7k-year-old well is the oldest wooden structure ever discovered
ctvnews.ca
ctvnews.ca
That discovery is only about 250 years younger than this one: "A total of 151 oak timbers preserved in a waterlogged environment were dated between 5469 and 5098 [BCE]." That is, the youngest timbers were from 5098 BCE.
This one: https://www.upce.cz/en/our-restorers-to-help-preserve-7000-y... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544032...
I think it's wonderful that they're able to date the wood specifically to 5259–8 BCE.
To put this in a worldwide human context, this is almost 2000 years before the beginning of the Harappan civilization; 1700 years before the Sumerian settlement of Uruk, where Gilgamesh and Nimrod ruled and from which we get "Iraq"; 2100 years before Narmer became the first Pharaoh in Egypt; and 3600 years before the Shang rose in the land of China. In 5259 BCE there were still woolly mammoths on two islands between the lands we now call Russia and Alaska. But the city of Çatalhöyük had already been deserted for 400 years after 1400 years of flourishing.
Moreover, 5259 BC is roughly as long before the extinction of those mammoths as that is before the present day.
A city that's 200 years old today is "young" by human standards; even civilizations (cultural shapes) a thousand years old have probably only gone 10% of the temporal distance since the first settlements.
I sometimes wonder how our current present could possibly be seen by people 7,000 years from now in the future (well, I tend to stop at 1,000 because it's already too big, but contemplating 10,000 or 100k even is humbling). There's this sense that we would be "ancient" to them, a different world. That most of our preoccupations would be long solved, and that only a few memes of our culture would remain to their day. To wonder if, in the grander scheme of things, we're "empty" like so many times before us and will leave pretty much nothing substantial, or if we're "decisive" like those ideas and people and eras that shaped civilization as we know it today.
Would future eras see our computers and AI-attempts as foolish delusions like some people thought vapor machines could solve everything? Would our cars and planes and trains be seen as a temporary means of transportation that only lasted a couple centuries before something much better, much more "obvious" would take place? When would we escape Earth and grow beyond, is it for this century or much later, would it even be a done deal by 3,000? What new science lies beyond us in time simply because we just can't see it now, and yet we could actually make now if we just thought of it? (like we could have invented electricity in Ancient times, but conversely Einstein's GR was a gift from the Gods because it was at least 100 years too early in refinement). How much of what we take for granted is actually debatable or plain wrong; how much of what we doubt today is actually true, the right intuition? When do we eventually cease to be "homo sapiens sapiens" because too many mutations is too many and we've become something else? How much of "something else" is of our own doing (volition, objective) though genetics, epigenetics, culture? Etc., etc., etc.
I find that far from being sterile or futile, these are extremely valuable thought experiments because they let us break our current mold and observe things from an arbitrarily different (call it "weird") standpoint. They let us re-imagine the past and unfold it differently, thus see many futures — and as always, plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
And since we use electrons and stuff like that we too, will seem an empty age.
For diffusion in silicon (as opposed to silicon dioxide) the empirical diffusion coefficient of oxygen is given as 0.13 exp(-2.53 eV/kT)cm²/s by Binns, Londos, et al., 1996. This works out to 3.9 × 10⁻⁴⁵ cm²/s (3.9 × 10⁻⁴⁹ m²/s in SI units) at 293 K (20°) and 8.5 × 10⁻³⁶ cm²/s at 373 K (100°). If I'm calculating this right, the room-temperature number is some 10³² times slower than at the usual silicon oxide layer growth temperatures used in chip manufacturing, which can grow submicron-thickness oxide layers in a time on the order of an hour https://www.iue.tuwien.ac.at/phd/filipovic/node29.html https://cnx.org/contents/lJGecnVz@89.1:lYPudNFT@2/Chapter-6-... although sometimes using steam rather than just air. So, if the diffusion coefficient through amorphous SiO₂ is similar, the chip surface will rust away by a similar amount at room temperature in on the order of 10³² hours, which is 11 octillion years (1.1 × 10²⁸ years), long after star formation ceases and the last red dwarf goes out. A much more urgent consideration than silicon rusting is that, unless urgent conservation measures are taken soon to prevent it, the Sun will engulf and vaporize the Earth in under 8 billion years.
(It's possible there might be other weathering effects that become dominant at lower temperatures, for example, diffusion of corrosive species with lower activation energies than the 2.53 eV measured above; it seems plausible that even 10³² hours of cosmic rays might be enough to blast the chips apart into nothing. We'll know for sure in a few octillion years.)
(Laura Nuccio's dissertation http://www1.unipa.it/lamp/NuccioPhDThesis.pdf gives 2.9 × 10⁻⁴ exp(-1.17 eV/kT)cm²/s on p. 30, which works out to 2.2 × 10⁻²⁴ cm²/s (2.2 × 10⁻²⁸ m²/s) at 293 K (20°). This gives a time of only 10¹⁰ hours, only about a million years, for a similar amount of oxide formation to take place at room temperature to the oxide layers commonly used as insulators in chips. So perhaps the aluminum traces on the surface of silicon will be converted to insulating aluminum oxide within the next several millennia.)
None of this means that the chips will work, though; much tinier amounts of dopants diffusing much shorter distances through the chip are sufficient for the chip to stop working. But it seems likely that post-human archaeologists millions of years in the future could reverse-engineer a 6502. Perhaps a future Chris of Clickspring will document his meticulous reconstruction of the "Commodore Mechanism" on the Centaurian equivalent of YouTube.
Aside from silicon, though, the humans' civilization has produced many million-year-lifetime objects like the screen-printed ceramic floor tiles I'm standing on (which have text stamped into their back), bricks, pottery, and glass, which bear witness to a complex material culture with widespread literacy. Somewhat less long-lived, but still capable of lasting millennia, are the numerous objects made of brass, bronze, aluminum, and thick stable plastics. (Polyethylene, polypropylene, and PET will last millennia, no problem, unless they're only 10 microns thick like this shopping bag. Acetate will eat itself, and the paper around it, in decades through vinegar syndrome; similarly for most elastomers, although silicone is pretty stable. Celluloid dissolves into brown goo when it doesn't spontaneously detonate. Things like polystyrene and ABS are of intermediate stability. I have no idea about nylon, epoxy, and phenolic.)
