Re:Antikythera Mechanism
by Rebelgecko on Sunday July 28, 2019 @01:30AM
(#20546013)
One of the things most interesting to me about the mechanism is that it devotes a lot of gears and hardware to making small corrections which get completely overwhelmed by the inaccuracy of the manufacturing.
It's actually possible to build a working machine lathe out of the parts of an ordinary car engine. If you really wanted to make society collapse resistant, including a manual about how to do so, a couple of tungsten carbide bits, and a couple of hacksaw blades with every car would probably do the trick. I think everything else you need (welding equipment, drills, etc) would be fairly straightforward to cobble together.
It would take another 1000 years of slow incremental improvements in manufacturing to be able to make one of these devices accurate enough to be useful.
If you want to make civilization resistant to collapse and increase its ability to recover quickly: bury gear cutters, lathes, magnifying glasses, precision tools, etc. The most difficult part will be bootstrapping the ability to build accurate tools with which to rebuild an industrial society.