Making Technology Anti-fragile

for millennia

For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future - a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save humanity, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire - both scientists and scholars - and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for future generations. He calls this sanctuary the Foundation.
~ a description of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy

Four hundred eighty thousand years ago, men as we are today first began to walk on Earth. We began making things from wood, stone, and other materials. Our predecessors on this planet had been using fire for at least a million years. Fire is useful for hardening wood, for keeping warm, for cooking food, for burning stubble to provide potash for the next year’s crops, and for many other purposes. People began to develop in many ways that we are aware of in the anthropological record.

Many artefacts of bone are not fossils, so it would be mistaken to say “in the fossil record.” We have bones with records of various sorts, including a bone marked with prime numbers. And at some point we were able to produce the bas-relief sculptures of Gobekli Tepe, the pyramids of Egypt, MesoAmerica, and Gunun Padang, as well as the things we find around them such as ancient sailing vessels and strange stone technologies.

Some of the things humans seem to have done thousands of years ago involve lifting weights we could not lift with the most advanced construction technologies we have today. Extremely hard stones were etched perfectly into geometric shapes, with laser precision.

Some ancient human culture worked out certain critical longitudes and placed monuments on them. Portuguese sailors exploring the islands of the Atlantic found a remote island with a sculpture of a man mounted on a horse with no saddle pointing in some direction we no longer know for sure because the king of Portugal had the thing torn down and then “lost” it in Lisbon. You can go find discussions of these matters in various places.

We know from the geological record that there have been many cataclysms. Earth is not a tectonically stable planet. In the span of a few hundred million years, plates full of carbonaceous materials are subsumed into the hot mantle where oil and natural gas are formed and find their way upward through cracks in the crust. Asteroids and comets hit the Earth from time to time, wiping out species such as the North American mega fauna and the dinosaurs. Roughly 12,000 years ago huge deep sheets of ice covered Europe and North America, and then melted in the span of weeks, raising sea levels by as much as 400 feet. Coastal cities were inundated. People died. Technology fell back.

In his epic poem The Iliad, the Greek poet Homer recites lines he learned around 800 BC if our histories are even vaguely correct, about a war that we now believe probably took place between Greek city states and a powerful city called Troy about 1200 BC. I first read this epic poem when I was age 11 because classes were boring and my teachers were told to send me to the library as often as possible. (Otherwise I would think up really interesting ways to alleviate my boredom.)

It seemed remarkable to me that Homer describes a party with certain powerful personalities on a place called Mount Olympus with dancing golden girls manufactured by someone named Hephaestus. In later centuries the Romans would call this same character Vulcan. In my day we called such dancing creatures “robots” and “androids.” Homer also describes a serving device that would move from one personality to another delivering ambrosia and nectar delicacies. George Lucas had his android C3PO in gold and his serving robot R2D2 in blue and white.

On the shield of Achilles there are motion pictures described by Homer. Not a series of stills, but a moving picture in which a series of events take place. The person Athena gave the shield, Aegis, to Achilles for use in pursuing the war with Troy. Other magical artefacts are described in ancient myth and legend. You are welcome to name a few in the comments if you wish, as that would be a fun branch of this discussion to pursue.

Now how did Homer have the knowledge of motion pictures? And what of the paintings and frescoes in other places where ancient devices such as electric lights, music boxes, and communications technologies are depicted? How many legends of flying craft are found in places all around the world? How did the Nazca lines get drawn without someone hang gliding or riding a kite or hot air balloon high above them?

Or look at it this way, instead. In 1610 there were Europeans who had crafts and trades, guilds that kept certain knowledge for the master craftsmen. About ten percent of the population were in some sort of trade, craft, mercantile pursuit, manufacturing, or other technological work. About ten percent were aristocracy, professors and students, clergy, and members of chaste orders. Eighty percent or more of the population throughout Christendom were farmers, mostly at the subsistence level.

In the next 400 years, we developed calculus, astronomy, rocketry, lighter than air craft, heavier than air craft, and began exploring the star system we’re in. Our technologies allow 2% of the population of Christendom to feed 98%. Now, go back to the beginning of this essay. Four hundred and eighty thousand years is a long time. Would you be prepared to defend the position that only once in all those millennia was there ever a civilisation as advanced as our own? I would not.

Indeed, if we go back to Archimedes, who most likely created the advanced mechanisms found in the sea near Antikythera, who definitely had an accurate mileage measuring device used widely to put mile markers on the old stone roads of Europe, and who had the calculus 2,240 years ago, and figure that there were some ups and downs, but start with him (and Aristarchus of Samos and others), how many civilisations of our level of technology could have existed in 480,000 years? Well, if there were zero “dark ages” with people recovering from globe spanning cataclysms, there would be about 214 periods of 2,240 years length.

