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And yet we still haven’t figured out nuclear swords smh.
Best I can do is a flail.
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.
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.
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.
Is there a lemmy community about it?
NonCredibleDefense, not sure which instance it’s on, but they hit all on the regular.
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.
Give it about 38k years
Have hope! The swords were actually invented in 20k years!
Tell that to my uranium sword.
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
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
3D video was a fad in the 1950’s
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
What the fuck is this from lol
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0096486/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
Movie called Young Einstein
Ahh thank you!
I was confused for a bit while watching the video so I watched all of it until the end. I only ended up more confused as time went on. What’s even worse is there’s no indication of what it’s from.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0096486/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
Movie called Young Einstein
It’s probably a narrow demographic that immediately recognizes Yahoo Serious, isn’t it? Especially in the northern hemisphere.
I’m in the Southern hemisphere so right in my neighborhood 😁
Silly meme. Nuclear bombs are much too heavy to wield on the battlefield, and their shape is unsuitable for piercing platemail armour
If only I had some sort of mechanical machine that would lob this 300 kg nuclear bomb 90 m away at my enemy. One day science will catch up to man’s dreams, one day…
Nuke hurling trebuchets are an underexplored fantasy tech.
To be safe, make it a 90kg nuclear bomb 300m away!
Nuclear artillery shells are an actual thing, though.
However, depleted uranium tipped arrows sound very cool.
They just have to make small adjustments
Also gamma radiation is good at “piercing” platemail armour.
Until they make the Fat Man
The real life version of that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
One of the hallmarks of a bad weapon: significant overlap in maximum range and minimum safe distance
Just mount it on the back of a spot robot similarly to https://youtu.be/0rliFQ0qyAM 😂
Lol fucking america of course its already made
What about uranium armour tho?
And the stone age was loooong
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.
I suspect a large part of it was the collapse of civilization, at least, in that corner of the world.
“we’re in a late stage bronzist society, it’ll collapse any day now!”
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.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call “foreshadowing”.
What do you mean there was a mythical sea people?! Lol rabbit hole.
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.
Anatolia?
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.
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.
Iron, like actual iron, is weaker than bronze. IIRC, tensile strength is copper<iron<bronze<steel, by roughly x2.
Nope. Not at all. Steel weapons are superior to bronze in every way.
The comparison was iron and bronze. Not steel and bronze.
There was never a time when iron was used in a major way until they figured out how to make steel. So technically it was always the steel age, not the iron age.
Steel, I believe, needs much higher temperatures and purified inputs.
And?
… and steel was brought up.
But not in the context of a comparison with bronze. Nobody made the claim that Bronze was as strong as Steel.
Bronze is better at making musical instruments, and who doesn’t need a trumpet or a tuba nowadays?
Surely we are in a steel age and not an iron age
Technically it was never the iron age but the steel age.
End of silicon age and the start of the quantum age.
That’s ridiculous, you can’t make a good sword out of silicon.
How do you know? I bet you never even tried.
Well I tried a “sword” made out of silicon and it was only good for pleasuring my wife
You’re probably thinking of silicone, but either way, good on you.
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.
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
I just realized “dialing a number” comes from turning a dial.
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)
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.
It’s where we put classified information because the kids won’t read news papers!
wtf is a pennysaver
Really showing your age, there, Dagwood.
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)
What’s a newspaper?
What is love?
Baby don’t hurt me
I’d rather have a copper spear than a steel sword. Swords are small and weak. Spears are long and powerful.
I’d rather have a nuclear spear tbh
Nuclear spear.
Pro: Kills all of your enemies.
Con: Also kills you and everyone you know.
Con: Also kills you and everyone you know.
Unless you can throw the javelin far enough.
Nuclear-Spearman: Huuuun, where’s my atl-atl?!?
Honey: I put it away! Don’t you think about running off doing no nuclear-do!
Preps sophon on another planet
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
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.
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.
Kopeshes are pretty well established. Which were copper swords.
Is there a statistic for estimated energy consumption per capital against time available?
How do you measure time available?
what were they doing for all that time
dying of dysentery
Playing Copper and Bronzers.
They’ll say the same thing about us. We could start building a utopia right now.
Utopia relies on greed not existing
Technology relies on information being passed down
::black mirror episodes becoming reality enter the chat::
The gamer switched from the “Aeon” mod to “quick game” pace
