Wow this belongs in the comment museum, excellently written and insightful. It reminds me of the The Body Rituals of the Nacirema[1]. I wish more people wrote things like this, it gives a dash of objectivity to how things are.

I agree with both you and GP though, in some ways things really haven't changed at all despite these technological changes. If you can't see the constancy too then I don't think you see the big picture. All of this that we have is a product of the same work that began back then, all for the same reasons. You have to abstract to see the constancy. I think you really miss out if you don't see what GP is saying too.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacirema

Thank you.

I agree.

Well, except for the parts that were compliments to me, which I don't have enough objectivity to pass judgment on.

All of what you're describing happened after the Industrial Revolution, and most in the last 20 years. Yet the cutoff between Ancient Times and "our era" (?) happened 2000+ years ago, for some reason.

Also, we don't fly "like birds". We are flown, crammed into metal tubes that are more similar to ancient galleries carved in mountains, mentioned in the OP, than to any bird.

Edit: As a matter of fact I don't understand your response (or your tone). I didn't say that nothing had changed since the building of the pyramids. I said we're the same, and is that in dispute? Has human nature changed more in the last 4,500 years than in the 500,000 to 1,000,000 years of its evolution? Or in the last 100 years? Because we drive cars?

I think you're both right. We live completely differently now, but it's not clear that our essence has greatly changed.

In particular, that our values have changed is wonderful. But that's a cultural development. I'm convinced most of the people I've known would have shrugged at slavery like most Romans did, had they grown up with it. (Maybe they would have questioned it as children, but by adulthood they would have choked those questions down.)

Undoubtedly Khufu's subjects would be aghast if you shrugged at damming the Nile; perhaps the Romans would be aghast if you shrugged at oral sex, conscientious objectors, and female bosses instructing male employees; Hindutva activists today are aghast if you shrug at eating hamburgers, to the point that they may lynch you if they catch you slaughtering a cow. Some of our moral values are of course the correct ones, slavery being actually objectively immoral unlike those other examples, but generally people only know their culture's value system, not the objectively correct one. And some of our moral values are definitely not the correct ones.

The modern, western world still had slavery as recently as 150 years ago, so that too is not really a marker to differentiate between our era and antiquity.

Not to mention all the wars and genocides of the last two centuries, unprecedented in scale and ferocity, which make it hard to pretend we are morally better than any previous generation.

As I mentioned, the Burj Khalifa was built to a significant extent with slave labor, being completed only ten years ago, while the Great Pyramid probably was not, despite what the Greeks thought two thousand years later. In the United States there are some two million prisoners, most of whom also perform slave labor, as did the victims of GULAG.

Perhaps the Khwarazmians would disagree that the genocides of the last two centuries were unprecedented in scale and ferocity.

"Antiquity" is conventionally considered to end about 1500 years ago, though this really only applies to Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_antiquity

The reason for this is the very sparse historical record from the European Dark Ages. Scholars in the High Middle Ages like Petrarch could look back on their own recent history, and then a vast gap of mostly unknown, and then the impressive cultures of Antiquity among whose ruins they lived. We know more about the Dark Ages now than we did then but still not that much.

Here you can see people flying like birds without being canned in metal tubes: https://youtu.be/rvQ9DjJNal0 https://youtu.be/-C_jPcUkVrM https://youtu.be/gtvCnZqZnxc https://youtu.be/UYi9r2eiUhU

It seems likely that we have changed. I suspect Merer's workers, even if they had grown up in modern civilization, would not tolerate being employees, being disarmed, and having their children taken away for education; and probably more of them were dyslexic than in modern populations. But I don't really know.

Generally the rule is that domestic animals are stupider, smaller-skulled, more submissive, weaker, more neotenous, less aggressive, fatter, lower in testosterone, less sexually dimorphic, and possessed of smaller teeth than the wild type (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_syndrome#In_anim...). Modern humans have these traits to a very notable degree compared to, as you allude to, chimpanzees and even Neandertals or Denisovans; but perhaps we have also been substantially domesticated over the last 4500 years, maybe even over the last 2000. Not because of driving cars, but because of having kings. Are we the Eloi? I don't think Wells thought of the aristocracy as the Morlocks.

