Making iron from sand [video](youtube.com)
youtube.com
Making iron from sand [video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPIUMpiV0IY
162 comments
On a related note, you might be interested in the book "How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler" by Ryan North. It addresses that idea, of restarting civilization and reinventing the technology that has been most helpful.
Not quite as pre-historic, but along similar lines, I quite enjoyed Honzuki no Gekokujou (Ancendance of a bookworm), a series about a book-loving girl reborn as a sickly poor commoner child in a fantasy world and her attempts to create books (and other modern products) from scratch.
Definitely echoing this one, the light novels are incredible for anyone looking for something fun and casual to read. It deviates a bit more into the fantasy and political drama arena as the series goes on, but you still get fun references to reinventing products from our world all throughout.
I just finished binging the first 2 seasons after reading this, thank you.
Huh, this is pretty much my personal project (civboot.org), but I've never heard of Dr Stone!
Yes, I was definitely inspired by them. However, OsE is about building a village toolkit, but has no path to building a (minimalist) computer chip or computer software which can run on that chip. Last I checked they use full CAD software, definitely requiring commodity hardware.
[deleted]
Something like this was why I loved Jules Verne's Mysterious Island as a kid. In retrospect it was kind of unrealistic how the Smith (the Engineer) happened to know all the tech they needed to survive, but it certainly set my path!
(also, featuring Epic Crossover!)
(also, featuring Epic Crossover!)
There is this YouTube channel called "how to make everything".
Huh, sounds right up my alley. I am kind of obsessed with open world crafting games, so thanks for the recommendation.
Edit: This whole comment chain is a gold mine :-D
Edit: This whole comment chain is a gold mine :-D
It was a manga serialized in Shounen Jump, the anime is merely an adaptation.
Actually a light novel was the original source.
(https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/manga.php?id=2...)
Ascendance of Bookworm is not Doctor Stone
I'm sorry, I see my mistake, I thought the parent was talking about another comment where they were talking about Ascendance of Bookworm.
Regardless, both have interesting stories. ^^
Regardless, both have interesting stories. ^^
I once went on a foraging walk with an expert forager. It was fun and entertaining and sort-of-useful. But he’d say things like “see this seed” holds up VERY tiny plant with VERY tiny seed “if you collect enough of these you can grind then up to make flour and then make bread.”
The whole thing made me less excited about foraging and more excited about how frikkin amazing a supermarket and global supply chain is.
This video gives me the same feeling. Thank fuck people figured all this out for us a long time ago.
The whole thing made me less excited about foraging and more excited about how frikkin amazing a supermarket and global supply chain is.
This video gives me the same feeling. Thank fuck people figured all this out for us a long time ago.
I was in Costa Rica recently and a tour guide pulled a fruit about the size of my fist from a tree. He quizzed us on what the top of the fruit was. We could not identify it. We ended up feeding it to a cow.
It was a single cashew.
That experience changed my perception of supply chain, you can buy thousands of those for very low price. The fruit is huge and you get just one nut!
It was a single cashew.
That experience changed my perception of supply chain, you can buy thousands of those for very low price. The fruit is huge and you get just one nut!
Was he wearing gloves ? I understand the cashew fruit is kinda gnarly to work with. But you can make a liqueur from it: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feni_(liquor)
The fruit itself is not too bad as long as you can avoid touching the saps residue on the base of the fruit. We had a cashew tree when I was growing up. We usually eat the fruit as a spicy fruit salad (mixed with other tropical fruits). One day, my dad decided to harvest the dried cashew nuts he's been collecting, cracked them open with a machete. Took a while to crack them all and we did get some tasty nuts, but he didn't wear a glove while doing it so the skin on his palms were peeling. The dried shells basically contains concentrated sap which is really bad to your skin. Several months later we no longer have a cashew tree :)
I think cashew nuts are the strongest proof that we must be living in a simulation.
we've been getting into gardening a bit more this year and looking at all that's involved with buying a can of beans or veggies or whatever I look at those things with a whole new appreciation. We don't just pay for the raw produce from some place, we pay for all the labor that went into cleaning and packaging, and everything that brought that piece to us. When you grow your own you need to do all the prep and washing and canning etc if you so choose. It's quite a chunk of labor to commit to.
But its a real pledge for the environment. Not just words.
Everyone wants green but refuses to do the work.
Everyone wants green but refuses to do the work.
A lot of home gardeners drive their SUV to the box store to buy plant saplings in plastic pots and small plastic bags of compost/manure/fertilizer, then in a separate trip to the big box hardware store to buy kiln dried dimensional lumber for a raised bed, then pay a contractor to drop off a few tonnes of soil for that raised bed, then plant their saplings in their brand new garden. Then harvest time comes around and if they're really committed, they'll can their own tomatoes! Boiling a huge stock pot of water on their gas stove to pasteurize their 6 quarts of sauce. On the net, this type of home gardening uses dramatically more resources per unit of output than production farms. It can be worth it because of the freshness and quality that you can gain, but unless you're paying a lot of attention and effort (saving seeds, using more natural nutrient sources to amend the soil, etc), you're not doing the environment many favours by gardening.
That said, topsoil loss is one part of commercial farming that is not nearly addressed enough - it's a nonrenewable resource being squandered and literally washed away every season.
That said, topsoil loss is one part of commercial farming that is not nearly addressed enough - it's a nonrenewable resource being squandered and literally washed away every season.
yah my thoughts wandered into that territory a bit wondering about economies of scale etc by leaving it up to the professional farmers. It's definitely something to think about.
I think the freshness/quality is a real draw. All our multiplying strawberry plants give such a punchy berry--store bought just can't compete. There's an independence aspect too to contemplate in light of food security and rising food prices and shortages and that sort of thing. One other thing that's popped up is the garden created all this food for bugs too. I see a bunch of lady bugs, praying mantises, and just today this white butterfly was hopping around laying single eggs beneath a broccoli leaf. I think I'm going to let those lil caterpillars grow to maturity.
I think the freshness/quality is a real draw. All our multiplying strawberry plants give such a punchy berry--store bought just can't compete. There's an independence aspect too to contemplate in light of food security and rising food prices and shortages and that sort of thing. One other thing that's popped up is the garden created all this food for bugs too. I see a bunch of lady bugs, praying mantises, and just today this white butterfly was hopping around laying single eggs beneath a broccoli leaf. I think I'm going to let those lil caterpillars grow to maturity.
The benefit to the environment is nonexistent. 99% of the benefit is an increased appreciation of how food is grown and the work it takes to do it right and how easily it all goes wrong.
There is something that changes when you get into how much things can go wrong. I've been explaining to my kids that we're taking care of living things. And living things have their own clocks and times that draw us out of ourselves in the care of them. It's kind of hardened me up to reality somewhat after having watched so many seedlings not make it and watching others not thrive. I've become for lack of a better word more ruthless in cutting short plants that aren't going to produce. There's some kind of mental change that occurred I want to say over this process. I've lost patience for the straggler, for the stunted, for the sick. I think there was some unrealistic mush in me before that was rooted in a completely unreasonable expectation for how things work. It was a very startling discovery to say the least.
There are ways to do it right. In the suburban context (as long as you have decent soil and keep inputs out of it), whatever you grow is an improvement on grass or weeds. If you grow from seed, compost your own fruit and veg waste, maybe raise some chickens and use their manure - you can grow a lot of food from what would otherwise be unproductive space. I was just pointing out that that isn't what happens for most people.
At this point I don't think we should go green. I think we should go atomic.
Green energy is mostly the path to hell being paved with good intentions.
Green energy is mostly the path to hell being paved with good intentions.
i agree. nuclear.
and coal.
and develop fusion in the meantime. a well funded global effort.
and coal.
and develop fusion in the meantime. a well funded global effort.
One of the things that really stands out is just how much wood goes into every gram of iron he extracted. That charcoal pile was huge and it was only enough for a dozen or so BB sized chunks of iron. The limitation on the availability of iron in primitive times seems mostly limited by the size of the nearby forest and how good you are at converting them into charcoal.
This is indeed true, and Bret Devereaux has written about it extensively on ACOUP: https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
Why England was deforested.
The same observation is likely true for a lot of carbon-intensive goods. I’ve read how much carbon goes into a kilo of beef, but I’ve never seen a graphic representation.
As a kid I was fascinated by the extraction of iron from sand using a magnet. I’d hang out in sandboxes on playgrounds and collect it. I figured out you could wrap the magnet in a plastic bag for easy removal of iron filings. Last I recall I had filled two and a half peanut butter jars.
There are beaches on New Zealand’s west coast that are black iron sand. It’s used to make steel at Glenbrook near Auckland.
The sand is hot as all hell in summer and it gets into everything, things with magnets in particular. Watching people cross the sand in summer is amusing. Patients with it on them need a good wash before MRI scans - a known hazard in radiology here.
I recently saw a documentary that showed researchers actually using a magnet to find micro meteorites. I tried it in our yard with my five-year-old, and we found lots of small iron containing particles, some of which looked black and glassy under the microscope.
[deleted]
I love this channel and have been watching it for years, but one note of caution: this isn't the same type of primitive technology our ancestors used tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago. I would best describe it as "technology from scratch using all available modern knowledge".
In a way it's even more interesting than trying to do primitive technology as it actually was. In this example, he's using modern knowledge of ore smelting and doing it in a way with the fewest tools/processes possible. Our ancestors (250,000 to ~3000 years go) could have done this, but they didn't. Metallurgy did not appear until a few thousand years ago and iron working working even later than bronze and other types of metal working. In fact, he's not even trying that hard, as he doesn't use the stream to build a waterwheel and automate many of his processes (though he did build a water hammer once).
