Primitive Technology: Iron Bacteria Cement [video] | Hacker News Reader

Primitive Technology: Iron Bacteria Cement [video]

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If you're new to Primitive Technology then it's worth starting from the oldest videos and working forward. These aren't just random tasks he sets himself. He starts by going into the Australian jungle with absolutely nothing except cargo shorts (not even shoes) and then proceeds to build himself a series of shacks and houses, starting with nothing more than a sharp stone and various plants. Then he starts building kilns and firing clay he digs out of the river bank (with a stick) making pots, bricks and roof tiles. Then he starts making charcoal and building a forge, so he can turn the iron bacteria in the creek into actual forged iron objects. He's been at it for years initially as a hobby and now he earns enough to make it his "job". He doesn't attempt to recreate the paths taken by ancient people - he's willing to use modern scientific knowledge - but he does appear to live by his rule of not taking anything with him and just using only the natural resources around him.

His videos are also blessedly free of unnecessary music and shouted all-caps voice overs like many similar productions, whether on TV or YouTube.

They’re very relaxing to watch after a long frustrating day at work.

Also be sure to stick to Primitive Technology and not any of the knock off channels produced in South East Asia and India where they do lots of work off camera with heavy machinery and modern tools.

Well these days they call it ASMR. But you're right he's one of the first to strip away all unnecessary sounds. Makes for a very therapeutic video.

No audio effects != ASMR.

True, though his videos often fit the criteria of including "tactile" or "natural" sounds and he seems careful not to add anything that would get in the way.

It doesn't fit the criteria, because being outside is not ASMR either.

i would be really surprised to hear that anyone had experienced the asmr from watching the videos on this channel

I wouldn't. One of the main asmr triggers is watching someone focus and work on something.

Well, depends on the person I guess. Personally I can not stand all those Asmr videos, (restoration, bladesmithing stuff)

It is also very helpful to enable captions. He does not speak in his videos but he adds detailed captioning to describe what he is doing.

I probably went six months in watching his videos before I realized that. It was a treat to re-watch with a deeper perspective!

Also if you turn on subtitles you'll get a bit more information on what he's actually doing and why.

A couple of years ago i tried to get some clay from a nearby creek, but i found it extremely difficult to replicate his way of making things from clay. Apparently the region he is doing his stuff got some perfect clay everywhere.

most soils contain some clay; if the problem is that all your clay is impure, you can mix it into a slurry and 'decant' it (let it settle, then pour off the water) and let it mostly dry

the clay is far finer than the sand and silt, so it will settle most slowly, and the topmost layer will be mostly clay

some soils deflocculate the clay, so you may need to add a flocculant to get it to decant properly

if your clay is very expansive you may need to add a lot of temper to keep your work from cracking while drying; the good news is that very expansive clays like bentonite are also highly plastic and so can tolerate a higher temper fraction. you probably want the shrinkage on drying (from the fully plastic state to the bone-dry state, though leather-hard is usually a good enough approximation) to be about ⅛. if you have a lot of kaolin you may be able to go lower than that but if it's much more than that you're going to have a really hard time with cracks during the final stage of drying (from leather hard to bone dry)

making things from clay requires a lot of knowledge but fortunately the humans have been doing it for twelve thousand years and so have accumulated that knowledge already

He actually also has a video on decanting his clay on the channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2RKtUh6m3Q

Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of clay?

i'm mostly just repeating what i've been told in pottery classes, digitalfire.com, pottery groups on fecebutt, and classes and workshops i've attended on adobe construction

i guess i've also spent a few hundred hours reading about clay (archaeology papers, composite materials papers, textbooks on functional fillers for plastics) and playing with clay, but what i wrote above goes well beyond what i can justify from my own direct observations

Thank you for your input!

(also I think it was a reference to Monty Python: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtHZn5X5bXM)

Before the sedimentation pit video he just spent a lot of time manually extracting sticks and rocks from his mined clay. The videos often compress the work of a month into about 10 minutes, so it definitely ends up looking easier than it really is. Usually though it's obvious how much time is invested, simply because he shows the failures as well as the successes and when time skips ahead it's clear how much repetitive work he must have done.

I had that experience over and over as a kid reading about early human development, going out and trying to find my area's equivalent of some material and ending up with nothing but a mess.

In Art History class they mentioned off hand that the people who knew where to find random rare stuff were very valued in early societies. No citation was given though.

I imagine in a pre tech world people would develop a sharp eye for “that looks unusual, let’s take some of that and mess with it and see if it’s useful somehow”.

Well that and they were literally just the same as we are now.

