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Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

280 points by aoeuid 16y ago

gohat 16y ago
I don't think this question is as profound as it seems. Basically, it is asking: If a civilization had access to the resources to create a technology, why didn't they? Take perspective, or drawing things so that they look real. Closer things are bigger, further things smaller. Until it was invented around the Renaisance (1400/1500), all art was flat and kinda clumpy. Why couldn't people draw nice things until then? That's what new technology is. A profound change in how we use resources.
- jodrellblank 16y ago
  I don't think this question is as profound as it seems. Basically, it is asking: If a civilization had access to the resources to create a technology, why didn't they? But it is a profound question. The turnaround version of it is: what do we have the resources to create, but aren't doing? What aren't we looking for? What aren't we seeing?
tlear 16y ago
Best example of a technology that we have not followed is Nuclear powered space flight project Orion. One such launch would lift more material into orbit then all the rockets we launched so far. Flight to Mars would be trivial, staying on it would not but thats another issue
fendrak 16y ago
"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.
- aoeuid 16y ago
  The guy who wrote this post used to be president of Alcor (http://alcor.org 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.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    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.
    - nazgulnarsil 16y ago
      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.
      - tptacek 16y ago
        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.
Helianthus16 16y ago
Bleh. 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.
- nitrogen 16y ago
  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.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Clearly trains can't go at speeds approaching that of light, so Einstein's Gedankenexperiment is meaningless.
WalterBright 16y ago
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.
- smhinsey 16y ago
  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.
  - metageek 16y ago
    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.)
    - smhinsey 16y ago
      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.
      - watchandwait 16y ago
        The vast majority of Roman slaves were miserable, illiterate war captives, and generations of their offspring, working large scale farms in Italy. The instability from Roman slavery actually came from the masses of displaced Roman yeoman farmers, who could not compete with the slave agribusinesses. This was a considerable concern in ancient Rome, for cultural reasons and also because these small farmers formed the backbone of the Roman legionary forces during the Republic.
nitrogen 16y ago
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 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.
- Tuna-Fish 16y ago
  With nuclear tech, humans have to be the ones pushing the buttons, making pure accidents quite unlikely. If moore's law holds and we make a strong AI, it might theoretically be possible for it to "go FOOM" -- use most of it's thinking power to make itself exponentially smarter, hitting the ultimate physical limits of computing in a relatively short time. If that happens, and the ultimate physical limits of computing are sufficiently far away, the entire human race no longer has any say on it's future -- whatever happens from then on is decided by a singleton entity. A good overview of the arguments from both sides can be found from the Hanson - Yudkowsky debate on the subject: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Hanson-Yudkowsky_AI-Foom_Debate http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Hanson-Yudkowsky_AI-Foom_... Disclaimer: I have not studied the issue deeply enough to be on either side.
  - adrianN 16y ago
    The Ultimate Physical Limits of Computation: http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9908043 http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9908043
  - nitrogen 16y ago
    Even with a rapidly-developing strong AI, though, humans have to give the initial machine the ability to limitlessly acquire resources and alter its own hardware. Despite the likelihood that a highly intelligent AI could easily convince some humans to do its bidding, the resource acquisition limitation gives me some measure of confidence that strong AI will not be the downfall of our civilization. I would be more concerned about unexpected emergent behavior in our existing networks as more and more intelligence is added to various systems than a purpose-built self-modifying AI.
jasonkester 16y ago
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 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.
- Charuru 16y ago
  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.
  - JanezStupar 16y ago
    So what you're saying that intense competition between national armies is not the kind of competition that humans are willing to stake almost anything and commit endless resources on? War itself may not increase technological growth. But preparations for war certainly do. And please show me another competition that has yielded lets say 50% of technological advances that various arms races have? Sadly when human develops new kind of tech and is looking for money to get it widespread - the first and deciding question is: "Can it be used as a weapon?" Think of the nuclear bunker gap!
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - toddh 16y ago
      Wasn't low-cost sequencing of human genomes created by the competition generated by an X prize? Maybe we simply aren't harnessing gamification principles properly. Maybe really big games like wars aren't the only way.
iwwr 16y ago
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-fissile and also produces a lot of heat (which is the point, really). Pu-238 poses almost no proliferation risk. Even the radioactivity is in the form of alpha radiation, which needs very little shielding (hardly even penetrating the skin). The only problem with Pu-238 right now is that it's very expensive to produce and also very scarce. If Pu-238 were abundant, it could find many applications and pose very little security risk; building a dirty bomb out of it won't really work (as a matter a fact, neither making one out of Pu-239). In general, our civilization has an irrational fear of nuclear energy. Even more egregious since there is a variant of nuclear technology that's almost completely proliferation-free, namely the thorium cycle.
