[areoform]

The Antikythera mechanism gives me nightmares. Just as the suggestion that a lack of transmissions from intelligent life means the existence of a great filter. The Antikythera mechanism is a strong indicator of technological regression in human beings.

Perhaps more terrifying is the fact that it is not the first time we've regressed or collapsed. The mysterious Late Bronze Age Collapse is another example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse Or, the Classic Maya civilization collapse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Maya_collapse

It is inconceivable for us to imagine a rapid regression today. Our civilization seems invincible, the knowledge seems to be too widespread. But most of our knowledge is brittle. If you were to send a time capsule forward with the recipes to remake our modern world, including eUV technology. How would you do it? (using extant literature)

Research papers require years of study and background knowledge to fully understand and they fully fail to capture the science involved. Patents are even more inscrutable. We couldn't send our CAD drawings and specifications forward either, because they require specialized knowledge as well. After all, how would they build an iPhone if they don't know how to make screws or glue? Or, the multi-layer PCBs etc.

Another renaissance to recreate our civilization from our published work would be nearly impossible. Or, take centuries to accomplish.

It may be fruitful to imagine ways to fit civilization into a box that can last tens of thousands of years, so that future generations can find it —— post apocalyptic tragedy —— and rapidly recreate our world.

[lisper]

> It is inconceivable for us to imagine a rapid regression today

To the contrary, I'm finding it increasingly likely that I will see the collapse of civilization within my lifetime, and I'm 57. I see two prospective tipping points on the horizon: the collapse of democracy in the U.S. leading to nuclear war, and climate change leading to world-wide food shortages. The former seems likely within 5-10 years, and the latter within 20-30.

(And BTW, I am not feeling anywhere near as sanguine about this as the text above makes it sound.)

[antocv]

Havent you noticed that people who see dark future post and tell it more often the past 30 years, than people who think "it will all be just fine"?

I remember the late 90s doom and "oh no millenium 2000" gloom predictions, and 2012 nostradamus end of the world maya calendar the end is near. I read about the 80s cold war "will go hot nuclear any time" and can be seen in movies like Terminator.

US will not collapse, no nuclear war will happen, climate change is not even the biggest fuckup we are doing (cutting down the amazon is, biodiversity loss overall), but we post-pone the imminent danger from a scheduled Ice Age.

[lisper]

I was pretty optimistic in 1990, but since then there is new data. Donald Trump was elected president and led a violent insurrection against the government based on a transparent lie with, so far, no negative consequences. If he runs in 2024 he will win the Republican nomination. Unless the Democrats suspend the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, he will almost certainly be elected president again (because measures are being put in place at the state level to insure that the election is not "stolen" from him again). And I've seen the effects of climate change with my own eyes. The changes are happening with breathtaking speed. The climate where I live is already dramatically different today than it was when I moved here a mere 11 years ago. All of the data from the last 30 years is dramatically worse than the worst-case projections of 1990. Absent some really dramatic technological or political breakthrough, it is a question of when, not if, climate change destroys civilization. It might be longer than 30 years out (I certainly hope so), but it's not 100 years out, not any more.

[basementcat]

To me this may imply a sort of built-in "failsafe" against political and economic hegemonies that is a part of human nature. This may be useful to ensure that political systems do not last forever so at least some part of humanity is able to explore alternate ways to construct and operate societies.

[lisper]

Well, that's a cheerful way of looking at it I guess. Personally, I'm a fan of civilization, but maybe that's just a reflection of my rich-white-male privilege.

[antocv]

> Donald Trump was elected president

Oh no, the end of the world is upon us, how could the people chose _that_ kind of guy as president. The people where meant to chouse _our_ woman it was _her_ turn.

Ironic really, you are scared of democracy ending yet as main reason why, because democracy worked.

[lisper]

You left out the important part: Trump incited a violent insurrection against the government based on a transparent lie with, so far, no negative consequences.