Really makes you think what's perfectly possible physically today, but we lack the knowledge to actually do it.
In a way it's even more interesting than trying to do primitive technology as it actually was. In this example, he's using modern knowledge of ore smelting and doing it in a way with the fewest tools/processes possible. Our ancestors (250,000 to ~3000 years go) could have done this, but they didn't. Metallurgy did not appear until a few thousand years ago and iron working working even later than bronze and other types of metal working. In fact, he's not even trying that hard, as he doesn't use the stream to build a waterwheel and automate many of his processes (though he did build a water hammer once).
Really makes you think what's perfectly possible physically today, but we lack the knowledge to actually do it.
Sure, tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago nobody was working with metals at all. And the centrifugal fan he uses is a modern invention; the oldest mention of them in the literature is less than 500 years old, in De Re Metallica.
It's really interesting to think about the "could have done this but didn't" stuff!
Silver chloride is one of the less sensitive silver halides you can use in photography, but it works; it dates to about 2500 years ago when someone (the Lydians?) figured out you could separate silver from gold by firing it with salt. So you could have done photography 2500 years ago instead of 200 years ago.
There's lots of stuff in optics that only requires a Fizeau interferometer (made of a candle flame and a razor blade, Bronze Age stuff), abrasives (Paleolithic), reflective metal (Bronze Age again; Newton's mirrors were just a high-tin bronze), abrasives, and an unreasonable amount of patience. Imhotep could have made a Dobsonian telescope and seen the moons of Jupiter 4700 years ago if he'd known that was a worthwhile thing to do.
Speaking of metrology, I've heard conflicting stories about surface plates: one story that the Babylonians knew about grinding three surfaces alternately against one another to make them all flat, and another that Maudslay originated the technique only about 220 years ago. (Or, sometimes, Maudslay's apprentice Whitworth.) This is clearly a technique you could have employed in the Neolithic.
Sorption pumps for fine vacuum (usually 1e-2 mbar) require a high-surface-area sorbent (zeolite or maybe even kieselguhr or ball-milled non-zeolite clay: Neolithic), probably glassblowing (Roman Republic era in Syria), sealed joints (apparently Victorians used sealing wax successfully up to HV though not UHV, and sealing wax is pine resin and beeswax: probably Paleolithic), and some way to heat up the sorbent (fire: Paleolithic). Fine vacuum is enough for thermos bottles (dewars) and CVD, among other things.
Conceivably you could have just luted together an opaque vacuum apparatus from glazed earthenware (which dates from probably 3500 years ago), using sealing wax to seal the joints. But debugging the thing or manipulating anything inside of it would have been an invincible challenge.
Sorption pumping works better if you can also cool the sorbent down, too; dry ice is today made by explosive decompression of carbon dioxide, similar to how puffed corn and rice can be made with a grain-puffing cannon, and regularly is by Chinese street vendors. Pure carbon dioxide is available by calcining limestone (thus the name: Neolithic) in a metal vessel (Bronze Age) that bubbles the result into water into a "gasometer", a bucket floating upside down. Compressing the carbon dioxide sufficiently probably requires the accurately cylindrical bores produced for the first time for things like the Dardanelles Gun (15th century). But possibly not; the firepiston in Madagascar is at least 1500 years old, dating back to the time of the Western Roman Empire, and I think it can achieve sufficiently high compression.
Mercury has been known all over the world since antiquity, though usually as a precious metal rather than a demonic pollutant. Mercury plus glassblowing (Roman Republic, again) is enough for a Sprengel pump, which can achieve 1 mPa, high vacuum, 1000 times higher vacuum than an ordinary sorption pump (though some sorption pumps are even better than the Sprengel pump). High vacuum is sufficient to make vacuum tubes.
The Pidgeon process to refine magnesium requires dolomite, ferrosilicon, and a reducing atmosphere or vacuum. You get ferrosilicon by firing iron, coke, and silica in acid refractory (such as silica). Magnesium is especially demanding of reducing atmospheres; in particular nitrogen and carbon dioxide are not good enough, so you need something like hydrogen (or, again, vacuum) to distill the magnesium out of the reaction vessel. As a structural metal magnesium isn't very useful unless you also have aluminum or zinc or manganese or silicon, which the ancients didn't; but it's a first-rate incendiary weapon and thermite reducer, permitting both the easy achievement of very high temperatures and the thermite reduction of nearly all other metals.
Copper and iron with any random kind of electrolyte makes a (rather poor) battery; this permits you to electroplate. The Baghdad Battery surely isn't such a battery, but it demonstrates that the materials available to build one were available starting in the Iron Age. Electroplating is potentially useful for corrosion resistance, but to electroplate copper onto iron you apparently need an intermediate metal like nickel or chromium to get an adherent coating, and to electroplate gold or silver you probably need cyanide or more exotic materials. Alternate possible uses for low-voltage expensive electricity include molten-salt electrolysis and the production of hydrogen from water.
Copper rectifiers and photovoltaic panels pretty much just require heating up a sheet of copper, I think? Similarly copper wires for a generator only require wire drawing (Chalcolithic I think, at least 2nd Dynasty Egypt) and something like shellac (Mahabharata-age India, though rare in Europe until 500 years ago), though many 19th-century electrical machines were instead insulated with silk cloth.
Vapor-compression air conditioners probably need pretty advanced sealing and machining techniques, but desiccant-driven air conditioners can operate entirely at atmospheric pressure. The desiccants are pretty corrosive, but beeswax-painted metal or salt-glazed ceramic pipes are probably fine for magnesium chloride ("bitterns" from making sea salt, Japanese "nigari"), and you can pump it around with a geyser pump.
I think the geyser pump is still under patent, but it can be made of unglazed earthenware or carved out of bamboo (both Neolithic) and driven by either a bellows (Neolithic) or a trompe (Renaissance).
Some years ago I figured out a way to use textile thread (and, say, tree branches) to make logic gates; I posted that to kragen-tol. So you probably could have done digital logic with Neolithic materials science, though only at kHz clock rates. And of course you could have hand-filed clockwork gears out of sheet copper as early as the Chalcolithic, instead of waiting until the Hellenistic period.
It's really interesting to think about the "could have done this but didn't" stuff!
Silver chloride is one of the less sensitive silver halides you can use in photography, but it works; it dates to about 2500 years ago when someone (the Lydians?) figured out you could separate silver from gold by firing it with salt. So you could have done photography 2500 years ago instead of 200 years ago.
There's lots of stuff in optics that only requires a Fizeau interferometer (made of a candle flame and a razor blade, Bronze Age stuff), abrasives (Paleolithic), reflective metal (Bronze Age again; Newton's mirrors were just a high-tin bronze), abrasives, and an unreasonable amount of patience. Imhotep could have made a Dobsonian telescope and seen the moons of Jupiter 4700 years ago if he'd known that was a worthwhile thing to do.
Speaking of metrology, I've heard conflicting stories about surface plates: one story that the Babylonians knew about grinding three surfaces alternately against one another to make them all flat, and another that Maudslay originated the technique only about 220 years ago. (Or, sometimes, Maudslay's apprentice Whitworth.) This is clearly a technique you could have employed in the Neolithic.
Sorption pumps for fine vacuum (usually 1e-2 mbar) require a high-surface-area sorbent (zeolite or maybe even kieselguhr or ball-milled non-zeolite clay: Neolithic), probably glassblowing (Roman Republic era in Syria), sealed joints (apparently Victorians used sealing wax successfully up to HV though not UHV, and sealing wax is pine resin and beeswax: probably Paleolithic), and some way to heat up the sorbent (fire: Paleolithic). Fine vacuum is enough for thermos bottles (dewars) and CVD, among other things.
Conceivably you could have just luted together an opaque vacuum apparatus from glazed earthenware (which dates from probably 3500 years ago), using sealing wax to seal the joints. But debugging the thing or manipulating anything inside of it would have been an invincible challenge.
Sorption pumping works better if you can also cool the sorbent down, too; dry ice is today made by explosive decompression of carbon dioxide, similar to how puffed corn and rice can be made with a grain-puffing cannon, and regularly is by Chinese street vendors. Pure carbon dioxide is available by calcining limestone (thus the name: Neolithic) in a metal vessel (Bronze Age) that bubbles the result into water into a "gasometer", a bucket floating upside down. Compressing the carbon dioxide sufficiently probably requires the accurately cylindrical bores produced for the first time for things like the Dardanelles Gun (15th century). But possibly not; the firepiston in Madagascar is at least 1500 years old, dating back to the time of the Western Roman Empire, and I think it can achieve sufficiently high compression.
Mercury has been known all over the world since antiquity, though usually as a precious metal rather than a demonic pollutant. Mercury plus glassblowing (Roman Republic, again) is enough for a Sprengel pump, which can achieve 1 mPa, high vacuum, 1000 times higher vacuum than an ordinary sorption pump (though some sorption pumps are even better than the Sprengel pump). High vacuum is sufficient to make vacuum tubes.
The Pidgeon process to refine magnesium requires dolomite, ferrosilicon, and a reducing atmosphere or vacuum. You get ferrosilicon by firing iron, coke, and silica in acid refractory (such as silica). Magnesium is especially demanding of reducing atmospheres; in particular nitrogen and carbon dioxide are not good enough, so you need something like hydrogen (or, again, vacuum) to distill the magnesium out of the reaction vessel. As a structural metal magnesium isn't very useful unless you also have aluminum or zinc or manganese or silicon, which the ancients didn't; but it's a first-rate incendiary weapon and thermite reducer, permitting both the easy achievement of very high temperatures and the thermite reduction of nearly all other metals.
