Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies

https://1517.substack.com/p/forgetting-the-asbestos

by areoform • 4 years ago

283 209 4 years ago

1517.substack.com

linuxftw• 4 years ago

This fate is befalling the entire post-industrialized world.

Boeing learned this the hard way when they opened up that plant in SC. Institutional knowledge can't always be replicated.

mach1ne• 4 years ago

Although we attempt to store information in external mediums, it's humans who make the world go round. Funny to think that, in practice, the collective knowledge of mankind is a fuzzy imprecise mess coupled with a few scribbled notes.

Gumbercules• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure the world would keep going round if humans did not exist.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS• 4 years ago

Yeah, but once the humans are gone, why keep the simulation running?

leobg• 4 years ago

True. Engelbart would be appalled to see where things are at in 2022.

danbmil99• 4 years ago

I recall reading that the lack of documentation for the Saturn 5 was related to politics behind the space shuttle. The accusation was that NASA intentionally lost or destroyed the Saturn V docs so the space shuttle would be the only option.

indymike• 4 years ago

This happens often in the military. For example, shredding the machines used to build the F-14 and F-22.

HyperSane3• 4 years ago

I read that they actually carefully documented how to make the F-22 and also stored all the tooling. We could restart making them but it wouldn't be cost effective to do so.

plasticchris2• 4 years ago

And the Blackbird, sadly

elil172• 4 years ago

Another, closely related example: A lot of the welding abilities needed to build another Saturn V were lost. We couldn’t replicate the rocket without having a lot of people relearn old welding techniques.

avmich• 4 years ago

We couldn’t replicate the rocket without having a lot of people relearn old welding techniques.

We can perhaps create sufficiently close replicas, which may work well enough, using very different technologies.

throwaway4aday2• 4 years ago

This seems at odds with the current production of several launch systems of comparable or greater size. Do you know which parts required these special welding techniques?

elil172• 4 years ago

We have better ways to do things now - adhesives, new welding techniques that impose different design constraints, etc. IIRC there was some thought of reusing parts of the Saturn V design on the Artemis program but it was not practical because of the welds involved.

HyperSane3• 4 years ago

Making a Saturn V today wouldn't make sense because manufacturing tech has improved tremendously since then. They didn't even have CAD! A modern design would take perhaps a tenth of the hours of labor.

pfdietz3• 4 years ago

In particular, and apropos to the comment you are responding to, we have a wonderful new way to weld aluminum alloys: friction stir welding. It was invented in the 1990s, long after Apollo.

agumonkey2• 4 years ago

aren't there other industries with similar welding skills ? nuclear plants seem to have high grade requirements, maybe not space grade right off the bat but also maybe not too far off ?

csours• 4 years ago

I'm looking at a pile of several hundred shell scripts, and I feel this intimately and personally. What was your intention script author xb412j?

---

For a very different example, look to older satire groups like The Goon Show or Firesign Theatre or Monty Python. Monty Python may not be old to some people reading this, but try to explain some of the things they were making fun of. Many of the sketches are timeless, but many are very 'of their time'

abathur• 4 years ago

There could probably be a form of punishment or a group party game based on deciding whether or not a short option in a pipeline is a bug or correct (without comments, of course).

Mix legacy/GNU/BSD/*box options if you'd like to ruin relationships.

_trampeltier• 4 years ago

The Air Force Is Having To Reverse Engineer Parts Of Its Own Stealth Bomber

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39537/the-air-force-ne...

virgulino• 4 years ago

They also had to reverse engineer some nuclear warheads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

eclipxe• 4 years ago

That was in the article.

plasticchris2• 4 years ago

Maybe John Romero can help, he mentioned working on it. I guess there’s a 6502 in there somewhere

cogman109• 4 years ago

Asbestos encapsulates a problem with society at large. We, unfortunately, are simply too binary in our thinking "Oh, asbestos causes cancer? We better purge it from everything everywhere".

The context of when and why (and to who) asbestos causes cancer is simply ignored.

This sort of problem exists everywhere. If something bad happens or is caused by something (politics, economics, etc) we are simply too quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

From a tech standpoint, I see this a lot. Postgres at my current company got banned because one team one time had a bad experience with it (after they misused it).

Retric3• 4 years ago

Managing complexity is important even if it results in suboptimal solutions.

Imagine if when building a house you needed to shape every single brick for it’s actual load. Sure you end up using less materials, but you lost economies of scale and suddenly need vast quantities of computing power for minimal gain.

Using uniform bricks and banning stuff may seem wasteful, but it enables efficiency elsewhere.

cogman109• 4 years ago

That's not what's happening in terms of asbestos. Rather, it's more like "Electricity has caused buildings to burn down, so lets ban electricity".

Rather than focusing on the safe use of a material, we instead lean towards removing it all together. Older materials with known faults (such as wood being flammable) are deemed acceptable simply due to having known weaknesses in a period where we didn't care about safety. If we found out wood causes cancer, we'd still use it in building and furniture because we've always used it in building and furniture.

It's not an economies of scale problem.

When you get right down to it, the people that got mesothelioma from asbestos pretty much universally directly worked with it (usually in the form of doing things like blowing it in loose form for insulation).

Yet we spent an ungodly amount of money and time stripping asbestos from buildings that had been there for decades not causing any problems. Ironically, directly exposing people to asbestos in the process (more than you'd ever be exposed to it was left undisturbed).

jollyllama• 4 years ago

A lot of this is a result of culpability/liability/blame. Intelligent use of aesbestos will be precluded by extreme legal risk. Your coworkers probably avoided repercussions for their experiences by shifting the blame to Postgres.

pixl97• 4 years ago

One way to look at this is when process and policy is not followed.

In IT we see this when information is lost (no backup policy), or information is leaked (no security policy). Using technology with no policy/process is almost always a risk factor for business. If said posts team had created a policy and process it's very likely the incident would not have occurred in the first place.

