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Historical Tech Tree

historicaltechtree.com

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Re: Historical Tech Tree

#31

Post by RHSeeger »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #27
sizediterable wrote: post #17

Highly recommend the Dr. Stone anime if you're interested in a story with the premise of starting civilization from scratch but armed with the sum total of modern human knowledge about science and engineering.

I'd also recommend the Destiny's Crucible series - the basic premise is that a chemist from our world is transported to another planet of humans at a much lower technological level, and some moderately standard isekai hijinks ensue. I read five of the books, and really enjoyed them; if you like the "competence porn" genre of novels, this is a pretty good one.

> "competence porn"

See... now, I love that type of show/comic/book/etc. And now that I have a name for it, I want to search for more. But I very much do _not_ want to search for that term. Lol

Re: Historical Tech Tree

#32

Post by fudged71 »

Its a great start! Bound to have bias and blindspots. It would be cool to run an agent that could incrementally enrich this knowledge graph. Take some modern day technologies and backtrace the components and their development.

Re: Historical Tech Tree

#33

Post by pavel_lishin »

RHSeeger wrote: post #31
pavel_lishin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also recommend the Destiny's Crucible series - the basic premise is that a chemist from our world is transported to another planet of humans at a much lower technological level, and some moderately standard isekai hijinks ensue. I read five of the books, and really enjoyed them; if you like the "competence porn" genre of novels, this is a pretty good one.

> "competence porn" See... now, I love that type of show/comic/book/etc. And now that I have a name for it, I want to search for more. But I very much do _not_ want to search for that term. Lol

I think a similar genre is "humanity fuck yeah" - HFY - so you can search for that as well.

Re: Historical Tech Tree

#34

Post by croddin »

Leary wrote: post #6

Does anyone know which technology on this tree has the most descendents?

I vibe coded with gpt-5 and the source json (https://www.historicaltechtree.com/api/inventions) to get this list:

Top 10 inventions by number of direct descendants

1: High-vacuum tube — 13

2: Automobile — 12

3: Stored-program computer — 12

4: Voltaic pile — 11

5: High-pressure steam engine — 11

6: Glass blowing — 10

7: Papermaking — 10

8: Bipolar junction transistor — 10

9: Writing (Mesopotamia) — 9

10: MOSFET — 8

Re: Historical Tech Tree

#36

Post by drivers99 »

wongarsu wrote: post #29

Obviously something of this magnitude will have blindspots. This tech tree seems to be vastly underselling the impact of advances in metallurgy and precision machining. As well as most of what you might call "basic science". This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology

They are expecting suggestions for this work in progress.

https://www.historicaltechtree.com/about#contributing

Re: Historical Tech Tree

#37

Post by kristopolous »

macote wrote: post #24

Source code found here : https://github.com/etiennefd/hhr-tech-tree

https://github.com/etiennefd/hhr-tech-tree/blob/main/src/scr... this is kind of how I expected it. Honestly I would have done https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ and then parsed it.

Additionally I've always wanted institutions to be part of the timeline of technology. Corporations, Nation-states, Universities, Guilds, International Organizations - the ways people innovatively organize make things possible that otherwise wouldn't be.

The higgs boson experiments, for example wouldn't have been possible without the complex international institutions that orchestrated it. Manhattan project, Moon landing, the internet ... the iphone ...

Re: Historical Tech Tree

#38

Post by croddin »

croddin wrote: post #34
Leary wrote: post #6

Does anyone know which technology on this tree has the most descendents?

I vibe coded with gpt-5 and the source json ( https://www.historicaltechtree.com/api/inventions ) to get this list: Top 10 inventions by number of direct descendants 1: High-vacuum tube — 13 2: Automobile — 12 3: Stored-program computer — 12 4: Voltaic pile — 11 5: High-pressure steam engine — 11 6: Glass blowing — 10 7: Papermaking — 10 8: Bipolar junction transistor — 10 9: Writing (Mesopotamia) — 9 10: MOSFET — 8

Top 10 by total descendants (direct + indirect)

1: Control of fire — 585

2: Charcoal — 444

3: Iron — 422

4: Iron smelting and wrought iron — 419

5: Ceramic — 404

6: Pottery — 402

7: Induction coil — 389

8: Raft — 365

9: Boat — 363

10: Alcohol fermentation — 353

Top 10 by total ancestors (direct + indirect)

1: Robotaxi — 253

2: Moon landing — 242

3: Space telescope — 238

4: Lidar — 236

5: Satellite television — 231

6: Space station — 228

7: Stealth aircraft — 228

8: Reusable spacecraft — 224

9: Satellite navigation system — 224

10: Communications satellite — 224

Re: Historical Tech Tree

#39

Post by FredPret »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #16

It's funny that there are so many innovations right now the recent part of the chart just has to arbitrarily exclude an insane amount of stuff innovation that's happening. No HIV vaccine. mRNA vaccine get's a single entry instead of vaccine per disease like prior vaccines. No battery stuff since 1985. Just amazing, fractal improvement is everywhere.

Great phrase - fractal improvement. It's kind of the idea of this book [0]

Even more cool: commercial progress trails tech. It takes a long time for companies to figure out how to turn a new idea or a cheaper input into a new product/industry, and then for related companies to grow into an economic ecosystem.

So one would expect to see some spectacular economics over the next couple of centuries.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp...

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