Pre-smartphone was a very different time.
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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There were literally phone numbers you could call and someone at a library would look up the answer to your question. In like, a day or so. And call you back with the info.
I want this job so bad. Do you know how much I know but never get asked about! I have to inflict it apon people to get it out ofy system.
Pfft, I bet you can't even tell me one interesting thing about minerals
Does Bronze count as a mineral for these purposes? If so did you know that the earliest form of bronze was arsenical and that large amount of copper deposits used during the copper and bronze age were contaminated by arsenic. This is probably what resulted in early blacksmiths being shamans, because they poisoned themselves while making their tools and went crazy.
I'll allow it, because A. interesting. and B. I can use my preplanned response:
Can the trap be a glacier? I want future archeologists to dissect my corpse much like how Ötzi who was probably a metal shaman based off of his tools and how far travelled he was. Though he was most likely a very early example, also he was most likely murdered.
Interesting exception: in North America around the Great Lakes, pure native copper was widely available at the surface due to the ice sheets exposing underground deposits when they advanced/retreated.
The Great lakes copper complex also used cold forging which avoids the issues of vaporization. Can't have your brain melted by vaporized materials if you never melt it down or cast it, though thats only possible due to the relative purity of the more veins.
Also the Great lakes copper complex most likely kicked off due to the collapse of trade routes making getting good quality stone for tools a right pain in the ass.
I thought mercury was more likely for causing those "issues."
While that may have been an issue for some the sheer amount of arsenic bronze artifacts kinda points in the direction of it being the arsenic. Mercury was more of an issue for later cultures who used it for makeup or other sundries, or alchemists and Medicare but they played around with questionable materials all the time.
They're rocks, Marie!
... Wait, that's not right.
Yeah, I bet their apple knowledge isn't up to snuff either.
Here's a cross-over mineral and biology:
Teeth are not bone. They are made of a variety of the mineral apatite called hydroxyapatite (fluoride treatment converts some of it into fluorapatite, which has stronger chemical bonds).
Further, apatite is a homophone for appetite but they come from completely different root words.
I have a friend who works for a library. They still offer this service. I don't think anyone under the age of 70 has used it in some time.
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We texted Chacha (242242) when I was in high school. It just sent the question to some dude on their computer who looked up the answer and texted you back. I still have no idea how they made money.
I still have no idea how they made money.
That's the neat part, they didn't.
They wanted to pivot to ads, or paid subscriptions, but neither revenue stream really materialized for them.
Google had a text to search service, too, that didn't make money, but turned out to be pretty valuable user data for developing smarter semantic search.
That would have been such a fun job to have
But what if the game show only gives me 30 seconds
There used to be an address at some university and you could mail them photographs of insects and they would tell you what those insects were.
Usually it would turn out to be a beetle of some kind.
I really wonder what the other people thought, that they just landed on the core of their body? I suppose they could defecate while in flight, but man that would be a drag.
Probably comes from the old tale that hummingbirds never stop flapping their wings or they die so why would they need feet?
Hummingbirds, the real Speed and Crank stars.
hummingbirds never stop flapping their wings or they die
Same with sharks
Wow, I never knew sharks had wings.
/s
Nor feet!
How can you be sure are you a sharkologist?
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Apparently as many dumbasses around back then as now.
There is a widespread idea that people from the past were dumb due to a lack of information, the age of smartphones and free access to information has made it clear that a lack of information was never the issue, we are just really fucking stupid animals.
I mean, yeah, but also we made machines to feed us interesting things and it turns out we really like to be mad for some reason (justified or otherwise) and we'll share things to make others mad too. Throw in a profit motive, economic woes due to said profit motive, and it's over.
Part of our animal nature is to be tribalistic, and we don't often get a lot of that in our daily lives so that people find ways to feed that need. Tribalism involves violent intent about outgroups that don't conform to our "tribe" (read: pack).
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Again, stupid fucking animals.
You would NOT believe-… ok honestly everybody reading this already knows.
But there are SO many people that will offer confident unprompted incorrect advice on so many subjects while they have the sum of human knowledge in their pocket. Or they will ask some dummy for the answer while having that same access.
And the best part is that many of them use their literal human knowledgebase portal to send the wrong information!
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This is the opposite outcome of one of my friends advisors. We went to the Roswell UFO museum as a lark. And one of the info panels said "this is potential alien metal panels, analyzed by a scientist, Dr. So and So" and we told the professor, who got really angry. "I said that I would look at what they had and it was all flattened pieces of beer cans, I told them not to associate me with this nonsense!"
So you're saying he did analyze the metals, and that he couldn't conclusively prove that they weren't alien metal?
This whole "it's comprised of an unknown element" thing that sci-fi likes to do is ridiculous in and of itself.
If aliens did turn up on Earth their starships would be constructed out of known materials, sure it might be some exotic alloy, or other engineered metamaterial, but we definitely understand what it was.
There's no such thing as alien atoms. Iron is iron.
I think the most crazy thing we could potentially encounter atomically (that we theorize about but haven't seen) is material from the possible "Island of stability" that could be (much) farther along in the periodic table from things we've created.
For the uninformed, the island of stability is a range on the periodic table with atomic numbers in the ~170's (currently the element with the highest atomic number - how many protons in the nucleus - that humans have synthesized is Oganesson, with an atomic number of 118) where it is believed that nuclei will remain (more?) stable, rather than breaking down in microseconds after we slam other elements into each other with devices such as the Large Hadron Collider.
There are SO many challenges with even getting to 118. Getting higher than that is theoretically possible but so far we haven't worked it out. A super advanced civilization might have the means and/or dedicated the resources, and be the beneficiary of whatever properties exist in the advanced/exotic matter that we know nothing about.
That being said, we would still be able to analyze the materials and understand what we're looking at, even if our WTF meters are breaking from the overload because we don't know how they managed to achieve it.
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I'm still not convinced alien technologies would be totally incomprehensible to us. Some of it obviously will, but their tech will still adhere to basic fundamentals like levers, inclined planes, and wheels -- as well as fundamental forces like electromagnetism, kinetic energy, and pressure.
When you need to fasten two parts of machinery together, there are a limited number of efficient ways to do it. I fully expect bolts, nuts, and washers to be a universal technology. Same with focusing radiation; there are not many substitutes for lenses, mirrors, and lasers. When you need to move something around in gravity well, you're always going to need a wheel. If something needs to rotate, there aren't many substitutes for a rotor, stator, copper windings, and electricity. Gears, chains, and belts work just fine for transferring that rotational energy. Nobody is gonna go looking for exotic forces to perform tasks that can be far more easily accomplished conventionally.
Not wheels. When your technology is sufficiently advanced you un-invent the wheel and just hover everywhere.
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I imagine everyone in the bar silent while he's on the phone, leaning forward, waiting to hear the answer.
my advisor: …yes
Girl stacking cups in the background: OH MY GOD!!!!!!
I have to wonder how much money was made, and what happened to the poor fool who bet against this.
Oh wow, to be jump scared by the Destiel fanfic writer I'm obsessed with (the stories not the person lol) in the wild.
Northern Sparrow is an amazing writer and talks often about bird physiology in her fics!
!justguysbeingdudes@lemmy.world
Just goes to show this place is only one half step up from reddit.
This ancient repost keeps getting upvotes no matter how many times it comes up.
I have two trainees and when they come to me with complex questions they’ve clearly thought out and debated it makes me so happy.
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