If we further assume that 12,000 years are involved in recovering population wiped out and cities drowned or burnt up or covered with volcanic ash, in between cycles of technological development, we get a “mean time between peaks” of 14,240 years or so. That allows for 39 previous civilisations of our current level, more or less. Consider also that some of these earlier high civilisations had travel to the planets and the stars, and you begin wondering who we might find when we go out into the universe.

We have some confidence that we can use gravity slingshot techniques to accelerate large spacecraft to 10 percent of the speed of light. If we had done so as a species some 400,000 years ago, we could be building civilisations 40,000 light years from here today, in orbit around stars hidden from our view by nebulae and dust clouds. And think of all the people in the galaxy who have not heard the good news of Jesus Christ.

Thinking of the unshielded copper wires used for early telegraph cables in Europe and in North America, there was certainly a kind of radio frequency signal generated by these vast antennae. Not very powerful, but telegraphs were used night and day, so some readable signal might have been generated as far back as 1837 or a little later. It would be propagating outward at the speed of light, and could reach a technological civilisation capable of receiving and understanding it within perhaps 180 light years of Earth - a volume of space in which there are perhaps 120,000 to 200,000 stars.

Archives

So what do we do to make knowledge and technology anti-fragile? Of course, the problem with paper is, it melts when Mongol hordes throw the libraries of the Houses of Wisdom in Baghdad into the river running through town. They say that after the sack of Baghdad in Anno Domini 1258 the water ran black from the water-soluble ink for six months. People and animals walked across the river on the pulpy mass of wet paper.

The problem with carving things in stone, as the Egyptians did, is it takes a long time and you basically end up with bumper sticker slogans. Some of the events the Egyptians carved in stone, while flattering to the current ruler, were false to fact. Of course, they cleverly built the Edfu buildings so that the words they carved on the interior walls between the buildings were protected from sandstorms. And there are some really long reigns of individual kings in their ancient king lists in various places. Did some ruler live as an individual for twenty or thirty thousand years? Or does that entry describe a dynasty?

There is a technology called DOTS. It has been pioneered by an outfit called Group 47. I was introduced to it in the early days of Eldar Capital back in 2016 when we were considering investments in various business opportunities. It makes an optical record on a very durable medium, guarantees a hundred years of archive record, and is clearly intended to last much longer. You can read more about it at the provided link.

We now have petabyte drives and other very large arrays of memory storage systems. Quite a few months ago, Naomi Brockwell of NBTV.media asked me to write up some research I conducted on synology persistent non-cloud backup storage. So it is an area of technology about which I’ve done some serious investigation. You can privately encrypt a vast amount of data with these systems and you don’t need to use network services to get them to your storage devices. I think we’ll be making some use of this knowledge in our efforts.

There are ways to store the data of our civilisation. Not only the technologies but also the stories, the art, the architecture, the philosophies, the ethics, and the spiritual truths given to us by God. It would be wise to be prepared in the event that a series of acts of God come about and things that are truly evil are ripped from the face of the Earth. One of our jobs is to preserve what is good for our children and grandchildren.

Mechanisms

Of course, it is good to have access to knowledge, but if your optical reader device requires a lot of gear in order to manufacture, you may be stuck for a while without that knowledge. Mechanisms wear out. Depending on how far back things “fall” after the cataclysms, it may be important to know how certain developments were brought about.

Today we not only have extensive understanding of what Newcomen and Watt did to create their steam engines, we have people who know how to make examples. There is an annual event in McClouth, Kansas where people with steam engines that drive hay baling and wheat harvesting equipment of all kinds come together. Lots of people have working steam engines that have been used in various applications from driving riverboats to powering factories.

Some of the mechanisms we need to know how to make are used to make other mechanisms. A micrometer is a very useful tool for measuring divisions of 0.001 inch and a rated accuracy of ±0.0001 inch which is a very small amount and a very high level of accuracy. We need to know how to make them. We need tool and die shops that can make the tools and the dies to make other things. We need lathes and computer driven milling machines and 3D printers. We need to be able to make whatever we need, and we need to be able to make the things we need to make them.

Here there is an opportunity for a digression, which I shall not take. I will simply describe a “Systeme D” or “demerder” concept I have been talking about for over twenty-five years. A factory that can run away. It has a machine shop in a container. It has a tool and die shop in a container. It has computer numerically controlled CNC milling machines and 3D printers. And tables and work stations. You load up the containers on trailers and deliver them to an empty warehouse. Let’s say you rent that warehouse for a few months and you hook up to 3-phase power. Takes a few hours to get everything running. Other diesel rigs bring in trailers full of the supplies you need. You make everything you have orders for in the city where you have located. Send them out for delivery - maybe you have deposits for half in advance and you get the other half on delivery. While your deliveries are going out, you are packing everything up and leaving town. Permits? Taxation is theft. Permits are theft. We don’ need no stinking permission slips. And we don’t have any reason to obey the people who seek to enslave us.

