Alternative galaxies - WAS Antikythera mechanism

[A.K. Boomer]

I think you missed the point - surrounded by water or not - if you have one single "crystal ball" basically capable of predicting the future in certain ways why would you let it leave anywhere???

again the sky meant a totally different thing to these folk - it was close to everything - nowadays people are to busy going to emergency rooms due to bumping into stuff while walking and looking at their I-phone, sky? heavens? WTF is that???

[tomato coupe]

I think you missed the point - surrounded by water or not - if you have one single "crystal ball" basically capable of predicting the future in certain ways why would you let it leave anywhere???

Why would someone let it leave anywhere? Well, I guess it wasn't where they wanted it to be.

If you wanted to move something - regardless of how valuable it was - it probably went by boat. They likely considered travel by boat to be relatively free from risk.

[Machine]

According to the referenced video and other sources, the cargo on the ship is suspected of being war booty. The Roman ship was thought to have been overloaded, carrying seized Greek property. And the timing for this is right. This was during the time of Caesar, the same era Rome was venturing into Greek territories and conquering them. So it's a reasonable theory it was seized in a military campaign and was being shipped back to Rome for its obvious value and rarity.

[John Stevenson]

At last, someone who can read.

[A.K. Boomer]

According to the referenced video and other sources, the cargo on the ship is suspected of being war booty. The Roman ship was thought to have been overloaded, carrying seized Greek property. And the timing for this is right. This was during the time of Caesar, the same era Rome was venturing into Greek territories and conquering them. So it's a reasonable theory it was seized in a military campaign and was being shipped back to Rome for its obvious value and rarity.

Well they didn't get too far did they lol but that would go hand in hand with leaving with too many goodies and the ship did have allot of goodies including many heavy statues and such...

[A.K. Boomer]

I bet that a small bench lathe, a X2 mini mill, bench grinder, and dividing head all fit quite nicely into a DeLorean.

good stuff Engin keep em coming lol

[danlb]

Rare mechanisms tend to be lost over time simply because the people who find them can't figure out what they are.

Look at how many times we have "What is this" threads on this forum. A piece of clockwork with a broken spring is indistinguishable (from the view of the common man) from a thousand other devices that use gears and springs. It may be a timing device for a nuclear bomb or it might be a record player, and the average person will be clueless without an engraved label.

Dan

[A.K. Boomer]

damn good point danlb... "hey WTF is this?" --------- "I don't know but its bronze so melt it down and make me a toad sticker" ---- "uhhh --- ok"

[Weston Bye]

As a sort of postscript to this thread, and perhaps with some insight into the age that may have produced and then forgot the Antikythera Mechanism, read this:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/firstdark.html

But read at your peril - it is deep wide and long.

[J Tiers]

There was a comment about not assuming what technological level some group may have been at. There seems to be evidence of stone urns and the like that have surfaces perfect enough, inside and out, th suggest that lathes were used to make them. And these are from points south of the Egyptians, dated around 2000 to 4000 years BC.

Somewhere around then, the Sahara was not a desert, in some theories, at least.

[Rustybolt]

In order for there to be an antikathera there had to tools and eqipment to build it. If there were tools and equipment to build it there must have been other devices built that used gears and cogs. There must have been a prototype. Possibly not in metal, but a proof of concept.
This thing didn't spring out of a vacuum. Somebody worked long and hard to be able to divide a circle into even parts and then machine it.

[rcaffin]

Somebody worked long and hard to be able to divide a circle into even parts
The Greeks and others in that area may not have had CNC machines, but they were good geometers. Dividing a circle - not hard. Making a file, even rudimentary - one of the oldest tools in the game. Truth to tell, the design of a file has probably not changed much in the last 2,000 years. It works.

Cheers
Roger

[AD5MB]

In order for there to be an antikathera

if antikythera comes into contact with kythera do you get a chemical reaction?

[Abner]

I think occupational hazard or hobby hazard is coming into play here.
For anyone to build such a machine they would need lots of written records of when these events occurred, and do the math. This is just the mechanical reduction of a pile of papers not a crystal ball. It's just gear ratios here folks. Yes the builder was clever beyond doubt.
The ability to accurately record events over a long period, record the interactions on a time line, and then mark all of them to a specific starting time point is what I think is the most profound part of the whole project. The data behind this machine is the fantastic portion. The construction while impressive is just like I said - it's just gear ratio's.

[Machine]

This is just the mechanical reduction of a pile of papers not a crystal ball. It's just gear ratios here folks. Yes the builder was clever beyond doubt. The ability to accurately record events over a long period, record the interactions on a time line, and then mark all of them to a specific starting time point is what I think is the most profound part of the whole project. The data behind this machine is the fantastic portion. The construction while impressive is just like I said - it's just gear ratio's.

Really? So a person writing down his observations of birds flying is more brilliant than someone who designs and builds a flying airplane? And you do know that the ancient Greeks weren't living in the era of automatic transmissions, cucko clocks, personal computers and television? They were living in antiquity, long before any of the modern inventions and knowledge you were born into and now take for granted. Knowledge that seems "so easy" today, was yesterday's eternal conundrum. The Antikythera mechanism is an incredibly complex machine even for the standards of 1000+ years after its construction. Which themselves wouldn't have been built without the lost and found again legacy of ancient machines like this corroded lump of metal found on the sea floor.

It's through the work of a million geniuses spanning thousands of years that we have what we have today. Make no mistake, inventing the technology we have today was not easy. What is easy is to look back on what they discovered with the benefit of a priori knowledge, dismiss their state of mind living within their own time, and conclude: "it's just gear ratios"