Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#161

Post by mikewave » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

gpm wrote: post #136

masklinn wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coal, yes. Iron, wouldn't the iron we moved to the surface be even more accessible? We didn't destroy it, just rearranged and concentrated it? Might depend how long it takes: because rust is porous and friable, rusting iron should eventually degrade to nothing, and the rust would be difficult to re-concentrate then reduce back to iron.

Would whatever the rust turns into be any less accessible (ignoring availability of coal) than what we started out with though? I don't pretend to know the entire "iron cycle", but it seems like it ought to just be turning back into the same sort of minerals that we originally extracted it from?

Sure, if you have a billion years to wait for it to all run through the rock cycle again.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#162

Post by masklinn » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:00 PM UTC

gpm wrote: post #136

masklinn wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coal, yes. Iron, wouldn't the iron we moved to the surface be even more accessible? We didn't destroy it, just rearranged and concentrated it? Might depend how long it takes: because rust is porous and friable, rusting iron should eventually degrade to nothing, and the rust would be difficult to re-concentrate then reduce back to iron.

Would whatever the rust turns into be any less accessible (ignoring availability of coal) than what we started out with though? I don't pretend to know the entire "iron cycle", but it seems like it ought to just be turning back into the same sort of minerals that we originally extracted it from?

Iron rusts over historical timescales, metal deposits form over geological ones.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#163

Post by Joker_vD » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

jazzyjackson wrote: post #156

Joker_vD wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You jest, but I've heard a tale from a local engineering college: they regularly give to the graduating-year students a task to design some system which, after you remove all the fancy wordings, is basically insides of a toilet cistern/tank. Year after year, the students keep producing astonishingly convoluted designs.

I once re-invented the whistling teapot while deeply engrossed in using Arduino for anything and everything. I had only saucepans to boil water with and wished they could alert me once the water reached temp, perhaps optically sensing the turbulance of the surface. My roommate could not roll their eyes enough.

Well, if you put a lid on a saucepan (and you should, it conserves energy and makes water boil faster) you can detect it clattering when the water starts to boil! So you don't need any optical input, a microphone will suffice ― which is cheaper, too. Filter out the low frequencies of water humming, amplify the rest, and you got a (not-so-nice-sounding, because it rattles, not whistles) boiling point alarm!

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#164

Post by crispyambulance » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #95

crispyambulance wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it might be helpful to consider what happened to the dinosaurs. The same could happen to us if we fail to evolve in time... Asteroid hits. Wipes out almost all life. A million years later, the biomass around us will have all been converted to a black ooze (oil), covered by millennia of rock, sediment, and tectonic plates. Eventually future civilized beings who plunder the Earth for our biomass that has been c…

Are you suggesting if the dinosaurs had tried harder to "evolve in time", they could have better survived an asteroid hit? I don't think that's how evolution works. For humans either.

> Are you suggesting if the dinosaurs had tried harder to "evolve in time", they could have better survived an asteroid hit?

Well, yes. It's not fair to the dinosaurs, I admit. They hardly had a chance to develop language and mathematics. They were still too busy ripping each other's faces off. And not having opposable thumbs, of course, really put a damper on technological development. Maybe in a another million years things would have been different, but the asteroid had a different idea.

We, on the other hand, are at least on the precipice of the capability to divert asteroids. Hopefully we don't get an asteroid visit too soon.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#165

Post by bostik » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:03 PM UTC

isk517 wrote: post #106

marcus_holmes wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan has very low quality iron ores. Yet they turned out (arguably) the best steel swords in the world. Constraints don't always lead to bad outcomes.

Japan definitely produced some of the most beautiful looking swords, and they are extremely impressive given the quality of iron they are forged out of, but I don't think any sane person would choose one to take into battle given any other option.

Friend is a hobbyist blacksmith and he said it really well.

Japan developed their hugely overdone turned-steel technique because the ore they had to work with was so bad: hammering the garbage out was the only way to get the quality of the steel itself into acceptable levels. As a result, Japanese smiths developed something very close to what we'd now call layered steel.

European swordsmiths (think: Toledo) had access to higher-grade ore, and as a result never needed to develop techniques to work around fundamental problems with their source material.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#166

Post by mas147 » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #66

gpm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coal, yes. Iron, wouldn't the iron we moved to the surface be even more accessible? We didn't destroy it, just rearranged and concentrated it?

Guess what we do most of our iron smelting with?

What?

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#167

Post by easygenes » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:05 PM UTC

7thaccount wrote: post #137

ben_w wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I sometimes wonder is: if there was a dinosaur species which had reached roughly our level of intelligence and society, would they have left enough of a mark on the world that we could even tell? If they got further than us, tried to capture an asteroid and mine it, could they have wiped themselves out without leaving behind technosignatures that would still be visible?

This is called the "Silurian hypothesis" and is named after the Doctor Who episode that showed an advanced dinosaur race called the "Silurians" that went into cryo millions of years ago. Some real geologists explored the idea (someone could find the paper and subsequent news articles) and I think the conclusion was that on geological time periods, there might not be much left for us to find.

Pretty sure all the radioactive ore refining we have done is going to leave a mark for billions of years. Never mind how we’ve displaced large percentages of the readily available rare earths already.

I doubt the dinosaurs shuttled away or buried all their geo-engineering marks.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#168

Post by jlkuester7 » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

hnmullany wrote: post #25

rozab wrote: post #11

Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.…

Same way - the extended 3rd century crisis in the Roman Empire led to a loss of sculpting expertise. No art was commissioned for so long that skills weren't passed on.

I was just reading an article on a nuclear power plant built (in Norway?) recently that mentioned how it was a considerably more difficult/costly project due to the fact that there was not sufficient expertise left in the West since so few reactors had been built over the past decades....

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#169

Post by ch4s3 » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:10 PM UTC

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #152

ch4s3 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Th narrative of "the west doesn't manufacture anything" is greatly oversold. The US makes more steel than it did 40 years ago, for example. Sure, we make fewer hairs and t-shirts, but it's natural for that stuff to chase lower labor costs. We're also an agricultural powerhouse. Now, for sure we have fallen a bit behind in making chips, but that may change.

So we are the Romans. We can make swords and bread! We'll do great in WWIII!

That's ridiculous. We're churning out new ideas in biotech, medicine, media, finance, automobiles, airplanes, batteries, some solar stuff, and on and on. We have a huge, dynamic economy that does a lot of things really well. We've uncovered some major issues in the last two years but we've done better I think than one might have expected under the circumstances. I think in particular the rapid development and production of multiple vaccines in record time displays our capacity to innovate and manufacture complex goods.

It's impossible to know what's coming in the distant future, but it doesn't feel like any of our problems are insurmountable.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#170

Post by evilduck » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:10 PM UTC

gpm wrote: post #136

masklinn wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coal, yes. Iron, wouldn't the iron we moved to the surface be even more accessible? We didn't destroy it, just rearranged and concentrated it? Might depend how long it takes: because rust is porous and friable, rusting iron should eventually degrade to nothing, and the rust would be difficult to re-concentrate then reduce back to iron.

Would whatever the rust turns into be any less accessible (ignoring availability of coal) than what we started out with though? I don't pretend to know the entire "iron cycle", but it seems like it ought to just be turning back into the same sort of minerals that we originally extracted it from?

The problem will be a lack concentrated deposits making post-collapse (and new) industrial efforts much harder. A pile of rust from one tractor in someone's back yard is not going to be worth the effort to mine and refine.

Possibly an analogous situation is the history of steel in Japan and their efforts to extract iron from sand, since they don't have significant iron ore to mine on their island.