Could any inventions have come sooner?

[CaptainChewbacca]

I wonder how things could have been different if someone had gone a little further, dug a little deeper. Roman steam engines are one example, but what if cloning came about in the 1950's, or if Tesla had realized what he'd done when he created a Laser-effect in 1889? Maybe radar in WWI, or perhaps Issac Newton could discover radioactivity?

This thread is for speculating over the ramifications of early development of some invention or technology, a sort of fun "what if" thread.

[weemadando]

Well, if the Dark Ages didn't happen we could have had an industrial revolution around 1300 CE.

Or, in more radical cases, had the concepts of steam power caught on (Archimedes steam cannon etc), we could have seen some truly bizarre changes.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Well, if the Dark Ages didn't happen we could have had an industrial revolution around 1300 CE.

Or, in more radical cases, had the concepts of steam power caught on (Archimedes steam cannon etc), we could have seen some truly bizarre changes.

Archimedes designed a steam cannon? Do tell.

[Setesh]

A reletivly simple affair, a massive boiler that could create tremendous (by their standards) pressure and a valve connected to a tube packed with whatever ammo they decided on (IIRC he never built a combat sized model just a small demonstraton model) . Hero of Alexandria took the priciples farther and made a simple steam engine. Most of this work was lost until the end of the dark ages, Leo Da Vinci built a better steam cannon based on Archimedes work.

[Ypoknons]

'You'd have to prove that the dark ages actually set back humanity by 500 years. Despite their engineering genius - roads, adqeducts and such, the Romans were not technologically ahead of the Chinese or even the anicent Middle East in many ways (they had good tricks, IMO, but for example the Chinese had had the compass for a while by the turn of the century), and even the Byzantines improved Roman architecture in many ways with their huge domes.

[Ypoknons]

'You'd have to prove that the dark ages actually set back humanity by 500 years. Despite their engineering genius - roads, adqeducts and such, the Romans were not technologically ahead of the Chinese or even the anicent Middle East in many ways (they had good tricks, IMO, but for example the Chinese had had the compass for a while by 0AD), and even the Byzantines improved Roman architecture in many ways with their huge domes.

[weemadando]

The dark ages didn't really set us back. Merely stagnated us.

The big killers:

Great Library being lost.

Crusades and destruction of Muslim libraries.

The several hundred years of the Church saying: thinking is t3h badzors!

[Admiral Valdemar]

I doubt you'll find anyone saying the Dark Ages helped us much either. Had the Roman empire still existed, Europe could have been far more developed and able to further itself than it did in our timeline. Even if the Romans didn't have all the best minds, they assimilated what was best of every other culture from Spanish weaponry to Greek architecture. Instead, we got a collapse that dragged everyone backwards and that is certainly not as good as having a slower progressing, but stable and somewhat advanced society answering to Rome.

[SirNitram]

The loss of the Roman Empire and it's infrastructure and knowledge base, along with the stagnation brought about by the Church and the Dark Ages, crippled technological advancement.

Of course, it would be tricky to speed things up too much, because while the steam engine existed in the Roman Empire, there was no impetus to develop it. Slaves existed, for one thing. But one could engineer situations.

[Anguirus]

I sometimes wonder why it took so long before we had the bicycle. Or the pencil. Good, simple ideas that for some reason didn't come around till the 1800s.

[tharkûn]

The dark ages didn't really set us back. Merely stagnated us.

Doubtful. China stagnated far longer on superior technology, argueably the dark ages took and increased the value of technology (when it finally did emerge) that states were forced to adopt it as they all didn't have the massive manpower of China or Rome to deal with problems otherwise.

Crusades and destruction of Muslim libraries.

Do you have any particular libraries in mind. I don't recall any major losses on that front, at least not more than happened during any of the intrareligious conflicts of the day.

The Crusades actually helped technology along, Crusaders brought back eastern technological advances as well as capturing Islamic libraries in the Iberian crusades intact.

The several hundred years of the Church saying: thinking is t3h badzors!

The Church of the dark ages was the last bastion of science and learning. It was after all the Church that preserved the Latin texts, kept illeteracy at bay, and provided a network for scholar's to publish. Not to mention that their quest to keep the liturgical calender correct basicly brought about the science of astronomy and hence much of modern science.

The Irish Church in particular placed a high value of scholasticism. If it weren't for the Church Europe would have been seriously short on libraries.

I doubt you'll find anyone saying the Dark Ages helped us much either. Had the Roman empire still existed, Europe could have been far more developed and able to further itself than it did in our timeline. Even if the Romans didn't have all the best minds, they assimilated what was best of every other culture from Spanish weaponry to Greek architecture.

