What's the most consistently good meme in stories and why is it Lost Technology?

finally, an actual meme instead of a trope.

/thread

This makes my eyes rain.

Any examples of this?

i prefer evil charactes becoming good but still sticking with the evil side rather than joining the good guys betraying everything they stood for.

Zebra cavalry is the ultimate meme

I love the Lost Technology trope. It lets me use mechs without upsetting my autism.

>super magical megatech McGuffin that protects [MAIN CHARACTER]'s hometown is on the fritz, [MAIN CHARACTER] needs to go on a quest to find the tools and parts and knowledge how to fix it before everyone dies
>Finds an ANCIENT SAGE that specializes in GODLY MEGATECH, returns him to the hometown on the brink of the McGuffin failing
>Sage just looks at the hero long and hard in disbelief, smacks the machine once or twice, updates the OS, turns it on and off again, and changes a filter before promptly leaving.
>everything is fine.

Go read about the lost library of Alexandria, or the whole fucking renaissance when you grow out of your diapers, toddler.

You forget the part where he also removed the solid body dust and spider webs from the cooling fans.

I was for a while walking to work next to a computer shop which was offering cleaning. As in - physical cleaning. I once even stopped to take a closer look on the literal pile of dust they had to first shake out of the PC's frame and then even consider turning the air compressor on.

This also pleases me greatly.

The technology of the Romans wasn't lost per say, rather the infrastructure of the empire was no longer present, meaning that the kind of "High Level" works they were capable of were no longer possible. Writings and understandings from the period were maintained, they just were not used anymore.

What is true is that their was a decline in scientific and technological advancement, but that decline began with the decline of the empire, more than it did with the actual fall. The decline in advancement was also not exactly as severe as it is often suggested to be.

That being said Lost Tech is still a god tier trope, even if I'm not so sure it has ever actually happened in mankinds actual history.

>Go read about the lost library of Alexandria

waaaaay overblown.

>That being said Lost Tech is still a god tier trope, even if I'm not so sure it has ever actually happened in mankinds actual history.

bronze age collapse is the biggest real example. most of the cities in the region were destroyed and everyone went back to being rural farmers for a few centuries.

easter fukcing island
google thje history of dat shit

Happened a couple of times with the mass die offs in the pre-colonial Americas too. Turns out, the decimation of your populace isn't good for sustaining a base of knowledge

That’s not lost technology. That’s just islanders not thinking their way into the future and fucking up their ecosystem.

ONLY if said technology isn't the explanation for what once was considered magical and mysterious.

I do IT at one of the largest industrial areas in the country
Whats really fun is finding iron filings in a laptop

This is true.

I've seen it done badly, like in Golarion where it's all confined to one country and no one ever reverse-engineers it or takes it anywhere else.

>What's the most consistently good meme in stories
When technological progress is not stagnant in settings with magic. The contrast between the elite magic users and the common folk who use technology to greater effect.

Like that?

Though it is aesthetically pleasing to have the classic "magic vs technology" dichotomy on a setting, it doesn't make much sense.

In a world where magic is common, science would obviously try to explain it and make it work in conjunction with other technologies.
Also, in a world where you can just cast a spell to, say, move around a big rock, you're most likely to create a machine that maintains the spell for as long as you need than to create a non-magical machine to move it instead.

Depends on how magic works. If magic is fueled by ambient mana that works like an ocean with currents and tides and hurricanes, then magic is too downright unpredictable for any magical technology. Of course, by analogy you could make devices to predict mana and figure out its inner workings, but actually harnessing it would be a pain in the ass compared to just making cranes or something.

But if harnessing and controlling magic is so hard, how would magicians actually work with it with enough skill to be actually useful for anything?

But if harnessing and controlling atomic energy is hard, how would engineers actually work with it with enough skill to be actually useful for anything?

When lost technology actually isn't as advanced as people in-universe hype it to be or it's only more advanced in some areas but current civilization has surpassed it in others.

>what is bronze age collapse

A theory debunked before your parents were born

>it's impossible for esoteric knowledge that requires incredible specialization and years of study to comprehend to be lost after societal collapse
>it's impossible for the means to manufacture high technologies to degrade and become unusable / unsustainable
>it's impossible for basic resources to have been used up to the point that you simply can't get another industrial revolution going

...

