> we still don’t know how to make Damascus steel or Roman concrete That's an oft-repeated but ultimately meaningless statement. We know how to make things bet

> we still don’t know how to make Damascus steel or Roman concrete That's an oft-repeated but ultimately meaningless statement. We know how to make things better than Damascus steel or Roman concrete. Our processes have exceeded the ancients. The quality of Damascus steel is likely overrated, since it wasn't quite as absolute shit as what was being regularly traded at the time. Same with concrete. We might not have exquisite written recipes and procedures for these materials, but they have been reverse-engineered, and it turns out, they weren't that great compared to modern chemical and material engineered products. We don't need to 'rediscover' Damascus steel because it is obselete. A romantic idea, and poetic in how it was 'lost' to time, but consider that it was 'lost' to time, similar to Japanese steel-working, because nobody wanted to buy it anymore. It became economically and culturally irrelevant.