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Lost Technology
"I have said this before, and I do feel it is worth reiterating for those of you about to embark on archaeology degrees: ancient and powerful civilizations do NOT leave dangerous weapons lying around on the off chance that their descendants might someday find themselves in a tight squeeze and need them."
—Professor Bernice Summerfield, "Beyond the Sun"

Beyond Schizo Tech, beyond Scavenger World, there's Lost Technology.

Anime's Applied Phlebotinum. Similar to Imported Alien Phlebotinum, with the catch that the current population comprises the survivors or replacements of an age that fell due to its arrogance, war, or some other catastrophe.

Let's face it. The Ancients had some pretty neat gear. Robots, weapons, even the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything (42). Easy to use, little or no maintenance required, and after thousands of years of neglect often still in perfect working order!

...oh yeah, and this technology completely and utterly destroyed the Ancients and most of the world with it. But that doesn't stop the villains (or the heroes) from wanting to get some for themselves. Usually, said Lost Technology then tries to destroy the world again. Some, but not all, heroes are smart enough to try to keep people away from the stuff.

Occasionally the good guys need Lost Technology to combat ancient evils that have arisen again (or villains who have acquired Lost Technology of their own). They usually use it as best they can, despite Black Boxes. Often, this is the origin of a Super Hero.

May also show up in the guise of Lost Magic in fantasy settings. Also see Sufficiently Advanced.

Examples

Anime and Manga
  • The City in Blame! is so immeasurably vast that "lost" technology is positively ubiquitous. For a more obvious example, Killy's weapon is revealed to be an ancient and legendary piece of technology that nobody has been able to replicate. He is mildly shocked to learn this.
  • Keeping people from (while recklessly getting into) the stuff is a major premise of Galaxy Angel, which is called Lost Technology in the series. The serious Galaxy Angel Gameverse has it in droves, but replace backtalking missiles with, say, dangerous ones.
  • The Demon God Androids, the Eye of God "Death Star", the Trigger of Destruction battleship, etc. etc. from El Hazard The Magnificent World.
  • Mai-Otome
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has a ton of this stuff, and it's always a major part of whatever crisis the main characters are facing. The manga suggests that the surrounding star systems and dimensions are having a secret arms race with the stuff which will lead to another galactic catastrophe if it is not stopped.
  • Showed up often in Bakuretsu Hunters.
  • The demi-armors from Maze Megaburst Space.
  • The eponymous airships in Simoun are so far lost that their origin isn't clearly remembered. Knowledge of how to use them is only regained through time travel.
  • Texhnolyze
    • Technically the technology is only lost to the population of Lukuss - the Class and the Theonormals never lost it.
  • The doll Emily in Soukou No Strain turns out to be Lost Technology... with dubious origins.
  • An ancient war machine forms a important part of the plot of Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind.
  • Due to citywide amnesia, the megadeuses from The Big O are Lost Technology despite being little more than 40 years old.
  • Boson jumping technology in Martian Successor Nadesico.
  • In Murder Princess, the Lost Technology is actually called Lost Technology, proper noun. All of the world's "magic" and monsters, as well as the heroine's two companions, were born from Lost Technology, and when its "central processing unit" is destroyed so is everything it created.
  • This is the whole basis of the manga 666 Satan (aka O-Parts Hunter) with the most ultimate of lost technology able to restart the universe itself.
  • Trinity Blood. Not only is it actually called Lost Technology but they even heavily analogize Lost Technology to magic by giving it mystical references.
  • The technology of Laputa in Castle In The Sky. Unusually, it did not destroy them; they voluntarily threw it away because it was alienating them from the earth.
  • The main theme of Turn A Gundam. To fight back against the alien humans of the Moon Race, Earth (which appears to have somehow gone back to the Victorian era) starts digging up old mobile suits and battleships it finds. Turns out we're seeing the end of all the then known Gundam timelines. The Turn A was so powerful it sent humanity effectively back to the stone age, with only the Moon Race retaining video documentation of what happened.
    • Also used as the plot for the more kid aimed spin off Musha Generation, alabeit with the mecha now super deformed, more fantasy elements to the cast and the overall theme being the way of the samurai.
  • Trigun, very much so. It even uses this exact expression ("Lost Technology.")

