5 lost technologies that could've changed the world.

[Spaceception]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlite

http://fuel-efficient-vehicles.org/energy-news/?page_id=787

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronovisor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleforce

http://jansloot.telcomsoft.nl/Sources-1/More/CaptainCosmos/Not_Compression.htm#.V18Q5aLMJnB

 

So what do you guys think of these technologies? And when do you think we could reproduce them?

Spoiler

Maybe not the Chronovisor, that might be fake, but who knows?

 

[monstah]

4 minutes ago, Spaceception said:

So what do you guys think of these technologies? And when do you think we could reproduce them?

I think claimed, alleged and proposed are actually the best terms to describe them

[Camacha]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. These inventions have never proven their worth in the real world, which might be because they are amazing but never got the chance. More likely is that they were never that amazing to begin with.

People make great claims all the time. Only when you can back that claim up, it becomes interesting.

[sojourner]

Isn't this just a stealth attempt at a conspiracy thread? Which is against forum rules?

 

Either way, my thoughts on these "technologies" is, LOL.

[Spaceception]

2 minutes ago, sojourner said:

Isn't this just a stealth attempt at a conspiracy thread? Which is against forum rules?

No, and I hope it doesn't get into that.

[YNM]

The problem with these kind of stories are lack of proper documentation. One shouldn't even tread in, unless to redo the experiment (which may or may not work).

Exceptions are the last two - rail/coil gun and large-capacity memory is already a thing.

Edited June 14, 2016 by YNM

[Guest]

I've read that the compression thingy is impossible, just saying.

[Streetwind]

Oh dear... oh dear. Let's see:

1.) is an elaborate publicity stunt by a single person who felt needy for attention. Literally everyone wanted in on this alleged supermaterial, but when it came down to actually licensing and reproducing the technology, the guy refused - for obvious reasons, if you ask me. He never had anything to sell in the first place. This isn't a "lost technology", this is a work of fiction.

2.) was allegedly created by a highschool dropout. Even if he had possessed an unusual spark of genius, it seems awfully strange that the device hasn't been replicated**. Consider that today, we have automotive engineers employing software to cheat government emission tests because there is absolutely no way that the fuel efficiency and emission targets that are demanded of them can be achieved while keeping inside the cost envelope demanded of them. If this alleged "filter" allowed multiplying a car's mileage by 8 even in its simplest form - which apparently didn't need any sort of complex equipment or materials to construct - then multi-billion dollar car companies would have been using this forever. The conspiracy theory that the inventor was somehow assassinated by the oil industry completely fails to acknowledge that there are other entities, with just as much power and money, who would have benefitted to such immense magnitude from this technology that they'd have lapped this up like a dog encountering a spill of peanut butter. But that, of course, doesn't fit the story. Because that's all this is: not a "lost technology", but rather a work of fiction.

(** But what am I saying, it has been replicated. Just go on the internet and search for fuel vapor engines. You'll find websites and even youtube videos - each and everyone of of them more sketchy and pseudoscientific than the last...)

3.) is literally sourced straight from a 40's science fiction novel. This isn't a "lost technology", this is a work of fiction.

4.) exists today. It's called a mass driver/coilgun/railgun. It also works a lot differently than Tesla imagined, because he never got around to actually experimenting on it and figuring out the pitfalls in trying to accellerate matter to relativistic speeds inside an atmosphere - such as the way said matter tends to spontaneously undergo nuclear fusion with the air molecules it encounters, if it moves fast enough. The very first XKCD What If deals with precisely this phenomenon, and the resulting effect on the "weapon" that fires the stuff. And everything around it, if you catch my drift.

In other words: not a "lost technology" either. More of an early paper concept produced ignorant of several physical realities, but which nevertheless served to inform later developments in similar (and more practical) directions.

5.) is a curious case. The guy really did die from a heart attack just one day before signing a deal that would have made him rich, that much is proven. The problem with the story? He was running a software company. Like, literally, a company. It had a CEO and employees and everything. But did any of them actually work on this coding system? Nope. None of them did. In fact, none of them ever saw it. Sloot claimed that in the event of his death, he had a copy of the software stored in a safe deposit box at a bank. However, as it turned out after his death, no such thing had ever existed.

