Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
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Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
1–10 of 134 posts
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#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 come in the face of dire consequences. In these cases, almost anything was better than death.
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#3"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 cryopreservation than if you are cremated or buried underground.
But because of various mostly psychosocial factors, practically nobody gets cryopreserved. I think this is the specific example he was trying to point out.
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#4"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…
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 will be successfully and happily resurrected (which is itself the product of several probabilities, many small--the probability that even perfectly preserved corpses can even theoretically be resurrected, the probability that the tissue damage caused in the freezing process can be repaired, the probability that future generations will actually resurrect you rather than put your corpse in a museum or something, and the probability that upon resurrection you will, in fact, be the same person and not suffer extreme brain damage and lifelong mental retardation), cryonics doesn't sound like such a good idea anymore.
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#5"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…
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 - so it's of more use to someone who has been diagnosed with a fatal disease, or is getting on in years)
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#6Bleh. 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 not Edison, had invented the phonograph?" are just another series of what ifs.
The universe didn't fucking happen that way. Archimedes doesn't have access to those ideas. You can't just wonder what would have happened if people had discovered the internal combustion engine in the bronze age, because that question is meaningless.
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#7The 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.
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#8The 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 civilization; and they do so absent the inherent check on their proliferation that was present in the case of nuclear energy...
The suggestion that strong artificial intelligence and quantum computing are more likely destroyers of civilization than nuclear energy seems laughable without further argument. As with nuclear weapons, problems only arise in the application of technology by humans, not in the concepts themselves, and I see far more potential for physical and societal devastation in the application of nuclear weapons than in AI or QC.
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#9Bleh. 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…
The entire genre of steampunk is devoted to asking the "What If?" of alternate technological history. Clearly the question is slightly less than meaningless. Understanding the history of technology and why certain things did or did not happen can help us to optimize our societal approach to technology and progress in the future.
Re: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?
#10In 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 is that all technological advances are dependent upon a complex mix of social, political and environmental factors which we still do not understand, and thus cannot predict
The implication then is that, had WWII not happened, 1950 would have looked a lot like 1939. Instead, the world saw nearly 10 years of rapid technological advances, with nations inventing amazing new things as though their life depended on it.
Plot the rise and fall of the Space Program alongside the Cold War, and you can see the pattern again.