With products control is very rarely tightly held. There is a supply chain from where it's mined out of the ground all the way to destruction of the product which may be decades or even centuries away. Trying to ensure that your customer use a product intelligently over that long of time frame is too risky for most businesses.

permo-w2• 4 years ago

the problem there is that if you don’t entirely ban asbestos and ensure that everyone knows asbestos = cancer, then like a cancer, corporate interests and the profit motive will ensure that it slips and slides back into usage to the point where it becomes a problem again

with public health risks, strong reaction is absolutely fine, and I wish we had more tendency towards it, not less. let’s do something drastic about micro-plastics!

cogman109• 4 years ago

Well, this is exactly the problem, it's completely arbitrary and based on public outrage what gets banned and what doesn't. If we can't motivate enough people to care about something, it won't be banned.

That's not a way to run health policy. I'd certainly like more action against PFAS, for example. At very least, more science done to know exactly how harmful it is (especially given how it's permeated so much of the public drinking water).

But, would I ban PFAS all together? Heck no. Rather I'd want to have a better understanding of where they should and shouldn't be used and how we should treat PFAS chemical outputs.

hwillis• 4 years ago

To illustrate this: Asbestos is only banned in spray-on insulation, pipe insulation, paper, flooring, and new uses. The actual reason its not used as much (and it certainly is still used) is because of the public opinion and threat of lawsuits.

https://web.archive.org/web/20121022215630/http://www.epa.go...

EPA does NOT track the manufacture, processing, or distribution in commerce of asbestos-containing products. It would be prudent for a consumer or other buyer to inquire as to the presence of asbestos in particular products.

reedf1• 4 years ago

Interested to know how one can misuse postgres enough to ban it!

cogman109• 4 years ago

They stored data in the array and then did a bunch of queries against that array. Queries like "select * from foo where array contains value".

Shocker, that's slow.

dragonelite• 4 years ago

nuclear energy is also good example i think.

WalterBright• 4 years ago

If gasoline cars were invented today, they would never be allowed to be sold to consumers, because gas is too toxic and too flammable to allow ordinary people to use it.

amluto• 4 years ago

Like how hydrogen cars are in development but are waaay too dangerous to sell, so you can’t buy one.

Except you can. The Toyota Mirai is available and quite heavily subsidized. Whether buying one is a good idea is a different question, although the main issues with owning one don’t involve safety as far as I know.

Gigachad• 4 years ago

Cars in general are extremely dangerous. I can’t think of anything else we allow that’s as bad.

highwaylights3• 4 years ago

Well, OK, except that there’s an infinitely long-lived bystander risk to not purging asbestos from all use.

You could (for instance) argue that once the product exists, and is in place, it poses no further risk to anyone - this is a common suggestion but is demonstrably, dangerously false. It’s a rock, it never breaks down. Its state never changes over mortal timescales. Eventually a building, or a rocket, or a train will be refurbished or scrapped - and when that happens people in the area are at no less risk than they ever were.

iseanstevens• 4 years ago

I think in the case of a non-reusable rocket being launched into space there could be an argument for it, assuming extreme precautions at installation and some calculation/precaution in case the rocket fails in atmosphere.

It could even lower the net asbestos on earth :) (not /s, though I attempting to add humor)

areoform10• 4 years ago

Author here, while I agree with some of your points, phasing out technologies is less of a problem as much as forgetting them. For example, we have far better insulators than asbestos now that can serve as thermal protection systems if we ever build a rocket of this scale again. One example of these new technologies are aerogels. In 2012, NASA showed off the HIAD, Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator, it's a flexible heat shield that's made out of aerogel, https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/game_changing_de...

Plus toxic materials are very much still in use in the space industry, including asbestos. They're used as separators in fuel cells, insulation for missiles, etc

Asbestos was banned for buildings not for the space industry. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/decades-after-proof-of-its...

It will be replaced slowly as better materials become available.

cogman109• 4 years ago

One example of these new technologies are aerogels.

And, to be fair, if you could use aerogels, you should use aerogels. They are way better at insulation than asbestos. They are simply cost prohibitive in most cases.

Despite what it may look like, I'm not trying to shill for asbestos :D. I just think it's a microcosm of a problem with society.

schlauerfox• 4 years ago

I think more to your point, specific government secrets get forgotton because they are closely kept under punishment, open access science, by letter or by journal has been going well for 600+ recorded years. Trades even longer by apprenticeship. Clockmakers and any other as well.

bad_alloc• 4 years ago

Ironically we might have also forgotten the massive cleanup that was needed for or buildings to either remove or permanently bind asbestos. How do you drill a hole into a wall, do maintenance on cables and pipes or tear down a building when it might emit enough asbestos needles to give you cancer at any disturbance? It is not sustainable.

CorrectHorseBat• 4 years ago

Forgotten? We have just started doing that

JumpCrisscross• 4 years ago

We, unfortunately, are simply too binary in our thinking "Oh, asbestos causes cancer? We better purge it from everything everywhere".

The author's point being we not only purge it physically, but also culturally and thus intellectually. (I feel like there's a meta point around this thread being de-railed by discussions about how bad asbestos is.)

thaumasiotes3• 4 years ago

We, unfortunately, are simply too binary in our thinking "Oh, asbestos causes cancer? We better purge it from everything everywhere".

I don't think this has anything to do with the OP. It is focused on the process of knowledge being lost simply through the raw fact that nobody remembers it. This is applied to everything:

We have lost more than 50% of all feature films made before the 1950s

The message of the piece is that we've forgotten the asbestos because, when you go to look at the preserved rockets today, it isn't there.

userbinator• 4 years ago

when you go to look at the preserved rockets today, it isn't there.

...probably because it was removed for aesthetic and health reasons.

alerighi• 4 years ago

The thing is that it poses a risk that can be avoided, since there are alternative materials with the same (or better) properties that doesn't cause cancer.

