Out Of Place Artifacts

Last Updated on Friday, 7 December 2007 02:03 Written by Brian! Friday, 7 December 2007 01:58

Since Atomic Robo #3 involves an ancient steampowered pyramid supertank motivated by a waterclock program that took 5,000 years to compute, I figured we could talk a bit about out-of-place artifacts.

Most O-O-Ps, as they’re called, just aren’t Action Science-y enough to work in a Robo story, although I really want to do something with the Crystal Skulls. Obviously, they’re fakes, but they don’t have to be in a world with a scientist robot!

Still, we like to maintain at least a nod toward plausibility. For instance, if we ignore the sheer scale of Issue #3′s pyramid tank (and the effects of corrosion and the clockwork mummy workforce), it starts to look somewhat not completely implausible. Finds such as the Antikythera mechanism challenge our perception of what ancient engineers and artisans were really capable of producing. Hell, we’re still not entirely sure how the pyramids were built. Some folks are inclined to say that proves supernatural or extra-terrestrial involvement. Me? I think that’s stupid and the simpler explanation is that we underestimate the technical know-how available to those folks. Obviously, their pyramids couldn’t move around, but these people clearly had a few tricks up their sleeves that we still don’t know about. Hell, maybe we’ve got all the tech right but we haven’t figured out how it was really used. Our ancestors had as much ingenuity as we do, it’s entirely possible that an “obvious” solution occured to one of them that we haven’t figured out yet. I mean, it took us thirteen centuries to rediscover concrete. Our ancestors were not morons.

And as much as we’ve learned about the history of Earth’s civilizations, what we know is incredibly limited. All we really have are puzzle pieces, and not that many when you think about it. Some ruins here, a few surviving epics there, etc. If people four thousand years from now had to reconstruct 20th century life based on a handful of random episodes of Friends and half a Buick, they’d have some pretty solid ideas about our technological ability, but it’d probably surprise them to learn that we had access to atomic power or that we were routinely capable of launching things into space to hit targets moving ten thousand miles an hour ten million miles away.

I’m not suggesting Egyptian Astronauts beat us to the Moon or anything, but when you compare what we can verify about ancient technology vs. what’s been lost to the ravages of time, it’s pretty clear there’s some wiggle room. And how much of these technologies have we rediscovered? Perhaps more interesting, how many have we completely forgotten about? Think about it, many technological advances were the results of pure accidents. What happens if you forget that technology in an age where illiteracy reigns? What are the odds that you’ll be able to rebuild on the work of the past? Pretty damn slim. What are the odds it’ll be stumbled upon again? Slimmer!

Let’s look at Tesla for a moment. Civilization is synonomous with plumbing and electricity. The Romans gave us one, Tesla gave us the other. Were it not for Tesla’s alternating current technology, we’d have been stuck with direct current for, well, who knows how long? Even if someone else eventually figured out AC, it may have easily been at a point after DC had become too central to the system (in terms of physical infrastructure and the politics of industry) to replace. Edison didn’t choose direct current on a lark: alternating current was a pipe dream, no one could figure it out. And yet, in Tesla’s own words on the subject, “…the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers…”

Were it not for Tesla’s innate understanding of currents, electricity would be neither cheap nor widespread. If you didn’t live in or near a city, then life today would be more like the 19th century than the 21st. A single person with the right idea at the right time can make an incredible mark on the course of history. So how many Teslas were there? How far did their works travel in those ages where it was much more difficult for information to spread and to persist? And what fundamental laws of nature were they superhumanly privy to?

We’re stretching into the realm of pseudo-science here and treading a path dangerously close to ludicrous New Age suggestions, but I think it’s clear that the ancient world holds a number, perhaps a great number, of technological secrets. Some of them, maybe most of them, have been rediscovered, but I like to think about what might have been forgotten. Maybe a mechanical genius was Pharoh five thousand years ago. Maybe his ideas were so heretical that his successor erased him from history. Maybe he knew that was going to happen, so he designed an automated weapon to strike from the grave — literally.

Well, it makes for interesting comics, anyway!