I sat in an Athens, Greece museum last year and admired the object and the data around it.
The thing is....you sit down after a while and start asking yourself questions about the gearwheel, the amount of data being manipulated, and how smart the guy was to build it, and the guy was who carried it around with himself.
It’s a tremendous amount of knowledge that this little box has within itself. If you walked into some university with a hundred clever astronomical students and a hundred engineering students....giving them the task to build such a device....with no computers. I think they’d all just grin and walk away. They would consider it impossible. So, the question is...how did this engineer design it? And is there a possibility that others exist in today’s world....in private collections?
I suspect that this was not a one-off. There was probably some kind of small industry that made these things and they evolved over the years.
Think about clocks, electric drills, kitchen appliances, etc. These have evolved in our society and are common, but how many would be left in a few thousand years? I wonder what they were called back then and if there are any references to them in surviving literature? There is just so much information that has been lost.