Large empires historicly had an impulse to stagnate, particularly once they had well defined borders. China, the Ottomans, the Eastern Romans, various Caliphites, the Mughals, Russia ...

Frankly the great leaps in Roman technology and adaptation occurred in the early half, by the time of collapse there is very little which they are improving upon.

And that is perhaps the one redeeming factor of the Dark Ages; they broke Europe up into many competing states where no ruler could afford to just throw manpower at problems. Likewise resource scarcity meant that rulers had incentives to find new ways to fix old problems. Competition may well be better for technological progress than a large peaceful empire which has little pressing need to innovate.

I don't know if the dark ages were necessary, but they might have been.

Instead, we got a collapse that dragged everyone backwards and that is certainly not as good as having a slower progressing, but stable and somewhat advanced society answering to Rome.

I suggest you look at China. There were very long periods of stability answering to a central authority; however they stagnated far worse than Europe ended up doing (not breaking out of it until the 20th century).

The loss of the Roman Empire and it's infrastructure and knowledge base, along with the stagnation brought about by the Church and the Dark Ages, crippled technological advancement.

What exactly did the Church do to retard technological advancement? In brought about the crusades which resulted in massive technology transfer from east to west, it was the prime source of literacy in the middle ages, it preserved a common tongue so scholars could easily interact (as they did for centuries following) with minimal troubles, and the preserved huge amounts of classical text.



Personally my bet is you could not speed up the adoption of new technologies all that much. Virtually all the ancient advanced tech has one simple problem - it is hideously expensive to initially implement. In many cases it would have been far more cost effective not to implement the technological solution - if you only had the manpower.

[Surlethe]

The Church of the dark ages was the last bastion of science and learning. It was after all the Church that preserved the Latin texts, kept illeteracy at bay, and provided a network for scholar's to publish. Not to mention that their quest to keep the liturgical calender correct basicly brought about the science of astronomy and hence much of modern science.

The Irish Church in particular placed a high value of scholasticism. If it weren't for the Church Europe would have been seriously short on libraries.

I think his point is the Church focused on preserving, rather than expanding; it didn't encourage much in the way of innovation: so, writing and recopying texts is all good and dandy, but other than keeping the liturgical calendar in synch, nobody decided to improve upon the texts they were keeping and copying until the Renaissance.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

While it is correct that the Church did partake in the preservation and accumulation of knowledge, it did also have a dark side to it (which doesn't invalidate what you say). As I have read, it frequently cherry-picked what it wanted to keep (what agreed with doctrine) and didn't bother to keep what didn't, instead buring or rewriting over said information.

The Scholastic movement, according to my western civ book, describes a massive movement to maintain latin and other texts of information, but at the same time, they destroyed many more texts and stagnated development due to doctrinal contradictions. (They aren't specific, though).

[HemlockGrey]

Keep in mind that a lot of modern inventions require equally modern advancements in other areas. You can't just take Archimedes' steam engine or the design for McCormick's Reaper and hand it to 8th century Europeans; you need stuff like advanced metullargy techniques.

[SirNitram]

The loss of the Roman Empire and it's infrastructure and knowledge base, along with the stagnation brought about by the Church and the Dark Ages, crippled technological advancement.

What exactly did the Church do to retard technological advancement? In brought about the crusades which resulted in massive technology transfer from east to west, it was the prime source of literacy in the middle ages, it preserved a common tongue so scholars could easily interact (as they did for centuries following) with minimal troubles, and the preserved huge amounts of classical text.

In what delusional realm do you exist in, Tharkun? Oh yes, the one of apologists.

The transfer of technoloy east to west was occouring during Rome, as was a standardized language.

The stagnation was because the Church was the bastion of learning. They were not pushing for the return of plumbing or indoor heating. They were not pushing for new technologies. The Roman Empire pushed because it was necessary for an Empire.

Religion has always been a stagnator of technological progress because, surprise, they promote faith.

Personally my bet is you could not speed up the adoption of new technologies all that much. Virtually all the ancient advanced tech has one simple problem - it is hideously expensive to initially implement. In many cases it would have been far more cost effective not to implement the technological solution - if you only had the manpower.

Hence why it won't work if money is tied up in Cathedrals and your best thinkers are theologists instead of engineers.

[SirNitram]

Keep in mind that a lot of modern inventions require equally modern advancements in other areas. You can't just take Archimedes' steam engine or the design for McCormick's Reaper and hand it to 8th century Europeans; you need stuff like advanced metullargy techniques.

