Is that King's Landing?
A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism
31–40 of 136 posts
Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism
#32Sometimes I think the Antikythera Mechanism is more of an ancient Greek Rorschach blot: what people are certain it was supposed to do may reveal more about what is important to them than it does about the mechanism and its maker's intent.
Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism
#33I always wonder what future archaeologists in will read into artifacts from our time when they find them in 2000 years...
I read someware that in 2000 years the books we managed to save from the middle ages and up to about 1850 will still be around but anything printed after that will be gone because the paper of the modern age is to fragile to last.
The cultures that dominated North and South America prior to the arrival of European explorers and the mass plague that accompanied them were absolutely vast, and we are only now starting to piece together the size and scale of some of those empires.
There are several reasons for the gap in understanding of their scale, but one is that the well-settled communities (with some exceptions primarily centered in South America) often used primarily wooden construction, as wood was extremely plentiful in the New World. When the European plagues led to 90%-plus die-offs in these cultures, the survivors couldn't maintain the scale of cities they'd built, and since wood rots relatively quickly, their permanent settlements were all but eradicated by the time any subsequent waves of European exploration arrived to write down what they saw in languages Europeans could read.
Modern archaeology techniques, by analyzing land cultivation and the few remnants a wooden building leaves of foundation, are starting to comprehend the scale of the cities built by the original settlers of North and South America.
https://www.history.com/news/native-american-cahokia-chaco-c...
Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism
#34What happened to these advanced civilization of the antiquity? We have drawings of highly advanced siege engines yet it seem that after the fall of Rome we all went back to fighting with sticks for a few centuries. Why is that?
oops
This isn't really historically correct. There was no single burning of the Great Library of Alexandria that completely destroyed it. Like many libraries of antiquity it suffered several fires and recovered, but eventually fell into decline and disfavor as other academia centers sprang up.
Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism
#35I always wonder what future archaeologists in will read into artifacts from our time when they find them in 2000 years...
They'll read digital archives. They'll be fine.
Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism
#36What happened to these advanced civilization of the antiquity? We have drawings of highly advanced siege engines yet it seem that after the fall of Rome we all went back to fighting with sticks for a few centuries. Why is that?
Knowledge is passed on from master to apprentice. Nearly-universal literacy helped to alleviate this issue somewhat, but even today most practical knowledge is passed on by people working together. The result is that even a gap of a single generation is enough for some knowledge to be lost. That's why Roman concrete was forgotten, why we can't build a Saturn V anymore, why you can't just start a chip-fab with enough…
That's why odd gaps appear. Like an article about how China can't manufacture the balls for ball-point pens, or critical parts for jet engines.
Maybe a few missing pieces are why Intel cant seem to figure out EUV lithography.
None of these things are trivial and probably not documented in a way where a noob could pick them up.
Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism
#37What happened to these advanced civilization of the antiquity? We have drawings of highly advanced siege engines yet it seem that after the fall of Rome we all went back to fighting with sticks for a few centuries. Why is that?
The fall of the Roman empire was essentially a post-apocalyptic event for the West. The economic and political collapse of Rome's satellite states halted the progress of technological and cultural development across subsequent generations. Many ancient Greek classics, such as the works of Aristotle might have been lost forever had they not been saved by Islamic scholars. And don't think it couldn't happen again. We'v…
Modern digital recordings can last for a very long time. And old USB stick dug up in hundreds of years, can be reinterpreted by a future modern civilization. They're kind of all 'saved by Islamic scholars' in that sense?
Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism
#38I always wonder what future archaeologists in will read into artifacts from our time when they find them in 2000 years...
Mostly they'll be interpreting plumbing. Toilets, sinks will last for 1000 years or longer.
Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Literally the dark ages...go read up on it.
Define irony
meh the dark ages are well studied and any minor effort to find some information on it will get someone more and more accurate information on it than asking on HN. It's the kind of question that has a short but useless answer that fits on hackernews 'fall of rome bad for progress' but the answer you should get is to go put in some basic effort and look it up - its easy to find information on using the terms 'dark ages'.
Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism
#40What happened to these advanced civilization of the antiquity? We have drawings of highly advanced siege engines yet it seem that after the fall of Rome we all went back to fighting with sticks for a few centuries. Why is that?
Jonathan Blow has an excellent talk on this topic in relation to software.