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Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

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Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

#101

Post by api »

Unseelie wrote: post #97
api wrote: post #79

" Transhumanists must come to realize that in order to control history, and thus their own destinies, they must leverage their way into a position of control over the ideology, morality and direction of this civilization. To fail to do so at this juncture in time is to accede to the end of our history – not by the practical abolition of death, but rather by its universal application to humankind, and perhaps to all l…

If we work on the assumption that the majority of people aren't rational scientists, then harnessing the superstition towards such things as progress and invention rather than conservatism seems a very brilliant move by those persons trying to leverage political discourse. Its likely much easier to convert the followers of hate, fear, and superstition on their terms than to convince them that rational science is bett…

You have a point, but what I'd really like to see is something more "meta."

First a little background.

I had a discussion with a business guru around MIT once about marketing. He related a story (possibly apocryphal) about Larry Ellison of Oracle and how he would run into meetings of Oracle's sales guys in the early days and berate them for not lying enough. "If you don't lie nobody will believe you!"

Anyway, this guy was saying that this is exactly true. If you don't lie people won't believe you.

I've kind of seen it myself in the business world. I also think that it explains much of what we see in the world with regard to religion, political ideologies, superstition, etc.

The problem is that the primate social part of our brain interprets uncertainty, skepticism, doubt, and even caution as signifiers of low primate social status. Huge, gargantuan claims, boldness (even if wrong), and certainty are seen as signifiers of alpha status.

Thus a certain-of-themselves idiot or nutjob is of higher social status than a cautious, skeptical, rational person.

Salesmen exploit this by intentionally telling audacious lies (of a sort) in order to elevate themselves socially in the perception of potential buyers. People buy from alphas, not betas.

What I want to see is a detailed neurological and psychological deconstruction of this. I want to see it hacked, targeted, dismantled. That would be progress.

To give an example, a spray-on pheromone that fucked with this subsystem of the brain in some way would be awesome. (Not sure if that's possible since humans might not react this way, but just an example of the sort of thing I'd like to see.)

Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

#102

Post by dspeyer »

Symmetry wrote: post #59
wazoox wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> building a dirty bomb out of it won't really work (as a matter a fact, neither making one out of Pu-239). Plutonium is chemically extremely toxic. Even throwing some powdered plutonium in air somewhere would cause serious harm. Edit : In fact it's not :)

Thats actually an urban legend (though one thats often repeated in the media). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/pl... The radiological toxicity of plutonium is _way_ higher than the chemical toxicity.

This is Plutonium Oxide. IIRC, metallic plutonium is a lot more dangerous. Also almost impossible to come by in an oxygen atmosphere. Kind of like Aluminum.

Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

#103

Post by nitrogen »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #18
nitrogen wrote: post #8

The informative first half of the article was fascinating, but it slowly deteriorated from there as I read the argumentative second half. In my view, things took a drastic turn for the worse around this sentence: Mature genetic engineering, nanotechnology, strong artificial intelligence, and quantum computing, to name but a few, each hold many times the potential for systemic harm to, or destruction of our civilizati…

With nuclear tech, humans have to be the ones pushing the buttons, making pure accidents quite unlikely. If moore's law holds and we make a strong AI, it might theoretically be possible for it to "go FOOM" -- use most of it's thinking power to make itself exponentially smarter, hitting the ultimate physical limits of computing in a relatively short time. If that happens, and the ultimate physical limits of computing…

Even with a rapidly-developing strong AI, though, humans have to give the initial machine the ability to limitlessly acquire resources and alter its own hardware. Despite the likelihood that a highly intelligent AI could easily convince some humans to do its bidding, the resource acquisition limitation gives me some measure of confidence that strong AI will not be the downfall of our civilization.

I would be more concerned about unexpected emergent behavior in our existing networks as more and more intelligence is added to various systems than a purpose-built self-modifying AI.

Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

#104

Post by devinj »

ThomPete wrote: post #98
Charuru wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that war increases technological growth? That's crappy pop-history that's largely been discredited. Competition invites advancement, blowing up your competitors does nothing.

As far as I remember to have read somewhere. The Nazi doctors did quite a lot for the advance of the medical field simply because of all the horrible experiments they could do.

Not really. Unfortunately, while the Nazi doctors did a lot of stuff, it was almost all useless to the scientific community because they didn't really apply the scientific method. There are only a few citable results, in particular the Dachau hypothermia experiments (for example), and even those are rarely used for obvious political concerns. So actually, the Nazis have not advanced modern medicine very much at all.

Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

#105

Post by h-sebell »

anamax wrote: post #77
qw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't compare the output of a country with over 300 million people with Northern Europe. The money spent on technology alone is probably larger than the combined national budgets of those countries. Of course this will produce more noticeable results, but that doesn't mean that they don't contribute to innovation.

> You can't compare the output of a country with over 300 million people with Northern Europe. Why not? The comparison is considered fair whenever it favors Northern Europe, so why is it unfair when NE doesn't do as well? Northern Europe has roughly the same population as the US. The people look basically the same. They're considered first world. etc. > The money spent on technology alone is probably larger than the…

> Northern Europe has roughly the same population as the US.

Where do you get this number from? Looking at the definition of NE on Wikipedia, even if we include GB and Ireland we get roughly 100 million people. If we don't the number is closer to 30 million. The second number should be closer to your definition of NE considering your comment

> the (relatively) content societies of contemporary northern Europe

So NE has roughly 1/10th the population of USA, so if you are going to compare USA to NE you have to compare it per capita. I don't know about innovation per capita but with the exception of California I doubt there is a big difference, and the only reason California has a greater amount of innovation is cause of the anomaly called Silicon Valley.

