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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?

#121

Post by adrianN »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #73
adrianN wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think (mostly) self sustaining outposts on the Moon and Mars are technologically infeasible. See for example the studies Robert Zubrin did for NASA. Whether there are sufficient economic incentives to actually build them is unfortunately a different question.

It's technologically feasible to send a mission to Mars. It's unfeasible to have self-sustaining colony on Mars. Mars Direct proposal does not even try to cover self-sustaining part.

Actually it does, at least as outlined in his book.

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

#122

Post by nazgulnarsil »

philwelch wrote: post #83
nazgulnarsil wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only if you abuse the abstraction of language to impose restrictions on reality that don't exist. people who would have been declared dead 50 years ago are now resuscitated routinely.

I don't think anyone who's ever been declared "dead" has ever been "resuscitated" more than a year after the fact, at least not since we've been able to distinguish a comatose state from death. Fine, there's a slim chance it's theoretically possible. I openly conceded that. Multiply that by all the other slim chances involved, though, and it gets even slimmer. It doesn't balance against the extreme costs unless your…

I choose not to pretend my decisions aren't selfish.

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

#123

Post by nazgulnarsil »

dkarl wrote: post #67
elptacek wrote: post #57

There's a somewhat negative cast towards the end of this article where the author discusses "the fundamental inability of most humans to handle such technology responsibly" and how "psychosocial factors" retard progress. And then you have some dire, terminal outlook for humanity. This reads like correspondence bias to me. At first, it seemed contradictory to the first paragraphs of the article, which seemed to be lea…

Engineering requires some coherence of vision. Coherence of vision in society is hard to achieve and probably undesirable -- the best systems of government, in my opinion, are the ones that protect difference and function in spite of it. In other words, if you successfully solve the engineering problem of designing a system of government, the resulting society will not be amenable to social engineering. If society an…

only in those traditional forms of governance that are semi-compulsory to one degree or another. free immigration between competing systems of governance allow each unit to have coherence of vision while still allowing people to choose freely about what sort of ideological vision they agree with.

This was a genius political invention. The result was called something like the "unified states", but it was destroyed in a civil war and lost to history. I hear books from that civilization survive, but no one reads them.

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

#124

Post by anateus »

devinj wrote: post #104
ThomPete wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lesser known WW2-era legacy is the Japanese Unit 731 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 which perpetrated horrific experiments upon great numbers of Chinese and some POWs.

Unlike the Nazi experiments these don't seem as well known in the west, though they've had a potentially greater effect. I say potentially because most of the doctors were pardoned (the ones that weren't captured by the Russians) and several rose to prominence in Japanese medical circles. The results of Unit 731 are mostly classified, and have been used to jumpstart biological weapons programs in both the USSR and the US (at least one Unit 731 doctor moved to the US to work on bioweapons).

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

#125

Post by loup-vaillant »

gwern wrote: post #88
loup-vaillant wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fatal disease will probably make the life insurance that pays for your cryopreservation much more costly. Signing up when you're still healthy and young may be more beneficial, even when the probability of eventually destroying your brain is higher.

Eliezer wasn't talking about how you sign up or pay for it (he himself is signed up with term insurance & is young and reasonably healthy); he was talking about what kinds of dead people having signed up would be most useful to. Predictable deaths are best because the stabilization teams can be there waiting. (There are of course wrinkles to this. If you die of alzheimers or senile dementia, is there any 'you' left,…

I wasn't replying to Eliezer… And I think I agree with you. And:

> so it's of more use to someone who has been diagnosed with a fatal disease, or is getting on in years

I read this as "Cryonics is more useful for you if you are ill or old". (1) I agree, and (2) at this point, insurance companies may make it less affordable, for you.

My point is, if you wait too long (typically until illness or senescence), then Cryonics could become so expensive that the utility/cost ratio decreases, despite the fact that utility itself greatly increased.

