Technology is a tricky thing. It is intimately connected to all other forms of development. Take a simple thing like a safety pin for example. Looking at it you can easily say that it is not a technical marvel. But it cannot be made out of thin air. The metal used in making it is low grade spring steel. It will not snap back and will deform if it is made from iron. To make a safety pin you have to have knowledge of mining. Then the purification of metals. Then comes the carbonization of metal which makes it hard and gives it the elasticity it needs. Then it requires a very specific tungsten (or ceramic, but let’s stick to tungsten) die to draw out the wire so you can make the wire for many pins from the same die. The technology required for melting tungsten is very high. Then for the shiny finish you need electroplating. The last three processes require electricity since you need regulated temperatures. You can’t just melt metals for drawing out a wire, it would just make blobs. There has to be a very specific temperature to soften the metal with specific properties before you can pull it out of a hole to extract a wire. You need power plants for electricity and you need some kind of transmission system to get the electricity from the source to the forge. To make turbines you need a lot of things. You need roads to carry the turbines to the dam… you need concrete for the dam. Electroplating requires advanced chemistry, so does electricity. To carry electricity you need insulation which requires knowledge of petrochemicals and their distillation for making rubber. In short, you can’t make the simple modern-day safety pin unless you already have the infrastructure to make the space shuttle.
Technology does not mean just the space shuttle, everything is connected to everything else. For example take a relatively common and inexpensive item like rubber. Its a petroleum by-product. The crude oil must be drilled and for that someone has to figure out what to drill for and where. People can’t possibly know they are looking to make rubber from it before they find it. But if there is no rubber there will be no domesticated electricity or cars (no tires or tubes or wires). If you don’t have cars you don’t need highways for horses. You can’t commute. You will be restricted to your neighborhood for livelihood in daylight only (no lights because no wires). It takes the efforts of generations of dedicated people to accomplish the simple tasks we take for granted. If any link in this chain fails, the whole thing collapses.
So why am I blabbering about all this?
Indian mythology is replete with stories of heroes with godlike powers and fantastic technology. Flying ships, interplanetary travel, thought controlled weapons with massive potential for destruction. I don’t take the feasibility of these technical aspects in those times too seriously but for the sake of argument it’s possible that maybe one of the links of these chains failed miserably and everything was lost. It is possible.
Part – 1 of 2
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