tl;dr - Look around you. At the way things are. Do you think things have always been that way? And if they haven’t, how alien is the past really?
The Universal Law of Gravity
We say that The Law of Gravity is Universal.
Universal - big word that. Every where in the whole entire Universe. Even the places we can’t see - which is most of the Universe. We say, with a lot of confidence that, even in the places we can’t see, that Gravity acts the same way that it does here on Earth, as described by Indians in the 1st to 5th Century AD, as articulated by an Englishman sitting under an apple tree.
But, sometimes, it doesn’t. Stars and light move and bend in a way that doesn’t match what the Law of Gravity says. When we encounter such aberrations we say, well the Law must be true because it is the Law. Because if we said that the Law was not Universal, it would break all sorts of ways of thinking about the world, and that would leave us in a very uncertain place. Humans don’t like this uncertainty. So, the Law must be Universal. How do we then explain these motions and bends that don’t match up with the Law?
Well, there’s a lot that we cannot see in the Universe. There must be more of these “unseen things” that account for these aberrations such that the Law remains intact and we are not plunged into uncertainty. We have a nice, sufficiently mysterious name for these unseen things - we call it Dark Matter. And there’s a lot of it. In fact, MOST of the Universe is Dark Matter. Let’s keep this in mind as we read ahead.
The Bigness of History
History is BIG. Technically, history is as big as the universe, in terms of time and space. Human history is also big, but of course it is not nearly as big as the history of the Universe. As an aside, is there any point in talking about the history of a Universe where we don’t exist to talk about it?
From - https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html
Ancient Human History
Now let’s look at this timeline. Look at that pink part on the right hand side of the timeline. That’s what we call “recorded history” - history of which we have records - written, carved in stone, passed down as stories.
You could say that the Cave Paintings in 40,000 BC are a form of recorded history - so why don’t we?
We see that we had complex language by 50,000 BC (I wonder how we determined that) but then it took us 10,000 years to make cave paintings?
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
At a high level, there are many interesting things happening here. So before we were Behaviourally Modern (that is, if we saw a human in 50,000 BC, we could guess at their intentions and actions, and have a theory of mind for them), we were anatomically human - distinctly separated from Apes, recognisable to us modern humans.
Somewhere between 800,000 BC and 125,000 BC (now thats a time range for you) - humans discovered fire. From fire, to complex communication to cave paintings, it took us 750,000 to 75,000 years? Why? Some say that evolution works slowly - but is that what happened? Or were there a bunch of humans discovering fire all over the world and then dying. Was fire discovered 6 million years ago and the knowledge of it kept dying and being re-discovered?
“Modern” Human History
Let’s look at these 5000 years of Recorded History that we have.
Oh boy. A lot happened in the last 5000 years right? We made wheels, vehicles and iPhones. There were wars, religions and “overpopulation”. We got Philosophy, Science, History. So much. In a span of 90 years - Julius Caesar rose and fell, the Roman Empire was Founded and Jesus was born and Jesus was crucified. 90 years.
So - 750,000 years to go from fire to complex communication. 90 years for immense upheaval in Human History.
Some say that events that happen in the past, cause an acceleration in the future. So, because we had complex communication, things happened faster. It took us 10,000 years to go to Cave Paintings from complex communication and another 40,000 years to go to Wheat Cultivation but it is still a useful way to think about things. Once we had Wheat, things really started to go fast in some ways.
Recap :
Things inexplicably take a very long time to happen
Once things happen they cause more things to happen, faster
The Things Humans Did
We built 5000 year old cities (Ur). We figured out plumbing (Mohen jo daro).
We built the Pyramids.
There’s always a question of what level of sophisticated engineering it took to build them. This sort of thinking gave rise to conspiracy theories - the most popular one involves aliens. Turns out, it is not that hard to build massive structures with primitive technology. There’s plenty of videos on YouTube showing how it could be done.
What is interesting though is that it took at least 3300 years for European Cathedrals to be built as high as the Pyramids. Depending on your perspective - that’s a very long or very short time for engineering knowledge to evolve.
Between the Pyramids and the Cathedrals there were a bunch of Indians that just, out of nowhere, laid the foundations of mathematics which our modern understanding of the universe is built on.
What is common to all these things that we built?
