One of my favorite quotes from Iain M. banks’ Culture series, paraphrased here since I don’t recall which book it’s in, is that technological progress is more like scaling a rock face than climbing a ladder. There is so much room for surprise and incomprehension.
I sometimes think about how vast the parameter space of our physical universe is, and if that vastness means we wouldn’t be able to recognize ancient advanced technology if it’s far enough outside of our current mode of progress.
My favorite example is handing an SD card with all of Wikipedia and the Gutenberg Project and maybe even the Wayback Machine on it to a Roman emperor. He’d look at it and might have a mild interest in the geometrical metal bits on an otherwise insignificant tiny flake of weird material. If the deliverer were to tell him that it contained millions of documents, he wouldn’t believe it.
An expert in the field of storage media could, if for some reason permitted, spend years trying to explain it to the scholars of the time. Even if the expert succeeded in convincing them, it would take an unimaginable effort lasting lifetimes to ever make use of the thing. It would not succeed. Not because those people were stupid, but because the specialization that’s needed to understand the artifact is so far away from from their cultural knowledge and capabilities as to be unreachable. Why should we expect our culture be any different?
The primary counter-argument to this is math and physics, and it’s a pretty strong one. It holds up quite well when dealing with past civilizations that are beneath or somewhere close to our current level of understanding. If you’ll permit another flight of fancy though, imagine an ancient society that figured out how to encode information in the irregularities of crystalline structures: every lame-ass quartz medallion we’ve unearthed could be the equivalent of a 10TB hard drive, and we’d never be the wiser.
I think this is pretty unlikely, but it’s good to be humble and interrogate your assumptions.
I sometimes think about how vast the parameter space of our physical universe is, and if that vastness means we wouldn’t be able to recognize ancient advanced technology if it’s far enough outside of our current mode of progress.
My favorite example is handing an SD card with all of Wikipedia and the Gutenberg Project and maybe even the Wayback Machine on it to a Roman emperor. He’d look at it and might have a mild interest in the geometrical metal bits on an otherwise insignificant tiny flake of weird material. If the deliverer were to tell him that it contained millions of documents, he wouldn’t believe it.
An expert in the field of storage media could, if for some reason permitted, spend years trying to explain it to the scholars of the time. Even if the expert succeeded in convincing them, it would take an unimaginable effort lasting lifetimes to ever make use of the thing. It would not succeed. Not because those people were stupid, but because the specialization that’s needed to understand the artifact is so far away from from their cultural knowledge and capabilities as to be unreachable. Why should we expect our culture be any different?
The primary counter-argument to this is math and physics, and it’s a pretty strong one. It holds up quite well when dealing with past civilizations that are beneath or somewhere close to our current level of understanding. If you’ll permit another flight of fancy though, imagine an ancient society that figured out how to encode information in the irregularities of crystalline structures: every lame-ass quartz medallion we’ve unearthed could be the equivalent of a 10TB hard drive, and we’d never be the wiser.
I think this is pretty unlikely, but it’s good to be humble and interrogate your assumptions.