5 ms·

Author here, based on my reading of your comment, I think we're talking at cross purposes. Your comment seems to be about how these technologies aren't useful

Author here, based on my reading of your comment, I think we're talking at cross purposes. Your comment seems to be about how these technologies aren't useful for us in the present. AFAICT, it doesn't dispute that the knowledge was lost. An additional interpretation is that you're interpreting my writing as being from someone who thinks that "the Romans clearly built it better" etc. That's not the point I'm making. Yes, we have napalm and recipes for it. Yes, we have digital computers that are incalculably better than the Antikythera mechanism. Yes, we can trivially manufacture better concrete. And that's amazing, for us today, but how much better would it have been if we hadn't forgotten about these technologies in the first place and had continued to improve on them? Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now? The loss in knowledge doesn't matter (as much) anymore in the present, but it has held us back, measurably so. For a thousand years, between the Antikythera mechanism and a few hundred years ago, we somehow lost their equivalent of Kepler's laws, some version of calculus, precision machining, mechanical computing etc. For over a thousand years, we have no records of anyone producing devices that approached or surpassed its capabilities. What if the knowledge behind that device hadn't been lost and we were 1k years further along into our understanding of mathematics and computing? That's the point here. The point is that those technologies were exceptional at their time, but were still lost, and we are poorer for it, because it took away hundreds of years of erstwhile progress that could have been made had we remembered and kept building on them. Happy to hear how I could make the ending better though!