- daniel-cussen 16y ago
  Chile is already moving toward building the first thorium nuclear reactors: http://diario.elmercurio.cl/detalle/index.asp?id={183364cc-da29-4d75-9853-5e090eda2d10} http://diario.elmercurio.cl/detalle/index.asp?id={183364cc-d...
- wazoox 16y ago
  > 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 :)
  - Symmetry 16y ago
    Thats actually an urban legend (though one thats often repeated in the media). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/plutonium.html http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/pl... The radiological toxicity of plutonium is _way_ higher than the chemical toxicity.
petervandijck 16y ago
There are some good theories on this in social science; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism and the book "The co-construction of users and technology" http://www.amazon.com/How-Users-Matter-Co-Construction-Technology/dp/0262651092/ http://www.amazon.com/How-Users-Matter-Co-Construction-Techn...
ableal 16y ago
A 17th century attempt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolomeu_de_Gusm%C3%A3o http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolomeu_de_Gusm%C3%A3o
meric 16y ago
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 variety of steam driven devices using his aeolipile; a primitive turbine type steam engine with surprising motive capacity." From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon "Unmanned hot air balloons are popular in Chinese history. Zhuge Liang of the Shu Han kingdom, in the Three Kingdoms era (220–80 AD) used airborne lanterns for military signaling." "In fact, von Braun was engaged in designing and building the V-2, and much more sophisticated rockets, solely because he wanted to achieve the exploration of space; both personally and for the human species." In each example above where technologies were invented / discovered, you can see that these innovations were driven by individuals and their purpose. In the case of the automata and the hot air balloon, both were invented by a leader of their own respective society - "Hero of Alexandria" and "Zhuge Liang" - the chinese military genius. Von Braun wanted to invent rockets for the purpose of space exploration... but his effort was redirected into war and destruction. Comparing to innovations we've made in the past, say, 30 years, you can see the same. Bill Gates commoditized hardware and brought computers onto many desks cheaply. And Steve Jobs... you know the rest. 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.
- HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
  What you are ignoring is that while the individual is definitely the catalyst for the innovation, the environment is equally important. Considered another way, there are countless people around the world with the intelligence and drive of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but they live in impoverished villages in India and Africa and struggle just to stay alive. They may do better than their neighbors, but without the support of a technologically and financially advanced society, what they can accomplish is severely limited.
varjag 16y ago
The Greeks and Romans were societies of slavery, with very little need to industrial innovation.
- simonsarris 16y ago
  Oh come now, there was certainly abundant industrial innovation in those soceties. The sawmill (like at Hierapolis), grainmill, shipmill, cranks and connecting rods, roman cranes, the first book (codex) had many advantanges over scrolls... The first recorded (buttress) dams, cements, camel harnesses, foot-powered looms, force pumps, glass blowing, hydraulic mining, hushing (flood mining), reaper, lateen sails. Almost all of these were not toys; they filled a very real need.
  - varjag 16y ago
    Some of those where invented there, but, not unlike Hero's turbine, never enjoyed a widespread adoption. A lot of other is non-machinery processes that can't really be easily replaced by manpower alone (sails? dams?) Industrial innovation (as in replacing manpower with machines) was not really catching up in ancient times, mainly because there is little incentive to save on labor if you have a steady supply of slaves. Perhaps the best illustration of social dynamics at play there we have is North vs. South states, pre civil war. Same people, same starting point, but such a dramatic difference.
- philwelch 16y ago
  In America, the invention of the cotton gin increased, not decreased, the demand for slavery. This is an instance of the Jevons paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
deadmansshoes 16y ago
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?
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >But when did the idea of slowly floating towards your fortified, gun-toting enemy in a giant gas filled balloon seem a good idea? You don't fly in the balloon your soldiers do. That is what makes it as good an idea as trying to climb to the battlements whilst having rocks, hot pitch, arrows and sword blows rain down on one from above. Even if the balloon simply diverts attention from your siege ladders then it might give enough advantage, it could also probably be used at distance to gain information vital to a successful siege - can you starve them out quickly, how strong are the numbers, where are cannon or arsenals located, etc..
  - deadmansshoes 16y ago
    "You don't fly in the balloon your soldiers do." Strangely, I wasn't suggesting the Montgolfier brothers were going to take Gibraltar single-handedly. There is a huge difference between climbing a wall with seige ladders where once you get a few men across everyone else can follow, and 2-3 men floating in a wooden basket and trying to land (!) in a fortress. Granted reconnaissance may have been useful, but if after 4 years of seige you haven't worked out your enemy through espoinage and being shot at, a balloon is not going to help.
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      >Strangely, I wasn't suggesting the Montgolfier brothers were going to take Gibraltar single-handedly. Lol, nor I, I was assuming that creation of one balloon would allow creation of multiple balloons for use in any given battle. I'd imagine the access a balloon gives, with the addition of surprise and maybe a steering fan, to be pretty good. You could send up some test balloons and then send up some huge ones with bombs on the bottom and shoot them down over the target for yourself. Or perhaps a pile of diseased food to a hunger-stricken garrison, or ... You can't readily break down a whole castle with a single trebuchet either.
