How Humanity Forgot More Than It Ever Knew
A Framework for Understanding Human Technological Evolution Through Redundancy-Based Knowledge Preservation
This is the introduction to a longer framework I’ve been developing. The full document (33,000 words) is linked at the end. I’m releasing this anonymously because the argument matters more than the author—I have no book to sell, no channel to promote, no career that benefits from your belief. Read critically.
In 2000, the United States National Nuclear Security Administration discovered it could no longer manufacture FOGBANK—a classified material essential to the function of its nuclear arsenal. The production facility had been decommissioned in 1993. Nearly all personnel with manufacturing expertise had retired or left the agency. Documentation was either lost, incomplete, or too classified to have been properly recorded in the first place. It took five years and over $69 million to reverse-engineer a material that American engineers had routinely produced just fifteen years earlier.
In a final irony, the reverse-engineered version initially failed testing because modern purification processes were too effective—the original FOGBANK had contained a specific impurity that was critical to its function, but no one had documented which impurity or why it mattered.
This is not ancient history. This is not a tale of burning libraries or collapsing empires. This is the world’s most technologically advanced nation losing the knowledge to manufacture its own nuclear weapons within a single generation.
The FOGBANK incident is typically treated as an embarrassing institutional failure—a cautionary tale about documentation practices and knowledge management. I propose a more unsettling interpretation: FOGBANK is not an anomaly. It is the rule. The apparent stability of modern technological knowledge is an illusion created by infrastructure so recent that we have not yet had time to lose what it preserves.
The Pattern of Loss
The destruction of the Library of Alexandria remains the archetypal example of catastrophic knowledge loss, though modern scholarship has revised the dramatic “single fire” narrative. The library’s decline was gradual, spanning centuries—multiple fires, political purges, institutional neglect, and the slow decay of papyrus scrolls in a humid Mediterranean climate. The romantic notion of a singular catastrophe may itself be a form of coping mechanism: we prefer identifiable villains to the more disturbing reality that knowledge simply erodes when preservation systems fail.
But Alexandria is merely the loss we remember because someone wrote about it. Consider what we have demonstrably lost and cannot recover:
Damascus steel: Medieval bladesmiths produced weapons with carbon nanotube structures and distinctive watered patterns that modern materials science cannot fully replicate. When trade routes shifted and specific ore sources became unavailable, the technique vanished—because practitioners understood what worked through generations of trial and error, but not why it worked at the molecular level.
Roman concrete: Structures built two millennia ago remain standing while modern concrete degrades within decades. Recent analysis has identified self-healing calcium-aluminate formations in Roman harbour concrete, but the precise formulations and techniques remain partially reconstructed at best.
Greek mechanical computation: The Antikythera mechanism (c. 100 BCE) demonstrates precision gearing and astronomical calculation capabilities that would not reappear in the historical record for over a millennium. Surviving copies of related texts contained diagrams of geared mechanisms, but the drawings didn’t work—scribes had simplified the angled gear teeth to square teeth because they didn’t understand which details were functionally significant. Only the discovery of the physical artifact revealed the transcription error.
These are not obscure footnotes. These represent fundamental technological capabilities that existed, functioned, and then ceased to exist because the knowledge required to reproduce them was not preserved with sufficient redundancy to survive localised catastrophe.
The Observable/Theoretical Distinction
Here’s the framework I’m proposing for understanding which technologies can be repeatedly lost and rediscovered, and which represent genuine novelty.
Observable technologies are those discoverable through direct sensory experience and empirical trial-and-error. A metalworker can discover through experimentation that certain ore combinations produce stronger alloys. A builder can observe that arched structures distribute weight more effectively than flat spans. A hydraulic engineer can determine that water flows through pipes at rates predictable from diameter and pressure. None of this requires understanding underlying physics—only systematic observation, repetition, and intergenerational knowledge transfer.
Theoretical technologies require understanding forces that cannot be directly perceived by human senses. Electromagnetism, nuclear physics, and quantum mechanics manipulate phenomena invisible to unaided human observation. While their effects can be observed, their manipulation requires theoretical frameworks that cannot emerge from trial-and-error alone. One cannot accidentally discover radio transmission by heating metals or mixing chemicals; one must first understand electromagnetic wave propagation as a theoretical construct.
This distinction explains a persistent archaeological puzzle: why could ancient civilisations achieve extraordinary sophistication in mechanics, metallurgy, architecture, and astronomy while never developing electronics?
