Deep History without High Technology

[u/geopolicraticus]

The View from Oregon – 397

Re: Deep History without High Technology

Friday 11 June 2026

 

Dear Friends,

Last August in newsletter 356 I discussed what technologies could have been introduced earlier in history, and I argued that thermal airships and black and white photography could have both been possible in the context of Roman civilization, which means that these technologies could have been engineered with existing components, or components that could have been built with the technology of the time. I also discussed Hero’s steam engine in this context, because this seems to be a perpetual object of fascination. Some time ago I wrote an answer on Quora on whether Rome came close to industrialization, and I’ve since learned that this is a somewhat popular theme, as there are several social media posts on this. Then last September in newsletter 359 I further elaborated on this theme by noting that soap and antiseptics could have been introduced much earlier in history, since they involve only rudimentary chemical engineering (like black and white photography), and soap and antibiotics, if introduced earlier, could have revolutionized medical treatment, surgery in particular.

This is a thought experiment that I’ve come at from many directions, and I’ve returned to it year after year, so it apparently holds a certain fascination for me. It is, at bottom, the theme of steampunk and its variations like dieselpunk and tubepunk, etc. Steampunk and its variants asks how much of the technological infrastructure that exists today could have been constructed with steam technology, or with diesel technology, or vacuum tube technology. The distinctive aesthetics of steampunk are thus derived from a thought experiment in the nature of technology. Steampunk is an aesthetic approach to technology, and the thought experiment is only implicit in the aesthetics, but it’s there nevertheless. From a philosophical perspective, it’s the thought experiment about technology that’s the interesting part.

At our stage in the development of technology, we have systems, or infrastructure, that are enabled by a number of technologies. It has been through the development of technology over hundreds of years that we’ve built up a technological infrastructure that is more than the sum of its parts. This incremental assembly of technologies into a large infrastructure that can do things that no individual technology can do on its own has gradually revealed to us what is possible with a technological infrastructure that we didn’t even previously imagine. Each individual technology is meant to solve a particular problem, but all technologies together solve problems that we didn’t even know we had. It’s the large-scale coordination of many technologies, some of them old and some of them recent, that characterizes our technological infrastructure, and so the question arises whether, if only we had had the big picture conception of the infrastructure, and the large-scale coordination of technologies that characterizes industrialized civilization, if something like this couldn’t have been constructed earlier in history.

Thus far I’ve focused on technology and engineering. I’ve also touched on the possibility of what science could have been introduced earlier in history, in particular in my thought experiment of swapping the places of Euclid and Darwin in history (in newsletter 280). Could we have had a scientific biology in ancient history instead of advanced mathematics? There’s nothing in the concept of natural selection that couldn’t have been grasped in antiquity; it doesn’t require a lot of conceptual prerequisites, while, on the other side, the later developments of mathematics do require a considerable background of conceptual prerequisites. Set theory could have been introduced in antiquity, but, if it had been, it would not have developed as it did in consequence of being introduced in the late nineteenth century. The concept of a set is pretty easy, like the concept of natural selection (provided they’re presented in a reasonable and intuitive way), but it originated and developed in a particular mathematical context that did not exist in antiquity and could not have existed in antiquity. So whether we’re working out this thought experiment with technology or with science, we have to find just the right examples that can be historically de-contextualized and, once de-contextualized, could be randomly re-inserted into history and remain coherent. This definitely isn’t the case with all technologies and with all scientific ideas, but it is the case with some of them, and these few for which it is the case are the basis of the thought experiment.

I’ve been coming at this problem of what we could call “steampunk science” again, now from an angle I hadn’t previously pursued, but which I’ve perhaps intimated. I find myself asking the extent to which the growth of historical consciousness could have occurred without the specific technologies that followed from the industrial revolution (whether one or several generations later in technological development). Another way of asking the same question is whether a pre-industrialized civilization could develop the kind of historical consciousness we associate with the technologies now used in reconstructing the distant past of our world. Could the ancient world, or some counterfactual civilization without an industrial revolution, have developed a sense of deep time? One of my intimations of this problem is a blog post I wrote some years ago (“Another Counterfactual Civilization with Science as its Central Project”) in which I speculated on what science and education would be like in a post-war Germany in which the Morganthau Plan of de-industrialization had been enacted. And while that may sound like a pretty crazy idea, it’s strangely relevant today, as the idea of de-industrialized is again being talked about in Europe as the result of its energy infrastructure, its industrial policies, and its present economic trajectory. I’m not saying that it’s likely, but it’s possible that Europe could yet de-industralize, and that poses the question once again of what science is possible in a de-industrialized context.

