[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy0tKL1T7wFoYcxCe0xjN6Q
Thought experiment: someone gives you a hard drive with some music and video files on it...but you have no idea what a hard drive is, or what music and video files are, or what a file format is.
Beyond a certain level, you can only reverse engineer tech if you already know almost everything there is to know about how it works, or you're vastly smarter than the original designers - by at least a couple of orders of magnitude.
I can't imagine anyone alive today being able to solve the hard drive problem, or an alien equivalent, from scratch.
You'd have to be able to work out the basic physics of magnetic storage, the disk-level coding system used, the higher level file and data organisation, the chip design in the drive firmware, the code in the firmware, the rest of the drive electronics, the coding and compression systems used for audio and video data (how do FLAC or H.265 work on the inside?) - and you'd only be able to do all that if you understood that the hardware target was a modulated gas compression reproduction system with a certain frequency range intended for use in an atmosphere with specific characteristics, and a planar display technology with a similarly limited ability to generate a moving pattern of electronic magnetic frequencies.
And even if you could decode and view the cat videos on the drive, you probably still wouldn't find them funny.
I can imagine an engineer figuring out an analog broadcast, but once either party uses anything digital, all bets are off, especially once you imagine some codec being used to save bandwidth.
Of course, showing a season of some engineers trying to decode a broadcast makes for poor TV, so I get why they never bother mentioning this, but the thought process makes me realize how much I'm standing on the shoulder of giants when I debug a video player issue.
Enterprise had them working around the universal translator on several encounters, and IMO even just that got old. It makes me glad that most series handwave away those concerns most of the time, and try to make it an interesting plot point when they don't.
Instead of /just/ the hard drive (much like having JUST a VHS tape) you also have some complete things it would slot against. An actual (if broken) VHS player or two to examine.
Having that hardware as a reference would exponentially reduce the difficulty of the task. Even if the capacitance values are completely screwed up over time there'd at least be a sort of range and general outline encoded by the type of components involved.
Modern electronics are harder; a lot of them are electronically programmable, so you'd actually rather hope to find one of the really cut-throat cheep units that are mass produced where actual mask-roms are used. Those might hold up over time. We can hope that some sort of advanced imaging system can 'de lid' the chip without resorting to a freeze and slice method, but even then it might be possible for the mask roms to be decoded. The EEproms will have probably long lost anything other than the fact that a given quantity of storage MIGHT have been used. The actual contents of their less-volatile registers may well have decayed past any sort of recognition.
For such cases hacker/collectors might have actually done some of the job; it's possible that some archivist's collection has an obscure dump of some firmware blob or update that is requisite for the task. A civilization level archaeology effort might be able to reconstruct sufficient artifacts to either reproduce a conformant unit or at least emulate one via more sophisticated methods.
But seriously - imagine you had a blu-ray disc, and a CD player. How many years wasted trying to figure out how that laser and that control circuitry could possibly extract data from that surface? Yet clearly they're intended to go together...
It starts with some modern concept (modern being a couple decades ago when it was made), and traces the random circumstances that led to all the various inventions that got us there.
A favorite game of mine to play would be to try and put myself in the shoes of people from that time based on the conceptual understanding they may have had of things back then, and try to imagine the magnitude of the breakthrough something as simple as a pulley or gear may have had, and what sorts of problems I might try to solve when THAT was the cutting edge tech.
In reality people know bits about small bits (think of every person involved in making a mouse back through all materials). And yet without coordination these folks all collaborated to make a mouse. I'm an optimist because people all over the world are making the world better. The rate at which it is happening is picking up, and in general benefiting more and more people. We use communication (including Amazon and Facebook), markets, social movements, regulation etc as feedback loops to find and improve.
The one thing I can guarantee is that there will keep being more to understand, and that as an individual you will keep understanding a smaller and smaller proportion of it.
I enjoy perpectives from Matt Ridley about this (eg The Rational Optimist book) and his Ted talk[2]. A nice tidbit is that King Louis XIV of France had about 500 people preparing meals for him each night. You can go to town and have the same, with far better food and service than he had. By historic standards, we live like royalty, all because we don't understand everything.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil
[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex
Also a surprising amount of devices are overly complex because there's this historical separation between business and users (and because economic incentives are compiled into the implementation).
All of which makes you wonder: on actual Earth, is there a class of tech-company Morlocks keeping the disposable-income Eloi dependent with their endless supply of disposable gadgets?
There is indeed something keeping working class humans dependants: a focus on growth at all costs (including population growth). It is pervasive (the ideology is reinforced with ads) and makes you desire for example the latest iPhone X.
With a permanent growth, the basic problem is all humans are still born with a dependancy on housing and food (and other fancier things) that are in short supply. To attain these, humans need to work. Their work is used not just to maintain the basics, but to fuel growth.
Some people (mostly millenials) have found a solution: leave cheap, remain childless.
It causes many people to freak out about the economy, the birth rate, and how more immigration is needed to maintain growth. People don't really want that, and end up voting funny.
In the old days if someone didn't like how things were going there were spaces with (far less) people that they could go off in to and do their own thing; if it mattered that much.
In less old days someone was part of a community. They did things that supported the community and return the community supported them.
In recent history people were part of national communities, there were careers with 'retirement' plans and advancement tracks that enabled someone to achieve most of their potential if they wanted it.
Today everyone wants a short term solution with no long term planning or costs. There is no community because you don't know if you're going to be there in 5 or 10 years. There is no investment because you don't know if you're going to be there in 5 or 10 years. There is no sense of belonging because there is nothing to belong to. Everyone is a disposable cog in a machine that doesn't care about them.
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People have always voted funny, and I think that's what has gotten us where we are now.
I don't think it is possible to leave anymore. Not just that, but we are selling out our young generation and immigrants. We indoctrinate people to borrow a debt that can't be legally discharged, just to acquire mostly useless government sanctionned diplomas. We have rules for immigrant workers that to me look like indentured servitude. And on top of that, we resent these people that make modern society possible. I am waiting for them to shrug like Atlas. I hope they will.
I am lucky to be outside out that, but it still disgust me. Like you said, this is a society that wants to treat people like disposable cogs in a machine, that doesn't care about them. I get that, and I could be on board, if only it was honest and without lies.
I just do not agree that people have always voted funny. Their perspectives were more aligned with the government before. Not so much now, and I don't think it is fair to blame them.
Without bringing politics to HN, I think I have some unpopular libertarian political opinions. But even for me, it goes way too far, and it is not libertarian at all.
Except for a few, who are treated like fools or motors.
> Everyone is a disposable cog in a machine that doesn't care about them.
The same as above. However, the cogs work more than motors, where it should have been the opposite.
Lin Meimei I guess awakened the emotions they'd never required nor experienced before.
Are we talking about a novel or the current government in power in some prominent countries at the moment?
"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."