• Transporter Room 3@startrek.websiteEnglish
        34·
        16 days ago

        Damn, every time I think I’m original or clever today, someone beats me to it.

        I was just thinking of “demon core on a warhammer/shield/trebuchet (not a catapult because that’s for plebs)”

        Small point of pedantry, that is a flail, not a mace. A mace is mounted directly onto a handle, flails have the flexible material between the weight and the handle.

        • Mango@lemmy.worldEnglish
          19·
          16 days ago

          I just happened to have the exact best response possible pic saved recently enough that I could find it in my phone. 🤣 This makes my whole day!

          Fixed it for you.

          • Transporter Room 3@startrek.websiteEnglish
            7·
            15 days ago

            Demon core memes are my favorite thing from NCD and literally nobody else in my life even knows what it is, let alone think they’re funny.

            It’s the same with Ea-Nasir memes.

            • explodicle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              3·
              15 days ago

              You’re not alone, you’re together through time with so many others past and future. None of us are going to put up with repeatedly subpar copper ever again.

    • HenriVolney@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      15 days ago

      That would be a Jedi lightsaber. I can’t remember which YT channel calculated the amount of energy in those little bastards but I think it was about a small nuclear recator

  • 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    117·
    16 days ago

    I know this isn’t the comparison being made, but I love the idea of jumping straight from swords to nukes. Writing prompt: a 16th century blacksmith suddenly realizes, “If I surround an unstable rock with a neutron reflecting earth metal, I can trigger a runaway chain reaction that’ll get that stump outta me yard.”

    • Technus@lemmy.zipEnglish
      37·
      15 days ago

      What always blows my mind to think about is how the materials for our advanced technology were here the whole time. We could have had computers and nuclear energy and spacecraft 20,000 years ago if we’d just had the knowledge.

      • The Snark Urge@lemmy.worldEnglish
        30·
        15 days ago

        This is the real reason I follow the Primitive Technology channel. One of these days he’s going to make an arc welder out of mud and bugs.

        • Technus@lemmy.zipEnglish
          20·
          15 days ago

          I follow him too. People joke about him being a short way away from computers, but I think it’s a testament to just how far we’ve come as a species. Because even with the benefit of modern knowledge on the chemistry of the process, he’s kinda still stuck on figuring out how to scale out his iron production.

          It also shows just how labor-intensive everything is without modern machinery, when it takes him several days of effort, from gathering and processing the raw materials, to making charcoal, building the kiln, and finally smelting the ore just to get a handful of pellets of pig iron.

          • The Snark Urge@lemmy.worldEnglish
            8·
            15 days ago

            Jokes aside, you’re right. Progress is never easy, fast, or guaranteed and we truly are standing on the shoulders of many, many non-giants and there is still so much work to do. It’s humbling and awesome to contemplate.

      • k110111@feddit.deEnglish
        16·
        15 days ago

        Not quite, in order to have a technology you need methods, materials and society needs to be ready for the tech.

        I recently learned that 50 years ago someone filed a patent for solar panels with more than 20% efficiency and the us government was like yeah its too revolutionary so you can’t sell this nor tell anyone about this unless it is US military. Imagine we all could have had >20% solar panels 50 years ago, even today we are only marginally above 20% efficiency.

        Another example, would be the company who made the iPhone like device well before iPhone but the market wasn’t ready.

        Another example that is fucked up. Governments are starting to restrict AI for consumers but also using AI to kill children in Gaza.

        I’m pretty sure a lot early doctors were also burned at stakes because they were called witches or smth.

        • Technus@lemmy.zipEnglish
          10·
          15 days ago

          You’re right, it’s not strictly just the knowledge, but it’s also the expertise to execute it, the tooling to build precision machinery and devices, and a production chain of raw materials of sufficient quality.

          Even theory itself doesn’t just come out of the blue. Einstein didn’t pull the General Theory of Relativity out of his ass, he was building on centuries of groundwork and experimental evidence and just connected the dots. On the shoulders of giants, indeed.

          Its funny to look at games like Civilization 5 that make you work your way down a tech tree and think of them as reductive, but in many ways the actual progress of technology was not far off.

          But I was just thinking that it’s crazy that it’s theoretically possible that we could have had this technology at any point if we had the capability. Like, there was no rule that was like “must reach game year 1945 CE to unlock nuclear weapons”.

          I’m pretty sure a lot early doctors were also burned at stakes because they were called witches or smth.

          You don’t even have to go back that far to find blatantly dangerous willful ignorance, not even two whole centuries.

