Offensive Squid

Dealing with alien technology, Arthur C. Clarke's law may provide a solution. He said, that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. James White (?) noticed, that there are no wonders at all, only natural laws we haven't discovered yet.

I had a discussion about biblical wonders with two co-workers a couple of years ago. One of them doing "serious" bible studies, the other one a voluntary paramedic at the Red Cross, and I asked them to imagine the latter been sent with his emergency kit back to Jesus' era. The medical equipment and his knowledge should be enough for some "wonders" … until he has used up his supplies.

But would we really able to be the "Connecticut Yankee"? How much of our daily used technology is "magic" for us? There is a funny, cute little story written by the Russian author Kir Bulychev ("Паровоз для царя", lit. Steam locomotive for the tzar)* , about an alien having a crash-landing in a backyard. The alien is a clerk, and absolutely clueless how his flying saucer is working. A neighbour cannot believe this, but gets asked what he would do if he would drive with his car to Tsar Ivan the Terrible and gets the order to reproduce it … even a more primitive steam locomotive would be out of reach.

It would be an enormous efford to build even a toaster from scratch … http://www.thetoasterproject.org/

___

* credits to tvtrope http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw…..oTheRomans

Hljothlegur said:

hee hee.  That's why when I want to build a toaster from scratch, I gather dry leaves and tree parts and start a small controlled fire, jam the bread onto a forked stick, lean the stick out over the fire and several minutes later, I have toast.   The tricky part is getting the fire going, of course, but I think for toaster purposes all those metal parts are overkill.

The toaster had been an art project, an example, how much knowledge and prerequisites are needed for even such a trivial household appliance: "A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant". Think of building a car instead … or creating "magical" fire.

With a lighter? First, we would need a flintstone. Where could we find one? Do we even know how it looks like? We'll need iron, too (first ore), for smelting coal would be needed. How to produce charcoal? For this, you would need fire first … 

Maybe matches would be easier. Matches consisting of wood—and what else? Especially phosphorus—do we know how to produce it? (Needs fire, too …)

And even for the stone-age method some skills are needed.

____

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus

http://homepage.mac.com/laddie…..ction.html

Phosphorus is fairly easy to manufacture. You just boil down urine and collect the salt. Stinky, but straightforward. The trick is keeping it from combusting–it's fairly volatile.

Hljothlegur said:

Of course!  I just meant that if we eliminate metal from our projects, we can save lots of work. 

Maybe we have to exclude plastic, too. It could be produced cheap, but only with big equipment.

Metal is great once you already have a system in place which refines metal from ores, but much of the metal used today is the "surplus value" of already having the giant system up and working. 

One big blast furnace with a production of up to 12.000 tons/day …really gigantic. In my opinion, the problem after crash of civilisation would be, that for the survivors it would be much easier harvesting iron from the ruins, than to build such a coal-eating moloch. Could the knowledge be preserved? Even more, if you've got to struggle against starvation?

It's the systems, even more than the knowledge, that count – we can have a very complete knowledge of iron smelting without the stash of technology and systems. 

Definitively right. Have you heared about the "Ulfberht" swords? http://www.guardian.co.uk/scie…..ings-sword

There we had technics in the word's original meaning … in some ancient cultures a smith's work had been called magic.

Hence my comment about the metal being the stumbling block when you try to create a technology as a single person.  The other people are part of the system and why it works.

or is that the point? :)

This is the point. How less we know about our daily used technology …

Post edited 11:13 pm – April 11, 2011 by Andrea_A

Hljothlegur said:

The Deutsche Museum is super, imho, and yes, also a good point – some dicks would light it up just to watch it burn. Eventually, we would be using books as toilet paper. Then, no one will even bother with toilet paper.  It'll be the library at Alexandria all over again.

I loved Canticle for Leibowitz when I was young; grim but witty.  Do you recommend "Der Untergang der Stadt Passau"?

Toilet paper? Maybe too precious. Rather it gets recycled. Making paper is easy — if you use old paper [1]. My mother owns some books, produced during World War 2, where the bookbinder used waste paper for glueing the back — technique used since medieval times [2].

I'm not shure about recommendation; should re-read it first. But Amery's book is an excurse of a well-established satirist to Science Fiction, came out as a great success — and it is no brick.The only problem could be that parts of the text may be in black letter (oldfashioned font).

Stumbled about an excerpt of Vernor Vinge's upcoming novel "The Children of the Sky" from a Norwegian Con site [3]. Fitting somewhat to the topic of rebuilding a civilization.

… Across longer times, through the rise and fall of Slow Zone civilizations, librarians were the heros of each rebuilding from the ashes of the last fall of civilization. …

Edit: Trying to get back to the original topic, I've got no problem of Vinge's use of not exactly explained FTL drive to tell the story. And his concept of the Zones makes it even more interesting. On the one hand there are slower than light ships settled in Einstein's universe, on the other hand the Powers with their magical technology, but unable to exist in the lower Zones. And a technology tradition [copied?] over billions of years, so there is the question if there is really understanding of the deep physical basics.

__________

[1] http://www.pioneerthinking.com…..paper.html

[2] http://www.uni-protokolle.de/n…../id/12077/ (in German)

[3] http://www.norwescon.org/archi…..erview.htm