Hacker News Reader

Comment by eigencoder | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a lot of recency bias here. Over and over again in human history, we've lost technology. We often lose technology. The past 200 years is the exception, not the rule.

I also think that some parts are really weakly-reasoned:

> The Ancient Egyptians cut stone with an impressive level of precision. The Incas in South America did too. So much so that people sometimes claim that the Egyptians and the Incas used some kind of now-lost technology. But they most likely didn’t: they were just really good at cutting stone.

Yeah, but we're not that good at cutting stone anymore. So what gives? The explanation here is very lacking. They either had a technology that let them cut stone so well, or some special know-how (itself a form of technology, in my opinion) that enabled cutting stone so precisely.

View on HN

> we're not that good at cutting stone anymore

Current methods of cutting pretty much anything including stone are absurdly more precise than what Incas and Egyptians had. We can cut stuff like diamond lenses down to 10-100nm roughness.

...and we're so damn good at it that we can grind a complex shape to micron precision for the purposes of a shitpost -- which then gets automatically blasted to a million algorithmically selected interested parties for the amusement of all.

https://youtu.be/uR-hY7hUsaY?t=79

I have nothing but respect for the skill and professionalism of the ancients, but I find it extremely distasteful when someone tries to express this by putting down their modern counterparts.

Yea this is economics, not tech.

We also don't build carriages as well or have an army of craftsman doing it, but it's lost/regressed because there's no economic incentives.

We build car/truck bodies, which are much the same --- the family station wagon when I was growing up had a badge in the doorwell, "Body by Fisher" w/ an image of a carriage, that company having been a carriage-maker which transitioned to car/truck manufacture.

And we do pretty much the same with stonework now compared to the ancients.

There are a few that know how to do it by hand, but mass production has evolved.

You mean we are not that good at cutting stone with ancient techniques, or perhaps more accurately nobody wants to expend the manual labor when there are more efficient methods. Stone carving is still a trade you can get into but you use manual techniques for fine detail, and grinders and pneumatic tools for bulk cutting.

Wielding a modern power tool that can cut stone 1000x faster than ancient hammer and chisel, you'd likely still have trouble to cut a pyramid block precisely. Modern precise-cutting machines are huge compared to the things they cut.

It's the ability to precisely measure and mark huge pieces of rock what looks like a miracle to me. Producing the exact shape is easy when you can always check how close to the desired shape you are, and it's the hard part.

I think you are overestimating the precision of ancient pyramid blocks. Most of them are quite crudely cut, with the gaps filled with rubble and mortar.

Speaking of the Great Pyramid, the bulk of it is crudely cut, but the outer casing and the lining of the interior chambers has gaps well below 1 mm in width. These stones are about 2.5m long, much longer than a typical human, and weigh several tons. Not only had they to be cut to sub-millimeter precision, they also had to be installed equally precisely. This takes serious engineering chops, especially when you don't even have steel.

The Egyptian alien engineer thing is mostly a meme, but it stems from the fact that Western Egyptologists can't get their heads out of their asses long enough to agree on how it was done. Plus the Egyptian government won't allow any kind of physical or non-physical investigations because it would conflict with Zahi Hawass's personal pet theories.

No technology was really lost, we just can't agree on how they stacked the stones into pyramids. The stonecutting technology they used is very well understood and we even have real actual tools used by the actual ancient Egyptian stonecutters and some of the tools used to manipulate and place stones.

There's also several incredibly solid theories on pyramid construction, but to verify them would require investigating the actual pyramids, which Hawass will not allow.

We could “easily” (in technological terms) build the pyramids today, but nobody wants to spend a $100B on a 150m-tall pile of solid, imported rock with 3 small rooms in it.

> Yeah, but we're not that good at cutting stone anymore

We are pretty good at cutting stone, but not very good at cutting stone with the resources available to the ancient egyptians. So in some sense the technology has been lost: but that's more because there aren't really people try to perfect that craft, as opposed to because of some magical trick or technique that we don't know anything about (Though it's murky exactly what approaches they used, that's because there's multiple plausible ones and it's hard to pin them down, not because there's no plausible ones we can think of).

There are mentions from ancient sources that Incas were able to "make the stone soft". I suspect that the lost technology is more likely a form of concrete, not super-precise curved stone cutting. (The Roman Pantheon dome is likely the largest concrete structure of the ancient world, and it predates Incas by several centuries.)

I've seen rumors on the internet that you can dissolve (or at least soften) granite and other otherwise tough materials with molten natron.

Here's a rabbit hole if this sounds like fun to you - https://natrontheory.com/index.html

That website looks like the narrow end of a wedge designed to open you up to some crazy pseudo-history. Props for above-average graphic design for a conspiracy theory site, though.

> Props for above-average graphic design for a conspiracy theory site, though.

The focus and color in those graphics makes them look like AI-generated graphics to me.

Eh, maybe. The papyrus one in particular looks quite fake, now that you mention it. I was mainly thinking of the layout anyway. But going to the bother of generating vaguely striking images to fill out that layout is still more than a lot of these people do. For better or worse. I stopped at the blatantly manipulative CTA, so I don't know how bad the whole thing is.

That's how we mass-produce sodium silicate today, for example for foundry cores and waterproofing concrete. You have to get the quartz (from granite or otherwise) pretty hot for this to work. Pottery kiln temperatures.

Normally you purify the quartz first, but here we're discussing what molten washing soda would or wouldn't do to granite. The quartz in granite normally forms a continuous phase, so as long as the quartz remains solid, the granite will remain solid.

Granite melts at a lower temperature than pure quartz, and I'm not entirely sure it wouldn't just melt before the washing soda had an effect.

I agree there are much better examples. I think Historically more significant loses have happened. There is trove of techniques Gauss solved 100 years in advance that were not communicated and lost. Example here being FFTs which were not rediscovered until post ww2.

I think the question is also really hard to answer in a non-answerable way because if you don't know you've forgotten who do something you simply just don't know. If you sub-divide humanity in to factions certain factions have lost the economic ability of doing some things for example have been lost to America. While humanity can still do it certain places would be totally lost without the existing tribal knowledge. It would take us a long time to reinvigorate a tool and die industry in America its not a lost thing but if you can't do it commercial currently can you do it at all?

Hopefully that's nota weird direction to take the discussion in

Building edifices with accurately cut big stone blocks is out of fashion: bricks and mortar or concrete have been prevalent for many centuries. Mortar, shock-absorbing supports and other technology that can be used with stone blocks make very precise shaping pointless.

I agree, the article is very dismissive about losing technology. There's lots of ways we lose technology, from big cultural changes over time (Dark Ages) as well as more niche technologies or processes, like a "secret formula" that was protected until it was lost. The difference with technology is that often we can rediscover lost technologies by the web of understanding we have around it and other advancements in our recovery techniques.

For example, Roman concrete, that strengthens in sea water: https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-cas...

If you really think that some sort of unknown ancient supertechnology was used for creating the Egyptian's artifacts and giant structures, I'd strongly suggest you watch these two videos. They do an excellent job of completely demythifying all of those poorly substantiated speculative ideas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mysYT260dqU&list=PLuROoe7EZ3...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_NguZUDku4&t=9216s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com