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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]

#211

Post by ds206 »

JJMcJ wrote: post #204
colordrops wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Recently a group finished a stone block of the size in the Egyptian pyramids in just a few days. Another group hauled a Stonehenge sized block of stone from area the stones came from to the site of Stonehenge in about two weeks. Estimate is that, using existing tools of the time, 100 stonemasons could have done the Sphinx in about five years. And we have medieval and classical buildings in Europe where the building m…

Do you have a link or more information regarding the pyramid block formation?

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

#212

Post by Vetch »

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.

Yep, the [paper's conclusion](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200000027/downloads/20...) was just as you said, there'd not be much of a record to find for civs older than 4 Ma. Also, there are past anomalous and abrupt events in the geological record that appear similar to byproducts from our anthropogenic activity. Evidence against is that timing for majority of such anomalous events can be matched to mundane geological activity in the record.

The rate at which we're accumulating change compared to geological record is also a strong argument against, although they argue limitations in current dating methods reducing how much can be said with certainty about prior epochs.

While there is precious little reason and evidence to believe a priori in a previous advanced dino civ, there are studies that could be done on sediment data that'd lend more certainty (such as looking for unusually rapid metal production).

> Anthropocene layer in ocean sediment will be abrupt and multi-variate, consisting of seemingly concurrent-specific peaks in multiple geochemical proxies, biomarkers, elemental composition and mineralogy. It will likely demarcate a clear transition of faunal taxa prior to the event compared with afterwards. Most of the individual markers will not be unique in the context of Earth history as we demonstrate below, but the combination of tracers may be. However, we speculate that some specific tracers that would be unique, specifically persistent synthetic molecules, plastics and (potentially) very long-lived radioactive fallout in the event of nuclear catastrophe. Absent those markers, the uniqueness of the event may well be seen in the multitude of relatively independent fingerprints as opposed to a coherent set of changes associated with a single geophysical cause.

My opinion is this ultimately boils down to how hard human level intelligence is to evolve, which is why the hypothesis is interesting in the context of the Fermi Paradox. Intelligence might be extremely difficult to evolve, it might require an unusual background environment set of condition or just might not be that useful in general.

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

#213

Post by simonh »

xyzzy21 wrote: post #194

The presumption that other people aren't smart enough to do what you can or imagine has a name: bigotry. The "shouldn't exist" is bigotry. It's also evidence that we see even today that knowledge is fragile and easily lost when it has a large tacit component. Most things technological are highly fragile because half of the knowledge required to create them is tacit. See also: "FOG BANK".

It has nothing to do with assumptions about how smart people in the past were, we have every reason to believe they were just as smart as us. In fact we have direct evidence from surviving mathematical texts, treatises on philosophy, etc that they could be highly original and insightful thinkers. Smarts is simply not at all the issue and frankly you describing diligent scholars who clearly have huge appreciation and admiration of the people they study bigots is highly offensive and uncalled for.

The real bigots are the conspiracy nuts who think ancient civilizations we know of couldn't have achieved the many things we evidence of, and think it must have been aliens or other advanced civilizations on implausible magic islands.

The question is simply one of technology. We can't simply assume that people at a certain time had technology we have no evidence for, no accounts of, and no evidence of similar or near precursor technologies. The Antikythera mechanism was a shock because there was no evidence any such thing could exist at that time. We also don't have evidence such things existed in Babylon a thousand years previously, or in Egypt 3,000 years before that. Equally we have no evidence they definitely didn't have them. So should we assume they had such things? We simply make the best estimates we can and adjust when we find wonderful surprises like this one.

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

#214

Post by Vetch »

Conlectus wrote: post #157
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 found this to be a compelling counterargument to Blow's alarmism about forgotten knowledge in tech https://www.datagubbe.se/endofciv/ A related point: numerically there are far more low level developers now than there were in past he idealizes. No such knowledge is being forgotten, it is used and innovated upon regularly. It may be in less frequent use, but is still there if needed.

Yeah, there is necessarily more specialization because there is vastly more knowledge than ever before. As a fraction of expertise, low level knowledge might be less but low level experts are more numerous than ever before. Rather than forgetting, the real risk might be knowledge production extending beyond our collective capacity to keep up and make sense of it.

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

#215

Post by usrbinbash »

jfengel wrote: post #186
jazzyjackson wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where the notion that productivity software should be “attractive” came from. Were whole businesses not built on VisiCalc? The registers at B&H photo in NYC appear to be some DOS terminal system, but the employees know the keyboard shortcuts by muscle memory and the interface’s reaction time is instantaneous. If that’s not good software I don’t know what is.

I wonder where the notion that productivity software should be “attractive” came from. From the people who make choices about where to put their money. You can get away with ugly software -- especially if you had something that worked 20 years ago and is still sufficient, and there is no alternative. But if users have the choice of something attractive, they'll pick it.

That depends entirely on the use case and the user.

I have the choice of many many many text editors and IDEs to manage my source code.

What do I use? vim. In a terminal(-emulator).

Why? Because I like my editor to be ready the moment my finger leaves the ENTER key, I like direct interoperability with the terminal, I like that I can hack together even the most absurd things in .vimrc, and I like that I have the same editor with the same settings on all servers I take care of, even when I connect to them via ssh.

I also use vlc for playing audio and video. Are there players that have a more edge UX? Sure. Do they come with builtin-full support for almost all formats, have a tiny memory footprint, can be used to convert stuff, don't spy on me and can be controlled via a terminal (hello ncurses mode!)? Nope.

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

#216

Post by jrochkind1 »

crispyambulance wrote: post #164
jrochkind1 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yea…

I think it's a misconception that we can somehow speed up or direct "evolution", no matter what language and mathematics we have.

Diverting an asteroid, however, is not evolution.

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

#217

Post by bsder »

Gravityloss wrote: post #178
colordrops wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most things in the ancient Greek world needed to be completed in less than a generation because a generation tended to be the recurring timeframe for wars (funny that).

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

#218

Post by bsder »

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…

> The ancient Greeks definitely had no technology that would have allowed them to do that

Sure they did. Bronze is not that hard to work with. Simple silica (sand) abrasives cut through it quite well. Lapping makes things nice and flat. Accuracy is defined by your skill with tools.

Hand sheet metal layout is a real skill even in the modern world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DypIDbAVTc

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

#219

Post by PostOnce »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #210
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…

There is also this implicit form of -ism built into it, in that certain groups of people were "obviously" less intelligent so it is unlikely they could ever build something magnificent or intellectually obscure. Whether it is a belief that aliens must have built Mayan or Egyptian Pyramids because of a bias that they were dumb savages, or whether it is dismissal of alternate forms of successful government and social o…

nobody thinks Einstein was beneath us because he didn't have an iPhone

if something "shouldn't exist" in a time period it has nothing to do with judging those people as inferiors, its simply the timeline of the development of technology (or our misconception thereof)

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

#220

Post by darcys22 »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #210
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…

There is also this implicit form of -ism built into it, in that certain groups of people were "obviously" less intelligent so it is unlikely they could ever build something magnificent or intellectually obscure. Whether it is a belief that aliens must have built Mayan or Egyptian Pyramids because of a bias that they were dumb savages, or whether it is dismissal of alternate forms of successful government and social o…

This is a very interesting thought to explore! We have this cultural default to assume that people back then were less smart than us. But we really are exactly the same but we have a better starting point then they did to build interesting things.
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