From: Chuck Kuecker (ckuecker@mcs.net)
Date: Sat May 29 1999 - 07:23:47 MDT
At 10:58 PM 5/28/99 -0700, you wrote:
>> Lee Daniel Crocker wrote: ... It is idle fantasy to
>> imagine that (1) technology can move backwards, ...
>
>The latest Star Wars episode made me wonder: can technology
>go backwards? They seemed to imply technology was going
>violently aft. Can anyone think of an example, now or in any time
>past, where a society had it and later didn't? Descended from
>enlightenment to superstition? Would dark ages Europe qualify? spike
>
Pre-Christian societies (Greeks) had knowledge of steam power,
(Babylonians?) electricity (old electroplating plating batteries found in
ruins) and that the Earth was round and not the center of the universe.
Most of this was lost in the rise of Western civilization and the Dark
Ages. Does it matter that the technology was used primarily as special
effects in temples?
If we were to suffer a planetary disaster that killed off most of our
technicians and scientists, modern mass production and microelectronics
would become tales of a lost civilization, as no one person could
resurrect, for instance, even a small semiconductor fab by himself. Our
civilization is only robust when you consider the pool of resources made
available by the billions of people out there, and the thousands of
different companies competing to make product. A few ill-placed meteor
strikes could indeed send us back twenty or thirty years, effectively.
This does not imply that the actual knowledge is lost - just that the
know-how to make the knowledge into product is missing. The field-effect
transistor was known in the early years of the 20th century as a
possibility, to physicists, as was nuclear fission, but until the
infrastructure developed to make either viable, they remained dreams.
Chuck Kuecker
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