Even if your genes were the same, would you be the same person if you had grown up never seeing an alphabet, never driving a car, two of your siblings dying in childhood, and never hearing of a government (like most of the world in Merer's time) or at least of a democracy (like Merer's workers)?

This would be the case if I was born in the countryside around Paris in 1400 or almost anywhere in the world around the same time.

As recently as 1840 still, France had a king (as did much of Europe), there were of course no cars, phones, etc., and over 60% of the French population could not sign their name.

Again, everything you are talking about in your original response relates to the very recent past, and that wasn't my point. I would agree the world changed beyond recognition in the last 50 years (although I would disagree it had much effect on us as a species).

But my original point was that the separation of history in "antiquity" and "our era" is arbitrary, and that we can relate to people from 4,500 years ago as well as our great great grand parents -- and perhaps more.

I see! I think you're right that change has been very fast recently, very much faster than anything innate about us can change, and of course that post-Renaissance Europe was in many ways very similar to Classical Antiquity. That's why it was called the "Renaissance", after all.

But there was a fairly sharp break between Late Antiquity and the Dark Ages, which I don't think is really arbitrary, except in the sense that it was only a local phenomenon and so only appears if your focus was Europe. It wasn't as big a change as the last century or two has been, but it was a big change. The progression of the Middle Ages was much more gradual, but it too eventually produced enormous changes, and certainly the Reformation and the consequent introduction of the Westphalian form of state were enormously consquential.

My great-great-grandparents were probably born around 1860, mostly in the US. So not only had they heard of governments, they knew about democracy and literacy, though some of them probably weren't themselves literate. They traveled and shipped goods by railroad, which was of course made of metal smelted from stones. They bought and sold things with coins and even paper money (though not fiat money). Some of them probably drove cars, though I've only heard definite stories of their children, my great-grandparents, doing so. Some of them made phone calls. Glass was mass-produced in their lifetimes, though greenhouses were still only for the rich, and steel-framed skyscrapers were built. They knew many illnesses were caused by "germs". Hot-air balloons were a century before their births; some of them may have lived to see not only heavier-than-air flight but also the Great War. I don't know if any of them ever underwent anesthesia, but it became widespread for surgery in their lifetimes.

So, I don't know that it's true that I can relate to Merer as well as to my great-great-grandparents. Merer didn't have iron, coinage, flight, germ theory, anesthesia, mass production, and so on. He probably didn't know the Earth moved or that the stars were suns. He might not have known the Earth was round. Even the Polynesians hadn't yet learned to navigate over open ocean. He didn't have wheeled vehicles; chariots would be introduced centuries later by the Hyksos.

AFAICT, the cut-off for "ancient" is the fall of the Roman Empire. Basically ~395 CE. Likely due to European civilization needing to rebuild post dark ages.

This is certainly problematic for many reasons, the largest being that civilization went along uninterrupted outside of Europe.

This is the single best comment I have ever read on HN.

Of course you won't see it glorified by HN folk, cause they're entirely elsewhere vibrationally. Too busy complaining. "Well, someone has to complain! Someone has to keep others accountable!" they cry. May be true, maybe not, but when all we do is complain, nothing gets done. Not for lack of effort and busyness, but for lack of faith and goodwill.

On the contrary, if no one complaints nothing will happen. Moaning always comes before invention. Its just not the moaners themselves who make anything happen but they are very much part of the delicate balance. You could invent something without moaners but no one would recognize it.

Take this one for example:

> bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies

The amount of moaning we still have to do about this? If we fail at that task, this fire stuff will be sure to be the end of us.

I suppose that in a sense any non-playful attempt to change the state of affairs, whether directed at technical progress or not, is rooted in a "complaint": you imagine a possible future and judge that the current state of affairs is worse by comparison.

And you cannot simply ignore the present when you do this. Any attempt to bring that future about necessarily begins by taking stock of the resources available in the present: if you try to hike to a mountain peak without taking your gaze from that peak, you will stumble and twist your ankle. But that is not a judgmental, condemnatory way of perceiving the present; it is a factual evaluation of the means available to you in the present, similar to the factual evaluation of the possibilities that exist in a possible future.