          The idea of a doctor washing their hands to avoid the transfer of disease-causing germs from one patient to another (like, going from an autopsy in one room to delivering a child in the next without washing up) was deemed so ludicrous and laughable that the backlash and rejection led to the man who suggested it having a mental breakdown and dying in an insane asylum.

          This was right in the middle of the development of the germ theory of disease, among a mounting pile of evidence that it wasn’t just “bad smells” that cause disease.

      • Kedly@lemm.eeEnglish
        11·
        15 days ago

        I mean, we need the infrastructure to use them as well, it wasnt just knowledge that was blocking us, each piece of new tech usually needs at least some of the previous to be possible to use

  • essell@lemmy.worldEnglish
    114·
    16 days ago

    Silly meme. Nuclear bombs are much too heavy to wield on the battlefield, and their shape is unsuitable for piercing platemail armour

  • Diplomjodler3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    16 days ago

    The copper age only lasted about 1000 years. Then came the bronze age. But the iron has been going on for longer than the bronze age and copper age combined.

        • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
          19·
          16 days ago

          so, caught an article on NPR where they were interviewing an archeologist who specialized in the Sea Peoples (and the bronze age collapse). In any case, there were some points he made that stuck with me. The most pointed being that, the collapse during the bronze age (for those that lived in it,) wouldn’t have known it was happening.

          It was slow, happened across generations. while the climate change and other factors was inexorably moving to collapse… the changes weren’t fast enough for people to notice, it was just the way things were their entire life.

        • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          15 days ago

          The sea people were climate migrants. Actually, we don’t know that much about them except to say Mesopotamia really hated them.

          They may have invaded Egyptian time or two, but they really don’t known where they came from.

          But it’s almost certain that the massive trade network that was highly specialized and crisscrossed the known world collapsed causing everyone to get isolated.

          Tin, for example only came from one place and the mines just stopped producing.

    • Keanu@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      9·
      16 days ago

      I believe bronze and iron weapons are equally powerful, but bronze is a mixture of copper and tin (requiring two types of input). Iron is more plentiful than tin, so militaries do not need large supplies of tin if they can manipulate iron. Steel, I believe, needs much higher temperatures and purified inputs.

      • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        8·
        15 days ago

        While iron is more plentiful than tin, it is harder to purify than tin or copper. The ‘iron age’ refers to the time when humans started smelting iron, and making tools using various steels and other iron-based alloys. These are generally much stronger than bronze.

      • Aqarius@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        15 days ago

        Iron, like actual iron, is weaker than bronze. IIRC, tensile strength is copper<iron<bronze<steel, by roughly x2.

  • Dagwood222@lemm.eeEnglish
    24·
    16 days ago

    I just posted something about ‘classified ads’ in newspapers and someone asked what classified ads are.

    A 30 year old posted that he now felt old after reading that question.

    • BakerBagel@midwest.socialEnglish
      14·
      16 days ago

      I had some 50 year old bartender try to be condescending with me saying i probably didn’t know how to use a dial phone. Showed her up by explaining my aunt used to have a Princess phone and had to explain that one to her

      • Kedly@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        15 days ago

        Dial phones are the WEIRDEST thing to feel superior over. As a gimmick they’re fun, as something to be used, they’re annoying as fuck. Imagine dialing a 9 digit number with those things… (Also imagine calling someone in this day and age without a gun pointing to your head)

        • BakerBagel@midwest.socialEnglish
          4·
          15 days ago

          You can actually tell hiw important an area was by the area code. If it was somewhere people called often, they would have low numbers, while bumfukc nowhere gets high numbers that take for ever to dial.

    • Mango@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      16 days ago

      It’s where we put classified information because the kids won’t read news papers!

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      16 days ago

      Those, uh, those are advertisements for classified materials, yes?

      What kind of newspapers are you reading?

      (/jk. I’m old enough to have read the comic section)

  • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.eeEnglish
    9·
    16 days ago

    So dividing by four again will surely give us the timetable for how soon we can expect a planet buster to be developed to harvest Mercury’s raw material to build a Dyson fleet

  • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
    9·
    15 days ago

    I wonder if there’s research out there into the hottest temperature humanity can reach throughout history? So many things that advance technology depend on getting even hotter. With a simple wood fire, you can cook food to make it safer to eat and get more nutrients out of it. With a better design and fuel to get hotter, you can work copper, or glass, or steel. Hotter still and you can fuse atoms.

  • cro_magnon_gilf@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    7·
    15 days ago

    Is there even evidence of copper swords existing? The whole Copper Age is really just in our “history” because it has to be. The archeological evidence is pretty scant. It’s possible people used lead (even easier to melt and shape, and there is evidence of very early use of lead) more than copper before the Bronze Age.