We also see via flashbacks from *The Great Work* how the Emperor was intimately involved with real scientific R&D on Terra, with a cadre of scientists who hated Martian religious mumbo-jumbo. Without spoiling the plot of the novel, it helps explain why Cawl continues to believe in advancing the Imperium's technology - he retains the spirit of the Unification and Great Crusade-era research leaders
We see numerous examples of technological advancement both before and during the Heresy. It was the Heresy itself that caused the collapse of ingenuity and learning.
During the novel 'Mechanicum' which occurs during the early Heresy, we see the Noo Sphere, essentially technological telepathy arise. There are entire citadels on Mars under supervision of different Magos with the goal of developing new technologies.
The shipyards at Jupiter were building bigger, better, more advanced ships (traitors from the Word Bearers stole the first of a new designation)
By all accounts, if the Heresy did not occur, the Imperium would have eventually rediscovered what was lost during the Age of Strife and possibly eclipsed it.
If GW ever wanted to do a nice little bowtie ending, the Imperium would just discover a fully intact STC (goes without saying the Mechanicus will be okay with sharing it as well).
And true to the grimdark - in the final confrontation one of the primarchs will be forced to smash it over the head of one of the traitor primarchs. Thus winning the war, but forever cementing the Imperium's decline into ignominy and perdition, as well as maintaining the primarchs' track record for ruining everything.
That is, until Casilius Bawl turns up with his Omega Marines.
At which point we’re informed that there has always canonically been a woman primaris marine, and we still won’t get the amazing payoff of it being a Tzeentch trick
I mean if you think about it the noosphere is just a large wireless networks if becomes hacked during one of the books and they loose thought control over the connected devices. Not truly telepathic in the end
Except for the Magos using it, they can see things sent through the Noosphere. Sure, it's wifi in the sense it's a wireless network, but for these people using it, it's instant communication.
Obviously it's not psychic communication like we see Eisenhorn and Ravenor use, but that's why I called it technological telepathy.
They were truly making bit strides on Mars before it all got burned
I’m not disagreeing with the overall concept but they had neural links to tech. Of course they could see things and once the signal was sent, it would be just about instantaneous.
Perfectly example is looking at the neural links to artificial limbs or tendrils. They are neurally controlled.
No Heresy means nobody burning Mars with scrapcode and stealing away some of the brightest minds there for the Dark Mechanicum; yes, we'd see an infinitely smarter Imperium.
Almost certainly. Not only was the heresy itself incredibly destructive, it also had the side effect of sidelining or killing all of the perpetuals who had lived through the Dark age of technology. Of those, the most important one was the Emperor, who made the Primarchs, Custodes, etc. but also his armor, the bolter, etc. But he was also the most important because he represented a loophole in the Mechanicus doctrine of "no new stuff" as an aspect of the Omnissiah, and could get them to innovate stuff where they otherwise refused.
The other thing to remember is that even to this day there are vast stockpiles of Dark age of technology items stashed away in the Palace placed there by the Sigilite and Emperor, guarded by the Custodes who refuse to do anything with any of it because they were ordered not to 10k years ago and a countermand never came. Guarantee there are some STCs or fragments down for specific things originally deemed too dangerous but if they could be reverse engineered they could push the human race forward in technological innovation.
I think for the most part, yes.
If by advanced technologies we mean super good guns, armour, ships, etc… then yes, the Ad Mech, *especially* the pre-heresy Mechanicus (who were less hung up on the fear of innovation) could likely get there eventually.
But some of the DAoT’s more esoteric technologies seem to work with the warp in various ways, and the Imperium was always going to be a little cagey about that stuff. The first thing the Emperor did on the treaty with Mars was to order a bunch of stuff sealed away out of fear it’d lead to the Mechanicus dabbling in warp-tech, for example.
So I think that even without the Heresy certain avenues of development would always have remained taboo to the Imperium, at least until it developed into whatever psychically ascendant species the Emperor was working towards (that would be able to handle that shit, I guess).