deleted 16y ago
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elptacek 16y ago
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.
- dkarl 16y ago
  Engineering requires some coherence of vision. Coherence of vision in society is hard to achieve and probably undesirable -- the best systems of government, in my opinion, are the ones that protect difference and function in spite of it. In other words, if you successfully solve the engineering problem of designing a system of government, the resulting society will not be amenable to social engineering. If society and politics are amenable to engineering, then the system of government is almost certainly poorly designed. In a democratic society you can only achieve coherence through perceived ethnic and cultural uniformity, but that perception is manufactured at great cost to everyone who doesn't fit the imposed national identity.
  - nazgulnarsil 16y ago
    only in those traditional forms of governance that are semi-compulsory to one degree or another. free immigration between competing systems of governance allow each unit to have coherence of vision while still allowing people to choose freely about what sort of ideological vision they agree with. This was a genius political invention. The result was called something like the "unified states", but it was destroyed in a civil war and lost to history. I hear books from that civilization survive, but no one reads them.
  - elptacek 16y ago
sovande 16y ago
Yeah, well I'm still waiting for my flying car.
gacek 16y ago
Any idea how the air for first baloons was heated?
api 16y ago
"Transhumanists must come to realize that in order to control history, and thus their own destinies, they must leverage their way into a position of control over the ideology, morality and direction of this civilization. To fail to do so at this juncture in time is to accede to the end of our history – not by the practical abolition of death, but rather by its universal application to humankind, and perhaps to all life on earth." The followers of hate, fear, and superstition spend virtually every waking hour attempting to leverage such control. Why not visionaries? But there is a counterpoint too. The ideology of some sectors of the transhumanist/visionary community is uncomfortably reminiscent of superstition itself. I am referring to Ray Kurzweil and his Singularity University cult, and others. It looks very much like a religious movement reminiscent of Scientology or flying saucer contactees in the 1950s. It doesn't strike me as being much more rational than many other superstitious religious movements.
- Unseelie 16y ago
  If we work on the assumption that the majority of people aren't rational scientists, then harnessing the superstition towards such things as progress and invention rather than conservatism seems a very brilliant move by those persons trying to leverage political discourse. Its likely much easier to convert the followers of hate, fear, and superstition on their terms than to convince them that rational science is better.
  - api 16y ago
    You have a point, but what I'd really like to see is something more "meta." First a little background. I had a discussion with a business guru around MIT once about marketing. He related a story (possibly apocryphal) about Larry Ellison of Oracle and how he would run into meetings of Oracle's sales guys in the early days and berate them for not lying enough. "If you don't lie nobody will believe you!" Anyway, this guy was saying that this is exactly true. If you don't lie people won't believe you. I've kind of seen it myself in the business world. I also think that it explains much of what we see in the world with regard to religion, political ideologies, superstition, etc. The problem is that the primate social part of our brain interprets uncertainty, skepticism, doubt, and even caution as signifiers of low primate social status. Huge, gargantuan claims, boldness (even if wrong), and certainty are seen as signifiers of alpha status. Thus a certain-of-themselves idiot or nutjob is of higher social status than a cautious, skeptical, rational person. Salesmen exploit this by intentionally telling audacious lies (of a sort) in order to elevate themselves socially in the perception of potential buyers. People buy from alphas, not betas. What I want to see is a detailed neurological and psychological deconstruction of this. I want to see it hacked, targeted, dismantled. That would be progress. To give an example, a spray-on pheromone that fucked with this subsystem of the brain in some way would be awesome. (Not sure if that's possible since humans might not react this way, but just an example of the sort of thing I'd like to see.)
kjhghj 16y ago
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...
Nugem 16y ago
I came to read about Roman hot air balloons, instead everyone is talking about plutonium and nuclear weapons. Thanks guys, I am probably on a watch list now. Reported.
VladRussian 16y ago
The governmental analysis around 1997-99 concluded that nuclear fusion power woulnd't be cheaper than 4c/kwt (i.e. than coal based electricity) and thus it wouldn't make an economical sense (thus that close to 0 investment in that research - only LLNL's NIF which is deep in petty managerial fights (and laser driven approach isn't really the one what will get it) and Sandia which finally got back to the experiments at the level they left in 99 (though now they use different target which allows for a lot of new articles on plasma behavior (deja vu of Tokamaks, one can spend whole life looking at and describing patterns of flowing water under the bridge), yet that type of target is much worse for the fusion than the type used 10 years ago) . It is easy to imagine an outcome of the battlefield maneuverability analysis by a Rome DOD bureaucrat of horse driven chariot vs. hot air balloon and the resulting decision on the development of the balloon technology.
kujawa 16y ago
"Research into stem cell therapies, cloning, and gene therapy technology have also been greatly slowed by psychosocial concerns." Dear humanity: you are simply too dumb to have nice things.
nradov 16y ago
I wonder what history would have been like if the Roman empire had gunpowder and bronze cannons? Just like with hot air balloons, they had all the necessary basic technology but never thought to put the pieces together.