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

#126

Post by elptacek »

dkarl wrote: post #67
elptacek wrote: post #57

There's a somewhat negative cast towards the end of this article where the author discusses "the fundamental inability of most humans to handle such technology responsibly" and how "psychosocial factors" retard progress. And then you have some dire, terminal outlook for humanity. This reads like correspondence bias to me. At first, it seemed contradictory to the first paragraphs of the article, which seemed to be lea…

Engineering requires some coherence of vision. Coherence of vision in society is hard to achieve and probably undesirable -- the best systems of government, in my opinion, are the ones that protect difference and function in spite of it. In other words, if you successfully solve the engineering problem of designing a system of government, the resulting society will not be amenable to social engineering. If society an…

All governments appear historically do have been designed by a small group of people with coherence of vision. All of these systems, based on idealism, fail to account for the complex requirements of administrating a functional society. As a result, our "democracy" is incessantly patching itself -- ask any law student. Despite being currently the most popular ideal, democracy is a terrible design. The result is that countries like the United States are definitionally socialist, despite what we prefer to beleive.

I have no criticisms of any form of government. Criticisms have the net effect of polarizing people, which is counterproductive at best. Unfortunately, any discussion of the political component of any dynamic is perceived as criticism, if not an outright attack. The intensity of the reaction to perceived criticism varies greatly from culture to culture. This is horribly unfortunate, because it discourages critical thinking and contributes to these 'psychosocial factors' that retard progress.

Of course, the author assumes that his concept of progress is what is desired. There are a thousand ways one could pick this article apart.

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

#127

Post by smhinsey »

bzbarsky wrote: post #117
smhinsey wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worl…

I don't think that it's a necessity, but we're talking about the Romans, who are pretty notoriously paranoid about security issues since Rome was sacked by the Gauls. This concern seems in line with what I know of the general attitude of the average Roman citizen, especially if you're talking about slaves that came from the outer provinces, as most did in later years.

I just don't think you can ever be totally secure psychologically while you own slaves, but as I said elsewhere in this thread, there are a lot of things about the Roman mindset that are very difficult for the modern mind to identify with, so at best, this is marginally informed speculation on my part.

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

#128

Post by Tuna-Fish »

nitrogen wrote: post #103
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

Assuming it starts at human-level or slightly above, internet access would probably be enough.

Plenty of people make a lot of money over the Internet, and identity theft isn't exactly rare. Anything that's considerably smarter than humans would probably be running on AWS after the first week, without any overt co-operation from it's creators.

I do not hold this to be particularly likely, because I think that the software side of making a mind capable of recursive self-improvement is likely orders of magnitude harder than people seem to think it is. However, if we do succeed in making one, the argument "it needs help from it's creators" is a very weak one -- even a human level one with access to any networking would likely be able to take the ability to improve itself.

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

#129

Post by pbhjpbhj »

deadmansshoes wrote: post #110
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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

Lol, nor I, I was assuming that creation of one balloon would allow creation of multiple balloons for use in any given battle.

I'd imagine the access a balloon gives, with the addition of surprise and maybe a steering fan, to be pretty good. You could send up some test balloons and then send up some huge ones with bombs on the bottom and shoot them down over the target for yourself. Or perhaps a pile of diseased food to a hunger-stricken garrison, or ...

You can't readily break down a whole castle with a single trebuchet either.

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

#130

Post by pavel_lishin »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #50
meric wrote: post #23

The article mentioned: "The Montgolfier brothers came up with the idea while lying beside a fire and watching hot ash and embers float upwards – and they thought about this in a military context – namely how to take Gibraltar from the British." And later "However, Hero of Alexandria (10–70 CE) was well known for constructing complex automata, had powered a pipe organ using his wind-wheel (windmill) and developed a va…

What you are ignoring is that while the individual is definitely the catalyst for the innovation, the environment is equally important. Considered another way, there are countless people around the world with the intelligence and drive of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but they live in impoverished villages in India and Africa and struggle just to stay alive. They may do better than their neighbors, but without the suppo…

Even people living in affluent societies may be steered from the path we imagine them to take. Bill Gates was very lucky to have access to a computer at an early age. If he'd lived in, say, San Antonio, would have have achieved what he did?
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