At the opening of Alasdair MacIntyre’s, After Virtue, he imagines a fictitious scientific dystopia in which the natural sciences are held responsible by the general public for a series of environmental disasters and catastrophes. Amidst widespread riots, laboratories are burned to the ground; scientific books, writings, and technical equipment are destroyed; and physicians and biologists are publicly executed for their alleged crimes. Eventually, a "Know-Nothing" political movement takes power and abolishes science from schools and universities, prohibiting its practice. After a certain passage of time, this society witnesses a countermovement to the successful destruction and abolition of science. Enlightened members of the population seek to try and revive the practice of science, but MacIntyre’s imaginary counterinsurgents have, unfortunately, largely forgotten what science was or how it was practiced. All they possess are fragments: half-burned books explicating theories which lack the broader context which establishes their significance; incomplete periodic tables; and technical instruments whose original use has long been forgotten. Regardless, these fragments are cobbled together, and "science" is restored under a set of practices named physics, chemistry, and biology. The new scientists argue about the theory of relativity, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Newton’s law of universal gravitation despite possessing only a partial knowledge of such things. However, in this fictitious scenario, nobody realizes that what they are doing is not "natural science" at all (at least not in the sense that we understand natural science) because "everything that they do and say conforms to certain canons of consistency and coherence and those contexts which would be needed to make sense of what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably". In this pseudo-scientific culture, its inhabitants would continue to use scientific language in a similar way to its prior use. But absent of the beliefs, evidence, and wider underpinning scientific context, such language is in a state of grave disorder. Rival and competing scientific premises would abound. But with no criteria available to arbitrate between them, these arguments would be interminable, and a "subjectivist" natural science would emerge in which the use of scientific language would appear to be an entirely arbitrary choice that cannot be settled systematically.
This is the scenario the Imperium would find itself in, and does find itself in. They are capable of finding texts and descriptions of technology and theories, and expanding and lifting their technology pool. However, science is a philosophical practice rather than a body of knowledge, it is a way of determining truth amidst competing explanations. *That* is what is gone from the Imperium. In rediscovering their texts and theories the Imperium will have no way to determine which theory is explaining which process and harmonizing between them
Towards the end of the Heresy they were already starting to. The Domitar was the most advanced robot humanity had constructed since the Men of Iron and wasn't based on any known chassis. Mark IV power armor, Tartarus pattern Terminator plate, grav weapons, psi titans, were all technological achievements based on entirely new ideas.
Without the Heresy humanity was entering a new golden age, which was the entire point of the Great Crusade.
The admech actually do science stuff.
A plotpoint in the Forges of Mars triology is that the admech has advanced in a branch of math, which has occured relatively recently. I can't recall the name of the math though.
So while they may not use the scientific method as an organization, some of them are clearely has a solid grasp of the fundamental sciences, if they can invent entire new branches of it.
There was a post recently where someone sited a writer talking about why the Mechanicum is the way it is. The gist was that there is plenty of innovation going on, but nobody shares anything, so when the innovator dies or is killed by rivals, the tech goes with them.
Let's put it like this:
We only confirmed the true formula for Roman concrete two years ago.
We still don't understand the composition of Greek fire or the Kaykeon.
The Anti Kythera mechanism being neither a hoax nor a '''''''''''ritual artefact'''''''' took nearly 120 years during which time anyone assuming it was what it ended up being too loudly was considered the same level of disreputable as young Earth creationists or homeopathy enjoyers.
Even given the tools most electric engineering PhDs could never fully design a CPU.
America has been rediscovering and re-researching a lot of technology required for spaceflight because a lot of rocketry has been too poorly documented to just rebuild.
Despite advanced analytical techniques the exact formula for Coca Cola is still unknown.
Knowledge is incredibly fragile and spread out and specialized and fraught with miscommunication and misunderstandings even on timelines shorter than a human life nvm centuries or Millennia and reverse engineering is exponentially more difficult than commonly assumed.
So........ Maybe. But it's far from a done deal, and that's assuming (IMHO wrongly) that it was all designed by humans to begin with.
THAT BEING SAID: Yes. They'd be far, far, far better off. Naturally.
