I've been bingeing my way through a youtube channel [1] that's largely focused on old/outdated consumer technology. I'm astounded by how little I knew about how any of it worked. In particular, I was astonished when I watched the one about how VHS tapes works. There's just so much knowledge underpinning even relatively obsolete technology. As time goes on the fantasy trope of "ancient lost knowledge" becomes less hard to understand. In a hundred years will anyone know how a VHS works? Or how they encoded color information alongside a backwards compatible black-and-white analog TV signal (IMO another incredible feat)?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy0tKL1T7wFoYcxCe0xjN6Q

There's a kind of technological pre-horizon involved in understanding any advanced technology.

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.

It's probably not fair, but I've asked similar questions about alien encounters in science fiction shows. Those like Star Trek that have a universal translator hand wave away language issues, but even then, how do they deal with the video transmission itself?

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.

Even just PAL and NTSC analog broadcasts would take some work to figure out if the alien ship was using the other one, and those were both developed from a common base of technology (early 20th century Earth).

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.

I'd like to take that experiment a step further.

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.

Instructions unclear: hard drive now stuck in VHS player.

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...

Fortunately we have organizations like wikipedia, Libgen , and the web archive devoting themselves to preserving knowledge archaic, novel, fringe, and vital all alike.

Not sure how back you've gone in terms of that tech, but you may enjoy the Connections series (several seasons, although the earliest were the best IMHO).

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.

That is fine! In economics there is a famous essay I, Pencil[1] explaining that no one knows how to make a pencil. Sure you put some graphite in some wood, but how do you make graphite? And how do you make the machines that make it. And how do you make the components that go into that. Or updating this, no one knows how to make a computer mouse. (You'd need some hydro-carbons for the plastic, machines, machines that make machines etc.)

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

There is a YouTube channel[1] that discusses making things such as a hamburger from scratch, much like your pencil example.

[1] https://youtube.com/channel/UCfIqCzQJXvYj9ssCoHq327g

You don't need to know a lot to change league though. Most kitchen appliances, tools are basic geometry and a bit of time. It's damning when you open them to see how there's nothing to it. It's damning to see that kids get to learn geometry in the abstract and unless they go for some kind of technical or engineering career, will never know "life critical" use of it.

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).