Imagine if you had 80 years to live and nothing but rocks to play with. You'd get pretty good with rocks and you would be pretty desperate to find something new and interesting to play with.

But like you see in the videos, in nature there are a whole lot of other things to play with than rocks and combine it. Wood, soil, bacteria, fire ...

> He doesn't attempt to recreate the paths taken by ancient people - he's willing to use modern scientific knowledge

I would argue that he definitely does. Most of his developmental lineage follows a similar path the the most commonly understood ancient societies. He augments that with modern knowledge, certainly, but is doing most things in a manner “of the time”. He uses tools/technologies from previous videos to build upon the next versus bringing in outside/modern assistance, usually (there have been cases where it’s not completely feasible).

He obviously brings a camera too.

I'm going to go out on a limb here with no real evidence to back me up and say that he probably has his shoes and clothes nearby as well as batteries / solar panels for his camera equipment, including tripod. Probably some modern survival gear (tent?) and food as well.

All this is kept off camera and the actual work of going from scratching sticks on the ground to eventualy working iron seems to be 100% genuine.

I am a huge fan of Primitive Technology. This guy would not surprise me if he built a PC XT out of mud, slime and wood one day.

It would be kind of cool is for April fools day he found "redstone" and each successive year on that day he built on that to eventually make a CPU. It would take some clever (practical) special effects to do well though.

There are many copycat channels now.

Not sure why this is here - I enjoy primitive tech's videos (often imitated, never duplicated - too many imitation channels have poorly-covered excavator tracks and chainsaw chips when the work crew and camera crew come in between cuts).

But before watching, be sure to enable subtitles for a description of what he's doing!

or, conversely, turn them off before it starts and try to figure out what he's doing and why. then when it's done, turn the captions on and watch it again!

our living room turns into bedlam when we do this. everyone shouting what is about to happen or why it's happening and we're almost always wrong. it's great!

I like going into t mobile stores and changing the loud TV channels to primitive technology. it's beautiful to see the whole place calm down.

I wish I had as much energy as you

I like going into t mobile stores and changing the loud TV channels to primitive technology. it's beautiful to see the whole place calm the fuck down.

So... Maybe in the way back of my brain I knew there were subtitles, but there is a good chance I'm just now learning about this.

I think I've been watching these randomly since the beginning just trying to figure out what he's doing. I thought that was the game here!

It's been a long time since I've seen anything from his channel, but I recall that he would put out blog posts explaining the processes shown in the videos too.

I think the blog is dead: https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com

The video descriptions and the pinned comment are also really information dense though.

And John Plant, the guy running Primitive Technology, has published a book, which I've not read but could be of interest to people who like this kind of content and would like more of it in the text form.

My 10yr old son enjoys the book a lot!

Not entirely sure why you appear to be shadowbanned (nothing looked egregious in a quick scan of past comments), so I vouched for this comment so it shows for people that don't have showdead on.

Maybe it's that most your comments are very short and single sentences and it's triggering some automated system looking spam as a false positive? Maybe it's worth being slightly more verbose in replies for a while, in case that's it. I assume if you get enough people vouching for comments the ban reverses itself, but I don't really know. You could also email hn and ask why.

So many people learn that there is subtitles through the comments section after many years of watching all his videos, probably because the videos are so enjoyable even without the explanations.

I present to you the best Hacker News comment I've ever read (it was in response to another Primitive Technology video): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32697419

If I get stranded in ancient times, I hope to God kragen is there with me.

from most people's point of view, this will have been ancient times right here

they will marvel at how stupid we've been and what obvious opportunities we've been wasting

my efforts at improving the situation:

http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano

http://canonical.org/~kragen/derctuo

http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua

That's extraordinary. If kragen is around, I've always been curious what, if any, of our technological discovery history has really been time-gated rather than just dependency-gated. Like, are there certain technological advancements that simply would have been impossible before the year X, when Y happened?

The Spinning wheel could arguably have been a Neolithic invention but instead only shows up fairly recently. What makes it notable is it probably saved more labor than any other device in history, and in many ways set the stage for the Industrial revolution.

