stickmaker | JOHT 87: Recognizing Technology (Reply)

The Joy of High Tech

Rodford Edmiston

Being the occasionally interesting ramblings of a major-league technophile.

Please note that while I am an engineer (BSCE) and do my research, I am not a professional in this field. Do not take anything here as gospel; check the facts I give. And if you find a mistake, please let me know about it.

What is Technology?

Yes, after all these installments I am finally getting around to defining what they're about. :-)

This particular column was inspired by a pet peeve of mine. I am very tired of SF stories - whether print, audio, small screen or big screen - having someone from a starfaring society (people usually representing our supposed descendants) finding intelligent aliens living in what to the visitors are primitive conditions and declaring that they have no technology.

This is due to a confusion between the sophistication of the technology used and how well it is applied by a society, and the society's level of scientific development. The ancient Romans had viaducts to bring fresh water into Rome and the _cloaca maxima_ to take waste water out. These systems were impressively sophisticated, well developed and well maintained. The water supply, in particular, transported its precious cargo across valleys and through tunnels in the hills, all the while maintaining a specific angle of decline. This angle produced a precisely determined rate of flow, one fast enough to reduce sediment buildup and slow enough to easily handle curves. The water came from clean springs and pools in the surrounding hills, and there was plenty of it delivered to the city. In fact, for most of the Twentieth Century Rome had less and poorer quality water coming in than it did during the heyday the Empire's existence.

Yes, the technology of the Roman Empire was primitive by our standards, but they used it well to improve the quality of their lives. The sophistication of application was there, even if the scientific knowledge of our own era was not.

In one of the Star Trek films the crew of the _Enterprise E_ discover what they think is a primitive humanoid civilization, and make disparaging remarks about them not having any technology. I was looking at the scenes of the village and thinking "They have pottery, with decorative glazes. They have weaving, with dyed threads. They have architecture, with flourishes in multiple materials. They have fountains with running water. That is all technology." Later it is shown that the villagers even have a dam which ensures they have a steady supply of water to drink and use in their fields, with an associated distribution system. The writers must have actually had a similar viewpoint to mine. These people turn out to be well educated scientifically - they are even aware of interstellar society - and have sophisticated analytical thought processes. They _choose_ to live this way. (The Original Series had a similar lesson for Kirk and Spock with the revelation of the true nature of the Organians. Of course, there the deception was deliberate on the part of the natives, to avoid upsetting their guests.)

So, here comes the definition: Technology is the application of knowledge to the production of goods and services towards a useful purpose. (Is art a useful purpose? Every society has thought so, to at least some extent. Artistic elaborations for pragmatic objects - such as designs on pottery - are universal. Art for its own sake is nearly universal. A point I have made before in these columns is that art often drives the development of technology, and vice versa.) As a sound rule of thumb, if you want to get a good preliminary evaluation of how technologically sophisticated a society is, look at how it handles water. (New Orleans does a terrible job of handling excess water. When I took a hydrology course in the mid-Seventies the New Orleans levee system was given as a bad example of how to keep a city dry.)

Rome wasn't the only ancient city to do a good job of transporting and distributing water. One of the more famous is what today is known as Petra; the building complex erroneously if poetically described by John William Burgon in his 1845 poem (he did visit the area, but 17 years later) as "A rose-red city, half as old as time." The city actually was only at its peak for about a thousand years, though the area is known to have been inhabited for at least 7000 years. (There are a few people living there now, mostly those who work as tour guides and their families. Likely, it was never completely abandoned.) Petra as it is known today was developed to take advantage of traders on one route of the old Silk Road, as well as other desert travelers. Eventually it faded away, due to a combination of events which included Roman conquest, earthquakes and shifting trade routes.

