4 ms·

Incredibly interesting. Amazing to think at the very moment Europe was entering the Dark Ages, the Vikings were starting to raid, and Muhammad was having his v

• renewiltord 8mo ago
  The Dark Ages never happened. They had electric lighting and then the sunlight came out.
• nine_k 8mo ago
  Amazing, but it's also terrifying that the Maya civilization then faltered, instead of getting onto the exponential development spiral. The great Roman civilization also faltered, but at least the Byzantium continued to carry some of its achievements. The great Arabian civilization was for some time more advanced than European (which was in the middle of the dark ages), but it also did not stay progressing for too long. There's no guarantee that our current "western civilization" line is not going to falter and decline in a similar way.
  • Scrapemist 8mo ago
    And that’s fine. Another follows after. If we leave them something.
    • mrguyorama 8mo ago
      Part of the problem is that industrialization was achieved by exploiting globs of easily available resources. But we used them all. We haven't left anyone something. It could very well be that we climbed the ladder and burned it behind us.
      • philipallstar 8mo ago
        What do you mean, we haven't left anyone something?
        • rationalist 8mo ago
          I've heard a few people say we've already drilled all of the easy-to-get oil, so the next civilization may not develop using oil. But maybe all that means is they will master some other technology that we did not. It seems like previous civilizations have mastered technology that we cannot figure out.
          • philipallstar 8mo ago
            > It seems like previous civilizations have mastered technology that we cannot figure out. That was true for a while (e.g. in Britain they spent 500 years figuring out what the colonising Romans had done to try and recreate their advances), but I don't think we're now in that situation. The best thing would've been to mostly convert electricity to nuclear in the 1980s, as by now we'd be handing over ultra advanced nuclear designs and low carbon to the future. Now we're just playing catch-up with the 1980s.
      • lyu07282 8mo ago
        Colonialism never really ended it just transitioned into a different form, sometimes even very overtly like parts of africa are still using the french colonial currency union (CFA) for example, the IMF keeps the global south in debt entrapment with structural adjustment programs designed to prevent development. etc. etc. we never really left them alone
        • cpursley 8mo ago
          I'm happy other people are thinking about this. One of the big stories over the fast years that few know about is a number of the French colonies kicking off the shackles. Can they make it on their own or with their new Chinese and Russian "friends"? Guess we'll see.
          • lyu07282 8mo ago
            This platform is 90% just comfortable shitlibs living in the imperial core, so can't expect much. I think BRICS is the best thing that ever happened to the global south, if only to provide a counterbalance to the western 'empire of chaos'. As a Kenyan official put it: "Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture."
        • wahern 8mo ago
          > IMF keeps the global south in debt entrapment with structural adjustment programs designed to prevent development. etc. etc. we never really left them alone Countries invite IMF assistance. If they wanted to be left alone, all they have to do is do nothing. If IMF loans didn't have strings attached, they wouldn't be able to borrow money, as it's those strings which build bond investor confidence. The entire point of IMF assistance is to avoid being cutoff from international borrowing for being horrible credit risks (again). The root cause of national debt problems is primarily government corruption, but also mismanagement, often at the behest of populist politics that excuse economic policy failures by, e.g., scapegoating outside forces. The US isn't immune to this problem, either, it just happens that the US had, albeit intermittently, long enough runs of solid financial management (e.g. Hamilton during the Founding) that it could grow an economic base that could withstand intermittent periods of mismanagement without the entire economy collapsing (yet). Even when a country is dealt a really crappy hand at the outset, it's not irreversible. Haiti is the poster child for crushing debt unfairly imposed by foreign powers, yet the Dominican Republic had the same history, but managed to overcome it. In some instances, interventions blamed for keeping Haiti oppressed were precisely what helped the Dominican Republic flourish. Likewise, nobody hears about the IMF success stories, just the failures; and it's not because the former don't exist or are rare.
      • senkora 8mo ago
        This is part of the civilizational collapse narrative. It is definitely true in a way. I think that how much it would end up mattering depends on how well solar tech would withstand a civilizational collapse. I think that a proto-industrial society with photovoltaics and batteries would be able to bootstrap itself back up to the present state, even without easily exploitable fossil fuels. (I am not an expert in any of this)
        • trollbridge 8mo ago
          How are they going to make pv’s and batteries in the first place?
      • junofan 8mo ago
        Biomass can substitute. You have to defend it, which is difficult if rivals have petroleum. But that wouldn’t be an issue if nobody had petroleum. We haven’t burned the ladder.
