Will the Manhattan Project Always Exist?

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/09/will-the-manhattan-project-always-exist.html

by luchak • 17 years ago

40 20 17 years ago

An intriguing line of thought. I think, however, the number of references to historical events is much greater now than in the past. There are 1.3M results for "nuclear bomb" on Google; 120M for "nuclear". More are being added daily. Ones that die off are being replaced.

jcl• 17 years ago

But who is to say what those 1.3M results will mean for future readers? The article's point is that "future history" may choose to interpret the Manhattan Project as some kind of myth.

There's stuff in antiquity that is mentioned a lot, yet we're not sure if it had any historical basis: Atlantis, the Great Flood, King Arthur, Prester John, etc. We're not sure if Archimedes ever built his heat ray, or if the formula for Greek fire ever contained anything special. We only just recently discovered that the Persians inadvertently used carbon nanorods to create Damascus steel, and we're still not totally sure how they did it.

(Also, there is a lot of garbage on the Internet. For some unknowable reason, "moon landing" gives 3.6M results on Google, while "moon landing hoax" gives 3.9M results...)

DanielStraight2• 17 years ago

Excellent points.

ahpeeyem• 17 years ago

"(Also, there is a lot of garbage on the Internet. For some unknowable reason, "moon landing" gives 3.6M results on Google, while "moon landing hoax" gives 3.9M results...)"

I think that's because Google includes pages that have any of the keywords you supply, unless you tell it to do differently. Some examples:

http://google.com/search?q=moon+landing+hoax : about 3,190,000

http://google.com/search?q=moon+landing : about 3,030,000

http://google.com/search?q=%2Bmoon+%2Blanding+%2Bhoax : about 297,000

http://google.com/search?q=%2Bmoon+%2Blanding : about 3,010,000

So there aren't more pages about the moon landing hoax than there are about the moon landing, there are just more pages that say the words moon OR landing OR hoax.

Regardless of this example your point stands, there's a lot of garbage on the internet :)

jerf• 17 years ago

One doesn't have to be a strong Singulatarian to recognize that projecting 4000 years into the future is not the best idea. There is a non-trivial probability that sophonts of the future will perfectly well believe that Man had the atomic bomb in 1950, what with that being a standard part of the ambient personality/memory matrix available for free for all pet paleohumans, post-human-based personality megaliths, retro-humans, poingtarees, and all others of sophont class H1C except the tridilons.

I know this isn't really meant as a projection into the future, and I suppose I'm just riffing off that point to observe it really isn't the best jump off point for an essay, since it distracts you with a lot of other things like the temptation to observe how this is the worst time in the history of Man to try to predict the future.

mechanical_fish3• 17 years ago

This is lots of fun to read, because it's good to keep a perspective on history.

That said, it's not at all clear that the next several thousand years will be analogous to the last several thousand. We have a rather different starting point. The key difference is mass production. A society without printing can come close to losing the works of Plato: every copy of Plato cost weeks, months, or years of a laborer's salary to make. [1] So, even at the height of Greek and Roman civilization, there were a limited number of copies of Plato's work. There were also a limited number of educated people who could read those works -- not because people were stupid, but because reading material was sufficiently expensive that it wasn't worthwhile for the majority of people to master its use.

Meanwhile, Plato himself was seen by perhaps only a few thousand people in his lifetime, at most. There were no planes or trains. There were no photographs or recordings. Hence, there weren't a lot of eyewitnesses to spread tales of Plato's genius. Inefficient as they were, the written books did most of that work.

Compare that to the atom bomb. I never got to see one in person, but I've seen them a hundred times in photographs and films. Literally half the people alive today have seen the atom bomb in one way or another. And the stories of those who encountered them directly can be heard by everyone, who then compose stories which mention the bomb, which themselves get mass-produced. There are probably more action figures of Godzilla in existence today than there ever were copies of Plato's works.

---

[1] I was recently listening to Brad Delong's economic history course from Berkeley, and at one point he tried to explain the value of a book in medieval times. A book was worth the modern equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars -- that was what it cost to assemble the materials and then copy out the writing by hand. A scholar would count himself well-off if he owned two or three personal books.

jwhite2• 17 years ago

> There are probably more action figures of Godzilla in existence today than there ever were copies of Plato's works.

And plastic doesn't break down at nearly the same rate as parchment or papyrus.

You make good points.

hughprime• 17 years ago

A book was worth the modern equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars -- that was what it cost to assemble the materials and then copy out the writing by hand. A scholar would count himself well-off if he owned two or three personal books.

