 If you ever see someone stealing some ancient Greek ruins, you should probably call the uh the uh Hang on I I had I had something for this You know the Greeks just kind of pour hot water over some coffee grounds and swirl it around for a bit It's chewy The Greeks are often painted as pioneers of reason and not for nothing Logic, art, politics, mathematics, philosophy, there aren't many areas of human thought which weren't explored by the ancient Greeks and in many ways continue to be defined by them. For example, mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead once said that the history of European philosophy was essentially a series of footnotes to Plato. Bertrand Russell suggested that every advance in science had to be made in the teeth of Aristotle's disciples because he basically defined our understanding of the natural world until Galileo. I got to see the ruins of Aristotle's Lyceum and Plato's Academy and the Agora where Socrates supposedly wandered around asking irritating questions and then I saw this and I had a little existential crisis. Now that's not uncommon I have existential crises about breakfast cereals sometimes but I really had to sit down and rethink some things about civilization. This bronze mechanism was found around the turn of the 20th century off the coast of a Gretian island called Antikythera. It's been dated to around 150 BC around the time that the Roman Empire annexed Greece as a protectorate. As far as we can tell it's a sort of hand cranked astrological calendar showing the relative positions and motion of the planets in many different calendar systems. It still is an incredibly complex device with stacks on stacks on stacks of gears and drive shafts and whatnot. The gears are really the thing that threw archaeologists for a loop and had all sorts of people flipping out about this thing. Finally cut metal gears of this type which are great for precision machinery just sort of vanish from the historical record until around the 14th century where they made precision timekeeping and measurement devices possible. That's more than a thousand years where this very important technological discovery which is now essential for making everything from cars to robots to chattering teeth novelty toys only existed in a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean. Now I'm used to thinking of civilization as a gradual accumulation of technology and knowledge like someone discovers gears someone else uses those gears to make a lathe someone uses that lathe to make pistons and everything just keeps growing and improving on what came before shoulders of giants that sort of thing but the remains of this device are an indication that that's not always the case in some nearby alternate reality this became clockwork escapements and precision machinery it could have been accurate scientific instruments and automation and the analytical engine it could have been all of these things 15 centuries before they actually happened but it wasn't instead humans discovered precision gearing as a power transmission and measurement tool then forgot about it then after thousands of years figured it out again and then finally used it that forgetting thing probably wasn't due to a singular point of failure either the mechanism has signs of being just one out of a set of these things that were produced which probably means that several people got to look at it and see how it worked it's not like the library of alexandria where we put all of the books about how to make gears in one place and then oh no instead it's probable that there was a constellation of circumstances a whole bunch of things that didn't go quite right which meant that this crucial technological discovery just didn't stick the first time maybe people just didn't recognize the value in it maybe if you're in a culture which depends on slavery you don't think or care about automation maybe people just didn't think that it could be applied to anything but astrological calendars because of those circumstances whatever they were we literally had to reinvent the wheel and it took us centuries upon centuries to do it i mean it's a wheel with teeth on it but still it's easy to look at the antikythera mechanism as some sort of unique historical oddity but this pattern of something being discovered then and then rediscovered and oh my god this is actually really freaking important happens again and again thales of malicious made observations about static electricity around 600 bc but nothing came of it steam power was used in little spinning toys as early as the first century ad but nobody thought it was very important concrete was discovered in 700 bc by the nabbitians then again by the romans between 300 bc and 500 ad then completely forgotten until the 14th century despite the fact that people still inhabited roman buildings made out of concrete throughout the middle ages reflecting on these examples and the ruins of ancient greek civilization was sobering the narrative of continuous human progress that civilization is just accumulating knowledge and slowly building towards some bright utopian future lends itself to a sort of complacency i think that we like to imagine that so long as the library of alexandria doesn't burn down so long as we have multiple backup copies of these ideas in multiple locations then everything will be fine we'll just look them up when we need them but the antikythera device and these other pre-discovery discoveries tell a different story human knowledge isn't this ever expanding sphere where once we learn something we write it down and then can use it whenever we need it knowledge erodes and decays and is buried in all sorts of different ways sometimes it is dramatic historical events that drive that erosion like the fall of the roman empire but sometimes it's as simple as nobody really caring about a stupid little steam driven toy until we get that johnny mnemonic thing humans have to prioritize what sorts of things we choose to learn and think about and discuss with others even with this massive distributed database of information that i'm talking to you from if nobody finds a particular concept important enough to load into their brains and think about and use it might as well have never existed for me this ancient clockwork mechanism crumbling after two millennia under the agian sea is a sort of symbol for how fragile a good idea can be we managed to find this one again thank goodness but how many more are gone forever either because history was stacked against them or nobody found them interesting enough to think about how many are waiting for you to find them and realize what they're actually for are you like me suddenly desperately motivated to go to wikipedia and learn some stuff please leave a comment below and let me know what you think thank you very much for watching don't forget to blah blah subscribe blah share and don't stop thunking