<story><title>Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies</title><url>https://1517.substack.com/p/forgetting-the-asbestos</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>areoform</author><text>Author here, based on my reading of your comment, I think we&amp;#x27;re talking at cross purposes.&lt;p&gt;Your comment seems to be about how these technologies aren&amp;#x27;t useful for us in the present. AFAICT, it doesn&amp;#x27;t dispute that the knowledge was lost.&lt;p&gt;An additional interpretation is that you&amp;#x27;re interpreting my writing as being from someone who thinks that &amp;quot;the Romans clearly built it better&amp;quot; etc.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not the point I&amp;#x27;m making.&lt;p&gt;Yes, we have napalm and recipes for it. Yes, we have digital computers that are incalculably better than the Antikythera mechanism. Yes, we can trivially manufacture better concrete.&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s amazing, for us today, but how much better would it have been if we hadn&amp;#x27;t forgotten about these technologies in the first place and had continued to improve on them? Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now?&lt;p&gt;The loss in knowledge doesn&amp;#x27;t matter (as much) anymore in the present, but it has held us back, measurably so. For a thousand years, between the Antikythera mechanism and a few hundred years ago, we somehow lost their equivalent of Kepler&amp;#x27;s laws, some version of calculus, precision machining, mechanical computing etc. For over a thousand years, we have no records of anyone producing devices that approached or surpassed its capabilities.&lt;p&gt;What if the knowledge behind that device hadn&amp;#x27;t been lost and we were 1k years further along into our understanding of mathematics and computing?&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the point here.&lt;p&gt;The point is that those technologies were exceptional at their time, but were still lost, and we are poorer for it, because it took away hundreds of years of erstwhile progress that could have been made had we remembered and kept building on them.&lt;p&gt;Happy to hear how I could make the ending better though!</text></item><item><author>dale_glass</author><text>The ending doesn&amp;#x27;t quite work, and I&amp;#x27;d say neither does the article as a whole really.&lt;p&gt;First, we didn&amp;#x27;t really forget &amp;quot;greek fire&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;roman concrete&amp;quot; exactly. We don&amp;#x27;t know what the formula for &amp;quot;greek fire&amp;quot; was exactly because it wasn&amp;#x27;t recorded. But in modern times we have an amazing chemistry and can come up with a hundred formulas for napalm -- we just don&amp;#x27;t know which of those matches &amp;quot;greek fire&amp;quot;. Nothing was lost but the association between a formula we almost certainly know and a name.&lt;p&gt;Same goes for roman concrete. We know far more about concrete than the Romans did. We just don&amp;#x27;t bother to engineer everything to last forever, because that costs money and has little point to it a lot of the time. Yes, some buildings are works of art, but many things just have a function to fulfill, which is often temporary. Nobody is sad that the millions of mass-made soviet residential crappy buildings aren&amp;#x27;t still as good as new. If they were made to a better standard they&amp;#x27;d still be ugly cookie cutter things.&lt;p&gt;And I&amp;#x27;d say the same goes for the Saturn V. We didn&amp;#x27;t forget material science or heat shielding. We launch plenty rockets and even landed car sized robots on Mars -- that required excellent understanding of heat shielding. If we had any reason to build a modern copy, we&amp;#x27;d use whatever shielding is required, after accounting for modern improved materials. We wouldn&amp;#x27;t be dumbfounded that the thing melted down on the launch pad. That in the popular consciousness we see the engines without the asbestos covering doesn&amp;#x27;t really mean much of anything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dale_glass</author><text>I still don&amp;#x27;t think it quite adds up. You&amp;#x27;re mixing two different things together because they look kinda similar on the surface but aren&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;If you want to make the point that &amp;quot;what if we developed steam power sooner&amp;quot;, then sure, that works so long you keep talking about steam power in Ancient Greece. Yes, knowledge did get lost there.&lt;p&gt;But that&amp;#x27;s not what happened with the Saturn V. The knowledge didn&amp;#x27;t really go anywhere. We still have the engines and the designs, they&amp;#x27;re just technologically obsolete. We&amp;#x27;re not making them not because it&amp;#x27;s some lost wonder-technology we forgot how to make, but because it costs a lot of $$$ and there&amp;#x27;s no profit to be made by sending another lander to the Moon and science funding is scarce. That we don&amp;#x27;t see the asbestos covers much doesn&amp;#x27;t really mean anything because the actual knowledge is in the fields of heat management and materials science, and not magazine cover photos.</text></comment>
