Hacker News Reader

Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

Ancient Aliens conflates two very different ideas.

The show’s core argument is that ancient civilizations were more advanced than we give them credit for. That may be true, but “more advanced” does not mean they had superior technology or help from aliens. It can simply mean they had technical knowledge, methods, or craftsmanship that we have since lost or forgotten.

Elon Musk has made a similar point about the US space program. We landed on the moon more than 50 years ago, but in some ways we now have to relearn how to do it (because we forgot how). That does not mean we had better technology in the 1960s, and it certainly does not mean aliens were involved. It means knowledge, systems, expertise, and institutional capability can fade over time. And that doesn't mean aliens were involved (as the tvshow would make you believe).

View on HN

> It means knowledge, systems, expertise, and institutional capability can fade over time

This has also been happening since ancient times. Famously, how to make roman concrete was lost after the fall of the empire and Europe did not reinvent high quality concrete until much later in the 18th century. They also lost entire industrial-scale manufacturing pipelines for pottery and had a regression back to crude, hand-shaped pottery.

Turns out we humans have been dealing with the same human problems for hundreds of thousands of years.

This reminds me of Gall’s Law. You cannot create a complex system, you must create a simple system and improve it over time.

The issue arises when you get so many iterations in, you’ve forgotten the process. Any catastrophic event can mean you won’t be able to create the silicon chip or airplanes and so much other technology.

Maybe I’m wrong and people and books do exist that can explain the process and human might would succeed.

A semiconductor company couldn't get their second plant to work until they tore it down and set it up again in an exact copy of the floor layout of the first plant. They don't know why.

The Freefall webcomic can sympathize. http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1500/fc01415.htm

Have we actually forgotten how to land to the moon? That sounds very fishy, I’m pretty skeptical that’s not the case, that was done at a time where we had good records and still have access to them. And it’s close enough to current time that people who worked on it are still alive (not all of course). Coming from musk makes me believe that’s not true, he’s far from a reliable narrator

Many of the manufacturing processes used to make the Apollo spacecraft were not followed in the production floor - and nobody wrote those changes down. That's one well-known example of Apollo-era knowledge lost, there are a few others if you seriously care to DDG them.

Can you see how far

"some Apollo program last-minute production-floor manufacturing changes were not written down"

is from

"humans lost fundamental technology needed to land on the moon"?

In aerospace, those are the same statements. Those production floor changes are often the difference between a payload working or failing.

How many years did these production floor changes take to engineer?

Over a period from 1960 to 1969:

> Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $187 billion in 2024 US dollars)[24] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[25]

A large chunk of those industries and supporting academia no longer exist in the US outside the defense sector.

I remain in awe at the Apollo program, it is a most marvellous thing, and I am aware that it was not always received well at the time.

Comparing the cost, the Iran war cost the US between 25 billion and 113 billion, so 187 spending billion over 9 years is not insurmountable. Political will provided. Alas.

Obviously I was asking about the lifespan of an individual undocumented change, not the entire Apollo program prior to 1970.

Okay, but dgallow at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48589728 asked "Have we actually forgotten how to land to the moon?", not "can we build a Saturn V rocket which is fundamentally the same as the ones from nearly 60 years ago?"

Reading about the design for the F-1B engine gave me some understanding of the issue.

The F-1B was meant as a modernized version of the Apollo Saturn F-1 main engine.

The original design used extensive hand-welding, and the specific details of how to handle tricky situations likely not included in the manufacturing processes details because it was simply expected from an expert welder of the time.

That sort of expertise is far less common now. But rather than try to find those welders, the designers of the new engine used newer methods like additive manufacturing to replace welding entirely.

The old F-1 engine used a lot of complicated mechanical control methods. The F-1B used computer controls.

The new design had fewer components, was lighter, and was designed for a 15% performance boost over the original design.

So, sure, perhaps we can't exactly build a new Saturn V rocket following the 1969 blueprints, due to missing production floor changes. But we would never try because we are not limited to 1960s building methods if we wanted to use the Saturn V design as the basis for going back to the moon.

1. You are correct it's not very far.

2. "Not far" is the difference between "land humans on the surface of the moon and return them safely to Earth" and not doing that. Some of this stuff was unbelievably lucky, go read about the F1 engine baffles - getting that right was pure stupid luck as much as it was engineered.

And there were literally hundreds of these examples - across five different space vehicles and the interfaces between them.

Yes, it's absolutely a lot of work, cost, and risk to design and qualify a new rocket for human spaceflight from scratch. Especially if you've let all your institutional knowledge drift away in the meantime.

I just don't think that comes close to meeting the bar of "lost technology" in the sense that term is used by the extraterrestrial pyramid theorists (i.e., the manipulation of fundamental physical forces allowing the blocks to be levitated into place).

I agree with you about that. We are facing an engineering challenge, not a physics challenge.

It has been a common meme within NASA since before SpaceX was founded.

The hard part of putting humans on the moon and bringing them back safely is not a problem if basic scientific knowlege, it is more an engineering challenge in an incredibly complex and bespoke domain. It is the know how that this component from this manufacturer has this kind of failure rate under these conditions, but when interacting with this other component under these conditions the failure rate is much higher, but that can be mitigated if we apply this kind of technique, but only if the temperature stays within X....

There are two parts to manufacturing technology: The written knowledge of what to build, and the process knowledge of all the gotchas and tricks and skill that people experienced in their craft rarely write down. (In many cases the great craftspeople with the knowledge are not great teachers or writers). Manufacturing an object is not like compiling code, where if you pick the right inputs and machines you get the same output. The actual process of building is so full of domain knowledge and variability that ten different people following the same written instructions can get wildly different results.

Derek from SmarterEveryDay ran into this when trying to get a product manufactured in the US and shared his experience: https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?t=1386

Thanks, that’s very interesting

In the same way we've forgotten how to write Windows 1.0 programs. Sure, we can work it out again - specially with modern reverse engineering tools. But that's the point - we'd have to work it out again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com