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One of my favorite quotes from Iain M. banks’ Culture series, paraphrased here since I don’t recall which book it’s in, is that technological progress is more l

One of my favorite quotes from Iain M. banks’ Culture series, paraphrased here since I don’t recall which book it’s in, is that technological progress is more like scaling a rock face than climbing a ladder. There is so much room for surprise and incomprehension. I sometimes think about how vast the parameter space of our physical universe is, and if that vastness means we wouldn’t be able to recognize ancient advanced technology if it’s far enough outside of our current mode of progress. My favorite example is handing an SD card with all of Wikipedia and the Gutenberg Project and maybe even the Wayback Machine on it to a Roman emperor. He’d look at it and might have a mild interest in the geometrical metal bits on an otherwise insignificant tiny flake of weird material. If the deliverer were to tell him that it contained millions of documents, he wouldn’t believe it. An expert in the field of storage media could, if for some reason permitted, spend years trying to explain it to the scholars of the time. Even if the expert succeeded in convincing them, it would take an unimaginable effort lasting lifetimes to ever make use of the thing. It would not succeed. Not because those people were stupid, but because the specialization that’s needed to understand the artifact is so far away from from their cultural knowledge and capabilities as to be unreachable. Why should we expect our culture be any different? The primary counter-argument to this is math and physics, and it’s a pretty strong one. It holds up quite well when dealing with past civilizations that are beneath or somewhere close to our current level of understanding. If you’ll permit another flight of fancy though, imagine an ancient society that figured out how to encode information in the irregularities of crystalline structures: every lame-ass quartz medallion we’ve unearthed could be the equivalent of a 10TB hard drive, and we’d never be the wiser. I think this is pretty unlikely, but it’s good to be humble and interrogate your assumptions.

jacobr1 6y ago
My favourite example came from my 9th grade physics class, our textbook told a story that attempted to teach scientific method. Imagine a soda vending machine. Now imagine that I tell you that when you insert money and press the buttons, small goblins are can see what buttons are being pressed, take the money and it put it in a box, and then hand you the selected soda. The textbook even had helpful diagrams that seemed plausible (presuming you had such creatures). Now tell me why this is or isn't so ... and prove it even! How many of you have ever opened up or observed a vending machine (well, on HN I bet that number is surpassingly high, but presume you haven't). It was fantastic exercise in intellectual humility. For your SD Card example though, I'll nitpick. Sure, just a card and explanation won't get you very far ... but I think something like an iPad (with a good power-supply) would produce enough evidence to convince them (depending upon the individual, I grant there might be some who just attributed it to supernatural forces even in the face evidence and explanation). I suspect humans in general are more willing to deal with "blackbox" technology that has practical application than most tinker types on HN would admit. Very little historical technology that was hard earned with trail-and-error has a theoretical basis known to even skilled practitioners. Even today, to most most people I know, the technology they use on a daily might as well be magic. Sure they know there some kind of "science" beyond it, but I'm also not sure they could convince me it wasn't just goblins if I demanded some theory of it worked.
- throwanem 6y ago
  I mean, one of the first major papers about supercapacitors from back in the late 50s, early 60s, something around that, included a line like "we don't know what's actually going on inside this component when we use it this way, but it sure does store a lot of energy, here's how to make one". There's nothing shocking or unreasonable or even old-fashioned about understanding what something does before we wonder why it does it. In fact, I'm pretty sure the origin of almost all human knowledge has been precisely in questions of exactly that sort.
  - eru 6y ago
    Thermodynamics was largely invented to understand how steam engines work.
  - andi999 6y ago
    Last time i checked high temperature superconductors were not understood as well.
zaphirplane 6y ago
Why do you think that an old civilization with deeply held beliefs of gods, magic, seers, oracles ... etc find it hard to believe that a library worth of books has been shrunk down. There is only a small window where magic/gods was being supplanted by monotheistic dogma that is plausible. On the other hand you tell me this dot contains the total sum of knowledge and I’d be nice ... or a drop of this liquid would destroy a solar system I’d be where is the lid
- mongol 6y ago
  What would persuade them? It would be really hard to explain how it would be possible.
- eru 6y ago
  What people profess to believe in and how they act are two different things.
- filoeleven 6y ago
  There’s a huge difference between belief in an artifact as holding magical powers and the expectation that you could make practical use of it. I might be wrong about the emperor’s belief. I chose an SD card particularly because it looks insignificant. Getting an emperor to say “this is a sacred relic” is still a long way off from getting an emperor to say “let us endeavor to unlock the secrets of this relic.”
codeulike 6y ago
One of my favorite quotes from Iain M. banks’ Culture series Its from "Matter" Hippense cleared his throat and said, "The type of progress you guys are used to doesn't scale into this sort of civilisational level; societies progress until they Sublime - god-like retirement, if you will - and then others start again, finding their own way up the tech-face. But it is a tech-face, not a tech-ladder; there are a variety of routes to the top and any two civs who've achieved the summit might well have discovered quite different abilities en route. Ways of keeping technology viable over indefinite periods of time are known to have existed aeons ago, and just because something's ancient doesn't mean its inferior."
jula432vdf 6y ago
As far as we know, quasars could be fully artificial, and around them you could find some of our future friends. and those things would be pretty outdated - ancient - technology by time we spotted them.

