Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies
The ending doesn&#x27;t quite work, and I&#x27;d say neither does the article as a whole really.<p>First, we didn&#x27;t really forget &quot;greek fire&quot; or &quot;roman concrete&quot; exactly. We don&#x27;t know what the formula for &quot;greek fire&quot; was exactly because it wasn&#x27;t recorded. But in modern times we have an amazing chemistry and can come up with a hundred formulas for napalm -- we just don&#x27;t know which of those matches &quot;greek fire&quot;. Nothing was lost but the association between a formula we almost certainly know and a name.<p>Same goes for roman concrete. We know far more about concrete than the Romans did. We just don&#x27;t bother to engineer everything to last forever, because that costs money and has little point to it a lot of the time. Yes, some buildings are works of art, but many things just have a function to fulfill, which is often temporary. Nobody is sad that the millions of mass-made soviet residential crappy buildings aren&#x27;t still as good as new. If they were made to a better standard they&#x27;d still be ugly cookie cutter things.<p>And I&#x27;d say the same goes for the Saturn V. We didn&#x27;t forget material science or heat shielding. We launch plenty rockets and even landed car sized robots on Mars -- that required excellent understanding of heat shielding. If we had any reason to build a modern copy, we&#x27;d use whatever shielding is required, after accounting for modern improved materials. We wouldn&#x27;t be dumbfounded that the thing melted down on the launch pad. That in the popular consciousness we see the engines without the asbestos covering doesn&#x27;t really mean much of anything.