I had no idea what to title this post; it will make more sense if you read.
I was sitting back in my chair just now, came up with the idea, and decided that I must immediately come here and share.
To elaborate, I was thinking about semiconductor (microelectronics, specifically) manufacturing, and thinking about how incredibly precise it has to be. No human has the ability to do it so precisely, so we use machines. But those machines, too, had to be manufactured very precisely. How was that done? Well presumably another machine made the precise parts for those semiconductor fab machines. How about
those machines? I think you see where I am going -- machines are made of parts that were made by other machines, and so on. But tracing that lineage of manufacturing back, you eventually come across a point where humans were directly involved in the manufacturing of a machine or part. That is, the humans themselves made the part manually. This brings up a couple interesting ideas. First of all, the precision of the manufacturing of us relatively clumsy humans can be massively multiplied by creating machines that help create other machines, and so on. Second, every modern product we have, ranging from cars to semiconductors with 14nm features, has ultimately, whether directly or (more likely) indirectly through machines, been created entirely by human hands.
I suppose those two ideas there are pretty obvious and self evident. But that made me think about something interesting. Take a microprocessor for instance: it almost has "relatives" of manufacturing, so to speak. For instance, the fab machines that manufactured it are its direct relatives, followed by the machines that helped make those machines, and so on. Eventually, indeed, the "relatives" can be traced back to human hands.
Now, like any lineage of ancestry, individual lineages spread out very quickly. We each have eight great grandparents, for example, despite them being only three (or two?) generations away. Well if you take any manufactured product and trace all of its various manufacturing lineages back, they all end with human hands somewhere. So, finally, my ultimate question. Take a microprocessor for instance; how long back does its farthest manufacturing lineage trace? Back to the industrial revolution? I wouldn't be surprised! Perhaps just one part was manufactured back then that went into another machine, which created parts for another machine, and so on, all the way to high tech semiconductor fab machines today.
Thinking about modern day products having parts that have been isolated from manufacturing via manual labor for decades is a fascinating concept to me.
Also, I have no idea if this post is too complex to be fully followed... Ah well.
You're currently reading a post signature on an Internet forum -- get a life!