The Universal Tech Tree

Does anyone know of a similar arrangement for books or biographies?

At one point in time I tried to read one of each major category of books in the Dewey Decimal system but was stymied (need to try again using LoC), then later, wanted to read biographies in chronological order to my kids, but that was a hard list to put together.

For an associated text, see:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29240912-why-the-wheel-i...

which I'm currently reading and which is quite good and very engaging.

Someone is probably already making the most brutal Factorio mod of all time.

That is fantastic! Thanks for providing the link. I was expecting something like that on the submission URL.

Thanks! I could not find it

Speaking of Burke, I believe his book The Pinball Effect has notations in the margins directing the reader to other pages that mention the same node in the graph (whether that's exactly how he thought of it or not). It seems like an interesting attempt to express this non-linear structure in the form of a book.

He explicitly says in the article that it's actually a DAG.

I see your point about it not being a strict tree. It is tree-like, however, in the sense that the branches/edges only point in one direction: forward in time.

Yes, we have been gated.

In the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond develops a theory for why Europe and Asia developed vast, powerful civilizations, but Africa and the Americas did not.

In Africa, the co-evolution of primates/humans and other life resulted in that other life becoming extremely dangerous to humans. My impression is that if Africa were the only continent, humans would still be living in caves, because nature had enough time to adapt. Even today, we do not have the technology to tame the wildlife and diseases of Africa, nor will most crops grow there. So the ability to escape the continent would have been the first “external gate”.

In the Americas, the geography and north-south orientation of the continents, as well as the lack of work animals and crops suitable for agriculture, gated development until much later than Europe and Asia. Corn took a very long time to go from being an itty bitty little thing to a crop capable of supporting civilization.

Energy and materials. In particular, discovery and exploitation of hydrocarbons changed the entire trajectory of human technology development.

It is very interesting to wonder if we may have seen "convergent evolution" towards certain technologies with different physical circumstances, but I think it's safe to say our species' (and planet's) future is forever altered by the massive biogeochemical battery, trickle-charged over eons, which we are discharging as rapidly as possible.

In a different "branch", transportation may look completely different.

Electric cars were invented 200 year ago, and the first rechargeable battery in 1859. I wonder how things would have looked like, if we had focused more on EV.

In a related scenario, if the car lobby hadn't fought so hard to prioritize personal cars instead of public transportation, we would probably have a more efficient society where you could live far away from your work, and commute in 500km/h trains. The towns could become more walkable and condensed. Logistics would be simpler with a more hub based distribution where more of your customers live in the same place. More area could be available for agriculture or preservation of nature instead of being used for highways and spread out metropolitan areas

Sure. Someone could have invented gunpowder at pretty much any time. It's not particularly complex, just no one figured it out until (probably) some Chinese monks discovered it accidentally in the 9th century. But in some plausible alternate history the Roman legions were using explosives and cannons to conquer the world a millennium before that.

The answer is clearly yes IMO. We probably wouldn't have nuclear fission if it weren't for Shinkolobwe, which by sheer luck had uranium ore at a concentration far greater than any uranium ore ever found anywhere else on earth. Surely there are other technologies we're missing out on simply because we don't (or didn't at the time) have the raw materials.

I’m being pedantic but while external factors definitely can cause big jumps in tech, everything is always interconnected. We can’t discover rocketry without previous leaps in material science, those were impossible without manufacturing and mining infrastructure, those not possible without agriculture and sociological structures and organization, not to mention all the associated advances in mathematics etc

We can certainly imagine a limiting factor based on our prior development. Imagine a world where large amounts of coal or oil never formed, or formed in a manner that made it inaccessible to a pre-industrial revolution society. Without easily accessible chemical energy, the technical progress made during the industrial revolution probably takes 1000 years instead of 100.

The age of discovery was a similar scenario. Imagine a different world where 2/3rds of the continents are uninhabitable desert/tundra/arctic, and there was no economic benefit to better ships, clocks, astronomy, cartography. Delays social development of joint stock corporations etc...

More than just human ingenuity than human political organization. Building modern technology requires all the amenities a moderns state affords it, from capital financing, to complex supply chains, to modern bureaucracy, to rule of law, to a willing populace that can conform to rigid roles. Stuff like that takes hundreds of years to build, not so much from innovation but the accumulation of trust and conformity, and the necessary defences to prevent outside invasions from nomadic warlords like the Mongols.

OK this is amazeballs. Can you expound on technical implementation? Relying on Wikidata, then it relies on whatever Wikidata editors' internal governance system is for inclusion, exclusion, quality control of entries, correct?

I see you submitted this to HN almost a decade ago. How has it not gotten picked up for discussion??

Possibly related to that period having two world wars and the Cold War? If I look a lot of the inventions in that timeline, they're related to or directly funded by warfare. Consider radio and radar, rocketry, space flight, the Internet and its related technologies, there's a very big list.

In the US, institutions like DARPA were directly funded for that purpose.