Engines

When I lived and worked in Houston in the aerospace industry, I was told by some of the engineers who worked on the F1 engine that Rocketdyne put together for the Saturn 5 rocket system first stage that it was a complicated thing to turn on and operate successfully. There were certain pre-ignition sequence activities that had to be gone through. And the people who knew how to do that from 1955 when the engine was developed through about 1975 when it was last flown are, well, mostly not with us any longer. Since around 2012 engineers at the Marshall Spaceflight Centre in Alabama have been working on developing an F1B from an old F1 engine that was stored for a long time at the Smithsonian Institute as part of their air and space collection. So it may be that we’ll once again have a production line and engineers capable of getting them to run right.

But you can see where it is non-trivial to have complicated things and have them work correctly. So it is not enough to have an archive of steam engines and diesel engines and rocket engines and what have you, it is also necessary to have people who work on them, trained to operate them, and trained to develop them from first principles.

Scholars

In short, it is important to have scholars who are actually interested in how things work. It should be clear that none of these scholars can be at all Marxist, since Marxists are evil, hateful sycophants of mass murder who want to enslave mankind because they hate humanity. A certain amount of rigour should be applied to the scholars in terms of picking and choosing who to involve in this work.

For over a thousand years there have been universities in Europe. Universities are different from colleges in performing original research. Universities have obviously been infiltrated by Marxism. Purging the Marxists might be sufficient in some cases, but it would also be worthwhile to build new insttitutions, laying their foundation on principles that are going to last. I refer, of course, to hearing and doing the words of Jesus Christ.

Prior to the endarkenment that is called “the Enlightenment” there were traditions that scholars were monks and professors were men who professed their faith in God. These traditions were forsaken. And if you want to know how that worked out, look around you. The filthy corrupt regurgitations in congress and the evil nasty things posing as presidents of universities are what you get when you turn your back on God, when you have publications put phrases like “God is dead” on the cover of their ragazine, and when people are not punished for being indecent, ungodly, child raping, baby torturing, demon worshippers. And, no, John Carter, it is not okay to call upon the name of the Greek demon Zeus and pretend to be all cynical and sarcastic about these matters. Choices have consequences. Choose ye this day who ye will serve.

Foundation

I’m confident that many entities are going to be established for the purpose of building archives, including technological archives, for supporting scholars and researchers, and for building next generation systems. Some of those will be for-profit enterprises. As a free marketeer, I believe mankind is market seeking. Things that are designed to profit are designed for a long time.

But I also know that bureau-rats corrupt everything they touch. The longer a business exists, the larger it grows, the more it becomes infested with bureau rats. And bureau rats have a non-profit imperative. The bureau rat thrives on having a bigger budget, so they contrive to spend all of their budget before the fiscal period ends. (My dad used to be the chairman of the physics and astronomy department at a state university. He would buy typewriters at the end of the fiscal year because he had to “use it or lose it” with his budget, and he knew he could barter typewriters with other departments if he had them to spare.) The bureaucratic imperative is to have more staff reporting to you and more budget under your control, and profits don’t matter unless someone comes in with an audit. It is a rare company that cuts its bureaucracy.

Asimov’s answer to this issue was the establishment of a foundation. I think God’s answer is the establishment of Holy Orders. If you look at the Rule of Benedict, and its author, you can see a lot of Benedictine monasteries and convents that are still in existence. You don’t need permission from government to start one.

Another highly successful example of anarchism in action is the Alcoholics Anonymous group. You don’t need any permission from anyone to start one. Start a meeting and ask around. You’ll find there is an enormous amount of support available, many resources, just for the asking. People really do want to help. And that is how we are going to build a galaxy spanning civilisation, friends.

Space Scouts

Which brings me to my final point for this essay. When Ben Stone wrote his book about “Sedition, Subversion, and Sabotage,” which he named a “field manual parody,” it got me to thinking. So I wrote the Space Scouts field manual parody to extend on some thoughts in that respect. I think we need to conceive of organisations that will protect civilisation and defend families and decency and order.

One such organisation will be the Space Scouts. It will train generations of students in how to understand the universe, how to measure things like the circumference of the Earth and the distance to the Moon with ordinary experiments that could be run in 2,280 BC. It will train its members in scouting and tracking and hunting and fishing and shooting and living off the land and other key skills. It will also teach the art of improvisation. Adapt, improvise, overcome. Never give up. Never surrender. Never leave a soul behind. Rescue the captives, free the slaves, and end tyranny.

To bring about these groups, these organisations, these archives, and these new institutions will require a lot of help. You can help. Would you, please?

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That’s what I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I’ll have something new. Or old.