Put simply - knowledge. How to shape and cut stone. Which stone to choose. How high things can be built before they fall. Organizational ideas about the universe. That the sun is an extra terrestrial object. That there is revolution. That water needs to be boiled. That music is organized in a fundamental set of pleasing tones. That chemicals can be combined in a certain order and quantity to produce other chemicals. This knowledge that resided in individuals but was spread by institutions.
Let’s take a look at this pretty thing from Egypt: Its called a Merkhet (Instrument of Knowing),and it was used to tell time and direction 600 years before Christ was born.
Now - to build a Merkhet and use it effectively, there are certain things you have to take for granted :
That there is such a thing as time
That time can be measured
A theory of measurement
That stars are celestial objects that move in predictable patterns.
There is a way to manufacture such clean edged sides and beautiful inscriptions (only 50,000 years after cave paintings!)
This is a pretty sophisticated worldview.
These devices are theorized to have been used by priests in the temple of Horus. This implies an institution that had learned this knowledge that was learnt somewhere, preserved and spread so far that we still have a Merkhet surviving today.
Using common sense, there would have to be many Merkhets - so many that even after being destroyed, we have still found a few today from that long ago. This implies a society sophisticated enough to encourage the mass production, distribution and use of such a product.
Unfortunately that’s not the case for most of history.
A similar thought exercise can be done for the following examples:
A 1700 year old bottle, made of glass, with dolphin shaped handles with wine intact
A 25000 Year Old ivory carving. What is she wearing? How can we immediately its a she? How did someone, supposedly still hunting, gathering & worrying about predators and no technology achieve such mastery of craft? And this is just the one that survived. How many more were made? If you met her, would you be able to communicate?
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Today, “the West” is dominant. So we think that the West is all there is, all there was, all that will ever be. While the influence of Christianity on the last 2000 years is undeniable - we’re missing far too many pieces.
Amongst a certain group of people the west is all there is. The Greek, the Roman tradition, and more recently the French and the German. This is just the story we currently believe. We believe in some sort of a straight line from the Founding of the Roman Republic to the Renaissance/Enlightenment and the modern, liberal, homogenous world order we have today.
Somewhere along the line, this story, has become a Law. A Law that hints at a divided mind and society based on language, genetics & geography.
And yet, when we explore other parts of our history, we see that this Law is not a Law at all. Maybe the Law would make more sense if we understood the dark matter shaping it. It might be useful to change the Law or understand that it is not universal at all.
(The West is not unique in thinking that it is unique. There are Iranians, Africans, Indians, Chinese today who think that their civilization is the one true story of humanity, or the source of hidden wisdom, or The Most Sophisticated In The Ancient Times.
This sort of talk is boring and pointless. It is much more interesting to think about what was common back then to all of these. That there are entire parts of “recorded history” completely invisible to us. The example I use are Indian and Egyptian because they’re the ones I know off the top of my head. But you can find the same in Greece, Persia, China, Africa. )
in 600 BC the Surya Siddhanta was written - an astronomical text describing the earth as a sphere.
In 600 BC in Egypt, they were using the Merkhet.
The earliest Vedas are dated to around 1600 BCE (Although this should be controversial now for obvious reasons). Even a cursory glance at the wikipedia page of the Vedas reveal an incredibly sophisticated and profound view of the world and human society. A mere 1500 years after Ur.
What kind of an institution allowed for the space and resources for men and women - just like you and me - to not only come up with this worldview but disseminate them enough that they are still preserved word for word, intonation for intonation today.
300 CE - the Iron Pillar of Delhi is constructed. That hasn’t rusted till today. Imagine the sophisticated understanding of the world that it took to create such an object. It had to have been built on a base of knowledge spreading deep into our past. Do you have iron objects around you that don’t rust?
(What was happening then in France, Germany, England - well - you can google for yourself.)
I call these pieces the Dark Matter of History.
The institutions that encouraged, preserved and propagated sophisticated, accurate, useful world views that have disappeared without leaving a trace. And yet we would be nowhere
In the first city we have discovered, there are texts that describe even older histories.
Why did Aryabhatta work on those problems? Where was his trained? Who were his colleagues? How did they build upon each other knowledge?
