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the Human History
VBakes
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Registered User regular
I came across an article about artifacts of unknown origin. I have to say it makes me wonder about our dating methods and our accuracy regarding our species history. How do we know what we know about our past? Also how much DONT we know? Its an interesting read, regardless.
Therman Murman?......Jesus.
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Ah, Chariots of the Gods. Good stuff.
The fossils and stuff that's been carbon dated is freaky though.
All I remember about that book was his overuse of "Hey! Presto!"
The ancient Greeks also had rudimentary steam power and an understanding of using parabolic mirrors to focus light. If one of the philosopher-ancestors of modern scientists around at the time had made that vital leap, the effects would have been staggering. Even if it was just steam-powered hammers and forges, the middle ages would have happened a thousand years early and we'd be living with year three thousand technology now.
Someone needs to build a time machine and fix this, pronto...
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I mean, I know it's a huge leap in logic to turn an interesting toy into something useful, but had someone put two and two together and realized that said twirly-ball could be used to, theoretically, spin a crank or something...
You know, suspending disbelief for a minute here if we assumed that time travel was definitely possible, it would be interesting to look at history and be like "yeah this was obviously a dude from the 31st century. Come on, that leap in logic just makes no sense."
...Perhaps they did, Dum, dum Da!
There's another set of dinosaur images as well in cambodia, yeah I know its hardly the best source but then this thread isn't about that sort of thing anyway.
I love this bit though, go to the 'dino art section and at the bottom there is an article with this picture
and the caption "So accurate, they must have seen dinosaurs alive!" next to it
I told my mom about it when I got back from that vacation and she said it was because Indians were in touch with the land and it gave them psychic gifts.
My impression is that it isn't that ancient scientists failed to make this or that leap, but that the structure of early societies simply didn't encourage technological advance very well. It was the social and political systems that held things back. People had flashes of insight and discoveries here and there, but they had trouble linking up and building on each other's work.
They had it in the Roman Empire but didn't want it. Slave labor and a government controlled economy retarded the progress.
Hero had all kinds of awesome ides regarding the use of steam and hyrdaulics. He came up with systems for making doors open that looked like the hand of god, little mechanical devices that did pretty much anything, and the world's first vending machine. But he never saw the steam turbine as anything more than an unwieldy piece of shit. Because it was.
Without considerable advances in stuff like metallurgy and smelting an actual steam engine was way beyong the Romans. And the society itself just wasn't structured for any kind of technological revolution. They didn't have the capacity for resource explotation, corporation building or self interested inverstment needed to make a steam turbine anything more than a curiosity.
The slave labour point is a bit off, since slaves were a pretty innovative bunch, and no one in the farming business shied away from innovation just because they already had free labour, but the point about the Roman economy and society is bang on. They were smart guys. If there had been a way for a steam engine to be useful it would've been used. But it couldn't turn a crank without breaking it, it couldn't work a mine shaft without flooding it and there wasn't any incentive to make it work better.
OK, so this guy invents a mechanism whereby he can program an articulated mechanism to do any set of tasks repeatedly and identically, so he puts it into a "dancing" mechanical lion and uses it to entertain the Emperor or something.
Now, if someone had just said "hey, maybe that could work for reaping grain too..." the industrial revolution would have happened before Caesar took the throne.
And all this is for artefacts of known origin, and historical accounts of same....
Actually, I now begin to wonder: What if there's something like this going on right now? Suppose some guy working in a lab somewhere finds this remarkable discovery, but no-one pays any attention because he publishes in a little known journal and there's no immediately useful or obvious implementation...
If in a thousand years, people are looking back on this using their floating holo-displays based on this guy's work and wondering why we primitives didn't implement it years ago, I will be so peeved...
We must hunt down this imaginary person and his imaginary discovery and exploit it post-haste!
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Assuming that all the stuff is true, I'm curious to find out what events set our technology back or kept it from spreading in the first place.
I would argue that slave labor actually was hugely responsible for retarding scientific advancement. I mean, it's a little bit like the Flintstones (bear with me here) -- sure, they don't have a garbage disposal, but they've got some dinosaur instead. And wealthy Romans had slaves. They did pretty much everything that we rely on technology for nowadays -- communication, transportation, sanitation, preparation of food, even entertainment.
