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Comment by smitty1e | Hacker News Reader

"Simply shouldn't exist"

Pyramids were wonders of the ancient world long before the Python web framework.

The condescencion of the modern age toward those who came before use never ceases to amuse.

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article and rush to the thread to complain about it. Find something interesting to comment about instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

All they're saying is that the technology represented in this device has no equivalent in the historical record anywhere near that time and that place. It's not to say that it literally cannot exist, rather, our historical understanding of these peoples is clearly incomplete. These are the sorts of findings that change our understanding of history which makes it pretty exciting to me.

The Clickspring series on this mechanism was mentioned elsewhere and is some of the finest content on YouTube, I'd strongly recommend checking it out.

I've seen people claimed that, e.g. the polished granite columns common across European palaces and even some cathedrals, could not have been a) polished so well without laser technology, b) could not be moved and then erected without modern engine-powered equipment. So all of it was the work of ancient aliens or something, and the history as we're taught it is completely falsified, for some reason.

Because obviously, if you can't imagine how to do something then it must be impossible.

I've often wondered if the people making these claims ("you need lasers to make something that flat") are people working in archeology or are actual civil engineers or machinists etc. Talk to a master machinist about how to make a large stone flat with access to ancient technology and I suspect you'll get a handful of plausible answers.

"Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy" is the text I see referenced most often in this context. On the pdf at [1], from page 24 onwards it describes the procedure to create a flat surface accurate to single digit micrometers "from scratch" with nothing but a scraping tool and some dye (and a whole lot of patience).

[1] https://pearl-hifi.com/06_Lit_Archive/15_Mfrs_Publications/M...

Thank you for posting that, you beat me to it. FOMA is a classic. Here’s a video illustrating the process of creating a microscopically flat surface from three unflat surfaces. It can be done with ancient technology, if you have enough time.

https://youtu.be/5m_Opf3nhQU

Haven't watched yet, but I always wonder, what would be their reason to do so? I assume it takes huge amount of time and effort. They would get pretty similar effect by stopping much earlier. No need to polish two stone to death, just to fit one onto another. Whats even weirder, many times they seem to care much more about the connecting sides, not the eye-facing one. I don't buy the slavery-argument. Even with access to "free labor" there is no point in over-expending the time and effort.

They wouldn't grind down the stones to micrometer flatness for construction work, just a mm or so.

The type of buildings where you see extremely precise stonework tend to be cathedrals and palaces, where spending insane amounts of labor is kinda the point. It demonstrates to the masses how grand, rich and powerful the inhabitant of the building is. Spending lots of money on a building is a way of showing off.

from one angle, the church spends money for monumental purposes. But I’m not of the opinion that you can just spend your way to those cathedrals: the workmen (freemasons in the original sense) have to believe they are giving glory to god.

Here’s a great video [0][17min] documenting the Met Museum’s commissioning of moroccan mosaics, by the end you can see the craftsmen taking great pride in their work, above and beyond what they’re paid to do, carving “allah” over and over out of religious dedication.

(just want to push back on the notion that religion is all about manipulating people with your power, the crimes of the vatican notwishstanding)

[0] https://youtu.be/Og6cTlwBTrk

I've seen exactly blue-collars workers arguing for impossibility: it's hard enough to do with modern technology ("I know it first-hand!"), how would you even do it without it?

That’s perhaps a testament to our dependence on modern machinery, if the skills did exist once.

It's fairly simple to construct a way to see your own face. All you need is a high-grade color LCD or OLED display, a high-resolution digital camera, a power source, a few controls and a logic board. Too bad none of this was available before 2010, those poor ancients must have always wondered what they looked like.

You jest, but I've heard a tale from a local engineering college: they regularly give to the graduating-year students a task to design some system which, after you remove all the fancy wordings, is basically insides of a toilet cistern/tank. Year after year, the students keep producing astonishingly convoluted designs.

I once re-invented the whistling teapot while deeply engrossed in using Arduino for anything and everything. I had only saucepans to boil water with and wished they could alert me once the water reached temp, perhaps optically sensing the turbulance of the surface.