280 points by aoeuid 16y ago

gohat 16y ago

I don't think this question is as profound as it seems. Basically, it is asking: If a civilization had access to the resources to create a technology, why didn't they? Take perspective, or drawing things so that they look real. Closer things are bigger, further things smaller. Until it was invented around the Renaisance (1400/1500), all art was flat and kinda clumpy. Why couldn't people draw nice things until then? That's what new technology is. A profound change in how we use resources.

jodrellblank 16y ago
I don't think this question is as profound as it seems. Basically, it is asking: If a civilization had access to the resources to create a technology, why didn't they? But it is a profound question. The turnaround version of it is: what do we have the resources to create, but aren't doing? What aren't we looking for? What aren't we seeing?

tlear 16y ago

Best example of a technology that we have not followed is Nuclear powered space flight project Orion. One such launch would lift more material into orbit then all the rockets we launched so far. Flight to Mars would be trivial, staying on it would not but thats another issue

fendrak 16y ago

"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.

aoeuid 16y ago
The guy who wrote this post used to be president of Alcor (http://alcor.org 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.
- philwelch 16y ago
  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.
  - nazgulnarsil 16y ago
    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.
    - tptacek 16y ago
      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.

Helianthus16 16y ago

Bleh. 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.

nitrogen 16y ago
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.
Vivtek 16y ago
Clearly trains can't go at speeds approaching that of light, so Einstein's Gedankenexperiment is meaningless.

WalterBright 16y ago

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.

smhinsey 16y ago
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.
- metageek 16y ago
  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.)
  - smhinsey 16y ago
    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.
    - watchandwait 16y ago
      The vast majority of Roman slaves were miserable, illiterate war captives, and generations of their offspring, working large scale farms in Italy. The instability from Roman slavery actually came from the masses of displaced Roman yeoman farmers, who could not compete with the slave agribusinesses. This was a considerable concern in ancient Rome, for cultural reasons and also because these small farmers formed the backbone of the Roman legionary forces during the Republic.

nitrogen 16y ago

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 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.