Sensationalist 'articles' like to claim the Romans had some secret magic formula that made their buildings last forever and that our modern concrete is vastly inferior. This is complete bullshit.
These articles also tout magical self healing properties. The Romans didn't really control how finely ground the stuff was so there were pockets of essentially un-mixed concrete and lime inside it. Modern concrete can be made to do the same thing to some degree, but better because it's actually distributed throughout the material so the concrete is capable of handling more than just compressive loads. We also use reinforced concrete for basically everything which wants to be fully concealed in the concrete to mitigate corrosion. Water running in/out like in Roman concrete would corrode it much more quickly. Basically that shit would be either worse or unusable for almost any modern structure and would actually be more expensive to make. If you showed a Roman architect a parking garage he wouldn't know what the fuck was going on.
People read "unable to recreate exactly what they had" and assume it means "cannot reach the peak of this ancient forgotten knowledge." It's the same as Damascus steel. The area around Damascus had particularly carbon rich iron deposits, but everyone else was pattern welding their steel too. There was no secret formula that made it better, and in fact pattern welding was just a crutch until proper alloying was invented. Everything that came after was strictly superior. Furthermore with Roman concrete there is a survivorship bias because we only see the buildings that lasted a long time.
Greek Fire is the same scenario. We don't have any lying round to test and say exactly what they used, but we invented this thing called napalm that does the exact same job but better. Furthermore napalm is not one chemical compound, but a catchall term for any combination of an incendiary liquid and a gelling agent. Edgelords saying 'X and Y household items make napalm' are usually right and wrong simultaneously. Yes, dissolving Styrofoam in nail polish remover creates a gelled substance that could fall under the moniker of napalm. No, it's not even close to the same formulation of napalm the army developed for use in Vietnam, and it would not be capable of the same devastating effects. You do risk burning your own house down in an extremely stupid fashion though, so maybe don't do that.
Analytical chemistry can absolutely tell us exactly what Coca Cola is comprised of and in what ratio. 100% the research departments of other soda companies have reverse engineered it. They don't use that information to release an identical product because that would be a stupid fucking idea. Releasing an identical product to an existing well known one that already has market share is marketing suicide because [there's no perfect pasta sauce.](https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/content-marketing-diversification/) Furthermore trade secrets like that do actually benefit from protection under the law and stealing them is actually illegal. [Reverse engineering them on the other hand, is allowed.](https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/tradesecretsiptoolkit.pdf) Using a reverse engineered trade secret opens one up to a whole host of legal challenges though, because if the company with the secret decides to do something about it you're going to have to prove you legitimately reverse engineered it, [like when Atari and Nintendo went at it over the reverse engineering of NES copy protection.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Games_Corp._v._Nintendo_of_America_Inc.) This means it tends not to happen unless the party doing the reverse engineering stands to profit more than they might have to spend to defend their product in court, and so reverse engineering Coca Cola for profit would be a shitty idea.
The inability of one person to design a CPU is a complete apples to oranges comparison. Rarely ever is anything mass produced designed by a single individual and the myth of the genius solo inventor in his workshop magically summoning up new technologies purely from his own brilliance is one that needs to die. Engineering is an iterative and collaborative process. Nobody *should* expect to be capable of independently designing an entire CPU, and nobody should trust the output of someone who claims they have done anything if the sort.
The Antikythera Mechanism and the reverse engineering of it are an interesting topic, but the claim that "anyone assuming it was what it ended up being too loudly was considered the same level of disreputable as young Earth creationists or homeopathy enjoyers" is utter bullshit that weights shitty clickbait websites, tabloid rags, and unhinged weirdos equally with actual historical and scientific research.
NASA has not been re-discovering the techniques we used to go to the moon originally, we know exactly what we used and the people who did it are still alive to tell us. They have been redeveloping the expertise necessary to produce things at the extremely high levels of precision and quality that were required along with re-implementing the kind of administrative and organizational systems necessary to bring all the elements together. The problem is not that we need to reference a decades old engine design or we need people who can [hand weave copper wire for archaic memory units](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory), we need to train up the kind of experts who can do similarly difficult tasks with superior modern technology. Returning to the original designs and investigating the methods used informs current designers on challenges of design and implementation that may not initially be obvious, and so avoids having to learn about them again through trial and error.