jacobr1 6y ago

My favourite example came from my 9th grade physics class, our textbook told a story that attempted to teach scientific method. Imagine a soda vending machine. Now imagine that I tell you that when you insert money and press the buttons, small goblins are can see what buttons are being pressed, take the money and it put it in a box, and then hand you the selected soda. The textbook even had helpful diagrams that seemed plausible (presuming you had such creatures). Now tell me why this is or isn't so ... and prove it even! How many of you have ever opened up or observed a vending machine (well, on HN I bet that number is surpassingly high, but presume you haven't). It was fantastic exercise in intellectual humility. For your SD Card example though, I'll nitpick. Sure, just a card and explanation won't get you very far ... but I think something like an iPad (with a good power-supply) would produce enough evidence to convince them (depending upon the individual, I grant there might be some who just attributed it to supernatural forces even in the face evidence and explanation). I suspect humans in general are more willing to deal with "blackbox" technology that has practical application than most tinker types on HN would admit. Very little historical technology that was hard earned with trail-and-error has a theoretical basis known to even skilled practitioners. Even today, to most most people I know, the technology they use on a daily might as well be magic. Sure they know there some kind of "science" beyond it, but I'm also not sure they could convince me it wasn't just goblins if I demanded some theory of it worked.

throwanem 6y ago
I mean, one of the first major papers about supercapacitors from back in the late 50s, early 60s, something around that, included a line like "we don't know what's actually going on inside this component when we use it this way, but it sure does store a lot of energy, here's how to make one". There's nothing shocking or unreasonable or even old-fashioned about understanding what something does before we wonder why it does it. In fact, I'm pretty sure the origin of almost all human knowledge has been precisely in questions of exactly that sort.
- eru 6y ago
  Thermodynamics was largely invented to understand how steam engines work.
- andi999 6y ago
  Last time i checked high temperature superconductors were not understood as well.

zaphirplane 6y ago

Why do you think that an old civilization with deeply held beliefs of gods, magic, seers, oracles ... etc find it hard to believe that a library worth of books has been shrunk down. There is only a small window where magic/gods was being supplanted by monotheistic dogma that is plausible. On the other hand you tell me this dot contains the total sum of knowledge and I’d be nice ... or a drop of this liquid would destroy a solar system I’d be where is the lid

mongol 6y ago
What would persuade them? It would be really hard to explain how it would be possible.
eru 6y ago
What people profess to believe in and how they act are two different things.
filoeleven 6y ago
There’s a huge difference between belief in an artifact as holding magical powers and the expectation that you could make practical use of it. I might be wrong about the emperor’s belief. I chose an SD card particularly because it looks insignificant. Getting an emperor to say “this is a sacred relic” is still a long way off from getting an emperor to say “let us endeavor to unlock the secrets of this relic.”

codeulike 6y ago

One of my favorite quotes from Iain M. banks’ Culture series Its from "Matter" Hippense cleared his throat and said, "The type of progress you guys are used to doesn't scale into this sort of civilisational level; societies progress until they Sublime - god-like retirement, if you will - and then others start again, finding their own way up the tech-face. But it is a tech-face, not a tech-ladder; there are a variety of routes to the top and any two civs who've achieved the summit might well have discovered quite different abilities en route. Ways of keeping technology viable over indefinite periods of time are known to have existed aeons ago, and just because something's ancient doesn't mean its inferior."

jula432vdf 6y ago

As far as we know, quasars could be fully artificial, and around them you could find some of our future friends. and those things would be pretty outdated - ancient - technology by time we spotted them.