My roommate could not roll their eyes enough.

Well, if you put a lid on a saucepan (and you should, it conserves energy and makes water boil faster) you can detect it clattering when the water starts to boil! So you don't need any optical input, a microphone will suffice ― which is cheaper, too. Filter out the low frequencies of water humming, amplify the rest, and you got a (not-so-nice-sounding, because it rattles, not whistles) boiling point alarm!

It's hard only because you don't have hundred of slaves you can put to work 12+ hours until they pass out

This argument can work both ways. Some people claim everything in Egypt could be done with hands, patience (or by forcing someone). But there are many other clues, suggesting that civilization had access to some very sophisticated tools or machinery. Maybe not lasers, but not hand saws either. Check this short clip for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Oe1--ss51Q&t=917s It describes a sarcophagus was ditched mid-production, because the cut was made in the wrong way. I am not saying that the conclusion is valid, but it's an interesting data point.

> Because obviously, if you can't imagine how to do something then it must be impossible.

Yep, this is known as the "argument from incredulity".

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity

That's why I like videos of handtools techniques. People splitting massive rocks. Levers and pivots to manipulate them. Mechanics are not recent.. we just do it faster thanks to modern energy storage and transfer.

Because obviously, if you say impossible, you mean impossible, and it's not a figure of speech (since unless we're talking about 'alien technology' conspiracy theorists, the people calling it "impossible" already know that e.g. the polishing clearly has been done and is thus possible without lasers).

I've worked for people who think anything they can't do themselves is impossible. It's not an uncommon outlook.

There are actually several descriptions of similar devices in the literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Similar_...

Oh for sure and I think that's an important point: this device didn't pop out of nowhere.

Something of this complexity strongly suggests an existing school/guild/etc which developed the knowledge and crafts around designing and building "clockwork" devices like this. China had discovered the geared wheel centuries previous so gears were known. It's the integration of the basic underlying technologies that is surprising, and I don't think it's a huge leap to presume that there must be more of these devices out there waiting to be discovered!

And the Antikythera mechanism gave a lot of credibility to those descriptions. Without it, they might well be dismissed as fantasy; Roman and Greek writers, even historians, were generally pretty credulous by modern standards and the literature contains references to all sorts of things which couldn't possibly have been true.

I think that's gp's point: rather than saying "An ancient computer that we don't understand is making us realise how little we know about the ancient world and challenging our assumptions about ancient technology" the headline is "An ancient computer that shouldn't exist".

> our historical understanding of these peoples is clearly incomplete

That's the point being made.The conventional wisdom lens frames them as inferior, instead of us being the ones who are flawed.

There's a difference between "They couldn't have done that..." and "We didn't realize they could have done it."

There's nothing _particularly_ surprising about the Pyramids, though; they were fairly obviously possible at the time and made sense in context. The Antikythera device was more surprising; if nothing else, it's the oldest known example of clockwork in that part of the world, by _centuries_.

There's no magic here; it clearly did exist. But it's surprising that it did; it feels out of time in a way that most artifacts don't.

"The condescencion of the modern age toward those who came before use never ceases to amuse."

Well, it's also a bit sad testament to the fact that in general people have very little experience of how far they could go from starting from first principles, instead of just reading a single plausible answer from textbook.

A single human can be quite inventive and achieve quite a lot if they focus their energies.

The bayesian interpretation could be also that "it's pretty easy to progress this far in mechanical computation if you guess the correct route to take".

If a web framework in the Pyramids was discovered, it would defy our understanding of the history of technology and "simply shouldn't exist". It's a dramatic way of putting it, but it's really just saying that our understanding was wrong. It shouldn't exist given our model of the world, so our model is wrong.

They shouldn't exist if the null hypothesis hold true, so this is evidence against the null hypothesis, aka the official history.

This shouldn't surprise you neither, but that depends on your null hypothesis ;)

Taken another way, we're condemning our own current lack of imagination, understanding.

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