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.

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’m in the Southern hemisphere so right in my neighborhood 😁

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.

The sea people were climate migrants. Actually, we don’t know that much about them except to say Mesopotamia really hated them.

They may have invaded Egyptian time or two, but they really don’t known where they came from.

But it’s almost certain that the massive trade network that was highly specialized and crisscrossed the known world collapsed causing everyone to get isolated.

Tin, for example only came from one place and the mines just stopped producing.

Baby don’t hurt me

You can actually tell hiw important an area was by the area code. If it was somewhere people called often, they would have low numbers, while bumfukc nowhere gets high numbers that take for ever to dial.