Asbestos was widely adopted because it was a very cheap material, they did know that it was dangerous but that fact was hidden by the companies selling asbestos containing materials for profit. There is no reason to use it.

Not only asbestos, for example in the past they used to put radioactive material in daily life object, such as clocks, dials, etc to illuminate them in the dark. Obviously it was not a good idea, since the risk it poses didn't justify the purpose. Same thing with smoke detectors, now we are no longer using radioactive particles in them, basically because we have better electronics that not only can replace radioactive material but can be more effective in detecting a fire.

nostrademons• 4 years ago

Most professionals who work with asbestos don't recommend "purge it from everything everywhere." Rather, the usual recommendation is to leave it intact and don't touch it, unless it's going to be disturbed in a way that'll release the fibers anyway (eg. imminent renovation or demolition, accessible to small children). Even then, oftentimes abatement consists of encapsulation, i.e. just wrap it in some physical barrier that will prevent it from being disturbed. It's banned in new construction, but choosing to use something different when building anew is a lot less expensive than ripping it out of existing construction.

himinlomax• 4 years ago

Asbestos encapsulates a problem with society at large. We, unfortunately, are simply too binary in our thinking "Oh, asbestos causes cancer? We better purge it from everything everywhere".

There is actually a good reason for this: the slippery slope is not always a fallacy.

taneq2• 4 years ago

I worked with a guy like that once, anything he’d tried and it didn’t work perfectly was forever forbidden as “tried that, didn’t work.” Nobody else was allowed to attempt it.

MisterTea• 4 years ago

And I don’t understand why. What did she hear that I didn’t?

Easy answer: Her personal zeitgeist. The author seems to focus on the lyrical meaning of the song being the root cause for her emotion. But her reaction is likely far more complex than "satire of communism" but a time capsule or snap shot of memories and emotions of her world when she heard this song. It not only recalls memories of a painful part of her life but also the pleasant parts: friends, relations, family, things and places which are long gone; A temporal marker to a place which she cannot travel to.

Of course the author kind of explains this in the next paragraph, but then seemingly backtracks to her interpretation of the lyrics: "We will never be able to truly understand or feel how the satire hit under the weight of an oppressive communist regime." I highly doubt it was only about the weight of an oppressive communist regime.

When I hear "eye of the tiger" I can get a bit emotional. It has nothing to do with "Rising up to the challenge" or the band Survivor but the whole of the period in which I heard the song. It brings back a simpler time: childhood bedroom, my father was still alive, the joy of being a kid and discovering rock music. It's so much more than the subject of the song and lyrics...

Night_Thastus• 4 years ago

This is an excellent article. It's fascinating (if a bit sad) to see examples of what was once common knowledge disappear for no good reason.

buscoquadnary• 4 years ago

It's this exact situation that makes me fear the most about Copilot how long before all our understanding and knowledge is lost, and we collectively descend into superstition that forbids tampering at risk of breaking something.

Copilot seems to allow us to write more code, but the problem was never the amount of code produced but understanding the code that would solve the problem. It worries me what we are losing

But I have faith

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c0balt• 4 years ago

The first part should be (assuming ascii) the Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus opening speech

exar0815• 4 years ago

https://youtu.be/WyK7lX4sk0c

I can definitely recommend the music, very atmospheric, very alien.

munificent• 4 years ago

The article laments this but I think it's important to understand forgetting as an essential part of progress. We all have finite mental capacity and attention. Time spent learning outdated tools and processes is time not available to use for more valuable ends.

We understand this deeply when it comes to software architecture where encapsulation and information hiding are fundamental principles but it applies everywhere. There is a value in not knowing, or not needing to know, because it frees up brainpower for other stuff.

permo-w2• 4 years ago

am I wrong in thinking that the author is over-estimating the ubiquity of the image of the Saturn V?

I googled it, assuming he was talking about this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Space_Sh...

because for me this is the standard image of a space rocket. I don’t recall ever seeing a picture of the Saturn V, but perhaps this is an age thing?

Vecr• 4 years ago

The Saturn V was the first and second stage of the system that sent humans to the moon as part of the Apollo program, that's why a huge number of people knew about it. I'm not sure what you mean by "an age thing" (are you too young? too old?), but it's in the "current" paper copy encyclopedias (most even have images) that I assume most schools still have, and encyclopedias from the 1980s and 1990s appear to as well, so it's not just a 1970s thing.

mhneu• 4 years ago

The context of when and why (and to who) asbestos causes cancer is simply ignored.

Asbestos causes a very, very nasty cancer - mesothelioma - that causes almost certain death. Painful death. With a very bad prognosis. And mesothelioma is caused mainly by asbestos.

There's a reason why we purged asbestos. No one wants to get mesothelioma.

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/malignant-mesothelioma/causes-...

The main risk factor for pleural mesothelioma is exposure to asbestos. In fact, most cases of pleural mesothelioma have been linked to high levels of asbestos exposure, usually in the workplace.

Note that talc is a mineral crystal/fiber a little like asbestos, and talc is connected to ovarian/uterine cancer. Let's not play around with dusty tiny pieces of rock, they seem to be bad for our bodies.

areoform10• 4 years ago

Author here, the point of the piece isn't the asbestos. It's that we literally (in the original sense of the word) forgot the asbestos; asbestos was used as a part of the first stage F-1 engine's thermal protection system for the famous Saturn V rocket.

As the insulation was applied at the very last step, there aren't many photos of the final product. Add the presence of the cancer-causing asbestos, none of the existing displays and museum pieces show this vital component.

Because the museums don't reflect this fact, it doesn't exist in popular culture. And because it doesn't exist in popular culture, and that the people who built the Saturn V are dying off, we are largely in the process of forgetting what the most famous machine of the 20th century looked like.

