@futurebird Paolo Bacigalupi (wrote "the Wind Up Girl") has this interesting idea of like (I forget his exact wording, and this is paraphrasing a paraphrase of a talk) a "hump" that technological civilizations have to get over. He frames things in terms of extractive resources, things that are non-renewable, and asks the question of whether your civilization can use the time of prosperity granted by these to invent a method of living without them. And if you don't in time, you simply crash.
@futurebird technology mostly seems likely to be what makes it possible to overcome those three factors and wipe out the whole species in one go. Thanks, Fermi Paradox.
Technology does a lot of other pleasant things though, when it's not wiping us out in whole or in part. I like that about it.
@futurebird oh, but think about food & cooking it. It enhanced health & life span considerably. Or the invention of soap & drink water hygienics: water wells not next to toilet sides ;-)
@futurebird 1/3
maybe this says more about me than about SF in general, but in the SF I read, misuse of tech was often presented as a likely cause of the extinction of technologically advanced species; such a species may find it easy to divert a dangerous asteroid, but the same tech that enables asteroid diversion also enables wars with targeted asteroids (potentially capable of much more damage than thermonuclear weapons)
I'm not entirely convinced that technology aids in improving diversity.
There seems to be a strong incentive to hoard techniques and technologies, then when that breaks down eventually the people who didn't have access tend to do things the same ways as those who did.
@futurebird Love this critique. I think there’s a lot of real world examples that show the negative impact of technology -> monoculture -> increased fragility. Thinking about the tenuous state of bananas after industrialization. 😟
@futurebird humans before technology where at the cusp of extinction many times. there is some possibility that first technologies (fire, stone working, housing, ...) evolved from this experiences.
But we have this way of not seeing earlier technologies as the "real technological revolution" the older the tech, the less effort we ascribe to its development and refinement. Producing this silly idea that we are always right on the precipice of the biggest revolution yet.
@futurebird@benni A great example is string. I often think about those heroes that figured out that plant fibers could be twisted together and used to hold things together, then woven to make clothing, containers, and structures.
@futurebird@benni Historian here, and I strongly agree with this. Most claims for the absolutely game-changing profundity of present advances are rooted in gross ignorance of the history of whatever field is being talked about. Sometimes it's willful ignorance, sometimes genuine, often it's motivated by desire to sell your own product. But overall, most claims that we are RIGHT NOW about to see the biggest change EVER in X fail to stand up to even the quickest serious look at the history of X.
(Climate change/ ecological collapse, sadly, seems to be the exception to this.)
Actually I'm nuch more impressed by the person who got the idea of making a blade out of a silex shard, or the one who found a way to send a javelin farther than their much stronger friend by using an atlatl, or the one who found how to start a fire
@levpetrovitch@futurebird@benni
sewing (as in clothing) and sowing (as in planting seeds) are two that seem like huge transformational technologies to me. Clothing is hugely important for dealing with different climates, weather, and terrain of all kinds, in addition to its numerous social functions. And most types of clothing require sewing or weaving, or both.
Planting crops I don't need to go on about largely because nearly everyone recognizes what huge changes it enables.
@futurebird@benni I touch in this in singer of my classes set in the Victorian period. They thought they were on the edge of ultimate advancement, too: engines, photography, telegraph, etc. And arguably, people in previous eras had to be better at science and tech bc they had less of an archive of knowledges to work with.
@futurebird
it seems bitingly similar to the thing Niklas Wirth was on about for tech history and constantly re"new"ed ideas borne from ignorance, computers seems to be the most brazen example, and is not terribly surprising its a wider trend. @benni
@futurebird@benni there's definitely a lot of truth to this, but on one count, mathematics, I strongly suspect we are on the cusp of the biggest revolution yet, assuming we don't fuck up so badly otherwise.
But yes, trying to help create this revolution has made me appreciate some of the challenges of yore, not only getting people to appreciate mathematics in general, but also getting a critical mass of people thinking about math in a new way that it becomes sort of the accepted folklore wisdom.
I've drawn a lot of inspiration and solace from the examples of Christopher Clavius, Aryabhata, and so many others.
Other inventions discussed that weren't invented for embarrassingly long times were discussed like buttons, pasteurization, hot air balloons, and magnetic compasses.
@futurebird@benni I think underlying limitation isn’t the technology/know how but rather how hard something is to actually do at a meaningful scale. So to me the big one is the ox. Like sure you could mine copper and tin without a beast of burden to move the heavy ore but is it worth doing? Wheels are “simple” but are they worth making without metal tools?