Trump's election was not a failure of democracy, merely a failure of common sense among the electorate. The failure of democracy began when Trump tried to get the secretary of state of Georgia to "find 11,000 votes". It continues now that he is successfully promulgating the Big Lie. It will be complete when he is "re-elected" in 2024.

[aa-jv]

Why was Trump your indicator that US democracy was failing, and not Bush Jr? IMHO, the latter did far more to destroy American democratic society than Trump - but the wealth and riches he provided through his war crimes seems to occlude this fact from most American's point of view.

Trump is just the latest in a long line of failures one could point at as examples of the destruction of American democracy, and he wasn't even the most effective at altering America's sociopolitical landscape, as Bush and Obama were ..

[lisper]

Yes, the decay certainly goes back further than Trump. Before Trump there was Bush and before Bush there was Nixon. You could probably trace it back as far as the JFK and RFK assassinations, maybe further. Some see what is happening now as an extension of the Civil War.

But Trump is unique in that he:

1. Has never accepted his 2020 election defeat

2. Wields enough control over the rank and file of his party to have the power to terminate the career of any Republican who crosses him in any way, and has demonstrated the willingness to use that power without reservation

3. Demanded that election officials to commit election fraud (and was impeached for it, but not removed from office)

4. Incited a violent insurrection against the government and has suffered no negative consequences for it

It is his ability and willingness to use his power to promulgate the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen that makes him a much bigger threat to democracy than anything the U.S. has seen since the Civil War.

[aa-jv]

If only Al Gore had been a bit more ballsy about having the election stolen from him by Bush .. we probably wouldn't be dealing with the failure of democracy that is manifest in America's wanton destruction of so many other sovereign states and the murder of literally millions of people around the world .. the point is, Americans aren't the only ones who suffer when their democracy is corrupted for military purposes.

[kbelder]

I think I've mentioned this before on HN, but I remember a teacher in my highschool class in 1984, asking if we thought there would be a nuclear war with the USSR in our lifetime. I was the only kid out of 30 that didn't think there would be.

Doomsayers are sometimes correct, but usually not, and they are ever-present. And, for some reason, very appealing to many.

[FpUser]

Why would collapse of democracy in the US lead to nuclear war?

[pohl]

If democratically-elected government disappears, something will fill that power void, and they will control that arsenal. Who knows what could happen with them.

[FpUser]

>"Who knows what could happen with them."

Same as with the democratic government. Dictators are not suicidal. They prefer to be left alone.

[pohl]

Tell the people of Ukraine right now how much Putin wants to be left alone.

[FpUser]

I do appreciate your concern about Ukraine but this has nothing to do with Russia being against nuclear proliferation. If it wanted to it would have zero problems seeding those all over the places.

[tehjoker]

they'll fight other countries to deflect from internal problems

[nine_k]

Did the collapse of democracy in Russia lead to nuclear war?

[tehjoker]

It didn't which is great news, but tbh I regard the Russians as more rational than us.

[quacked]

You don't know any Russians then, haha

[FpUser]

Nothing new. They were fighting other countries all along. Still not suicidal.

[imoverclocked]

The US is a major nuclear power and is one body that actively works to counter-balance nuclear proliferation in the world.

[FpUser]

>"is one body that actively works"

Not true. Unless you count invading other countries under false pretenses as one.

If you think Russia is interested in proliferated I have a nice bridge.

[imoverclocked]

[1] "Preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction is traditionally a top priority of U.S. foreign policy."

I didn't say anything about Russia.

[1] https://www.nti.org/countries/united-states/

[FpUser]

Your post reads as the US is the only one working on NPT. It is not.

As for your reference - US based and owned org is of course totally unbiased. Color me surprised.

[lisper]

Not quite sure how to answer that if it's not already obvious to you. If democracy collapses, the result will almost certainly be Donald Trump being effectively a dictator. He very nearly started a nuclear war on more than one occasion during his first administration when some checks and balances were still in place [1] [2]. Nothing could stop him if he decided to do it again during his second.

[1] https://gizmodo.com/the-pentagon-worried-trump-was-about-to-...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/milley-acted-prevent-t...

