Beautiful! I wonder if Jimmy Maher's heard about this; he wanted something like it for The Analog Antiquarian back ages ago before he kicked that off, as a way of reflecting the span of history in the structure of the index/TOC, but we never could figure out really how to get it to go anywhere we liked. It's a surprisingly tricky problem, and this is an impressive realization!
This is cool, but I think the execution is off because there's so much empty space. I think it would work better if the nodes were much smaller and closer together so you can see more of the graph in one screen.
It's interesting that prior to the industrial revolution there are still some periods where it seems like innovations arrived relatively fast, and others where it was comparatively slow. E.g. a lot more entries are in the 500 BCE - 200 BCE period than the 200 - 500 range.
My particular interest is in screw cutting lathes, and it appears that the Wikipedia entry[1] (on which this seems to be based) was off by about 25 years (1775 instead of 1800), and thus copied to this work. I've let the folks at Wikipedia know.
Have you ever thought about how alien lifeforms would probably invent screw cutting lathes too? The screw feels like such a "human thing", but what else would serve the rotational wedging purpose in this universe's elements and physics?
It's funny that there are so many innovations right now the recent part of the chart just has to arbitrarily exclude an insane amount of stuff innovation that's happening.
No HIV vaccine. mRNA vaccine get's a single entry instead of vaccine per disease like prior vaccines. No battery stuff since 1985. Just amazing, fractal improvement is everywhere.
Highly recommend the Dr. Stone anime if you're interested in a story with the premise of starting civilization from scratch but armed with the sum total of modern human knowledge about science and engineering.
Also, if you want even further back precedent for this kind of plot device, I highly recommend reading a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court by Mark Twain.
upstream of what? Did you not look for mesopotamian or egyptian writing, which predate chinese writing by thousands of years. This sounds more like a chinese bias lol.
Whether a node is a terminus (or root without predecessors) is basically ~never meaningful in the tree, it's almost always just missing data. Here it seems pretty clear I omitted a link from Chinese writing to woodblock printing. Fixed!
Obviously something of this magnitude will have blindspots. This tech tree seems to be vastly underselling the impact of advances in metallurgy and precision machining. As well as most of what you might call "basic science".
This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology
A lot of those things are incremental improvements that build onto each other, like refining an alloy by a few % many times over to end up with something entirely different.
How would one determine what is sufficiently different to deserve a node?
But 100% agree, incremental improvements are the vast majority of advances.
They tried to define what they mean by technology [1], but they seemingly gave up on it partway through. Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list.
The inconsistent definition and the pretty large gaps leads to a lot of oddness. Just look at how sparse anything related to textiles is. "Clothing" just gets one "invention" in 168k B.P., even though a t-shirt and an arctic jacket are obviously very different technologies. New world agriculture is similarly strange. Nodes appear from nowhere and lead nowhere, presumably because there are implicit "nature" edges they didn't want to represent as technology.
Almost all science is tightly bound with advances in material science, often the driving each other in alternating steps like interlocking gears. One engine driving those gears is war, another is population growth and education.
There are obvious exceptions, such as Math, Philosophy (insert all links lead to philosophy here). But even Math is seeing progress in materials science as a component now (computer derived proofs for instance).
Making a really good tech tree is a stupendously hard problem. I once started working on one for a game but gave up once I realized that doing this properly is probably going to take a lifetime or two and there are other things I can do that are more immediately useful.
Unfortunately, a lot of the reasoning behind omissions is that we have lost the majority of information; what we learned was from luck, inference, and unfortunately (because it produces misleading results), selective durability of some items over others.
Its a great start! Bound to have bias and blindspots. It would be cool to run an agent that could incrementally enrich this knowledge graph. Take some modern day technologies and backtrace the components and their development.
But they won't do it if they don't like this sort of approach! Which I think is wrong of them btw. But I don't think I've heard from historians much since this project went public.
63 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 71.2 ms ] threadHistorical Tech Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44104243 - May 2025 (1 comment)
Edit: oops!
The Universal Tech Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161607 - June 2025 (65 comments)
(A link to an article about how it's made, with 65 comments)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe
What "folks at Wikipedia"? Can't you just edit the date yourself?
No HIV vaccine. mRNA vaccine get's a single entry instead of vaccine per disease like prior vaccines. No battery stuff since 1985. Just amazing, fractal improvement is everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_A...
why are they separate?
This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology
How would one determine what is sufficiently different to deserve a node?
But 100% agree, incremental improvements are the vast majority of advances.
The inconsistent definition and the pretty large gaps leads to a lot of oddness. Just look at how sparse anything related to textiles is. "Clothing" just gets one "invention" in 168k B.P., even though a t-shirt and an arctic jacket are obviously very different technologies. New world agriculture is similarly strange. Nodes appear from nowhere and lead nowhere, presumably because there are implicit "nature" edges they didn't want to represent as technology.
[1] https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/what-counts-as-a-technology
There are obvious exceptions, such as Math, Philosophy (insert all links lead to philosophy here). But even Math is seeing progress in materials science as a component now (computer derived proofs for instance).
Making a really good tech tree is a stupendously hard problem. I once started working on one for a game but gave up once I realized that doing this properly is probably going to take a lifetime or two and there are other things I can do that are more immediately useful.