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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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askchapo
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Oh i feel ancient aliens and ancient technologies are wildly different groups. One is like "you didn't build that" to all ancient people. The ancient technologies is more of cyclical history/fall from grace (due to sin, here probably evangelicals can come in)/golden age (here fashies can come in)/bible tells true stories twisted by time (again red meat, for evangelicals). Aliens don't do anything that interesting for both of those groups, aside from racism, no lessons to be extracted.
I could see ancient technologies lost to history being real. But I don't think there were any societies as technological developed as we are now. In several millenium though after a great cataclysm, maybe they'll uncover remnants of our technology that puts everything they've developed to shame
Nah, we'd know. Like there's some possibility people were doing, idk, ironmongery 100kya+ ago, but metallurgy leaves very obvious contimates in the soil, glass and ceramics never decay. Any refined aluminum would be a dead giveaway. Like it's possible people independently discovered mettalurgy or pottery or something a few times and we just haven't found the sites yet, but large scale industry makes a mess.
There isn't any evidence for it, anywhere. The closest real thing would be that the bow and arrow was independently incented a number of times in different places.
I like how Rimworld deals with ancient metals. Instead of mining iron you just find a bunch of compressed steel or components as ore deposits.
That had been true for most of our cultural memory though. It wasn't till the mid 1900 our engineering was as good as the Roman's. So in living memory there were people who had the experience of living in a world that wasn't as cool as existed in antiquity.
Now, that does forget that most people in roman times weren't having a good time. Just that their good times were better than ours for most history.
I love ancient engineering, especially that weird stuff that winds up ahead of its time. It feels like, as someone who likes bouncing systems off each other to create new ones, many many technologies were developed lots of times and were lost when the economic conditions no longer supported people who could learn and recreate certain technologies. Like that ancient greek steam engine. The guy making it may have passed it on to a few other people interested enough to, but those people didn't have the free time or interest to continue that design.
So the thing with steam engines, is you need to contain a very large amount of pressure to get useful work out of them. Like a lot of pressure. The idea that you could make a neat toy that spun around when you heat water has been around for ages. But we didn't start making steam engines until the 19th century because the materials science wasn't there yet. The 19th century was when we started being able to crank out large amounts of high quality metal, and reliably create very strong joins on the seams of those metal objects. And that got us started, but early on all we had for seals was greased leather gaskets, and we could only contain so much pressure that way. Someone had to bring in vulkanized rubber, which could withstand immense heat and pressure, to get us the powerful steam engines we associate with the industrial rev.
These aren't new techs - i think mesoamericans were vulcanizing rubber 1kya, the steam engine in principle is 2kya, but the necessary metallurgy was 19th century, and that's where the needed technology, industry, and economy came together to produce a steam engine that could contain the immense pressures needed to produce useful work.
It was a tech pulled out of the hat, but one could imagine different ways of, say, sharpening metal being lost and rediscovered a lot. Or something.
We kinda had something like that with plate armor. A lot of the techniques for making really advanced plate armor were lost by the 20th century, and the in latter half of the 20th a bunch of larpers and medieval nerds started reverse-engineering existing suits, consulting what manuals survived, digging through museums, and now we're back at a point where there are a couple of shops in the world that can make the rally good stuff if you can put down, ikd, it's probably 15k these days.