[FpUser]

>"He very nearly started a nuclear war on more than one occasion during his first administration

The info in the links you've mentioned does not inspire much confidence.

[oh_sigh]

I'll bet you $1M that civilization doesn't collapse within 30 years!

[lisper]

I would like nothing better than to lose that bet, but I don't think my wife would approve. How about a bottle of your favorite scotch? (Which may well cost $1M 30 years from now.)

[weberer]

Pretty sure it was a joke since if it does collapse he wouldn't have to pay anyway.

[lisper]

You need to re-read the GP comment. He was betting that civilization would not collapse.

[wildermuthn]

If he wins the bet, he gets money. If he loses the bet, money is worthless,

[kingcharles]

I don't think any of those events will come to pass, but I suspect you might live long enough to see The Singularity arrive, and that might be the harbinger of doom you are seeking.

[lisper]

One could argue that this has already happened: social media is the singularity. The evil AI doesn't have to be implemented entirely in silicon. Indeed, that fact that it runs in part on human brains helps it remain stealthy.

[bsenftner]

Now that is an interesting take - are you thinking an emergent hive mind is in social media, and that is controlling society? Quite interesting...

[lisper]

More or less. Human brains are an emergent property of a large number of highly interconnected neurons, so I see no reason something similar couldn't emerge from a large number of highly interconnected brains.

But the thing to keep in mind is that this emergent thing is not necessarily conscious or intentional, but if it reaches the point where it self-replicates then it becomes effectively a life form that starts to undergo Darwinian evolution and thus becomes very difficult to get rid of. The point is that all this is (potentially) just a straightforward consequence of the laws of physics, not some sci-fi super-villain going "Bwahahaha! Silly humans!" in the back of data center somewhere.

[lovemenot]

This is epitomised by the word "meme":

  an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture

1976, introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene

[bsenftner]

Yes, I follow your reasoning. I buy the existence of a subtle, self perpetuating public attitude. It may emergently coordinate to the degree it is indistinguishable from an independant living entity. Once it is named, it will be seen and observed everywhere, and blamed for all manner of evils. It's the boogieman, in reality: a manifestation of all our collective fears.

[ecpottinger]

And explains why it is also so messed up at the same time.

[JohnBooty]

    Another renaissance to recreate our civilization from 
    our published work would be nearly impossible. Or, 
    take centuries to accomplish.

It might not be possible at all.

We've long since used up the "easy" sources of energy on this planet - all of the fossil fuels conveniently located near the earth's surface have long been depleted. By the time they could possibly be replenished, the Sun will be nearing the end of its life. So we probably won't be bootstraping our way back to an advanced society via a second fossil fuel-powered industrial revolution similar to the first one.

The remaining energy sources are generally pretty tricky to harness.

For example, even if the knowledge to build nuclear reactors or solar panels is not lost during a civilization collapse, it will be awfully tough to actually get those power sources back online without an existing industrial infrastructure to mine/refine/transport all of the necessary ingredients.

If we get a "second chance" at this civilization thing, the road there is going to be insanely hard even if we're lucky enough to start out with all of the science-y stuff that our first civilization figured out eons ago.

[istinetz]

>By the time they could possibly be replenished, the Sun will be nearing the end of its life.

What? No. You're making shit up and passing it as fact.

>Most anthracite and bituminous coals occur within the 299- to 359.2-million-year-old strata of the Carboniferous Period, the so-called first coal age.

>Astronomers estimate that the sun has about 7 billion to 8 billion years left before it sputters out and dies.

There are several other completely made up things in your post.

[thombat]

However current theories of stellar evolution place the extinction of life on Earth in the range on hundreds of millions of years, due to the increase of its luminosity. For example here's a description of a better climate model [1] extending the time until the surface temperature reaches 70 degrees Celsius to one billion years, whereupon feedback of the water content of the atmosphere results in boiling away all liquid water.

So while the sun may be nowhere near the end of its life, the time of Earth lying in its "Goldilocks zone" is much shorter.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131216142310.h...

