So, when's the flight to Alpha Centauri?
I'd prefer we only ever produced chariots and set tax to 90%.
Historical Tech Tree
81–90 of 132 posts
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#82My particular interest is in screw cutting lathes, and it appears that the Wikipedia entry[1] (on which this seems to be based) was off by about 25 years (1775 instead of 1800), and thus copied to this work. I've let the folks at Wikipedia know. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe
> I've let the folks at Wikipedia know.
What "folks at Wikipedia"? Can't you just edit the date yourself?
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Andrew Carnegie wrote that one of the things that gave him an advantage over other steel manufacturers was that he hired a chemist to test ore for iron content. By implication, this was something that had never been done before.
I just looked it up, and he was born the year after Mendeleev, who'd go on to design/arrange the periodic table of elements. I'm guessing they had traditional assaying techniques, just with less accuracy than a contemporary chemist.
I don't think you're right about that. They judged ore, as the comment above mentions, by the location it came from. They tried standard techniques to process whatever ore they had, and if those techniques led to a bad result, they considered the ore bad.
Andrew Carnegie discovered that certain "bad" ore was that way because its iron content was much higher than usual. Secure in the knowledge that this ore was actually better than "good" ore, he developed the techniques to use it.
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#84My particular interest is in screw cutting lathes, and it appears that the Wikipedia entry[1] (on which this seems to be based) was off by about 25 years (1775 instead of 1800), and thus copied to this work. I've let the folks at Wikipedia know. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe
Interesting. On that note, Da Vinci's design (which I was fortunate enough to see a replica of at a local museum) was also very clever, being suited not only for screw cutting but also screw origination, as it could make new screws more accurately than the two leadscrews in the machine itself, and swap them out to improve its own accuracy. But I suppose it doesn't extend that date even further back because it wasn't…
having no experience in precision manufacturing and metrology... how does one become more precise than input tools?
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#85I'd expect something things like Chinese Writing to be a big upstream dependency, but here it's a terminus. Detecting a western-bias in the sourcing.
what's the technological difference between Chinese Writing and Western Writing?
why are they separate?
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#86Discussed once (and I do mean once): Historical Tech Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44104243 - May 2025 (1 comment) Edit: oops! The Universal Tech Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161607 - June 2025 (65 comments)
Someone else found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161607
(A link to an article about how it's made, with 65 comments)
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#87Obviously 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
Almost all science is tightly bound with advances in material science, often the driving each other in alternating steps like interlocking gears. One engine driving those gears is war, another is population growth and education.
There are obvious exceptions, such as Math, Philosophy (insert all links lead to philosophy here). But even Math is seeing progress in materials science as a component now (computer derived proofs for instance).
Making a really good tech tree is a stupendously hard problem. I once started working on one for a game but gave up once I realized that doing this properly is probably going to take a lifetime or two and there are other things I can do that are more immediately useful.
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
They tried to define what they mean by technology [1], but they seemingly gave up on it partway through. Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list. The inconsistent definition and the pretty large gaps leads to a lot of oddness. Just look at how sparse anything related to textiles is. "Clothing" just gets one "inven…
Feel like if you're doing something like this you should just basically maximalize your definition. The fun here is seeing all the nodes, obviously! Maybe then you get into arguments about whether the dependencies were "required", but there it's more or less resolvable by relying on what "actually" happened rather than the minimal tree (which is its own exercise)
You will end up writing a technology focused complete history of the world. That tapestry would be absolutely fascinating to be able to navigate and it would also be always out of date.
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list. This is an interesting example. It's a technology that's very important for staying alive, but not one that you'd expect to contribute to any kind of progress. It's just something you have to do to corn before eating it.
I'm a former archaeologist, so my personal definition of technology is extremely expansive. You don't actually need to nixtamalize maize. It's totally edible without and most americans today don't eat nixtamalized corn outside masa. It's just a process to make it more nutritious and importantly, nearly nutritionally complete. For ancient societies, nixtamalizing had a role similar to things like vaccination do for us…
A lot of tradecraft is in the most literal sense tradition, passed from one person to another with no other context than 'it works' and 'this is the way it is done'. The analogies in the software world are probably libraries, design patterns and languages. Each of these embody a lot of knowledge without being - usually - very explicit about the reasons why they are the way they are.
Researching those reasons requires a lot of work and most people just want to get to the result step without necessarily understanding why you put the oil in the pan before the egg. They're hungry.
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#90Obviously 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
Metallurgy is by far the most important human technology. That's why "copper", "bronze" and "iron" are used to classify ages.
There is no 'most important' human technology. All of it interlocks, and usually the prerequisite steps all need to be followed before you can progress to the next level. I wonder how long it would take given a paper copy of wikipedia (hopefully printed on acid free paper) to get back to a functional technology society. I'm sure it would go faster than the first time around, but I'm not so sure it would be less than a few hundred years.