Literature
  • In Asimov's Foundation novels, most of the galaxy loses its tech when the Empire collapses; the Foundation preserves, improves and reintroduces it. In the later novels, sentient robots are a lost technology universally believed to be mythological, until the heroes meet the last surviving one in the final pages of the last book.
  • Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Thud! introduced Lost Technology in the form of "Devices", mysterious magical/technological devices found and utilized by the dwarfs.
  • Lost technology and the ruins of long lost high-tech civilisations turn up in the Dying Earth novels (and the fantasy RPG) by Jack Vance, as well as in several of his other short stories (both Fantasy and Science Fiction).
  • There are hints of a previous, lost technological civilisation in some of the Shannara novels, a Fantasy series by author Terry Brooks. In Sword of Shanarra, the characters are told the civilisation destroyed itself with powerful weapons, and encounter a mutant-cyborg monstrosity in a ruined city. This aspect is not played up so much in the later novels, although the Big Bad in one is an AI from the old world.
    • Brooks is currently linking this to his Urban Fantasy series World/Void: the Genesis of Shanarra series is set After The End of World/Void.
  • Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time series heavily plays the Lost Magic angle up, stocking the world full of unknown thousand-year-old devices mostly in working order, sometimes harnessed and sometimes just accidentally triggered. The Hero is given glimpses into the pre-cataclysm world, as well. At one point, the reader is afforded a glance at a "three-pointed star in a circle, older than all the other objects, reeking of pride and vanity". Or, as we call it today, the Mercedes-Benz logo.
  • Valyrian steel in A Song Of Ice And Fire, and though not really technology, in some weird manner, dragons.
    • Valarian steel is a fantasy counterpart to a real-world "lost" technology: Damascus steel, which isn't actually lost so much as superseded.
    • Damascus wasn't really superseded as much as made unprofitable, and the guild-kept secrets were lost due to lack of use. Quality forges of the renaissance were able to get good steel at a fraction of the cost of the labor-intensive damascene process. Even modern swordsmiths who make Wootz Damascus admit that despite the improvement in quality and beauty (and massively increased price), Damascus steel doesn't produce as much of a profit on a $/man-hr basis.
  • In Stephen King's The Dark Tower Series; Roland's world has "Moved on" and is littered with forgotten technology from the time before. Some of these such as various robots and and a field of oil derricks become important plot points.
  • In Second Apocalypse, the remnants of the Inchoroi are largely ignorant of their own old technology and use it in a Black Box fashion. On the good guy side, the Heron Spear of legend that used to be wielded by the Inchoroi king can be identified by the reader as a laser gun.
  • An ancient galaxy-spanning internet exists in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep, considered to have dangers such as viruses and outright lies as well as important secrets, with dire consequences ranging from destruction of a society's technology to the ruination of actual immune systems. The novel is about what happens when a malevolent power, the Straumli Perversion, is released from one of these archives by a team of archaeologist programmers.
  • In a Star Trek Deep Space Nine novel, the crew of the Defiant runs across a world that was essentially SET UP this way as an experiment. A highly-advanced culture dropped off a whole bunch of their babies on a planet with tons of small, hi-tech devices scattered all over the place and sat back to see what would happen. We then get the people who are so dependent on technology they don't understand that they're royally screwed when the batteries go dead.
  • In Ayn Rand's Anthem Lost tech includes a subway system and an abandoned house.
  • The series The General, by David Drake and S.M. Stirling (later, Eric Flint steps in for Stirling), has a Lost Technology computer providing information for a planet at a development stage akin to the American Civil War on Earth, to eventually rebuild interstellar travel over a millennium after it was lost due to a galactic civil war.
  • The titular quest in Hiero's Journey is about a search for lost computer technology in an After The End world.
  • T. E. Bass' Half Past Human depicts an Earth about 3000 years in our future, where humans have devolved into a four-toed variety (called the Nebish) and technology appears to have declined as well (although it's still higher than ours). There are two instances of Lost Technology in this novel, both owned by (and planted to assist) the few remaining five-toed outcasts; one gets dismantled by Nebish technicians, who fail to recognise it as a Class 6 cybernetic device, since it's small and portable and their understanding of Class 6 cybers is that the brain case alone would weigh over two tons.