It should also be kept in mind that it's very much possible to produce extremely small software when needed. For example, there are programming competitions which center around producing videos, tech demos or even entire games within the confines of 4096 bytes (or similar sizes). However, each of these is custom-written - they are small because smart people hand-tweaked this particular thing to fit into that size. There's no algorithm that can do it for just anything. As such, it is not difficult to believe that what Sloot actually produced was vaporware, assisted with a few hand-crafted demos that were much smaller than the (generally clueless) audience thought possible.

In other words, he ran an elaborate computer software scam and likely planned to abscond with the money, like many others before him and after him. It's just my conjecture, but maybe it was the extreme stress on the eve of the grand finale of his game that did him in? Who knows. But regardless: this isn't a "lost technology", this is a work of fiction.

 

Come on now, @Spaceception - you can surely do better than to fall for cheap clickbait videos like this one?

[Spaceception]

3 hours ago, Streetwind said:

Come on now, @Spaceception - you can surely do better than to fall for cheap clickbait videos like this one?

I thought it would be a cool video to show you guys I didn't think it would be fake.

[Elthy]

Especialy the fuel thing sounds like a fake, since it would stand against the laws of thermodynamics. While internal combustion engines efficency is low (in the range of 25%-35%) an increase of e.g. nine timesbetter miles/gallon is not possible. He would have to change more obvios things, e.g. the shape (for lower air resistance) or the wheels (for lower friction). Also better efficency would result in greatly reduced temperature of the engine and the exhaust, since the energy wouldnt be lost as heat.

It kinda reminds me of those companys which sell e.g. strong magnets to tape to your fuel line, to somehow "polarize" the fuel for "better burning".

[YNM]

Regarding the fuel thing, what's described already happens - today, injectors are used to create practically fuel "vapors" (it's mist but gasoline vaporize a bit everytime). The claim isn't very far off either - using car the right way around can save fuel, for ex. avoiding congestion and moving at optimum cruising speed (which is pretty fast on high-performance cars, was pointed out in a TG show, where you can have a sports car more efficient than a Prius).

For the memory, we solved the problem - not compress the data, but compress the physical size and get more of it.

Edited June 14, 2016 by YNM

[PB666]

17 hours ago, Spaceception said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlite

http://fuel-efficient-vehicles.org/energy-news/?page_id=787

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronovisor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleforce

http://jansloot.telcomsoft.nl/Sources-1/More/CaptainCosmos/Not_Compression.htm#.V18Q5aLMJnB

 

So what do you guys think of these technologies? And when do you think we could reproduce them?

  Hide contents

Maybe not the Chronovisor, that might be fake, but who knows?

 

The teleforce can work, the others not so, the teleforce has two problems. First the why and the how it to leave something in the polluted air long enough, ususually a few minutes it starts developing an invisible patina, while highly valuable on antiquities, in the world of electron microscopy its a pest. When you place these metals in a vacuum, the patina wants to go back into the vacuum but lack the kinetic energy to do so, it you distarge a high voltage they gain the energy and colored discharge occurs, ussually a avocado green color is a mixturs of several gases. The problem is that in air it doesn,t happen. 

So imagine that each of these particles is carrying a charge, the are accelerating to thousands  of miles in the distance of a few microns. You cant do this with metal objects, you can create a type of  capaciter the carries a charge, it can accelerate, but in this case you are accelerate an atoms thickness of gas on a metals surface, so the electrostatic reserve has to be much greater, at 10,000s it would be simply dangerous, the rate of acceleration will be far less. While the amps would not be that great the type of power being produced would be simply dangerous. The second problem is that while in a vacuum everything works great, if you trash through a chamber at 4000 miles per hour your chamber wont be a vacuum chamber, so that you would have to have a high speed aperture that closes behind the projectile, one in front that opens after the projectile leaves closes again, evacuates, then the interior aperature reopens. This would take a few seconds. 

Is essence this is a magnetic mass accelerator with the magnets replaced by a charge. Neither are used. 

[magnemoe]

49 minutes ago, YNM said:

Regarding the fuel thing, what's described already happens - today, injectors are used to create practically fuel "vapors" (it's mist but gasoline vaporize a bit everytime). The claim isn't very far off either - using car the right way around can save fuel, for ex. avoiding congestion and moving at optimum cruising speed (which is pretty fast on high-performance cars, was pointed out in a TG show, where you can have a sports car more efficient than a Prius).