So I don't know that I agree with your thesis that progress is rooted in dissatisfaction, though many people do.

> The amount of moaning we still have to do about this? If we fail at that task, this fire stuff will be sure to be the end of us.

This comment suggests to me that you do not yet adequately appreciate the risks of pervasive surveillance and precision-guided munitions, by comparison with which the risks of thermonuclear warheads pale.

Thank you! FWIW it has 50 upvotes, so I guess several people liked it. There's a lot of stuff somewhat like this in Dercuano, Derctuo, and Dernocua (http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua) and in particular the story of Lao Yuxi in Dernocua is especially similar to it in nature.

I have to say I usually regret commenting here on Character Assassination News, more or less for the reason you say. I think it's an unhealthy, self-destructive habit of mine.

Other recent comments of mine you might enjoy, though some of it is certainly "complaining":

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736 (calculating the energy cost of the lowest-tech-possible way to do atmospheric carbon capture, upvoted to 7)

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29880287 (offering a particularly clean formulation of binary search, downvoted to -1)

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28926494 (trying and failing to estimate the relative externalized environmental costs of using a plastic bottle and washing a glass one, upvoted to 20)

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29505838 (on the historical development of the "willful infringement" doctrine in patent law, including citations to caselaw and law review articles, and in particular how reading patents can expose you or your employer to treble damages; upvoted to 2 points and flagged)

5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29697411 (on why metallurgical research is still more or less driven by experiment rather than computation, upvoted to 74)

6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28660097 (my dismaying epiphany, based on empirical data, that I'm only about three times as fast writing things in Python as I would be in C, despite extensive experience in Python, and that it's often probably not worth the drawbacks. Probably a modern C alternative like Rust would be better; upvoted to 3)

7. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29815027 (on beating SciPy mathematical optimization algorithms on a circuit design problem in under 250 milliseconds with just a list comprehension, unvoted at 1)

8. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144119 (a list of the biggest unanswered questions in physics today, upvoted to 10)

Other recent comments of mine that I thought were good but didn't make it into the top 8:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750891 (just quoting the Tipitaka on the list of games the Buddha would not play, upvoted to 25)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29704120 (on ways to generate the Sierpinski triangle, to which I would add http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/skitch#!@12rr[t[[email protected]]f...])