But the question hasn't been 'Could you build this earlier'. It's been 'could technology have gone quicker', and the answer is yes. It will be balanced, of course, but that doesn't mean it can't go faster.

[weemadando]

Tharkun, you are aware of the fact that a SINGLE library in muslim occupied Spain contained more texts than the entirity of Western Europe at the time? That was ONE library out of their network. And they were always actively searching for more knowledge to document and learn from.

[Gil Hamilton]

The problem with Tharkun's argument is that it only really applies within the Church.

-They preserved knowledge from Rome and Greece, but not terribly much compared to the Muslims. It was only after they started actively looting the Muslims did they start regaining that knowledge. After all, it was originally they who burned the libraries, with early Christians destroying many of the "pagan" libraries, destroying books or overwriting them with prayers.

Tharkun points out the vast amount of knowledge retrieved by the Crusaders, but it begs the obvious question. Why did the Muslims have all that knowledge and the Europeans did not? It's not like the Muslims had a head start. So why, for example, did you have Arab scholars having stuff that actually approached a Scientific Method and men like Al Hazzin actively experimenting and theorizing about optics while Europe lives under the popular conception that we see because our eyes generate light? How is it that Europeans had to resort to capturing such knowledge rather than independantly developing it? The fact is that at the time, Europe completely lacked the mentality and organization for such scientific endeavors.

A good example of that lack of mentality is visual perspective and mathematics. Look at Middle Age art work. You'll notice that the lot of it is flat and that some people are giant while others are tiny. It's not because the artists of the Middle Ages lacked the capacity to accurately render an image, they lacked the mentality. They painted and worked entirely based on religious significance. Art and construction based on reality was beyond their thought process; they couldn't wrap their brains around working in a non-religious fashion. You might go "But Gil, that's art work, what does that have to do with science and mathematics?" Well, a fair bit, actually. No one in Europe was even thinking about working in an Earthly perspective; they were too busy focusing on God. However, this changed in the city-state of Florence. The Florentines, pre-Enlightment, started something that was honest to god revolutionary; Humanism and a powerful middle class, not to mention the beginnings of capitalism. These wealthy businessmen and scholars had a mentality shift. They started thinking "What about me?"

So they started looking around them and saw things that at the time were beyond them, the ruins of Rome. They started looking at the old texts and look to the East and started honestly thinking about the Reality That Is, not from a spiritual Christian angle. People like Brunelleschi, who WOWed Florentines with his perspective painting of the Baptisty, started a shift where they honestly started thinking about the world itself, as the Greeks and Romans did, because the popular idea among them was that the Romans had such glory and that people who weren't royalty or clergy could be worth something. They talked of Republic and scientific investigation and experimentation beyond things like alchemy. It was around this time that the Humanists like Toscano reinvented the idea in the West of a round Earth (even though they underestimated the size of Asia and didn't quite know about North America) and invented modern navigation (impossible in the Dark Ages, they lacked the tools and knowledge to navigate without the North Star, due to having lost the knowledge of the Ptolemaic grid system and perspective). This actually allowed them to circumnavigate Africa again and get access of the Orient. See, beyond where Sierra Leone is currently, there is a point that the Greeks claimed that beyond which was a land of fire and the Arabs claimed that it was a land of endless dung. The Portuguese, however, thought it was a land of endless profit (they were right) and utilized the knowledge and know how to the Humanists to make it happen. They became extraordinarily wealthy as a result.

This and other major developments occured when Europe moved away from the Church. All this was impossible in the Dark Ages and why it was Dark.

-They preserved literacy in Europe... if you were a member of the Clergy. If you were outside of the Clergy, you were practically guaranteed to be completely illiterate and uneducated. This is something that included a great many monarchs. Further more, the Chruch made little to no effort to actually dispense knowledge amongst people outside of the Clergy with the purpose of education. During the Dark Ages, where are the schools and universities? You aren't going to find many during the Middle Ages and what schools did exist were Seminaries (something that continued well into Enlightenment, note that practically all the major universities in America dating pre-Revolution overwhelmingly started out as seminaries).

[fgalkin]

The loss of the Roman Empire and it's infrastructure and knowledge base, along with the stagnation brought about by the Church and the Dark Ages, crippled technological advancement.

Of course, it would be tricky to speed things up too much, because while the steam engine existed in the Roman Empire, there was no impetus to develop it. Slaves existed, for one thing. But one could engineer situations.

