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What an incredible comment, thanks kragen! Good sources for anyone wanting to right realistic alternative history stories. Although I can't help but think that

What an incredible comment, thanks kragen! Good sources for anyone wanting to right realistic alternative history stories. Although I can't help but think that most people, ancient or otherwise, would me most interested in applications. The foundations, like atomic theory, or chemistry, require...something else. Curiosity? A culture that lauds discovery and motivates scientists at least in part with vanity? Greed? A desire for more, to conquer ones enemies? Science is very good at making better weaponry and more indirectly, for reducing scarcity for all, making larger populations, and so larger armies.

kragen 4y ago
Thank you! Me, I'm more interested in building alternate futures than writing stories about alternate histories. It's just more difficult! If you want to understand what cultural or political factors have prevented innovation, maybe a good place to start is the cultures that are currently failing at innovation. I mean, on an absolute scale, that's all of them, but some are failing harder than others: the PRC is failing harder than Taiwan, the US is failing harder than the PRC, Brazil is failing harder than the US, Nigeria is failing harder than Brazil, and Malawi is failing harder than Nigeria. Maybe an especially good place to start would be the stories of people who have succeeded at innovation despite finding themselves in the most unfavorable conditions, like William Kamkwamba's application of windmills in Malawi. He wrote a book about it: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Any STEM graduate school research program in the US or Europe is full of people who are advancing foundational knowledge, but moved there from cultures that are doing very poorly at advancing foundational knowledge. It might be worthwhile to talk to them. Of course, the situation 100, 1000, or 10'000 years ago was not the same as the situation in Malawi today. On one hand, the people who invented fossil-fueled mass production, movable type, and gunpowder 1000 years ago in China didn't have to compete economically against cheaper and technically superior imports from the modern US, the way Malawians do today; on the other, they couldn't import knowledge and tools from the US, and they didn't know that the things they were attempting were even possible.
- vitiral 4y ago
  I would LOVE any thoughts you had on Civboot.org, it sounds like you have a good high level of what roadmap and the general technologies thag would need to be put in place to make it possible.
  - kragen 4y ago
    I'll take a look! The git repo is a little heavyweight, but it looks like my cellphone connection can handle it. I've spent US$6 on cellphone credit for the last 2 months, and that's about to run out, so I'm getting 60 KiB per second now. It'd sure be nice to have a version of the repo that doesn't include dozens of megabytes of digital audio! I feel like maybe the stated goal, "be able to create a technology stack which can self-replicate with 500 motivated students in 8 years, starting with a US-equivalent 8th grade education," is going to be hard to measure progress against, because every test run takes 8 years. Worse, it takes 500 motivated students with only a US-equivalent 8th-grade education! A much more ambitious goal would be easier to measure progress against. A thing I'm not totally clear on is whether this is an unbootstrapping effort like Primitive Technology and bootstrappable.org, where your 500 motivated 12-year-olds are marooned on a desert island with only the shirts on their backs and the Ark of the Covenant, and have the primary objective of building a jumbo jet from found materials within 8 years, or a bootstrapping effort like Debian reproducible builds. To take an extreme example, if you had a 3-D printer with a "reproduce self" button that needs only rocks, clay, wood, dirt, sand, ore, etc., to print out a new identical 3-D printer, even a single 12-year-old could operate it, even if not very motivated. Would such a "seed factory" qualify as a Civboot? (Properly documented, of course, and with enough additional UI that you could use it to make other things.) What if there's no feasible way to build it by hand from rocks and clay etc. if you don't already have one (or the entirety of civilization)? A Drexlerian nanotech assembler would be such a device, for example. You like Forth. I'm still not convinced about Forth. In the abstract it seems like it should be about as good or bad as C: the base language facilities are slightly more primitive, but Forth permits arbitrary compile-time computation, an advantage C doesn't have. In practice Forth doesn't seem to pay off as a language; I think it's better understood as an operating system for embedded work, with the Forth language taking the role of Tcl or Bash or editor keyboard macros: it's a scriptable user interface, IDE, and "debugger", in the sense that you can inspect the contents of memory. But maybe I just don't have enough experience with Forth yet, and if I just keep practicing, it will become easier and more appealing than C. I've at least gotten over the initial hump of trying to keep all my data on the stack all the time instead of using VARIABLEs (or VALUEs). But I still find writing things in Forth a lot more bug-prone than writing them even in C, much less in something like Python, which gives probably a 2-4 times speedup over C in programming time. And I still find Forth code a lot harder to read than C or assembly. (You might be interested in StoneKnifeForth.) I agree that electronics are probably pretty important, because control is one of the crucial aspects of such a cyclic fabrication system, and one that can dramatically simplify its other aspects. Electronics are an extremely appealing way to do control because electrons are so light, so, at any fixed power level, you can move electrons about 100 times faster than entire atoms. So although there are a huge number of ways to do computation (relays, fluidics, hydraulics, pneumatics, Drexler's rod logic, Merkle's buckling-spring logic, DNA epigenetics, etc.) electronics have a really huge power advantage. (Solid-state electronics especially, though there do exist gigahertz-capable vacuum tubes.) I see electronics fabrication as primarily a question of material processing capabilities: purification, measurement, etching, vacuum pumping, ion bombardment, air filtering for clean benches or clean rooms, stuff like that. Patterning is of course necessary, but the hard part of patterning, at least the way we do it now, is making good photoresists. Is that the kind of feedback you're looking for?