Also, though, people do lithography today too, including to reproduce writing. The best stones tend to be palimpsests, ground down by the artists to expose a fresh flat surface to print new art with, but many lousier stones are buried in sealed, dry 20th-century municipal middens. Intaglio printing has often used gypsum plaster, as has metal casting. These pieces could easily survive millennia if kept dry. So too with typemetal plates used for book printing.
Steel, of course, the 20th century's favorite drug, rusts away to slag in a few short decades; but stainless steel, like the spoon I am eating with, forms a surface oxide film similar to that of aluminum, but made of chromium oxide rather than amorphous sapphire. Like silicon and aluminum, it too should last for millennia or longer.
It should be easy to do much better than this with a little effort.
In conclusion, if the current global civilization collapses, enormous volumes of its writings will survive for thousands to millions of years in the form of durable manufactured objects that contain writing more or less incidentally.
This will become a problem even if there would be no war. Energy resources had almost finished, and no viable alternatives were found.
Reminder that the sun exists.
Even modest amounts of bronze and iron smelting cleared forests (for charcoal) throughout the Mediterannean and European regions. Much of the reason for forest regrowth throughout Europe has been the shift to other fuels. Nonrenewable fossil fuels.
Which have issues both of abundance and atmospheric impacts.
Returning to an era of predominantly solar energy, even with our considerably enhanced technical and scientific knowledge, absent the preindustrial ease of access to specific materials (iron, copper, etc.), as well as that great advance: naturally-occurring agricultural fertilisers (saltpetre from India, guano from South America and Pacific islands), would be ... markedly different from the present.
Plants are a very inefficient way of converting sunlight into work. The difficulty was not a matter of energy scarcity; it was that the humans didn't know what energy was, how to bore a cylinder, or how to vacuum-silver a mirror. There are very significant bootstrapping difficulties, yes, but also very significant bootstrapping resources, if we can preserve them. Knowledge is the most important one.
> absent the preindustrial ease of access to specific materials (iron, copper, etc.)
Copper and especially iron are immensely more accessible in the humans' landfills than they ever were in ore deposits.
Artificial fertilizer synthesis does seem like it might be particularly tricky to carry out at a small scale.
The point remains that for primary energy, we don't have a whole lot of options, and plant productivity is much of that. A modern civilisation knocked back won't have nuclear power, reliable electrical transmission, or advanced battery technologies. Mobility of fuels will be limited.[2]
"Technology", a distractingly vague term, seems to be based on specific modalities, each with its own specific capabilities and limitations.[3] Precision boring is contingent on sufficent-quality metalurgy, based on available materials, fuels, and smelting/casting controls, as well as measurement and feedback (information/systems management) controls. At that, what you buy in, say, a reciprocating steam engine, is a net fuel-to-work efficiency gain from about 3% (Watt ~1800) to about 25% (best stationary triple-expansion engines). Locomotive steam engines were about 10% efficienty, barely 3x better than Watt's 1800 design.[4] That is: precision and technology still only bring you up to theoretical maximum efficiencies. Process and systems management technology is at best a fractional factor 0 <= t < 1. (Many proposed technologies end up with efficiencies well below 0. We typically don't adopt those.)
Fuels are larger multipliers. Increasing applied energy frequently increases potential output as a multiple factor: capital + process + n times more energy results in some tn times more output (where n > 1 and 0 <= t < 1). You can keep applying more energy to a process for ever increasing outputs, at least to a considerable extent -- generally to thermal, friction, vibrational, stress, or other limits.
Landfill mining has been suggested. It was a (minor, though not miner) element in Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth* (1976). And has long been practiced, historically and presently, with a range of consequences.
The more general problem here is that recycling is at best less than 100% efficient, and the generational loss is r^g (g == generations, with 0 <= r < 1). The most-recycled current materials within the US is lead, largely from car batteries), with rates of 74%. At two generations, the remaining material is 55%. After 10, it's less than 5%.[5] Eventually dust is your best source. Non-ore-forming materials (e.g., rare earths) already exhibit this, the difficulty in their sourcing isn't due to their scarcity per se (they're relatively abundant within Earth's crust), but in their failure to concentrate, and the immense amounts of overburden and tailings created in their use. It's less a matter of mining than of pollution and landscape spoilage exporting, costs China have been willing to absorb in recent decades.
The next H-B alternative, not dependent on abundant natural gas,[7] or lack of one, will be hugely monumental. I'd hedge my bets on a bioengineered process, though there are others being pursued, see: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01145
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fu...
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Notes:
1. Both based on incident sunlight => stored energy, generally as cellulose or lipids. Algael productivity discounts the likely impact of parasites and/or disease on large-scale development (as does land cropping). Lifeforms other than human are also keen on large and convenient plant-energy stores.
2. There's little discussion of this even in histories which take an energy-centric viewpoint such as Smil or Weissenbacher, but a key liability for fossil fuel energy resources was that they were so unevenly distributed, and transportation capabilities so limited. Better to (locally) gather fuelwood, dung, press olive for oils, or render animal tallow, than to try hauling seacoal, natural tar, or the few rare oil seeps more than a few tens of km.
Even the coal-rich US didn't transition from wood until its inland rail-based transportation system was developed. On which coal still represents a large share of revenues and massive constituent of total ton-miles. Oil's development as a fuel waited in part on reliable metalurgy, the capability to construct pipes of more than ~10cm in diameter and a few tens of metres in length. Along with rights-of-way, a sufficient challenge that as of WWII, major infrastructure (the Big Inch and Little Big Inch pipelines, still in use) were constructed not by private industry but by the Federal Government.
International oil shipments were contingent on developing double-hulled supermassive oil tankers. Ari Onassis, Greek shipping magnate, was, it turns out, a Greek supertanker shipping magnate.
