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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr maps From 13th Century Europe are scarily accurate, use Mercator style projection and have no obvious antecedents

The level of sophistication of science in medieval Europe may be way ahead of what we assume (have we even tried to measure it?).

Cartography may well have been leap frogged by one forgotten expedition but things like the Antekythera mechanism keep pointing to unsung genius and strong civilisation that we just assume did not exist - what if we were judged not by Feynmann but by Trump in 1000 years time?

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> The level of sophistication of science in medieval Europe may be way ahead of what we assume (have we even tried to measure it?).

I think he's not gesturing towards medieval Europe, but Rome. There was one empire which was extremely interested in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and England, and was bound together by ship, put a lot of effort into improving travel and logistics and measuring distances, much of which's science & math has been lost (leading to regular surprises like the Archimedes palimpsests and the Antikythera mechanism), whose maps could have lasted 800 years or so to be rediscovered by medieval Italians.

> Cartography may well have been leap frogged by one forgotten expedition but things like the Antekythera mechanism keep pointing to unsung genius and strong civilisation that we just assume did not exist - what if we were judged not by Feynmann but by Trump in 1000 years time?

I agree with your first point, that we seem to be missing a lot of information and that early civilizations may have been more advanced than we suspect, in some ways. But I've re-read the second part a few times and I still don't know what you're getting at (beyond trying to make an "amirite?" political comment). Being judged by "Trump" means they would think we incredibly advanced because "Trump is stupid and would think we're amazing" or that we'd be judged as stupid because "Trump is stupid and wouldn't see what we had"? Likewise being judged by "Feynman" would cause us to be viewed as stupid because he's so smart or us as smart because he'd figured out how smart we are? Your point might be more effective if you termed it more concretely, instead of trying to relate it via two figures who exist in different spheres of human endeavours.

The parent was trying refer to 'judged by the achievements of' X.

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