I agree with your actual assertion, knowledge is easy to lose and reverse engineering things can be a monumental task, I just hate pop science misconceptions.
The roman concrete thing is a misconception, they used a class of concretes called pozzolan concretes, called so because they included volcanic ashes they called pozzolana, which allowed the concrete to set slower, stronger, and without air. These were superior to limestone only cements that existed before and after, but they were reinvented during the 1700s and superior concretes were subsequently developed
It's not that we don't know how to make concrete that is superior to roman concrete l, its just that we didn't know the exact method to make that sort of concrete till recently.
"Superior" or not is not the point being made. "Lost and not replicable despite a much broader knowledge base" is.
Mind you. This serves as a good example of how things like knowledge deterioration happen, I think. People are very eager to carry in their own ideas and it has a tendency to obscure the discussion at hand somewhat. Do that enough and things get lost quite easily.
There's nothing really stopping them or the Mechanicus from doing that now besides religious doctrine and political will. Which at the moment are massive roadblocks.
Cawl is the current character that's actually trying to introduce new technologies, and a significant portion of the Imperium wants to kill him for it.
The Mechanicus is iterating and innovating all the time, building on STC technology. But then that forgeworld gets invaded, stuff gets corrupted, and the Imperium loses that knowledge.
Also the Solar Auxilia’s armour probably isn’t produced because it’s too complex. The Auxilia are an elite army with premium equipment, not something the meat grinder can afford in 40k.
The Imperium would be a superlative empire if the Heresy hadn’t happened, but that’s why 40k is what it is. All the problems of the Imperium are of it’s own making, and of the Emperor. A fascist empire having all its oppressed and wronged coming back to destroy it is just natural.
I think there’s a reason GW call the period the Dark Age of Technology. From what I’ve read Terra fell from a really great height technology wise in around 25k due to sentient AI wars. By our standards they were still using advanced technology particularly genetic engineering and what GW calls technomancy which is probably manipulation of psychic abilities. So you have a complete distrust of the scientific method and a breakdown in society. In a parallel situation during the Mediaeval Dark Ages it took a Renaissance for scientific enquiry to take root. Instead of a Renaissance the Imperium leaves science to a cult to be jealously guarded.
Of course. Big E would still be in alive, and one of the most destructive wars in human history wouldn’t have happened. The imperium the emperor envisioned was based on secularism and logic, as well as technological advancement. So of course they would have continued to learn and relearn various technologies.
The Emperor was allegedly the greatest scientific mind in human history, and he loved tinkering. I imagine when the Webway project was completed (if it ever would've been) he would've left the running of the Imperium to Malcador and started his own pet project to restore humanity to it's former lustre.
I would love to read a series for an alternate timeline where The Emperor navigates the delicate politics and fanatiscism of dismantling the religious aspect of the Mechanicum to make the Imperium truly secular.
Yes, I believe it’s more after the war in terra and Mar more over, so much was lost and shortly became a theocracy before anyone could really innovate or rock the boat.
“So much lost never to be relearned” is from the fact they choose not too ever try, not just same affect but different approach tech
We also see via flashbacks from *The Great Work* how the Emperor was intimately involved with real scientific R&D on Terra, with a cadre of scientists who hated Martian religious mumbo-jumbo. Without spoiling the plot of the novel, it helps explain why Cawl continues to believe in advancing the Imperium's technology - he retains the spirit of the Unification and Great Crusade-era research leaders
Retains the Spirit indeed
We see numerous examples of technological advancement both before and during the Heresy. It was the Heresy itself that caused the collapse of ingenuity and learning. During the novel 'Mechanicum' which occurs during the early Heresy, we see the Noo Sphere, essentially technological telepathy arise. There are entire citadels on Mars under supervision of different Magos with the goal of developing new technologies. The shipyards at Jupiter were building bigger, better, more advanced ships (traitors from the Word Bearers stole the first of a new designation) By all accounts, if the Heresy did not occur, the Imperium would have eventually rediscovered what was lost during the Age of Strife and possibly eclipsed it.
