No it doesn't …? It just says that nowadays we are less consciously entranced by iron and can more easily get our hands on it, so we don't need to kill people for the comparatively minuscule amount in their blood.
No, I'm not iscrewyou (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21349665). I doubt that I buy that it would happen, but I think that saying it would is just being mistaken, not engaging in some sort of claim to moral superiority.
I agree in that it is probably largely just a case of being mistaken. However, comments like that often carry an implicit, “those horrible ancient civilizations” context embedded within them.
There’s an idea that knowledge (science, economics, technology, etc) and morality are intrinsically linked when in fact, they’re orthogonal.
Because I didn’t mention “those great ancient civilizations” doesn’t imply that I mean the opposite. Any history book will show you the atrocities committed by humans against each other for false reasons that today we say to “how could they?”
I was simply engaging in a philosophical question of what if.
And any newspaper will show you the atrocities committed by contemporary humans against each other, for false reasons that out forefathers would have said "how could they [not learn a single damn thing we taught them]?"
The fact that we do not share their biases do not make our behavior any better, nor our excuses any less petty, dumb or self-serving. And rest asured that our descendants will judge us just as harshly as we judge today those that came before us. Such is human nature.
Anyone trying to extract tangible amounts of iron from hemoglobine is an utter imbecile. It cannot be done now with modern technology and fossil fuels (after all, we do not see abattoirs selling their blood by-products to the steel industry), much less under the restrictions of a pre-industrial society.
Contrary to the GP opinion, ancient people were not dumber than dirt. Any ruler stupid enough to try anything like that on the scale suggested would not remain a ruler for long. People would revolt, oportunistic leutenants would organize a coup, neighbouring rules would seize the chance and invade.
But more importantly, the ruler thenselve would refrain from pursuing this atrocity. The fact that he was a ruler would imply a modicum of competence. Even if he was amoral enough to try, he would stop trying after the first thousand murders turned barely enough iron to cast a hatchet. After all, the tributes that village would have produced during the first year alone would be overwhelmly more valuable.
Iron is extremely common, it's found all over the place in useful quantities. But anyway people in history, in general, weren't complete gibbering idiots.
Khan wasn’t an idiot, he was ruthless. That’s a very different thing.
Likewise, the Holocaust is an interesting topic to study - how exactly did the Nazis murder millions while maintaining at least formal deniability? Would the same even be possible today, with our communications technology? My immediate reaction is “no”, but then I remember that there were people escaping from occupied territory with first-hand accounts of the atrocities being committed, and it was still far from common knowledge.
I don’t believe for a moment that every German who claimed ignorance of the extermination camps was doing so earnestly, but every American I’ve spoken with that lived through WW2 said that there wasn’t really any mention of the camps until Western Allies started liberating them. Even when the Soviets started encountering them, the media treated them as rumor.
I strongly suspect that today, the same thing could happen and that people who reported on it and tried to investigate/document it would be seen as part of the “conspiracy fringe” in one form or another. Indeed, it may be happening, in China, with the Uighurs and other groups. The fact that I don’t really know how much weight to give reports from there gives me pause, and I consider myself fairly well-informed. Certainly better informed than the average “man on the street”, if only because politics is an interest of mine.
In general. And three of those four were done by people who knew perfectly well what they were doing and why, and their actions while despicable, were entirely rational in service of their goals.
There are all these stories like Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court where someone goes back in time.
If someone went back in time with sword and armor made using modern metallurgy, would they be considered magical? The armor would likely be lighter and more maneuverable while still providing protection. The sword would likely be lighter, sharper, and more durable.
I enjoyed this story of a family that was disconnected from society for 40 years, from 1938 to 1978. When found, the technology that most amazed them was... plastic!
> "Lord, what have they thought up — it is glass, but it crumples!"
The family also noticed "moving stars" (which were of course satellites) starting in the 1950s.
> The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when “the stars began to go quickly across the sky,” and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.”
I doubt it. If an alien species came to Earth and gave us a plastic that was 100 times as strong as standard plastic, we'd just go “wow, that's some strong plastic."
Well, we live in age where rapid technological progress is considered normal, or even mundane.
I don't want to imply that there was no new technology developed in the middle ages, but I don't think your average medieval lord expected to see notable technological advancements from generation to generation, let alone year to year.
I suspect that’s our biases talking. For a recent example, tend to think of vacuum tubes as a single thing, but they had vast investments in R&D and got much better over time. And that’s for something invented in 1904.
Similarly, I suspect a huge range of technical innovation that occurred throughout medieval time gets compressed into a few simple ideas like swords or plows. However, if you’re actually using these things day in and say out, what seems to us as a minor change could have been thought of as revolutionary at the time.
i don't know, there's a sibling comment demonstrating that titanium has managed to enter the popular consciousness as a near-magically strong metal, when there's still plenty of uses for steel, and aluminum (even ignoring cost).
so, like vantablack, and titanium, i think the excitement around the wonder-plastic would depend on marketing.
I always thought it's a fascinating idea to see if you could make something using modern metallurgy that looks identical to medieval arms and armour, but has much better properties. So kevlar is out, but how would modern steel fare? Tungsten? Titanium?