[asdff]

Couldn't you just burn plastic directly? Mine a landfill and burn it up.

[ecpottinger]

Mine it with slave labour to separate the items, and you end up with glass, metals and plastics is amounts that would be worth a fortune to a roman level civilization.

We think of it as garbage, bur that garbage already represents a lot of energy already used to process them to that level.

[kbelder]

Not just to a Roman level civilization; I think it'll be immensely valuable to us in the near future. It's a treasure trove of materials, we just need better refining tech to separate out all the metals and rare earths, reprocess the plastic, etc.

[marcosdumay]

> The Antikythera mechanism is a strong indicator of technological regression in human beings.

Is it evidence of widespread technological regression, or "this small group with strong leadership did amazing things, too bad nobody can do that anymore", or just people not wanting it anymore?

For centuries after it was built, there was no large scale collapse that could bring a widespread regression (there were many localized ones, including on the place that built it), and clockmaking was never considered a lost art or anything like that.

[areoform]

The mechanism suggests a strong "industrial" base to support it. They had to get the metals from somewhere, find the expert artisans to craft from somewhere else, source the parts, find the tooling etc.

Just as a mass produced pencil isn't just a pencil, it is the capacity to produce the pencil.

They had the capacity to create precision gearing, which suggests a level of mechanical prowess that isn't matched until a century or so before the dawn of the industrial age.

[marcosdumay]

Commercial metalworking stayed around all the time until today. It only increased and improved. (It's made of bronze, it's not like bronze working was lost.)

The tooling may evidence some kind of regression. I really don't know what kind of tooling was needed to create this, although gears by themselves and high precision in a single mechanism do not say much. From the looks of it, this devices requires a lot of theoretical knowledge, but not so much practical one (but that's an uninformed opinion, if you have information, it would be great). The theory was not lost in any way.

[hasmanean]

Don’t forget the fact that the mechanism used a model made by Hipparchus, but after Hellenism the Greeks adopted the Ptolemaic geocentric view of the cosmos with epicycles and stuff.

Epicycles delivered more precision but at the cost of much greater complexity. Ultimately it took Kepler to simplify it even more through his iterative equation though I can’t imagine how to turn that into a mechanical model.

The Antikythera mechanism was possible because of the simplicity of the underlying solar system model that lent itself to easy implementation by gears. It’s much more elegant than even modern methods of computing orbits. That’s the main surprise I find in its design…how much they could simplify it (and not how complex the mechanical construction is).

[nemo]

FWIW, the device is called an 'orrery'. When it was made in Syracuse, it wasn't a product of an industrial base, but was a project made by a certain sort of mathematician and scholar doing cutting edge engineering and applied mathematics. The Antikythera one seems to go back to the traditions from Archimedes' workshop which was amazingly advanced. Archimedes wrote a treatise on building them (now lost, alas). Orrery making in something like Archmedes' tradition continued on for hundreds of years outside Syracuse, esp. in Athens and Alexandria, and we have references to orrery making through the ages. The art of making them was a product of libraries and schools where they were created by scholars as an academic craft, not an industrial production facility.

[nine_k]

It's not that industrial base.

If devices like the antikythera were commonly produced, we'd find more of them, and descriptions of them. This looks like a one-off achievement.

I'd rather say that this maybe more like a Saturn-5 of the day: a top achievement that required extraordinary efforts, and not very reproducible because of that. Most things around and in its production chain were not nearly as advanced.

[Terry_Roll]

Well some ancient alien conspiracy theories suggest nuclear bombs have been dropped on different parts of the planet.

Mahabharata a short distance from Jodpur in India, which Oppenheimer commented on.

Mohenjo Daro in Pakistan

Nuclear destruction of Sumer linked with the Anunnaki.

Pyramids in other places around the planet besides Egypt, its possible mainstream history isnt telling us everything or we have a sanitised version of history.