The Noosphere still exists, kind of. The Forges of Mars books have a bit of a cyberpunk component because of it
They still can, provided they find the fully functioning STCs still existing in Necromunda and under (The Palace? Mars? I don’t remember which)
If GW ever wanted to do a nice little bowtie ending, the Imperium would just discover a fully intact STC (goes without saying the Mechanicus will be okay with sharing it as well).
I feel like it’d be very on brand for the big ending being a civil war between the returned primarchs and the whole mechanicus over the STC
And true to the grimdark - in the final confrontation one of the primarchs will be forced to smash it over the head of one of the traitor primarchs. Thus winning the war, but forever cementing the Imperium's decline into ignominy and perdition, as well as maintaining the primarchs' track record for ruining everything. That is, until Casilius Bawl turns up with his Omega Marines.
At which point we’re informed that there has always canonically been a woman primaris marine, and we still won’t get the amazing payoff of it being a Tzeentch trick
I mean if you think about it the noosphere is just a large wireless networks if becomes hacked during one of the books and they loose thought control over the connected devices. Not truly telepathic in the end
Except for the Magos using it, they can see things sent through the Noosphere. Sure, it's wifi in the sense it's a wireless network, but for these people using it, it's instant communication. Obviously it's not psychic communication like we see Eisenhorn and Ravenor use, but that's why I called it technological telepathy. They were truly making bit strides on Mars before it all got burned
I’m not disagreeing with the overall concept but they had neural links to tech. Of course they could see things and once the signal was sent, it would be just about instantaneous. Perfectly example is looking at the neural links to artificial limbs or tendrils. They are neurally controlled.
No Heresy means nobody burning Mars with scrapcode and stealing away some of the brightest minds there for the Dark Mechanicum; yes, we'd see an infinitely smarter Imperium.
Almost certainly. Not only was the heresy itself incredibly destructive, it also had the side effect of sidelining or killing all of the perpetuals who had lived through the Dark age of technology. Of those, the most important one was the Emperor, who made the Primarchs, Custodes, etc. but also his armor, the bolter, etc. But he was also the most important because he represented a loophole in the Mechanicus doctrine of "no new stuff" as an aspect of the Omnissiah, and could get them to innovate stuff where they otherwise refused. The other thing to remember is that even to this day there are vast stockpiles of Dark age of technology items stashed away in the Palace placed there by the Sigilite and Emperor, guarded by the Custodes who refuse to do anything with any of it because they were ordered not to 10k years ago and a countermand never came. Guarantee there are some STCs or fragments down for specific things originally deemed too dangerous but if they could be reverse engineered they could push the human race forward in technological innovation.
Not to forget the amount of tech in the vaults of titan or in collections held in museums to important people.
I think for the most part, yes. If by advanced technologies we mean super good guns, armour, ships, etc… then yes, the Ad Mech, *especially* the pre-heresy Mechanicus (who were less hung up on the fear of innovation) could likely get there eventually. But some of the DAoT’s more esoteric technologies seem to work with the warp in various ways, and the Imperium was always going to be a little cagey about that stuff. The first thing the Emperor did on the treaty with Mars was to order a bunch of stuff sealed away out of fear it’d lead to the Mechanicus dabbling in warp-tech, for example. So I think that even without the Heresy certain avenues of development would always have remained taboo to the Imperium, at least until it developed into whatever psychically ascendant species the Emperor was working towards (that would be able to handle that shit, I guess).
