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Comment by martythemaniak | Hacker News Reader

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

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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?

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.

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

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!

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