The oldest copper mines in Timna National Park date back to 4500BC | Hacker News Reader

The oldest copper mines in Timna National Park date back to 4500BC

bbc.com

66 pointsMiriamWeiner18 comments

I'll need a lot of convincing that this is "Writing and other marks left behind by ancient miners" and not "random vandalism".

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/wm/live/624_351/images/li...

I had the exact thought. Also what writing is that? Historically you would assume it’s Roman Latin. If that’s one of their evidence, it does not point to King Solomon temple. As you would assume some Hebrew text.

This article is a cross between tourism PR and faulty reasoning by an Indiana Jones wannabe

Greek would also be possible, which would put the writing no earlier than 500BC. To my eye it couldn't pass for the earlier Phoenician alphabet.

When you're talking about a mine that was likely operated for centuries, it's also hard to say "everyone who worked here was a slave" or "everyone who worked here was a well-paid highly educated craftsman".

Huh. I was just reading yesterday that the Negev is the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface in the world (1.8My). https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-e...

If anyone is interested in the history of this area, there is an interesting theory about the location of Mount Sinai.

https://www.i24news.tv/en/tv/replay/holyland-uncovered/x6h81...

Copper is used for electrical traces, I take it. If technology allows for light (laser) based switching, could less metals be used in the construction?

Copper allows creating a movement of electrons, which is what you usually call electricity. Any kind of light, while it allows transferring a signal, does need to have the signal transformed from electricity to light on one end, and from light to electricity on the other.

Replacing a very long cable with a fiber that allows transferring the same signal using light is a way to save on copper. But in appliances themselves, having signals transformed to and from light is too expensive. So you won't find lots of light fibers inside of appliances.

I think the person you're replying to meant having the computing be done optically (switching by some optical rather than transistor means), so in theory if you could do that you wouldn't need any copper except to provide power to your optical computer. I doubt we'll ever get to the point where optical computing is more cost effective than what we currently have though.

Silicon photonics is changing this dynamic some, right?

Odd place to ask this question. As it happens, inside chips it's either (doped) silicon, aluminium (metal layers), or gold (bond wires).

There's a reason why copper isn't used in chip manufacture; something to do with reacting with or diffusing into silicon dioxide.

There's a reason why copper isn't used in chip manufacture; something to do with reacting with or diffusing into silicon dioxide.

Huh?

A number of years ago when I was still doing chips, copper was quite popular. Wikipedia claims it still is[1]: copper-based processes continue to be the state of the art for the semiconductor industry today.

As Wiki explains, the key is "dual-Damascene". They inlay copper into trenches.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_interconnect

Expanding on above, Al-based BEOL interconnects were used until the process for making the more-difficult Cu interconnects matured around the turn of the millennium. Without precautions, Cu will diffuse into Si badly and generate tons of traps. TiN is a typical barrier material, but increasingly exotic materials are now being used in cutting edge nodes.

TLDR: Ancient underground copper mines

Thank you!

TL;DRs are generally frowned upon here, but a clickbait title deserves one, I think.

Can we change the clickbait title?

Sure thing, we've gone with a representative image caption from the article.

This is an interesting article hampered by a tenuously related clickbait title. Please change it.

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