we learn slowly
How are Rome's monuments still standing?
101–110 of 218 posts
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is desert structures still have to deal with water ingress. It does rain, and when it rains it's often a blowy monsoon of doom, assaulting desiccated wood structures which more often than not have developed some leaks from the year-round wind/sandstorm/thermal/UV abuse and complacency promoted by deceptively always-dry conditions. And when lumber that has been dry and 120F+ for half a year abruptly gets soa…
Every climate brings its own challenges, of course, but it still seems true that that's better than dealing with constant precipitation, freezing, and so on.
If we're talking about the PNW, it doesn't take a genius to look around and see nature alone manages to build towering long-lasting structures in that environment. Some of those redwood trees are older than the oldest buildings in the entire nation.
The desert's evolved long-lasting structures are shrub-sized and endure by retreating underground. Otherwise there's rocks.
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#103Tangentially related to this, one of my hobbies is to explore old long abandoned ghost towns and mining camps in the Southwest US. It is really impressive how well many of these structures have held up in harsh climates. One of my favorite parts is seeing how repairs were improvised in the wilderness using whatever supplies happened to be available. The standard approach to trash back then was to throw it in a pile n…
Isn't the Southwest uniquely not harsh? The biggest enemy of most man-made structures is water.
The sun is brutal on anything that isn’t metal.
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#104Tangentially related to this, one of my hobbies is to explore old long abandoned ghost towns and mining camps in the Southwest US. It is really impressive how well many of these structures have held up in harsh climates. One of my favorite parts is seeing how repairs were improvised in the wilderness using whatever supplies happened to be available. The standard approach to trash back then was to throw it in a pile n…
Isn't the Southwest uniquely not harsh? The biggest enemy of most man-made structures is water.
Depends on the material I'd say. Large temperature swings like common in the desert certainly don't help. Wind/sand abrasion could also be an issue. But in general you're right, desert climates can be good for preserving things. The only thing better would probably be a permanent ice cover.
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't modern bottles designed for that too? Atleast here, you return them to the store, get some money back, and they wash and refill them
In the US, the beverage companies hired people to conclude that washing bottles uses more energy/carbon/etc than disposable containers. Walmart used this as an argument for styrofoam cups.
Which is just a scapegoat problem, shifting the mind away from the original problem - disposable containers creating large amounts of waste that mostly end up in landfills, or worse, scattered in nature.
The energy use of washing bottles was never a concern. The energy use of transporting heavy bottles was largely offset by globalizing beverage production.
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#106Tangentially related to this, one of my hobbies is to explore old long abandoned ghost towns and mining camps in the Southwest US. It is really impressive how well many of these structures have held up in harsh climates. One of my favorite parts is seeing how repairs were improvised in the wilderness using whatever supplies happened to be available. The standard approach to trash back then was to throw it in a pile n…
Are there really sites undisturbed enough for you to see how they did repairs or disposed of their trash? That sounds amazing.
SW-America is definitely on my bucket list and I love ghost towns. In Western Europe it's hard to find any abandoned place older than a couple of years that's preserved well. I guess it's because the next city is never very far and there's always uncultured idiots whose idea of fun it is to vandalize places for no reason.
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. Romans invented concrete, and it was so good that still today the average concrete can't compete with it (its resistance to cracks is one example) Rewind history and roman buildings would still be there. They are thought to be one of the few things that would survive human extinction. The only thing that would outlast them are Giza Pyramids. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
I don’t have the energy to revisit the arguments about Roman concrete that come up every time it is mentioned on HN. Needless to say, the notion that their “superior” method was “forgotten” is a massive oversimplification of what actually happened. Another comment made my point better than I did - which was that Roman buildings that remained standing did so because they were useful for some purpose, often an alternat…
In East Asia, Japan in particular, most "old" buildings are reconstructed fairly often. They might reuse a lot of the old supplies, but many are very much a Ship of Theseus. Roman structures are, for the most part, preserved as they were--not fully disassembled and rebuilt.
One thing is that most places with extremely old structures have them far and few between. A 2000 year old building that wasn't rebuilt from the ground up is often a symbol of national pride for a country and seen as somewhat of a miracle that it's still standing. What makes Rome unique is the city alone is full of such structures, and it's a living, active city. In other countries that had a Roman presence, many of their oldest structures are remains built by Romans.
Most Egyptian structures were buried under sand for millennia and well-preserved as a consequence of that. I have to wonder how they'd hold up if they were in a different climate and with humans bustling about constantly into the modern era.
Either way, Romans were clearly doing something special.
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jonathan Blow makes a bunch of great points about our simplified view of ancient people, versus the reality of their complex achievements which could only be brought about by lots of ingenuity and iterations. https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk
The lack of writing probably impaired things greatly. I know the Romans had writing. But did they ever write manuals? It was not like Gutenberg's printing press, which put progress on a steep upward trend.
For professions that requires formal education, certainly. There were manuals/“handbooks” for doctors and philosophers.
Plinys “Natural History” contained detailed geographic information, but was considered a work of history (surprise, surprise).
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#109Survivorship Bias The ones that are still standing were built really well. Each will have its own reason for standing so long.
But what are those reasons?
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#110Survivorship Bias The ones that are still standing were built really well. Each will have its own reason for standing so long.
Sure, but the fact that some monuments have held that well is impressive.
It might have been a happy accident, it most likely was, but the valuable insight here is that we know that there is a recipe for concrete that lasts for thousands of years in real world conditions. We probably can do better today, we have a much better understanding of chemistry and computer simulations, but what we can't do is conduct a thousand year long experiment, and that's the Roman empire have done to us.