Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012) • Hacker News Board

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#61

Post by api » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 3:25 PM UTC

kartan wrote: post #56

Houshalter wrote: post #32

One of the most fascinating books I ever picked up from the library was Ancient Inventions ( https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Inventions-Peter-James/dp/034... ), which goes over the details of stuff like this. The historical figure that strikes me as "most likely to be a time traveller" is Archimedes, who designed incredibly advanced machines that destroyed the Roman fleet and protected his home city. Sadly he was acci…

> Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only. I read somewhere that one of the problems in antiquity to develop useful machines was the abundance of slave/captive labor. Why do you want to create a complicated inefficient first version of a machine when you have cheap humans being to do the task?

After initially being skeptical and disliking him for libertarian leaning political reasons, I've come around to wondering if John Maynard Keynes might have been even more right than we have imagined.

Slave labor is kind of an extreme case of the paradox of thrift. Slaves have no disposable capital and they flood the labor market down to zero. Slavery is like a permanent deflationary spiral. There is just no reason to innovate or invest in anything except conquest and luxuries, which describes most ancient cultures well.

Had the Greeks or Romans abolished slavery and set a minimum wage we might be flying to Proxima Centauri in a fusion rocket starship by now.

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#62

Post by tonmoy » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 3:26 PM UTC

angersock wrote: post #21

nine_k wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telephone or at least telegraph are also easy, and may be even more valuable in a military setting.

Maybe easy, but you'd need to create lots of long insulated wire--while not impossible, very expensive. Telescopes and semaphores would get you very far at a fraction of the cost.

Also, source of electricity may be non-trivial. Battery would need creating acids and non-metal container to store them. A simple DC generator would need a permanent magnet.

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#63

Post by Filligree » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 3:26 PM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #48

knz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I would have the goal of the "modern world" in mind if transported to a pristine planet! Millions of people want the technology but not the stress and pollution of the rat race. A small remote coastal settlement in a temperate climate with some technology to make life easier (fishing nets, agricultural tools) sounds ok! Of course the daily grind there is probably food production and medical issues.

My post was intended to be two questions: 1. What are the chances of any us surviving outside of human civilization if all technology was stripped from us, even if we had memorized all of humanity's combined knowledge? 2. How long would it take to replicate current technology from scratch, if all the research was already done for you, and you were basically immortal? By "from scratch" I mean skipping the creating-the…

I've given some thought to #2, from the perspective of a mildly-transhuman child left by herself in a jungle (it's a novel..), and came to the unfortunate conclusion that...

Maintenance is a killer. There comes a point, fairly early in technological development, where it's simply impossible for any single person to keep everything working and still have time to improve on the situation.

That's true for even the most benign of environments. Hana, unfortunately, was stuck in a rather damp jungle.

(And to preempt the possibly inevitable question, find it at https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/song-in-the-fo.... Read if you feel like; I like to think it's cute.)

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#64

Post by njharman » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 3:32 PM UTC

Houshalter wrote: post #27

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telescopes reduce the number of relays, if terrain is conducive, but don't seem transformative if you have flags already?

As far as I know, the romans never used semaphore. Maybe for practical reasons like not having telescopes, but maybe the idea just didn't occur to them. It would be pretty low hanging fruit for time travelers to introduce.

I think it was more due to not solving any problem. Same way despite Greeks inventing steam power, no one made engine from it cause there was no need. Too many slaves provided needed labor.

Runners, horses, ships moved communications fast enough. Even if you knew ceaser was coming to Rome, transport speed meant you couldnt do much with that. And yes we with hindsight cab cherry pick situations where it would help. But it was not worth cost to create, train and maintain such a system for hundreds if years for the fee.tumes it provided marginal benefit.

In other words most technology is synergistic. It really isn't awesome unless bunch other tech is at sufficient level to exploitmkit

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#65

Post by bsenftner » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #17

probably_wrong wrote: post #2

I often like to fantasize how would I fare if I found myself suddenly transported into medieval times or earlier (spoiler: poorly). Articles like this make me appreciate even more how little difference there is between us and humans thousands of years ago. I wouldn't have figured out how to make a working wheel, and I've seen one. I have no idea where I picked up the idea that "ancient civilizations were dumb", but t…

> I often like to fantasize how would I fare if I found myself suddenly transported into medieval times or earlier I wonder the same. If I was suddenly teleported to the middle of a forest, without anything, not even my shoes and clothes, and no chance of any contact with civilization again, what SHOULD my first few tasks even be?? Imagine a modern human, ideal in health and strength and faculties, and immune to dise…

Gaaa! I can't find the reference to a short story I've read about an over-developed future where the entertainment of the time is "athlete performers wearing body/environment capture suits" who are trained for "any scenario" and then randomly dropped into alien primitive populations where they have to survive, live without detection, and their "reality show goal" is to become a leader or otherwise pivotal to that primitive race, all the while not being discovered by "the Federation" type of modern police because such intervention with a primitive race is highly illegal. The public watches it all in a "body sim" like VR player. Is this triggering anybody's memory? Can't believe I'm blanking on the author...

