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The Antikythera mechanism gives me nightmares. Just as the suggestion that a lack of transmissions from intelligent life means the existence of a great filter.
by areoform 5y ago
The Antikythera mechanism gives me nightmares. Just as the suggestion that a lack of transmissions from intelligent life means the existence of a great filter. The Antikythera mechanism is a strong indicator of technological regression in human beings.
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse Or, the Classic Maya civilization collapse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Maya_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.
- xyzzyz 5y agoOr, even better documented, the civilizational collapse in the aftermath of the fall of Western Roman Empire. It recovered in the second half of the medieval period, but in the West, the first few centuries after the fall were truly Dark Ages indeed.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- marcosdumay 5y ago> The Antikythera mechanism is a strong indicator of technological regression in human beings. 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.
- areoform 5y agoThe mechanism suggests a strong "industrial" base to support it. They had to get the metals from somewhere, find the expert artisans to craft from somewhere else, source the parts, find the tooling etc. 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.
- marcosdumay 5y agoCommercial metalworking stayed around all the time until today. It only increased and improved. (It's made of bronze, it's not like bronze working was lost.) The tooling may evidence some kind of regression. I really don't know what kind of tooling was needed to create this, although gears by themselves and high precision in a single mechanism do not say much. From the looks of it, this devices requires a lot of theoretical knowledge, but not so much practical one (but that's an uninformed opinion, if you have information, it would be great). The theory was not lost in any way.
- hasmanean 5y agoDon’t forget the fact that the mechanism used a model made by Hipparchus, but after Hellenism the Greeks adopted the Ptolemaic geocentric view of the cosmos with epicycles and stuff. Epicycles delivered more precision but at the cost of much greater complexity. Ultimately it took Kepler to simplify it even more through his iterative equation though I can’t imagine how to turn that into a mechanical model. The Antikythera mechanism was possible because of the simplicity of the underlying solar system model that lent itself to easy implementation by gears. It’s much more elegant than even modern methods of computing orbits. That’s the main surprise I find in its design…how much they could simplify it (and not how complex the mechanical construction is).
- nemo 5y agoFWIW, the device is called an 'orrery'. When it was made in Syracuse, it wasn't a product of an industrial base, but was a project made by a certain sort of mathematician and scholar doing cutting edge engineering and applied mathematics. The Antikythera one seems to go back to the traditions from Archimedes' workshop which was amazingly advanced. Archimedes wrote a treatise on building them (now lost, alas). Orrery making in something like Archmedes' tradition continued on for hundreds of years outside Syracuse, esp. in Athens and Alexandria, and we have references to orrery making through the ages. The art of making them was a product of libraries and schools where they were created by scholars as an academic craft, not an industrial production facility.
- momojo 5y agoReminds me of Asimov's Foundation trilogy. "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_(1951) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series#Foundation_(...
- interroboink 5y agoYou might like Jonathan Blow's talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk Also, is your name a reference to the Mars trilogy? Reading that now (:
- areoform 5y agoYes, it is! I even had the chance to talk to Kim Stanley Robinson about it :)
- aspenmayer 5y agoDid this exchange happen on HN, by chance? Color me curious.
- lisper 5y ago> It is inconceivable for us to imagine a rapid regression today 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.)
- FooHentai 5y ago>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? 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.
- short12 5y agoOr a copy of ozymandias?
- JohnBooty 5y agoAnother renaissance to recreate our civilization from our published work would be nearly impossible. Or, take centuries to accomplish. It might not be possible at all. 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.
- asdff 5y agoCouldn't you just burn plastic directly? Mine a landfill and burn it up.
- ecpottinger 5y agoMine it with slave labour to separate the items, and you end up with glass, metals and plastics is amounts that would be worth a fortune to a roman level civilization. We think of it as garbage, bur that garbage already represents a lot of energy already used to process them to that level.
- kbelder 5y agoNot just to a Roman level civilization; I think it'll be immensely valuable to us in the near future. It's a treasure trove of materials, we just need better refining tech to separate out all the metals and rare earths, reprocess the plastic, etc.
- istinetz 5y ago
- akomtu 5y agoIt's the normal progression of civilizations. When one gets too rusty, it dies to lets its small and better offspring live: those people start from scratch, but they retain knowledge and rebuild all bells and whistles very quickly. We are the fifth. America will be home for the sixth and then, in a thousand years, it will become a history too. This is what Revelation 17:10 talks about, but in a more poetical form.
- npunt 5y agoIf you're interested in the subject, I'd recommend the Fall of Civilizations podcast which digs into various civilizations and their decline: https://www.patreon.com/fallofcivilizations_podcast https://www.patreon.com/fallofcivilizations_podcast
- kromem 5y agoAnd yet even in antiquity there were people thinking that the nature of their own existence was a recreation of the past from within the future. 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).
- cryptonector 5y agoSome of my friends believe the covid vaccines are part of a depopulation scheme. If they're right then the collapse of our civilization would be happening right now though we might not be conscious of it yet.