The point of the piece is the forgetting. Not the asbestos.

highwaylights3• 4 years ago

Given that’s the case, you didn’t need to include Asbestos in the title of the article to garner more clicks, as I’m sure you must have realised it would have done.

taeric7• 4 years ago

This has my curious. I could have sworn every space museum I went to made a point about the asbestos coating. Just an odd fake memory of mine? (Sincere question, btw. I have more synthetic memories than I'd care to admit.)

themitigating• 4 years ago

The information on asebestos can be found in some book or technical documents

29athrowaway• 4 years ago

It was used for snow effects in old movies. Like The Wizard of Oz

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pzfTz-tIbTY

Really terrible if you think about it.

femto• 4 years ago

A close relative worked for a company that made asbestos cement products in the day.

The factory contained an automated production line, about 100m long. The first step was a room into which the raw asbestos fibre was blown. From there it went into the main machine. The door to the room had a glass window, through which the "snow storm" inside could be seen.

One of the old hands in the factory related a story whereby new people would be locked in the room and their mates would crowd around the window to watch the snowman show.

A lot of the people I knew from that company died from mesothelioma, including the person who told me that story. (My relative was not one of them.)

The upper echelons of the company knew the true risk (as it emerged later) but it was downplayed, within the company. Most of the workers truly believed that the risk wasn't that great.

taneq2• 4 years ago

I hope they gave everyone radium for their health afterwards! :P

peterpost2• 4 years ago

You've clearly not even read the article.

oliveshell• 4 years ago

For the record, talc doesn’t seem to be dangerous on its own.

The problem is the geology of many talc deposits. Anywhere talc has formed metamorphically, it naturally co-occurs with asbestiform minerals. [1]

As a result, talc mined from these sources is unavoidably subject to asbestos contamination.

[1] https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70027257

echelon• 4 years ago

Asbestos is still being used in industrial settings today.

In undergrad, we used it frequently in organic chemistry for thermal reactions like sodium fusion.

We don't see it being installed in places where it can be easily inhaled. But it absolutely still has uses.

joshuanapoli• 4 years ago

The EPA has an action to ban asbestos more completely. https://www.epa.gov/asbestos/epa-actions-protect-public-expo...

larryliu3• 4 years ago

No, it's no longer produced anywhere in the world except Russia.

New industrial projects don't use asbestos. Existing installations are replaced with rockwool, fiberglass or kaowool once it need replacement.

Your undergrad professor wasn't up to date. Kaowool is a drop in replacement.

nyanpasu64• 4 years ago

The example is likely subpar as it is a fictional example

Is placing asbestos around the rocket engines a fabricated example with photoshopped images, or is the description of the design process behind the actual images fictional?

Multicomp• 4 years ago

Documentation can't save us from being human.

No data translated from one medium (brain) to another (paper) and back (brain) is 100% efficient.

But documentation is not only 'tutorials' / how to do something.

Documentation is also 'design' / what to do, 'requirements' / why we're doing it, 'changelog' / why we are making the tweaks we are making in the process.

I'm enough of an antiquarian to be interested in why the phone guy who installed the phone lines for the theme parks did what he did...turns out burying the phone lines directly in the dirt was for a particular reason (cheap / good enough) and for decades, it was indeed good enough. But because nobody read the roll up paper showing the phone line runs, the lines were destroyed when someone came along and installed a roller coaster with a greater than 180 degree turn in that spot, cutting the bundle. The documentation wasn't missing data, but the humans failed to read it.

We do forget things all the time, sure. But don't blame documentation when humans don't read it. The weakness in the system are humans, always.

Now is not the time to give up documenting things. All salutes to the ongoing flamewars over 'code should be self-documenting means I never have to write AnYtHiNg down' aside, someone said civilization advances by the number of things we can write down...because we only have so much wetware / RAM / brain space.

Someone said this and I'm stealing from them: under similar conditions, the wimpiest charcoal on the flimsiest napkin lasts longer than the sharpest mind.

In this knowledge-based industries, no matter our particular focus, we individually would be served better by improving our communication skills, namely documentation of more than just the brittle business processes and API interfaces, but the who/what/when/where/why of what we're doing.

mrw• 4 years ago

I liked Jonathan Blow’s ‘Preventing The Collapse of Civilisation’ talk on the same topic from 2019. [1] Although, it’s more related to software engineering. Previously discussed on a couple occasions. [2][3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317

dale_glass2• 4 years ago

The ending doesn't quite work, and I'd say neither does the article as a whole really.

First, we didn't really forget "greek fire" or "roman concrete" exactly. We don't know what the formula for "greek fire" was exactly because it wasn't recorded. But in modern times we have an amazing chemistry and can come up with a hundred formulas for napalm -- we just don't know which of those matches "greek fire". Nothing was lost but the association between a formula we almost certainly know and a name.

Same goes for roman concrete. We know far more about concrete than the Romans did. We just don't bother to engineer everything to last forever, because that costs money and has little point to it a lot of the time. Yes, some buildings are works of art, but many things just have a function to fulfill, which is often temporary. Nobody is sad that the millions of mass-made soviet residential crappy buildings aren't still as good as new. If they were made to a better standard they'd still be ugly cookie cutter things.

And I'd say the same goes for the Saturn V. We didn't forget material science or heat shielding. We launch plenty rockets and even landed car sized robots on Mars -- that required excellent understanding of heat shielding. If we had any reason to build a modern copy, we'd use whatever shielding is required, after accounting for modern improved materials. We wouldn't be dumbfounded that the thing melted down on the launch pad. That in the popular consciousness we see the engines without the asbestos covering doesn't really mean much of anything.

taeric7• 4 years ago

I'd say this goes to some odd myth that I see all too often. That if "you do it right," you won't have to do it again. Somehow, superior technique and dedication of past attempts was lost and that modern attempts are doomed to failure. In large, paradoxically to the explanation, because we are better at building things that just barely accomplish their goals.