[throw1234651234]

As fun as these speculations are, there is nothing cohesive about it. "which Oppenheimer commented on" - or he just wanted to say something that sounded badass and educated in his "I am become...the destroyer of worlds."

/* Mohenjo Daro in Pakistan Nuclear destruction of Sumer linked with the Anunnaki. */

0 evidence

"Pyramids in other places around the planet besides Egypt, its possible mainstream history isnt telling us everything or we have a sanitised version of history."

Very different pyramids. Other places had houses too. Some of them were square and some round. Could it be ancient aliens?!

[Terry_Roll]

Unfortunately watching an increasing number of TV programs is like watching/listening to someone talking whilst on drugs, they jump around all over the place, I'm sure its creating ADHD in me as a result.

[interroboink]

You might like Jonathan Blow's talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

Also, is your name a reference to the Mars trilogy? Reading that now (:

[areoform]

Yes, it is! I even had the chance to talk to Kim Stanley Robinson about it :)

[aspenmayer]

Did this exchange happen on HN, by chance? Color me curious.

[kromem]

And yet even in antiquity there were people thinking that the nature of their own existence was a recreation of the past from within the future.

We are actually performing early versions of such recreations as we speed towards both destroying ourselves and developing a lifeform that makes us obsolete, and yet many still don't examine the present moment against the past and future.

As for the Bronze Age collapse - in Alexandria around the 2nd century BCE following the conquest of Alexander the Great you had a ton of cultures of the Mediterranean comparing notes on their respective histories.

Most of those notes have been lost to us, but we have the general conclusions they drew which was that an Exodus from Egypt had occurred, it had been many different people and not just one, and they had conquered most of the Mediterranean.

And indeed, there's striking parallels between Ramses II, the Lybian appearing Pharoh with 50 sons, and stories like the Lybian king Danaus as part of Diodorus Siculus's Exodus fleeing Egypt from Aegyptus, his brother with 50 sons.

We know Ramses II captured many different peoples in battle, and that many of the groups captured later appeared as sea peoples, initially allied together with Lybia against Egypt during Ramses II's successor.

It only remains a mystery because of the reluctance of one group to think things occurred at all different to what's written in a single book scribed centuries later, and the reluctance of anyone not in that group to entertain that aspects of what's written in that book are a continuation of an oral history of actual events (though notably altered).

[FooHentai]

>If you were to send a time capsule forward with the recipes to remake our modern world, including eUV technology. How would you do it?

Acknowledging that I'm being edgy here...

"What do you get the man who has everything? Might I suggest a gravestone inscribed with the words: so what?” — Simon Munnery

I think I probably just wouldn't do it. In part because I suspect the main motivation is our existential angst more than a genuine desire to help unknown future persons.

[short12]

Or a copy of ozymandias?

[momojo]

Reminds me of Asimov's Foundation trilogy.

"Seldon explains that his science of psychohistory foresees many alternatives, all of which result in the Galactic Empire eventually falling. If humanity follows its current path, the Empire will fall and 30,000 years of turmoil will overcome humanity before a second Empire arises. However, an alternative path allows for the intervening years to be only one thousand"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series#Foundation_(...

[akomtu]

It's the normal progression of civilizations. When one gets too rusty, it dies to lets its small and better offspring live: those people start from scratch, but they retain knowledge and rebuild all bells and whistles very quickly. We are the fifth. America will be home for the sixth and then, in a thousand years, it will become a history too. This is what Revelation 17:10 talks about, but in a more poetical form.

[npunt]

If you're interested in the subject, I'd recommend the Fall of Civilizations podcast which digs into various civilizations and their decline: https://www.patreon.com/fallofcivilizations_podcast

[xyzzyz]

Or, even better documented, the civilizational collapse in the aftermath of the fall of Western Roman Empire. It recovered in the second half of the medieval period, but in the West, the first few centuries after the fall were truly Dark Ages indeed.

[cryptonector]

Some of my friends believe the covid vaccines are part of a depopulation scheme. If they're right then the collapse of our civilization would be happening right now though we might not be conscious of it yet.