And yet we still haven't figured out nuclear swords smh.
Best I can do is a flail.
Damn, every time I think I'm original or clever today, someone beats me to it.
I was just thinking of "demon core on a warhammer/shield/trebuchet (not a catapult because that's for plebs)"
Small point of pedantry, that is a flail, not a mace. A mace is mounted directly onto a handle, flails have the flexible material between the weight and the handle.
I just happened to have the exact best response possible pic saved recently enough that I could find it in my phone. 🤣 This makes my whole day!
Fixed it for you.
Demon core memes are my favorite thing from NCD and literally nobody else in my life even knows what it is, let alone think they're funny.
It's the same with Ea-Nasir memes.
Tell that to my uranium sword.
I know this isn't the comparison being made, but I love the idea of jumping straight from swords to nukes. Writing prompt: a 16th century blacksmith suddenly realizes, "If I surround an unstable rock with a neutron reflecting earth metal, I can trigger a runaway chain reaction that'll get that stump outta me yard."
What always blows my mind to think about is how the materials for our advanced technology were here the whole time. We could have had computers and nuclear energy and spacecraft 20,000 years ago if we'd just had the knowledge.
This is the real reason I follow the Primitive Technology channel. One of these days he's going to make an arc welder out of mud and bugs.
I follow him too. People joke about him being a short way away from computers, but I think it's a testament to just how far we've come as a species. Because even with the benefit of modern knowledge on the chemistry of the process, he's kinda still stuck on figuring out how to scale out his iron production.
It also shows just how labor-intensive everything is without modern machinery, when it takes him several days of effort, from gathering and processing the raw materials, to making charcoal, building the kiln, and finally smelting the ore just to get a handful of pellets of pig iron.
Jokes aside, you're right. Progress is never easy, fast, or guaranteed and we truly are standing on the shoulders of many, many non-giants and there is still so much work to do. It's humbling and awesome to contemplate.
Not quite, in order to have a technology you need methods, materials and society needs to be ready for the tech.
I recently learned that 50 years ago someone filed a patent for solar panels with more than 20% efficiency and the us government was like yeah its too revolutionary so you can't sell this nor tell anyone about this unless it is US military. Imagine we all could have had >20% solar panels 50 years ago, even today we are only marginally above 20% efficiency.
Another example, would be the company who made the iPhone like device well before iPhone but the market wasn't ready.
Another example that is fucked up. Governments are starting to restrict AI for consumers but also using AI to kill children in Gaza.
I'm pretty sure a lot early doctors were also burned at stakes because they were called witches or smth.
You're right, it's not strictly just the knowledge, but it's also the expertise to execute it, the tooling to build precision machinery and devices, and a production chain of raw materials of sufficient quality.
Even theory itself doesn't just come out of the blue. Einstein didn't pull the General Theory of Relativity out of his ass, he was building on centuries of groundwork and experimental evidence and just connected the dots. On the shoulders of giants, indeed.
Its funny to look at games like Civilization 5 that make you work your way down a tech tree and think of them as reductive, but in many ways the actual progress of technology was not far off.
But I was just thinking that it's crazy that it's theoretically possible that we could have had this technology at any point if we had the capability. Like, there was no rule that was like "must reach game year 1945 CE to unlock nuclear weapons".
I'm pretty sure a lot early doctors were also burned at stakes because they were called witches or smth.
You don't even have to go back that far to find blatantly dangerous willful ignorance, not even two whole centuries.
The idea of a doctor washing their hands to avoid the transfer of disease-causing germs from one patient to another (like, going from an autopsy in one room to delivering a child in the next without washing up) was deemed so ludicrous and laughable that the backlash and rejection led to the man who suggested it having a mental breakdown and dying in an insane asylum.
This was right in the middle of the development of the germ theory of disease, among a mounting pile of evidence that it wasn't just "bad smells" that cause disease.
I mean, we need the infrastructure to use them as well, it wasnt just knowledge that was blocking us, each piece of new tech usually needs at least some of the previous to be possible to use
Silly meme. Nuclear bombs are much too heavy to wield on the battlefield, and their shape is unsuitable for piercing platemail armour
If only I had some sort of mechanical machine that would lob this 300 kg nuclear bomb 90 m away at my enemy. One day science will catch up to man's dreams, one day...
Nuke hurling trebuchets are an underexplored fantasy tech.
However, depleted uranium tipped arrows sound very cool.
They just have to make small adjustments
Also gamma radiation is good at "piercing" platemail armour.
Until they make the Fat Man
The real life version of that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
One of the hallmarks of a bad weapon: significant overlap in maximum range and minimum safe distance
And the stone age was loooong
The copper age only lasted about 1000 years. Then came the bronze age. But the iron has been going on for longer than the bronze age and copper age combined.
I suspect a large part of it was the collapse of civilization, at least, in that corner of the world.
“we’re in a late stage bronzist society, it’ll collapse any day now!”
so, caught an article on NPR where they were interviewing an archeologist who specialized in the Sea Peoples (and the bronze age collapse). In any case, there were some points he made that stuck with me. The most pointed being that, the collapse during the bronze age (for those that lived in it,) wouldn't have known it was happening.
It was slow, happened across generations. while the climate change and other factors was inexorably moving to collapse... the changes weren't fast enough for people to notice, it was just the way things were their entire life.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call "foreshadowing".
I just posted something about 'classified ads' in newspapers and someone asked what classified ads are.
A 30 year old posted that he now felt old after reading that question.
I had some 50 year old bartender try to be condescending with me saying i probably didn't know how to use a dial phone. Showed her up by explaining my aunt used to have a Princess phone and had to explain that one to her
It's where we put classified information because the kids won't read news papers!
wtf is a pennysaver
I'd rather have a copper spear than a steel sword. Swords are small and weak. Spears are long and powerful.
I'd rather have a nuclear spear tbh
Nuclear spear.
Pro: Kills all of your enemies.
Con: Also kills you and everyone you know.
Preps sophon on another planet
I wonder if there's research out there into the hottest temperature humanity can reach throughout history? So many things that advance technology depend on getting even hotter. With a simple wood fire, you can cook food to make it safer to eat and get more nutrients out of it. With a better design and fuel to get hotter, you can work copper, or glass, or steel. Hotter still and you can fuse atoms.
So dividing by four again will surely give us the timetable for how soon we can expect a planet buster to be developed to harvest Mercury's raw material to build a Dyson fleet
Is there even evidence of copper swords existing? The whole Copper Age is really just in our "history" because it has to be. The archeological evidence is pretty scant. It's possible people used lead (even easier to melt and shape, and there is evidence of very early use of lead) more than copper before the Bronze Age.
Kopeshes are pretty well established. Which were copper swords.
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