FpUser 4y ago
>"The point is that those technologies were exceptional at their time, but were still lost, and we are poorer for it, because it took away hundreds of years of erstwhile progress that could have been made had we remembered and kept building on them." I agree with you point. On the other hand I think if we did not forget anything and kept improving while still having medieval views we might have had exterminated ourselves already.
kragen 4y ago
I really enjoyed the post, even though I wasn't clear what part was fictional and what part was truthful. You might be interested in Lucio Russo's book The Forgotten Revolution. He describes how the Hellenistic scientific and technical culture which gave us Heron's aeolipile, Greek fire, the Antikythera mechanism, Archimedes' method of exhaustion, Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's size, Eucid's axiomatization of geometry, etc.†, was lost. Basically what happens was that when centers of science like Syracuse and Alexandria were conquered by the pre-scientific Romans, the philosophers who weren't massacred were dispersed to the four winds, preserving their knowledge in foreign lands if at all. In later generations, Christian fanatics lynched Hypatia and threw down the Egyptian temples, extinguishing the millennia-long knowledge of hieroglyphics. Russo reaches some conclusions that aren't generally accepted, but much of the history he reviews in the book is uncontroversial, if little-known — but starkly horrifying. It wasn't a gradual process of forgetting, but a series of genocidal catastrophes. Similar processes obliterated the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the Maya codices, the khipu, and in our own time most of the world's languages and folklore, much of the Timbuktu libraries, the Afghan relics of early Buddhism, and the collections of the archaeological museums in Iraq. ______ † I have omitted Roman cement and the separation of gold from silver because I don't have any reason to believe they came from the Hellenistic world.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  Exactly. When you look at the actual history of scientific progress or lack thereof, the reasons it stops/regresses are never technical or about people forgetting. They're about invasion, shifting power centers, economic collapse, societal decay, religious zealotry, and whatnot. And indeed, many of the moments where massive progress was made were flukes, not the norm -- very happy coincidences that were unlikely to continue for long. So the idea that we've lost progress due to "forgetting" makes as much sense as saying that a company shut down because the engineers forgot how to work with the codebase. No -- it was all about much larger events. The forgetting was a result, not a cause.
  - areoform 4y ago
    To be honest, I thought long and hard about bringing up what happened at Alexandria, but I thought against it. I wanted the piece to be more solution focused. The act of preservation in the now, making copies etc. is kind of like a prophylaxis against an adverse event. We are doing the mundane to prepare for the insane.
taeric 4y ago
But this is predicated on a non falsifiable claim that we could have built on these technologies. That they weren't extended to better things just a easily hints at them being technological dead ends. Consider the massive costs that went into many old structures. Often you could measure them in lives lost during construction. In the case of asbestos and leaded paint, lives and damage done by having used them. Now, I do believe we should have people study the past. I still like reading on old programming techniques. But progress is not necessarily held back by not building on what came before.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >Consider the massive costs that went into many old structures. Often you could measure them in lives lost during construction. Or the simple fact that laborers were not paid. Hard to compete against literal slave labor
  - User23 4y ago
    Volunteer labor is a thing. That’s how many cathedrals were built.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      If you volunteer enough, your salvation is all but assured. Doesn't exactly sound like volunteering to me.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        As a matter of fact, at least here in Germany a lot of cathedrals took decades, some even centuries to build - the Cologne Cathedral, for example, took way over six hundred years. Additionally, they were often built in "batches" and expanded and modified, schedule pretty much depending on some emperor or volunteer donations providing enough funds for the next section. Me and my s/o, who actually studied a lot of the German cathedrals for her master's degree, went on a tour across a lot of the cathedrals this summer with the 9-euro flat train ticket... it's utterly amazing what medieval people could pull off. If you're interested in old buildings, wait until the successor of the 9-euro ticket comes next summer and go on a trip yourself, it's definitely worth it.
larryliu 4y ago
Roman concrete is simply concrete made by pozzolan cement. You make pozzolan cement by grinding quicklime together with volcano ash, fly ash from coal power plants, or metallurgical slags.
- grosswait 4y ago
  But the author’s point still stands. That knowledge was lost and then rediscovered.
ordu 4y ago
> What if the knowledge behind that device hadn't been lost and we were 1k years further along into our understanding of mathematics and computing? I believe that knowledge is overrated on the long run. It is methods for knowledge creation what really matters. And incentives to apply the best known methods. Had you read Bret Devereaux talking on an absence of Roman Industrial Revolution?[1] No practical steam engine before it's time has come. Knowledge is created when it is needed. I believe the same stands for computing. It must be some new demand for calculation that created computing. Probably the development of economics. [1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
- nicky0 4y ago
  Computing was created because of the demand for calculating artillery trajectories and code breaking in the 1940s
  - eesmith 4y ago
    The Z3 was made for aerodynamics calculations, and more generally civil engineering.
  - ordu 4y ago
    I'm not sure that this is the whole story. Analytical Engine of Babbage was designed at 1830. It was not built at the time of course... But the idea was tried again and again unless it made it's way into practical applications. It seems to me that there was a demand. Probably not economics but engineering?
StillLrning123 4y ago
Distribution of knowledge is the only way forward. There where probably only a few people that had key knowledge to these technologies. Once they disappeared, so did the technology.
carlmr 4y ago
>Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now? Dead from climate change most likely.
dale_glass 4y ago
I still don't think it quite adds up. You're mixing two different things together because they look kinda similar on the surface but aren't. If you want to make the point that "what if we developed steam power sooner", then sure, that works so long you keep talking about steam power in Ancient Greece. Yes, knowledge did get lost there. But that's not what happened with the Saturn V. The knowledge didn't really go anywhere. We still have the engines and the designs, they're just technologically obsolete. We're not making them not because it's some lost wonder-technology we forgot how to make, but because it costs a lot of $$$ and there's no profit to be made by sending another lander to the Moon and science funding is scarce. That we don't see the asbestos covers much doesn't really mean anything because the actual knowledge is in the fields of heat management and materials science, and not magazine cover photos.
- areoform 4y ago
  Thanks for engaging with the piece so deeply! Really appreciate it. Just as legacy tech isn’t automatically better than today’s technology, today’s technology isn’t always better than legacy tech. The agency has gone back to the Apollo well many many times for these “technologically obsolete” designs because they effectively solved problems that we haven’t faced in decades. Example, the CSM’s umbilical connection was a work of art, it had to be reverse engineered from museum pieces for current gen spacecraft, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/umbilical_inspection.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/umbil... The F-1 engine’s turbopump and gas generators had to be taken apart by hand because we haven’t built anything close to their throughput for decades, https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/f1_sls.html https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/f1_sls.html Apollo’s phenolic resin heat shield led to the Phenolic-Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA) that was then studied by SpaceX to develop their current PICA-X heat shield. IIRC, there’s a fairly direct line between the Apollo parachutes and SpaceX, https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2017/t_3.html https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2017/t_3.html There are many more big and small examples that I can’t name off the top of my head. From the thermal roll to core sampling, having that knowledge allows us to learn from their experience and do better. Hundreds of thousands of extremely smart people worked on the program and they came up with some extremely interesting ideas along the way. It’s faster/more useful to have a library of their work to draw from rather than going to the well again and redoing it from scratch.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
> how much better would it have been if we hadn't forgotten about these technologies in the first place and had continued to improve on them? Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now? I don't think this is a possible world in the first place. The knowledge of steam engines and intricate mechanical machines wasn't "lost" by accident: it was lost because there was no good reason to develop it further. The Greek steam engine was a cool demo, neat little piece of stage magic for the temple whose doors it powered, but there weren't any practical applications in sight. I bet it also was a hell of a maintenance burden. The unfortunate reality of our lives seems to be that technology only propagates as long as there's enough funding for it. That means at least several people have to need it very much to support a single inventor. Many more people if there's a need for extra labor, or expensive resources (such as metals). That's as true today as it was 2000 years ago. What I'm saying is: the reason the Greek steam engine was forgotten is that there was no demand for it back then, and that's because of a combination of factors, such as: - It could do only so much, because other important technologies - such as precision manufacturing - weren't in place; - The things it could do could be served better and cheaper by other means - such as hired, slave[0] or animal labor; Learning history on my own[1], past the school curriculum, I was surprised to discover that a lot of technology was always there in the background. Medieval times weren't just a long period of stagnation - it's when the building blocks for industrial evolution were slowly invented. A lot of important developments happened in mining, where increasingly powerful and reliable pumps allowed people to dig deeper. The progress here was sustained, because it was paying for itself. The industrial revolution happened when things aligned just right. The steam engines could be manufactured cheaply and robustly enough, and put to important enough work, that they paid for themselves - which financed their improvements, which opened more net-profitable applications, and so on - creating a positive feedback loop that run so long, it triggered more feedback loops, and turned humanity into proper technological civilization. Note that there's a lot hiding in the "put to important enough work". The overall political and economic situation of the era was what created the "jobs" for steam engines, and that situation is downstream from technologies developed for sailing (progress in astronomy, healthcare and shipbuilding), communications (the printing press), and many others. Point being: inventions aren't islands; they can't sustain their existence if there isn't a need for them. The question "where would we be if we didn't forget ${technology that we 'forgot' and 'rediscovered' centuries later}" doesn't seem valid to me. ---- [0] - There's an argument I see raised every now and then that historically, technology made jumps when labor was expensive; conversely, cheap labor meant it was cheaper to just throw more bodies at any problem. [1] - I'd like to say "studying history", but what I really mean is just occasionally watching some high-quality documentaries and reading blog posts by people who (claim to) know this stuff.