After water, sand, and gravel, oil is the most-transported material in the modern economy.
Natural gas likewise is more difficult to transport than oil or coal, requiring hermetically-sealed containment, and high pressures and/or low temperatures. It has a tendency to go boom in ways that coal and oil for the most part don't, which makes neighbours even edgier than for those materials.
Transport and nonuniformly-distributed fuels are co-dependent.
3. My thinking leads to identification of nine of these: 1. fuels, 2. materials, 3. process (technical) knowlege, 4. causal (scientific) knowledge, 5. network dyanmics, 6. systems management (physical, social, informational), 7. information (acquisition, parsing, processing, storage/retrieval, transmission), 8. power transmission & transformation, and 9. hygiene (addressing unintended / undesired consequences). Still in development. See (in slightly earlier form): https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww
4. Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization, (2017). Figure 5.5, p.243.
5. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/recycling-statistics-and-i...
6. A chief export of Trinidad and Tobago, and the reason for that small Caribbean island nation's hugely outsized per-capita carbon footprint.
See:
T&T EMissions Trends: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/emis/t_t.html
T&T CO2 emissions https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/trinidad-and-tob...
Global per-capita emissions https://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-... (from: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-carbon-emiss...)
T&T exports / economy: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-are-the-major-natur...
If we want to compare the carrying capacity of Spaceship Earth under solar power in the future and the past, I think it behooves us to consider the whole sunbeam-to-wheels efficiency, or sunbeam-to-hooves, as the case may be. It's true that photosynthesis is about 1–3% efficient (I think beema and sugarcane can approach 4% at times), but typical crop yields are closer to 0.3 W/m² [1], which is an efficiency of 0.1% if sunlight averages 300 W/m². Also, muscles are not perfectly efficient, and animals can't spend 100% of their energy input on their muscles; they have to spend some of it on digestion, homeostasis, reproduction, and — though this may be redundant — rest. So if draft animals are 20% efficient [0] and food production by photosynthesis is 0.1% efficient, then the total sunlight-to-hooves efficiency of plowing with oxen, horses, or by pulling the plow by hand, is in the neighborhood of 0.02%.
By contrast, low-cost photovoltaic panels are 16% efficient, as you say; electric motors and generators are typically about 90% efficient in combination, and the rest of the electrical system is typically about 90% efficient, as long as no batteries or high-voltage transmission are required. This gives a sunlight-to-wheels efficiency of about 13% for the best realistic case of solar, about 600 times better than corn-fed oxen. (Multijunction cells could push that up to 33% or so, but they're far too expensive with current production techniques.)
However, it might prove difficult to refine silicon in the case of a collapse of the post-1970s industrial infrastructure, so perhaps it is best not to calculate based on photovoltaic panels. A more conservative low-tech case is, as you imply, a CSP-driven steam engine like Frank Shuman's 1912 Sun Power Company power station Solar Engine One, which I mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22363678 and which reputedly achieved about 4% efficiency [2]. If applied to Watt's 3%-efficient vacuum engine driving a generator, a solar thermal collector with an easily accessible efficiency of 50% would produce sunlight-to-wheels efficiency of about 1.2% — not great, but still 60 times better than oxen or corn-fed farm boys.
So there are, I think, excellent reasons to believe that solar energy could sustain current levels of human population on Spaceship Earth, even after a hypothetical systemic collapse.
As for proposed energy technologies with efficiencies below 0, these would be perpetual-motion machines: if applied to a 100-watt load, an engine of efficiency -10% would supply the load with 100 watts while consuming -10 watts, which is to say, producing 10 watts in some other form, perhaps electricity. I do not expect to see many of these. Perhaps this was not what you meant?
I will respond separately to your comments about materials recycling.
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[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurnane/2016/07/18/fueling... Tour de France riders eat 6000 to 8000 kcal per day (25–35 MJ in modern units, 300–400 W), 30% of which is just their basal metabolism, while racing 6 hours per day at about 400 watts of power output. That's about 30% cornbread-to-wheels efficiency, but it omits the power usage of reproduction, growth, and homeostasis — racers can't train year-round at Tour-de-France intensity levels without dying, nor can they do it while pregnant or growing out of childhood. Even during the race, most days are less than 6 hours of racing, and there are two official "rest" days with no racing at all.
[1] http://www.worldofcorn.com/#us-average-corn-yield-metric says US corn yield is 11 tonnes/hectare, presumably per year. If corn is the standard 15.5% moisture and the rest carbohydrate and protein at 4 kcal/g — not precisely correct, but close enough — that's about 0.5 W/m². https://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/circulars/production.pdf table 04 says the world produced 1079.9 million metric tons of corn in the 2017/18 year on 192.12 million hectares, for a yield of 5.62 tonnes/hectare, so that seems reasonable, but that's only ¼ W/m².
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/power-from-sunshi... is an article Shuman wrote before building it. The actually built plant was reported to produce only about 50 to 60 horsepower when the sun was shining; according to M. Ragheb's Solar Thermal Power and Energy Storage Historical Perspective, it had five 62 m × 4 m troughs at 7.6 m spacing, totaling 248 m² of collector. However, this would collect 248 kW of insolation, implying an efficiency of 15–18%, which is implausibly high for a steam engine. Ragheb also, contradictorily, reports that it was 4% efficient. I suspect a unit conversion error.
On net ag efficiency: I've ... looked into this somewhat, with Vaclav Smil and Howard & Eugene Odum being generally recommended sources.
One aspect of the ecological approach is to look at plants not so much as inefficient, but as the end result of about 3.5 billion years of process refinement, optimising for numerous characteristics, not simply stored carbohydrate/lipids energy, including diseases, weather, pest, and other tolerances. Much of human ag selective breeding borrows energy from those plant services in favour of food productivity. The result is plants less able to thrive on their own. Optimising fertiliser and watering quantities and schedules also allows greater productivity. How much of that is specifically reliant on additional energy inputs is harder to pin down, though fertilisers pre Haber-Bosch were reliant on accumulated deposits generally moved by sailing ships. We could (if necessary) revert to sail, but those deposits are largely gone.
