• Transporter Room 3
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        337 months 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.

          • Transporter Room 3
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            77 months 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.

              • @[email protected]
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                7 months ago

                NonCredibleDefense, not sure which instance it’s on, but they hit all on the regular.

            • @[email protected]
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              7 months 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      27 months 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

  • @[email protected]
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    1147 months ago

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

    • @[email protected]
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      357 months 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
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        307 months 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.

        • @[email protected]
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          207 months 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
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            87 months 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.

      • @[email protected]
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        167 months 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.

        • @[email protected]
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          107 months 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.

      • @[email protected]
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        117 months 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

  • Diplomjodler
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    267 months 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.

    • @Keanu
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      97 months 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.

      • @[email protected]
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        87 months 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.

      • Diplomjodler
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        57 months ago

        Nope. Not at all. Steel weapons are superior to bronze in every way.

          • Diplomjodler
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            87 months ago

            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.

          • Zorque
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            37 months ago

            Steel, I believe, needs much higher temperatures and purified inputs.

        • @[email protected]
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          27 months ago

          Bronze is better at making musical instruments, and who doesn’t need a trumpet or a tuba nowadays?

      • @[email protected]
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        47 months ago

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

    • Match!!
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      47 months ago

      Surely we are in a steel age and not an iron age

  • @[email protected]
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    247 months 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.

  • @[email protected]
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    107 months ago

    I’d rather have a copper spear than a steel sword. Swords are small and weak. Spears are long and powerful.

  • @[email protected]
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    97 months 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.

  • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin
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    97 months 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

  • @[email protected]
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    77 months 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.

  • @[email protected]
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    67 months ago

    Is there a statistic for estimated energy consumption per capital against time available?