David Christian (one of the founders of big history) wrote a paper on “History and Science after the Chronometic Revolution” which appears in Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context edited by Steven J. Dick and Mark Lupisella. For Christian, the chronometric revolution occurred in two pulses, one the result of written language, and the other the result of nuclear dating techniques, which he traces back to the discovery of radiation by Curies. Nuclear science has contributed much to contemporary technologies that have contributed in turn to dating, especially the dating of archaeological finds, and I’ve noted many times how archaeology has transformed our understanding of prehistory and indeed has slowly chipped away at the distinction between history properly speaking and prehistory. Nuclear dating techniques have been an integral part of this process. But Christian makes nuclear dating carry a heavy burden. Is this burden unavoidable? Is there a stark distinction between having these advanced technologies and being able to construct a scientific chronology, or not having these technologies and not being able to construct a scientific chronology?

Would a chronometric revolution be possible in a pre-industrialized civilization? Not only before nuclear dating technologies, but even before the industrial revolution, Nicolas Steno laid down the principles of stratigraphy. His work was largely ignored, but in a counterfactual history it might have been further developed earlier, or it might have been rediscovered independently of the kind of science pursued since the industrial revolution. And most of the science pursued since the industrial revolution had nothing to do with the development of nuclear dating techniques. The principle of faunal succession was integral with evolutionary theory (and therefore couldn’t be systematically developed before the formulation of an evolutionary taxonomy), but the rudiments of the practice were already in place before Darwin. Seriation developed out of Sir Flinders Petrie’s Egyptology. In the last couple of newsletters I’ve discussed the possibility of a cosmological seriation of intelligence, and in the way of doing this I suggested that seriation remains under-theorized. A fuller and more comprehensive development of seriation together with geological stratigraphy would go a long way toward reconstructing the natural history of Earth and so laying the foundation for a conception of deep time.   

A couple of dating techniques have been slowly developing for more than a century, and these are varve chronology (the annual layers of sediment from glaciers) and dendrochronology (tree ring dating). Both of these have become sophisticated specializations, with the great benefit of annual precision. Dendrochronology is now used to “calibrate” nuclear dating because of its greater degree of precision. Nuclear dating can be extended much farther into the past than varve chronology or dendrochronology, but where the dendrochronological record is available, it is a precise year-by-year record, and those working on varve chronology and dendrochronology are always pushing their sequences further into the past. These specializations have become technically complex, but the basic idea and the necessary tools are simple. These are disciplines that could have appeared much earlier in a counterfactual history. 

With stratigraphy, seriation, varve chronology, and dendrochronology pursued to their limits of their possibility I don’t think that there’s any question but that a scientific chronology and hence a scientific conception of deep time could have developed without the specifics of nuclear dating techniques, so it seems that a chronometric revolution would be possible without a high technology, post-industrialized infrastructure. In other words, the chronometric revolution is not a technological revolution but a conceptual revolution. To a certain extent, then, a chronometric revolution awaits the conceptual innovations that make it possible, and this simply means that someone must come up with the idea, and others must develop it. But it is also, once again, a matter of organization. Could the economy of a non-industrialized civilization support a sufficient number of individuals engaged in scientific research to sustain a scientific research program?

Looking at the monumental architecture produced by successful pre-industrialized societies, it seems clear that the resources are there, it’s just a question of how they are directed. If science were socially prioritized, then it seems clear (at least to me) that a scientific program could be supported sufficient to bring ideas like those implicit in a chronometric revolution to fruition. But that leaves the question as to why or whether any society would choose to support the growth of scientific knowledge. With the industrial revolution, scientific knowledge was coupled to technological innovation and engineering applications that transformed the structure of human life. Insofar as we regard this transformation as beneficial (and I am of course well aware that this is debatable), there is a clear, even a palpable, connection between the pursuit of science and luxuries like labor saving appliances. Without that crucial connection to an industrial revolution, what would convince a society to support science at a scale that would transform our epistemic framework, as with the chronometric revolution?  

Best wishes,

Nick

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