kragen 4y ago

Thank you! Me, I'm more interested in building alternate futures than writing stories about alternate histories. It's just more difficult! If you want to understand what cultural or political factors have prevented innovation, maybe a good place to start is the cultures that are currently failing at innovation. I mean, on an absolute scale, that's all of them, but some are failing harder than others: the PRC is failing harder than Taiwan, the US is failing harder than the PRC, Brazil is failing harder than the US, Nigeria is failing harder than Brazil, and Malawi is failing harder than Nigeria. Maybe an especially good place to start would be the stories of people who have succeeded at innovation despite finding themselves in the most unfavorable conditions, like William Kamkwamba's application of windmills in Malawi. He wrote a book about it: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Any STEM graduate school research program in the US or Europe is full of people who are advancing foundational knowledge, but moved there from cultures that are doing very poorly at advancing foundational knowledge. It might be worthwhile to talk to them. Of course, the situation 100, 1000, or 10'000 years ago was not the same as the situation in Malawi today. On one hand, the people who invented fossil-fueled mass production, movable type, and gunpowder 1000 years ago in China didn't have to compete economically against cheaper and technically superior imports from the modern US, the way Malawians do today; on the other, they couldn't import knowledge and tools from the US, and they didn't know that the things they were attempting were even possible.

vitiral 4y ago
I would LOVE any thoughts you had on Civboot.org, it sounds like you have a good high level of what roadmap and the general technologies thag would need to be put in place to make it possible.
- kragen 4y ago
  I'll take a look! The git repo is a little heavyweight, but it looks like my cellphone connection can handle it. I've spent US$6 on cellphone credit for the last 2 months, and that's about to run out, so I'm getting 60 KiB per second now. It'd sure be nice to have a version of the repo that doesn't include dozens of megabytes of digital audio! I feel like maybe the stated goal, "be able to create a technology stack which can self-replicate with 500 motivated students in 8 years, starting with a US-equivalent 8th grade education," is going to be hard to measure progress against, because every test run takes 8 years. Worse, it takes 500 motivated students with only a US-equivalent 8th-grade education! A much more ambitious goal would be easier to measure progress against. A thing I'm not totally clear on is whether this is an unbootstrapping effort like Primitive Technology and bootstrappable.org, where your 500 motivated 12-year-olds are marooned on a desert island with only the shirts on their backs and the Ark of the Covenant, and have the primary objective of building a jumbo jet from found materials within 8 years, or a bootstrapping effort like Debian reproducible builds. To take an extreme example, if you had a 3-D printer with a "reproduce self" button that needs only rocks, clay, wood, dirt, sand, ore, etc., to print out a new identical 3-D printer, even a single 12-year-old could operate it, even if not very motivated. Would such a "seed factory" qualify as a Civboot? (Properly documented, of course, and with enough additional UI that you could use it to make other things.) What if there's no feasible way to build it by hand from rocks and clay etc. if you don't already have one (or the entirety of civilization)? A Drexlerian nanotech assembler would be such a device, for example. You like Forth. I'm still not convinced about Forth. In the abstract it seems like it should be about as good or bad as C: the base language facilities are slightly more primitive, but Forth permits arbitrary compile-time computation, an advantage C doesn't have. In practice Forth doesn't seem to pay off as a language; I think it's better understood as an operating system for embedded work, with the Forth language taking the role of Tcl or Bash or editor keyboard macros: it's a scriptable user interface, IDE, and "debugger", in the sense that you can inspect the contents of memory. But maybe I just don't have enough experience with Forth yet, and if I just keep practicing, it will become easier and more appealing than C. I've at least gotten over the initial hump of trying to keep all my data on the stack all the time instead of using VARIABLEs (or VALUEs). But I still find writing things in Forth a lot more bug-prone than writing them even in C, much less in something like Python, which gives probably a 2-4 times speedup over C in programming time. And I still find Forth code a lot harder to read than C or assembly. (You might be interested in StoneKnifeForth.) I agree that electronics are probably pretty important, because control is one of the crucial aspects of such a cyclic fabrication system, and one that can dramatically simplify its other aspects. Electronics are an extremely appealing way to do control because electrons are so light, so, at any fixed power level, you can move electrons about 100 times faster than entire atoms. So although there are a huge number of ways to do computation (relays, fluidics, hydraulics, pneumatics, Drexler's rod logic, Merkle's buckling-spring logic, DNA epigenetics, etc.) electronics have a really huge power advantage. (Solid-state electronics especially, though there do exist gigahertz-capable vacuum tubes.) I see electronics fabrication as primarily a question of material processing capabilities: purification, measurement, etching, vacuum pumping, ion bombardment, air filtering for clean benches or clean rooms, stuff like that. Patterning is of course necessary, but the hard part of patterning, at least the way we do it now, is making good photoresists. Is that the kind of feedback you're looking for?