That is, it is an odd blind spot to not realize that "barely exceeding the goal" is often far far harder than over building.

cwkoss3• 4 years ago

I'd be interested in making some concrete objects that can last 1000 years. Could anyone suggest some resources or search terms to learn what 'forever' concrete entails in our modern scientific understanding, and how much more it would cost?

hexane360• 4 years ago

I'm a materials scientist.

Part of the problem is "ancient Roman concrete" is the epitome of selection bias. We basically know why it's strong, and can basically recreate it, but it would take a very long period of process optimization and corrosion testing to get a consistent product we're sure has a long lifespan.

If you want something to last 1000 years, you may be better off cutting it out of a hard, stable stone (like granite).

cpgxiii• 4 years ago

The answer is simple but impractical:

Grossly overbuild the structure, so that it is lightly stressed. Don't use any reinforcing material within the concrete (much of the damage that happens to a modern reinforced concrete structure is the result of the internal reinforcement swelling due to corrosion). Ensure that the structure doesn't freeze (water that penetrates the concrete and freezes will cause cracking).

Note that following these limitations would rule out the vast majority of modern concrete structures.

kasey_junk• 4 years ago

Don’t try to make a single piece of forever concrete. Make tons of the stuff and spread it around, particularly in places conducive to long life for concrete. Then let survivor bias sort it out.

ridgeguy• 4 years ago

O/T, but materials longevity is a trigger for me.

Raise the bar and use diamond.

I used to be in the CVD diamond world. On my honeymoon nearly 30 years ago, my wife and I were hiking in the Himalayas, in Sikkim.

My Dad loved diamonds and used them in his work (geophysical drilling, using diamond bits). He passed a year before my marriage. I wanted to leave a rem meminisse eum a in his honor.

So I grew a 2mm thick x 2.5cm diameter diamond disc. I used some nucleation art to make his first name appear as a texture variation in the faceted growth surface. I left it on a protected ledge at ~ 19,000 feet, with a note that just said “Thanks, Dad”.

That disc, or its fragments, will be around until that mountain gets covered by a lava flow or subducted into the mantle.

Concrete? A thousand years? Let's aim higher. :-)

bsder• 4 years ago

No magic formula--just do maintenance every couple of years and rebuild every couple of hundred.

Structures that lasted from ancient times to today were either made out of giant slabs of stone or had maintenance done on them repeatedly over the years.

scheme271• 4 years ago

Talk to a civil engineer or architect and they can point you to the right mixes. A lot of it really depends on what sort of wear and stresses the structure will undergo.

einpoklum2• 4 years ago

We just don't bother to engineer everything to last forever, because that costs money and has little point to it a lot of the time

Unfortunately...

1. There's no "we". i.e. the entities choosing concrete mixtures and other construction technology do not typically share interests with the people / organizations which inhabit the buildings, except in some very abstract roundabout sense. Which is part of the reason why

2. Concrete construction is usually not engineered to last even a few centuries, let alone "forever". In fact, it is often so poorly engineered (or one might argue: misengineered) that it won't last even a single century, or less than that. Because the principle of costing less money tends to be taken all the way to the point of just barely passing regulatory constraints.

3. ... and those regulatory constraints are often quite lacking. I live in Israel, and a constructor is not even required to guarantee that their building will not-collapse beyond 7 years' time.

4. Actually, a lot of the mass-made soviet-era residential buildings are very well made and almost as good as new (well, considering how they often weren't so great when new). This depends on the specific country, region, period of construction etc.

jcranmer• 4 years ago

In chemistry in general, a lot of times, minute impurities can have a massive role on the properties of materials (this is especially apparent in food, were flavors are basically entirely defined by chemicals found in ppm quantity). Modern process control essentially works by having the needed and acceptable impurities measured in precise amounts, and relying on chemists and metallurgists to monitor how these impurities come about, but this kind of control has only really been possible for a century or maybe two.

In more ancient times, the process control instead basically relied on "get your ingredients from this well/mine/whatever". So while we actually have a decent idea of what Greek fire is (it's a kind of napalm), we don't have any way of knowing what their actual source of naphtha was, so we don't know what the precise impurities that gave it its best kick were. (I'll also opine that there were probably several different formulas in use, and we may be ascribing properties of different kinds of Greek fire to the same one, which would mean that the search for "the" formula for Greek fire could only ever be a failure.)

mjhay• 4 years ago

The real secret to Greek fire was the Byzantine's unusually advanced "siphon," which heated the mixture in a pressure vessel to allow it to spray fairly long distances. The main use was on ships of course, but there was also a man-portable flamethrower version, which is quite strange to think about someone in AD 900 wielding.

This ship-borne version only worked in calm conditions, otherwise fireships were just as likely to set themselves on fire. However, it did do pretty well in the sheltered Sea of Marmara around Constantinople. The fireships probably saved the empire from the Caliphate during the 719 siege of Constantinople by destroying the much large Muslim fleet. That occurred at a nadir of Byzantine power and the height of Caliphate power. Western Eurasian history would have looked very different if the Caliphate got control of the Bosporus then, as opposed to the Turks 700 years later.

ivanhoe• 4 years ago

Yes, exactly, the same story is with the Damascus steel. We now know that the secret to it, beside the cool look, was that it contained many carbon nanotubes in steel that greatly improved the performance of the blade. That was achieved by a combination of special properties of the iron ore (supposedly sourced from somewhere in India) and the technology itself that got lost over the time. Of course, modern steel is way better and we now actually understand the tech behind the carbon nanotubes, but the old masters were achieving it all by simply conducting many, many experiments.

couchand4• 4 years ago

Something curious to me in materials science/pharmaceuticals/etc. is how difficult it is to replicate the natural laboratory in an artificial one. This is another way in which humanity is losing knowledge, but here it's even dressed up to look like the accumulation of knowledge!

areoform10• 4 years ago

Author here, based on my reading of your comment, I think we're talking at cross purposes.

Your comment seems to be about how these technologies aren't useful for us in the present. AFAICT, it doesn't dispute that the knowledge was lost.