Wealthy Romans really had very little incentive to invest time, effort, or money in technological advancement because of the way Roman society was structured. If Rome had just managed to get rid of slaves, figure out that whole "capitalism" thing, and had put down the Christians sooner, we'd still be speaking Latin.
...Or maybe that's just my personal fantasy, but fuck you.
As far as actual history, I like how little we actually know about what has happened and that even the most plausible of sources can be entirely nullified by scientific discovery... I like to think that the past is almost as much in a state of flux as the present and future.
Does that Sagan thing sound famliar? I did a quick Google and didn't turn anything up. I'm not even sure if it was one of the eps. of Cosmos or something else entirely... I caught this years years ago.
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Actually, I'm going to have to strongly disagree with the assertion about cheap and plentiful slave labour. While during the late Republic (end of Third Punic War through Marian Reforms and until the Second Triumvirate) there were plentiful slaves from Hispania, Gaul, and Greece, all of that basically ended with the fall of the Republic. While there were some notable expansions post Augustus, the Empire was essentially at its peak in the first century AD, and with it, slave labour became increasingly expensive and hard to find. While it's been popularly assumed that slaves were a defining force of Roman society, I've been reading alot of recent scholarship that disputes the ever-present nature of slavery, especially in regards to the agricultural production of the Empire. There is some evidence that mostly freemen were employed, in a situation similar to crofters or (later) serfs (which gives some segue between Roman society and feudalism). What also is notable is a significant downturn in slave rebellions post-Third Servile War - if the number of slaves increased with the population of the Empire, I would assume that there would be more large-scale slave rebellions, but that isn't the case.
IIRC, by the time Caesar had officially assumed the title of Imperator, the issue of slaves pushing freemen out of agriculture had become extremely pressing. God, I wish I had read Grant more recently, but I do remember something about reduction of slave labor in agriculture mixed in with Caesar's other populist reforms (debt relief, etc, etc).
It would make sense though that after the Second Triumvirate (presumably at least a few years into the reign of Augustus proper) slave prices would start to rise, given the stagnating borders of the Empire. Though certainly limited expansion did occur until the geographical peak of the Empire around the time of Trajan/Hadrian.
Still, at that point, the Empire was experiencing plenty of other problems. I mean, really, to succeed, Rome would have had to develop not just an economic system less reliant on slaves, but a national army much more similar to the ones that modern nation states possess. Obviously the whole private army thing was a recurring source of turmoil and instability.
Sagan was being overly romantic if he did say that. An industrial revolution during the Roman Empire would have completely decimated the Mediterranean. They would have gone through resources at an unbelievable rate.
The slave point doesn't really work, because a slave labour force isn't any real disincentive to increase profitability. The Roman era actually saw a lot of innovations in making menial labour easier, partly because slaves are a pretty innovative bunch, and partly because anything you can do to make the work faster and more efficient is more money for you. So wealthy romans were open to new technologies, but not so much new financial practices. Wealth for wealth's sake was much more common than grand investment schemes.
There is one little piece of technology that I always wonder if it might have revolutionised the Romans. The minute hand. They had an absolutely massive manufacturing industry, but no concept of shift work. An efficient production line needs accurate time keeping and Roman time was always pretty vague. I reckon widespread use of timers would have had a pretty profound effect on the rate of industrialisation, more so than the big spinning ball.
It's a fucking tube.
I can teach you. :winky:
I got really mad at the girl when she decided to take up sculpting as her minor art, rather than glass blowing. I wanted a girlfriend who could blow glass. But apparently it's really hot and tiring work and the fumes suck.
If all that had happened, it would just mean that we'd have nuked ourselves to kingdom come back in the 1800's or so. It would be like a game of Civilization.
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I read a bunch of stuff about the Dark Ages not being so dark. My gawd, the Crusades... WOW
The Muslims actually advanced quite faster than Europe in that age since they had a rather large scholar class whereas Europe really did not aside from monks who spent 500 years copying old Greek and roman stuff over and over.
Mercantalism/Capitalism as a pseudo religion in Europe?
I think it had something to do with Ghengis Kahn. I'm not 100% on that, but I think he royally fucked them all in the ass.