Live Action TV
  • Pretty much the premise behind Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, as well as the movie that started the franchise.
  • In the Star Trek Voyager episodes "Message In A Bottle" and "Hunters" the ship comes across a vast abandoned network of relay stations (over 100,000 years old; each powered by its own black hole!) enabling them to make contact with Starfleet on the other side of the galaxy.
  • The entire Andromeda series is centered around a big peace of Lost Technology.
  • Land Of The Lost was full of this, in fact the Land itself was a pocket universe created by Altrusian technology IIRC.

Music

Tabletop Games
  • Lost technology and the remnants of a star-spanning Galactic Republic are a central part of the setting of Fading Suns, where mankind has descended into a new feudal age and most technology is considered sinful or even blasphemous by the Church.
  • First Age artifacts, especially warstriders, from Exalted.
  • The Brothers' War that underpins nearly all of the early storyline of Magic The Gathering was begun when the two brothers found the Lost Technology of the Thran.
  • The golden age of Humanity in Warhammer 40000 was brought to an end around the 25th millennium by "soulless" rebelling robots known as Men of Iron and the advanced Standard Template Constructs that contained its technological knowledge were fragmented and scattered across the stars. The current Imperium of Man rebuilt human technology by recovering knowledge from these artifacts of the ironically-nicknamed "Dark Age of Technology". (The Dark Age of Technology is also, confusingly, known as the Golden Age of Technology. Whilst human technology verged on Crystal Spires And Togas at times, it is considered a spiritual dark age by the Imperium.)
    • There is also lots of other 'archeotech' out there from several of the other races, mostly the Slann/Necrontyr and the Old Ones/Eldar. Its heavily implied that three of the main races from the setting are forgotten and lost biological weapons.
  • Gamma World is a haven for Lost Technology.
  • Basically anything more advanced than a lighter in Rifts is either lost technology or reverse-enigeered from lost tech. The Glitter Boy is a shining example of both - not only do most of the suits in existence come from before the Cataclysm, but the only new ones come from Free Quebec, who managed to work out their mechanics.
  • Battle Tech has 'LosTech' which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin. Well it's technically old Star League tech that was never proliferated, but don't go telling the Successor Houses that...

