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

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

#171

Post by bmn__ »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #93
ceejayoz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the interesting possibilities for the Fermi Paradox is the fact that we've wiped out the readily accessible deposits of iron, coal, oil, etc. A second go at the industrial revolution would be much harder, if we regressed that far.

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.

> arguably

Experiment: https://youtu.be/ev4lW0wbnX8?t=1245> (German audio track, machine translated subtitles in English available)

The question is whether this settles the argument or stokes its flames.

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

#172

Post by colordrops »

tzs wrote: post #67

I think we tend to underestimate what ancient technology could produce because we forget that in ancient times they often operated on longer timescales than we do. With our technology for example we could make all the parts for the Antikythera mechanism in a short time. The ancient Greeks definitely had no technology that would have allowed them to do that, so we see the existence of the Antikythera mechanism as a gr…

Same goes for the perfectly fitted stones in Inkan walls in Peru. They weren't built by aliens or telekinesis, but rather unoccupied workers that rubbed on the stones all day for decades. There is plenty of evidence that these walls and cities were never in a "finished" state, but always in progress, with partially complete stones and scattered pieces not yet near the wall in many sites.

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

#173

Post by dang »

Maybe a good time to do this:

The Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27934684 - July 2021 (29 comments)

The Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27915777 - July 2021 (3 comments)

Scientists Have Unlocked the Secrets of the Ancient 'Antikythera Mechanism' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26482765 - March 2021 (1 comment)

Scientists Have Unlocked the Secrets of the Ancient 'Antikythera Mechanism' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26469609 - March 2021 (1 comment)

Scientists solve another piece of the puzzling Antikythera mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26444311 - March 2021 (1 comment)

A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435416 - March 2021 (130 comments)

The Antikythera Mechanism – Evidence of a Lunar Calendar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25440018 - Dec 2020 (1 comment)

Antikythera Mechanism: Evidence of a Lunar Calendar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25412576 - Dec 2020 (1 comment)

Hacker’s Discovery Changes Understanding of the Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25408405 - Dec 2020 (5 comments)

2000 Year Old Analog Computer - Decoding the Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24247667 - Aug 2020 (2 comments)

Decoding the Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculator: Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195196 - Oct 2019 (24 comments)

Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20543223 - July 2019 (35 comments)

Was the Antikythera Mechanism the world’s first computer? (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18642978 - Dec 2018 (56 comments)

Missing piece of Antikythera Mechanism found on Aegean seabed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18455764 - Nov 2018 (3 comments)

Missing Piece of Antikythera Mechanism Found on Aegean Seabed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18446622 - Nov 2018 (1 comment)

Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18276098 - Oct 2018 (3 comments)

Human skeleton found on famed Antikythera shipwreck - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12538876 - Sept 2016 (6 comments)

The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11902342 - June 2016 (66 comments)

The Antikythera Computer, Circa 205 BC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10546474 - Nov 2015 (1 comment)

Marine Archaeologists Excavate Greek Antikythera Shipwreck - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280722 - Sept 2015 (1 comment)

Divers return to famous Antikythera wreck to hunt for treasures - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10274733 - Sept 2015 (2 comments)

The 2000 Year-Old Computer – Decoding the Antikythera Mechanism (2012) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10192082 - Sept 2015 (5 comments)

Famed Antikythera wreck yields more treasures - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8438996 - Oct 2014 (8 comments)

Reconstruction of planetary gearwork in the Antikythera Mechanism (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8329647 - Sept 2014 (1 comment)

The Two Thousand Year Old Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4878859 - Dec 2012 (1 comment)

Apple engineer uses Lego to rebuild Antikythera mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1993988 - Dec 2010 (42 comments)

Lego Antikythera Mechanism (video) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1991557 - Dec 2010 (2 comments)

Antikythera Machine built out of Lego - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1990493 - Dec 2010 (3 comments)

Lego Antikythera Mechanism (oldest known scientific computer) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1988818 - Dec 2010 (1 comment)

The Antikythera Mechanism: Animation and Analysis [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1948365 - Nov 2010 (1 comment)

Beautiful phyiscal model of the Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1871202 - Nov 2010 (3 comments)

Antikythera Reborn – The Hackers of Ancient Greece - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101701 - Jan 2008 (2 comments)

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

#174

Post by dang »

smitty1e wrote: post #3

"Simply shouldn't exist" Pyramids were wonders of the ancient world long before the Python web framework. The condescencion of the modern age toward those who came before use never ceases to amuse.

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article and rush to the thread to complain about it. Find something interesting to comment about instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#175

Post by isk517 »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #148
isk517 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am confused. Are you saying that the quality of the iron makes them shit swords, or that guns are better than swords?

From what I've heard and seen the quality of metal makes them prone to breaking, and you need skill to take full advantage of the razor sharp edge. I have seen a great video showing katana students cutting bamboo and struggling and then a master going clean through that I wish I could have found again. For the record I don't think they are shit swords, just they look really cool and that has lead to various media elevating their superiority to other swords beyond reality.

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

#176

Post by NateEag »

easygenes wrote: post #167
7thaccount wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Schlock Mercenary is a sci-fi webcomic with a fun thread about sapient dinosaurs fleeing Earth pre-impact.

There's no good way to read just those strips, but it starts here:

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2018-07-25

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

#177

Post by bmn__ »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #155
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.…

I've seen that talk but it feels like putting the cart before the horse. The risk isn't in programming, it's in the CPUs themselves. C and ASM are still some of the most popular languages in the world. But for a modern CPU, there are machines in the production process that only a single company in the world can make. We're infinitely more likely to lose the capability to make a modern CPU than lose the capability to…

> We're infinitely more likely to lose the capability to make a modern CPU than lose the capability to know how to code in C.

I agree with this. I want to add that I think if the knowledge of modern CPUs is somehow lost, it won't be catastrophic, merely crippling, since there are literally tens of thousands of CS students every year learning how to build a CPU from electronic circuits.

We will revert to slow and bulky CPUs, be able to run C on them, and in due time rediscover and reëngineer miniaturisation, superscalar multithreading, etc.

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

#178

Post by Gravityloss »

colordrops wrote: post #172
tzs wrote: post #67

I think we tend to underestimate what ancient technology could produce because we forget that in ancient times they often operated on longer timescales than we do. With our technology for example we could make all the parts for the Antikythera mechanism in a short time. The ancient Greeks definitely had no technology that would have allowed them to do that, so we see the existence of the Antikythera mechanism as a gr…

Same goes for the perfectly fitted stones in Inkan walls in Peru. They weren't built by aliens or telekinesis, but rather unoccupied workers that rubbed on the stones all day for decades. There is plenty of evidence that these walls and cities were never in a "finished" state, but always in progress, with partially complete stones and scattered pieces not yet near the wall in many sites.

Then there are projects like Colosseum which took only 7-8 years to build. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum or Parthenon that took 9 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon

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

#179

Post by gpm »

evilduck wrote: post #170
gpm wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The pile of rust that use to be a tractor, sure, that's not worth much. The pile of rust that use to be a city though... surely that's more concentrated than the rust mixed with rock (or clay) that we originally extracted it from?

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

#180

Post by gpm »

masklinn wrote: post #162
gpm wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Am I wrong to think of metal deposits as just "rust mixed with rock"? It doesn't seem like the rock part (i.e. the details of what it is mixed with) should be critical for the extraction process?
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