Copper and iron with any random kind of electrolyte makes a (rather poor) battery; this permits you to electroplate. The Baghdad Battery surely isn't such a battery, but it demonstrates that the materials available to build one were available starting in the Iron Age. Electroplating is potentially useful for corrosion resistance, but to electroplate copper onto iron you apparently need an intermediate metal like nickel or chromium to get an adherent coating, and to electroplate gold or silver you probably need cyanide or more exotic materials. Alternate possible uses for low-voltage expensive electricity include molten-salt electrolysis and the production of hydrogen from water.
Copper rectifiers and photovoltaic panels pretty much just require heating up a sheet of copper, I think? Similarly copper wires for a generator only require wire drawing (Chalcolithic I think, at least 2nd Dynasty Egypt) and something like shellac (Mahabharata-age India, though rare in Europe until 500 years ago), though many 19th-century electrical machines were instead insulated with silk cloth.
Vapor-compression air conditioners probably need pretty advanced sealing and machining techniques, but desiccant-driven air conditioners can operate entirely at atmospheric pressure. The desiccants are pretty corrosive, but beeswax-painted metal or salt-glazed ceramic pipes are probably fine for magnesium chloride ("bitterns" from making sea salt, Japanese "nigari"), and you can pump it around with a geyser pump.
I think the geyser pump is still under patent, but it can be made of unglazed earthenware or carved out of bamboo (both Neolithic) and driven by either a bellows (Neolithic) or a trompe (Renaissance).
Some years ago I figured out a way to use textile thread (and, say, tree branches) to make logic gates; I posted that to kragen-tol. So you probably could have done digital logic with Neolithic materials science, though only at kHz clock rates. And of course you could have hand-filed clockwork gears out of sheet copper as early as the Chalcolithic, instead of waiting until the Hellenistic period.
What an incredible comment, thanks kragen! Good sources for anyone wanting to right realistic alternative history stories. Although I can't help but think that most people, ancient or otherwise, would me most interested in applications. The foundations, like atomic theory, or chemistry, require...something else. Curiosity? A culture that lauds discovery and motivates scientists at least in part with vanity? Greed? A desire for more, to conquer ones enemies? Science is very good at making better weaponry and more indirectly, for reducing scarcity for all, making larger populations, and so larger armies.
Thank you!
Me, I'm more interested in building alternate futures than writing stories about alternate histories. It's just more difficult!
If you want to understand what cultural or political factors have prevented innovation, maybe a good place to start is the cultures that are currently failing at innovation. I mean, on an absolute scale, that's all of them, but some are failing harder than others: the PRC is failing harder than Taiwan, the US is failing harder than the PRC, Brazil is failing harder than the US, Nigeria is failing harder than Brazil, and Malawi is failing harder than Nigeria. Maybe an especially good place to start would be the stories of people who have succeeded at innovation despite finding themselves in the most unfavorable conditions, like William Kamkwamba's application of windmills in Malawi. He wrote a book about it: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.
Any STEM graduate school research program in the US or Europe is full of people who are advancing foundational knowledge, but moved there from cultures that are doing very poorly at advancing foundational knowledge. It might be worthwhile to talk to them.
Of course, the situation 100, 1000, or 10'000 years ago was not the same as the situation in Malawi today. On one hand, the people who invented fossil-fueled mass production, movable type, and gunpowder 1000 years ago in China didn't have to compete economically against cheaper and technically superior imports from the modern US, the way Malawians do today; on the other, they couldn't import knowledge and tools from the US, and they didn't know that the things they were attempting were even possible.
Me, I'm more interested in building alternate futures than writing stories about alternate histories. It's just more difficult!
If you want to understand what cultural or political factors have prevented innovation, maybe a good place to start is the cultures that are currently failing at innovation. I mean, on an absolute scale, that's all of them, but some are failing harder than others: the PRC is failing harder than Taiwan, the US is failing harder than the PRC, Brazil is failing harder than the US, Nigeria is failing harder than Brazil, and Malawi is failing harder than Nigeria. Maybe an especially good place to start would be the stories of people who have succeeded at innovation despite finding themselves in the most unfavorable conditions, like William Kamkwamba's application of windmills in Malawi. He wrote a book about it: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.
Any STEM graduate school research program in the US or Europe is full of people who are advancing foundational knowledge, but moved there from cultures that are doing very poorly at advancing foundational knowledge. It might be worthwhile to talk to them.
Of course, the situation 100, 1000, or 10'000 years ago was not the same as the situation in Malawi today. On one hand, the people who invented fossil-fueled mass production, movable type, and gunpowder 1000 years ago in China didn't have to compete economically against cheaper and technically superior imports from the modern US, the way Malawians do today; on the other, they couldn't import knowledge and tools from the US, and they didn't know that the things they were attempting were even possible.
Regarding your [Taiwan, US, PRC, Brazil, Nigeria, Malawi] innovation ranking, I don't feel like I have a good sense of it, TBH. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd be curious to know on what basis you make the judgement. Is it just in reference to TSMC?
I guess I'm interested in the historical conditions because now it's commonly held that "innovation is good" but it was not always so! The ancient Egyptians had an incredible stable empire that lasted thousands of years, and yet they did not innovate. Other cultures like the Romans seemed to innovate, but then stopped. Same with the Chinese (or rather they innovated but did not apply innovations like gunpowder to, well, guns). The Roman motivation was modern, I guess, in that it got them more. Maybe they would have kept going if not for collapse? Then came the Dark Ages, and then the Enlightenment, in which all the good stuff started to happen! You had all these smart people asking great questions and doing experiments, talking to each other and advancing human knowledge, faster than ever before. Why did that happen? The innovation you're talking about is a difference in degree, not kind; the shift I'm talking about seems more like a phase change. Why did Descartes start caring about geometry after Euclid had, apparently, ended the subject? Why did Laviosier question the alchemist views on substances? Why did Newton and Leibniz spend so long dwelling in a strange and alien world of self-consistent imagination? (And all this in addition to the artists, philosophers, explorers, and inventors!)
What happened?!
I guess I'm interested in the historical conditions because now it's commonly held that "innovation is good" but it was not always so! The ancient Egyptians had an incredible stable empire that lasted thousands of years, and yet they did not innovate. Other cultures like the Romans seemed to innovate, but then stopped. Same with the Chinese (or rather they innovated but did not apply innovations like gunpowder to, well, guns). The Roman motivation was modern, I guess, in that it got them more. Maybe they would have kept going if not for collapse? Then came the Dark Ages, and then the Enlightenment, in which all the good stuff started to happen! You had all these smart people asking great questions and doing experiments, talking to each other and advancing human knowledge, faster than ever before. Why did that happen? The innovation you're talking about is a difference in degree, not kind; the shift I'm talking about seems more like a phase change. Why did Descartes start caring about geometry after Euclid had, apparently, ended the subject? Why did Laviosier question the alchemist views on substances? Why did Newton and Leibniz spend so long dwelling in a strange and alien world of self-consistent imagination? (And all this in addition to the artists, philosophers, explorers, and inventors!)
What happened?!
No, TSMC is equally scarce in the US and PRC, and also equally absent from Brazil, Nigeria, and Malawi, so it's not just in reference to TSMC, though they are indeed one indicator.
The Romans seemed to innovate because they were conquering the Greeks and adopting their innovations. When they had no more Greeks to conquer, the innovations ended.
The Chinese did innovate by applying gunpowder to guns; that's why they've had guns since the 12th century, while the oldest European guns are from the 14th century, evidently copied from the Islamic world, who probably copied them from the Mongols, who probably copied them from the Chinese.
Your history is missing about seven centuries between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment; you might want to read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Middle_Ages, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Middle_Ages, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_period. Also, the Roman Empire didn't finish collapsing until 500 years after the end of the Dark Ages; you may be thinking of the Western Roman Empire.
I think there's a pretty continuous stream of major innovations since the beginning of the Iron Age, though it's true that often one or another culture has become a backwater and stopped innovating, like Europe during the Dark Ages, or arguably Yuan China. I think the difference between currently existing cultures is more phase-change-like, in the sense that intellectually ambitious Brazilians and Nigerians tend to move to the US or Europe.
To take the particular example of Descartes' geometry, following Euclid you had Archimedes, Apollonios of Perga, Pappos, Zhang Heng, Liu Hui, Aryatabha, Bhaskara, Zu Chongzhi, Brahmagupta, al-Mahani, ibn Qurra, al-Khwarizmi, Shen Kuo, al-Haytham, Khayyam, Yang Hui, Pacioli, al-Tusi, Tartaglia, and Viète, among numerous others; Descartes could draw on all of their work, much of which had been translated into Latin, and other parts of which had influenced later writers whose work had been translated into Latin. Bombelli invented complex numbers a century before Descartes!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_geometry and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_geometry go into more detail. No century passed without major advances in geometry, though many centuries pass in which none of those advances bear European names.
And we could make similar lists about chemistry or algebra.
The explanation to me seems straightforward: the Roman Empire conquered the civilized parts of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and it was evidently not a hostile environment for innovation in general and geometry in particular. Consequently the only Roman name in my long list above is Pappos. The Roman yoke was then supplanted by the heavier yoke of the early Christian Church, which actively sought out and destroyed knowledge; to them we owe not only the Dark Ages but also the loss of the knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the burning of the Nestorian and Arian texts, the desecration of the Archimedes Palimpsest, centuries of persecution of the Jews, and the suppression of heliocentrism, as well as the burning of the Mayan codices and the khipu, losses whose magnitude will remain forever impossible to calculate.