Tell me do you know how to make damascus steel?
What if the knowledge of how certain technology is lost because the infrastructure to make it was lost in a cataclysmic event and the only people that bothered to remember how it worked after it was no longer relevant were small numbers of hobbyists or scholars studying old dusty books that are incredibly rare and falling into continual decay, eventually as these scholars die off and fail to pass on the knowledge nobody is left that understands the technology, either that or the rare individuals that still understand the tech are written off as madmen or eccentrics.

>Says lost tech could never happen
>Can't even make greek fire, or damascus steel

>You see a metal object with two odd openings...
It's a toaster. Fuck off. FUCK OFF

>Cadillacs & Dinosaurs
Man, I miss Xenozoic Tales soo much

Technology aside, there is a famous case when it comes to preservation of script. In 1830s, certain French Catholic priest decided to rise money and put into print collection of letters and treaties from doctors of Church and all the influencial figures in early days of Christianity. Since it was a controversial matter and he acted against papal ban, eventually he had to use his own funds (he was but a lowly parson in French countryside) and what he collected, creating a really cheap-ass printing in the end, on crappy paper and with the worst ink that there was...
... and this is the only way we can access half of the documents contained in that printing, as there are no other surviving copies, while there are few dozens of those books still left.
And note this didn't happen in ancient times, but not even two centuries ago, with easy access to mss printing and (relatively) high literacy was a thing.

>Confusing electric socket with toaster
Seriously?

Are you fucking retarded?
It's EASIER for it to happen in PRE-industrial societies, as this means flow of information, knowledge, schooling as such, ways of storing data and copies are much more sparse. You have less educated people with less ways of store they knowledge. The more you go back in time, the more severe it gets.
So when you have a society that doesn't have writing, you can wipe out all its knowledge by pure accident. Say, a sneeze. They have writing, but it's a rare skill? Good luck, you might end up with an entire library and nobody being able to read it or crack it like a code.

>electric socket
>two openings
Are we in fucking Germany

So you agree that at such a setting techonology would adapt into controlling magic.
Cool.

False equivalency.

>Tell me do you know how to make damascus steel?

Well...

You want a very high carbon steel, say 1.7% carbon (Saschse), containing "V, Cr, and Ti at a combined level of

Can't we make steel way better than Damascus nowadays?

I like the reverse. The lost technology is only tought to be good but turns out to be just stupid shit done by vast caveman empire.

Examples, plz.

Historically that type of damascus (pulad) tended to be a pretty brittle affair. Lots of carbon to begin with makes for a steel that elans more towards hardness than toughness, plenty of phosphorus is not a good thing, and on top of that the thermal cycling probably encourages grain growth, weakening the steel.

A few tests done in the twenties (pic) showed a traditional "solingen damask" (pattern welded steel) being better in every way than a number of steels samples from old pulad blades. I would suspect that this Solingen damask would have been some of the best steel to be found five hundred years earlier, but not better than that. A piece of "Solingen cast steel", which I guess was a good, modern steel at the time of those tests then performs better than the Solingen damask in every way. And with steel being one of our most important construction materials, as well as the main material for a large amount of arms and armour during the greatest war humanity has veer been through, there's been an enormous amount of resources put into improving our knowledge and capability regarding steels in the last ninety years.

Let me elaborate a bit more. As to why it's a false equivalency.

>But if harnessing and controlling magic is so hard, how would magicians actually work with it with enough skill to be actually useful for anything?

>But if harnessing and controlling atomic energy is hard, how would engineers actually work with it with enough skill to be actually useful for anything?

There's three major differences between these two concepts that make this a false equivalency.

1, Atomic energy is not synonymous with magic, which is a force or possibly something even more esoteric.

2, Engineers are not synonymous with mages. One is capable of doing something that nobody else on the planet can do. The other has a rare skill set that hypothetically anyone can acquire.

3, Atomic energy comes from an easily identifiable source, Magic doesn't.

it goes hand in hand with villain decay

>magic, which is a force or possibly something even more esoteric.
>Atomic energy comes from an easily identifiable source, Magic doesn't.

Unless of course magic is simply a fully natural thing coming from an identifiable source and following knowable laws. You know, kinda like people used to think magic worked.

...

>Unless of course magic is simply a fully natural thing coming from an identifiable source and following knowable laws.

Depends on the setting, but I'm going off the most common usage of it in fiction, which is an unidentifiable nature of the universe that corresponds to thought and allows certain men and women to manipulate it at will. There is simply no scientific equivalent (that we are aware of) except maybe the Big Bang or something we aren't aware of.

Our boi Magus, although he wasn't exactly 'evil'

That's not a meme, that's a cliche.

You fucking meme.