[deleted]
Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
31–40 of 134 posts
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#32The Romans did not have the printing press. The press produced a sharp exponential increase in technological progress. Without the press, the spread of new ideas and techniques is extremely slow, and there isn't much cross-pollination of technologies. Worse, an awful lot gets forgotten.
The more you think about it, the more impressive it is that they maintained such a far-flung and orderly bureaucracy (relatively speaking) without the printing press.
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.)
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#33Bleh. The moment you start thinking "one of the most powerful and off putting military advantages that could have been deployed, in either Ancient, or Renaissance times, would have been hot air balloons." is the moment you start thinking 'What if sharks had lasers?" The breathless "and then I thought"s and stupid hypotheticals: "How would the technological arc of the ancient world have been changed if Archimedes, and…
Clearly trains can't go at speeds approaching that of light, so Einstein's Gedankenexperiment is meaningless.
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#34The 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…
The Ultimate Physical Limits of Computation:
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
The guy who wrote this post used to be president of Alcor ( http://alcor.org ), one of the two cryonics organizations in the US. Cryonics is in fact certainly a procedure where people will definitely die if they don't get it, particularly because it can only be done after 'legal death'. Its efficacy can't be established conclusively right now, but it's certainly more likely you'll be revived if you undergo cryopreser…
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…
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.
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#36The Romans did not have the printing press. The press produced a sharp exponential increase in technological progress. Without the press, the spread of new ideas and techniques is extremely slow, and there isn't much cross-pollination of technologies. Worse, an awful lot gets forgotten.
With wax tablets being used it's surprising too if none of the Romans thought to use an impression mechanism¹ to print with. -- 1 - Perhaps drawing initially on foil, backing with clay, heat and press and then wipe over an "ink" (which could also then be set on to paper). Or maybe simply forming letter shapes which are put together on a board and heating and impressing them in to the wax. Indeed this brings me to thi…
Printing, as a technology for creating duplicate images (eg, with wood blocks), was in use at least a millenium prior to Gutenberg in many societies, including parts of late Rome. Moveable type came much later, and it was Gutenberg's incorporation of this with a whole slew of engineering improvements that led to the printing revolution in Europe.
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
With wax tablets being used it's surprising too if none of the Romans thought to use an impression mechanism¹ to print with. -- 1 - Perhaps drawing initially on foil, backing with clay, heat and press and then wipe over an "ink" (which could also then be set on to paper). Or maybe simply forming letter shapes which are put together on a board and heating and impressing them in to the wax. Indeed this brings me to thi…
Just a thought, but paper is a much more information dense medium. Perhaps transportation of the clay tablets was expensive enough to make doing them by hand each time easier than printing them.
Indeed, but clay tablets could have been thinned, they could also have used organic material (with fired pieces it burns away, cf paper-clay) to lighten the resulting tablets without much loss in ruggedness (paperclay is stronger than clay alone, like concrete vs cement).
I think such a development would lead naturally to think "damn this epic of Gilgamesh needs a few camels to transport, perhaps instead of impressing back in to clay I can press it on something lighter" and then possibly with the realisation that pressing on a damp cloth with an unfired tablet impression produces a great serviceable print ...
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
With wax tablets being used it's surprising too if none of the Romans thought to use an impression mechanism¹ to print with. -- 1 - Perhaps drawing initially on foil, backing with clay, heat and press and then wipe over an "ink" (which could also then be set on to paper). Or maybe simply forming letter shapes which are put together on a board and heating and impressing them in to the wax. Indeed this brings me to thi…
Printing, as a technology for creating duplicate images (eg, with wood blocks), was in use at least a millenium prior to Gutenberg in many societies, including parts of late Rome. Moveable type came much later, and it was Gutenberg's incorporation of this with a whole slew of engineering improvements that led to the printing revolution in Europe.
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.
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#39In 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 elsewhere (on, eg, feeding the poor).
What does it mean for technological innovation if the 'complex mix' of factors it depends upon includes the enthusiasm of a propaganda-fueled public? After all, the (relatively) content societies of contemporary northern Europe have never produced anything like the level of innovation seen in Cold War America, despite their unusually high appreciation of scientific rationalism. Uncomfortable thinking...
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#40Kudos 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 give enough advantage, it could also probably be used at distance to gain information vital to a successful siege - can you starve them out quickly, how strong are the numbers, where are cannon or arsenals located, etc..