I think sword made of alloy tool steel would put divots in a medieval one. I have a tungsten steel knife blade I made. You can use it whittle a regular knife. It's also not brittle in the least.
There was an interesting bit of anachronism in Good Omens where the angel and demon of the piece show up in early medieval England in VERY anachronistic full plate armor - and then the camera pulls back to the mere mortals in splint mail and studded leather, and I realized the plate was part of their supernatural-knight personas.
By "they" do you mean the weapons and armor or the person? The person would be just as likely to be killed or detained indefinitely quite quickly than not IMHO. The armor and sword would be considered an oddity and perhaps go into legend as something more.
The thought occurred to me while reading this article, something like this must have happened "accidentally on purpose" in these medieval forges and smiths - a steel becomes fortified with just the right amount of tungsten to and forged to armor and blades far superior to the usual fare, and goes on to become armor of kings and the stuff of legend. Excalibur, perhaps.
And this probably happened a fair bit, and many people told the stories and continued the legends.
Now, when we play an RPG video game and discover a "Legendary gauntlets, +12 damage +14 resilience" - it sort of triggers an innate feeling within us because of our shared history in which legendary loot was actually a real thing? Fun thoughts.
Full plate armor only weight about 30-35lbs and was extremely maneuverable.
As far as sword steel goes then while some modern steels are superior as far as edge retention and or corrosion resistance goes they aren’t that much better than some of the ancient high quality steels as far as the final product goes to appear magical.
Modern blade steel is more about mass production and consistency so you don’t need to hammer the impurities for 50 days out of your billet.
Sure you might be able to go with titanium instead of steel for the armor but I’m not actually sure it would provide better protection. Plate armor was tempered steel it provided protection by deflecting blade blows and by being able to absorb crushing blows trough deformation instead of shattering.
Yeah you could design a full plate armor with composite materials today that might be better but then it’s well beyond modern steel and even then I’m not sure if many people would think it’s magic.
The ancient iron-smiths. They devised dozens of techniques for making iron harder and tougher. But they didn't know "how it works".
But now we know how it works. That is to say, we have a nice body of thought that describes what we observe going on there. Good thoughts. Useful thoughts.
But how does that work, with thoughts describing observations? I dunno.
Maybe we're like the ancient iron-smiths, except with thoughts.
I'm unconvinced that metal smiths of the iron/steel age did not "understand how it worked." That certain smiths and geographic regions produced consistently high grades of steel suggests they did have an understanding, albeit it an understanding grounded in a world model that differs substantially from our own modern framework. If, for example, an alchemical world view sufficed to describe and predict the results of forging a particular metal or alloy then it was sufficient for understanding within the constraints of what was needed. Plenty of modern bladesmiths have no deeper understanding of metallurgy than "this is good for X, this other is not according to experts or experience."
Aristotelian physics was sufficient in the time and geographic area in which he operated (friction as primary) but was insufficient in a larger domain compared to Newtonian physics (force has primacy). Both served to bring us to and through the industrial age, but then the domain expanded and quantum physics was needed.
Don't discount the genius of our ancestors regardless of archeological age. We may feel smugly superior playing with our tools of the silicon age but get magically transported to the stone age naked and with no access to external knowledge and try and achieve in the basics of food, clothing, and shelter... let alone tools such as hand axes, skinning knives, arrow and spear points, etc.
> If, for example, an alchemical world view sufficed to describe and predict the results of forging a particular metal or alloy then it was sufficient for understanding within the constraints of what was needed.
I strongly doubt alchemy predicted any significant aspects of steelmaking. All alchemical reasoning that I've seen has either been post-hoc trying to explain an observation, or has been quaintly incorrect (see the typical description of how to produce a basilisk, for example).
I'm sure there were many geniuses among our ancient ancestors! The fact that they had no science doesn't mean they weren't smart.
Our age is superior in the sense of more advanced; that doesn't mean that we individually are superior to them as individuals, except in the sense of being more knowledgeable.
> It can also be coated with other materials: a thin sheet of steel coated with an even thinner layer of tin makes the light, sturdy, and non-corrosive tin cans that now hold much of our food.
Are tin cans still used? I was under the impression they'd been replaced by aluminum...
Here in the UK, most food cans are steel. I checked several with a magnet, and the only ones that didn't stick were sardine cans. All the cylindrical food cans stuck. But canned drinks are usually aluminum.
Aluminium (sorry, Brit) is lighter than steel but more expensive, so food cans are usually steel because the contents are fairly heavy anyway. Drinks cans are smaller with a lighter contents weight, and are often held in the hand while drunk so weight is a bigger issue.
40 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 89.2 ms ] threadYou’re sure that’s what would have happened then?
There’s an idea that knowledge (science, economics, technology, etc) and morality are intrinsically linked when in fact, they’re orthogonal.
I was simply engaging in a philosophical question of what if.
> Any history book will show you...
And any newspaper will show you the atrocities committed by contemporary humans against each other, for false reasons that out forefathers would have said "how could they [not learn a single damn thing we taught them]?"
