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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?

#51

Post by wazoox »

iwwr wrote: post #11

Fascinating article, with just one quip I'd have: Plutonium-238, the material in nuclear batteries is very different from Plutonium-239, a material for nuclear weapons. There is great stigma against Plutonium, but mainly because of Pu-239. If you remember some of the news around the launch of the Cassini probe, there was opposition because of the Pu-238 pellet powering the RTG. Compared to Pu-239, Pu-238 is non-fissi…

> 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 :)

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

#52

Post by wazoox »

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…

In fact much revolutionary technologies come from small incremental improvements, and often were invented by several people at the same time : the telephone, the radio, the steam engine, television...

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

#53

Post by Gormo »

WalterBright wrote: post #7

The 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.

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'.

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

#54

Post by wazoox »

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…

> Each story of humans' invention seems to just as much be a story of the individual who led its discovery, rather than the environment surrounding him/her, and when the environment is taking into account, it seems it does more to stifle innovation than to foster it.

We can argue that the WWII may not have taken place without Hitler, however the personal computer revolution would have occurred with Commodore instead of Apple, and CP/M instead of MS-DOS, because most inventions essentially "are breathed with air" when their time's arrived.

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

#55

Post by smhinsey »

metageek wrote: post #32
smhinsey wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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 end of the day, you end up with a highly literate population of slaves in the middle of Rome, posing a significant risk to stability. Either that or they were massively efficient in their reliance on written material, which in itself would be remarkable in light of how successful they were in exporting their culture throughout the empire.

This is a great example of where the mindset of the ancient civilization is just so dramatically different than our own that it's difficult to understand their motivations.

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

#56

Post by elwin »

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?

The Montgolfier balloons could reach altitudes of 2000 meters, which would have been impossible to hit with 18th century muskets or cannon. Landing would have been dangerous, of course.

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

#57

Post by elptacek »

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 leading up to, "this is another engineering problem and we must analyze it for a solution before we can continue to progress technologically." So I reread the whole thing... and it seems that was just my own bias inserting itself between the lines.

And I still don't understand why the political components of the dynamics of social and technological progress cannot be approached as an engineering problem.

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

#58

Post by jimrandomh »

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…

The inclusion of quantum computing in that list is stupid, but strong AI is a real and very serious danger. I can't really do the topic justice in a quick comment, so here's a link instead: http://singinst.org/upload/artificial-intelligence-risk.pdf

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

#59

Post by Symmetry »

wazoox wrote: post #51
iwwr wrote: post #11

Fascinating article, with just one quip I'd have: Plutonium-238, the material in nuclear batteries is very different from Plutonium-239, a material for nuclear weapons. There is great stigma against Plutonium, but mainly because of Pu-239. If you remember some of the news around the launch of the Cassini probe, there was opposition because of the Pu-238 pellet powering the RTG. Compared to Pu-239, Pu-238 is non-fissi…

> 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.

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

#60

Post by watchandwait »

metageek wrote: post #32
smhinsey wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Slavery was present in every ancient society. The Roman empire was successful because of superior military tactics and world class fortification and infrastructure engineering-- especially roads and agriculture.

Additionally, the Romans had organizational advantages in an advanced legal and commercial code. The Romans were also extremely flexible and combined conquered local traditions with their own (Roman paganism was particularly tolerant) and by expanding Roman citizenship in ever broader circles.

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