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Technology goes step-by-step

I’d like to start out today with a quote:

Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken.

Chairman Sheng-ji Yang
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri

Although quotes taken from computer games generally aren’t given much credence, I would like to call your attention to this one. Technology is a step-by-step process. Let me expand on this for a bit. Let us
assume that we had an indestructible, complete, portable, and perfect archive of all the technological advancements of our global civilization going back to the first time we deliberately used fire. Now let us assume that it is going with an group of people (size is arbitrary, but think big for our purposes), which are then put on an untouched world, either another planet, or are sent back in time on this one. Now: How long will it take for the people to regain the technology we have here? A long, long, long time. The most optimistic I can think of would be a thousand years, and that is really optimistic. Several
millennia would probably be required. The good news is that since they are just working on the requirements of the new technologies, that they will have to put less effort into development, and furthermore, the fact that the have the non-physical technology means that they will be much better off than our ancestors (cleanliness, etc). Metal smithing was a huge boost, in it’s various
stages. But they’ll still have to start with what they can pick up off the ground and work up.

Physical Technology

Physical technology is the slowest and least adaptable. For starters, you need to have the physical materials there in order to build your item, then you would need to make sure it doesn’t break through use. Let’s go back to blacksmithing. In order to start up a forge, they’ll need some
ceramics, some ore (having found and gotten it from the rocks), and charcoal, as regular coal can be hard to come by. Even assuming that the prospective person is an expert on smithing, and has absorbed everything from the archive, it’s going to be a huge ordeal to crank out those first few items. What should
those items be? I would make smithing tools, if I had the option The same is true with just about any physical technology. If you take any modern material, and run it back 100 or even 50 years, people would be baffled by it. I’ll just mention electronics because a mention is all that is needed for that topic.
What happens when they have the technical capability to refine their tools? To upgrade physical tools, you have to modify them. Let’s say that the first generation of tools were clunky and unwieldy. The smith learns to make them less so. What do you have to do with each and every hammer? Lug them back to the smith and have him or her rework the hammers into the new version. The hammer is just an example, but it applies across the board to any such tools.

Non-Physical Technology

So, how about non-physical technology? A vague term, so let me clarify a bit: Technologies that are in use today that do not explicitly rely on physical components. How about cleanliness? Cleanliness is a technology we have for keeping ourselves free of disease. How about agriculture? How about
celestial navigation? How about basic meteorology? Each of these interacts with the physical world, but do not rely on any physical tools to apply the basics. They are enhanced with the availability of certain items (soap, scarecrow/fence, sextant, barometer), but you can implement them on a basic level without such addons. Furthermore, advancement is much less limited. Once you have soap, you
can just include that in the washing you already do, and presto! Cleanliness Level 2. Many of these technologies are only limited by how fast you can propagate knowledge. Teaching new techniques, and in turn teaching others, will spread much faster than the poor blacksmith group can churn out hammers. The huge advantage here is that many people would have rather high levels many useful techniques ready-to-go in their minds, and would just need the availability of the physical component to upgrade (soap, anyone?). However, some technologies would be severely lacking. Medicine comes to mind. There are very few people (statistically speaking) that know the medicinal properties of herbs and the human body well enough to act as healers. The good news is that most of what is needed here is a propagation of information. With this group, it would be word of mouth. Herbal knowledge would spread very fast. Most
of us have enough understanding of the human body for that level of technology.

Inner Technology

Now we come to inner technology. By this I mean techniques and methods for being greater within so as to improve the world without. As with any technological area, it is a step-by-step process. You are immobilized by fear until you overcome it, usually with rage, then anger, and so on. The good
news for these people is that such technologies are totally independent of physical components. The greatest factor in how fast you can implement inner technologies is how quickly you can adapt. As people become more and more conscious, they will be better able to make intelligent choices, and act for the
greatest good of all. As fear and separation fall away, the group will act in harmony and be more effective. As each person improves their inner world, so will they improve the world around them. This is what makes this particular branch of technology my absolute favorite. The fact that if you have what it
takes to open your eyes a little, the world will respond. This is why I’m here, and why I’m doing this blog. I’ll post more on my past and present another time, but I wanted to continue laying the groundwork for the more advanced stuff to come.

Coming up in my next post: Inner Technologies - Portable to any location.