The fact that we do not share their biases do not make our behavior any better, nor our excuses any less petty, dumb or self-serving. And rest asured that our descendants will judge us just as harshly as we judge today those that came before us. Such is human nature.
Contrary to the GP opinion, ancient people were not dumber than dirt. Any ruler stupid enough to try anything like that on the scale suggested would not remain a ruler for long. People would revolt, oportunistic leutenants would organize a coup, neighbouring rules would seize the chance and invade.
But more importantly, the ruler thenselve would refrain from pursuing this atrocity. The fact that he was a ruler would imply a modicum of competence. Even if he was amoral enough to try, he would stop trying after the first thousand murders turned barely enough iron to cast a hatchet. After all, the tributes that village would have produced during the first year alone would be overwhelmly more valuable.
I disagree:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan
Likewise, the Holocaust is an interesting topic to study - how exactly did the Nazis murder millions while maintaining at least formal deniability? Would the same even be possible today, with our communications technology? My immediate reaction is “no”, but then I remember that there were people escaping from occupied territory with first-hand accounts of the atrocities being committed, and it was still far from common knowledge.
I don’t believe for a moment that every German who claimed ignorance of the extermination camps was doing so earnestly, but every American I’ve spoken with that lived through WW2 said that there wasn’t really any mention of the camps until Western Allies started liberating them. Even when the Soviets started encountering them, the media treated them as rumor.
I strongly suspect that today, the same thing could happen and that people who reported on it and tried to investigate/document it would be seen as part of the “conspiracy fringe” in one form or another. Indeed, it may be happening, in China, with the Uighurs and other groups. The fact that I don’t really know how much weight to give reports from there gives me pause, and I consider myself fairly well-informed. Certainly better informed than the average “man on the street”, if only because politics is an interest of mine.
If someone went back in time with sword and armor made using modern metallurgy, would they be considered magical? The armor would likely be lighter and more maneuverable while still providing protection. The sword would likely be lighter, sharper, and more durable.
Just an interesting thought experiment.
> "Lord, what have they thought up — it is glass, but it crumples!"
The family also noticed "moving stars" (which were of course satellites) starting in the 1950s.
> The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when “the stars began to go quickly across the sky,” and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.”
It's a fun read. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-rus...
I don't want to imply that there was no new technology developed in the middle ages, but I don't think your average medieval lord expected to see notable technological advancements from generation to generation, let alone year to year.
Similarly, I suspect a huge range of technical innovation that occurred throughout medieval time gets compressed into a few simple ideas like swords or plows. However, if you’re actually using these things day in and say out, what seems to us as a minor change could have been thought of as revolutionary at the time.
so, like vantablack, and titanium, i think the excitement around the wonder-plastic would depend on marketing.
And this probably happened a fair bit, and many people told the stories and continued the legends.
Now, when we play an RPG video game and discover a "Legendary gauntlets, +12 damage +14 resilience" - it sort of triggers an innate feeling within us because of our shared history in which legendary loot was actually a real thing? Fun thoughts.
As far as sword steel goes then while some modern steels are superior as far as edge retention and or corrosion resistance goes they aren’t that much better than some of the ancient high quality steels as far as the final product goes to appear magical.
Modern blade steel is more about mass production and consistency so you don’t need to hammer the impurities for 50 days out of your billet.
Sure you might be able to go with titanium instead of steel for the armor but I’m not actually sure it would provide better protection. Plate armor was tempered steel it provided protection by deflecting blade blows and by being able to absorb crushing blows trough deformation instead of shattering.
Yeah you could design a full plate armor with composite materials today that might be better but then it’s well beyond modern steel and even then I’m not sure if many people would think it’s magic.
The ancient iron-smiths. They devised dozens of techniques for making iron harder and tougher. But they didn't know "how it works".
But now we know how it works. That is to say, we have a nice body of thought that describes what we observe going on there. Good thoughts. Useful thoughts.
But how does that work, with thoughts describing observations? I dunno.
Maybe we're like the ancient iron-smiths, except with thoughts.
Thought smiths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel
Aristotelian physics was sufficient in the time and geographic area in which he operated (friction as primary) but was insufficient in a larger domain compared to Newtonian physics (force has primacy). Both served to bring us to and through the industrial age, but then the domain expanded and quantum physics was needed.
Don't discount the genius of our ancestors regardless of archeological age. We may feel smugly superior playing with our tools of the silicon age but get magically transported to the stone age naked and with no access to external knowledge and try and achieve in the basics of food, clothing, and shelter... let alone tools such as hand axes, skinning knives, arrow and spear points, etc.
I strongly doubt alchemy predicted any significant aspects of steelmaking. All alchemical reasoning that I've seen has either been post-hoc trying to explain an observation, or has been quaintly incorrect (see the typical description of how to produce a basilisk, for example).
Our age is superior in the sense of more advanced; that doesn't mean that we individually are superior to them as individuals, except in the sense of being more knowledgeable.
No smugness implied or intended.
Are tin cans still used? I was under the impression they'd been replaced by aluminum...