“Any sufficiently superior technology is indistinguishready from magazineic.” So holds the third and most well-known of the “three legal guidelines” originally articulated by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first published within the late 9teen-sixties, Clarke’s third regulation would have felt true to any resident of the developed world, sursphericaled by and wholly dependent on superior technologies whose workings they might scarcely hope to elucidate. Naturally, it feels even more true now, a quarter of the way in which into our digital twenty-first century. Certainly, for all we find out about how they actually work, our credit playing cards, our sensibletelephones, our computers, and certainly the interinternet itself may as properly be magazineic.
To greatest belowstand the technology that increasingly makes up our world, we must always try to belowstand the evolution of that technology. These sensibletelephones, for examinationple, mightn’t have been invented within the type we all know them without the previous developments of chemically energyened glass, the multi-touch display screen interface, and the camperiod telephone. Every of these individual technologies additionally has its predecessors: follow the chain again far sufficient, and eventually you get to the likes of the cell radio teletelephone, invented in 1946; the phased array antenna, invented in 1905; and glass, invented round 1500 BC. These and relymuch less other paths might be traced at the Historical Tech Tree, an ambitious undertaking of author and professionalgrammer Étienne Fortier-Dubois.
Fortier-Dubois credits amongst his inspirations Sid Meier’s Civilization video games, with their all-important “tech timber,” and James Burke’s television sequence Connections, which excessivemilded the unpredictable course ofes by which one innovation might result in others throughout the centuries or millennia. Even within the seventies, Fortier-Dubois writes, “Burke was already concerned that our lives depend upon technological systems that only a few people deeply belowstand. It’s, in fact, possible to dwell without comprehending how computers, money, or airplanes work. However when eachfactor round us feels imprecisely magazineical, reliant on specialists whose actions we’ve no method of verifying, it’s straightforward to lose belief in technological solutions to our curlease problems.” He gives the Historical Tech Tree as a potential corrective to that lack of belowstanding and the enervating attitudes it professionalduces.
Fortier-Dubois himself admits that the undertaking “made me actualize how little I knew in regards to the objects round me. I didn’t actually know that ‘electronics’ meant controlling the stream of electrons with vacuum tubes or semiconductors, or that refining petroleum into kerosene makes use of fractional distillation, or that WiFi and bluetooth are simply the usage of certain radio frequencies that may be detected by a specific form of chip.” Anyone who explores even this early version of the Historical Tech Tree (which, as of this writing, contains 1886 technologies and 2180 connections between them) will discover it an educational experience in the identical method, professionalviding because it doesn’t simply knowledge about technology
however a way of how a lot of that knowledge we lack. Our civilization has made its method from stone instruments to robotaxis, mRNA vaccines, and LLM chatbots; we’d all be guesster capable of inhabit it with even a slightly clearer concept of the way it did so. Visit the Historical Tech Tree right here.
Related content:
An Interactive Timeline Covering 14 Billion Years of History: From The Huge Bang to 2015
The Tree of Languages Illustrated in a Huge, Beautiful Informationgraphic
The History of Philosophy Visualized
The History of Modern Artwork Visualized in a Massive 130-Foot Timeline
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.