FpUser 4y ago

>"The point is that those technologies were exceptional at their time, but were still lost, and we are poorer for it, because it took away hundreds of years of erstwhile progress that could have been made had we remembered and kept building on them." I agree with you point. On the other hand I think if we did not forget anything and kept improving while still having medieval views we might have had exterminated ourselves already.

kragen 4y ago

I really enjoyed the post, even though I wasn't clear what part was fictional and what part was truthful. You might be interested in Lucio Russo's book The Forgotten Revolution. He describes how the Hellenistic scientific and technical culture which gave us Heron's aeolipile, Greek fire, the Antikythera mechanism, Archimedes' method of exhaustion, Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's size, Eucid's axiomatization of geometry, etc.†, was lost. Basically what happens was that when centers of science like Syracuse and Alexandria were conquered by the pre-scientific Romans, the philosophers who weren't massacred were dispersed to the four winds, preserving their knowledge in foreign lands if at all. In later generations, Christian fanatics lynched Hypatia and threw down the Egyptian temples, extinguishing the millennia-long knowledge of hieroglyphics. Russo reaches some conclusions that aren't generally accepted, but much of the history he reviews in the book is uncontroversial, if little-known — but starkly horrifying. It wasn't a gradual process of forgetting, but a series of genocidal catastrophes. Similar processes obliterated the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the Maya codices, the khipu, and in our own time most of the world's languages and folklore, much of the Timbuktu libraries, the Afghan relics of early Buddhism, and the collections of the archaeological museums in Iraq. ______ † I have omitted Roman cement and the separation of gold from silver because I don't have any reason to believe they came from the Hellenistic world.

