Don't forget the cavernous structures which people are forbidden to enter, buzzing with the activity of objects controlled by those enchanted crystals, like the magic brooms in Fantasia, performing myriad arcane rituals with rare and exotic materials to make more enchanted crystals.
They perform elaborate cleansing rituals on any item brought into the crystal-writing room. When they enter, they wear special clothing, lest the impurities of the outside world taint the crystals.
Those magical tools being self-referential incantations written in the weird and decidedly non-human language of the crystals themselves, containing deep magic [0] derived from the secrets of life itself [1] exploited to solve problems of intractable complexity in creating the next set of incantations.
Disturbingly, using the magical tool twice on the same incantation never produces exactly the same result.
Those EUV lasers are themselves insanely crazy, and unlike the semiconductors they are part of producing, the EUV gear has lots of expensive short-lived consumables — like mirrors!
Yep. One thought experiment I like is how well I’d be able to carry forward human technological progress to some primitive group, given any descriptions or samples of said tech that I’d want.
Microprocessors are always the choke point, where I’d be hard pressed to reproduce one, and they form the basis for so much else.
The bootstrapping required to produce an iron tool from scratch (really, a small village with a surplus of food sufficient for one full time adult male + accessible ores) is doable in less than a lifetime with some recorded knowledge on how to do it. Even if they’re literally at the mud hut stage.
Producing even the simplest IC? Definitely not. And that is ignoring the need for electricity and everything else required to actually use it.
Coal is a recent "invention". The Brits were pretty damn lucky they found lots of it under the last tree they chopped down. It was all wood before that.
Microprocessors with tiny features are a chokepoint, but I suspect you could make a primitive one if you really worked at it, i.e. go back to 1960's technology, such as the AL1 or 4004.
Even going to 1925 and teaching how to make a MOSFET would help.
Batteries from wooden crates with newspapers, metal rods and is enough to do telegraph. That it is slightly harder ensures serious use.
If the drinking water is far away at the top of a mountain it isn't so convenient to throw your garbage in it, take a dump in it or float the dead in it.
nandgame and nand2tetris are important works of teaching for this reason. On the off chance I get thrown back in time to the exact right time for it to be useful, I'll be prepared!
Because if you need to explain GPS at the level of the impact of general relativity, my understanding is that by itself is already a topic normally introduced in the final year of a physics degree.
If you're OK with simplifying to "time passes at a different rate for the satellites, here's the equation, I will not explain why it works just roll with it", why insist on ceasing to use it if the foundation isn't understandable?
What you've suggested doesn't work at high resolution at sea or in the wilderness due to lack of radio towers at suitable frequencies, atmospheric variations and ducting influencing the signal of the existing systems.
Doesn't work in valleys or cities due to multipath reflections.
Only works in low rise areas or while flying at high altitude.
That's why the satellites got built in the first place, and why China and the EU added their own satellites to the US and Russian global navigation satellite system.
It is more funny than I initially thought: We keep making things more complicated and secret in order to make something else less complicated. Even the luddites accomplished only to make things more complicated.
I found a similar treasure some years ago: How we take convenience for self-evident. We love to pretend everything should be as easy as possible. You should really never have to think about anything, never have to learn anything, never do anything, nothing involving muscles, endurance or fine motor skills. Life is best without developing and without accomplishing.
Any human technology that the general population can't understand is an egregious failure in education that will be indistinguishable from large-scale cognitive impairment. -- h-d'a
There has never been a time when most technology in use was understood by the general population.
"The Last Man Who Knew Everything"[0] was 1773–1829 and the trend towards compulsory education was only beginning, 2 countries at the start of his life and 7 at the end[1].
It's like I keep saying: We etch runes into stones, and make the stones come alive and do our bidding by channelling lightning through the runes. And you say computers aren't magic?!
We are practically machine elves.. we enchant, transmute and bind mystical inscriptions onto crystals that are charged through an invisible and intangible energy to perform actions we could never do with our biological bodies. All of this is produced succinctly through an empirically pragmatic yet slightly esoteric process of a form of gnostic meditation we call the scientific method...
What is mystical to follow a procedure? And even breaking a big nut with a stone is an "action that we could never do with our biological bodies".
Currently it is more esoteric on how a baby (human but not only) is formed than how we build a microprocessor. So if anything I would say we are statistical acrobats, existing despite the numerous approximations in biology. Compared to us humans, microprocessors are predictable and boring.
The mysticism is an emergent property of sufficiently complex and "obfuscated" procedures... No intelligent entity can lay claim to an omnipotent and perfected understanding of all known procedures... The fragments between silos of rational derivations of existing predicated truths we have discovered about the natural order of the universe is where it feels more like an enchantment than a discovery.
I strongly disagree around how forming a baby is amore esoteric.. cell mitosis is a pretty well understood science at this point and eventually we will reach a hard limit of covering all the surface area of that domain of knowledge. However technological discoveries unfold more like a fractal.. it isn't really a bounded domain as far as we know.
You think so? For me personally, there's few things that are more inspiring than understanding something and being able to reproduce it. This for me is the wonder of science.
I've always thought of chips and the unrelated peter principle ("people rise to the level of their own incompetence").
Except with chips it is shrink instead of rise. Like if a chip works well and is reliable, time to shrink it (or run it faster, or run it hotter, etc) :)
From Monster Manual by Gary Gygaxale and David Ångströmson (TSR Inc., 1978), p. 61, in the section on etches:
"An etch exists because of its own desires and the use of powerful and arcane magic. The etch passes from a state of humanity to a non-human, non-living, and non-conductive existence through force of light. It retains this status by certain conjurations, enchantments, and a reticlefactory. An etch is most often encountered within its hidden chambers, this lair typically being in some dry, deserted area or vast underground lab, and in any case both solidly constructed of stone and very sterile.
Through the power which changes this creature from human to etch, the armor class becomes the equivalent of +1 plate armor and +1 shield {armor class 0). Similarly, cast dice are 8-sided, and the etch can be affecied only by magical attack forms or by monsters with magical properties or 6 or more hit dice.
Etches were formerly ultra powerful magic-users of magie-user/clerics of not less than 18th level of magic-use. Their touch is so cold as to cause 1-10 points of damage and paralyze opponents who fail to make their saving throw. The mere sight of an etch will cause any creature below 5 nm {or 5 hit dice) to flee in fear of overexposure. All etches are able to use magic appropriately at the level they had attained prior to becoming non-human.
An etch can only be permanently destroyed when their reticlefactory is destroyed. Unless the etch's reticlefactory is located and destroyed, the dice will be cast, and the etch will re-adhere in 1d10 days after their apparent defect.
The fallowing spells or attack farms have no effect an etches: charm, sleep, enfeeblement, annealing, insanity or death spells/symbols.
Description: An etch appears very much as does a wight or mummy, being of skeletal form, eyesockets mere black holes with radiating points of amplificated light, and garments most often rotting (but most rich)."