Video Games
  • A twist on this is Fallout, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic USA, beginning 84 years after a massive nuclear exchange that took place in the year 2077. The local Big Bad has recovered terrifying Lost Technology — in the form of a powerful Nuclear Weapon from the beforetime!
  • Central to the Halo series; the entire setting is one giant piece of Lost Technology.
  • JRPGs are fond of this, especially Square:
    • Nearly every early Final Fantasy game has some elements (6 and 7 as Lost Magic), usually just to give you a chance to dungeon crawl through a high-tech tower of some sort. No one ever thinks to pick up a dropped laser gun or study the tech for the betterment of the world, though.
    • A major element in Wild ARMs 1 and Wild ARMs 3. In fact, in the first game, the protagonist Rudy is made of lost technology, and one that nearly destroyed the world to boot.
    • Xenogears tends to flip-flop on whether Gears are or aren't lost technology. At the very least, Gears are dug up from ancient ruins, but it's painfully obvious that they can be tweaked and created via available tech in the more advanced areas. At the very least, the Omnigears are lost tech.
      • The remains of the Elridge, however, and the Zeboim civilization, very much fit the trope. The Merkaba, the "Treasure of Kislev," the Yggdrasils, and Emeralda herself are primary examples.
    • Secret Of Mana centers around the attempts of the Big Bad to acquire the ancient world-destroying Mana Fortress and Mana Beast.
    • In Brain Lord, you fight through many gimmicky Lost Technology dungeons.
  • In Mass Effect, a large part of the story revolves around the galaxy's dependence on Applied Phlebotinum that were created by the Protheans, a mysterious race that died out 50,000 years ago. However, it is later revealed that the Phlebotinum were in fact Lost Technology to the Protheans as well; they were created millennia ago by a race of Artificially Intelligent synthetic lifeforms, which are themselves Lost Technology.
    • Don't tell them that, it just makes them mad. They claim to have no beginning and end if asked who made them, and then try to kill you.
  • Metroid's Chozo had marvelous technology, widespread over many a planet the player visits in a game, all of which Samus inevitably collects, blows up or uses during the plot to refill her Bag Of Spilling.
    • Ditto for their oneshot intergalactic Pen-Pals, the Luminoth.
      • To be clear: the Luminoth only developed seriously awesome technology in response to the appearance of the Ing. Prior to that, they were happy to have mostly harmless stuff, with the exception of the Planetary Energy Regulators, which were required to terraform Aether. Not so much Lost Technology, as technology they left behind as they fled.
  • The Xbox remake of Ninja Gaiden features a statue with floating stones. This power, it is said, "clearly shows that it was not made with modern technology" and "must be the product of an ancient age". It becomes important later.
  • The RPG Dokapon Kingdom actually has an item CALLED "Lost Technology." It unlocks a new character class, the Robo-Knight—male characters who use it become sentai-style mechs, while female characters become Robot Girls.
  • Mega Man Legends is all over this trope. From the setting to the plot to the Big Reveal at the end of the sequel to the world's money, it all has to do with Lost Technology.
  • Might & Magic. In the case of the first five games, possibly deliberately lost, to keep people from messing up with the experiment that is the reason why their worlds' names are written in all Capital Letters. From a certain point of view, the Big Bad is himself a piece of malfunctioning Lost Technology. Might & Magic 6, 7 and 8? The end of the world as we know it resulted in a collapse of civilization bringing them down from energy-weapons to just being up to cannons a thousand years later, but some pieces of what was before are still around...
  • The cultivators in Thief 2: The Metal Age.
  • Av Kamiw in Utawarerumono. Basically, giant Evangelionesque mechas in a world where a very few persons like herbalists know of gunpowder, and fear it too much to use it. Game breaker much? (They still go down to swords and arrows then it's the protagonists attacking, of course) The last stage of the game is also set in an abandoned research laboratory that has a few crumbling remnants of working technology, but it's generally useless stuff like holograms that tell us about the backstory.
  • The Jak And Daxter games feature the shiny orange artifacts, structures, and machinery of the Precursors.

Theater

Real Life
  • A great many of the Romans' construction techniques, such as how to make aqueducts, were lost for centuries once the Roman Empire collapsed, and the remains are still around today.
    • Don't forget so-called "Damascus" steel, which has been lost for centuries since the original iron deposits in India ran out (there was a key impurity in those particular iron deposits).
  • There is also Greek Fire, which could not be put out using water, of which the formula has been lost for ages.
    • Today the problem of finding out what it was is more related to that there are several options - there is more than one known way to make fire that can't be put out with water.
  • The US goverment forgot how to make a material used in trident missile production codenamed Fogbank.
  • The Antikythera mechanism was a mechanical device for computing the position of the Sun, Moon, and the planets from a date and time. Its parts are on par with 18th century clocks in terms of complexity. It was made in the 2nd century BC.
  • The Stradivari violins were made using secrets that were given from master to apprentice, and most of those secrets are lost today.
    • Plenty of studies have been made with high-tech equipment on these violins to find out the hidden factor. At the moment, the primary component is suspected to be the quality of the wood, which is ever so slightly rotten to give it its unique sound. Experiments are being made to replicate the technique, but since the Stradivarius-violins are so old and expensive, the chances are that it will take longer to convince people that new violins can sound as good, than it will take to actually make them.
  • Literally lost, supposedly were the blueprints and other info on the Saturn V rocket. Some say this was inhouse sabotage because NASA was dedicated to building the Shuttle and didn't want any alternatives getting in the way.
    • This is a myth. The Saturn V plans were never lost. The reason we can't build a Saturn V today is that the plans call for parts that were made in the mid-1960s and are no longer being manufactured.

Western Animation
  • In the Futurama episode Mother's Day, Fry reinvents the wheel (which he shapes like an oval) after the robots rebel.
  • Many of the Arkadian devices in Spartakus And The Sun Beneath The Sea could count as Lost Technology; their creators died long ago and nobody today knows how to fix them - which is Very Bad because their artificial sun is dying.

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