the rising sea
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industrial-scale von neumann machines to accelerate humanity's ability to manipulate nature
The Rising Sea is building the first industrially-useful self-reproducing manfacturing hardware.
The Tale of Thomas Newcomen
Long ago, in the age of iron, before mankind left forever to wander the stars, there lived an Englishman called Thomas Newcomen. As a young man his ambition was great, and he set out to steal a treasure from Heaven that would bestow prosperity on the people of the world. For years he searched far and wide, seeking wisdom in all places from remote uncharted villages to ancient buried libraries.
Eventually, at the top of an adamant tower, he came to a workshop whose door had been left ajar. Upon venturing inside, he found an array of complex and subtle machines.
Not wishing to be discovered, he took the first thing he laid eyes on from the workbench, slipped it into his pocket, and retreated back the way he had come.
When the Master of All Good Workmen discovered Newcomen's theft, his anger was fierce.
He laid a curse upon the people of Earth: that they'd reap sorrow and joy in equal measure from this brazen act.
And so Newcomen stole the first Heat Engine from God, and with it the seed of our modern economies of scale.
Mankind bought for itself the ability to transform energy at unprecendented scales, but at great cost: as scientific infrastructure became complex and capable, it also became costly and slow.
In exchange for a few centuries of prosperity, we were left with a fragmented world, where progress on the frontier of physics, chemistry, materials science, and engineering was restricted to small numbers of sprawling, expensive projects.
Newcomen's curse set our civilization back 1000 years. It may be hard to believe it, but during this period, the second dark age, it was actually cheaper to ship technology from the other side of the Earth than it was to compile it in your own backyard. The enlightenment that was later brought on by the democratization of physical scientific innovation came only when humanity began to see economies-of-scale for what they truly are: rigor mortis. The first early signs of death for a civilization.