Without detracting from your actual point, is that really tens of thousands of dollars' worth? Paper isn't all that hard to make, binding is just a matter of sewing, and copying a book out in longhand is, what, a few man-weeks' worth?

philwelch• 17 years ago

You forget that copying a book out in longhand required the services of someone who was literate, which at one point was a rare skill. A few man-weeks of highly educated skilled labor was and is worth tens of thousands of dollars.

ksvs• 17 years ago

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/medievalprices.html#BO...

patio11• 17 years ago

I think it is highly likely that the Catholic Church will have institutional memory of nuclear weapons in 3000 AD if for no other reason than "Our theologians spent a lot of time in the mid twentieth century writing on this subject. We're obsessive compulsive about recording things, had large amounts of resources to devote to it, and keep dead languages on life-support singlehandedly for millennia just because we have interesting things written in them."

Incidentally, anyone interested in the intersection of science fiction, Catholicism, and the Church functioning as external storage for the memory of the human race should read a Canticle for Leibowitz.

akkartik2• 17 years ago

"..anyone interested in the intersection of science fiction, Catholicism, and the Church functioning as external storage for the memory of the human race.."

Another recommendation: the Coalescent-Exultant-Transcendant trilogy by Stephen Baxter.

lionhearted• 17 years ago

The article is mixed - some really interesting points, some off-the-mark points. But this is one I've thought a lot about:

> Even Plato barely survived history’s guillotine—throughout medieval times, Plato was unknown in the West, living on only in Muslim countries and in footnotes to other Greek authors. Had the Muslims been worse stewards, or been conquered by marauding Christians who needed kindling or toilet paper, Socrates would have died in vain.

I wonder how many other exceptional Antiquity works we don't have? How many other masterpieces were made and destroyed due to the Dark Ages/Burning of Baghdad mix?

I've got this as one of the top 10 worst moments in human history, right up there with the Holocaust:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_(1258)#Destru...

In addition to the lost of life, cruelties, and destruction, we lost a lot of works that would've tremendously benefited humanity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom

So I wonder what else we don't have copies of? I'm marveled when I go through modern versions of some of the ancient works at how good they were. Antiquity Greece and Rome, and the Islamic Golden Age produced some really incredible science, philosophy, engineering, and literature. Sometimes I muse, wondering what other knowledge did they produce that we have no more records of?

mechanical_fish3• 17 years ago

I wonder how many other exceptional Antiquity works we don't have?

Well, as my music history lecturer pointed out, we've lost just about one hundred percent of ancient Greek and Roman music. There's not enough left to fill half an hour.

Given that the Greeks and Romans left behind a lot of fascinating writing about music, and that the music was apparently a central part of ancient Greek drama, this is a really big loss.

electromagnetic• 17 years ago

Well Greek and Roman cultures exemplified plays and indeed still have some of the most revered plays to date, likely second only to Shakespeare. We also know that there was music played to accompany them, and I have little doubt that they would have understood the use of music to make the play.

Yet just like a silent film without a pianist, we'll never have a complete understanding of what was intended by the Greek and Roman play writes.

Anyone watched Psycho without music? It's crap.

Mentat_Enki• 17 years ago

Aye, and don't forget the loss of the Library at Alexandria...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_at_Alexandria

akkartik2• 17 years ago

We don't even know when it was destroyed.

jwhite2• 17 years ago

> The article is mixed

I tend to agree. The title put me off as well. The attitude that existence depends on the event being recorded is too relativist for my personal preference.

The central point, that civilizations tend to underrate their ancient predecessors because the historical record becomes degraded or misinterpreted is easy to agree with. However, the claim that our distant descendants won't have a clue what we really achieved is one-eyed. Five hundred years ago, Europeans had lost much knowledge of the history of European civilizations, and their knowledge of civilizations on other continents varied from total ignorance upwards. Five hundred years of progress in historical research and research methods, together with scientific progress in archaeology, geology, paleontology, climate science, medical science, etc., has allowed us to uncover much that we didn't know about the past, despite the fact that there is still much more that is lost forever. If our civilization suffers a catastrophic event, a future civilization may still be capable of uncovering many facts about us.

Given the amount of knowledge that archaeologists can deduce from fragments of pottery, fragments of human remains, fragments of ancient settlements, etc., and given that the products of nuclear technology can have very long half-lives, I think the author of the article draws a long bow in claiming that thousands of years hence there will be scant evidence that we had A-bombs in the 1940's.

Will the Manhattan Project Always Exist?

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