Looking at annual areal output is a good metric. US productivity actually lags Europe if I recall -- Holland is especially efficient.
On animal energy output levels, athletes are best considered as demonstrating a maximum possible short-term output, not a long-term population average. Particularly in the face of suboptimal nutrition, disease, and injury.
Smil's got an impressive set of tables and charts (making excellent use of logarithmic scales) showing output of humans, various draught and domesticated animals, etc. One factoid I've stored away is that a blue whale has roughly the metabolic output of a tractor-trailer rig. And yes: sustained animal output is pretty sharply limited, across scales: per day, sustained over weeks or months throughout the year, or even over lifetimes. Overexertion or overuse severely curtails output, and peak outputs are not sustainable over long periods. (Something Frederick Taylor rather famously omitted from his "scientific" studies.) Figuring about 25% of a typical human's 2,500 - 3,500 calories gives a range of about 30-45 watts of continuous output.
Note that the acre was originally unit of area derived from a measure of work: the amount of land a farmer and team of oxen could plough in a day. In German: Tagwerk, literally "days' work". The unit was variable (condition of land, soil, oxen, and plough determined tillable area), and represented less than a full day's work as the animals had to be rested and pastured.
(Smil notes that a large waterwheel or windmill, and many early Watt steam engines, delivered about 5-20 horsepower, about 3.7 - 15 kW, of power. And that made a huge difference.)
On carrying capacity net net, one of the most highly recommended sources I've run across (though not yet read) is Joel E. Cohen's How Many People Can the Earth Support? (https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-many-people-can-the-earth...). My understanding is that he explores the basis and implications of values ranging from < 1 billion to > 1,000 billion, which includes most credible (and possibly some less than) estimates.
One point most serious discussions hammer is that "how many" goes along with "how much", in terms of resources:
I = P * A * T
On energy systems and conversion mechanisms: the interesting thing is how little the story's changed in 50, 75, or even 100 years. We've added fission, and PV's gotten remarkably better. Batteries have improved tremendously. Fusion's still a pipe dream. Otherwise: plants, sun, wind, water, geothermal, waves. Flux per unit area is a very good analysis metric, see the late David MacCay's Renewable Energy Without the Hot Air (http://withouthotair.com)
My suspicion is that direct solar thermal (avoids conversion losses) and CSP power (simple and robust) are likely mainstays. There's been some interesting research into low-tech silicon-fabrication processes, with the Global Village Construction Kit (now apparently rolled into Open Source Ecology / Appropedia) doing some work. Purity and process control are major limitations.
See:
https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
https://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia
Among the higher DDG results is your own GitHub laserboot repo:
https://github.com/kragen/laserboot
NB: Technologies with a less than zero efficiency factor remove useful energy from the system. A brake would be an example. Perpetual motion technologies have efficiencies >= 1. Which seems unlikely in practice.
(It's a joke, laugh.)
Your ontology in particular is very interesting. I'll probably spend some time looking into it.
As for perpetual stuff, it's just a matter of signature... ;-)
They're interesting and important questions.
It also helps to have review of ideas -- both for correcting and clarifying them.
Are you saying that 74% of lead discarded in the US is sent for recycling, or that of the part sent for recycling, 74% is successfully recovered, the other 26% being lost in various kinds of waste, or what? "74%" does show up in your source https://prd-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium... as the "percentage recycled" for lead in 2012 (table 1), which is explained as "Calculated by dividing the amount recycled by the apparent supply". On its face, this seems to suggest that 74% of the lead bought by lead consumers, such as battery manufacturers, was sourced from recycling, while the other 26% came from mining or importation, without providing any information about losses in the recycling process. Aluminum has 50% for 2016 in that same table (down from 57% in 2012), but only about 10% of aluminum is lost to oxidation during recycling.
The interesting question from my point of view is how the available waste compares to natural ores, whether that waste is from recycling losses such as dust around smelting mills, or from other sources such as treasure hunting, in the difficulty of recovering useful material from it. Since the concentrations of many interesting elements are orders of magnitude higher than their natural concentrations in ores — particularly in elements like the lanthanoids which, as you point out, do not concentrate very much† — my naïve supposition is that landfill mining will be considerably cheaper. (Moreover, because landfills are at the surface, it can be done without the risks of the black-damp or the stink-damp, though perhaps surprise PCB-filled transformers might compensate.)
As for H–B, it can be carried out perfectly well on electrolytic hydrogen, but that is only economic in the absence of a source of methane, or when energy is abundant.
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I love the way you dis "technology". In your mindmap I think there is a very significant thing missing, one which, as an illegal immigrant in a third-world country, I am constantly aware of.
What's missing? Well, suppose you want to replicate Watt's vacuum steam engine; let's analyze it in your framework, and see what's missing.
You need some kind of fuel, both to shape the metal and to run the steam engine once it's finished.
You need materials — at a minimum, you need some kind of material that can withstand the steam while holding the precise tolerances needed to seal the cylinder, and you need some kind of sealing material, whether that's hemp, leather, rubber, or the cast-iron, bronze, or carbon steel for Ramsbottom's miraculous piston rings. (And, yeah, something for lubrication.)
You need the technical knowledge ("process and system knowledge" in your diagram) to shape and assemble the parts of the engine, and the causal knowledge ("symbolic expression and manipulation") to troubleshoot it, fix it, and improve its design for your situation.
Although it may not be absolutely necessary, the network dynamics that enable you to obtain all of the above, and distribute the fruits of your steam-engine, are certainly an immense boon. Similarly for systems management ("Governance, Management, & Organization" in your diagram).
I'm not sure that you need much in the way of information processing, power transmission, or hygiene to build your steam engine.
So, suppose you have all these things; you're a master machinist and mechanical engineer in a post-apocalyptic village just uphill from a spring with an urgent need to irrigate their fields (the network dynamics). You have an ample supply of scrap metal of all kinds, plenty of books on steam-engine design, and friends who are willing to risk their lives operating your steam-engine once it gets built. The alpine forest nearby provides all the firewood you could need. What are you missing?