  • dzonga 8mo ago
    seems to me only the Chinese have been able to sort of withstand the test of time
    • nine_k 8mo ago
      ...if you ignore their going to utter ruin in 19th and early 20th century.
    • AtlasBarfed 8mo ago
      The Chinese being a continental empire, andin particular bordering the Mongol hordes, have basically been a continuous cycle of growth and collapse for 1000s of years. It can be argued they are headed for yet another collapse.
• lapetitejort 8mo ago
  All of this without pack animals or the wheel.
• graemep 8mo ago
  > Europe was entering the Dark Ages The "dark ages" never happened the way it is imagined in pop-culture. There was a genuine decline at the fringes, which includes Britain which maybe why it was so ingrained in Anglophone culture, but also history written by imperialists like Gibbon who thought the decline of Empires an intrinsically bad and regressive thing. The Eastern Roman Empire went on, the western broke up into successor states. Some things got worse, some things got better, there was progress made (especially for women and people at the bottom like slaves), and the early medieval period laid the foundations for progress later on. > Muhammad was having his visions Is that a bad thing? I know less about the history of that region than some others, but I think you need to look at prior conditions in places such as the Arabian peninsula to assess that.
  • reactordev 8mo ago
    >"Is that a bad thing?" I think they were just setting the Age of Man here. Time framing it in history so others would know when we are talking about. It's fine.
  • helterskelter 8mo ago
    The European Dark Ages was also a narrative largely invented by the Renaissance, which was trying to distinguish itself from what came before. Material wellbeing did improve overall, but that was because a huge portion of the population was killed off from the plague, freeing up tons of resources.
    • WalterBright 8mo ago
      The Dark Ages were a period after the Romans left Europe where there are little to zero records of what went on then.
      • helterskelter 8mo ago
        Depends on who you ask, it's sometimes used to refer to as late as the 1400's.
• philipallstar 8mo ago
  That's how amazing Rome was - doing something far larger 1000 years prior to the Maya.
  • joshmoody24 8mo ago
    The Americas invented agriculture thousands of years after the old world. So by comparison, they were speedrunning civilization. Before getting genocided
• WalterBright 8mo ago
  > something comparable to what the Roman Empire had done Not in sophistication. For examples: The Pantheon - https://www.pantheonroma.com/en/pantheon-history/ https://www.pantheonroma.com/en/pantheon-history/ There are no domes in Mayan architecture. The aquaducts - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct The romans mastered the arch. The Mayans never used them. Roman iron and steel - the Mayans used copper and gold. Roman ships had keels - Mayan ships did not. Cannot sail upwind without keels. Romans used the wheel - Mayans did not. Romans used papyrus for writing, and would send letters around the empire - the Mayans wrote on bark. And so on.
  • gwerbin 8mo ago
    This only makes it even more fascinating. A Bronze Age civilization, contemporaneous with Charlemagne!
    • lobf 8mo ago
      I mean, only because they weren’t outcompeted by an old world civilization yet.
    • adrian_b 8mo ago
      It should be noted that while in general metallurgy was less advanced in America, there also was a domain where it was more advanced than in the rest of the world. There is one metal that has been discovered by the South-American natives, before the contact with Europe, and which was unknown elsewhere: platinum. The Europeans have learned from them about platinum. Moreover, not only the South-Americans had discovered platinum, but they had also developed a technology to make objects of platinum. This is no small achievement, because platinum was impossible to melt or forge with the means available at that time. The South-Americans had worked around this, by inventing a form of powder metallurgy. To make things of platinum, they sintered platinum powder and nuggets with gold. This technology has been lost after the Spanish occupation, so the Europeans have developed techniques for platinum processing only much later, around the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. While platinum itself had been unknown in the rest of the world before the contact with South America, some platinum-group metals had been known, i.e. the natural alloy of osmium with iridium was known in the ancient Egypt, Greece and Roman Empire, in the form of nuggets that were mixed with those of gold in alluvial deposits. However none of the ancient Mediterranean people discovered any method for forging or melting the Os-Ir nuggets, so they were called "adamant", i.e. "untamed" (which has been distorted in the modern "diamond"). This was the original meaning of adamant/diamond. Only after the wars of Alexander the Great in India, the Europeans have learned about what are now called "diamonds", which were then named by the Greeks and Romans "Indian diamonds", to distinguish them from the Os-Ir diamonds. Later, the knowledge about Os-Ir nuggets has been forgotten and the references to them in Hesiod, Platon or Pliny the Elder have been mistranslated until now.