How can you assure us Broch?
History states we landed on the moon in 1969 ( during the cold war). Yet NASA themselves have stated that we cant put men on the moon today, because the technology to do so was lost... How was it lost? 1969 vs 2026... 57 years difference. Yet we cant land on the moon today. But 57 years before the moon landing, was basically when we developed basic aircraft for military use.... Sopwith Camel.... moon landing.... F35... Can build F35's with impunity, wont ever build the camel again... cant go back to the moon. Literally makes no sense at all. What tech did we lose after '69, that we cant reproduce today?
Quite a bit actually. The moon landing tech was specific to the application, and we cannot easily reproduce it.
Any given technology, whether a cathedral or the moon landings, grows out of the skills and capabilities of the society of the time.
For example. In the 1960's and 1970's, computers were mainframe-terminal set up with green text screens. Relatively few machines, small batch production, specialist programs. Compare to the diffuse mass-produced electronics of today..... so minaturised and difficult to make that some chips come from only one factory ("fab" plant). The complexity is such that the market to make it pay needs to be global.
So the skills for using and maintaining the old stuff die away.
A current situation. In the early 1970's, British Rail procured a computer mainframe to run the railway train paths- TOPS. It still underpins the railway today, and only now is the project to replace it happening. And even then, it works very well and is only being replaced because the mainframe parts and skills to repair, maintain and amend the programming are dying out.
The social dimension. All engineering tasks to at least some degree depend on tacit skills to make the theoretical process work. But, as we automate processes and systems and the last people who remember how to set the system up and get it working from scratch (vs just keeping it going) retire, made redundant and/or die, the skills are not passed on, and they are lost.
I read somewhere that when the USA started making nucs again, they had to find the last few people alive who had got a particularly delicate critical process to work, so they could train a new generation. Skills fade because accountant types don't value them and so the cost of passing them along is saved until (in many cases) it's too late.
It's also a case of scale. There are indeed a handful of artisans with the skills to recreate the carvings on the old cathedrals, they are typically employed maintaining those buildings. But do we have enough of them to reproduce a whole building in a sensible timescale (even if we could afford it)? I doubt it, would need to train a new generation.
Smaller scale. How many people can spin a good quality thread by hand these days? Not many I wager, yes the skills could be rebuilt but it's a generational thing.
Another one. The building of qanats and other traditional water management systems in the middle East.
It's really easy to lose technology if society moves along to something different or an implementation which is "better" (usually more automated). But automation brings trade-offs, for example there's some fabrics that cannot be produced by machine and so are still produced by hand amongst a few families in India. If they don't pass on the skills, they will be lost until someday the underlying skillset (handweaving) becomes common and redeveloped enough to once again reach that peak.
GC