Though the book-burning of the Christians evidently goes back to Paul, such anti-intellectual movements are not unique to Christianity: Qin Shi Huang, the Nazis, Pol Pot, the Boxers, Comstock, and Boko Haram provide counterexamples. The Christian atrocities are greater in magnitude only because the Christian Church ruled so much of the world for such a long time.
So why did the Dark Ages end so soon, given that the Roman Catholic Church still plays a strong and sometimes dominant role today, 1000 years later? Perhaps the creation of the Roman Catholic Church in the East-West Schism is one important cause (breaking in half the Church that had remained undivided since its genocide against the Nestorians and Arians), but it's an enormously debated question. Maybe Petrarch, the guy who first called the Dark Aages "dark", played a big role in ending them. Or maybe the tyrannical nature of Christian rule had weakened its victims until they could no longer suppress learning and innovation — nor resist conquest by more highly developed cultures, as in al-Andalus, the Seljuk Empire, and eventually even Constantinople itself. Or maybe the Crusades that followed increased contact between the Christian world, divided between decadent Byzantium and fanatical Europe, and the literate world. Or maybe it was the Medieval Warm Period. Or the Plague.
It's difficult to say in part because we know so little about the Dark Ages. What horrifying abomination enslaved the minds of Europe so terribly, despite the Greek legacy of great intellectual achievement? What were the contours of day-to-day life? How did people think about law, war, dispute resolution, rulers, legitimacy, slavery, heresy, workmanship, innovation, religion, and learning? We know that both cenobite monasteries and Jewish communities survived in Europe throughout this time as enclaves of learning, but the texts they wrote during the Dark Ages are mostly copies of earlier texts; they do not give us much insight into these questions. So what was the cause of this stagnation and backsliding? Historians disagree.
A different way to look at the question is that perhaps the stagnation and backsliding of the Dark Ages is not the part that calls for an explanation; perhaps progress and innovation is the exception and collapse, or at least bare subsistence, is the rule. In this conservative view, societies that can sustain geometers, mechanical inventors, and chemists are fragile and delicate things; such intellectual progress requires a rare social climate (though proponents disagree on the exact preconditions) and can easily be snuffed out. And certainly in history it is easy to find not only examples of such snuffing but also peoples who have remained relatively undeveloped for many centuries without ever developing.
The Romans seemed to innovate because they were conquering the Greeks and adopting their innovations. When they had no more Greeks to conquer, the innovations ended.
The Chinese did innovate by applying gunpowder to guns; that's why they've had guns since the 12th century, while the oldest European guns are from the 14th century, evidently copied from the Islamic world, who probably copied them from the Mongols, who probably copied them from the Chinese.
Your history is missing about seven centuries between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment; you might want to read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Middle_Ages, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Middle_Ages, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_period. Also, the Roman Empire didn't finish collapsing until 500 years after the end of the Dark Ages; you may be thinking of the Western Roman Empire.
I think there's a pretty continuous stream of major innovations since the beginning of the Iron Age, though it's true that often one or another culture has become a backwater and stopped innovating, like Europe during the Dark Ages, or arguably Yuan China. I think the difference between currently existing cultures is more phase-change-like, in the sense that intellectually ambitious Brazilians and Nigerians tend to move to the US or Europe.
To take the particular example of Descartes' geometry, following Euclid you had Archimedes, Apollonios of Perga, Pappos, Zhang Heng, Liu Hui, Aryatabha, Bhaskara, Zu Chongzhi, Brahmagupta, al-Mahani, ibn Qurra, al-Khwarizmi, Shen Kuo, al-Haytham, Khayyam, Yang Hui, Pacioli, al-Tusi, Tartaglia, and Viète, among numerous others; Descartes could draw on all of their work, much of which had been translated into Latin, and other parts of which had influenced later writers whose work had been translated into Latin. Bombelli invented complex numbers a century before Descartes!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_geometry and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_geometry go into more detail. No century passed without major advances in geometry, though many centuries pass in which none of those advances bear European names.
And we could make similar lists about chemistry or algebra.
The explanation to me seems straightforward: the Roman Empire conquered the civilized parts of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and it was evidently not a hostile environment for innovation in general and geometry in particular. Consequently the only Roman name in my long list above is Pappos. The Roman yoke was then supplanted by the heavier yoke of the early Christian Church, which actively sought out and destroyed knowledge; to them we owe not only the Dark Ages but also the loss of the knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the burning of the Nestorian and Arian texts, the desecration of the Archimedes Palimpsest, centuries of persecution of the Jews, and the suppression of heliocentrism, as well as the burning of the Mayan codices and the khipu, losses whose magnitude will remain forever impossible to calculate.
Though the book-burning of the Christians evidently goes back to Paul, such anti-intellectual movements are not unique to Christianity: Qin Shi Huang, the Nazis, Pol Pot, the Boxers, Comstock, and Boko Haram provide counterexamples. The Christian atrocities are greater in magnitude only because the Christian Church ruled so much of the world for such a long time.
So why did the Dark Ages end so soon, given that the Roman Catholic Church still plays a strong and sometimes dominant role today, 1000 years later? Perhaps the creation of the Roman Catholic Church in the East-West Schism is one important cause (breaking in half the Church that had remained undivided since its genocide against the Nestorians and Arians), but it's an enormously debated question. Maybe Petrarch, the guy who first called the Dark Aages "dark", played a big role in ending them. Or maybe the tyrannical nature of Christian rule had weakened its victims until they could no longer suppress learning and innovation — nor resist conquest by more highly developed cultures, as in al-Andalus, the Seljuk Empire, and eventually even Constantinople itself. Or maybe the Crusades that followed increased contact between the Christian world, divided between decadent Byzantium and fanatical Europe, and the literate world. Or maybe it was the Medieval Warm Period. Or the Plague.
It's difficult to say in part because we know so little about the Dark Ages. What horrifying abomination enslaved the minds of Europe so terribly, despite the Greek legacy of great intellectual achievement? What were the contours of day-to-day life? How did people think about law, war, dispute resolution, rulers, legitimacy, slavery, heresy, workmanship, innovation, religion, and learning? We know that both cenobite monasteries and Jewish communities survived in Europe throughout this time as enclaves of learning, but the texts they wrote during the Dark Ages are mostly copies of earlier texts; they do not give us much insight into these questions. So what was the cause of this stagnation and backsliding? Historians disagree.
A different way to look at the question is that perhaps the stagnation and backsliding of the Dark Ages is not the part that calls for an explanation; perhaps progress and innovation is the exception and collapse, or at least bare subsistence, is the rule. In this conservative view, societies that can sustain geometers, mechanical inventors, and chemists are fragile and delicate things; such intellectual progress requires a rare social climate (though proponents disagree on the exact preconditions) and can easily be snuffed out. And certainly in history it is easy to find not only examples of such snuffing but also peoples who have remained relatively undeveloped for many centuries without ever developing.
I would LOVE any thoughts you had on Civboot.org, it sounds like you have a good high level of what roadmap and the general technologies thag would need to be put in place to make it possible.
I'll take a look! The git repo is a little heavyweight, but it looks like my cellphone connection can handle it. I've spent US$6 on cellphone credit for the last 2 months, and that's about to run out, so I'm getting 60 KiB per second now. It'd sure be nice to have a version of the repo that doesn't include dozens of megabytes of digital audio!
I feel like maybe the stated goal, "be able to create a technology stack which can self-replicate with 500 motivated students in 8 years, starting with a US-equivalent 8th grade education," is going to be hard to measure progress against, because every test run takes 8 years. Worse, it takes 500 motivated students with only a US-equivalent 8th-grade education! A much more ambitious goal would be easier to measure progress against.
A thing I'm not totally clear on is whether this is an unbootstrapping effort like Primitive Technology and bootstrappable.org, where your 500 motivated 12-year-olds are marooned on a desert island with only the shirts on their backs and the Ark of the Covenant, and have the primary objective of building a jumbo jet from found materials within 8 years, or a bootstrapping effort like Debian reproducible builds.
To take an extreme example, if you had a 3-D printer with a "reproduce self" button that needs only rocks, clay, wood, dirt, sand, ore, etc., to print out a new identical 3-D printer, even a single 12-year-old could operate it, even if not very motivated. Would such a "seed factory" qualify as a Civboot? (Properly documented, of course, and with enough additional UI that you could use it to make other things.) What if there's no feasible way to build it by hand from rocks and clay etc. if you don't already have one (or the entirety of civilization)? A Drexlerian nanotech assembler would be such a device, for example.
You like Forth. I'm still not convinced about Forth. In the abstract it seems like it should be about as good or bad as C: the base language facilities are slightly more primitive, but Forth permits arbitrary compile-time computation, an advantage C doesn't have. In practice Forth doesn't seem to pay off as a language; I think it's better understood as an operating system for embedded work, with the Forth language taking the role of Tcl or Bash or editor keyboard macros: it's a scriptable user interface, IDE, and "debugger", in the sense that you can inspect the contents of memory.
But maybe I just don't have enough experience with Forth yet, and if I just keep practicing, it will become easier and more appealing than C. I've at least gotten over the initial hump of trying to keep all my data on the stack all the time instead of using VARIABLEs (or VALUEs). But I still find writing things in Forth a lot more bug-prone than writing them even in C, much less in something like Python, which gives probably a 2-4 times speedup over C in programming time. And I still find Forth code a lot harder to read than C or assembly.
(You might be interested in StoneKnifeForth.)
