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Prompted by another thread, if science had taken off two thousand years ago what would the world be like now?
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Sandy, the Roman Empire was amazingly affluent. You can hardly imagine how well heeled..... the Roman strata in an excavation in Egypt would be a thick ( a metre or so ) as the next one thousand years.....
They had so much money they could afford to throw... all sorts of things away....
The evidence is quite good for the AntiK mechanism to be an orrery, and the mad one - is it Mike Wright ? was right after all. He was the one that showed that the odd twiggly bits that no one understood in fact as he said all along corrected for slight lunar variations....
But later in the prog - a Latinist said, Oh, Cicero visited the house of the descendants of the Victor of Syracuse ( it wasnt Scipio Africanus was it ) and there they had machines which accurately predicted the phases of the moon.
It seems very much like Babbage's differential engine, but as a 2000 year before pre-quel.
Disraeli no less asked - what shall we do with Mr Babbage's machine ?
so clearly Dizzy wasnt exactly dizzy over it all.
The questions at the time was - well OK what do we do with it ?
Sandy, the Roman Empire was amazingly affluent. You can hardly imagine how well heeled..... the Roman strata in an excavation in Egypt would be a thick ( a metre or so ) as the next one thousand years.....
They had so much money they could afford to throw... all sorts of things away....
The evidence is quite good for the AntiK mechanism to be an orrery, and the mad one - is it Mike Wright ? was right after all. He was the one that showed that the odd twiggly bits that no one understood in fact as he said all along corrected for slight lunar variations....
But later in the prog - a Latinist said, Oh, Cicero visited the house of the descendants of the Victor of Syracuse ( it wasnt Scipio Africanus was it ) and there they had machines which accurately predicted the phases of the moon.
It seems very much like Babbage's differential engine, but as a 2000 year before pre-quel.
Disraeli no less asked - what shall we do with Mr Babbage's machine ?
so clearly Dizzy wasnt exactly dizzy over it all.
The questions at the time was - well OK what do we do with it ?
All sorts of amazing mechanisms existed in antiquity, and are alluded to but not proved to exist. Like PP says, the purpose for these to be used on a large scale didn't exist, as slaves were widely available. So the things we get machines to do now would be done more cheaply by slaves. In addition, machines that required precision parts must have taken forever to create - there are thousands of individually hand cut gear teeth in the Antikythera mechanism. Lack of automated precision tool-making was another reason why using slaves was simpler, quicker and cheaper.
The development of something so complex as a nuclear bomb, or for that matter many of the world's modern experiments such as the Particle Physics Labs; and the amount of open access needed to investigate biology in exotic and perhaps dangerous locations; and all sorts of other problems that don't occur to me at the moment, together probably mean that the world has to be (relatively) civilised before science can really take off. A great deal of the progress made in the 16th-19th centuries was essentially in smallish groups, but at some point this becomes no longer enough and you need time, money and lots of people involved to take things to the next stage.
So anyway, civilisation would need to have happened first in any case. As to how much further forward we'd be if the world had settled down enough to give us the opportunity -- well, presumably at least a few centuries more advanced. Among the things I'd expect us to understand in the next few centuries would be:
- how to do practical quantum computing
- better disease control
- An understanding of fundamental physics up to at least 1000 times higher energy than we are at today
But presumably either of two things would be added to this: not only would we have probably "finished" current directions of research but new ones would have been thought of, finished and prompted other new directions, and so on and on; or alternatively the world would be such a different place that some very different directions would have been taken from the start. How productive these would have been is anyone's guess. I'm always slightly sceptical of the values of such speculations because so much of what we've come up with was driven not just by idle curiosity but also by the circumstances of the world at the time. Better timekeeping technology, for example, owes much to the dangers of navigation at sea, which in turn was mainly a problem because of the European bent for sailing off to the New World and conquering or exploiting its resources -- if we'd stayed at home instead, in a peaceful world, would this have been such an urgent or important project?
Although Science certainly isn't a linear progression entirely (there are lots of dead ends and the occasional resurrection of old ideas that take you away from a single line) it is usually true that the next generation of work builds on what came before it, and at some point you find a starting point of a particular problem needing to be solved for whatever reason. A World with different problems would need different solutions, which would surely lead to a wildly different set of ideas and lines of thought to be followed. Perhaps, in the end, because the Universe would be the same place we'd have still made the same discoveries -- certain things are always going to be true -- but we would at least have got there in a very different manner. There is even a chance that we might even be behind where we are now. Well, why not?
So anyway, civilisation would need to have happened first in any case. As to how much further forward we'd be if the world had settled down enough to give us the opportunity -- well, presumably at least a few centuries more advanced. Among the things I'd expect us to understand in the next few centuries would be:
- how to do practical quantum computing
- better disease control
- An understanding of fundamental physics up to at least 1000 times higher energy than we are at today
But presumably either of two things would be added to this: not only would we have probably "finished" current directions of research but new ones would have been thought of, finished and prompted other new directions, and so on and on; or alternatively the world would be such a different place that some very different directions would have been taken from the start. How productive these would have been is anyone's guess. I'm always slightly sceptical of the values of such speculations because so much of what we've come up with was driven not just by idle curiosity but also by the circumstances of the world at the time. Better timekeeping technology, for example, owes much to the dangers of navigation at sea, which in turn was mainly a problem because of the European bent for sailing off to the New World and conquering or exploiting its resources -- if we'd stayed at home instead, in a peaceful world, would this have been such an urgent or important project?
Although Science certainly isn't a linear progression entirely (there are lots of dead ends and the occasional resurrection of old ideas that take you away from a single line) it is usually true that the next generation of work builds on what came before it, and at some point you find a starting point of a particular problem needing to be solved for whatever reason. A World with different problems would need different solutions, which would surely lead to a wildly different set of ideas and lines of thought to be followed. Perhaps, in the end, because the Universe would be the same place we'd have still made the same discoveries -- certain things are always going to be true -- but we would at least have got there in a very different manner. There is even a chance that we might even be behind where we are now. Well, why not?
Yes, lets say the AK mechanism spread to western europe and someone figures out gravity 200 years before Newton did, what if this person didn't have Newton's level of interest in mathematics? Calculus has to await an inventor and with Newton not having cause to mull over gravity, he could have ended up on a career path which never inpired him to do so either.
Yes, some other historical figure would have arrived at calculus, eventually but sending a polymath like Newton into a career in farming, for example, would derail so many other fields of study that he was interested in that the net effect is a global technological setback.
A big wave to all irresponsible time travellers, out there. :-D
Yes, some other historical figure would have arrived at calculus, eventually but sending a polymath like Newton into a career in farming, for example, would derail so many other fields of study that he was interested in that the net effect is a global technological setback.
A big wave to all irresponsible time travellers, out there. :-D
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