Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

Post by gte910h » Sat, Feb 26, 2011, 2:27 PM UTC

dwiel wrote: post #28

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

Post by Avshalom » Sat, Feb 26, 2011, 2:37 PM UTC

aoeuid wrote: post #3

fendrak wrote: post #2

"Such rapid and direct application of biomedical advances to humans is now inconceivable, not only in the US, but virtually anywhere in the world." This is true, but for one very simple reason: at the time of these inventions, there was no other option . If someone needed a heart operation that required stopping the heart, they would die. If someone needed dialysis after kidney failure, they died. Rapid applications…

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…

Post by qw » Sat, Feb 26, 2011, 3:02 PM UTC

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…

Post by tptacek » Sat, Feb 26, 2011, 3:07 PM UTC

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #15

philwelch wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a genuine plausibility difference between inventing new surgical techniques and freezing corpses in liquid nitrogen hoping that future generations will resurrect them. In terms of the high certain burden on the rest of society (in terms of expending resources, denying others the use of one's organs, denying the use of one's remains for medical research or education, etc.) and the very outside chance that one…

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.

Post by nazgulnarsil » Sat, Feb 26, 2011, 3:22 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #47

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.

What does that have to do with his point? The resuscitations you're talking about are not part of a continuum of improving outcomes for people with massive total systemic cellular damage from freeze-thaw cycles.