crazygringo 4y ago
Exactly. When you look at the actual history of scientific progress or lack thereof, the reasons it stops/regresses are never technical or about people forgetting. They're about invasion, shifting power centers, economic collapse, societal decay, religious zealotry, and whatnot. And indeed, many of the moments where massive progress was made were flukes, not the norm -- very happy coincidences that were unlikely to continue for long. So the idea that we've lost progress due to "forgetting" makes as much sense as saying that a company shut down because the engineers forgot how to work with the codebase. No -- it was all about much larger events. The forgetting was a result, not a cause.
- areoform 4y ago
  To be honest, I thought long and hard about bringing up what happened at Alexandria, but I thought against it. I wanted the piece to be more solution focused. The act of preservation in the now, making copies etc. is kind of like a prophylaxis against an adverse event. We are doing the mundane to prepare for the insane.

taeric 4y ago

But this is predicated on a non falsifiable claim that we could have built on these technologies. That they weren't extended to better things just a easily hints at them being technological dead ends. Consider the massive costs that went into many old structures. Often you could measure them in lives lost during construction. In the case of asbestos and leaded paint, lives and damage done by having used them. Now, I do believe we should have people study the past. I still like reading on old programming techniques. But progress is not necessarily held back by not building on what came before.

dylan604 4y ago
>Consider the massive costs that went into many old structures. Often you could measure them in lives lost during construction. Or the simple fact that laborers were not paid. Hard to compete against literal slave labor
- User23 4y ago
  Volunteer labor is a thing. That’s how many cathedrals were built.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    If you volunteer enough, your salvation is all but assured. Doesn't exactly sound like volunteering to me.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      As a matter of fact, at least here in Germany a lot of cathedrals took decades, some even centuries to build - the Cologne Cathedral, for example, took way over six hundred years. Additionally, they were often built in "batches" and expanded and modified, schedule pretty much depending on some emperor or volunteer donations providing enough funds for the next section. Me and my s/o, who actually studied a lot of the German cathedrals for her master's degree, went on a tour across a lot of the cathedrals this summer with the 9-euro flat train ticket... it's utterly amazing what medieval people could pull off. If you're interested in old buildings, wait until the successor of the 9-euro ticket comes next summer and go on a trip yourself, it's definitely worth it.

larryliu 4y ago

Roman concrete is simply concrete made by pozzolan cement. You make pozzolan cement by grinding quicklime together with volcano ash, fly ash from coal power plants, or metallurgical slags.

grosswait 4y ago
But the author’s point still stands. That knowledge was lost and then rediscovered.

ordu 4y ago

> What if the knowledge behind that device hadn't been lost and we were 1k years further along into our understanding of mathematics and computing? I believe that knowledge is overrated on the long run. It is methods for knowledge creation what really matters. And incentives to apply the best known methods. Had you read Bret Devereaux talking on an absence of Roman Industrial Revolution?[1] No practical steam engine before it's time has come. Knowledge is created when it is needed. I believe the same stands for computing. It must be some new demand for calculation that created computing. Probably the development of economics. [1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

nicky0 4y ago
Computing was created because of the demand for calculating artillery trajectories and code breaking in the 1940s
- eesmith 4y ago
  The Z3 was made for aerodynamics calculations, and more generally civil engineering.
- ordu 4y ago
  I'm not sure that this is the whole story. Analytical Engine of Babbage was designed at 1830. It was not built at the time of course... But the idea was tried again and again unless it made it's way into practical applications. It seems to me that there was a demand. Probably not economics but engineering?