Tuna-Fish 16y ago
With nuclear tech, humans have to be the ones pushing the buttons, making pure accidents quite unlikely. If moore's law holds and we make a strong AI, it might theoretically be possible for it to "go FOOM" -- use most of it's thinking power to make itself exponentially smarter, hitting the ultimate physical limits of computing in a relatively short time. If that happens, and the ultimate physical limits of computing are sufficiently far away, the entire human race no longer has any say on it's future -- whatever happens from then on is decided by a singleton entity. A good overview of the arguments from both sides can be found from the Hanson - Yudkowsky debate on the subject: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Hanson-Yudkowsky_AI-Foom_Debate http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Hanson-Yudkowsky_AI-Foom_... Disclaimer: I have not studied the issue deeply enough to be on either side.
- adrianN 16y ago
  The Ultimate Physical Limits of Computation: http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9908043 http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9908043
- nitrogen 16y ago
  Even with a rapidly-developing strong AI, though, humans have to give the initial machine the ability to limitlessly acquire resources and alter its own hardware. Despite the likelihood that a highly intelligent AI could easily convince some humans to do its bidding, the resource acquisition limitation gives me some measure of confidence that strong AI will not be the downfall of our civilization. I would be more concerned about unexpected emergent behavior in our existing networks as more and more intelligence is added to various systems than a purpose-built self-modifying AI.

jasonkester 16y ago

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 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.

Charuru 16y ago
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.
- JanezStupar 16y ago
  So what you're saying that intense competition between national armies is not the kind of competition that humans are willing to stake almost anything and commit endless resources on? War itself may not increase technological growth. But preparations for war certainly do. And please show me another competition that has yielded lets say 50% of technological advances that various arms races have? Sadly when human develops new kind of tech and is looking for money to get it widespread - the first and deciding question is: "Can it be used as a weapon?" Think of the nuclear bunker gap!
  - deleted 16y ago
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  - toddh 16y ago
    Wasn't low-cost sequencing of human genomes created by the competition generated by an X prize? Maybe we simply aren't harnessing gamification principles properly. Maybe really big games like wars aren't the only way.

iwwr 16y ago

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-fissile and also produces a lot of heat (which is the point, really). Pu-238 poses almost no proliferation risk. Even the radioactivity is in the form of alpha radiation, which needs very little shielding (hardly even penetrating the skin). The only problem with Pu-238 right now is that it's very expensive to produce and also very scarce. If Pu-238 were abundant, it could find many applications and pose very little security risk; building a dirty bomb out of it won't really work (as a matter a fact, neither making one out of Pu-239). In general, our civilization has an irrational fear of nuclear energy. Even more egregious since there is a variant of nuclear technology that's almost completely proliferation-free, namely the thorium cycle.

daniel-cussen 16y ago
Chile is already moving toward building the first thorium nuclear reactors: http://diario.elmercurio.cl/detalle/index.asp?id={183364cc-da29-4d75-9853-5e090eda2d10} http://diario.elmercurio.cl/detalle/index.asp?id={183364cc-d...
wazoox 16y ago
> 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 :)
- Symmetry 16y ago
  Thats actually an urban legend (though one thats often repeated in the media). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/plutonium.html http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/pl... The radiological toxicity of plutonium is _way_ higher than the chemical toxicity.

petervandijck 16y ago

There are some good theories on this in social science; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism and the book "The co-construction of users and technology" http://www.amazon.com/How-Users-Matter-Co-Construction-Technology/dp/0262651092/ http://www.amazon.com/How-Users-Matter-Co-Construction-Techn...

ableal 16y ago

A 17th century attempt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolomeu_de_Gusm%C3%A3o http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolomeu_de_Gusm%C3%A3o

meric 16y ago

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 variety of steam driven devices using his aeolipile; a primitive turbine type steam engine with surprising motive capacity." From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon "Unmanned hot air balloons are popular in Chinese history. Zhuge Liang of the Shu Han kingdom, in the Three Kingdoms era (220–80 AD) used airborne lanterns for military signaling." "In fact, von Braun was engaged in designing and building the V-2, and much more sophisticated rockets, solely because he wanted to achieve the exploration of space; both personally and for the human species." In each example above where technologies were invented / discovered, you can see that these innovations were driven by individuals and their purpose. In the case of the automata and the hot air balloon, both were invented by a leader of their own respective society - "Hero of Alexandria" and "Zhuge Liang" - the chinese military genius. Von Braun wanted to invent rockets for the purpose of space exploration... but his effort was redirected into war and destruction. Comparing to innovations we've made in the past, say, 30 years, you can see the same. Bill Gates commoditized hardware and brought computers onto many desks cheaply. And Steve Jobs... you know the rest. 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.

HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
What you are ignoring is that while the individual is definitely the catalyst for the innovation, the environment is equally important. Considered another way, there are countless people around the world with the intelligence and drive of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but they live in impoverished villages in India and Africa and struggle just to stay alive. They may do better than their neighbors, but without the support of a technologically and financially advanced society, what they can accomplish is severely limited.

varjag 16y ago

The Greeks and Romans were societies of slavery, with very little need to industrial innovation.

simonsarris 16y ago
Oh come now, there was certainly abundant industrial innovation in those soceties. The sawmill (like at Hierapolis), grainmill, shipmill, cranks and connecting rods, roman cranes, the first book (codex) had many advantanges over scrolls... The first recorded (buttress) dams, cements, camel harnesses, foot-powered looms, force pumps, glass blowing, hydraulic mining, hushing (flood mining), reaper, lateen sails. Almost all of these were not toys; they filled a very real need.
- varjag 16y ago
  Some of those where invented there, but, not unlike Hero's turbine, never enjoyed a widespread adoption. A lot of other is non-machinery processes that can't really be easily replaced by manpower alone (sails? dams?) Industrial innovation (as in replacing manpower with machines) was not really catching up in ancient times, mainly because there is little incentive to save on labor if you have a steady supply of slaves. Perhaps the best illustration of social dynamics at play there we have is North vs. South states, pre civil war. Same people, same starting point, but such a dramatic difference.
philwelch 16y ago
In America, the invention of the cotton gin increased, not decreased, the demand for slavery. This is an instance of the Jevons paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

deadmansshoes 16y ago

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?

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>But when did the idea of slowly floating towards your fortified, gun-toting enemy in a giant gas filled balloon seem a good idea? You don't fly in the balloon your soldiers do. That is what makes it as good an idea as trying to climb to the battlements whilst having rocks, hot pitch, arrows and sword blows rain down on one from above. Even if the balloon simply diverts attention from your siege ladders then it might give enough advantage, it could also probably be used at distance to gain information vital to a successful siege - can you starve them out quickly, how strong are the numbers, where are cannon or arsenals located, etc..
- deadmansshoes 16y ago
  "You don't fly in the balloon your soldiers do." Strangely, I wasn't suggesting the Montgolfier brothers were going to take Gibraltar single-handedly. There is a huge difference between climbing a wall with seige ladders where once you get a few men across everyone else can follow, and 2-3 men floating in a wooden basket and trying to land (!) in a fortress. Granted reconnaissance may have been useful, but if after 4 years of seige you haven't worked out your enemy through espoinage and being shot at, a balloon is not going to help.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >Strangely, I wasn't suggesting the Montgolfier brothers were going to take Gibraltar single-handedly. Lol, nor I, I was assuming that creation of one balloon would allow creation of multiple balloons for use in any given battle. I'd imagine the access a balloon gives, with the addition of surprise and maybe a steering fan, to be pretty good. You could send up some test balloons and then send up some huge ones with bombs on the bottom and shoot them down over the target for yourself. Or perhaps a pile of diseased food to a hunger-stricken garrison, or ... You can't readily break down a whole castle with a single trebuchet either.

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elptacek 16y ago

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.

dkarl 16y ago
Engineering requires some coherence of vision. Coherence of vision in society is hard to achieve and probably undesirable -- the best systems of government, in my opinion, are the ones that protect difference and function in spite of it. In other words, if you successfully solve the engineering problem of designing a system of government, the resulting society will not be amenable to social engineering. If society and politics are amenable to engineering, then the system of government is almost certainly poorly designed. In a democratic society you can only achieve coherence through perceived ethnic and cultural uniformity, but that perception is manufactured at great cost to everyone who doesn't fit the imposed national identity.
- nazgulnarsil 16y ago
  only in those traditional forms of governance that are semi-compulsory to one degree or another. free immigration between competing systems of governance allow each unit to have coherence of vision while still allowing people to choose freely about what sort of ideological vision they agree with. This was a genius political invention. The result was called something like the "unified states", but it was destroyed in a civil war and lost to history. I hear books from that civilization survive, but no one reads them.
- elptacek 16y ago

sovande 16y ago

Yeah, well I'm still waiting for my flying car.

