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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?

#111

Post by vorg »

h-sebell wrote: post #105
anamax wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

Northern Europe= UK+France+Germany+others

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

#112

Post by vorg »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #109
jarek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Antarctica IS inhabited (for my definition of "inhabited").

Perhaps the first bases on the Moon and Mars will be small Antarctic-like ones, from every big country on Earth. Perhaps Mars will never be "terraformed", instead the enclosed bases will slowly expand to accommodate expanding populations. Some people on Earth already live totally indoors, and in the future, many Asian cities in polluted environments may have roofs outside, as well as inside, to keep the air clean.

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

#113

Post by jarek »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #109
jarek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fast transportation, as needed by most humans, has very little to do with current space programs, most of which use extremely expensive and mostly single-use systems.

Again - there is no real need, right now, to live on Mars, absolutely. Neither is there a real need to live on ISS. Still we are doing it.

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

#114

Post by anamax »

qw wrote: post #90
anamax wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Why not? The comparison is considered fair whenever it favors Northern Europe, so why is it unfair when NE doesn't do as well? US is a single country with a common language and culture. It's much easier to share academical results and knowledge in that environment. I hate to use a buzzword, but "synergy" is probably a good description of that effect. > So, why is their GDP so much lower? We keep hearing how much be…

> > Why not? The comparison is considered fair whenever it favors Northern Europe, so why is it unfair when NE doesn't do as well?

> US is a single country with a common language and culture.

True, but that doesn't explain why the comparison is fair in some cases and not others.

>> So, why is their GDP so much lower? We keep hearing how much better they are, so why doesn't it show up in output?

> In my opinion it's not a good comparison.

How about some support for that opinion? (And, as I noted, no one complains about such comparisions when they're trying to make the US look bad.)

> If we look at the GDP per capita, you will find lots of states with lower rates than many European countries.

Actually, you find a few states that would be in the middle/low europe and a fair number of states that are over the top.

But, so what? There's variation between and within European countries. There's variation between and within US states.

That doesn't change the fact that US per-capita GDP is significantly higher.

> If there was something special about the US political system that generates wealth, you would expect the results to be more evenly distributed.

Why would you expect that?

The US poor fare rather well on an absolute scale.

You seem to think that what your neighbor has matters more than what you have. I disagree.

As to "relatively similar culture", the US TV culture is fairly uniform and the areas that techsters see are fairly similar, but go to south San Jose and tell me that it's just like Palo Alto. Heck, go to East Palo Alto and Redwood City. (They're not the same.)

If you're willing to travel a bit more (the US is big), there is lots of cultural diversity. Do you really think that Madison Wisconsin is much like Dry Creek Missouri?

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

#117

Post by bzbarsky »

smhinsey wrote: post #55
metageek wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's special about the printing press is that it makes copying cheap; the comparable Roman technology was slavery, which makes labor cheap. (In the short term.)

That makes it even more remarkable, really, because the investment required to avoid automation is incredible. You need schools to prepare slaves as teachers (taught by slaves, of course) to teach child slaves to read and write and whatever specialist skills required by scribes. You need schools to teach the kids to read and you need slaves to produce sufficient excess food to support all the other slaves. And at the…

Why would literate slaves pose a risk to stability, necessarily?

Keep in mind that slavery for these people was nothing like the chattel slavery of the US south. Being an educated slave did mean that you had some restrictions on what you could do; it also freed you from having to worry about food and shelter, say. Similar tradeoffs have been made by salaried workers in Japan in the 70s and throughout the Western world during the industrial revolution

And even the restrictions part was ... varied. If you're a slave and your owner lives in Athens while you live in a Greek city on the Bosporus and supervise your owners business interests in the Black Sea (an actual example I recall from some of the primary sources from my Greek history classes in college), you really don't have much in the way of restrictions on you. Yes, legally you're a slave. So what? It has very little impact on your day-to-day life, at least as long as business is good.

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

#118

Post by WalterBright »

00010 wrote: post #42
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I should have done some research before opening my fat mouth ... but duplicate images only or was it extended to duplicate "written" works? Ex post facto lots of this sort of thing (block printing images -> movable type) seem pretty straight forward, doesn't it.

I think one of the hallmarks of any truly revolutionary technology is the ease and speed with which it spreads, becomes assimilated, and soon seems 'obvious' to those who were born after its adoption. The wheel being the archetypal example. I'm no expert on printing presses, but the Wikipedia page on Moveable Type has some good material, including the suggestion that Gutenberg's most important innovation was a greatl…

Printing supported not only governments, but revolutions. I have a hard time believing the American Revolution could remotely have happened without the printing press.

Consider the modern parallel of the Egyptian Revolution being enabled by Facebook.

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

#119

Post by bzbarsky »

Eliezer wrote: post #71
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…

I don't know what quantum computing is doing on that list, but a mere glance around you will confirm that small increases in intelligence and brainpower, such as that involved between humans and the LCA of humans and chimps, can have rather large effects. Marvin Minsky once said, "Nuclear weapons are not really dangerous because nuclear weapons are not self-replicating." To this I would add that nanotechnology is not…

Maybe, and maybe not. Worth at least reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible if you haven't for a counter-argument.

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

#120

Post by katovatzschyn »

EdiX wrote: post #76
Gormo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is begging the question in a way, though. Why didn't the Romans have the printing press? Like the hot-air balloon, the concept of printing is clear and simple, and the technological prerequisites are minimal - you just need metallurgy, which the Romans had in abundance. The printing press ended up being developed in a culture that was in many ways less technically sophisticated than the Romans'.

I vaguely remember that this has to do with more with the paper than with printing technology, the paper being very expensive until recently.

I cannot find the source but I remember the same also. As well, "printing press like" techniques were used early in clay pot design and marking, again can't find source, which is the essence of the idea. Only it could not expand to the scale required of modern printing press standards.
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