In terms of discovery, trade with the America across the Bering Strait could have occurred vastly earlier and dramatically changed history. It’s likely people where crossing fairly regularly without realizing anything unusual was going on.

the spinning wheel is a wonderful example, and i wish i'd thought of it

arguably agriculture, the needle, the bow, the boat, and fire 'saved more labor' than the spinning wheel, but it isn't clear that in their case those even apply

it's a really interesting question, and i don't really have a good answer

plant has made a reasonably good demonstration here that if you have the knowledge and a fair bit of free time (i.e., you aren't working 60 hours a week just so you aren't arrested by the king's men, don't starve to death, and don't get eaten by lions) you can get from banging rocks together to casting tools from smelted iron within a single human decade; in historical human terms this took from pre-pottery neolithic (≈10'000 bce) to the warring states period (≈500 bce)

so it seems that human innovation was purely 'dependency-gated' or maybe 'knowledge-gated' at least during that period; but could we have acquired the knowledge faster? russo's book claims that the main reason we didn't was that we didn't have the hypothetico-deductive method until the hellenistic period, and then it was forgotten again after the roman conquests, until being rediscovered in the 18th and 19th centuries. but even today most places are not advancing rapidly or really at all; life expectancy may be improving in chuuk, bangalore, and montevideo, and they certainly know about the hypothetico-deductive method, but world-changing innovation isn't happening there, and there are worrisome signs it is endangered even in the places it's previously been abundant

so i don't think there were, like, volcanic eruptions or eclipses or population explosions or something that needed to happen before technological advancement could continue, if that's what you're asking

I tend to think of it as not dependency gated but social-technology gated. As you say, the critical resource was leisure, sufficiently widely distributed as to lead to humans playing status games like, "who can polish the shiniest mirror." And that requires a fairly sophisticated society in terms of number of classes, the way they depend on each other, possibilities of social mobility, resilience to sudden resource constraints, etc., etc.

i don't think the critical resource was leisure; hunter-gatherers have plenty of leisure time, and the leisure time of chinese emperors and the roman élite was so notorious that it toppled a number of dynasties. john plant has had less leisure time in his life than almost any individual noble, scribe, sadhu, or other monk, in most civilized societies throughout most of history

and i don't think that we have good evidence that the wildly innovative hellenistic society was noticeably more sophisticated in these ways than the imperial society that ground the intellectual face of mediterranean society under its boot for the following 16 centuries, ceding leadership in math, science, and technology to india and china until the renaissance

i think it's a mistake to think of intellectual and technological progress as something that will inevitably happen at the fastest rate allowed by some critical resource; historically progress was the exception, not the rule, and that remains true worldwide today. it requires a delicate constellation of favorable conditions

I liked Ober's The rise and fall of classical Greece for more background bearing on this for greater Greece. It argued that literary sources underweighted things like classical Greece's relative economic dynamism (shown by archaeology).

interesting, i'll have to check it out

i still haven't finished russo's book you recommended me, which was another huge mind bomb for me

Yeah, that's what I was asking. If any of our technology history can be attributed to external physical natural phenomena that hadn't existed before then, or something along those lines. Mostly because it's incredibly humbling to think of how all our technology today could have existed thousands of years ago if the right social conditions were in place along the way.

It's also interesting to think of what "pause points" we're stuck in now. Technology we know we could have but just aren't driving on right now. I guess one arguably obvious one recently was rocket technology.

well, i suppose certain natural resources are pretty scarce on earth; meteoric iron, for example, and platinum-group metals

current cases of 'tech we know we could have but aren't reaching for' includes molecular nanotechnology, human germline editing, decentralized software, provably secure operating systems, simple web browsers (we had them 20 years ago), gem-gum systems, space elevators, supergun-based orbital launch, lithium 'fusion' power, undersea cities, atmospheric carbon capture, orion-style nuclear rockets, terraforming, personal rapid transit, sustainable agriculture (arguably), human space travel (leo isn't travel), suborbital commuter rockets (45 minutes to anywhere on earth), universal access to implanted automatic defibrillators, asteroid mining, solar power plants in solar orbit, all kinds of drugs, implanted perceptual prostheses (with a narrow exception for making people 'normal' if they are disabled relative to social expectations), personal airbags to prevent death from falls, wheelchairs that can climb stairs, cruise airships, etc.

i've written about some of these at some length in the notes linked from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35017711

but basically 'why don't we have atmospheric carbon capture yet' is the same problem as 'why don't we have world peace yet' or 'why is sci-hub illegal in most countries'; the problem is power structures, incentive structures, human motivation, and the result, people working at cross purposes

I think Y tends to be a combination of factors like enough wealth within a society combined with enough people and communication and a culture of exploration and experimentation free from overly despotic government. Those circumstances have been quite rare in history as far as we know.

Man, that entire comment thread is like mind blowing! So many things were possible but didn't happen. Made me wonder about the number of things that are possible now but isn't!

