Building better rock throwers
Mar. 28th, 2003 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hnpccIt amazes me how much time and energy we, as a species, have spent on finding a better way to throw rocks.
Cruise missiles are, when you get right down to it, just very upmarket cannons. Cannons were upmarket catapults. Catapults were better than chucking them yourself.
It's the same with guns, which are essentially upmarket arrows. Both designed to hurl small pieces of rock or metal as fast as possible in the direction that they were being pointed at when released. In that respect I agree with the gun lobby in that guns don't kill people, people do. Guns do exactly what they are designed to do. (Unless they're badly maintained, in which case they may not). The direction in which the gun is pointing is up to whoever's holding it, or, quite often it seems, chance.
Dean is very interested in archery, so I get a lot of tidbits about the history of bows. What I find interesting is where the technology did, and often as importantly, did not spread. Bows aren't found in Australia. The technology didn't come here, which also had implications for firestarting (using a bow is a lot more efficient than using hands. Something which the contestants on Survivor seem to rediscover every time.)
I wonder why the technology didn't spread. The Tiwi Islanders had links with Indonesia and PNG, so it wasn't that it couldn't have spread, just that it didn't. It may have been because, as an islander people, bows weren't a great improvement on what was already available. While you can fish with bows, it's not an improvement on nets.
Meanwhile, back in the middle east, and the Congo and the Ivory Coast and probably another dozen locations that I don't know much about, we continue to throw rocks at each other.
In a very upmarket fashion, of course.
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Cruise missiles are, when you get right down to it, just very upmarket cannons. Cannons were upmarket catapults. Catapults were better than chucking them yourself.
It's the same with guns, which are essentially upmarket arrows. Both designed to hurl small pieces of rock or metal as fast as possible in the direction that they were being pointed at when released. In that respect I agree with the gun lobby in that guns don't kill people, people do. Guns do exactly what they are designed to do. (Unless they're badly maintained, in which case they may not). The direction in which the gun is pointing is up to whoever's holding it, or, quite often it seems, chance.
Dean is very interested in archery, so I get a lot of tidbits about the history of bows. What I find interesting is where the technology did, and often as importantly, did not spread. Bows aren't found in Australia. The technology didn't come here, which also had implications for firestarting (using a bow is a lot more efficient than using hands. Something which the contestants on Survivor seem to rediscover every time.)
I wonder why the technology didn't spread. The Tiwi Islanders had links with Indonesia and PNG, so it wasn't that it couldn't have spread, just that it didn't. It may have been because, as an islander people, bows weren't a great improvement on what was already available. While you can fish with bows, it's not an improvement on nets.
Meanwhile, back in the middle east, and the Congo and the Ivory Coast and probably another dozen locations that I don't know much about, we continue to throw rocks at each other.
In a very upmarket fashion, of course.
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