Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

chronopause.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 134 posts

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

#81

Post by api »

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…

The average person is only motivated by hate, fear, and superstition. That is the main constraining factor.

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

#82

Post by kjhghj »

The problem is their numbering system which makes it difficult to do countdowns.

ex, eye-ex, eye-eye-ex, ve-eye-eye-eye, ve-eye-eye, ve-eye ve, eye-ve, eye-eye-eye, eye-eye, eye

now what's next ? What's less than eye?

don't know - we have to wait for somebody to invent zero...

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

#83

Post by philwelch »

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.

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 decision-making process is extraordinarily selfish.

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

#84

Post by btilly »

Charuru wrote: post #12
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…

Are you saying that war increases technological growth? That's crappy pop-history that's largely been discredited. Competition invites advancement, blowing up your competitors does nothing.

Are you saying that war increases technological growth? That's crappy pop-history that's largely been discredited

Citation needed.

I can certainly say that without WW II and then the Cold War, Silicon Valley would not have looked anything like it does today. Read everything in http://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-val... and watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo for evidence for that assertion.

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

#85

Post by gwern »

Gormo wrote: post #53
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'.

> 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.

More details: the Antithykera Mechanism would seem to imply that the Romans had the metallurgy.

Interestingly, they or their predecessors also may have had the basic idea of block printing or movable type printing. The Phaistos Disc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc) from ancient Crete is a disc of fired clay onto which various symbols have been 'stamped'.

Set the symbols into a frame or carve them into a flat wooden block, and keep using clay as your printing material... Not as good as Chinese paper or Egyptian papyrus, but still better than scribes.

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

#86

Post by jarek »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #20
aoeuid wrote: post #3

Earlier 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…

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.

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

#87

Post by tptacek »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #49
tptacek wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you're discussing damage that comes about from primitive forms of cryonic preservation that haven't been used in decades. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18321197

Freeze-thaw cycles in LN2 also damage cells.

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

#88

Post by gwern »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #80
lionhearted wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has written about cryonics extensively at LessWrong - if anyone you know is forward-minded about living forever and at risk of passing away soon, you should probably start reading those articles and arguments for cryonics and pass them along. (Actually, everyone should read it, but I think the state of medicine makes it unlikely that you're preserved if you die from random trauma like a car accident…

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, recorded in the neurons?)

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

#89

Post by philwelch »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #20
aoeuid wrote: post #3

Earlier 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…

That WWII reference is especially ignorant. The vast majority of the West spent the entire 1930's trying to choose peace over war. They tried so hard to choose peace over war that when a handful of dictators chose otherwise, they stayed out of their way until the very last minute. It's very ignorant for someone today to accuse people of the pre-WWII era of not trying hard enough to avoid a war, when all of those people saw firsthand the horrors of WWI and for that very reason, tolerated military aggression against other countries as long as possible. In retrospect, the consensus seems to be that the Allies spent too much time avoiding the war, not too little[1].

And even if you include the people of Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan into the mix, you're making a fallacy about how people actually behave. It would have taken prescience people didn't have, back in the 1920's, to prevent the rise of the dictators of the 1930's. That's how history works.

[1] The only dissenting viewpoint to this that I give any credence is the idea that appeasement was necessary as a delaying tactic so the allies could build up their militaries to match the Germans.

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

#90

Post by qw »

anamax wrote: post #77
qw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't compare the output of a country with over 300 million people with Northern Europe. The money spent on technology alone is probably larger than the combined national budgets of those countries. Of course this will produce more noticeable results, but that doesn't mean that they don't contribute to innovation.

> 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 better they are, so why doesn't it show up in output?

In my opinion it's not a good comparison. If we look at the GDP per capita, you will find lots of states with lower rates than many European countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per_...

When you hear "how much better the countries are", it is based on other factors than GDP. If there was something special about the US political system that generates wealth, you would expect the results to be more evenly distributed. Northern Europe consists of countries that are far more diverse than US states with larger differences in political systems, language, culture and history.

It seems that some US states are better at generating wealth than others. But it is my guess that they still have huge advantages of a single market with a common language and relatively similar culture. You also see more mobility in the workforce than in European countries.

Post reply on HN