I knew about the Antikythera mechanism, at least by name, but the sophistication of it wasn’t clear to me until recently. The article in The Guardian makes me think:
What was initially dismissed as an anomaly – a rock with a cogwheel embedded in it must be so for other reasons, including much later shipwrecks – was a device with at least 30 (some say 70) gears, all precision engineered (the teeth were hand-cut equilateral triangles) and designed to predict the movements of the sun and moon, plus six of our closer planetary neighbours. The calendar dial can be moved to adjust for that inconvenient extra quarter day in the solar year.
And yet… they disappeared. The Helenic and Latin civilization vanished into a suck-hole of darkness and superstition, and we did not have anything that sophisticated for another millenium.
I sometimes wonder if that will happen again. Maybe two thousand years from now, another group of people will be digging through lunar regolith and be stunned to find the remnants of what we left there.
