Dec 23, 2024 4:54 PM
Replying to Keith Novak
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This topic is the sort of thing I would converse about at a bar or over dinner as I wanted to be an archeologist before I chose engineering as my career. My senior project for my aerospace degree was using FEA modeling to study the properties of 3000 year old Chinese bronze bells. Until the 1990's nobody had figured out how even the casting was possible let alone very advanced acoustic properties that I reproduced on a supercomputer. They lacked that technology so how was it even possible?
I look at the premise that because we don't know how to do it today that it must require advanced and possibly alien technology, as intellectual arrogance. Our brains have not evolved that much in the last few thousand years. I am convinced that if the smartest people and the majority of any modern economy was devoted to making monuments from very large stones, then that focus could match and probably exceed the ancient stone technology today.
How does this apply to PM? Sometimes, instead of relying on the most sophisticated technology of our age to solve the biggest problems, we can take a step back and think how they might be solved with a creative application of much simpler technologies.
