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The mysterious mysteries of the Ancients!
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While I can see why they link it to so many things, I think some folks are liberally hitching their ropes to anything that will legitimize their storybook... especially since if that one has a hole in it, the house of cards ain't gonna look to steady.
We're faking it. Kinda.
Edit: Umaro wins.
The Roman Empire also had a water wheel. And I mean that literally: there is only one water wheel that was known to have existed in the Roman Empire. And even it was created late in Roman history, when the conquests had come to a halt and the roman army was being pushed back, and thus the constant supply of cheap abundant slave labour had stopped.
tl;dr: necessity is the mother of invention, and when you have a seemingly endless supply of slaves there is no necessity for any other kind of power source.
That says we've found quite a few samples of actual Damascus steel. It also says that it apparently contains carbon nanotubes.
Dam. I was beat. Nice going Ricky.
I was under the impression that it wasn't so much that we can't make an incendiary with the properties of greek fire, it's that no one really knows which one of the many incendiary compounds we have if any was the one that the greeks actually used.
As far as Atlantis goes then yes, it is rather obvious that it never existed as a bona-fide ancient civilization, and certainly did not exist as the magical superpower which has rooted itself in the common imagination in the last hundred years or so. I don't think it's particularly implausible, however, that such a myth is based on actual events which were passed down over centuries worth of oral tradition.
The mediterranean is a very geologically-active region; Santorini and, later, Pompeii are two famous examples of large cities which were wiped out entirely by natural disasters. It's easy to understand how such a thing could be mythologized, especially when the cycles of the natural world - volcanism, the tides, weather, and just about everything else they couldn't explain - were seen, quite literally, as the work of the gods. Also keep in mind that, by the time of Plato's writing, the eruption at Santorini would have already been over a thousand years in the past.
And, of course, it's entirely possible that it was entirely a literary invention of Plato's imagination to serve as a political illustration. As has been mentioned before, nobody thought twice about "finding Atlantis" before the nineteenth century. Both of these alternatives - actual events which grew to legend in the retelling, or simple creative invention - seem eminently plausible to me.
I'll be honest, this explanation comes up time and time again for similar situations and I do not find it at all convincing. Slaves were still comparatively expensive to feed and clothe and so on, for example. And they could only work for so long before tiring. And there was always a risk of revolt or desertion.
A more likely explanation is that they just didn't invent the steam engine. It seems like a logical progression to us because we've moved far, far past that point and can see the development, rise, and fall of the steam-powered industrial age. We have a history with it and we can make the cognitive connection between a twirly toy and a steam-powered mill. But that's not actually how technological development works - and this was especially so in that early period.
I think we prefer that logical, progressive, promethean answer because it's a lot more consoling than the worryingly chaotic notion that such a momentous technology could simply be overlooked, unrealized.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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:lol:
Gold objects were all over the place. Iron and bronze... not so much.
EDIT:
For a good time, call...
EDIT2: And now for some practical information!
It's because they were more fascinated by the trapezoid.
whut
I'm pretty sure that's exactly the point I just made
Although I will say the Aztec example may actually have some rationale behind it - without reliable large domesticated mammals to pull carts (horses), the value of making them decreases significantly, especially in the kind of terrain the Aztec inhabited. As you say, there are plenty of theories on that one.
To drive the need for a Roman steam engine, there needed to be something to power. Waterworks were driven by gravity, and textiles didn't have the spinning wheel yet. And a steam engine for milling grain is probably impractical in terms of cost at that point.
The quality control for the assembly of steam engines in the Roman era would be laughable. Especially since boilers are prone to corrosion near joints and the idea of running a steam engine would probably die once one exploded.
True as all of this is, you'd need to get to the experimental stage before you run into those problems - and there's no evidence of that happening, ever.
i love ctrl-i
Here you have a precise, beautifully crafted clockwork astronomical machine from 100 BC, whose closest match would not be seen for a thousand years. You really do have to wonder how many devices of similar craftsmanship and sophistication we just have no idea about because they didn't sink by chance into the middle of the sea.
Fuck all this Atlantis nonsense - that is way more breathtaking.
Go back to ancient greece and ask if the world is round or flat, and you'd get much the same result as you would today. People flat out mocking you for even asking.
To be fair, I don't know of any seafaring society which ever thought the world was flat. At sea, without terrain, the curve of the globe can be quite surprisingly detectable - and ever since there have been tall masts sailors have noted how it is visible before the rest of a ship on the horizon.
Didn't Aristotle or some such accurately calculate the size of the Earth based on he shadow it cast on the moon (and thus also proving the Earth was round)?