You don't have any tools! You aren't going to get very far building a steam engine by banging bits of scrap metal together. You need to invest in some capital goods, which are classically considered one of the three primary factors of production, along with land and labor. You're going to need a foundry with crucibles and casting flasks; a lathe, with gears or a whip to drive it, at least some centers and a dog if not a chuck; vises; hammers; drills; hardened steel cutting tools for the lathe, and abrasive tools to sharpen them with; files for detail work; at least some vernier calipers if not micrometers, and probably scales, surface plates, indicators, and a balance; and some way to measure the composition of your scrap metal, of which I have no idea. You can bootstrap these from raw materials, but getting there is going to require some further intermediate tools — at least a pottery kiln, and probably also a wood shop and some means for assaying soils.
This is an amusing omission because, in my experience, it's common both for the vulgar to confuse tools such as cellphones with "technology" as a whole, which of course includes the whole technological matrix that you're analyzing; and for ignorant rulers to believe that the crucial ingredient in economic prosperity is for an outside company to open a factory in your town, thus "providing work".
Speaking of ignorant rulers, maybe this is in some sense implicit in your "network dynamics" or "Governance, Management, & Organization" categories, but I think it deserves special attention: a major obstacle to technological development always and everywhere is violence, in a couple of different forms. First, outright witch-burning is a constant threat, as experienced by Giordano Bruno, the Maya codices, Steve Kurtz, Aaron Swartz, Charles Lieber, and numerous others; second, and not entirely separate, unfreedom, expropriation, and wanton destruction, all by means of collective violence, destroyed Shuman's Solar Engine One, the first RepRap, Archimedes' life, Galileo's career, and Zuse's Z1, and nipped many other promising developments in the bud.
But such violence does not arise in isolation; it proceeds from a social climate that nurtures and foments it, which can impede progress even when it doesn't erupt into outright vandalism and murder. So I think there's a certain necessary element of tolerance and admiration of technical excellence whose lack strangles any hope of progress in most social climates. Not only did they laugh at Fulton, the Wright Brothers, and Bozo the Clown, they laughed at William Kamkwamba; how many other Kamkwambas has Malawi lost that way?
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† It isn't true that lanthanoids don't form ores at all; monazite and bastnäsite are ores of lanthanoids (as well as actinoids). Cerium in the earth's crust, for example, is about 60 ppm on average, but typically almost half (which would be 500 000 ppm) of either of these ores, so it's more concentrated there by three or four orders of magnitude. The difficulty is that they all form the same ore because they're damn near identical, chemically speaking, which is why many of them were among the last elements to be isolated. But this is very much not the case with landfill, in which the lanthanoids are conveniently separated not only from one another but from the hazardous actinoids — although cigarette-lighter flints have many lanthanoids, if you're mining catalytic converters, they'll be entirely free of both thorium and lanthanum.
On the ontology: that's an ontology of technological mechanisms.
It is not a reclassification of technological fields or domains. And it really is not a dis of technology, it's an attempt to clearly define what it is that technology does, and how. A question that's otherwise often very frustratingly avoided.
Economics treats "technology" simply as a synonym for "efficiency" or some "productivity multiplier".
There are both a theory of technology and a philosophy of technology, but neither really addresses this point. (Both tend to focus far more on social interactions and elements, which has been argued as a consequence of the more-socially-oriented philosophers and theorists not being comfortable with the, erm, technical aspects of technology.
So, to the ontology.
Your basic tools are often largely power transmission and conversion systems. "Simple machines" was much of what I had in mind in that category, though it includes more: levers, wedges, ramps, screws, gears, pulleys. Rope (tension) and stone (compression) both have transmission components. (Combine them, as a fibre-composite material: adobe-straw bricks, fibreglass, carbon-fibre, reinforced concrete, and you end up with a material with force-management properties.)
It's not that I don't consider tools. It's that tools themselves are not independent of the ontology, which concerns mechanisms and dynamics. Tools are not dynamics, they are implements embodying or achieving one or more dynamics. (I'd argue always at least two: material and, typically, power transmission or measurement, though usually also process knowledge, possibly others.)
Your simple tools -- hammers, saws, drills, planes, chisels, lathes, etc., are largely specific devices for converting one form of power or motion to some useful effect.
Electric devices are similar: generators convert motion to electricity, motors convert electricity to motion. PV converts light to electricity, LEDs convert electricity to light. Microphones convert audio energy to electrical signals, speakers convert electrical energy to audio waves.
Then there are furnaces, smelters, ovens, kilns, etc., measurement and monitoring tools. Maths if necessary to model your design. Etc., etc.
Most power transmission operates through thermal, kinetic, or electromagnetic forces. There are some which might operate through strong or weak nuclear force. Arguments could be made for chemistry as a mechanism, though that decomposes to electromagnetic interactions.
(I belive it's Smil who describes hydraulic accumulators as an early-stage technology and one which still substitutes for electricity in some applications: dentist's offices, auto repair shops, Amish workshops, and through liquid hydraulics in many heavy-lift applications. In the late 19th century there'd been hydraulic distribution networks spanning kilometers in industrial blocks and ports especially. For intermittent high loads they're particularly well-suited.)
So: to build a steam engine, you'd need the raw materials, the know-how, power transmission (rocker beam, flywheel, and gearwork, shaft or belt drives, etc.), and yes, some earlier instances of technological mechanisms implemented in materals suitable as tools: hammers, chisels, drills, lathes, grinders, and the like.
As for the hygiene factors of a steam engine: you have issues with radiating thermal energy, combustion gasses and ash, and the changes that any such machine might have on business, economic, social, and environmental considerations. All of those are emergent or unintended consequences, often not immediately evident. Robert K. Merton's study of latent vs. manifest functions has recently struck me as highly relevant and interesting. In particular, his observation that as tools of understanding, latent functions are far more significant than manifest ones because they are not as apparent. This itself likely has further ... latent ... consequences.
