Comment on we love those power laws
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 5 months ago
I love the idea of jumping straight from swords to nukes. Writing prompt: a 16th century blacksmith suddenly realizes, “If I surround an unstable rock with a neutron reflecting earth metal, I can trigger a runaway chain reaction that’ll get that stump out a me yard.”
Event_Horizon@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Cethin@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
I was confused for a bit while wat hung the video so I watched all of it until the end. I only ended up more confused as time went on. What’s even worse is there’s no indication of what it’s from.
DogWater@lemmy.world 4 months ago
What the fuck is this from lol
quotable@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
DogWater@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Ahh thank you!
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
It’s probably a narrow demographic that immediately recognizes Yahoo Serious, isn’t it? Especially in the northern hemisphere.
Event_Horizon@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I’m in the Southern hemisphere so right in my neighborhood 😁
Technus@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
What always blows my mind to think about is how the materials for our advanced technology were here the whole time. We could have had computers and nuclear energy and spacecraft 20,000 years ago if we’d just had the knowledge.
Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 4 months ago
This is the real reason I follow the Primitive Technology channel. One of these days he’s going to make an arc welder out of mud and bugs.
Technus@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
I follow him too. People joke about him being a short way away from computers, but I think it’s a testament to just how far we’ve come as a species. Because even with the benefit of modern knowledge on the chemistry of the process, he’s kinda still stuck on figuring out how to scale out his iron production.
It also shows just how labor-intensive everything is without modern machinery, when it takes him several days of effort, from gathering and processing the raw materials, to making charcoal, building the kiln, and finally smelting the ore just to get a handful of pellets of pig iron.
Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Jokes aside, you’re right. Progress is never easy, fast, or guaranteed and we truly are standing on the shoulders of many, many non-giants and there is still so much work to do. It’s humbling and awesome to contemplate.
k110111@feddit.de 4 months ago
Not quite, in order to have a technology you need methods, materials and society needs to be ready for the tech.
I recently learned that 50 years ago someone filed a patent for solar panels with more than 20% efficiency and the us government was like yeah its too revolutionary so you can’t sell this nor tell anyone about this unless it is US military. Imagine we all could have had >20% solar panels 50 years ago, even today we are only marginally above 20% efficiency.
Another example, would be the company who made the iPhone like device well before iPhone but the market wasn’t ready.
Another example that is fucked up. Governments are starting to restrict AI for consumers but also using AI to kill children in Gaza.
I’m pretty sure a lot early doctors were also burned at stakes because they were called witches or smth.
Technus@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
You’re right, it’s not strictly just the knowledge, but it’s also the expertise to execute it, the tooling to build precision machinery and devices, and a production chain of raw materials of sufficient quality.
Even theory itself doesn’t just come out of the blue. Einstein didn’t pull the General Theory of Relativity out of his ass, he was building on centuries of groundwork and experimental evidence and just connected the dots. On the shoulders of giants, indeed.
Its funny to look at games like Civilization 5 that make you work your way down a tech tree and think of them as reductive, but in many ways the actual progress of technology was not far off.
But I was just thinking that it’s crazy that it’s theoretically possible that we could have had this technology at any point if we had the capability. Like, there was no rule that was like “must reach game year 1945 CE to unlock nuclear weapons”.
You don’t even have to go back that far to find blatantly dangerous willful ignorance, not even two whole centuries.
The idea of a doctor washing their hands to avoid the transfer of disease-causing germs from one patient to another (like, going from an autopsy in one room to delivering a child in the next without washing up) was deemed so ludicrous and laughable that the backlash and rejection led to the man who suggested it having a mental breakdown and dying in an insane asylum.
This was right in the middle of the development of the germ theory of disease, among a mounting pile of evidence that it wasn’t just “bad smells” that cause disease.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
3D video was a fad in the 1950’s
Kedly@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I mean, we need the infrastructure to use them as well, it wasnt just knowledge that was blocking us, each piece of new tech usually needs at least some of the previous to be possible to use