Will the Manhattan Project Always Exist?

This is lots of fun to read, because it's good to keep a perspective on history.

That said, it's not at all clear that the next several thousand years will be analogous to the last several thousand. We have a rather different starting point. The key difference is mass production. A society without printing can come close to losing the works of Plato: every copy of Plato cost weeks, months, or years of a laborer's salary to make. [1] So, even at the height of Greek and Roman civilization, there were a limited number of copies of Plato's work. There were also a limited number of educated people who could read those works -- not because people were stupid, but because reading material was sufficiently expensive that it wasn't worthwhile for the majority of people to master its use.

Meanwhile, Plato himself was seen by perhaps only a few thousand people in his lifetime, at most. There were no planes or trains. There were no photographs or recordings. Hence, there weren't a lot of eyewitnesses to spread tales of Plato's genius. Inefficient as they were, the written books did most of that work.

Compare that to the atom bomb. I never got to see one in person, but I've seen them a hundred times in photographs and films. Literally half the people alive today have seen the atom bomb in one way or another. And the stories of those who encountered them directly can be heard by everyone, who then compose stories which mention the bomb, which themselves get mass-produced. There are probably more action figures of Godzilla in existence today than there ever were copies of Plato's works.

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[1] I was recently listening to Brad Delong's economic history course from Berkeley, and at one point he tried to explain the value of a book in medieval times. A book was worth the modern equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars -- that was what it cost to assemble the materials and then copy out the writing by hand. A scholar would count himself well-off if he owned two or three personal books.

The article is mixed - some really interesting points, some off-the-mark points. But this is one I've thought a lot about:

> Even Plato barely survived history’s guillotine—throughout medieval times, Plato was unknown in the West, living on only in Muslim countries and in footnotes to other Greek authors. Had the Muslims been worse stewards, or been conquered by marauding Christians who needed kindling or toilet paper, Socrates would have died in vain.

I wonder how many other exceptional Antiquity works we don't have? How many other masterpieces were made and destroyed due to the Dark Ages/Burning of Baghdad mix?

I've got this as one of the top 10 worst moments in human history, right up there with the Holocaust:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_(1258)#Destru...

In addition to the lost of life, cruelties, and destruction, we lost a lot of works that would've tremendously benefited humanity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom

So I wonder what else we don't have copies of? I'm marveled when I go through modern versions of some of the ancient works at how good they were. Antiquity Greece and Rome, and the Islamic Golden Age produced some really incredible science, philosophy, engineering, and literature. Sometimes I muse, wondering what other knowledge did they produce that we have no more records of?

One doesn't have to be a strong Singulatarian to recognize that projecting 4000 years into the future is not the best idea. There is a non-trivial probability that sophonts of the future will perfectly well believe that Man had the atomic bomb in 1950, what with that being a standard part of the ambient personality/memory matrix available for free for all pet paleohumans, post-human-based personality megaliths, retro-humans, poingtarees, and all others of sophont class H1C except the tridilons.

I know this isn't really meant as a projection into the future, and I suppose I'm just riffing off that point to observe it really isn't the best jump off point for an essay, since it distracts you with a lot of other things like the temptation to observe how this is the worst time in the history of Man to try to predict the future.

I think it is highly likely that the Catholic Church will have institutional memory of nuclear weapons in 3000 AD if for no other reason than "Our theologians spent a lot of time in the mid twentieth century writing on this subject. We're obsessive compulsive about recording things, had large amounts of resources to devote to it, and keep dead languages on life-support singlehandedly for millennia just because we have interesting things written in them."

Incidentally, anyone interested in the intersection of science fiction, Catholicism, and the Church functioning as external storage for the memory of the human race should read a Canticle for Leibowitz.

An intriguing line of thought. I think, however, the number of references to historical events is much greater now than in the past. There are 1.3M results for "nuclear bomb" on Google; 120M for "nuclear". More are being added daily. Ones that die off are being replaced.