Real-life tech-tree

October 19, 2008 2:54 AM

"In order to feasibly produce, say, transparent adhesive tape, integrated circuits or sugar-free soft drinks, you need such-and-such materials and such-and-such equipment, which in turn depend on other things, all the way down to ores and fuel and such. So if you want to build your very own set of night vision goggles from scratch, here's everything you need access to in order to get started" Has anyone compiled, for the public to see, anything resembling a real-life 'tech-tree', akin to what's found in computer games such as Civilization?

Such a database would help us see our everyday objects not just as things you can use, but as products of our society, and would greatly aid me in my secret plan for world domination.

Much of this kind of information is already compiled to such places as Wikipedia, and books such as David Gingery's series on how to build a complete metalworking shop from scrap, not to mention libraries full of industry and engineering textbooks, but nowhere have I seen it in a format that lays out technological and material dependencies explicitly for neat searching.

posted by Anything to technology (6 comments total)

There's a famous essay called I, Pencil which looks at some of what is necessary to make an ordinary pencil.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 5:03 AM on October 19, 2008 [5 favorites has favorites]

Thank you T-E, that essay lays out beautifully why I'm asking this question.
posted by Anything at 6:46 AM on October 19, 2008

I'm always reminded of the (highly recommended) series Connections when I see a tech tree.
posted by mattholomew at 6:58 AM on October 19, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

Something of this sort might be in amongst the documentation of the RepRap project.
posted by XMLicious at 8:32 AM on October 19, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Some of my friends at BYU took an honors class called the Daedalus Project. Essentially, the course was founded on a scenario where they were shipwrecked on a deserted island with nothing but what was in their pockets and, conveniently, a giant library on microfiche (I think this was just a scenario proxy for the University library, not an actual compendium the instructors made). Their group term project was more or less to convince the instructors they collectively knew how to build an airplane to get off the island. That means they'd have to be able, at a minimum, to build a reasonably light airframe, a working airfoil, and an internal combustion engine. That encompasses most technology up through the beginning of the 20th century, and probably gives one the roots for most current stuff other than modern chemical and materials engineering. So I suspect that class probably produced some papers or at least bibliographies that'd be close to what you were looking for.
posted by weston at 11:56 AM on October 19, 2008

Hmmm... an airplane engine from scratch? Wouldn't the deserted island have to be, like, either Cuba or Taiwan or something?

I think I'd build a boat and call it an airplane.
posted by XMLicious at 6:29 PM on October 19, 2008