On ignorant rulers as a governance mode: yes, effectively. I'd lump military leadership, governance, business management, courts, ecclesiastical organisation, industrial process controls, robotics, etc., as forms of management. The essential elements are system, state, sensing, decision, action, and feedback. Fundamentally: cybernetics.
There's a wonderful quote from the world of sailing:
"The Art of ship handling involves the effective use of forces under control to overcome the effect of forces not under control."
-- Charles H. Cotter
There's more to it than that, and the quote misses the elements of observation, decision, and action (or implies but doesn't explicitly state them). Still, I think it captures the essence of what I mean by "management".
On the resistances to technological innovations, I'd strongly recommend Bernhard J. Stern's 1937 work of the same title:
https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...
Which I liked so much I retyped in Markdown, suitable for PDF or ePub via Pandoc:
https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is
Stern, a sociologist, develops a theory of what drives this, which I think you'll find interesting and applicable to recent examples you cite.
Dysfunctional as that response is, it is part of the inherent, and I'd argue default governance mode. Which like many other default modes of behaviour, has to be modified or adapted if you wish to get past it.
With the exceptions of energy, helium, and the insignificant amounts incorporated into space probes, the humans do not consume mineral resources; they concentrate them, dilute them, and move them around, but they do not consume them. For example, there is just as much neodymium on Earth as there was a million years ago, to a precision of several decimal places. The difference is that now much of it is separated from the other lanthanoids (a difficult and energy-intensive process) and concentrated in junkyards and landfills.
> Energy resources had almost finished
This is pretty hard to predict, but I think this is more a problem of knowledge and organization than of resources. The first commercial human solar energy plant was built in Egypt in 1912–3 in Maadi by Frank Shuman, the guy who invented that horrible safety glass with wires running through it. It didn't use photovoltaic cells; it used a low-pressure steam engine. (And he sold the results as irrigation water, not electricity as originally planned.) It couldn't compete with increasingly cheap oil, but at the time it would probably have operated at a profit if the Great War hadn't broken out the next year, resulting in the British Army expropriating it as "raw materials"; Shuman was quoted in the New York Times saying, "We have proved the commercial profit of sun power in the tropics and have more particularly proved that after our stores of oil and coal are exhausted the human race can receive unlimited power from the rays of the sun."
But certainly the humans managed to trap one another in a crab-bucket of material poverty for thousands of years before, and they could do it again.
I find Tim Urban’s post on time scale to be similarly eye opening and thought provoking:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.h...
It seems these kinds of discoveries -- people were more advanced at some point in time than previously believed -- happen quite frequently. It makes me realize I have a much too linear view of the development of technology and civilization. There have been many stops and starts and backtracking along the way, of course with plenty of uneven distribution across single points in time as well.
Now we still have members of society that share in this innovation, but I am curious if we're down to 0.00001% of society that really thinks through things vs just being handed bread and work.
Well put!
The past two years I made a home made power generator of mostlY scrape parts of all sorts. Took me a long time on the internet, various forum, etc. to find out about the vasics of mechanics, transmission, chemistry, etc. At one german speaking forum of electrical engineering I got particularly upset because instead of explaining me things like how three phase power etc.works, all I got was stop it, it's to dangerous, you are about to violate rule number xyz.
I honestly believe we would no longer be able to fly to the moon or build the pyramids.
"Neolithic peoples behave as expected" is hardly a good headline - and though I don't know much about archeology, it seems like archeologists would be scientific enough to not attribute behaviours and technologies to Neolithic cultures for which there was no evidence.
Considering as well that the past is poorly documented (especially wood), discovering something not already known may be easier than we think.
I'll admit my thinking on this is very seat of the pants. I'm sure historians, archeologists, etc. think about this plenty.
If archaeologists have only come across tool X in cultures which engage in (say) year-round agriculture, they'll fairly naturally come to a weakly-held belief along the lines of "cultures which invent agriculture tend to also invent tool X soon afterwards".
Then evidence comes along of hunter-gatherers with tool X, and someone trying to make a rather dry press release into something more exciting writes "archaeologists are stunned because they previously believed that hunter-gatherers were foolish primitives who couldn't possibly have invented tool X".
Normally, one uses advanced carpentry techniques to look nice, or to make it strong and light. None of those are a restriction at the bottom of a well - Why not just use a thicker bit of wood and a basic unpinned miter joint held in place by soil?
When you're carving wood by hand, why go to the extra effort of fancy complex joints for no gain?
Because a bunch of complex joints are likely less labor intensive than using larger material. Remember, these "planks" were made by hand. It's the difference between spending an afternoon shoveling dirt or spending an afternoon fixing a tractor to shovel the same amount of dirt in 5min.
This gets conveyed as "here is how you make a strong joint". The knowledge of "strong enough", or "this thickness and a miter joint" is stronger than a "thinner joint but with a tenon" implies a rigor in the way knowledge would have been passed on and organized that we know largely didn't exist.
This sort of thinking and understanding is often apparent in medicine practiced in primitive tribes. There generally isn't a systemized, unified theory or understanding of dosages etc. in medicine but instead "scraps" of knowledge and facts.
In short, I wouldn't expect that a builder sat down and said "here are my four joints, which should I use" when constructing this, but instead said "I know a mortise and tenon is the strongest joint so we will use that" because the analysis of "is it strong enough" both wasn't practical and wasn't understood.
The knowledge of "strong enough" is something that anyone building without a desk reference on safety margins and the material wealth to build to those margins will learn to understand very well. You don't need a system to pass down that kind of knowledge because everyone will live their lives around it.
>In short, I wouldn't expect that a builder sat down and said "here are my four joints, which should I use" when constructing this, but instead said "I know a mortise and tenon is the strongest joint so we will use that" because the analysis of "is it strong enough" both wasn't practical and wasn't understood.
It wasn't consciously understood but whoever built it likely took stock of the situation (task that needed to be accomplished vs available materials and labor) and concluded that how they did it was the best way which is basically a less formal version of what you're describing.