An additional interpretation is that you're interpreting my writing as being from someone who thinks that "the Romans clearly built it better" etc.

That's not the point I'm making.

Yes, we have napalm and recipes for it. Yes, we have digital computers that are incalculably better than the Antikythera mechanism. Yes, we can trivially manufacture better concrete.

And that's amazing, for us today, but how much better would it have been if we hadn't forgotten about these technologies in the first place and had continued to improve on them? Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now?

The loss in knowledge doesn't matter (as much) anymore in the present, but it has held us back, measurably so. For a thousand years, between the Antikythera mechanism and a few hundred years ago, we somehow lost their equivalent of Kepler's laws, some version of calculus, precision machining, mechanical computing etc. For over a thousand years, we have no records of anyone producing devices that approached or surpassed its capabilities.

What if the knowledge behind that device hadn't been lost and we were 1k years further along into our understanding of mathematics and computing?

That's the point here.

The point is that those technologies were exceptional at their time, but were still lost, and we are poorer for it, because it took away hundreds of years of erstwhile progress that could have been made had we remembered and kept building on them.

Happy to hear how I could make the ending better though!

FpUser• 4 years ago

"The point is that those technologies were exceptional at their time, but were still lost, and we are poorer for it, because it took away hundreds of years of erstwhile progress that could have been made had we remembered and kept building on them."

I agree with you point. On the other hand I think if we did not forget anything and kept improving while still having medieval views we might have had exterminated ourselves already.

kragen5• 4 years ago

I really enjoyed the post, even though I wasn't clear what part was fictional and what part was truthful.

You might be interested in Lucio Russo's book The Forgotten Revolution. He describes how the Hellenistic scientific and technical culture which gave us Heron's aeolipile, Greek fire, the Antikythera mechanism, Archimedes' method of exhaustion, Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's size, Eucid's axiomatization of geometry, etc.†, was lost. Basically what happens was that when centers of science like Syracuse and Alexandria were conquered by the pre-scientific Romans, the philosophers who weren't massacred were dispersed to the four winds, preserving their knowledge in foreign lands if at all. In later generations, Christian fanatics lynched Hypatia and threw down the Egyptian temples, extinguishing the millennia-long knowledge of hieroglyphics.

Russo reaches some conclusions that aren't generally accepted, but much of the history he reviews in the book is uncontroversial, if little-known — but starkly horrifying.

It wasn't a gradual process of forgetting, but a series of genocidal catastrophes. Similar processes obliterated the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the Maya codices, the khipu, and in our own time most of the world's languages and folklore, much of the Timbuktu libraries, the Afghan relics of early Buddhism, and the collections of the archaeological museums in Iraq.

______

† I have omitted Roman cement and the separation of gold from silver because I don't have any reason to believe they came from the Hellenistic world.

taeric7• 4 years ago

But this is predicated on a non falsifiable claim that we could have built on these technologies. That they weren't extended to better things just a easily hints at them being technological dead ends.

Consider the massive costs that went into many old structures. Often you could measure them in lives lost during construction.

In the case of asbestos and leaded paint, lives and damage done by having used them.

Now, I do believe we should have people study the past. I still like reading on old programming techniques. But progress is not necessarily held back by not building on what came before.

larryliu3• 4 years ago

Roman concrete is simply concrete made by pozzolan cement. You make pozzolan cement by grinding quicklime together with volcano ash, fly ash from coal power plants, or metallurgical slags.

ordu2• 4 years ago

What if the knowledge behind that device hadn't been lost and we were 1k years further along into our understanding of mathematics and computing?

I believe that knowledge is overrated on the long run. It is methods for knowledge creation what really matters. And incentives to apply the best known methods.

Had you read Bret Devereaux talking on an absence of Roman Industrial Revolution?[1] No practical steam engine before it's time has come. Knowledge is created when it is needed. I believe the same stands for computing. It must be some new demand for calculation that created computing. Probably the development of economics.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

StillLrning123• 4 years ago

Distribution of knowledge is the only way forward. There where probably only a few people that had key knowledge to these technologies. Once they disappeared, so did the technology.

carlmr• 4 years ago

Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now?

Dead from climate change most likely.

dale_glass2• 4 years ago

I still don't think it quite adds up. You're mixing two different things together because they look kinda similar on the surface but aren't.

If you want to make the point that "what if we developed steam power sooner", then sure, that works so long you keep talking about steam power in Ancient Greece. Yes, knowledge did get lost there.

But that's not what happened with the Saturn V. The knowledge didn't really go anywhere. We still have the engines and the designs, they're just technologically obsolete. We're not making them not because it's some lost wonder-technology we forgot how to make, but because it costs a lot of $$$ and there's no profit to be made by sending another lander to the Moon and science funding is scarce. That we don't see the asbestos covers much doesn't really mean anything because the actual knowledge is in the fields of heat management and materials science, and not magazine cover photos.

TeMPOraL• 4 years ago

how much better would it have been if we hadn't forgotten about these technologies in the first place and had continued to improve on them? Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now?

I don't think this is a possible world in the first place. The knowledge of steam engines and intricate mechanical machines wasn't "lost" by accident: it was lost because there was no good reason to develop it further. The Greek steam engine was a cool demo, neat little piece of stage magic for the temple whose doors it powered, but there weren't any practical applications in sight. I bet it also was a hell of a maintenance burden.

The unfortunate reality of our lives seems to be that technology only propagates as long as there's enough funding for it. That means at least several people have to need it very much to support a single inventor. Many more people if there's a need for extra labor, or expensive resources (such as metals). That's as true today as it was 2000 years ago.

