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A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

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Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#81

Post by jtolmar »

belval wrote: post #15

What 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?

When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the various successor states didn't have enough organizational capacity / surplus / numbers to do things like arm permanent standing armies with advanced siege engines, or build aqueducts and long paved roads everywhere. But there was still technological advancement in plows, water mills, and crop rotation even shortly after the collapse.

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#83

Post by mseepgood »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #12

The design, so slim, so dense, so well engineered. There has to have been ones that came before. Too clever to not be an iteration. I wonder if we'll ever discover another.

> The design, so slim, so dense, so well engineered.

It's the Apple M1 of its time.

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#84

Post by progre »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #50
progre wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rome was the fiber internet of those days. When west rome collapsed europe went back to dial-up.

That's basically correct. Rome organized things on a very large scale with high productivity. Its replacement by less-organized tiny local systems cratered productivity, and the resulting systems couldn't afford to do the things Rome had done.

I came by this analogy by Dan Carlin. He was talking about "Germania" but the same applies to Sweden. When Sweden was christianized around 1000 AD this was basically equivalent to "being connected to the internet". Suddenly the vast resources (intellectual and communicational) of the catholic church where available to the (now christian) elite, giving them a huge advantage.

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#85

Post by ontekhunhsentuh »

leafmeal wrote: post #77
ontekhunhsentuh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you elaborate on the Saturn V a bit more?

This came up when people started looking sideways at the ballooning costs of the Space Launch System. Even though we have extensive blueprints and even parts left over from Saturn V rockets, the institutional knowledge to use any of those things simply doesn't exist anymore, and would have to be re-created at exceptional cost of you wanted to build another one.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build...

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#86

Post by dylan604 »

jdefelice wrote: post #2

Clickspring has been recreating the Antikythera[1] and findings[2] went into a research paper.[3] [1] Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPN... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkKgdq57uOo [3] https://bhi.co.uk/antikytheramechanism/

My day's schedule just got put on pause.

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#87

Post by smogcutter »

kipchak wrote: post #24
belval wrote: post #15

What 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?

Very broadly speaking we tend to now think of history or time as being fairly linear with progress being made while ancients tended to think of history as cyclical and those before them as random. The Antikythera mechanism or the somewhat inexplicable late bronze age collapse and the unidentifiable "sea people" that caused it are good examples to indicate there's some degree of cyclicality, wherein people stumble acr…

Regarding the “Bronze Age collapse”, there’s some thinking that it might be much less of an inexplicable cataclysm than it usually appears. Here’s a really interesting r/askhistorians thread about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fm3vs1/how_d...

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#88

Post by jandrese »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #12

The design, so slim, so dense, so well engineered. There has to have been ones that came before. Too clever to not be an iteration. I wonder if we'll ever discover another.

The flipside of being so small and dense is that was fragile, which is a problem when you're trying to preserve something for a millennia. It was also undoubtedly expensive, meaning few were produced in the first place and they would be a prime target for thieves and artifact hunters. The one in the article could easily be the last one remaining.

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#90

Post by dragonelite »

belval wrote: post #15

What 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?

A imperial decline mostly means a lot of chaos for a couple of decades, I think the most recent example would be the soviet union. It took Putin like almost 2 decades to recover/stabilize from the western plunder of Russia in the 90s via Russian oligarchs. Russia lost a lot of brain power in that period and lost a lot of institutional knowledge which might takes generations to rebuild again.

Also the engineers and high ranking members of society have to resources to flee to more stable regions and carry their knowledge with them. Its also the engineers that are usually given grace or offers by a opposing forces/rivals.

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