When I was working at HP in the 80’s there were a lot of Chinese students working there as interns. The view in Silicon Valley was that sharing information and using synergy to create fresh ideas was the best way to develop advanced technologies. Because this was the only place that I had worked up to that point, I took this for granted. There were no hidden secrets among the advanced technology providers: techniques, technologies, and ideas were all shared, and, in my opinion, this was one of the great discoveries of the era resulting in great technological innovation.
I later discovered that much of the rest of the business world was more interested in protecting their part of the universe and keeping it to themselves. They did not believe in the expanding pie where everyone benefits. Their belief was that there was only a certain amount of custard and, if you don’t get it, others would.
This is the same prehistoric thinking that predominates in the Trumpian universe. In Trump’s case it is probably a combination of poor education and a lack of understanding the economic environmental advances of the late 20th century. And, of course, you can’t count out greed when you are talking about Donald Trump.
The remarkable discoveries found in our oceans are a kind of time capsule. The Antikythera mechanism is a Greek analog computer found in 1901 in the waters of the Mediterranean. A device so sophisticated that we had difficulty identifying it as a computer until the late 20th century. The technology had been lost for thousands of years.
Will someone someday find our computers, our space craft, and our buildings and conclude that we, too, were another advanced culture that was lost to antiquity?