Mendeleev, his Table & Predicting The Future
Dmitri Mendeleev, in 1867, while writing a textbook he would use to teach a class in Chemistry discovered something astounding. In the 1800’s, it had already been noticed that elements had certain repeating properties. That elements resembled and behaved like other elements. But based on what? Was there a pattern?
Mendeleev cracked it. In some ways, simple and obvious and in others absolutely earth shattering in its implications - he decided to arrange the elements in a table according to their atomic number instead of their atomic weights. Famously, like another genius, he claimed the pattern came to him in a dream.
What’s so special about arranging knowledge in a particular way?
Because of this particular pattern, other patterns between the elements emerged.
These other patterns made us realize that what we thought we knew about some elements-such as their atomic weight- was wrong.
More importantly, the pattern was so strong, that Mendeleev predicted that matter must exist fitting some holes in his periodic table. That the new elements would resemble known elements in a certain way. How accurate were these predictions? See for yourself:
Huh, look at that. *
Why is this important?
To understand history, we must understand what is common to the institutions that created a space for important changes to happen.
To predict the future, we must study the past. We also seem to lose the knowledge that there is a pattern to human history and that things occur in cycles. We ignore this at our own peril. There could more efficient paths to progress by simply not repeating what we know not to work. Maybe, like Mendeleev, we need someone to dream us patterns of the past.
Obviously, progress isn’t linear. At one time a certain group of people knew enough and thought deeply enough to construct the Pyramids, to write the Vedas, to construct non rusting iron pillars. We seem to lose this knowledge.
Yet, I write this on a computer. Yet, today, they say that no one person can describe end to end how a modern computer is constructed.
It is interesting to think about what the ancients knew, how they knew it, how they saw what they know and how it must be spread. It is interesting to think about the mechanisms of the loss of such knowledge and that perhaps we can and should better to preserve it.
What inspired this post?
If you start by looking at things around you, it is easy to subconsciously believe things have always been a certain way. School is for 12 years, college for 4. You need a degree. Money works a certain way and so does government. A little bit of reading creates cracks in this reality through which you begin to see the fractally distributed pasts that have combined or collapsed to lead us to where we are today. And if what is today was not so for most of humanities existence, then what wonders do we have to look forward to in the future? Maybe looking at the past can tell us.
A common problem in companies today, is the loss of knowledge. For a fast growing successful 5 year old startup, one of the difficulties it faces in growing is scaling the skills and knowledge of its members fast enough. New people come in faster than they can be taught. New people become “senior people” quickly. The decisions of the past - proper in their context - become the inefficiencies of the future. These inefficiencies accumulate faster than the companies grow. Questions like “why do we do things this way” become more common. And this is only in 5-10 years.
Growing nationalism across the world has forced the regurgitation of certain national myths. As an Indian, I may scoff at certain ideas that have become popular today, there are certain facts that were agreed on by everyone that didn’t have real explanations to them. Its like, nobody chose to really understand why things happened the way they did. Colonialism took its toll but now we can do better.
Anyway, if things become faster all the time - then how do you preserve and improve upon knowledge such that it remains true, useful and easily accessible?
If the stories that drive our cultures, our collective memory of the past, are false - what is the implication on our collective sense of the future, of progress?
There’s a great website - Roots of Progress - exploring such questions through the lens material industry by exploring questions like “Why did it take so long to build a bicycle?” If you enjoyed this post I encourage you to check it out.
*Fun fact: the “eka” in eka aluminium comes from the Sanskrit for “one” and ekaboron indicates that the predicted element would be like boron. Why did Mendeleev know Sanskrit? How many chemists today know Sanskrit?
Mendeleev also founded the Russian petrochemical industry and the first Russian oil refinery, but those are just details.
Regarding predicting the future - check out the work of Peter Turchin
Thanks to Krupali and others from Twitter for giving me valuable feedback for this piece.
———————————————————————————————————————————————
If you like my posts please feel free to send me some btc! - 3H8yjsPAaFkeaGuKjdsA1ko8HTtcXKoFXJ
Rate you among the top 3 or just to give myself some flex my top 5 finds on clubhouse. The “dark matter” in our acknowledgement of what we don’t know over what we do and knowing that even with the little we know, there were some incredible feats and yet is it really incredible in grand scheme of things will remain a question on a philosophical plane. If that comment made no sense, then I will summarise it by saying “enjoyable read and thought provoking perspective”