Gravity can be observed by an apple falling from a tree; Newton’s equations formalised patterns anyone could witness. Electromagnetism cannot be observed at all—Hertz required apparatus designed from Maxwell’s theory to detect waves he otherwise had no way of perceiving.
The former are empirically accessible through observation and experimentation. The latter require theoretical understanding that depends on accumulated, preserved, interconnected knowledge across multiple domains.
The Telecommunications Threshold
The first transatlantic telegraph cable became operational in August 1858, failed within three weeks due to excessive voltage and manufacturing defects, and was permanently re-established in July 1866.
This development is typically discussed in terms of commercial and political implications. Its epistemological significance is rarely examined.
Prior to telecommunications, knowledge could travel no faster than physical transportation allowed. More critically, knowledge was stored in physical locations—libraries, archives, the minds of trained practitioners—that could be destroyed by localised catastrophe. The burning of a single building could eliminate centuries of accumulated understanding.
Telecommunications fundamentally changed this dynamic by enabling redundant storage across geographically distributed locations. A discovery published in one location could be simultaneously known and recorded in multiple others, creating resilience against localised destruction. This represents not merely an acceleration of knowledge transmission, but a qualitative transformation in knowledge preservation.
The timeline correlation is striking:
Year, Development
1837 - Cooke - Wheatstone telegraph (UK commercial)
1844 - Morse telegraph demonstrated (Washington - Baltimore)
1851 - Dover - Calais submarine cable (first international)
1858 - First transatlantic cable (proof - of - concept; failed after 3 weeks)
1865 - Maxwell’s equations unify electromagnetism
1866 - Permanent transatlantic cable
1871 - International Telegraph Union established
1887 - Hertz experimentally confirms electromagnetic waves
1895 - Marconi’s first wireless transmission
1897 - Electron discovered
1905 - Special relativity published
1920s - Quantum mechanics developed
1945 - First nuclear detonation
1946 - ENIAC operational
The telegraph was an observable technology—built through empirical trial-and-error without requiring theoretical understanding of electromagnetism. Maxwell’s equations, published one year before the permanent transatlantic cable, were preserved initially through regional European academic networks, then distributed globally via the infrastructure his successors would improve. The theoretical physics the telegraph helped preserve (Hertz 1887, Marconi 1895) enabled wireless telecommunications, further strengthening the preservation infrastructure.
All genuinely novel technologies—those manipulating forces invisible to human perception—emerge only after the telecommunications threshold is crossed. Observable technologies (mechanics, metallurgy, hydraulics, architecture) appear throughout human history, are lost, and reappear. Theoretical technologies appear precisely once, precisely when redundant global knowledge preservation becomes possible.
What This Framework Claims (and Doesn’t Claim)
Let me be explicit about scope:
This framework does NOT claim:
Extraterrestrial intervention
Mystical knowledge transmission
Unfalsifiable lost continents
That ancient civilisations were “more advanced” than us in all respects
This framework DOES claim:
Human cognitive capacity has remained essentially constant for at least 50,000 years
Sophisticated knowledge systems can develop given sufficient time and institutional stability
Such systems are vulnerable to catastrophic disruption when preservation mechanisms lack geographic redundancy
The telecommunications threshold represents a genuine discontinuity in preservation capability
Genuinely novel theoretical technologies cluster specifically in the post-threshold period
The full document engages seriously with the strongest objections I’m aware of. Each major claim is accompanied by counter-arguments, engaged with honestly rather than dismissed. There’s an entire section cataloguing the framework’s weaknesses and open questions.
The framework generates testable predictions—about cuneiform tablet content, underground infrastructure patterns, and what kinds of artifacts should and shouldn’t exist. These predictions could be proven wrong. That’s what distinguishes this from unfalsifiable speculation.
The Question
The question is not whether ancient humans were capable of sophisticated achievement—they demonstrably were. The question is whether our historical records capture the full scope of what was achieved, or merely the fragments that survived repeated cycles of loss.
The full document (33,000 words, ~98 pages) develops this framework in detail:
Section 2: Literature review engaging with Tainter, Hancock, Polanyi, and others
Section 3: Formal theoretical framework with edge cases addressed
Section 4: Evidence synthesis (Antikythera mechanism, cuneiform corpus, underground infrastructure, flood myths, specific sites)
Section 5: Discussion (transmission paradox, why not electronics, archaeological visibility, modern parallels, convergent development)
Section 6: Acknowledged weaknesses and open questions (genuine self-critique)
Section 7: Testable predictions and implications
Link to the full document: https://archive.org/details/cyclical-knowledge-loss-and-the-telecommunications-threshold-or-how-humanity-for