The ancient Egyptians built crazy-ass shit that we, with all our know-how and technology, can’t figure out for the life of us. People still get on TV to make claims that they MUST have been helped by aliens because we can’t figure out their techniques, and of course no hieroglyphic instructions were left behind.
We know ancient Egyptians used papyrus for writing. I assume there’s also no food recipes (except maybe of the kind for the pharaoh to use to gain immortality in the next life – i’m talking about how they made bread or beer), common construction techniques or any of that ilk left behind on their grand monuments, even though they are riddled with hieroglyphs. But those glyphs speak of battles and sorcery and curses and all sort of crazy shit. After a while of hearing about their exploits (were they recording history or practicing sympathetic magic – what we today might call visualization of our goals?) you start to realize it sounds like learning about your own society through billboards and movie trailers. There isn’t anything of substance about the day to day life and bureaucracy in the kingdom. Running a kingdom of that size would have been a huge hassle considering what we know of the technology of the day. Very few writings on impermanent materials from before 0 C.E. are extant, and the pyramids date back 5,000 to 10,000 years.
With things like the Kerkythea mechanism, the chroming of swords by the Chin Emperor who built the Terracotta Army, and whatever else have you being discovered on a routine enough basis, you begin to wonder just how vast and staggering an amount of knowledge has been lost throughout the years.
And there’s the issue of professionals jealously guarding their knowledge because it was ‘hard’ to attain in the first place (and by ‘hard’ to attain I mean studying everything that everyone else did before them and making some incremental advancements to that and acting king of the world), charging for access to it or not allowing access to it at all. Take the old guild system, where you had to become a slave to the guild to learn the secrets. Not much was written down for fear it could escape and then anyone could do it and their skills would be worth less than they were now. That could have been even more rampant in the ancient world, which would explain why clockwork computing was discovered in ancient Hellenic Greece and then forgotten about for hundreds of years, not to mention the violence and sacking of one another’s civilizations that happened quite often, the burning of libraries and indiscriminant killing.
The guarding of knowledge has it’s place. Unfortunately, most of the way it’s done now guards it from those it would benefit. True guarding of knowledge lies in replication, in the “information wants to be free” vein. After all, DNA spreads itself widely to protect the information it carries. Our knowledge should be the same way – the more everyone knows and collects, the more likely catastrophe won’t set us back as far as it has in the past.
But catastrophe is assured. It’s in the very nature of the universe, right now to the basic physical laws. The only question is how adequately are we prepared for the great unknown?
Tags: nerd with a capital N, yes this is really how I amuse myself