StillLrning123 4y ago

Distribution of knowledge is the only way forward. There where probably only a few people that had key knowledge to these technologies. Once they disappeared, so did the technology.

carlmr 4y ago

>Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now? Dead from climate change most likely.

dale_glass 4y ago

I still don't think it quite adds up. You're mixing two different things together because they look kinda similar on the surface but aren't. If you want to make the point that "what if we developed steam power sooner", then sure, that works so long you keep talking about steam power in Ancient Greece. Yes, knowledge did get lost there. But that's not what happened with the Saturn V. The knowledge didn't really go anywhere. We still have the engines and the designs, they're just technologically obsolete. We're not making them not because it's some lost wonder-technology we forgot how to make, but because it costs a lot of $$$ and there's no profit to be made by sending another lander to the Moon and science funding is scarce. That we don't see the asbestos covers much doesn't really mean anything because the actual knowledge is in the fields of heat management and materials science, and not magazine cover photos.

areoform 4y ago
Thanks for engaging with the piece so deeply! Really appreciate it. Just as legacy tech isn’t automatically better than today’s technology, today’s technology isn’t always better than legacy tech. The agency has gone back to the Apollo well many many times for these “technologically obsolete” designs because they effectively solved problems that we haven’t faced in decades. Example, the CSM’s umbilical connection was a work of art, it had to be reverse engineered from museum pieces for current gen spacecraft, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/umbilical_inspection.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/umbil... The F-1 engine’s turbopump and gas generators had to be taken apart by hand because we haven’t built anything close to their throughput for decades, https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/f1_sls.html https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/f1_sls.html Apollo’s phenolic resin heat shield led to the Phenolic-Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA) that was then studied by SpaceX to develop their current PICA-X heat shield. IIRC, there’s a fairly direct line between the Apollo parachutes and SpaceX, https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2017/t_3.html https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2017/t_3.html There are many more big and small examples that I can’t name off the top of my head. From the thermal roll to core sampling, having that knowledge allows us to learn from their experience and do better. Hundreds of thousands of extremely smart people worked on the program and they came up with some extremely interesting ideas along the way. It’s faster/more useful to have a library of their work to draw from rather than going to the well again and redoing it from scratch.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

> how much better would it have been if we hadn't forgotten about these technologies in the first place and had continued to improve on them? Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now? I don't think this is a possible world in the first place. The knowledge of steam engines and intricate mechanical machines wasn't "lost" by accident: it was lost because there was no good reason to develop it further. The Greek steam engine was a cool demo, neat little piece of stage magic for the temple whose doors it powered, but there weren't any practical applications in sight. I bet it also was a hell of a maintenance burden. The unfortunate reality of our lives seems to be that technology only propagates as long as there's enough funding for it. That means at least several people have to need it very much to support a single inventor. Many more people if there's a need for extra labor, or expensive resources (such as metals). That's as true today as it was 2000 years ago. What I'm saying is: the reason the Greek steam engine was forgotten is that there was no demand for it back then, and that's because of a combination of factors, such as: - It could do only so much, because other important technologies - such as precision manufacturing - weren't in place; - The things it could do could be served better and cheaper by other means - such as hired, slave[0] or animal labor; Learning history on my own[1], past the school curriculum, I was surprised to discover that a lot of technology was always there in the background. Medieval times weren't just a long period of stagnation - it's when the building blocks for industrial evolution were slowly invented. A lot of important developments happened in mining, where increasingly powerful and reliable pumps allowed people to dig deeper. The progress here was sustained, because it was paying for itself. The industrial revolution happened when things aligned just right. The steam engines could be manufactured cheaply and robustly enough, and put to important enough work, that they paid for themselves - which financed their improvements, which opened more net-profitable applications, and so on - creating a positive feedback loop that run so long, it triggered more feedback loops, and turned humanity into proper technological civilization. Note that there's a lot hiding in the "put to important enough work". The overall political and economic situation of the era was what created the "jobs" for steam engines, and that situation is downstream from technologies developed for sailing (progress in astronomy, healthcare and shipbuilding), communications (the printing press), and many others. Point being: inventions aren't islands; they can't sustain their existence if there isn't a need for them. The question "where would we be if we didn't forget ${technology that we 'forgot' and 'rediscovered' centuries later}" doesn't seem valid to me. ---- [0] - There's an argument I see raised every now and then that historically, technology made jumps when labor was expensive; conversely, cheap labor meant it was cheaper to just throw more bodies at any problem. [1] - I'd like to say "studying history", but what I really mean is just occasionally watching some high-quality documentaries and reading blog posts by people who (claim to) know this stuff.