What I'm saying is: the reason the Greek steam engine was forgotten is that there was no demand for it back then, and that's because of a combination of factors, such as:

- It could do only so much, because other important technologies - such as precision manufacturing - weren't in place;

- The things it could do could be served better and cheaper by other means - such as hired, slave[0] or animal labor;

Learning history on my own[1], past the school curriculum, I was surprised to discover that a lot of technology was always there in the background. Medieval times weren't just a long period of stagnation - it's when the building blocks for industrial evolution were slowly invented. A lot of important developments happened in mining, where increasingly powerful and reliable pumps allowed people to dig deeper. The progress here was sustained, because it was paying for itself.

The industrial revolution happened when things aligned just right. The steam engines could be manufactured cheaply and robustly enough, and put to important enough work, that they paid for themselves - which financed their improvements, which opened more net-profitable applications, and so on - creating a positive feedback loop that run so long, it triggered more feedback loops, and turned humanity into proper technological civilization.

Note that there's a lot hiding in the "put to important enough work". The overall political and economic situation of the era was what created the "jobs" for steam engines, and that situation is downstream from technologies developed for sailing (progress in astronomy, healthcare and shipbuilding), communications (the printing press), and many others.

Point being: inventions aren't islands; they can't sustain their existence if there isn't a need for them. The question "where would we be if we didn't forget ${technology that we 'forgot' and 'rediscovered' centuries later}" doesn't seem valid to me.

----

[0] - There's an argument I see raised every now and then that historically, technology made jumps when labor was expensive; conversely, cheap labor meant it was cheaper to just throw more bodies at any problem.

[1] - I'd like to say "studying history", but what I really mean is just occasionally watching some high-quality documentaries and reading blog posts by people who (claim to) know this stuff.

wnevets• 4 years ago

Same goes for roman concrete. We know far more about concrete than the Romans did. We just don't bother to engineer everything to last forever, because that costs money and has little point to it a lot of the time. Yes, some buildings are works of art, but many things just have a function to fulfill, which is often temporary. Nobody is sad that the millions of mass-made soviet residential crappy buildings aren't still as good as new. If they were made to a better standard they'd still be ugly cookie cutter things.

Practical Engineering has a good video on Roman concrete

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL0BB2PRY7k

thrown_22• 4 years ago

Nobody is sad that the millions of mass-made soviet residential crappy buildings aren't still as good as new. If they were made to a better standard they'd still be ugly cookie cutter things.

Yet still better than US suburbia.

emeraldd• 4 years ago

The mention of Roman Concrete is interesting. Was it that we forgot the recipe or didn't know what was special about the recipe in the first place? I can't find the article now, but I remember reading a while back that part of the reason it was lost was that the materials to make it could no longer be found and apparently equivalent materials didn't work the same.

8note• 4 years ago

Material availability is a big deal with Roman concrete. It used ash from the nearby volcanoes, which isn't available everywhere.

hnbad2• 4 years ago

Of course, as you’ve probably surmised, the song isn’t really about the color film. It’s a thinly veiled satire aimed at the communist regime by the artist, toying with everything from the regime’s attempts to pass its citizens’ lives as being nice to Western audiences to the drabness of communist Germany.

That's not entirely truthful, though? The artist said that the song complained about the drabness of life in socialist East Germany and being confronted with the economy of scarcity (making a color film hard to replace if you forgot to bring it) even present in the moments you escape it (by travelling to places with nicer scenery). But the entire jab at "the regime's attempts" and "Western audiences" seems to be conjecture on the part of the author and isn't in the interview they seem to be referencing.

Also for the record, the artist has somewhat disowned the song because the song's writer was a child abuser and rapist. Another piece of knowledge largely lost to time.

I think the author is a bit too invested in seeing the song in an American Cold War context that doesn't match the experiences of those in divided Germany for whom the Cold War was more about two equally untrustworthy superpowers threatening their annihilation over inconsequential power plays and engaging on continuous proxy wars.

It reads almost like the author thinks Merkel is weeping over memories of how she suffered under the East German government when in reality 2020 alone had plenty of reasons for her to feel sad and the song represents a tiny act of polite rebellion at the end of a reign that culminated in her watching powerless over federal ministers making decisions she disagreed with but would receive the blame for.

ltbarcly33• 4 years ago

Equally untrustworthy? You must consume a very large amount of Russian media evety day to be able to say that in earnest.

hnbad2• 4 years ago

Russian media hates the Soviet Union other than the vague idea of it as a continuation of a pan-Russian empire, so I'm not sure how you're jumping from "Cold War era US was untrustworthy" to me being pro-Russia (which I'm not, Putin is a fascist). I'm not even pro-Soviet Union or pro-German Democratic Republic (because I'm not a fan of oppressive governments even if they get a red coat of paint).

We have a lot more transparency and insight today (in part thanks to the advancement of modern technologies like the Internet) and Germany has matured beyond being a direct pawn in an international conflict (in part because the US won the Cold War and Russia is politically irrelevant in the grand scheme of things). But projecting the current state (and the public perception of it) back on the Cold War era is ahistorical.

Did you forget the purge of leftist (not just Soviet-aligned) organizations both under McCarthy but well into the Civil Rights era? The US participation in the Vietnam War, which was protested worldwide not just in the US? The Cuban Missile Crisis? I realize many of these events were perceived very differently in the US but from the POV of a country stuck right in the middle of the two world powers the US was just as likely to pull the trigger (or provoke the other party into doing so) as the Soviets.

The Cold War was decidedly not a "just war" (unlike WW2, arguably) but a power play between two nuclear super powers continuously threatening to end the world as we know it at a whim. The fear of nuclear annihilation is why there's still a strong bias against nuclear energy to this day. Positive public perception of the US in Germany was largely an aftereffect of the post-war era and a response to fear of possible Soviet revanchism for German war crimes.

Heck, the Marshall Plan was publicly perceived as an act of charity when in reality it was a loans program strongly tied to anti-communism (again exceeding mere "anti Soviet influence" but targeting leftist politics in general) and had the goal of building up Western Europe and West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.