<story><title>Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies</title><url>https://1517.substack.com/p/forgetting-the-asbestos</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>areoform</author><text>Author here, based on my reading of your comment, I think we&amp;#x27;re talking at cross purposes.&lt;p&gt;Your comment seems to be about how these technologies aren&amp;#x27;t useful for us in the present. AFAICT, it doesn&amp;#x27;t dispute that the knowledge was lost.&lt;p&gt;An additional interpretation is that you&amp;#x27;re interpreting my writing as being from someone who thinks that &amp;quot;the Romans clearly built it better&amp;quot; etc.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not the point I&amp;#x27;m making.&lt;p&gt;Yes, we have napalm and recipes for it. Yes, we have digital computers that are incalculably better than the Antikythera mechanism. Yes, we can trivially manufacture better concrete.&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s amazing, for us today, but how much better would it have been if we hadn&amp;#x27;t forgotten about these technologies in the first place and had continued to improve on them? Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now?&lt;p&gt;The loss in knowledge doesn&amp;#x27;t matter (as much) anymore in the present, but it has held us back, measurably so. For a thousand years, between the Antikythera mechanism and a few hundred years ago, we somehow lost their equivalent of Kepler&amp;#x27;s laws, some version of calculus, precision machining, mechanical computing etc. For over a thousand years, we have no records of anyone producing devices that approached or surpassed its capabilities.&lt;p&gt;What if the knowledge behind that device hadn&amp;#x27;t been lost and we were 1k years further along into our understanding of mathematics and computing?&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the point here.&lt;p&gt;The point is that those technologies were exceptional at their time, but were still lost, and we are poorer for it, because it took away hundreds of years of erstwhile progress that could have been made had we remembered and kept building on them.&lt;p&gt;Happy to hear how I could make the ending better though!</text></item><item><author>dale_glass</author><text>The ending doesn&amp;#x27;t quite work, and I&amp;#x27;d say neither does the article as a whole really.&lt;p&gt;First, we didn&amp;#x27;t really forget &amp;quot;greek fire&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;roman concrete&amp;quot; exactly. We don&amp;#x27;t know what the formula for &amp;quot;greek fire&amp;quot; was exactly because it wasn&amp;#x27;t recorded. But in modern times we have an amazing chemistry and can come up with a hundred formulas for napalm -- we just don&amp;#x27;t know which of those matches &amp;quot;greek fire&amp;quot;. Nothing was lost but the association between a formula we almost certainly know and a name.&lt;p&gt;Same goes for roman concrete. We know far more about concrete than the Romans did. We just don&amp;#x27;t bother to engineer everything to last forever, because that costs money and has little point to it a lot of the time. Yes, some buildings are works of art, but many things just have a function to fulfill, which is often temporary. Nobody is sad that the millions of mass-made soviet residential crappy buildings aren&amp;#x27;t still as good as new. If they were made to a better standard they&amp;#x27;d still be ugly cookie cutter things.&lt;p&gt;And I&amp;#x27;d say the same goes for the Saturn V. We didn&amp;#x27;t forget material science or heat shielding. We launch plenty rockets and even landed car sized robots on Mars -- that required excellent understanding of heat shielding. If we had any reason to build a modern copy, we&amp;#x27;d use whatever shielding is required, after accounting for modern improved materials. We wouldn&amp;#x27;t be dumbfounded that the thing melted down on the launch pad. That in the popular consciousness we see the engines without the asbestos covering doesn&amp;#x27;t really mean much of anything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taeric</author><text>But this is predicated on a non falsifiable claim that we could have built on these technologies.  That they weren&amp;#x27;t extended to better things just a easily hints at them being technological dead ends.&lt;p&gt;Consider the massive costs that went into many old structures.  Often you could measure them in lives lost during construction.&lt;p&gt;In the case of asbestos and leaded paint, lives and damage done by having used them.&lt;p&gt;Now, I do believe we should have people study the past. I still like reading on old programming techniques.  But progress is not necessarily held back by not building on what came before.</text></comment>