I agree that electronics are probably pretty important, because control is one of the crucial aspects of such a cyclic fabrication system, and one that can dramatically simplify its other aspects. Electronics are an extremely appealing way to do control because electrons are so light, so, at any fixed power level, you can move electrons about 100 times faster than entire atoms. So although there are a huge number of ways to do computation (relays, fluidics, hydraulics, pneumatics, Drexler's rod logic, Merkle's buckling-spring logic, DNA epigenetics, etc.) electronics have a really huge power advantage. (Solid-state electronics especially, though there do exist gigahertz-capable vacuum tubes.)
I see electronics fabrication as primarily a question of material processing capabilities: purification, measurement, etching, vacuum pumping, ion bombardment, air filtering for clean benches or clean rooms, stuff like that. Patterning is of course necessary, but the hard part of patterning, at least the way we do it now, is making good photoresists.
Is that the kind of feedback you're looking for?
I feel like maybe the stated goal, "be able to create a technology stack which can self-replicate with 500 motivated students in 8 years, starting with a US-equivalent 8th grade education," is going to be hard to measure progress against, because every test run takes 8 years. Worse, it takes 500 motivated students with only a US-equivalent 8th-grade education! A much more ambitious goal would be easier to measure progress against.
A thing I'm not totally clear on is whether this is an unbootstrapping effort like Primitive Technology and bootstrappable.org, where your 500 motivated 12-year-olds are marooned on a desert island with only the shirts on their backs and the Ark of the Covenant, and have the primary objective of building a jumbo jet from found materials within 8 years, or a bootstrapping effort like Debian reproducible builds.
To take an extreme example, if you had a 3-D printer with a "reproduce self" button that needs only rocks, clay, wood, dirt, sand, ore, etc., to print out a new identical 3-D printer, even a single 12-year-old could operate it, even if not very motivated. Would such a "seed factory" qualify as a Civboot? (Properly documented, of course, and with enough additional UI that you could use it to make other things.) What if there's no feasible way to build it by hand from rocks and clay etc. if you don't already have one (or the entirety of civilization)? A Drexlerian nanotech assembler would be such a device, for example.
You like Forth. I'm still not convinced about Forth. In the abstract it seems like it should be about as good or bad as C: the base language facilities are slightly more primitive, but Forth permits arbitrary compile-time computation, an advantage C doesn't have. In practice Forth doesn't seem to pay off as a language; I think it's better understood as an operating system for embedded work, with the Forth language taking the role of Tcl or Bash or editor keyboard macros: it's a scriptable user interface, IDE, and "debugger", in the sense that you can inspect the contents of memory.
But maybe I just don't have enough experience with Forth yet, and if I just keep practicing, it will become easier and more appealing than C. I've at least gotten over the initial hump of trying to keep all my data on the stack all the time instead of using VARIABLEs (or VALUEs). But I still find writing things in Forth a lot more bug-prone than writing them even in C, much less in something like Python, which gives probably a 2-4 times speedup over C in programming time. And I still find Forth code a lot harder to read than C or assembly.
(You might be interested in StoneKnifeForth.)
I agree that electronics are probably pretty important, because control is one of the crucial aspects of such a cyclic fabrication system, and one that can dramatically simplify its other aspects. Electronics are an extremely appealing way to do control because electrons are so light, so, at any fixed power level, you can move electrons about 100 times faster than entire atoms. So although there are a huge number of ways to do computation (relays, fluidics, hydraulics, pneumatics, Drexler's rod logic, Merkle's buckling-spring logic, DNA epigenetics, etc.) electronics have a really huge power advantage. (Solid-state electronics especially, though there do exist gigahertz-capable vacuum tubes.)
I see electronics fabrication as primarily a question of material processing capabilities: purification, measurement, etching, vacuum pumping, ion bombardment, air filtering for clean benches or clean rooms, stuff like that. Patterning is of course necessary, but the hard part of patterning, at least the way we do it now, is making good photoresists.
Is that the kind of feedback you're looking for?
It would, but I don't see it as feasible. Also, I have a thing about incentives, and if the goal is to make it automated then it's probably not going to be understandable. Whereas if the goal is to make it understandable then there is going to be pressure to make it simpler. Simpler technology is also going to have some difficulty with fully automated replication (although, who knows! It may be an important step to that vision too).
500 students and eight years is, I hope, a high end. My true hope is more like 30 and 4 years. Also, the Civboot can be broken down into tasks and built of commodity hardware until replaced, with different groups working on different aspects. If one group can build precision engineering, another group can use equivalent commodity precision engineering to make lenses, ... chemistry, manufacturing, etc can then be bundled together to build a computer chip, that would be a great early success. A full sci-fi school can only happen once all the components are proven and properly documented. In the interim, students can use and learn from built components. Even if this never happens in full, I'm convinced it's pieces would be highly valuable.
Edit: also, I can email you the relevant text if you prefer. Most of the size is my podcast and images, which should probably be moved to a separate repo and linked.
500 students and eight years is, I hope, a high end. My true hope is more like 30 and 4 years. Also, the Civboot can be broken down into tasks and built of commodity hardware until replaced, with different groups working on different aspects. If one group can build precision engineering, another group can use equivalent commodity precision engineering to make lenses, ... chemistry, manufacturing, etc can then be bundled together to build a computer chip, that would be a great early success. A full sci-fi school can only happen once all the components are proven and properly documented. In the interim, students can use and learn from built components. Even if this never happens in full, I'm convinced it's pieces would be highly valuable.
Edit: also, I can email you the relevant text if you prefer. Most of the size is my podcast and images, which should probably be moved to a separate repo and linked.
Also, I somehow hadn't seen the second half of your comments (was helping a toddler fall back to sleep).
I am a fan of what forth can do, but I find the language lacking. With a tiny bit of total code (i.e. 2-3 thousand lines) I've already made a "better" language: github com/civboot/fngi. Definitely WIP, but I'm already writing "code" in it.
As for what I'm looking for... anything really. So far the project has mostly been just me, so anything you wanted to contribute would be great. What I thought you would be specifically good at from you comment is outlining the technologies needed to get to precision engineering and semiconductor fabrication, which btw would probably be cold temperature (<300C) thin film lithography on glass or similar. These could include:
Creation of vacuums
Methods of manufacturing: lathes, CNC, molds, etc and how they have to be changed to do ultra precision manufacturing.
Manufacturing and purification of chemicals
Manufacturing and testing of optics (for patterning and precision engineering)
Precision measurements, including telescopes, oscilloscopes, scales, etc
I mean, the sky is the limit. Just understanding the problems and how it is both solved now as well as the history of solving it will be extremely valuable for simplification to the Civboot requirements.
I am a fan of what forth can do, but I find the language lacking. With a tiny bit of total code (i.e. 2-3 thousand lines) I've already made a "better" language: github com/civboot/fngi. Definitely WIP, but I'm already writing "code" in it.
As for what I'm looking for... anything really. So far the project has mostly been just me, so anything you wanted to contribute would be great. What I thought you would be specifically good at from you comment is outlining the technologies needed to get to precision engineering and semiconductor fabrication, which btw would probably be cold temperature (<300C) thin film lithography on glass or similar. These could include:
Creation of vacuums
Methods of manufacturing: lathes, CNC, molds, etc and how they have to be changed to do ultra precision manufacturing.
Manufacturing and purification of chemicals
Manufacturing and testing of optics (for patterning and precision engineering)
Precision measurements, including telescopes, oscilloscopes, scales, etc
I mean, the sky is the limit. Just understanding the problems and how it is both solved now as well as the history of solving it will be extremely valuable for simplification to the Civboot requirements.
This is great.
At a fundamental level, it's entropy and energy.
You need to expend some energy (1000/2000/5000/6 billion years of energy!) to organize your knowledge well enough to get that bit of entropy that tells you that you can shape the leaves this way to make a fan, or you can put copper and iron together to make a battery.
In a similar vein: we could have come up with StableDiffusion with just parchment, if ten of us had just written down the weights one at a time, 5 kilobytes per day, for several decades. Of course, what do we write down? That takes energy.
At a fundamental level, it's entropy and energy.
You need to expend some energy (1000/2000/5000/6 billion years of energy!) to organize your knowledge well enough to get that bit of entropy that tells you that you can shape the leaves this way to make a fan, or you can put copper and iron together to make a battery.
In a similar vein: we could have come up with StableDiffusion with just parchment, if ten of us had just written down the weights one at a time, 5 kilobytes per day, for several decades. Of course, what do we write down? That takes energy.
You'd still need calculators to run it on with sub-year response times. 100 teraflops times three minutes would 18 quadrillion multiplications of 8-digit numbers. At one minute per multiply you'd need 30 billion person-years of calculation to generate one image.
The training process was indeed slower still, but maybe that is because we are doing it inefficiently, as we did our biological evolution.
The training process was indeed slower still, but maybe that is because we are doing it inefficiently, as we did our biological evolution.
If you're interested in traditional ironmaking, Christopher Roy filmed a documentary a few years back on the techniques used up to the beginning of the 20th century in Burkina Faso, From Iron Ore to Iron Hoe: Smelting Iron in Africa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCnZClWwpQ
It's amazing to see how much work the traditional technique required. Though I don't know how much the techniques developed over the last 3000 years, none of the materials or manufacturing techniques exhibited in the documentary seem to require anything more than Neolithic products: leather, clay, wood, rope. (With the exception of using the cast-iron knife to carve the sluice, the same is true of Plant's video.)
So it's particularly surprising to realize that the Neolithic started 12000 years ago and the Iron Age only started about 3500 years ago (the Painted Gray Ware culture in India). For 8500 years people all over the world had the tools at their disposal to make iron, but didn't know it. That's 3000 years longer than all of recorded history! It's similarly amazing to realize that from 3500 years ago until 2600-2100 years ago all iron was made by hugely inefficient processes like these rather than with blast furnaces, and that until 1000-500 years ago blast furnaces were only used in China. And it wasn't until Bessemer that they could be used to make steel.