What you and the rest are forgetting is that the Roman Empire EXISTED all the way through the Dark Ages, and well into the Middle Ages. Didn't help us that much.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[SirNitram]

The loss of the Roman Empire and it's infrastructure and knowledge base, along with the stagnation brought about by the Church and the Dark Ages, crippled technological advancement.

Of course, it would be tricky to speed things up too much, because while the steam engine existed in the Roman Empire, there was no impetus to develop it. Slaves existed, for one thing. But one could engineer situations.

What you and the rest are forgetting is that the Roman Empire EXISTED all the way through the Dark Ages, and well into the Middle Ages. Didn't help us that much.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Thank you for completely failing to read the second paragraph which explains why the historical Roman Empire did not develop these things. It is so rewarding when even you can't read.

[fgalkin]

The loss of the Roman Empire and it's infrastructure and knowledge base, along with the stagnation brought about by the Church and the Dark Ages, crippled technological advancement.

Of course, it would be tricky to speed things up too much, because while the steam engine existed in the Roman Empire, there was no impetus to develop it. Slaves existed, for one thing. But one could engineer situations.

What you and the rest are forgetting is that the Roman Empire EXISTED all the way through the Dark Ages, and well into the Middle Ages. Didn't help us that much.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Thank you for completely failing to read the second paragraph which explains why the historical Roman Empire did not develop these things. It is so rewarding when even you can't read.

That would be my point. Besides, I was merely responding to all the Roman Empire teh collapzor posts, and yours happened to be the last one I saw.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Enola Straight]

Archimedes was on the verge of "inventing" the mathematical branch of Calculus, but a Roman soldier got pissed off and killed him when Archie gave him lip after the soldier walked in the dirt he was drawing on.

[Edi]

Comparing Chinese stagnation to the European stagnation in the Middle Ages is pointless, because the causes are different. China stagnated due to cultural and political reasons, they isolated themselves from the rest of the world by design.

European stagnation happened because of the breakup of the Roman empire and the migrations of the eastern peoples who contributed to or even caused it. Another big factor was that about right after things had started to settle after that period of unrest, the Black Death wiped out a massive portion of the European populace and fucked up the societal structure and everything else to a point that it took several centuries to recover population levels. Plague epidemics were also one cause that greatly contributed to the weakening of the Roman empire. Not all of these epidemics were necessarily the bubonic plague, but some kind of virulent and deadly pestilence and bubonic plague is the most likely culprit (it was around for a long time before the Black Death epidemic of the 14th century). There were outbreaks every few decades.

It's kind of difficult to maintain a high standard of education (even relatively) when large parts of the population is wiped out at fairly regular intervals. If the learned people die, regaining what was lost will take time. Then add the backward attitudes of the church on top of that, and it's no wonder it took so long for stuff to be discovered.

Edi

[SirNitram]

What you and the rest are forgetting is that the Roman Empire EXISTED all the way through the Dark Ages, and well into the Middle Ages. Didn't help us that much.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Thank you for completely failing to read the second paragraph which explains why the historical Roman Empire did not develop these things. It is so rewarding when even you can't read.

That would be my point. Besides, I was merely responding to all the Roman Empire teh collapzor posts, and yours happened to be the last one I saw.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

The loss of it's infrastructure and knowledge base set back things seriously; it's not enough to have just those, but the sudden loss of them is not going to help any attempt. It's a completely logical argument.

[Dark Hellion]

SirNitram, I suggest that you study into the History of Science a bit more before calling Tharkun a moron on this one. Much of what he said is technically correct, at least as much as you can get in the historical sense (I don't wish for this to become a historiographical argument). Rome had stagnated on its own technology for a long time, and while the Dark Ages toll on social constructs was massive, it placed an increased importance on technical advancement, and brought new methodologies of thought in (such as the first real challenges to Aristotelian thought). Without the Dark Ages modern University education would simply never have developed, and the idea of technology as a helper of life and not a simple amusement could have taken many more centuries to develop.
And stop accusing the Church of being backwards. From about 1000 to 1600 the church was the bastion of scientific thought. Churchmen working within the orthodoxy contributed massively to philosophy, astronomy, chemistry, opitics and other sciences. The Church considered the study of natural phenomena the study of Gods work and put great enphasis on it. They publish a simply massive number of manuscripts and were instrumental in translating ancient Greek and Latin texts. It wasn't until the Counter-Reformation that the Church gained its modern atitudes on science, and it still to this day maintains a more liberal standard than most Protestant religions. As much as I dislike the Church, it is intellectually dishonest to accuse them of holding down science and culture when they literally rebuilt it during the middle ages.