Then in the 13th Century the Mongols invaded, took Bagdad, and sacked it. They destroyed the library and threw all the books in the Tigris river that ran through the city. It is said that the river ran black with ink for six months.
mentions
The Antikythera Mechanism
The Voynich Manuscript
The Baigong Pipes
well I'm not going to ruin the whole surprise, read it yourself!
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It wasn't Aristotle, it was someone in Ptolemaic Egypt whose name I forget.
Not sure if this is what is being refered to, but Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's circumference based on the difference between noontime shadows in northern and southern Egypt.
Eh?
That would be the guy I was thinking of, yes.
Whether or not he was close is open to debate, since the unit of length he used actually meant different length to different people. But given conventional interpretations, he was off by something between 2% to 10%. Which is pretty damn accurate for his time.
EDIT: beaten by Hedgethorn. That's what I get for not refreshing the page before posting.
Yes, that is the very device we're talking about.
No, "a scientific invention [to] discover a divine truth lurking in the laws of the heavens" - a scientific toy - does not count as an experimental steam engine developed toward a practical use, which is fairly obviously what we're discussing here.
This is the one i've heard, an amazingly clever idea for measuring the curcumfrance of the earth.
If i remember correctly a similar idea was used for finding the size of the moon, and then the earth-moon and earth-sun distances, by assuming the earth-sun-moon creates a right-angle triangle.
There was more knowledge in the past than we often give credit for. The Americas were mapped thousands of years before Columbus "discovered" them. Antarctica was mapped thousands of years ago, and we have just now in the past hundred years found out what the land mass looks like under all that ice. (Check the Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings or the Piri Reis map)
Gold artifacts have been found in Mesopatamia whose purity was thought only to be a modern ability, with the temperatures needed for that level of purity of 2000 degrees F. It isn't even believed that those people had the means to create that level of heat.
Atlantis may or may not have ever existed, but I definitely believe we once had technologically advanced civilasation that for one reason or another was lost.
Have you ever tried to jam a knife between stone blocks that each weigh a ton? Besides, being able to cut blocks to fit has nothing to do with being able to build a skyscraper.
The first is a book. The second shows Brazil's coastline extending down to... somewhere. It conveniently fits the edge of the page (so oh hey he might've just bent it to... fit the page) and is totally undetailed (so alternatively maybe he just scribbled shit that he was PRETTY SURE was down there?). Claiming that it's Antartica is silly, though there was a general belief that there was some landmass down there.
This is vague enough that I have no fucking clue what you're referring to. However, it's entirely possible they just FOUND really pure gold.
Like, say, the Romans? Or any other ancient civilization that was destroyed (there were a lot of them).
No one argues that the Americas were known long before Columbus; the Vikings had colonies there, for one. As for Antarctica, maps have been showing it for a millennium, not because of some ancient knowledge, but because it was logical: people assumed the world was balanced, and there were these huge continents (Europe and Asia) up north but only Africa down south, so there should be another large land further south than people had explored. And since we now logically know that such a continent must exist there, it just makes sense to include it in the maps. The fact that they got the position of the real Antarctica right with that logic is a mere coincidence.
As I've already explained, trade secrets and techniques advanced compared to other in common use in Ancient times were commonly lost. But there was no advanced civilization comparable to ours in any way, shape or form. Just look around you. Look at the concrete gigantic cities, the road and electrical and sewage networks, the non-bio-degradable products and garbage, the consumption of resources and the massive footprint we're leaving on the planet. Do you really thing another civilization like ours could have existed, yet we're completely unable to find any trace of them?
In this same line, I've always been fascinated by how people tend to ignore Aristarchus. He figured out the heliocentric model nearly two millennia before Copernicus and calculated the relative sizes of the sun, moon, and earth based on his measurements (which were inaccurate, but his conclusions were valid).
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More realistically, there is no way that a civilization at our level, or even a bit lower, could have existed as short amount of time ago as the time that Atlantis is usually placed, and we not have found it. I mean we are still finding dinosaur bones from 65 million years ago and arrowheads from 100 years ago all over the place. The only way that an advanced civilization was around and we don't find out about it through archeological research is either they were so advanced they took all their shit with them or A Wizard Did It.
I don't recall the quote or who said it, but it seems self evident to me with all the commotion about the need for Green Energy and Recycling, but I remember hearing once that with the state of our level of advancement, if the world did go to shit, ala Fallout
or Jeremiah or what have you, the remainder of the Earth's resources, metals mainly like iron and such, would not be enough to lift the survivors out of a Middle Ages/Dark Ages style period.
tl:dr = I agree with Richy while providing links to TV Tropes and Wikipedia that will destroy any productivity in those who click them.
-- (Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)
The only way our successor civs could reach our level of technology would be if they already had access to better mining and refining techniques than we have now, before they get any technology beyond the late 1850s. The world could probably support people in the 1850s for ever, but we only get one shot at beyond it.