What similar opportunities are under our noses today? (More examples in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32697419.)
If you're interested in this sort of material culture unbootstrapping, you might also be interested in the unbootstrapping efforts for software described at http://bootstrappable.org/.
It's amazing to see how much work the traditional technique required. Though I don't know how much the techniques developed over the last 3000 years, none of the materials or manufacturing techniques exhibited in the documentary seem to require anything more than Neolithic products: leather, clay, wood, rope. (With the exception of using the cast-iron knife to carve the sluice, the same is true of Plant's video.)
So it's particularly surprising to realize that the Neolithic started 12000 years ago and the Iron Age only started about 3500 years ago (the Painted Gray Ware culture in India). For 8500 years people all over the world had the tools at their disposal to make iron, but didn't know it. That's 3000 years longer than all of recorded history! It's similarly amazing to realize that from 3500 years ago until 2600-2100 years ago all iron was made by hugely inefficient processes like these rather than with blast furnaces, and that until 1000-500 years ago blast furnaces were only used in China. And it wasn't until Bessemer that they could be used to make steel.
What similar opportunities are under our noses today? (More examples in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32697419.)
If you're interested in this sort of material culture unbootstrapping, you might also be interested in the unbootstrapping efforts for software described at http://bootstrappable.org/.
> What similar opportunities are under our noses today?
Material science is really hard, even though we already have at our disposal pretty much all the elements we're likely ever going to have! There are so many combinations and conditions to try.
I'd guess that if a room temperature and pressure superconductor is possible in our universe, it can likely be made in small amounts using today's technology.
High-entropy alloys are another exciting space to explore.
Materials science deserves a lot more respect than it gets. It's hard to appreciate how much hard-won materials advances, like neodymium magnets, enable the variety of technologies we have today.
Material science is really hard, even though we already have at our disposal pretty much all the elements we're likely ever going to have! There are so many combinations and conditions to try.
I'd guess that if a room temperature and pressure superconductor is possible in our universe, it can likely be made in small amounts using today's technology.
High-entropy alloys are another exciting space to explore.
Materials science deserves a lot more respect than it gets. It's hard to appreciate how much hard-won materials advances, like neodymium magnets, enable the variety of technologies we have today.
It might be more practical to change the temperature of the room! That's what they did for JWST.
There might be more elements to draw on: antimatter, obviously, but also strange matter and metastable nuclear isomers. And although quantum dots aren't actually new elements, in many contexts they act like it. And don't assume that, just because the surface of a material is at atmospheric pressure, the material 10 microns below the surface is at a lower pressure than the core of the Earth.
Really, though, as fascinating as materials science is, I think the biggest advances are elsewhere, at least for now and maybe for centuries. Better materials than 50 years ago weren't needed for Apollo 13, Linux, Stable Diffusion, seL4, Uber Cab, the WWW, AlphaZero, Z3, Hypothesis, Falcon, covid vaccines, or even 5G. (Better materials were used, but Linux displaying on a CRT with ten times bulkier chips would still be Linux. I mean, it was.)
There might be more elements to draw on: antimatter, obviously, but also strange matter and metastable nuclear isomers. And although quantum dots aren't actually new elements, in many contexts they act like it. And don't assume that, just because the surface of a material is at atmospheric pressure, the material 10 microns below the surface is at a lower pressure than the core of the Earth.
Really, though, as fascinating as materials science is, I think the biggest advances are elsewhere, at least for now and maybe for centuries. Better materials than 50 years ago weren't needed for Apollo 13, Linux, Stable Diffusion, seL4, Uber Cab, the WWW, AlphaZero, Z3, Hypothesis, Falcon, covid vaccines, or even 5G. (Better materials were used, but Linux displaying on a CRT with ten times bulkier chips would still be Linux. I mean, it was.)
Quantum dots, which can be manufactured with today's lab equipment from the elements on our periodic table, are a good example of why it's likely that the revolutionary materials of the future will also likely be something we can make with sufficiently clever application of today's tech.
The stress in a pressure vessel goes as Pr/t, so for P=365 GPa and t= 10e-5m, the effective tensile strength of the surface would either have to be thousands of times higher than carbon fibre or else the total size of the superconducting particle would need to be microscopic. I'm not sure that a material with such stored energy wouldn't rearrange itself in short order to relieve that stress.
Of course better materials than 50 years ago are not necessary for the Apollo missions, which took place 50 years ago. But there's also a materials reason why they didn't have quadcopter drones. We do still use most of the same structural materials today as back then, although materials science is one of the major limiting factors for rockets (especially reusable rockets) and metals that can survive high temperature oxidizing environments are a big step since then. And some of our most amazing materials, especially polymers, either were developed for or found their first applications in the Apollo program.
For the internet, one of the greatest materials science revolutions in that period was the improvement in optical fibers, where losses dropped by something like 13 orders of magnitude. This was not initially even suspected to be possible.
A good deal of semiconductor advances are arguably materials advances, and today silicon carbide power electronics are leading the way. Your smartphone has a flatscreen with a colour display thanks to the blue LED, another materials breakthrough of recent decades, which meant we could do away with bulky fluorescent backlights.
It's not at all clear that we would have AlphaZero without the advanced materials driving today's semiconductor, magnetic, and optical materials, which enabled data storage and compute power to be cheaply available. Without this, it may have been only possible in the same sense that Da Vinci could design but not manufacture a helicopter in renaissance Italy.
The stress in a pressure vessel goes as Pr/t, so for P=365 GPa and t= 10e-5m, the effective tensile strength of the surface would either have to be thousands of times higher than carbon fibre or else the total size of the superconducting particle would need to be microscopic. I'm not sure that a material with such stored energy wouldn't rearrange itself in short order to relieve that stress.
Of course better materials than 50 years ago are not necessary for the Apollo missions, which took place 50 years ago. But there's also a materials reason why they didn't have quadcopter drones. We do still use most of the same structural materials today as back then, although materials science is one of the major limiting factors for rockets (especially reusable rockets) and metals that can survive high temperature oxidizing environments are a big step since then. And some of our most amazing materials, especially polymers, either were developed for or found their first applications in the Apollo program.
For the internet, one of the greatest materials science revolutions in that period was the improvement in optical fibers, where losses dropped by something like 13 orders of magnitude. This was not initially even suspected to be possible.
A good deal of semiconductor advances are arguably materials advances, and today silicon carbide power electronics are leading the way. Your smartphone has a flatscreen with a colour display thanks to the blue LED, another materials breakthrough of recent decades, which meant we could do away with bulky fluorescent backlights.
It's not at all clear that we would have AlphaZero without the advanced materials driving today's semiconductor, magnetic, and optical materials, which enabled data storage and compute power to be cheaply available. Without this, it may have been only possible in the same sense that Da Vinci could design but not manufacture a helicopter in renaissance Italy.
A couple of small quibbles about the optical fiber thing:
1. 17 dB/km attenuation fibers were first demonstrated 52 years ago, so better materials than precisely 50 years ago were not necessary for switching global telecom from copper over to fiber optics. That is, the materials science revolution in question wasn't "in that period", but immediately prior to it. Otherwise, everything you said is correct, as I said before.
2. Since the ARPANet started working in 01969, 53 years ago, long before the actual switchover to fiber optics, clearly wide-area packet switching wasn't dependent on fiber optics. When I first started using the internet in 01992, I was sharing a VAX with dozens of other students, all using a 64 kilobit per second frame-relay link, but the WWW was already up and running, and I used it at the time. Of course the NSFNet was running over optical fiber at the time, but if microwave waveguides had been the only available gigabit-capable communications medium, I'm confident they would have been laying microwave waveguides. Relay lines of microwave towers would also have worked.
The crucial inventions of the WWW were HTML, HTTP, and the URL; from my point of view, those are fairly independent of computer speed and even bandwidth. I mean, yes, there's a minimal viable computer for parsing HTML; but as it turns out it's a Commodore PET running Contiki. All the improvements in computing speed and memory size in the last 45 years are unnecessary for running the WWW.
You could imagine an optical-fiber-free internet where the server-centric nature of HTTP was an unacceptably heavy burden on the more limited backbone, especially with 6502-class CPUs constantly refetching pages in order to handle scrolling. Replacing HTTP with something like Usenet, BitTorrent, Freenet, Fastly, IPFS, or Kademlia is probably enough of a solution there. Maybe you wouldn't have YouTube or NetFlix, but that's why I didn't include YouTube or NetFlix in my list.
1. 17 dB/km attenuation fibers were first demonstrated 52 years ago, so better materials than precisely 50 years ago were not necessary for switching global telecom from copper over to fiber optics. That is, the materials science revolution in question wasn't "in that period", but immediately prior to it. Otherwise, everything you said is correct, as I said before.
2. Since the ARPANet started working in 01969, 53 years ago, long before the actual switchover to fiber optics, clearly wide-area packet switching wasn't dependent on fiber optics. When I first started using the internet in 01992, I was sharing a VAX with dozens of other students, all using a 64 kilobit per second frame-relay link, but the WWW was already up and running, and I used it at the time. Of course the NSFNet was running over optical fiber at the time, but if microwave waveguides had been the only available gigabit-capable communications medium, I'm confident they would have been laying microwave waveguides. Relay lines of microwave towers would also have worked.
The crucial inventions of the WWW were HTML, HTTP, and the URL; from my point of view, those are fairly independent of computer speed and even bandwidth. I mean, yes, there's a minimal viable computer for parsing HTML; but as it turns out it's a Commodore PET running Contiki. All the improvements in computing speed and memory size in the last 45 years are unnecessary for running the WWW.