No doubt there are many things we could do today, with available materials, but we just don't know how to do it yet. There might be a catalyst that can efficiently combine CO2 with H2O to rip carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and create fuel. There might be a combination of materials and processes that we already know about which would enable grid scale nuclear fusion. There might be a way to use existing materials to create ultrafast photonic circuits.

So many technologies are actually pretty simple when you look at their components - a lot of genetic engineering is "just" plastic, metal, and heated water baths.

thank you, i'm flattered you liked it; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35017711 for my thoughts on the things that are possible now but not happening

If you liked that comment you might also like https://simplifier.neocities.org/

Great stuff, thank you very much.

wow, that's really flattering! thank you!

Totally unrelated to this video, just related to the subject matter on YouTube. Interesting how some of these style videos are totally bs.

https://youtu.be/Hvk63LADbFc

https://youtu.be/_0-uLF9PtNo

Again just to be clear, I believe this channel is legit. Just the genre on YouTube has some disingenuous stuff.

Primitive Technology is the first channel of this kind. These bullshit channels are just leeching off its success.

Yep. He's the OG. I started watching him in something like 2016 or so.

For a while he didn’t produce videos because he was contracted for some television shows in Australia due to his meteoric rise in popularity, but he thankfully was able to return to YouTube last year. I assume his contractual obligations had been met and no longer was bound by any exclusivity terms with the broadcast network anymore.

His book is extremely detailed and pragmatic as well.

Apparently the TV deal fell through: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrimitiveTechnology/comments/lfsq04...

> Another post on February 8, 2021, explained that Plant shot a pilot episode for the project but the network wanted to change the format, and that Plant could not share any more information.

The /r/primitivetechnology mod had previously reached out to Plant after worry related to the hiatus: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrimitiveTechnology/comments/gscvv8...

I was under the impression the hiatus was because he couldn't go to his filming location for an extended period of time for covid-related reasons. He's certainly had to start over/rebuild many of his projects.

He owns the land, so I doubt that's the (main) reason.

But of course covid would have effect on everything.

I believe he bought another plot at some point

I believe this is Leptothrix bacteria, it creates an iridescent sheen on top of stagnant water, often mistaken for oil. It's quite common once you know what you're looking for.

There were videos circulating from Ohio of people disturbing water and then seeing this iridescent sheen appear alongside conspiracy bs. Fascinating!

I don't think you see this bacteria in the Ohio climate.

They've found Leptothrix in Antarctica, it has no problem surviving in Ohio.

Maybe not this specific kind of bacteria, but AFAIK it was something similar (ie. biofilm created by bacteria).

That's interesting, but would those pots be as sturdy as fired clay pots? If you drop them, will the break more, or less easily, I mean, than fired clay pots?

I'm asking because they look a little too loose to me, and btw, the material seems less easy to mold than clay.

In any case this is a very interesting piece of information from a scientific point of view, but for practical reasons I think fired clay is much more practical (because much faster to make stuff with).

For those who are hearing, there are subtitles that you should turn on.

This one was cool.

Could you also extract iron from the bacteria?

EDIT: be sure to watch with the captions on, as the videographer explains what he is doing.

You can. He has some other videos where he actually does extract the iron and ~~makes a knife out of it.~~ makes a forgeable chunk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZGAYzItazw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPIUMpiV0IY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOj4L9yp7Mc

In the first link, I understood better many things about human history... Still the guy does not sweat in front of a furnace. Obviously irrelevant, but strange!

As someone who has fought wildfire before, I personally found that sweat does not accumulate in front of a source of heat. You start to feel damp or wet after you walk away from the heat. Perhaps it is the same with a hot furnace.

I think he's probably sweating, but the sweat evaporates faster than it can bead up. Or maybe he's dehydrated.. I have wondered what the "behind the scenes" of his videos looks like; when he goes out into the woods does he bring modern water bottles and pack a lunch?

> when he goes out into the woods does he bring modern water bottles and pack a lunch?

The wilderness he films these in is a 15 minute walk from his house: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dq0zec/im_john_plant_...

so he doesn't really bring anything with him https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dq0zec/im_john_plant_...

He does have a video about using "cane" to make a water filter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG-rNHgFxhs

hot, dry air has a tendency to evaporate water.

could this be used for 3D-printing?

I very much appreciate this dude. The amount of time and energy he puts into making these is amazing.

Learned a new fact and word today: iron bacteria have cementitious properties

i've always found iron bacteria fascinating, is it possible to cultivate and farm it?

It is, but the bacteria live off iron already in the water, increasing the amount of bacteria won't extract more iron.

More generally though, there is an entire field of bioleaching[0] which does use bacteria to either mine material or more often recover extra minerals from mine waste products.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioleaching

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