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Building a Telegraph Using Only Stone Age Materials
MMBK writes "It's the ultimate salvagepunk experiment, building a telegraph out of things found in the woods. From the article: 'During the summer of 2009, artist Jamie O’Shea of the organization Substitute Materials set out to test whether or not electronic communication could have been built at any time in history with the proper knowledge, and with only tools and materials found in the wilderness of New Jersey.'"
I really hate being referred to a video in a story. I am never interested in enough to sit through it. So how did they find copper? And a power source?
Well, probably his time machine has the same restrictions as the time machine I've once built: You can only go into the future, and that only at a speed of one second per second.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Precisely. Even if all the rundown Walmarts had their inventories depleted, *someone* will be selling a used hammer on the market for some food. We have over produced so much crap in the last 50 years alone, we don't need to be making more of basic items such as common hand tools and PVC pipe found in a Home Depot.
Don't forget. We're also very good at scavenging for resources as well. You think human beings are bad at recycling? In such a scenario, that's all we would be doing. Path of least resistance and all that...
Life is not for the lazy.
Spinning mirrors possibly. Maybe a strobe of some sort.
True it is line of sight, but probably good enough.
One thing I would not do is smelt miles of copper wire.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
This is a cool project and all, but I have to challenge the premise that civilization can collapse to a level where all technology is gone but detailed technical knowledge survives.
Several tens if not hundreds of thousands of people graduate from college with engineering degrees every year in the US alone. This has been going on for many decades, which means that in the US alone, there are literally millions if not tens of millions of scientists and engineers, many with decades of experience in their professional lives as well as bits and pieces of technical know-how picked up from hobbies and idle curiosity. These people don't all live within one lethal radius. They're spread out all over a big-ass country. Their tools (lathes, mills, computers, smelters, furnaces, etc) are also spread out over a big-ass country. And that's just "post-industrial" America I'm talking about. People with technical know-how and technology and machinery are spread out all over the planet.
Any end to civilization that takes out *all* technological capability would have to be a planet-wide event that would necessarily take out the geeks as well. Otherwise, if a giant meteor takes out North America, European, Chinese, Indian, and Brazilian engineers would just move in and do the rebuilding with Brazilian or Indian or Chinese or European-made equipment.
He made a battery in the woods, and that's cool. I hadn't realized that copper and iron were that easy to get without digging much. And, I can see how he could get at least some distance of copper wire. However, he did not tackle sensing the voltage that's turning on and off and communicating that to the user at the other end of the wire. At least not in this video. Does anyone have an idea of how to do that?
"If civilization collapsed..."
Interesting as a premise as that is, it isn't the concept behind what he was doing. This wasn't a DIY hard hack demonstration in the sense that those usually show up on /. This was a conceptual activity, intended to explore an idea. Think "art" not "science". His idea was that this example of technology could be built from nature without any preceding technology at hand, just the knowledge of how to do it. He wanted to to stand on the shoulders of the giants who'd come before him, but not take along any of their tools.
The fact that ultimately he did use one of those tools (a lighter) is why (IMHO) this exercise failed. I understand his reasoning: He could have started the fire without the lighter, and on previous occasions he had started fires without it. But once he made that argument, he could say that he could have have built a battery, and on another occasion he did, so he used a prefab one... and you might at well just leave it as a thought experiment. The performance itself was incomplete, and all that was left was a proof of concept rather than the execution of a concept.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I know it's hard to start a fire like this. I've tried and tried and tried it unsuccessfully. But as soon as he skipped that step, he was no longer doing what he set out to do: creating dits and dahs without using any post-stone-age gear.
If I set out to walk across the country, but take a bus from Pittsburgh to Toledo because it's raining, and I know that I could walk between them, I haven't actually walked across the country, have I?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You better hope the guy who starts out with the hammer doesnt figure out this, much simpler, three step program
1) Hit guy offering food for your hammer on his head, with your hammer ...
2)
3) Dinner!!!!!!
People, what a bunch of bastards