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842158 (on the energy balance of industrial agriculture, current phosphate reserves, and the degree of sustainability of current nitrogen fixation and phosphate extraction practices)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28678098 (on how to use coverage reports to improve software quality, upvoted to 21)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28592961 (a set of shitty shell scripts that constitutes a superior substitute for the YouTube Web UI, although right now youtube-dl and ytdlp seem to be getting throttled)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28333404 (complaining about line-extension fraud: "Pyrex" that isn't borosilicate, Saran Wrap containing no Saran, Sudafed without pseudoephedrine, and Western Digital's shingled disk drives, upvoted to 12)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28185545 (on how it's a problem that 90% of startup founders' jobs are storytelling, upvoted to 14)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29844706 (explaining why electrolytic hydrogen production with renewable energy is a viable option, though see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29857648 for some process efficiency issues)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401159 (on why web hosting providers should not censor terrorists, upvoted to 28; see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401109 on the history of liberalism, upvoted to 9 but with a followup downvoted to -1 and another upvoted to 8)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28611769 (on the problem of nonlinearity in hedonic utilitarianism, illustrated with the Cheesecake Factory and Michelin stars, though someone mistook it for an attempt at a Grand Unified Theory of Restaurant Hedonics; upvoted to 18)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834530 (on when rationality is or is not valuable, in particular on the importance of honoring Galileos rather than Maos)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28635172 (a perspective on electronic payment in Argentina and the tradeoffs of living there)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28721065 (on the history of refrigeration and the ice trade, upvoted to 10)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28509068 (on why reasoning from fictional evidence is unreliable and has historically led to bad conclusions, also coincidentally mentioning heart and kidney transplants, upvoted to 8)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29833195 (why it is impossible for China to be exporting its coal in the form of Bitcoin: it imports coal and doesn't export Bitcoin, and the whole Bitcoin network uses only 0.3% of China's energy consumption)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28441895 (on whether it is possible for the humans to learn algebra, upvoted to 8)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28613812 (on common misconceptions about Bayesian statistics)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28362300 (on the relative path losses of active and passive sonar and what that implies for submarine warfare, upvoted to 9)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28440912 (on what sorts of extraterrestrial life could potentially evolve to be intelligent)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29774257 (on the economic structure of why Google Search is no good any more)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28591650 (on including generalized lattice operators in programming languages, and the cognitive HCI aspects of programming language grammar design, upvoted to 8)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29735228 (on how Winnie-The-Pooh still is not in the public domain in many countries, apparently against the wishes of the Milne family)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28466492 (on some simple DSP for mouse wiggle detection to increase mouse pointer size in 12–18 instructions, upvoted to 2)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712106 (on companies fraudulently claiming to use two-factor authentication)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28467260 (on the history of tracked vehicles in polar exploration)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29671402 (on user interface design for algebraic-notation calculator programs)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29558779 (on using pencil and paper as a user interface for computer programs by way of a camera)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29557929 (on FTDI's unprosecuted criminal vandalism of their customers' customers' customers' hardware)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29557730 (on the problems of archival and preservation of computerized documents such as HyperCard stacks)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29504940 (on murder in Oakland)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29477589 (a very short retrospective on the EPIC 2014 video and modern journalism)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29476060 (on why we should eliminate copyright; more detail in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29559952)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29332777 (on the mineral resources used in modern electronics)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29321232 (on why you should still pay attention to P/E ratios of stocks)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29286058 (on why the University of California's decision to drop standardized test scores as an admission criterion is unpopular with the ethnic minorities they have benefited)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29171793 (on whether Perl was born at JPL or at Unisys)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29158664 (trying to figure out how much nuclear power PRC is actually building)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29152453 (complaining about people commemorating my dead friend's birthday by speculating that if he were alive he would support their political viewpoint, one which he steadfastly opposed his entire life)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144483 (on how the time gap from scientific discoveries to their technological deployment has or hasn't changed over the last century)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29143312 (on what would enable unfunded physics experimenters to make significant discoveries, getting into the nature of the historical interplay between theoretical and experimental physics)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29136343 (on social mobility and social justice in the Roman Empire)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29072399 (on why nuclear reactor development, and some other aspects of progress, stagnated after 01960)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28937181 (on the non-glorification of violence in US popular culture by contrast with the Iliad)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28885057 (an overview of data structures used for efficient implementations of text editors)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28878848 (comparing the relative costs of tracing GC, reference counting, and manual memory management; see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28878635)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28853236 (on Jacque Fresco's utopian Venus Project and the resulting Zeitgeist Movement)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733282 (on why it is bad for journalists to use "hacking" to mean "computer crime", which propagates confusion and fear of us)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731861 (on the benefits of notation as a tool of thought)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28679454 (what an urgent new feature with a short deadline on a software project might consist of)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28679139 (on which software project process practices are really valuable in my experience)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28678845 (on why frequent releases in particular are very valuable)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28588402 (a totally wrong comment about oxalic acid for rust removal that prompted an excellent reply)

All of those things and more are described in ancient texts that we consider mythology. The only thing we can be sure of is that our stuff will leave little more than a trace given enough time. What silly stories they would make [say] after the next ice age?

If only we could see, just once more, those 5000 kg African elephants run though the desert pulling a multi ton brick (or the vimanas if that is what they used)... see, once more, how those ships are loaded and how they are build.

But just their spreadsheets isn't so bad. The logistics alone is enough to impress us.

I suppose that when we have a tradeoff between longevity and literally any other useful feature of an artifact, we generally sacrifice longevity; at a 3% annual discount rate, if you can make a durable good last forever instead of 40 years, the extra NPV is only about 44% (or lower if the scrap value is nonzero), and for a substantial number of things we use an even higher discount rate than 3%. Even so, the remains of our civilization would be impossible to avoid seeing for many millennia if it collapsed. Numerous recognizable artifacts would survive for hundreds of millions of years if humanity died today.