"Petra" is not the city's original name. The presumably original inhabitants of the city - who were Nabateans - knew it as Raqmu. The ancient Greeks called it a name which meant "Stone." The Romans called it Arabia Petraea. The Nabateans started building in the valley there perhaps in the 5th Century BC. The permanent (well, on a human scale) features of the city might have been developed by them from an even earlier settlement, or could have been built from scratch once a need was seen. Either way, those who built the city started as nomads. They lived in the desert and knew how precious water could be. As well as how to handle it.

Many people who learned of Petra in modern history wondered how such a large metropolis (the population may have exceeded 20,000 at its peak) could endure in that arid environment. Turns out that later visitors, who arrived after the city had mostly been abandoned and the major features were no longer being maintained, were literally walking by and in some cases on the answers. There are channels cut into the rock which direct water from springs and the infrequent rains into hillside reservoirs and from there into the city, most of which is in a steep-walled valley. There was a huge, central pool there, which was probably the main water supply, plus other storage facilities. In antiquity, the city even earned part of its income by selling water to travelers.

Washed-in dirt and blown sand filled the central pool before modern visitors reached the area, and the major features of the water management system were not rediscovered until extensive archeological excavations were performed much later. The water directing channels were "discovered" by people noticing that during heavy rains water still flowed through some of them, to vanish into the sand covering the floor of the valley. Today the valley floor - including that central reservoir is being properly excavated.

You see this recognition by societies of the importance of water over and over, around the world, from China to South America. Archeological explorations of many Inca mountain cities, such as Machu Picchu, are revealing how the builders went to great lengths to bring in water and carefully conserve it. Successful societies always do a good job of handling their fresh water coming in and waste going out. As well as performing other useful tasks.

The Ancient Egyptians made an unusual application of natural water flows. There are known instances of the plunge pits formed by waterfall runoff from infrequent but often torrential desert rains being used to hide their dead. They would clear the debris out of the pit, tunnel in and up, to well above the highest level of the water, place the mummy and treasure, then refill the pit. Each subsequent rain would further hide the entrance. (How many of those remain to be found - after a few lucky hits revealed the practice - is anyone's guess.)

Note that in the Valley of the Kings, where the royal dead were supposed to be venerated and therefore their tombs were known places, many tombs have been damaged by water in modern times. Because the people who found the valley later didn't understand the purpose of the channels and dikes, which were intended to direct water away from the tomb entrances.

While there have been some instances of a technology being lost or abandoned - towards its end Rome lost the ability or perhaps the will to maintain the aqueducts - generally there is at least maintenance of ancestral projects, and usually progress. Though there are valid worries about losing what we as a worldwide civilization now have. Modern technology use would be difficult to restart if something caused a worldwide interruption. Something like a nuclear war or climate catastrophe.

During the Cold War there were frequent references about the prospect of bombing someone - maybe the entire world - back to the stone age. However, even during the old stone age, people had some sophisticated technology. Most of it hasn't survived, at least directly, since it involved things like wood, bone, cloth and ivory. However, many of the stone artifacts from that era and earlier have survived. Keep in mind that purpose-made tools and a lot of skill are needed to produce good flint knives, spear tips, axes and arrowheads. They aren't the tech we're used to, but they are definitely tech.

Even an apparently simple spear needs knowhow to produce. First the maker must decide what the spear will be used for. Is it to be a thrusting weapon, a throwing weapon, or something in-between? Then they must make an appropriate - and straight, regardless of type - shaft. Then comes the spearhead, which is, again, tailored to the particular use. Finally, the two main parts are joined. This last process is actually quite important, because you don't want to lose the business end of the spear you're using against a cave bear. There are multiple different methods, but most involve mounting the stone point in a groove or split at the business end of the shaft. The spearhead is then secured by animal sinew or something similar. This shrinks as it dries, making for a tight join. Many of these joins would then have pine tar or some other sticky, impermeable agent applied. This both further secured the head by acting as glue, and helped make the mount water resistant.