For the memory, we solved the problem - not compress the data, but compress the physical size and get more of it.

Yes, he might have invented something every car today uses, he however did it an very kerbal way with increasing pressure in fuel tank. 

You can compress a lot if you accept losses in the data, think jpeg and mpeg. If not far less and it depend on the data, two color line drawings can be compressed a lot perhaps 99%. program files around 50% unless they hold lots of easy compressable data. 
its mathematical limits on how much you can compress without loss, funny enough you can not compress white noise, think an image with each pixel is an random color, if all of the image is one color its just one number to store. 

[JetJaguar]

I was hoping this was going to be a thread about actual lost technologies, like Greek fire, Roman cement, the Antikythera Mechanism (or more specifically, the manufacturing techniques to make such a thing), or one of several ancient medicinal plants.

[Spaceception]

1 minute ago, JetJaguar said:

I was hoping this was going to be a thread about actual lost technologies, like Greek fire, Roman cement, the Antikythera Mechanism (or more specifically, the manufacturing techniques to make such a thing), or one of several ancient medicinal plants.

I've hear about the Greek fire, but not the others.

Have you heard of that flexible glass? I think it was the Romans.

Edited June 14, 2016 by Spaceception

[Andem]

One thing to note is that most of these channels are fluff. Yeah, I watch them and I think they're interesting, but I've lerned to not take much away from them. Now, say they had been talking about Greek fire or a Stradivarius violin, I would be a lot more interested. 

[JetJaguar]

1 hour ago, Spaceception said:

I've hear about the Greek fire, but not the others.

Have you heard of that flexible glass? I think it was the Romans.

That's another one to add to the list.  It would dent rather than shatter if dropped, and it could be beaten into shape like metal.  It might not have actually existed though, stories of it may have been an allegory.

Roman concrete is extremely durable and more resistant to weathering than modern concrete (the dome of the Pantheon is still, to this day, the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome), and the recipe for the cement used was lost some time during the middle ages.  Modern analysis is only just now understanding it's composition, but we're still not sure how it was actually mixed and poured.

The Antikythera Mechanism is a Greek clockwork device used for astronomical calculations that was manufactured some 1,500 years before anyone else was able to machine gears with such precision.

As far as medicines, the first I can think of is a Roman plant extract that was used to treat all kinds of medical problems but is probably most famous for it's use as a contraceptive.  It was likely collected to extinction due to high demand, a very limited growing range, and the fact that it could not be farmed.

Edited June 14, 2016 by JetJaguar

[wumpus]

The catch with compression schemes is that a "universal compressor" (an algorithm that always produces an output smaller than the input) is impossible.  From the sound of it (a coding scheme) that seems the case.  It may have been a "lossy compressor" that outputs some image/sound/movie that appears "good enough" to human eyes, but is not quite perfect (and as shown above, you can make movies with only a few k of memory, but they have to fit specific conditions).

The proof is simple (called the pigeonhole principle you can probably get a better explanation by googling pigeonhole compression).  Since any binary input has to effectively be a stream of 1s and 0s, covert that into a binary number.  Then produce all possible numbers with that many bits (this is basically infinite and for mathematical proofs only).  You now have 2^(string length) inputs and you want to compress them in half, so you compress them all.  You now have 2^(string lengths) strings that are "string length"/2 in length.  So you make a set of 2^(string length/2) pigeonholes and number them from 0 to 2^(string length/2)-1.  You then start filling each pigeonhole with a compressed string, but suddenly run out of pigeonholes and have to fit multiple strings (on average 2^(string length/2)) into each pigeonhole.  The fundamental impossibility lies here: your "universal decompressor" will have to magically determine which identical string was the original and how to decompress it.

[DaMachinator]

Aerogel has some of the claimed properties of Starlite.

Edited June 14, 2016 by DaMachinator

[PB666]

BTW, an electric hybrid, plug in, is a mid-sized car that can get 100 mpg.

[WestAir]

Wasn't starlite actually tested, though?

[Guest]

On 6/14/2016 at 4:55 PM, WestAir said:

Wasn't starlite actually tested, though?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxqFyDugqs4

It's said that Starlite didn't last over a week, and that that's the reason why it wasn't commercialized.

[passinglurker]

starlite aint got nothing on solar white https://www.nasa.gov/feature/cryogenic-selective-surfaces-0