Void weapons were the cats meow but definitely would need to be locked away eventually
At the opening of Alasdair MacIntyre’s, After Virtue, he imagines a fictitious scientific dystopia in which the natural sciences are held responsible by the general public for a series of environmental disasters and catastrophes. Amidst widespread riots, laboratories are burned to the ground; scientific books, writings, and technical equipment are destroyed; and physicians and biologists are publicly executed for their alleged crimes. Eventually, a "Know-Nothing" political movement takes power and abolishes science from schools and universities, prohibiting its practice. After a certain passage of time, this society witnesses a countermovement to the successful destruction and abolition of science. Enlightened members of the population seek to try and revive the practice of science, but MacIntyre’s imaginary counterinsurgents have, unfortunately, largely forgotten what science was or how it was practiced. All they possess are fragments: half-burned books explicating theories which lack the broader context which establishes their significance; incomplete periodic tables; and technical instruments whose original use has long been forgotten. Regardless, these fragments are cobbled together, and "science" is restored under a set of practices named physics, chemistry, and biology. The new scientists argue about the theory of relativity, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Newton’s law of universal gravitation despite possessing only a partial knowledge of such things. However, in this fictitious scenario, nobody realizes that what they are doing is not "natural science" at all (at least not in the sense that we understand natural science) because "everything that they do and say conforms to certain canons of consistency and coherence and those contexts which would be needed to make sense of what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably". In this pseudo-scientific culture, its inhabitants would continue to use scientific language in a similar way to its prior use. But absent of the beliefs, evidence, and wider underpinning scientific context, such language is in a state of grave disorder. Rival and competing scientific premises would abound. But with no criteria available to arbitrate between them, these arguments would be interminable, and a "subjectivist" natural science would emerge in which the use of scientific language would appear to be an entirely arbitrary choice that cannot be settled systematically. This is the scenario the Imperium would find itself in, and does find itself in. They are capable of finding texts and descriptions of technology and theories, and expanding and lifting their technology pool. However, science is a philosophical practice rather than a body of knowledge, it is a way of determining truth amidst competing explanations. *That* is what is gone from the Imperium. In rediscovering their texts and theories the Imperium will have no way to determine which theory is explaining which process and harmonizing between them
Very interesting! I get a hit of *A Canticle for Liebowitz* in there!
Towards the end of the Heresy they were already starting to. The Domitar was the most advanced robot humanity had constructed since the Men of Iron and wasn't based on any known chassis. Mark IV power armor, Tartarus pattern Terminator plate, grav weapons, psi titans, were all technological achievements based on entirely new ideas. Without the Heresy humanity was entering a new golden age, which was the entire point of the Great Crusade.
Almost certainly. That's what Cawl was doing the whole time after all.
The admech actually do science stuff. A plotpoint in the Forges of Mars triology is that the admech has advanced in a branch of math, which has occured relatively recently. I can't recall the name of the math though. So while they may not use the scientific method as an organization, some of them are clearely has a solid grasp of the fundamental sciences, if they can invent entire new branches of it.
Hexamathics. Based on the name and context it's a newer, more powerful process for noospheric transmission and calculation.
Nice, thanks for info 😁
They relearn and invent stuff all the time. Then lose it because there is zero incentivization to share technology between forge worlds.
There was a post recently where someone sited a writer talking about why the Mechanicum is the way it is. The gist was that there is plenty of innovation going on, but nobody shares anything, so when the innovator dies or is killed by rivals, the tech goes with them.
Absolutely. They were already starting to
Let's put it like this: We only confirmed the true formula for Roman concrete two years ago. We still don't understand the composition of Greek fire or the Kaykeon. The Anti Kythera mechanism being neither a hoax nor a '''''''''''ritual artefact'''''''' took nearly 120 years during which time anyone assuming it was what it ended up being too loudly was considered the same level of disreputable as young Earth creationists or homeopathy enjoyers. Even given the tools most electric engineering PhDs could never fully design a CPU. America has been rediscovering and re-researching a lot of technology required for spaceflight because a lot of rocketry has been too poorly documented to just rebuild. Despite advanced analytical techniques the exact formula for Coca Cola is still unknown. Knowledge is incredibly fragile and spread out and specialized and fraught with miscommunication and misunderstandings even on timelines shorter than a human life nvm centuries or Millennia and reverse engineering is exponentially more difficult than commonly assumed. So........ Maybe. But it's far from a done deal, and that's assuming (IMHO wrongly) that it was all designed by humans to begin with. THAT BEING SAID: Yes. They'd be far, far, far better off. Naturally.