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#66

Post by Houshalter » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 3:48 PM UTC

njharman wrote: post #64

Houshalter wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, the romans never used semaphore. Maybe for practical reasons like not having telescopes, but maybe the idea just didn't occur to them. It would be pretty low hanging fruit for time travelers to introduce.

I think it was more due to not solving any problem. Same way despite Greeks inventing steam power, no one made engine from it cause there was no need. Too many slaves provided needed labor. Runners, horses, ships moved communications fast enough. Even if you knew ceaser was coming to Rome, transport speed meant you couldnt do much with that. And yes we with hindsight cab cherry pick situations where it would help. Bu…

Well sending a message that a remote province is being invaded, is useful. Especially if you can send that message days faster than runners can send messages. Its also very useful to coordinate ships.

The difference between steam engines is that steam engines were very difficult to build. Semaphore is very simple and a trial system wouldn't be expensive to set up.

The Romans did use crude fire signals, so I think that proves that they would find it useful.

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#67

Post by dTal » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 3:48 PM UTC

knz wrote: post #39

KineticLensman wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "what would I try to invent?" question one is fascinating. If I found myself transported back to Roman times, I'd aim to make a lens. The Romans had glass so the raw material is there. With a lens you can fairly quickly go a telescope, which has immediate military application, so would perhaps be widely adopted. Astronomy might then follow, heading off the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held b…

Was glass and the tools needed to make a lens readily available to people then? Or would you nedd to time travel with substantial wealth?

"By the mid-1st century AD this meant that glass vessels had moved from a valuable, high-status commodity, to a material commonly available: “a [glass] drinking cup could be bought for a copper coin” (Strabo, Geographica XVI.2)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_glass

As for manufacturing lenses, you can get by without many tools with cunning techniques. Molten glass naturally forms curved shapes and can be polished by fire. Leeuwenhoek made tiny lenses in the 1600s, although no one knows for sure exactly how (he made a point of not sharing) - one technique that's known to work is drawing the glass into a fine thread, snapping the thread, and heating the end so it forms a tiny ball.

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#68

Post by mturmon » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 3:55 PM UTC

Houshalter wrote: post #58

kartan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only. I read somewhere that one of the problems in antiquity to develop useful machines was the abundance of slave/captive labor. Why do you want to create a complicated inefficient first version of a machine when you have cheap humans being to do the task?

Yes that's probably why the industrial revolution didn't happen. There's a good comment below that explains other societal reasons why the industrial revolution didn't happen, like the lack of contract law and investors. I also read a great theory once (but I can't find it again through google!) that the industrial revolution really required the invention of the cannon first. Building an efficient steam engine in rom…

The thing you can't recall in your second paragraph sounds like the sort of "chain of inventions" that James Burke used to explain on the old BBC series Connections. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) )

See in particular episode 6 in the original 1978 series (just going by the summary on Wikipedia).

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#69

Post by acjohnson55 » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 4:04 PM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #30

KineticLensman wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "what would I try to invent?" question one is fascinating. If I found myself transported back to Roman times, I'd aim to make a lens. The Romans had glass so the raw material is there. With a lens you can fairly quickly go a telescope, which has immediate military application, so would perhaps be widely adopted. Astronomy might then follow, heading off the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held b…

The problem is with the assumption behind "which fairly quickly leads to the discovery of microscopic organisms". In your scenario, who learns about microscopic organisms, and when? As a point of comparison, who discovered the existence of North America? Was it Christopher Columbus in 1492? Or was it the Vikings in 900 AD? Or was it some mix of people who first melded together in Beringia, somewhere around 20,000 BC?…

Yes, this totally!

People deeply overestimate the value of any single insight, and largely forget about the dozens of mundane but non-trivial details a successful implementation relies on. Great entrepreneurs understand this and know how to solve enough of those "little problems" to enable a big idea to thrive, and that's the magic of it. Bad ones obsess over the idea itself.

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#70

Post by notahacker » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 4:14 PM UTC

kartan wrote: post #56

Houshalter wrote: post #32

One of the most fascinating books I ever picked up from the library was Ancient Inventions ( https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Inventions-Peter-James/dp/034... ), which goes over the details of stuff like this. The historical figure that strikes me as "most likely to be a time traveller" is Archimedes, who designed incredibly advanced machines that destroyed the Roman fleet and protected his home city. Sadly he was acci…

> Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only. I read somewhere that one of the problems in antiquity to develop useful machines was the abundance of slave/captive labor. Why do you want to create a complicated inefficient first version of a machine when you have cheap humans being to do the task?

The other issue with having most of your labour performed by slaves is that the slaves themselves generally don't have the motivation, or education, or chance of actually being taken seriously to propose even incremental process improvements.