A few of the more-fugitive artifacts have survived and been found at archeological sites, such as bits of string, woven from tree bark fibers. Some of these are over 40,000 years old. The famous "Lion Man" ivory carving (there's the art, again) is between 35,000 and 40,000 years old, making it a product of the culture of the Upper Paleolithic. There are fragments of what has been identified as a hand loom, dated to about 35,000 years ago. The technologies these items represent must be taught and diligently practiced. This starts with making them. As noted above, that is a project in itself. Then the person using them - which may be someone other than the person who made them - must learn how. Both stages require intelligent, active decisions about what to do and how to do it.

Compare this with the purely instinctive behavior of sea otters using a rock to open a shellfish. Now, compare _that_ to chimpanzees making a "termite fishing tool" by stripping leaves from a flexible stem. While this requires learning from an older ape, the production and use appear to be strictly rote, and there are generally no elaborations or individual flourishes. Occasionally - by accident or deliberate experiment - a change occurs in the form of the tool. Sometimes that change is an improvement, which may be noted and included in future versions of the tool. By far, however, the normal situation is for members of each troop of chimpanzees to have their own method of production for and style of termite fishing tool, passed down unchanged through the generations.

Note that some birds also make insect fishing tools, but these appear to be produced purely by instinct.

Deliberate use of fire by our ancestors may be even older than the manufacture of stone tools. (Both natural fire and found sharp stones were likely used by opportunists before they learned to produce them deliberately.) Fire can be used to stay warm, to provide light, to cook food, to clear land, to drive game to a killing field and even to attack other humans.

The usual reason for a technology being abandoned is that something better comes along. Anthropologists in Europe working on a project to build a late stone age village were asked to compare the flint axes they were already using with a copper axe based on the one found with Ötzi, the Iceman. The people who made the request figured that the copper axe would be less useful, because knapped stone axes were much harder, sharper and more durable. An additional, period concern favoring the stone tools was that good-quality flint is easier than copper ore to find and process. The prevailing thought was that copper objects were used more as status symbols than practical tools, at least for most jobs. However, after making the comparison the reenactors preferred the copper axe head. The reason they gave was very simple: Flint blades have little variation in the angle of the edge, which is determined by the physical characteristics of the rock. The copper axe could be sharpened to whatever angle worked best for the job at hand. It was also much easier to renew the edge in the soft metal than in the hard stone. Finally, while flint blades would usually wear through small chips coming off, occasionally a larger flake would detach; sometimes the blade would split entirely during use. Both of those were not only aggravating, but potentially dangerous. The copper blade, by comparison, wore more quickly, but did so at a fairly constant rate with no chipping.

Of course, faddism does play a large part in what technology is used and how. As does a reluctance to learn some new way of doing something. This is often due to a suspicion that the new method simply won't do the job. ("Why should I try those new 'book' things when scrolls have worked fine for thousands of years?") Still, this column is about recognizing technology in unfamiliar settings; not in how some way of doing things gets adopted or dropped.

Sometimes, a technology survives long beyond the task it was originally developed for. I think I mentioned in a previous r\a\n\t\ article about encountering a young and computer savvy person who refused to believe that spreadsheets had been around for thousands of years. He simply would not accept that someone could fill the blanks on a form by hand and perform the repetitive mathematical operations without computer help. I wonder how he would have reacted to the fact that Hollerith punch cards (if he even knew what they were) were around for decades before computers were anything other than people good at math. In fact, punch cards - usually of wood - strung together were used to control looms, pianos, organs and other mechanical devices for several centuries. There were even punched paper tapes, though of a different form than those used in the second half of the Twentieth Century. (What do you think the rolls used in player pianos are?) Both of these technologies - which store information as holes in an otherwise solid material - provide data and instructions in media which found uses far beyond their original purpose, and well into the digital age.

I am a futurist, but I am also a pragmatist. I rarely early-adopt a new technology, instead waiting to see if it is actually as good as claimed and is going to last. I also want to see if it is reliable and maybe for it to become cheaper and more standardized. There's usually no rush. The odds are that if the new tech does something I need doing, I already have something for the job. No matter how primitive or "pre-technological" it might appear to faddists.