A well back then may have been quite a proud and precious thing you point your best builders at, considering it was the life source for the area village/farms.
Part of the book is a system of points that tracks civilization progress, and it peaks in Roman times but fails to reach exponential.
In what units? I'm curious to see how he managed to fit a something as complex as "civilization progress" into one dimension without pulling numbers and definitions out of thin air.
But it's not necessarily that the system is "correct", it's more like it allows you to make falsifiable predictions. Say you want to track the health of a culture over 1000 years, or of several cultures based on a certain variable (like degree of deforestation, or climate). In order to have anything other than subjective opinions, you need to have an objective measuring stick that can be reproduced by other people independently.
You may chose average lifespan, child mortality, average daily calories, put them in a weighted sum, and track that.
It doesn't make it The correct measure, of course. But it's something that anybody else can try and check independently, and instead of saying "deforestation sucks for health" you'll say "the health index took a steep dive 50 years after the last tree was felled on Easter Island". That's falsifiable - somebody else can do the math and say "no, it's wrong: people lived longer and ate more, with less child mortality".
https://quillette.com/2018/03/27/romans-ever-done-us-discuss...
But did you actually read these books? Some of the Goodreads reviews are pretty harsh.
The whole "Dark Ages were backwards after Rome collapsed" story overall is a historical meme pushed by motivated reasoning and poorly backed by facts. Even "collapse" is dubious. If Rome was really on the cusp of industrial revolution, why didn't Byzantium bother to finish the job any time in the next 1,000 years?
Sure, there was progress after the roman times, and sure, Dark Ages weren't really that dark, I totally agree. Scientific progress in particular kept going forward. But as a whole, the sheer quantity of civilization went down when the roman empire split, in measurable ways.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills
Slave labor may have caused a massive employment problem for the lower tiers of the non-slave population, but it sure did not cause Romans to skimp on water powered grain mills.
I don't think it likely, but like the article says, we wouldn't have any clue if there were.
Likewise, if our civilization collapsed, and in the far future another advanced civilization arose on earth, they wouldn't have a clue about us if enough time had passed.
lmilcin raises a great point that many surface deposits of material that help "jump start" a civilization would have been consumed, but would the decay of our civilization return those same materials back into the surface, ready for the next round of civ to extract it?
I'd imagine elements that end up being used in very small quantities would be trickier. Reclaiming materials from phones isn't economically viable even with our tech today.
I think any industrial civilization will not hesitate to use things that are lying on the ground. It is the definition of "industrial" to be efficient with what you are given.
It is possible we had other "types" of civilizations the way we had a dozen ancient civilizations exist akin to false jump starts like some kind of experiments but never reaching industrial level.
Ceramic toilets can last for millions of years in the geologic record. Our midden heaps will contain billions of them. That could be enough to ensure our place in archeological history.
There's also the issue that, as long as our research isn't too shoddy, it's sort of unidirectional. Once you have found an example of Neolithic groove joints or whatever, you've established that at least some people at the time could make groove joints, even if you didn't think they could before. Going in the other direction would require showing that the original research was Piltdown-Man-style fakery or something.
What do you suggest is done with them?
Nice try equating colonists with conspiracy debunkers, but the analogy does not hold up. The problem with colonists wasn't their arrogance or personal sense of superiority, it was their violent exploitation of others for their own benefit.
Sitting in an armchair smugly looking down on others isn't very nice, but it's far better than getting up from your armchair and murdering/enslaving/exploiting the people you look down upon.
People who debunk conspiracy theorists use argumentation, humiliation, and appeals to authority. Sometimes they do so improperly. But they aren't colonizing anything.
Yes ...
> (A modern form of this is making fun of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, creationists, Apollo conspiracy theorists, Juggalos, and 9/11 truthers, and occasionally engaging in more violent rhetoric toward them.)
... no?
On the one hand you have things like aboriginal knowledge that were useful and valid for providing the needs of survival in the context in which they found themselves, but is dismissed simply for being different. On the other you have people who are wrong and in ways that threaten their survival and society.
I think part of it is that we operate on a different timescale now.
We are used to being able to build big things quickly, or make things that require precise machining quickly. And so of course we can also build small things, or make less sophisticated things, even quicker.
If it would take a lifetime to build something or make something, we don't do it. Pretty much everything we need can be done way quicker than that.
We forget that for many of these things what makes them difficult is the doing them quickly part. If you are willing to take decades or even lifetimes, those things can be done with much simpler technology than we are using.
For example, I remember reading about some sort of geared mechanism from a couple thousand or more years ago. I don't think it was the Antikythera mechanism, but I don't remember for sure. Anyway, it had gears to a precision that was not seen afterwards until something like the 15th or 16th century, and so many people wonder how such ancient people could have produced such a thing.
But precise gears aren't hard if you have time. All you need is some kind of fine file that can work on the metal you want to make your gears out of, and someone who can spend a lot of time doing a "file a little bit/check the fit" loop.
You might need a workforce of 100 apprentices working for a lifetime to make something this way, and so those things are are. We see the scarcity of such items in the archaeological record, and unjustly assume it is because they didn't know how to make them.
Imprecise gears don't keep bad time; what they do is increase friction and wear out. Your gear ratio isn't going to change from 51:20 to 51:21 because the gears are soft, flexible, and vary in size with humidity, unless they vary by so much that the gears come out of mesh. As long as they're in mesh, each tooth on one gear is followed by precisely one tooth on the other. Rather, what will happen is that the depthing of the gears needs to include extra backlash to allow for the imprecision, and that imprecision causes deviations in the pressure angle and the like. This is a terrible problem if you are gearing down a steam engine to pump water out of a coal mine, but at the much lower loads encountered in horology, it just means you need to wind the clock more often. Chris on Clickspring has convincingly shown that even the primitive triangular tooth form used in the Antikythera Mechanism is quite adequate.
