism, whatever you want to call it is really a side show. James Lindsay, Dawkins, etc. don't have any real power. They are just a sideshow to the real power plays that go on in the background.
  • Carioca 7y ago
    As a Brazilian, I see a MUCH larger threat from the current right-wing government than from lefties inside academia. While the relationship between natural/hard/exact sciences and social/soft sciences can indeed be very strained, there's very little interference in the actual content of research. Meanwhile, the State Assembly of São Paulo formed an Investigative Comittee that just requested the content of all research produced by the three state universities in the last 8 years to look for bias under the guise of fiscal responsibility[1]. The commitee is led by a conservative state congressman who never attended college. 1: https://www.adusp.org.br/index.php/defesauniv/3408-deputada-tucana-pede-que-usp-unesp-e-unicamp-apresentem-a-cpi-lista-com-todas-as-pesquisas-realizadas-nos-ultimos-oito-anos https://www.adusp.org.br/index.php/defesauniv/3408-deputada-..., link in Portuguese
• benj111 7y ago
  "When the Romans took over, they dumbed things down" Without reading the cited book, the case doesn't seem to have been made for this. "then we have the first four books by Apollonius on conic sections—the more elementary ones—but the other three have been lost" Maybe the 4th volume was just wrong, or an index, or so highly valued it was separated from the other 3. Or maybe the rich hand side of the bookshelf got rot. Is there any more to this?
• agumonkey 7y ago
  I couldn't help but reading `Civilizational Collapse – Part IV` .
• sgt101 7y ago
  We would have known about machines like the Antikythera mechanism because the Romans wrote about them : specifically Cicero documented the existence of these kinds of machines (that could predict the motion of the planets).
  • gwern 7y ago
    The only reason anyone pays any attention to that throwaway line in Cicero is because the Antikythera mechanism exists. Can you find a single modern reference to that Cicero passage - pre-Antikythera mechanism - which interprets it, in full generality, as proving the Greco-Romans had analogue computing developed to such a high extent?
    • sgt101 7y ago
      No! You are right, but isn't that super interesting? Especially given various other descriptions of automata, and also some of the descriptions of medieval automata.
• fallingfrog 7y ago
  If our current civilization collapses, I think it’s unlikely that another similar one would arise- or if it did it would happen much more slowly. There are no more easily accessible seams of rich ores of any kind in the world; the deposits remaining require a lot of energy and technology to use since they are low grade ores and it would be very difficult to get to a high enough technology level to use them without already having the refined minerals. A chicken and egg problem. https://images.app.goo.gl/5aNH7AWvb3V745ZH6 https://images.app.goo.gl/5aNH7AWvb3V745ZH6