The Antikythera Mechanism. Computing BC Style.

I always thought I would be a scientist. As a child I was curious, about bridges, bugs, boats; boy stuff perhaps. Toys like Lego and Meccano helped me imagine machines and build them. Unfortunately, science and business were seen as completely separate streams. There was the occasional ‘eccentric’ inventor who got lucky and managed to make some money out of a patent, but eventually I was made to choose – business or science.

So, years later I make a living from marketing. It’s a fascinating, fun field, but as the old cliché goes – it’s not rocket science. Sometimes, if you are lucky, or you specialise, you get to work to promote things that may change human civilisation, incredible machines barely imagined in days gone by – or were they?

I’ve been in Athens for the last few days. It’s hard to imagine the sophistication of the civilizations that once occupied this part of the world. Counter intuitively, it is even harder to comprehend when you see the evidence before your very eyes. Much of what you learn here is that you never learnt anything. You realise that no matter what the intentions of your teachers were in your early years, they taught you what they knew, which in many cases was only a version of events.

Take a simple premise – the Earth is round. Of course, we all know this, and we all know that some Italian in the Renaissance defied the church to convince us that the world was not flat. It’s a neat story and most people accept it without question, but the concept of a round earth has been around for a long time. How long? Well at least as long as 347 BC and perhaps longer.

Great thinkers wrote of all liquids on the planet having a curved surface. Documents show that it was known that each point on the curve was the same distance from the centre of the earth. Ideas and writing are only so interesting. Machines that make calculations are quite another.

Almost buried in the Athens Archaeological Museum is a piece of bronze. By comparison with other objects in the building, it is relatively recent, dating from circa 150 BC. Stop. Think about that. 2159 years ago there existed a clockwork device with complicated gearing. All our high school science and history tells us that this machine should not exist.

The Antikythera Mechanism is not a simple device to tell the time on earth. This machine tells the position of the earth in relation to the sun, moon, planets and constellations of the zodiac on any given day in the past or future.

Modern science is not completely redundant or useless though. For years, the lump of bronze sat without anybody knowing what it was. Only through the application of new-fangled things like X-Rays and MRI technology was it’s functionality understood.

It’s a fantastic story (for more information, see references at the bottom)… but it’s just one piece of evidence to suggest that we really don’t know just how advanced we were or what has been forgotten or erased in the name of some faith or another. What else did humans know that we now don’t?

For as far as we have come, some things are no more advanced than the ancient places. Daily tasks that some think are wondrous when put into context are mere toys. Twitter for example.

Firstly, let me say that not only do I use Twitter, but I am advocate of its use for all kinds of purposes. But let’s face it – it’s not very new and it’s not very clever. Moreover, it is slowly being appropriated by the same old PR machines to deliver the propaganda of celebrity and dumbed down tit-bits of information.

The Twitter API allows for all kinds of interesting statistics, the search functionality allows for a snapshot of opinions of a small set of people – mostly American, mostly early adopters of technology and all self appointed. It’s hardly representative of the wider world, though that may change.

Some will argue that news events are changed forever by Twitter, but when you dig down, you realise that only a handful of those ‘tweeting’ about an uprising, a war, an attack, a sports match are actually there. There is something slightly backwards about watching a High definition feed and converting it back into 140 characters of text.

Worse. The comment offered by many is about the platform itself in a strange self-referencing waste of bandwidth. A post like “I am using Tweetdeck to organise my twitter life,” is akin to beating out on drums “These new cowskin hides take my signalling to a new level,” or waving a blanket over a fire to communicate “what do you think of my new white smoke signals?”

It’s cool. It’s kinda useful in a background information feed kind of way. It’s strangely addictive, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s relatively trivial and unimportant. Take it away and the world would not be any worse.

Who knows what a 4009 museum of the early 21st century would look like, or what it might contain. Hidden in a virtual room may be a 3D immersion that allows those in the future to experience the wonders of Twitter or an archive of all the content.

What would someone reading your contributions think of you from your tweets alone? – For that might be all that survives of you and your part in the collective wisdom. Would your 140 characters of insight compare to the calculations that put the circumference of the earth within 40,000 kilometres in 245BC?

A globally connected digital communications platform is something we take for granted in 2009. Why then, is the most talked about application, one that has less functionality than a newspaper?

Hopefully we’ll use our smarts to create something memorable, to stand the test of time and allow others to evaluate our chapter of history as one of creativity and advancement, rather than a relative dark ages. I’m not sure, but what do I know?

For a great podcast about the Antikythera Mechanism and transcript see:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2009/2508608.htm