You could imagine an optical-fiber-free internet where the server-centric nature of HTTP was an unacceptably heavy burden on the more limited backbone, especially with 6502-class CPUs constantly refetching pages in order to handle scrolling. Replacing HTTP with something like Usenet, BitTorrent, Freenet, Fastly, IPFS, or Kademlia is probably enough of a solution there. Maybe you wouldn't have YouTube or NetFlix, but that's why I didn't include YouTube or NetFlix in my list.
Yup, all correct. Also LCDs themselves and in particular active-matrix LCDs are a recent materials advance. Also, for the kind of thick-walled microscopic pressure vessel I was describing, the situation is worse than sigma = Pr/t, or Pr/2t for spheres, which is the thin-wall approximation.
Those structures are in the category of things the humans can be confident are possible, because the required pressure is only a few times higher than the tensile strength of buckytubes and nano-aggregated diamond, but have no idea how to make.
Those structures are in the category of things the humans can be confident are possible, because the required pressure is only a few times higher than the tensile strength of buckytubes and nano-aggregated diamond, but have no idea how to make.
When I was 6 or 7, I binge read "The Misterious Island" by Jules Verne. Later in school I re-read it to ace half of elementary chemistry - all things about acids, bases and metals. I think it was one of the books that shaped my life the most.
If you’re not familiar with this channel, you’re in for a treat!
Turn on closed captions to get an explanation of what’s going on.
Turn on closed captions to get an explanation of what’s going on.
I was afraid this was going to be a "fake" primitive technology channel... but it seems that this one, "Primitive Technology", is actually the _only_ real one! It was even used as "a baseline for what SHOULD be achievable in a natural setting" [0]
The video hyperlinked below is a fascinating debunking of most other "primitive" channels.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvk63LADbFc
The video hyperlinked below is a fascinating debunking of most other "primitive" channels.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvk63LADbFc
This guy basically invented the genre and everything’s else has been copping his success. Most can’t do the stuff he does and to differentiate they just make stuff up.
I remember after watching one of his videos YouTube started recommending all of those other primitive construction videos.
So many shots of a shirtless Asian guy poking at the ground with a stick and walking off with a scant handful of dirt cutting to a 10x10x10 foot hole in the ground with perfectly square sides and the guy poking at the bottom of the hole with the same stick. Laughably bullshit.
So many shots of a shirtless Asian guy poking at the ground with a stick and walking off with a scant handful of dirt cutting to a 10x10x10 foot hole in the ground with perfectly square sides and the guy poking at the bottom of the hole with the same stick. Laughably bullshit.
And with mini bucket excavator tracks surrounding the hole, no less.
Blisters on his hand, cuts on his foot, dirty all over the shoulder.
I remember when he was posting more frequently (I guess there has been a hiatus over the last 2-3 years) I would step away from the Friday evening company all hands to watch his new video as soon as I saw the notification. Which makes me think, perhaps this channel is still the only one I actually have "click the bell to be notified".
AAA content.
I remember when he was posting more frequently (I guess there has been a hiatus over the last 2-3 years) I would step away from the Friday evening company all hands to watch his new video as soon as I saw the notification. Which makes me think, perhaps this channel is still the only one I actually have "click the bell to be notified".
AAA content.
> hiatus
He was writing a book which he now sells.
He was writing a book which he now sells.
The same thing happened with the hydraulic press channel. Copycats emerged there as well.
Can you post a link to it? Sounds interesting.
Yeah, this guy is the OG. There's a few exposés on other channels and how they have crews and machinery off camera doing most of the work. This guy is real.
Oh most of those videos are obviously staged; but they are well-done and entertaining.
I watched one of them recently with my 3 1/2 year old, who loved it, displaying amazing attention span through the whole thing and making comments like how they nicely made this and that.
Why would anyone waste their energy debunking that; but go, go, you champion for the egregiously gullible, I suppose ..
I watched one of them recently with my 3 1/2 year old, who loved it, displaying amazing attention span through the whole thing and making comments like how they nicely made this and that.
Why would anyone waste their energy debunking that; but go, go, you champion for the egregiously gullible, I suppose ..
I also recommend buying his book [0] as a means to support his awesome work. I will almost certainly never actually do any of this, but it's fun to read anyway! Especially after watching the videos of him doing it.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Primitive-Technology-complete-making-...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Primitive-Technology-complete-making-...
I’ve watched Jon’s videos for years now without knowing he added captions… thanks for the tip !
He used to write a blog to go with each video which I really enjoyed.
He used to write a blog to go with each video which I really enjoyed.
The youtube description for each video has a lot more details, especially on how long the different steps take.
This guy is an absolute gem. Quality content every single post
This is awesome haven’t seen one of these videos for a while - think the last one I saw was him building the hut. Awesome reminder of how much iron is just around on the ground.
Really got a kick out of the rotating bellows that’s super cool.
If anyone is out at Zion NP and hiking angels landing there’s a large chuck of iron ore on one of the last switchbacks leading to scouts lookout - just love seeing that every time I’m up there. Great reminder of where the red color in the rock comes from
If anyone is out at Zion NP and hiking angels landing there’s a large chuck of iron ore on one of the last switchbacks leading to scouts lookout - just love seeing that every time I’m up there. Great reminder of where the red color in the rock comes from
It's like watching someone work at civilization's command-line.
Beautiful way to put it haha
or writing assembly code
Does this guy lives in the perfect spot to do these things? Making clay seems to be easy. Large quantities of metals in the ground. Never cold, plenty of wood everywhere.
> Never cold, plenty of wood everywhere.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology
> Primitive Technology is a YouTube channel run by John Plant. Based in [Far North Queensland] in the Australian state of Queensland,
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_North_Queensland
> Far North Queensland has a tropical climate and as such, the name Tropical North Queensland is sometimes used to refer to the region, mostly due to the tourism industry.
> Making clay seems to be easy.
I agree. [At least the rivers I know have plenty of clay.]
> Large quantities of metals in the ground.
I guess this is the most difficult part. It depends a lot on the exact place you are. It would be nice to know how much sand did he process and how much iron he got.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology
> Primitive Technology is a YouTube channel run by John Plant. Based in [Far North Queensland] in the Australian state of Queensland,
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_North_Queensland
> Far North Queensland has a tropical climate and as such, the name Tropical North Queensland is sometimes used to refer to the region, mostly due to the tourism industry.
> Making clay seems to be easy.
I agree. [At least the rivers I know have plenty of clay.]
> Large quantities of metals in the ground.
I guess this is the most difficult part. It depends a lot on the exact place you are. It would be nice to know how much sand did he process and how much iron he got.
Trace amounts of iron are present almost every where on the planet, most of it is bound to other elements though. You can easily find small "lines" of it in streams and river beds
Yep, and this was the initial benefit of iron despite bronze generally being better - you can find it anywhere, vs needing to source both copper and tin which tended to come from different, far flung places.
But the Bronze Age preceded the Iron Age...
Bronze has a lower melting point compared to Iron making it much easier to work with. I think you also have to invent charcoal first to reach the temperatures necessary to melt iron ore.
Iron was originally produced without melting it at all. Instead, iron ore was reacted with reduced gases, and a flux (limestone) causes the silicate contaminants to melt instead. The solid iron that's obtained (sponge iron) is then forged into shape (and also beaten to remove residual silicates.)
But iron won out in the end. It's harder to process, but the result is better.
Seems like if there were enough metal in the soil to be this easy to retrieve, a larger mining interest would already be there. Then again, I know nothing of Queensland to know if it is protected against that kind of thing or not.
"It's there" != "it's economical to extract commercially". And that != "it's more economical to extract than other places".
He used to live in the city in Australia and go out to a piece of property owned by a friend, based on the amount of money that he's made from his channel though I think he now bought a property just to do this. He was a lawn maintenance guy if I remember correctly.
Just this summer I noticed that the magnets on the back of my barbecue thermometer were picking up a lot of magnetic sand from the local riverbank. I went back with a super-duper magnet-fishing magnet and found that probably 20% of the rocks there were magnetic. I've explored a little bit, and (mind blown) there are magnetic rocks all over the place, from cliff sides to rocks in my front yard to gravel from my friend's driveway. I haven't looked anywhere outside of Oregon and Washington though, but it seems like rocks with significant (presumably)-iron content aren't rare at all.
Iron is 1000 times more abundant in the crust than copper.
I think so. A few years ago, he moved his operation to a different spot of land because it had more / other resources he wanted.
He bought a plot with everything he needs
Never mind where he lives. Where does he get the time to do this amazing stuff?
Thank you for this, I always knew that if I had to restart civilization from scratch I would have to go without anything digital because I understand the way thing work abstractly, but I could never make it happen. At least now I can think back on this video and wonder what magical tricks he did during those moments when the scene fast forwarded and magically progress was made.
Probably easier to just scavenge stuff, if you're fortunate enough to survive the initial fallout/disruption from say a nuclear war there's going to be a lot of stuff and not so many people.
David Gingery's book "Build your own metalworking shop from scrap" is a very fun read though
David Gingery's book "Build your own metalworking shop from scrap" is a very fun read though
This is "Primitive Technology". It sounds like you're looking for a "Post-Apocalypse Technology" series. I would watch that as well.
There will be lots of stuff, but what are the odds that exactly the thing you need will be available and in working condition? If you can make something entirely from scratch, you can make any subset of it from scratch. More generally, developing the means to do something yourself gives you a much deeper understanding than simply utilizing someone else's solution.