gacek 16y ago

Any idea how the air for first baloons was heated?

api 16y ago

"Transhumanists must come to realize that in order to control history, and thus their own destinies, they must leverage their way into a position of control over the ideology, morality and direction of this civilization. To fail to do so at this juncture in time is to accede to the end of our history – not by the practical abolition of death, but rather by its universal application to humankind, and perhaps to all life on earth." The followers of hate, fear, and superstition spend virtually every waking hour attempting to leverage such control. Why not visionaries? But there is a counterpoint too. The ideology of some sectors of the transhumanist/visionary community is uncomfortably reminiscent of superstition itself. I am referring to Ray Kurzweil and his Singularity University cult, and others. It looks very much like a religious movement reminiscent of Scientology or flying saucer contactees in the 1950s. It doesn't strike me as being much more rational than many other superstitious religious movements.

Unseelie 16y ago
If we work on the assumption that the majority of people aren't rational scientists, then harnessing the superstition towards such things as progress and invention rather than conservatism seems a very brilliant move by those persons trying to leverage political discourse. Its likely much easier to convert the followers of hate, fear, and superstition on their terms than to convince them that rational science is better.
- api 16y ago
  You have a point, but what I'd really like to see is something more "meta." First a little background. I had a discussion with a business guru around MIT once about marketing. He related a story (possibly apocryphal) about Larry Ellison of Oracle and how he would run into meetings of Oracle's sales guys in the early days and berate them for not lying enough. "If you don't lie nobody will believe you!" Anyway, this guy was saying that this is exactly true. If you don't lie people won't believe you. I've kind of seen it myself in the business world. I also think that it explains much of what we see in the world with regard to religion, political ideologies, superstition, etc. The problem is that the primate social part of our brain interprets uncertainty, skepticism, doubt, and even caution as signifiers of low primate social status. Huge, gargantuan claims, boldness (even if wrong), and certainty are seen as signifiers of alpha status. Thus a certain-of-themselves idiot or nutjob is of higher social status than a cautious, skeptical, rational person. Salesmen exploit this by intentionally telling audacious lies (of a sort) in order to elevate themselves socially in the perception of potential buyers. People buy from alphas, not betas. What I want to see is a detailed neurological and psychological deconstruction of this. I want to see it hacked, targeted, dismantled. That would be progress. To give an example, a spray-on pheromone that fucked with this subsystem of the brain in some way would be awesome. (Not sure if that's possible since humans might not react this way, but just an example of the sort of thing I'd like to see.)

kjhghj 16y ago

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...

Nugem 16y ago

I came to read about Roman hot air balloons, instead everyone is talking about plutonium and nuclear weapons. Thanks guys, I am probably on a watch list now. Reported.

VladRussian 16y ago

The governmental analysis around 1997-99 concluded that nuclear fusion power woulnd't be cheaper than 4c/kwt (i.e. than coal based electricity) and thus it wouldn't make an economical sense (thus that close to 0 investment in that research - only LLNL's NIF which is deep in petty managerial fights (and laser driven approach isn't really the one what will get it) and Sandia which finally got back to the experiments at the level they left in 99 (though now they use different target which allows for a lot of new articles on plasma behavior (deja vu of Tokamaks, one can spend whole life looking at and describing patterns of flowing water under the bridge), yet that type of target is much worse for the fusion than the type used 10 years ago) . It is easy to imagine an outcome of the battlefield maneuverability analysis by a Rome DOD bureaucrat of horse driven chariot vs. hot air balloon and the resulting decision on the development of the balloon technology.

kujawa 16y ago

"Research into stem cell therapies, cloning, and gene therapy technology have also been greatly slowed by psychosocial concerns." Dear humanity: you are simply too dumb to have nice things.

nradov 16y ago

I wonder what history would have been like if the Roman empire had gunpowder and bronze cannons? Just like with hot air balloons, they had all the necessary basic technology but never thought to put the pieces together.