Say what you will about Americans, US organizations or even how the US government has changed since then, but the Cold War era US government was scary and much like the Soviet Union felt more like a force of nature than a diplomatic ally you could reason with.

openrob• 4 years ago

Is this why when picking up a skill I always head to YouTube and forum posts?

Because someone taking through a problem informally always reveals something that wasn't clear in text/literature.

Anything from DIY projects to tech to cooking, it's always something important

svnt• 4 years ago

Clive James wrote a book — Cultural Amnesia — that comes at this concept from a slightly different angle, but still very interesting.

krisoft• 4 years ago

Meh. People are overly worried about forgetting. In my view forgetting is a normal part of information processing. You keep what is important and chuck out the rest.

Same with technological information. The way you keep information is by doing things. You bet that we won’t forget how to make bricks, because a lot of people in a lot of factories make bricks every day all around the world. The Saturn V was a white elephant and once the special circumstances which made it viable has ended people forgot how to build it. Who cares?

If someone wants a rocket they can design one for themselves. And turns out, they do. And those newly designed rockets are better for them. Not better in some tech spec sense, but better suited for the task they want it for.

judge2020• 4 years ago

The difference is that you don't necessarily know what is important until you forget it and try to recall it later. If you record everything, then you can make a more informed decision later on whether to keep, archive, or delete the information.

flippinburgers• 4 years ago

Have you never found yourself in need of a backup or wishing you had one?

Animats• 4 years ago

The author of the article does not have a manufacturing background. It shows. Knowing about, and measuring, sensitivities to process variation is a big issue. Look up Deming, quality, the Toyota production system, and such. Manufacturing has random, environmental, and systematic variation. Random looks like noise, environmental correlates with weather and other external factors, and systematic comes from tool and die wear. Statistical quality control is about separating those. Do we need to control the humidity more tightly, or replace the dies sooner?

(One of the problems the US has in manufacturing is the loss of a culture where more people have a clue about a manufacturing plant works.)

johndhi• 4 years ago

As an in-house lawyer, preserving the why is basically my job. I write up 'memos' in which we examine a problem, arrive at a solution and recommendation, and make the recommendation. Often times the team that makes the recommendation doesn't do a great job documenting the 'why' in its Jira ticket and so their organization can tend to forget why something is done. I try to make sure that doesn't happen, when it comes to important things. Unfortunately we aren't always certain of what is important and what deserves a detailed writeup.

k__• 4 years ago

I think, asbestos is a good example of gone by times. Same as leaded gas, or benzol. They are superior products from simpler times.

There were made with a singular purpose and everything else was sacrificed to that purpose, even the health of us all.

brutusborn• 4 years ago

Ironically I think the article is a good example of why we forget things. It's more desireable for the author to write a longwinded article about how we forget, than to try and put effort into ensuring society remembers important things. In essence, societal maintenance isn't sexy. The final solution provided is for thr author to better preserve their own output, which isn't a very good solution unless the author is producing important breakthroughs. To better preserve knowledge, people need to be happy to spend effort maintaining _other people's discoveries_.

MacroChip• 4 years ago

Was the documentation a failure? Or did the US save untold amounts of money because of the mothballing->documentation? The failure of the 20M attempt doesn't mean the overall strategy was bad nor that the documentation was net negative.

entaloneralie• 4 years ago

Reading this made me think of how newer homes and furniture burn faster, giving you less time to escape a fire. Research shows that 30 years ago, you had about 17 minutes to escape a house fire. Today it's only 3 or 4 minutes.

unnouinceput• 4 years ago

In EU we have fire code for house furniture. Often the furniture doesn't burn, but only the light synthetic materials. I don't know how it is in US, but I think the 17 minutes vs 3 minutes you say comes from this video:

https://youtu.be/bSP03BE74WA?t=165

which depicts a typical American setting.

stephc_int13• 4 years ago

The general loss of knowledge is something I've only personally started to notice during the last 2-3 years.

For most of my life I didn't even think that we were still at a stage where we could lose valuable knowledge.

But it clearly is everywhere, including basic everyday technology such as Electronics, Software, Wood working or even Cooking.

My gut feeling is that the knowledge loss that occurs at every generation is non-linear depending on the field, but it is higher than 75% overall, and probably more.

The loss rate could be reduced by increasing healthy lifespan.

skybrian• 4 years ago

It seems off-target to get an emotional response from pointing out that millions of people have a slightly wrong picture of what a Saturn V rocket looked like. This is trivia. Most of those people aren't rocket engineers. Having a better idea of what it looked like would help you draw one slightly more accurately, and that's it.

It doesn't help us understand how much important knowledge was lost by the people who really should know how to do it. It seems like SpaceX is doing okay?

cratermoon• 4 years ago

"The day-to-day compositions were recorded in a notebook, but the why behind it and the how were a closely guarded secret."

This has become more and more apparent to me over my career. Having a document that describes the steps to get to the end product is not useless per se, but it lacks context.

Anyone coming in anywhere from 6 months to 6 years later could maybe reproduce the steps, but anyone who has considered such problems at all would realized that rote reproduction doesn't get very far.

What your future self cares about is how and why you came to the end you did. Why did we use an unsigned int here instead of signed? Why is the field exactly 13 bytes?

rpastuszak• 4 years ago

Little trivia piece: it is said that Iranian shah Khosrow II used to entertain his guest by cleaning his asbestos napkins in fire.

boilerupnc• 4 years ago

Nothing we have tried in the past two hundred thousand years of our species’ existence has successfully captured and preserved sufficiently complex knowledge for future transmission.

I would argue that DNA has done an admirable job in this regard and I would deem it successful at capturing and preserving complex knowledge for future transmission.

I enjoyed the post and enjoyed its thought provocative stance. I feel like recording the “why” is important, not to facilitate recreating a given “thing” but rather to help our future creativity by staying aware of past inspiration triggers.

kapsi• 4 years ago

A sufficiently smart and malicious AI could wipe out most of our knowledge, now that everything is stored on electronic devices.

Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies

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