[marginalia_nu]

To be fair, there are entire human civilizations we know have existed that we barely have archeological evidence to make sense of. We know they had language, culture, technology and we've found shells, bones and rubble.

That, and the fact that we've found one antiktythera mechanism and nothing like it before or since raises questions. It seems implausible for a culture to produce a singular advanced mechanical computer with no precursors and then stop and never make anything like it again.

[giantrobot]

> It seems implausible for a culture to produce a singular advanced mechanical computer with no precursors and then stop and never make anything like it again.

A culture didn't create it. A person or team created it. The Antikythera mechanism was built before the ISO 9001 specification so its documentation may not have survived long past its creators lives. The high precision manufacturing required, in an era before high precision was all that precise, suggests the mechanism was likely a rare artifact. It was dumb luck it was found in the first place.

There's likely many complicated ancient devices lost to time because they weren't widely available or described in documents that have persisted. You literally run a search engine for marginalia that may not be popular or widely known. It wouldn't take much to knock a lot of that content off the web and be lost to history.

[marginalia_nu]

> There's likely many complicated ancient devices lost to time because they weren't widely available or described in documents that have persisted. You literally run a search engine for marginalia that may not be popular or widely known. It wouldn't take much to knock a lot of that content off the web and be lost to history.

Well that's my point. Not that the greeks had some forgotten industrial revolution, but that archeological records are very limited, and we were a stroke of dumb luck away from never discovering the antikythera mechanism. It raises the question of if we almost missed this, what else did we miss. Not just in greece but elsewhere too.

[tyg13]

To the contrary: the fact that only one ever was found, to me, suggests that it was the work of one brilliant mind whose work was not understood or continued by their culture.

[marginalia_nu]

Even if it is a single creator, does it seem realistic that this was the first and only machine they built?

[throw47474777j]

I’ve heard it argued by historians that there were likely to have been multiple prototypes of the antykythera mechanism, but each one was recycled to produce the next.

[fuzzfactor]

>each one was recycled to produce the next.

This could lend itself to the idea that one person made it, and if nothing whatsoever like it had ever come before you have to figure it took an awfully long time for one person to create something this complicated single-handedly.

Could be a number of years between iterations in a continuous improvement process that adds up to something like a life's work.

Maybe also could be passed down to a subsequent individual like a very specialized craft, and build technology across generations.

[mrangle]

Given the tech that is the product of multiple major breakthroughs, I'd rate that to be doubtful.

While I don't think that the following implies that robots existed, to my above point recall that Talos of Greek Myth is a robot.

Which does imply that the concept of such tech was shared across the entire culture. Which, in turn, suggests that related tech is less likely to be the product of one mind.

[masklinn]

Literally the entire SF genre is based around creating stories of things we’re unable to create.

Extrapolating automatons only requires having basic concepts of mechanical automation, which the Greeks very much had.

The idea of space flight predates powered flight by centuries.