I mentioned that the Burj Khalifa will be gone in a century or two; because it's built in a place with corrosive groundwater, it relies on cathodic protection to prevent corrosion in its foundations, and even its above-ground structure will spall due to the corrosion of the steel frame in a few decades, but the crumbled chunks of concrete will remain visibly artificial for hundreds of millions of years. Similarly no lathes and almost no papyri have survived from Khufu's time, but lathes clearly date back at least to Old Kingdom Egypt, before hieroglyphics, because we have the turned stone vessels they made.

What would be left of our own vimanas 4500 years from now if they are left out to weather? The steel parts will surely be just rust. I suspect that the aluminum and titanium parts, if not "looted" by "treasure hunters", will survive for that period of time with only a logarithmically thicker layer of hard protective oxide. The inconel superalloys of the jet engine gas turbines will not weather, though some lesser stainless steels will cease to be so stainless over such a timespan.

The polymers vary widely: cellulose acetate and most of the elastomers are inherently unstable and will degrade into a nasty goo in only a few decades, while PTFE (teflon), polyimide (kapton), polyethylene, polypropylene, and I think PVDF (kynar) are stable over geological timescales. Other organic polymers are in between; in particular I think the glass-fiber-reinforced epoxy circuit boards will last millennia without difficulty, and though the phenol-formaldehyde thermoset used for single-sided circuit boards is also a thermoset, I suspect it might only last a few centuries. PVC has to be mixed with stabilizers to avoid spontaneous degradation in a matter of years, and I don't know how long those stabilizers will last. Surely the naugahyde business-class seat cushions and the polyurethane seat cushions will become as brittle as a mummy; perhaps they will crumble into dust even without disturbance.

Also stable over geological timescales are the glass in the instrument panel and the hair-fine copper wires of the wiring harness, though those, too, will tend to attract treasure hunters. The silicon chips may not still be operable 4500 years from now (due to Flash decay, dopant diffusion, and tin whiskers) but the microscopic patterns on their surfaces will remain, protected by a thick layer of amorphous quartz. The harsh acids today's treasure hunters use to remove their gold bond wires leave the passivated silicon unharmed.

In the playground of my elementary school, I collected thousands of shards of the painted pots from the lost civilization of the Anasazi. They bore abundant silent witness to the perfection enjoyed by the art of pottery in that ancient civilization before its collapse, even devoid of the ephemeral leavings of soups and seeds they once held, and of course lacking any writing. Many of the timbers of the Anasazi survive aboveground, but few places are dry enough to permit that; but the carpentry Eythra 1 well from 7000 years ago, before the Copper Age, was found to have wedged tenons: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

So I feel safe in asserting that neither the Anasazi nor Khufu's subjects nor the heroes of the Mahabharata knew any art capable of building vimanas. I'm less sure of the settlements predating Jericho and Çatalhöyük: today most of them are under tens of meters of water, and Atlit-Yam seems to have escaped notice for thousands of years despite being in the harbor of Haifa, right in the cradle of civilization. The Antikythera Mechanism survived in a recognizable, if not operable, form, despite two millennia of brine; how many other such paragons of the mechanical art have been lost?

By writing in this style, you try to imagine what an ancient person who sees the world today would describe it as.

I do not know exactly why, but this style of writing is profoundly alienating to me. I think it's because it sounds like it is before our "rational turn" during the enlightenment and renaissance.

I don't mean this in a bad way, but I think your utilization of it is not compelling on its own for your point.

I don't think it is bad that it is alienating to you, although I hope that didn't cause you to suffer. Conveying the alien nature of antiquity (and, by implication, of the future) was much of my purpose in thus employing ostranenie.

> But many fewer people are born compared to our population (which is 250 times bigger than in Merer's time), because now people do not become pregnant unless they want to, usually.

Ancient people had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium_(antiquity) for the same purpose. They likely used it up to extinction.

Aye, and in the last century a huge fraction of the planet's biodiversity has been lost. But I don't think it's clear that silphium and similar herbal drugs constituted an oral contraceptive with effectiveness on par with the Pill.

So basically everything is amazing and nobody is happy

Perhaps happiness is not produced by amazement alone.

Perhaps, but there is one thing that I'm sure of, that it is not produced by complaining either.

I really love this comment, thank you