BUILDING ON THE ROMANS ? 3

[C2it]

This section of the forum has been a bit quiet recently.

Having just visited Rome, it's fascinating to speculate where civilisation might now be, if development continued following the Egyptian, Grecian and Roman Empires, rather than declining into the dark ages.

Steam power was there in Hero's time. Nothing really changed until mine dewatering was needed. Could there have been major steam power and subsequent industrial revolution around AD 0 since all the necessary technology was there ? Materials science could have developed along with strong materials, semiconductors ... why not ?

If that pace continued without interruption, where might we be now ? Could Newton and Leonardo have been even more inventive ? What about Einstein ?

Hydrocarbon fuels would have been here and gone. Could there have been a place for the Sinclair C5 ? No, there are limits after all.

 

[IRstuff]

I think that many speculators make the mistake of thinking that if a particular age only this, or that, that something magical would have happened, and there would have been utopia, or there would have been an Industrial Age instead of the Dark Ages. But the Dark Ages, like Afghanistan, was not a single-issue problem. While the collapse of Rome led to the Dark Ages, the pieces of the Roman Empire were unable to sustain themselves with self governance. That required the development of the feudal system of governance, etc.

A more thorough look at history of technology will show that most inventions occurred not because of a single person or a single happenstance, but through a confluence of many factors that, when combined, resulted a seemingly singular happenstance.

Steam power existed, yes, but the infrastructure for building and designing pressure vessels, plumbing, etc. did not

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[BJC]

Maby this would have happened.

http://www.ericweisstein.com/fun/startrek/BreadAndCircuses.html

Playing "what-if" is the worlds second most popular indoor activity.

 

[TheTick]

Egypt, Greece, China, Mongolia, Rome... all vanished empires. Seems a natural thing for empires to do.

 

[IRstuff]

Well, one might argue that China has had a resurgence in its influence. The Chinese have invested tons of money in third world countries to gain access to minerals, etc.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[drawoh]

C2it,

Read Terry Jones' book on Barbarians. Terry Jones figures that it was the rise of the Roman Empire that did in all that new technology.

The Greeks and Romans did not need labour saving devices as long as they had cheap slaves.

JHG

 

[mauricestoker]

After dreaming of how technology could have been advanced, you might want to consider the Luddite movement, the pet rock, and the Jerry Springer Show. I tend to believe that the future will probably be more like the movie Idiocracy or Brazil than some form of Utopia.

 

[cloa]

The Romans didn't really have a good engineering science system just take their belief that if the pipe was smaller then the water would run slower. Greek were much better but their time of influence was largely over. There wouldn't a lot more development with the Roman model continuing although other societies that were covered by the Roman Empire might well have something major.

 

[Ussuri]

"What have the Romans ever done for us?"

Sorry, couldn't help it.

 

[BJC]

The Romans invented the Sheeps Foot Roller. They were getting around to inventing the tractor to pull it when the Goths, Vandals, Lombards etc showed up.

 

[FeX32]

Jeeze, some people should really check their grammar before posting. So unprofessional. The opinion therein is now worthless.....


Fe

 

[MikeHalloran]

Nothing ever happened in isolation in either time or place.

James Burke's "Connections", well, connected, events happening around the world at the same time, and his "The Day That Changed The Universe" connected disparate events in time sequence, thus knitting together all the seemingly random bits of history that we learned by painful rote. I wish there was a way to teach history like that in the first place.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[marks1080]

I've often wondered why the Native Americans didn't get to the bronze age. What was so different in Europe than the Americas that they discovered bronze working?

 

[TheTick]

One "geopolitical" theory about Europe vs. America is that the geography of Europe facilitated transfer of technology between places with similar needs.

Not so sure I buy this. The Iroquois established a vast empire across the Great Lakes and Ohio River valley, with no appreciable technological advances.

Another thing feeding Europe's progress was a constant supply of invaders from the east. This kept things stirred up and moving around.

 

[drawoh]

marks1080,

I do not think Europeans developed bronze working. They learned it from the Middle East.

Copper seems to be a relatively rare, expensive material. So-called bronze age cultures really did not use all that much bronze. The ancient Egyptians for example, were more of a stone age civilization for example. Metal did not come into common usage until they learned to work iron.

Several American indian cultures used bronze, but they did not use very much of it.

JHG

 

[msquared48]

And now we have the technololgical advances of the Ultra-Bronze tanning beds!

Isn't that great?

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering
Motto: KISS
Motivation: Don't ask

 

[IRstuff]

Don't forget, "Necessity is the Mother of all invention." People rarely develop technology without some implicit or explicit need. Was there really a need for a Bronze Age for the Indians?

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[GregLocock]

Bronze swords and knives were better for fighting with than pointy wooden sticks, but I'm not sure they were a whole lot better for hunting with than stone tools. (Actually pointy wooden sticks are not a bad infantry weapon, used correctly).

Perhaps bronze was used more for status than practiciality, in which case a small variation in culture might have rendered it unnecessary?



Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

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[IRstuff]

A sword of any kind is a close-quarters weapon, and sword are mostly associated with massed infantry. The American Indian never got into warfare on that level.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[DrillerNic]

Read "Guns, Germs & Steel" which suggest why civilisation took off in Europe rather than North America or Australia or Africa....

One thing to remember about the Romans (and the Greeks) was that some of their mathematics were pretty poor... the Greeks belived that geometry was the answer to everything, and have you ever tried to so any kind of arithemtic with Roman numerals? I'd suggest that the invention of zero in India was carried to Europe via the Arab world, BECAUSE of the dark ages- European scholars going to Arab libraries because that was the only place that had copies of ancient Greek books also came across Indian ideas like zero.

Would this have occured if the Dark Ages hadn't happened? Greek ideas would have remained pre eminent (nothing to learn from barbarians in the east); a bit like the way that the Greek concept of medicine inflicted bleeding as a medical cure until about a century ago...

(to be honest, medicine as a technology for getting better is a bit shite isn't it.... thousands of years persuing completely wrong ideas about the human body and disease, 150 years of actually understanding about germs and only about 60 years of actually being able to do anything about bacterial infections... not a great history is it??? )