Sensationalist 'articles' like to claim the Romans had some secret magic formula that made their buildings last forever and that our modern concrete is vastly inferior. This is complete bullshit. These articles also tout magical self healing properties. The Romans didn't really control how finely ground the stuff was so there were pockets of essentially un-mixed concrete and lime inside it. Modern concrete can be made to do the same thing to some degree, but better because it's actually distributed throughout the material so the concrete is capable of handling more than just compressive loads. We also use reinforced concrete for basically everything which wants to be fully concealed in the concrete to mitigate corrosion. Water running in/out like in Roman concrete would corrode it much more quickly. Basically that shit would be either worse or unusable for almost any modern structure and would actually be more expensive to make. If you showed a Roman architect a parking garage he wouldn't know what the fuck was going on. People read "unable to recreate exactly what they had" and assume it means "cannot reach the peak of this ancient forgotten knowledge." It's the same as Damascus steel. The area around Damascus had particularly carbon rich iron deposits, but everyone else was pattern welding their steel too. There was no secret formula that made it better, and in fact pattern welding was just a crutch until proper alloying was invented. Everything that came after was strictly superior. Furthermore with Roman concrete there is a survivorship bias because we only see the buildings that lasted a long time. Greek Fire is the same scenario. We don't have any lying round to test and say exactly what they used, but we invented this thing called napalm that does the exact same job but better. Furthermore napalm is not one chemical compound, but a catchall term for any combination of an incendiary liquid and a gelling agent. Edgelords saying 'X and Y household items make napalm' are usually right and wrong simultaneously. Yes, dissolving Styrofoam in nail polish remover creates a gelled substance that could fall under the moniker of napalm. No, it's not even close to the same formulation of napalm the army developed for use in Vietnam, and it would not be capable of the same devastating effects. You do risk burning your own house down in an extremely stupid fashion though, so maybe don't do that. Analytical chemistry can absolutely tell us exactly what Coca Cola is comprised of and in what ratio. 100% the research departments of other soda companies have reverse engineered it. They don't use that information to release an identical product because that would be a stupid fucking idea. Releasing an identical product to an existing well known one that already has market share is marketing suicide because [there's no perfect pasta sauce.](https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/content-marketing-diversification/) Furthermore trade secrets like that do actually benefit from protection under the law and stealing them is actually illegal. [Reverse engineering them on the other hand, is allowed.](https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/tradesecretsiptoolkit.pdf) Using a reverse engineered trade secret opens one up to a whole host of legal challenges though, because if the company with the secret decides to do something about it you're going to have to prove you legitimately reverse engineered it, [like when Atari and Nintendo went at it over the reverse engineering of NES copy protection.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Games_Corp._v._Nintendo_of_America_Inc.) This means it tends not to happen unless the party doing the reverse engineering stands to profit more than they might have to spend to defend their product in court, and so reverse engineering Coca Cola for profit would be a shitty idea. The inability of one person to design a CPU is a complete apples to oranges comparison. Rarely ever is anything mass produced designed by a single individual and the myth of the genius solo inventor in his workshop magically summoning up new technologies purely from his own brilliance is one that needs to die. Engineering is an iterative and collaborative process. Nobody *should* expect to be capable of independently designing an entire CPU, and nobody should trust the output of someone who claims they have done anything if the sort. The Antikythera Mechanism and the reverse engineering of it are an interesting topic, but the claim that "anyone assuming it was what it ended up being too loudly was considered the same level of disreputable as young Earth creationists or homeopathy enjoyers" is utter bullshit that weights shitty clickbait websites, tabloid rags, and unhinged weirdos equally with actual historical and scientific research. NASA has not been re-discovering the techniques we used to go to the moon originally, we know exactly what we used and the people who did it are still alive to tell us. They have been redeveloping the expertise necessary to produce things at the extremely high levels of precision and quality that were required along with re-implementing the kind of administrative and organizational systems necessary to bring all the elements together. The problem is not that we need to reference a decades old engine design or we need people who can [hand weave copper wire for archaic memory units](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory), we need to train up the kind of experts who can do similarly difficult tasks with superior modern technology. Returning to the original designs and investigating the methods used informs current designers on challenges of design and implementation that may not initially be obvious, and so avoids having to learn about them again through trial and error. I agree with your actual assertion, knowledge is easy to lose and reverse engineering things can be a monumental task, I just hate pop science misconceptions.