Feel free to prove me wrong by getting the innovation numbers per capita during the Cold War. I wouldn't be surprised if Northern Europe would beat USA when population is considered, especially if you do not include former nations of the Soviet Union.

Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

#107

Post by Plimsoll »

00010 wrote: post #39
jasonkester wrote: post #10

In hindsight, it seems clear that if humanity had decided in 1939 to colonize space, instead of expending ~$17 trillion and ~74 million human lives on war and destruction, we would have reached the moon in a robust and durable way by no later than the mid-1950s He kinda gives away the answer to this earlier in the article, while explaining why the cool edge-case technologies the Romans had never took off: the truth i…

You could argue that a great deal of the technological advancement of the later 20th century is a direct result of the CIA's paranoia and inability to correctly assess the real capabilities of the USSR (and the attendant fervor and fear of the public, which enabled the vast level of government expenditure on the Space Program). A content and secure populace would surely have preferred the money to have been spent els…

If I recall right during second world war many jewish scientist emigrated from Germany to America. It was these emigrated scientist, their students and American scientist who played the scientific part of cold war. With so many new scientist moving in and political motivation to beat those communists, it sounds only natural that there was an outburst of technology at that era.

Meanwhile in northern European countries (I'm seeing this mostly in Finland's perspective) had to play nice and humble with the Soviet union it being geologically right next to it. In addition to that Finland had huge amount of war reparations to pay due to losing winter and continuation wars against Soviet Union. Also since Soviet Union was the other big player of that time, with its own space programs and so on, it was only natural that the brightest minds in technological perspective went to Soviet universities and did their possible contributions there (I'm not expert of this matter but I remember reading there was at least some level of brain leakage during that era) Fall of Soviet union wasn't either that good of a change for Nordic countries since Soviet Union was one of our biggest sources of export.

Of course this is all just historical blabbering the real deal being imho the fact that in Nordic countries are good places in average, which means we do well in global rankings like PISA tests, but for technological innovation and economical rise it usually is the right side of gaussian curve that is needed. Also in eyes of Finn (I really don't know how these things are in states) due to more or less powerful labor movement and being "Nordic welfare state" (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nordic_welfar...) we have high labor expenses for employer. Add this to seemingly high bureaucracy to start a company, I don't see it that odd that we don't have any startup culture and every one just goes to work for Nokia (this is of course just extrapolation as there are interesting startups here and there but I feel the general culture isn't that motivating towards innovation).

Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

#108

Post by VladRussian »

The governmental analysis around 1997-99 concluded that nuclear fusion power woulnd't be cheaper than 4c/kwt (i.e. than coal based electricity) and thus it wouldn't make an economical sense (thus that close to 0 investment in that research - only LLNL's NIF which is deep in petty managerial fights (and laser driven approach isn't really the one what will get it) and Sandia which finally got back to the experiments at the level they left in 99 (though now they use different target which allows for a lot of new articles on plasma behavior (deja vu of Tokamaks, one can spend whole life looking at and describing patterns of flowing water under the bridge), yet that type of target is much worse for the fusion than the type used 10 years ago) .

It is easy to imagine an outcome of the battlefield maneuverability analysis by a Rome DOD bureaucrat of horse driven chariot vs. hot air balloon and the resulting decision on the development of the balloon technology.

Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

#109

Post by dennisgorelik »

jarek wrote: post #86
dennisgorelik wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason why practically nobody gets cryopreserved is that Cryonics is a form of scientific scam. It sells people confidence that their mind can be preserved by freezing it. http://aidevelopment.blogspot.com/2008/12/cryonics.html That said, the author seems to be a true believer in Cryonics (however that does not make Cryonics legitimate). The article has interesting points, but cannot really be trusted, becau…

Hm... 100 years ago controlled heavier-than-air flight had barely been invented. Do you think it would have been accurate to think then that in 100 years, essentially permanent outposts crewed by several people in modules flying 350 kilometres above the Earth would be unrealistic? Not only because of technological impossibility, but mostly because of no need for that.

There was (and still is) an obvious need for fast transportation.

There is no real need to live on Mars.

To understand that try to understand first why Antarctica is still not inhabited.

Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

#110

Post by deadmansshoes »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #40
deadmansshoes wrote: post #30

Kudos to the Montgolfier for inventing the hot air balloon based on a need to invade a strongly held fortress. But when did the idea of slowly floating towards your fortified, gun-toting enemy in a giant gas filled balloon seem a good idea?

>But when did the idea of slowly floating towards your fortified, gun-toting enemy in a giant gas filled balloon seem a good idea? You don't fly in the balloon your soldiers do. That is what makes it as good an idea as trying to climb to the battlements whilst having rocks, hot pitch, arrows and sword blows rain down on one from above. Even if the balloon simply diverts attention from your siege ladders then it might…

"You don't fly in the balloon your soldiers do."

Strangely, I wasn't suggesting the Montgolfier brothers were going to take Gibraltar single-handedly.

There is a huge difference between climbing a wall with seige ladders where once you get a few men across everyone else can follow, and 2-3 men floating in a wooden basket and trying to land (!) in a fortress.

Granted reconnaissance may have been useful, but if after 4 years of seige you haven't worked out your enemy through espoinage and being shot at, a balloon is not going to help.

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