Lost technology is an enduring theme because for much of human history it was very easy to "lose". The main narrative of the last 2000 years is one of a fallen great civilization. Only in the past 100 years or so do we have large continuously maintained corpus of knowledge instantly replicated across the entire world, translated to almost every spoken language.

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bluGill 3 days ago | parent [-]

The fallen civilization was the Roman empire, so closer to 1500 years if you only count the western Roman Empire (which most do), or 600 years if you count the East. while a lot was last most technology was not and even knowledge of government was not lost.

You can get even m,roe interesting if you look too China, India, or the Americas for civilizations - but most of us don't really know much about them and don't think about them when we think of lost history.

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Nicook 3 days ago | parent [-]

Even if you want to stick with a western history based narrative, you can go back to the bronze age collapse before that. See ancient greek writing about how each progressive age gets worse (golden -> silver -> bronze -> heroic -> iron) .

Lost tech in China is pretty fascinating. There's archeological evidence of very advanced clocks that predate similar European ones, but they seem to have lost the knowledge on how to build it with the builder (City was conquered, clock was dismantled, his son was unable to reconstruct it). Meanwhile euros were able to push their knowledge forward more or less uninterrupted from the middle ages on.

Seems pretty clear to me that we could easily lose a bunch of knowledge again. Could even argue we're very close.

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logicchains 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

China's agricultural/plowing technology didn't recover to the pre-Mongolian-conquest level until the 1800s. Possibly because China's population fell 40-50% during the conquest and subsequent Mongol rule, which must have destroyed a lot of knowledge.

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lioeters 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> advanced clocks that predate similar European ones

I was thinking of the Antikythera mechanism, an analog computer/calculator from the 2nd century BC. There's a long gap in history from that time until Europe reached that level of technical sophistication in science and machinery.

A simplistic explanation might be: the fall of Rome led to the Dark Ages through political instability, loss of educational infrastructure, reduced trade, shift in cultural emphasis from classical science and philosophy to religion..

That reminds me of the Lost Libraries of Timbuktu, about the preservation of knowledge against time, wars, fires, and thieves. Not only technology but entire civilizations can get lost in time, like those pyramids in Natchez, Mississippi. Or the Lost City of Z, buried in the jungle.

In that sense technology - and the knowledge to understand and produce it - is always being lost to entropy unless we make an effort to keep it alive. Even then, shifts in economics or cultural context can make it impractical, unaffordable, or otherwise leaving no one to maintain it.

Even in my lifetime I feel like certain ways of thinking and living have been lost culturally. It's in the memories of those who experienced it, but after they're gone, there will only be footprints left in books, photographs, audio and video recordings, online archives and blogs.

	▲	Nicook 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Except then religion became responsible for philosophy's return and preservation.
	▲	bluGill 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		the techicall ability to make the Antikythera wasn't lost - just the free cash to spend on such 'toys' that were a lot of effort to make relative to the value.
	▲	LargoLasskhyfv 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone_(medieval)