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Thinking about this and going down the wikipedia rabbit hole of inventions scares me. I've heard the Dark Ages happened in part because society collectively for

Thinking about this and going down the wikipedia rabbit hole of inventions scares me. I've heard the Dark Ages happened in part because society collectively forgot how to re-create the advanced technology from ancients, so once things inevitably broke, people just became that less efficient. Another area which strikes me as complex as metalworking is textiles. What if we forgot how to use the machines for harvesting cotton, spinning it into threads and then weaving it into clothes? I wouldn't be able to help at all in such a catastrophe, despite holding advanced degrees. I'm afraid I wouldn't even know how to fashion a spindle, or operate one. Hopefully the internet has enough information that this doesn't happen again?

unethical_ban 7y ago
I agree. My hope is that I am as ignorant about our society's capacity to bootstrap important technologies, as I am in my own capacity to do so.
- segfaultbuserr 7y ago
  It reminds me about a book (Kevin Kelly?) that discussed technology transfer - it turns out that the process isn't straightforward at all, even if you already own the technology. Any existing technology is a chain of interdependence, transferring it requires one to rebootstrap everything from scratch. It has great practical implications (not only limited to space colony), one example is developing an industrial society in a developing country - even with full technological resources from developed nations, is it possible to skip the catastrophic heavy pollution from the crude industry that historically plagued the developed world, and instead, start directly at a more modern industry system that produces less pollution? The answer is unclear, some can be avoided, but others, possibly not.
NikolaeVarius 7y ago
Join your local makerspace/fablab. And a copy of https://www.amazon.com/Primitive-Technology-Book-Earth-Skills/dp/0879059117 https://www.amazon.com/Primitive-Technology-Book-Earth-Skill... Not a referral link
roywiggins 7y ago
Well, the scholars at the time thought so anyway. They were very keen on classical knowledge. More realistically, the "dark ages" were a time of political dislocation and fragmentation of trading networks, so Europe just got a lot poorer. Rome had knit together a vast trading network, but without Roman armies you couldn't trade long distances anymore. You forget how to build Roman roads when you don't have a government around to build roads, and even if you did, you don't have the money or manpower anyway. Medieval Europe invented a heavy plow, which the Romans never came up with, so it was not all disintegration. https://sciencenordic.com/agriculture-agriculture--fisheries-anthropology/how-the-heavy-plough-changed-the-world/1381548 https://sciencenordic.com/agriculture-agriculture--fisheries...
- paganel 7y ago
  Watermills were also on an evolutionary path (so to speak) in the early Middle Ages. From the dedicated wiki page [1]: > Largely unaffected from the turbulent political events following the demise of the Western Roman Empire, the importance of watermilling continued to grow under the new Germanic lords. (...) By Carolingian times, references to watermills in the Frankish Realm had become "innumerable". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_early_medieval_watermills#Historical_overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_early_medieval_watermi...
Symmetry 7y ago
Something I'm genuinely curious. What is the minimum number of people put together in a trade network sufficient to establish a particular technological framework? A hunter gather knows just as many things about the world as I do but will generally know the same things that everybody else in their tribe of the same gender knows. And of course there's access to specialized materials too to consider, starting with getting both copper and tin or arsenic in the same place during the Bronze Age. If we were trying to establish a settlement on Mars what would be the minimum number of people needed to make it self sustaining and able to build things like computers?

unethical_ban 7y ago

I agree. My hope is that I am as ignorant about our society's capacity to bootstrap important technologies, as I am in my own capacity to do so.

segfaultbuserr 7y ago
It reminds me about a book (Kevin Kelly?) that discussed technology transfer - it turns out that the process isn't straightforward at all, even if you already own the technology. Any existing technology is a chain of interdependence, transferring it requires one to rebootstrap everything from scratch. It has great practical implications (not only limited to space colony), one example is developing an industrial society in a developing country - even with full technological resources from developed nations, is it possible to skip the catastrophic heavy pollution from the crude industry that historically plagued the developed world, and instead, start directly at a more modern industry system that produces less pollution? The answer is unclear, some can be avoided, but others, possibly not.

NikolaeVarius 7y ago

Join your local makerspace/fablab. And a copy of https://www.amazon.com/Primitive-Technology-Book-Earth-Skills/dp/0879059117 https://www.amazon.com/Primitive-Technology-Book-Earth-Skill... Not a referral link

roywiggins 7y ago

Well, the scholars at the time thought so anyway. They were very keen on classical knowledge. More realistically, the "dark ages" were a time of political dislocation and fragmentation of trading networks, so Europe just got a lot poorer. Rome had knit together a vast trading network, but without Roman armies you couldn't trade long distances anymore. You forget how to build Roman roads when you don't have a government around to build roads, and even if you did, you don't have the money or manpower anyway. Medieval Europe invented a heavy plow, which the Romans never came up with, so it was not all disintegration. https://sciencenordic.com/agriculture-agriculture--fisheries-anthropology/how-the-heavy-plough-changed-the-world/1381548 https://sciencenordic.com/agriculture-agriculture--fisheries...

paganel 7y ago
Watermills were also on an evolutionary path (so to speak) in the early Middle Ages. From the dedicated wiki page [1]: > Largely unaffected from the turbulent political events following the demise of the Western Roman Empire, the importance of watermilling continued to grow under the new Germanic lords. (...) By Carolingian times, references to watermills in the Frankish Realm had become "innumerable". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_early_medieval_watermills#Historical_overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_early_medieval_watermi...

Symmetry 7y ago

Something I'm genuinely curious. What is the minimum number of people put together in a trade network sufficient to establish a particular technological framework? A hunter gather knows just as many things about the world as I do but will generally know the same things that everybody else in their tribe of the same gender knows. And of course there's access to specialized materials too to consider, starting with getting both copper and tin or arsenic in the same place during the Bronze Age. If we were trying to establish a settlement on Mars what would be the minimum number of people needed to make it self sustaining and able to build things like computers?