The cycloidal tooth form used in modern clocks was only invented in the 1600s to 1700s, while mechanical geared clocks built in the 1300s still exist today, like the one in the Sarum Cathedral, which is iron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbJb92H5gy8 — the clock uses a square tooth form with rounded corners on the large gears, meshing with smaller pinions whose "teeth" are round dowels. (This part of the mechanism is believed to be original, but the escapement has been replaced.) By contrast, the tooth form depicted in the 1364 Il Tractatus Astrarii is triangular, like the Antikythera Mechanism. The clock at Chioggia, also from 1386, seems to be made in precisely the same way from what I can make out from these photos: https://www.adjora.it/altro/curiosi/vari/orologio-antico-Chi...
Note that the Sarum clock is held together with tusk tenons like those in the 7000-year-old well discovered in 2012, but in wrought iron rather than wood. That's because in 1386 the screw was about 2000 years old but not yet in use as a fastener.
US Census estimates that there were 5-20M people 7,000 years ago. People tend to settle in similar places, so the stuff left over tends to disappear in normal circumstances.
I think it’s prudent to only assert what we believe we have enough evidence to assert with commensurate certainty.
Surely that means we’ll underestimate historic abilities and skills but it’s better than presume things based on “no-evidence” because then it’s speculation without ground facts.
It's easy to see that this is still true today. Not everyone is living a first wold life. India may have a billion people but they aren't anywhere close to the living standards in USA or Europe.
This is an interesting technique, which isn't explained in the article. Tree rings obviously stop forming when the tree is killed. However, the size of individual rings various according to the weather in any particular year, so by matching a sequence of trees of different ages you can build up a sequence of ring widths. Then you can find the position of an unknown tree within this sequence, accurate to the year.
Other more complicated dating techniques like radiocarbon dating and ice cores are too abstract or complicated, and therefore easier to hand wave away as containing too many unprovable assumptions. For instance, serious YEC people like to point out that we're assuming that the speed of light or radioactive decay rates were constant in the recent past. If it seems insane to cling to bad arguments like this, welcome to the world of science-minded YEC people.
But tree rings... everyone has seen tree rings, and everyone knows that sometimes they're thicker and sometimes thinner. That's hard to argue away. The YEC camp tries: they point out we're assuming there's one ring per year. But when I realized that this really was their best argument, I had to give up YEC and find out how deep the rabbit hole went. About a year later, I was an atheist.
What's a bit more incredible to me is that they have 7000 years of unbroken samples of wood from that one area? I know you can corroborate with other dating methods but the headline here is that this is pure dendro?
Also, with dendrochronology, surely we have to have other artefacts (wooden pieces at least) that are dated only just later from the same area (ie planted before these timbers were cut) -- be interesting to know what they are?
Unfortunately, what we all learn is true to the facts but what the local authorities is important. It is not surprising at all that some communities that lean heavily in to religion may choose to say anything BC is Pagan, uncultured, etc.
In earlier seasons, they often recreate some of the artifacts of the age they are digging, and it’s fascinating to see some of that technology in action
Check wikipedia if you don’t believe me.
Otherwise awesome!
The journal article about this discovery [1] gets to the point right in the first sentence:
> In 2018, during the construction of a motorway in the East Bohemian Region near the town of Ostrov (Czech Republic), archaeologists excavated a structure of a wooden water well lining with a square base area of 80 × 80 cm and 140 cm in height.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544032...
When, what, where and how all addressed right from the start.
What's coming back is the pre-cold-war delineation where areas of orthodox primacy north of the black sea are eastern europe, south of it are south-eastern, and the catholic areas are central, northern, southern and western (with the iberic peninsula often being split out as southwestern).
Basically before WWII "Western Europe" was France, the British Isles and the Low Countries.
Czech Rep. is as far east as Austria, and I dont think anyone would question Austria being part of traditional central Europe. I'd think that Hungary and Poland are usually considered the same - just depends on how strongly their cultures were affected by the old iron curtain.
When I was growing up East vs. West was the fundamental political distinction. Check out this map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NATO_vs._Warsaw_(1949-199...
The world was divided right down the to the physical Berlin Wall. It was so amazing when that finally fell.
And Greece was another several hundred kilometres east!
I don't really understand the controversy
I mean Czechia/Eastern Germany/Western Poland is pretty much the centre of the land-mass from Ireland/Portugal in the West to Ukraine/Estonia in the East. So, it's not wrong.
Geographic clustering is always slightly arbitrary, but in American parlance "Eastern Europe" and "Western Europe" are used dichotomously, and with the former usually corresponding to erstwhile Warsaw Pact members.
I guess "Central Europe" is a term only used by people who consider themselves "Central European", everyone else seems to only distinguish between east/west.
Certainly not by everyone. From German Wikipedia: “Deutschland [...] ist ein Bundesstaat in Mitteleuropa.”
Translation: “Germany is a federation in Central Europe”.
It’s part of the western block in the Cold War geopolitical framework, which doesn’t have a Central Europe.
> The presence of Slavs is what differentiates West from Central and East.
That is plainly and egregiously false.
It's just that for about 50 years there was an overriding east/west classification which overrode the old.
Historically, eastern europe was the areas where the orthodox church had primacy (north of the black sea). Basically the european part of the Soviet Union proper excluding the baltic states.
I think the vast majority of people here hear about the concept of time zones the first time in school (or when they go on their first vacation abroad), it's really this abstract thing that one might know exists, but rarely ever has contact with. If you'd ask people on the street how the timezone is called, I wouldn't be surprised if many wouldn't know.
Not to be confused with the West Coast, no one would think that because it doesn't have a coast. But relative geographical terms are, well, relative.
We think of Utah or Colorado as being "The West". I guess like you say, it's all relative.
Midwesterner's east of the Mississippi tend to consider Kansas and the Dakota's "Great Plains" states and not Midwest.
As I mentioned, Kansas is in the West if you're in Michigan, which definitely considers itself Midwestern.
But if you're a Southerner, Michigan is in the North. The North doesn't even exist, outside of the former Confederacy, where it refers to states which were in the Union during the Civil War.
So "the North" is a pure exonym.
Well well well... look what we've found
Now I have a reason for eating so much sugar