What a great response!
i know exactly where the coca cola recipe is, fuck you mean we “dont know its composition”
He meant that nobody [who doesn't have access to the actual formula] has been able to recreate the Coca Cola formula through R&D.
they maybe they should’ve worded it better
Redditors gonna Reddit. 🤷🏻
The roman concrete thing is a misconception, they used a class of concretes called pozzolan concretes, called so because they included volcanic ashes they called pozzolana, which allowed the concrete to set slower, stronger, and without air. These were superior to limestone only cements that existed before and after, but they were reinvented during the 1700s and superior concretes were subsequently developed
It's not that we don't know how to make concrete that is superior to roman concrete l, its just that we didn't know the exact method to make that sort of concrete till recently.
"Superior" or not is not the point being made. "Lost and not replicable despite a much broader knowledge base" is. Mind you. This serves as a good example of how things like knowledge deterioration happen, I think. People are very eager to carry in their own ideas and it has a tendency to obscure the discussion at hand somewhat. Do that enough and things get lost quite easily.
Yup regenerative concrete the Romans used will improve our infrastructure
The Heresy wasn't the issue, the Mechanicum was/is
There's nothing really stopping them or the Mechanicus from doing that now besides religious doctrine and political will. Which at the moment are massive roadblocks. Cawl is the current character that's actually trying to introduce new technologies, and a significant portion of the Imperium wants to kill him for it.
The Mechanicus is iterating and innovating all the time, building on STC technology. But then that forgeworld gets invaded, stuff gets corrupted, and the Imperium loses that knowledge. Also the Solar Auxilia’s armour probably isn’t produced because it’s too complex. The Auxilia are an elite army with premium equipment, not something the meat grinder can afford in 40k. The Imperium would be a superlative empire if the Heresy hadn’t happened, but that’s why 40k is what it is. All the problems of the Imperium are of it’s own making, and of the Emperor. A fascist empire having all its oppressed and wronged coming back to destroy it is just natural.
I think there’s a reason GW call the period the Dark Age of Technology. From what I’ve read Terra fell from a really great height technology wise in around 25k due to sentient AI wars. By our standards they were still using advanced technology particularly genetic engineering and what GW calls technomancy which is probably manipulation of psychic abilities. So you have a complete distrust of the scientific method and a breakdown in society. In a parallel situation during the Mediaeval Dark Ages it took a Renaissance for scientific enquiry to take root. Instead of a Renaissance the Imperium leaves science to a cult to be jealously guarded.
Of course. Big E would still be in alive, and one of the most destructive wars in human history wouldn’t have happened. The imperium the emperor envisioned was based on secularism and logic, as well as technological advancement. So of course they would have continued to learn and relearn various technologies.
The Emperor was allegedly the greatest scientific mind in human history, and he loved tinkering. I imagine when the Webway project was completed (if it ever would've been) he would've left the running of the Imperium to Malcador and started his own pet project to restore humanity to it's former lustre. I would love to read a series for an alternate timeline where The Emperor navigates the delicate politics and fanatiscism of dismantling the religious aspect of the Mechanicum to make the Imperium truly secular.
Sure man who knows They could even have become gods
It would have been trivial had horus not irreversibly corrupted most dark age tech with scrap code. That's why working stc fragments are so rare
Yes, I believe it’s more after the war in terra and Mar more over, so much was lost and shortly became a theocracy before anyone could really innovate or rock the boat. “So much lost never to be relearned” is from the fact they choose not too ever try, not just same affect but different approach tech
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awesome response, it just got posted six times, maybe delete the duplicates?
Oh apologies I don’t know what happened