Sure I’m just saying smelting ore would probably not be necessary as there would be lots of iron aluminum etc laying around for casting for example
In the description of the video on youtube he often explains how long the full project took, and clarifying what took longest, it's always much longer than I expect (in the trebuchet video I think the problem was that collecting bark to make the rope took a very long time)
I think those deleted scenes are hours upon hours of tedious labor.
His blog will usually tell you how long he actually worked on things. Some of them are surprisingly fast. But he is also probably not posting all of his failures.
sure, notice how he says things like "3 double handfuls of charcoal, 3 single handfuls of iron-bearing sand", or "dry fire for one hour before trying to smelt", etc. Any time he mentions a number or a ratio, I guarantee it's hard-won knowledge that took ages to come up with (even if it was one of his ancestors that did it, and he just learned it from a book).
And/or a combination of "it worked with 3 handful; I'll note it down and not mess with it"
Exactly - he'll show you the step, and then either ff the waiting, or ff the repeating the step over and over and over again.
Like what? He’s pretty assiduous about showing everything on camera or explaining it in the cc. Do you have cc turned on?
He shows all the processes in great detail, but he definitely cuts out the extremely long hours of repetitive hard work he puts in that would be boring for the viewer to watch. For instance, when he makes bricks, he'll show one trip to the creek for the water, all the mixing, shaping and drying, etc. for one batch, then he fast forwards through the dozen more batches he does.
Watch the video with subtitles on - he explains everything he's doing and why he's doing it.
If you like the Primitive Technology channel (and if you don't, why are you here?) I'd like to suggest Advoko Makes. It's not stone age, it's a lawyer from St. Petersburg with a cabin up in Karelia. A different take on going out into the wilderness and domesticating a little patch of it, his ingenuity and craftsmanship really shine through.
Seconded. Advoko Makes is one of the highest-quality channels on the internet, IMO. If you like the subject matter, for sure check him out. His hand-made custom tools are amazing. And his method for sawing lumber with only a chainsaw freehand is worth a look, too.
It's also hard not to like the guy. He's got a great disposition.
It's also hard not to like the guy. He's got a great disposition.
Using a primitive sluice to extract heavier particulate matter (presumably mostly iron or some form of iron oxide -- since iron is one of the most common elements in the earth's crust) -- is absolutely brilliant!
(I suppose if you were a survivalist, and you were "cheating" (not going through all the necessary steps to realize iron without modern tools), you could simply use a portable neodymium magnet to go through large amounts of dirt -- whatever particles stick are "mostly iron" ore -- which can now be processed further, such as being smelted, etc.)
Related:
How To Make Everything - Smelting Iron from Rocks (Primitive Iron Age Extraction):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUn6LzakHsM
Good and Basic - Smelt Success! (Iron Smelt #8):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6_zVvG4FNo
(I suppose if you were a survivalist, and you were "cheating" (not going through all the necessary steps to realize iron without modern tools), you could simply use a portable neodymium magnet to go through large amounts of dirt -- whatever particles stick are "mostly iron" ore -- which can now be processed further, such as being smelted, etc.)
Related:
How To Make Everything - Smelting Iron from Rocks (Primitive Iron Age Extraction):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUn6LzakHsM
Good and Basic - Smelt Success! (Iron Smelt #8):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6_zVvG4FNo
A lot of comments here are talking about starting a civilization from scratch or ancient practices. Those are interesting topics but be aware that's not really what the "Primative Technology" channel is about. He's really just a hobbiest seeing what he can do from scratch without modern tools. He's not practicing for a collapse or reconstructing the past.
This comment reminded me of a neat video I saw where reconstructing the past is the explicit intention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajqort8ldXA.
Starting from 1997, they picked a year 1229 as the simulated start date, then worked to build a castle using, for the most part, only extraction, refinement, and building practices from that year. They may adopt new technologies as they were found in 1230, 1231, etc. as the years progress.
Apparently some of the folks restoring Notre Dame went to apprentice there for a little while to learn some of the woodworking techniques needed for their work on the cathedral.
Starting from 1997, they picked a year 1229 as the simulated start date, then worked to build a castle using, for the most part, only extraction, refinement, and building practices from that year. They may adopt new technologies as they were found in 1230, 1231, etc. as the years progress.
Apparently some of the folks restoring Notre Dame went to apprentice there for a little while to learn some of the woodworking techniques needed for their work on the cathedral.
A corollary in the digital domain is the bootstraping required for modern elf/linux based OSes: https://bootstrappable.org/projects.html (aka moving gcc to c++ was a huge mistake).
Iron is actually "made" in the silicon-burning process, in a sufficiently large star, from the perspective of stellar nucleosynthesis.
It would be fair to say that this guy is refining iron.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon-burning_process
It would be fair to say that this guy is refining iron.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon-burning_process
It became a thing at my elementary school in the 80s to try and sell iron to hobby shops for cash, so kids were tearing out the big magnets from speakers and digging into the sandboxes at school to pull iron out of the sand.
I never did it because I doubted you could really get money for a few ounces of iron and it looked pretty tedious to dig in a sandbox all day with a fist-sized magnet, and they were ruining speakers to do it. Who knew there was an even more tedious way to do this with clay and water?
I never did it because I doubted you could really get money for a few ounces of iron and it looked pretty tedious to dig in a sandbox all day with a fist-sized magnet, and they were ruining speakers to do it. Who knew there was an even more tedious way to do this with clay and water?
My fluid mechanics intuition lets me think it would be better to place the outlet of the centrifugal blower (at around 5:50 in the video) tangentially to the housing. Am I wrong?
You can also make (extract) Iron from corn flakes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emXo7l42vRA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emXo7l42vRA
yeah, but the economics on that aren't as efficient. ;-)
Detail at the beginning of the video, but if the metallic sand is heavier, why not wash sand and collect the bottom? Is the sluice helping much?
[deleted]
Great video! I was wondering which country he was in when I heard the unmistakable screech of the cockatoo (or possibly a galah).
[deleted]
I feel so privileged being born after the industrial revolution.
This should make playing Minecraft easier
Reminds me of thetoasterproject.org
The first I recall seeing was the art/science project "Immaculate Telegraphy". This was the first time I saw, or perhaps felt, that memory and knowledge is also imparted into the tools themselves -- knowing what to do is not enough, there's a bunch of subtle boot-strapping steps that need to bake progress into actual artifacts too. And also how much of this extra-cranial knowledge is taken for granted now.
https://immaculatetelegraphy.tumblr.com/
https://immaculatetelegraphy.tumblr.com/
Yeah the bit where his hut was full of smelter fumes reminded me of how the toaster creator poisoned themself tring to refine metal
[deleted]
also a knife from bacteria
That
Okay, now build a 3nm semiconductor fab from scratch to record the video on. I wonder how long that would take. Let's assume that the engineering for the whole thing was perfect and already done, you have 1000 workers, every worker is perfectly coordinated, didn't screw up and worked say 60 hours a week. 40 or 50 years? Longer? The prospecting and mining all the unusual metals, and finding all the energy generating materials for the power plant would take half the time I'd imagine.
There's some speculation that a collapse of civilization at our current point would be difficult to undo, as we've mined a whole bunch of the easily accessible stuff and have to delve miles underground or sift through megatons of ore for the rest.
Except if our society was to collapse there would be brand new massive veins of resources extremely close to the surface and with incredibly high purity in the form of the old cities and infrastructure that we already built. Eventually they would have to make some jump from recovering previously collected resources to exploiting new sources, but by that point they would already have reached levels comparable to us.
We would be missing the cheap energy from hydrocarbons.
If civilization collapsed today, a bunch of the Powder River coal would still be there.
No fossil fuels though.
Most of the early industrial revolution was done with water wheels, steam engines came much later. Since most of the iron and copper extraction would be much much easier since you could loot them from pre-collapse cities, it could be a wash.
And of course if even a single library survives mostly intact then our successors will get an absolutely massive jump start. Just a single "principles of physics" college textbook contains centuries of research.
And of course if even a single library survives mostly intact then our successors will get an absolutely massive jump start. Just a single "principles of physics" college textbook contains centuries of research.
The fact we happened to utilize cheap fossil fuels does not prove that fossil fuels are necessary for an advanced civilization to develop. One might even argue our prolonged use of fossil fuels was a mistake.
Maybe we should have been extremely careful with how those energy resources were used instead of just using them for whatever or as if they'd never run out or have any externalities. Doing this in a way that's in the best interest of humanity, without repeating the mistakes of communism will be an interesting challenge for humanity in the decades ahead. That is assuming we don't develop some deus ex machina like cheap fusion power.
[deleted]
Easily available coal and oil is more likely issue. But I think that wood can be a replacement for energy source. It’s not as cheap so progress will be limited until better energy sources will be built.
Idk, most of the stuff we've mined is concentrated in existing stuff or in landfills.
Finding completely new ores could be a challenge, but most of the stuff is just around on the surface now
Finding completely new ores could be a challenge, but most of the stuff is just around on the surface now
[deleted]
From scratch? Over a thousand years. You will have to implement all kinds of processes. Even making basic things like plastics, optical glass.
You know if he could do that Intel would have hired him because the 3nm fabs aren't even in operation yet.
If you wanted to make a genuine argument you would have mentioned film based cameras rather than technology that doesn't even exist today.
If you wanted to make a genuine argument you would have mentioned film based cameras rather than technology that doesn't even exist today.
It's kind of silly and often hand wavy (especially when it comes to how much labor is actually needed to realistically produce refined materials). And it has the usual eye-roll-inducing shonen anime tropes. But if you like the "Primitive Technology" YouTube channel, you might get a kick out of "Dr. Stone".