Antikythera mechanism possibly older than previously thought?

[IATIA]

... Nevertheless I am sure you have learned stuff and then forgotten what you learned. If this is true of every individual....why shouldn't it be true of the collective?

Books!

[Anomalocaris]

I imagine that you know more things today then you did 10 years ago. Nevertheless I am sure you have learned stuff and then forgotten what you learned. If this is true of every individual....why shouldn't it be true of the collective?

Because the collective only forgets when it's overrun or taken over by morons.

I don't believe that is true.

1. Not every flash of inspiration makes it into the corpus of knowledge appreciated by the collective.

2. Throughout history the Collective mis-remembers and forgets all the time even those things which it appreciates or appreciated at one time. It is only in fairly recent times when the collective even attempted to systematically catalogue and preserves what is known. Prior to about the 18th century, it largely fell on the shoulders of individuals to preserve what they happen to have been interested in.

---

... Nevertheless I am sure you have learned stuff and then forgotten what you learned. If this is true of every individual....why shouldn't it be true of the collective?

Books!

That implies books are adaquately catalogued and sufficiently circulated. Even today there are vast amount of recent knowledge that were written down in books and which is lost to the public because the books containing them are rare, little known, or inaccessible in private collections. Often the owners of the private collections also have no idea of what is contained in their private collections.

---

Found an interesting article on research regarding the Antikythera Mechanism.

The Antikythera mechanism (/ˌæntɨkɨˈθɪərə/ ANT-i-ki-THEER-ə or /ˌæntɨˈkɪθərə/ ANT-i-KITH-ə-rə) is an ancient analog computer[1][2][3][4] designed to predict astronomical positions and eclipses. It was recovered in 1900–01 from the Antikythera wreck, a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera.[5]

New research suggests that the device may be as old as 205 BCE.

Sadly, the knowledge that went into creating the device was lost for a very long time. How much farther might we have progressed scientifically and technologically had much of the ancient knowledge of the Greeks and others not been lost?

I heard one suggestion that the origin of the antikythera technology goes back to between 300-260BC, shortly after Alexandrian conquest of near east, and the technology embodied in the gear train was perfected in Sicily prior to roman conquest during first punic war. The antikythera device itself might have been a late product of that technology built sometime after second or third Punic war. The technology then died out by late roman republic era, or early imperial era, and Romans merely collected the surviving fruits of that technology mainly as curios, with little or no appreciation of the potential of their technology other than as a parlor trick.

Only knowledge which are appreciated are likely to survive. There is no evidence knowledge and technology a bodied in the antikythera mechansim was properly appreciated. Antikythera knowledge and technology probably didn't survive long enough for Christianity and the dark ages to be able to claim responsibility for killing it.

[Heywood]

I imagine that you know more things today then you did 10 years ago. Nevertheless I am sure you have learned stuff and then forgotten what you learned. If this is true of every individual....why shouldn't it be true of the collective?

Because the collective only forgets when it's overrun or taken over by morons.

A disaster can crash the sum of human knowledge. Suppose a comet strikes our planet and over the next 10 years half the human population on earth dies. A lot of knowledge is going to disappear along with those people.

[The Grand Nudger]

I love the antikythera device - but lets keep a few things in mind.

It's -construction- doesn't actually surprise us. There was no advanced material science involved. We know that the civilizations around had the ability to make the components and also a penchant for making machines - Automata. That they'd been doing this for some time is made apparent by the fact that even their mythology is replete with machines. Many of us know that prometheus was tortured for his trouble -by a giant bird. Many of us aren't aware that the bird was artificial, described as a machine. Haphaestus, a sort of forge god - used automata to work his divine factory. Ctesibius is a famous actual or legendary inventor who lived or has stories told about from before the time of the AK Mech (even if we take the earlier date). He built toys, but also practical mechanisms (or has those things ascribed to him). Now the dates, the names, I wouldn;t say that the sources we have for that are very definitive - but what is definitive is that at a cultural level the greeks had a concept of machines that was very thoroughly woven into their cultural consciousness. These guys knew there was such a thing (even if it wasn;t always as amazing as the stories they told about it).

What it (the AK Mech) does is impressive, but only for the manner in which it is achieved. The functions that the device carries out (or is thought to carry out) are handled by analog computing mechanisms that lean on principles we already accept them to have understood (and some that they, in fact, originated). While it's a practical function - the cost of it's construction (as we understand it) would have been an impediment to practical -use-...or widespread distribution. Think of it like a GPS that costs more than getting lost would. Some people think of this as the brainchild of a genius inventor...but more comparisons can be made regarding a very skilled engineer. This is a novel idea made out of non-novel ideas. There is as little innovation in this as would be necessary to accomplish. Just looking at the design (or what we have of it) there are multitudes of improvements that could easily be made by anyone who actually understood analog computing principles...which anyone who built this from first principles would have to have known.

We're not accustomed to thinking of ancient peoples this way. As us, essentially, or effectively - but they were...and had been for some time. I don't think a genius built the antikythera mechanism, even though one (many, really) did think up all the principles upon which it's design relies. I think it was made to order from a known design by a competent fabricator, perhaps a tinkering engineer but not necessarily. A wealthy man or organization wanted this to demonstrate the application of well known principles. I don't even know if I would be comfortable calling it innovation (even though it is one of very few examples of the sort from the stories). I just don't know enough about the status of greek tech in the timeframe (and no one does) to think of it as some eureka moment. It;s also maybe just a little too convenient for my cultural bias to think that it -must have been- some wondermachine to them. Maybe they didn't implement it because they understood full well what it did and didn't feel like paying for it? It might have been a toy with which to educate wealthy children. - or, if you're a cynic like me, a toy with which to impress the silly parents of wealthy children - to send their son to learn from the great man, or to show the simpletons that the local potentate "knows shit they don't, son". If that wasn't (automata) their intended use, then they had a damned fine second life (for a machine) as such - as chuck noted.

(I'd also stress everything chuck said, lol)

[abaris]

A disaster can crash the sum of human knowledge. Suppose a comet strikes our planet and over the next 10 years half the human population on earth dies. A lot of knowledge is going to disappear along with those people.

Yeah, but that's about the size of it. Nothing less would do. And in recorded human history it was moron's work not natural disaster.

[The Grand Nudger]

Even -that- wouldn't do. You have to kill a whole hell of alot more of us - and the effect of our continuing technology is that the number of us you'd have to kill gets bigger and bigger.

You planning something Heywood?

[abaris]

You planning something Heywood?

I'm pretty sure, Obama will be at fault pretty soon.

[Heywood]

A disaster can crash the sum of human knowledge. Suppose a comet strikes our planet and over the next 10 years half the human population on earth dies. A lot of knowledge is going to disappear along with those people.

Yeah, but that's about the size of it. Nothing less would do. And in recorded human history it was moron's work not natural disaster.

The black plague destroyed a lot of knowledge. So have earthquakes and floods.

[abaris]

The black plague destroyed a lot of knowledge. So have earthquakes and floods.

Go open a history book. The plague didn't destroy collected knowledge, it only destroyed people, but not society.

Also there was a pitiful amount of knowledge to destroy to begin with compared to antiquity. In the West, the Roman physician Galen was still the outmost authority when it came to medicine. And scholars, if you deign to call them that, believed in the Miasma theory to be the reason for the plague.

[The Grand Nudger]

I was actually thinking of the plague specifically in my last post. 2/3rds of a society go the way of the dodo and we didn't lose much. Half us of would seem like it would have a smaller effect, though IDK...maybe if the comet miraculously landed on every school and library - getting just the right half..and associated support..maybe?

A magic comet.