A Lost Technology far ahead of its time …
BC 80-60. Water gushed over its body. Soaked with wetness, it sank deep down the sea throat. It hit the bottom with a thud. Mud clinged its body as a flea would to a dog. Light faded and so did any hope for seeing rays again. It knew its potential, its uniqueness. It knew it can’t get lost so soon. It knew it had to be found. What it didn’t know was the wait is going to be so long …
April 1900. As Elias Stadiatis dived 42-60 m deep down the water off tiny Antikythera island, he saw, what can be termed as, another wreck of a large cargo ship which usually faces a pre-mature death only to be mined and dug out by sponge divers. What Elias Stadiatis did was nothing unique of sort for his fraternity. But little did he know that this wreck contains one of the most precious thing, far more precious than the statues and jewelry. The irony was it lay there for almost 2 years as nothing but a plain piece of rock. It was in 1902, May 17th that the gear wheel embeded in the rock caught Valerios Stais‘ stare. It knew it was time for the world to know its true worth. It knew the time has come …
Antikythera Mechanism is supposed to be world’s first Analog Computer. The level of miniaturization and complexity of its parts can be compared to no clock prior to 18th Century. It was only after 1000 years that technical artifacts of this complexity came into existence. Professor Michael Edmunds of Cardiff University, who led the research on this expensive mechanism, has got this to say about it.
“Whoever has done this has done it extremely carefully. In terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than the Mona Lisa.”
A century has been lost for finding the exact purpose of this entity. What was earned was nothing but plain mystery. No answers. Just speculations that it has to be a tool designed to calculate astronomical positions during a period of 150-100 BC. It is these speculations that just add to its mystery.
In a period when common people viewed solar and lunar eclipses as superstitious events linked with fear, when law of gravity was not discovered to understand why heavenly bodies moved, planetary motion was as nebulous as a mud, who built this mechnism? Why was the technology on board a ship and was pre-maturely lost? Did really our ancestors at that time were knowledgable equivalent to what we are today? Was that knowledge lost just because of lack of means for transmitting knowledge? If that’s not enough, the compactness designer was aiming at by reducing the size of the device does make one compare it to modern laptops hinting it being mainly a mobile device.
So i guess we are left quite puzzled with this whole saga. Were all the written laws today already unhooded far time back just lost for a mean to transfer that knowledge? Its we to think …