At one point in time I tried to read one of each major category of books in the Dewey Decimal system but was stymied (need to try again using LoC), then later, wanted to read biographies in chronological order to my kids, but that was a hard list to put together.
For an associated text, see:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29240912-why-the-wheel-i...
which I'm currently reading and which is quite good and very engaging.
I like the idea and I like the article describing the background and rationale. I look forward to poking around in it. However I have a little bit of a hang-up with calling it a “tree”. Namely, a tree conjures the image of it being a 1-to-N graph, i.e. a single idea leads to several new ones, and so on, when it is very much not.
Ironically Connections was really what rammed this point home for me. It really is more like a social media graph, where ideas from all over, old and new, coalesce into a new epiphany that leads to a new invention. Burke constantly demonstrated this in his examples, and explicitly rejected the linearity of inventions.
But then again, the concept of a ‘tree of tech’ is rather poetic :)
The key property of real trees is that they _branch_ and the branches don't recombine.
I do agree that branches staying separate is the essential property of a tree data structure.
The need to connect leaves to roots is what gives individuals trees their branching nature. Obviously a tree can have holes in it etc, but loops in nutrient delivery present an inherent issue.
Something that fascinates me about early technology is that a significant amount of it was invented prior to Homo sapiens.
The information is organized clearly by date, technology and predecessor/descendant.
But,technology continues to improve, and this site has no database or github for continuing to update with new tech or to fill in the gaps.
This website format also makes it difficult to do other forms of analysis.
I wonder if the authors would make the data available in a knowledge graph form.
When an idle ruling class of parasites siphons all the productive surplus of society, there's not a lot of room for innovation... Unless they come up with a gentleman's compact to dabble in gentleman scholarship.
IIRC early cannons were pretty severely limited by the state of metallurgy at the time.
The oldest bell foundries do seem to happen at around the same time as the emergence of what we'd call a cannon, but before that there were indeed bamboo tubed contrivances and similar. If the Romans did have gunpowder earlier though, I bet they'd find a way.. I mean you don't hear about stone cannons and they'd be heavy AF but why not? These people basically invented fracking in BC, and literally tore down mountains to shake out all the gold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_M%C3%A9dulas
I feel more like our tech tree was pretty much directed by resources availability and human ingenuity didn't play much role at all and any species of roughly 50-150 human IQ would follow pretty much the same path when placed in similar situation, only perhaps slower or faster.
Another interesting idea that I'm not sure if I believe in is that rate of our technological progress might be mostly explained with population growth, as if technologies didn't really accelerate progress on future ones.
Huh? There are inventions that happened by mere coincident, or two "right" humans at the same place and the same time.
Penicillin, superglue and microwave ovens are just some examples from the top of my head, that probably wouldn't have happened if they weren't "accidentally" discovered. It would seem many inventions are driven by "Hmm, what happened there?" accidents, and since the right person actually paid attention, they dove into it rather than dismissing it.
I guess hindsight is funny like that, most inventions/technology seem obvious to us today. Like putting wheels on luggage, of course that's easier and better in every way, but how many years was it between "luggage" was invented, and someone put wheels on them?
I think I'd be happy putting this in the "inevitable" category -- the idea floats around and maybe it takes a few decades for the market to be wide enough and somebody to have a good implementation and marketing to make it take off as a consumer product, but if the specific people who did that in our timeline hadn't managed to, somebody else would have.
Notably we see way more coincident discovery after the printing press and more distant trade became common place (and centers of trade usually originated innovations wherever they happened).
But in contrast, if we knew that some invention like grinding lenses or whatever was completely impossible until some meteor or fungus hit planet Earth in year N and introduced a new element we were able to use, then that's an external factor.
I suppose there more pedantry is possible, like we could have invented space travel meteor-hopping tech by that point and discovered the "new element" for ourselves, but that's probably the wrong level of pedantry.
I think the closest practical answer is probably more along the lines of population density, and arguing that certain inventions would not be created until the density was enough to create a problem justifying its existence.
It is very interesting to wonder if we may have seen "convergent evolution" towards certain technologies with different physical circumstances, but I think it's safe to say our species' (and planet's) future is forever altered by the massive biogeochemical battery, trickle-charged over eons, which we are discharging as rapidly as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining#Early_h...
The oldest intentional use of black coal was documented in Ostrava, Petřkovice, in a settlement from the older Stone Age on the top of Landek Hill. According to radiocarbon dating, the site falls within the period 25,000–23,000 years BC.
The Industrial Revolution wasn't when people first learned about fossil fuels, but it was when we started turning heat into mechanical work at scale.
I didn't know that about coal! Thanks.
The age of discovery was a similar scenario. Imagine a different world where 2/3rds of the continents are uninhabitable desert/tundra/arctic, and there was no economic benefit to better ships, clocks, astronomy, cartography. Delays social development of joint stock corporations etc...
In the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond develops a theory for why Europe and Asia developed vast, powerful civilizations, but Africa and the Americas did not.
In Africa, the co-evolution of primates/humans and other life resulted in that other life becoming extremely dangerous to humans. My impression is that if Africa were the only continent, humans would still be living in caves, because nature had enough time to adapt. Even today, we do not have the technology to tame the wildlife and diseases of Africa, nor will most crops grow there. So the ability to escape the continent would have been the first “external gate”.
In the Americas, the geography and north-south orientation of the continents, as well as the lack of work animals and crops suitable for agriculture, gated development until much later than Europe and Asia. Corn took a very long time to go from being an itty bitty little thing to a crop capable of supporting civilization.
So on and so forth. Diamond didn't put a lot of effort into making his theory actually fit the evidence, he just wrote an engaging book.
I wish these were still in fashion
Electric cars were invented 200 year ago, and the first rechargeable battery in 1859. I wonder how things would have looked like, if we had focused more on EV.
In a related scenario, if the car lobby hadn't fought so hard to prioritize personal cars instead of public transportation, we would probably have a more efficient society where you could live far away from your work, and commute in 500km/h trains. The towns could become more walkable and condensed. Logistics would be simpler with a more hub based distribution where more of your customers live in the same place. More area could be available for agriculture or preservation of nature instead of being used for highways and spread out metropolitan areas
In contrast to the author's decisions here, I decided to
-go for an "everything tree" even if that will contain many more errors
-use DBpedia/Wikidata, and address issues discovered by editing Wikipedia/Wikidata
-use a 3D visualization tool, due to the size of the graph
I think it reveals an interesting overall structure, and some interesting details for those who zoom in despite the issues with the data.
I've been interested in the timing of new inventions and how they sometimes go on to become successful innovations. This visual tree is a great resource.
That really resonates with me. It’s like trying to isolate a single root in a massive banyan tree – impossible! Every new tool or technique we develop isn't just born in a vacuum; it’s built on the shoulders of giants, as they say. Or, to keep with the tree metaphor, it's nourished by the nutrients and structure provided by all the growth before it. It’s a very organic way of looking at progress, far more accurate than the typical linear 'invention A led to invention B' timelines we sometimes see. It also makes you wonder about the butterfly effect in technology – how a seemingly small 'hitch' in the past could have profoundly altered the entire tech tree's future branches
I think one can make a similar argument that Generative AI, for example was dependent on 3D video games, but that seems sort of contingent, and in another universe it could have happened in the opposite order.
Data collection bias? Goalpost/definition change maybe (many recent advances are in "better" software and hardware)? Less research/exploration investment vs. business/exploitation investment?
Interesting to think about "what if my whole life has actually been in a period of global exploratory slowdown?"
In the US, institutions like DARPA were directly funded for that purpose.
jessep•3d ago
pizzooid•20h ago