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Comment by zouhair | Hacker News Reader

He did it though. Assuming that anyone else could have done it or would have done is a bit presumptuous.

Look at the history of sound recording[0] for example. You can see that the technology that made it possible existed for years and years before anyone attempted such a feat. Now imagine if the first one who decided to record audio never done it would you think that we will be where we are now because "For sure someone would have done it" argument? I highly doubt that.

What bugs me though is what are the things that could exist right now but are not because someone still didn't think about them.

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>>Now imagine if the first one who decided to record audio never done it would you think that we will be where we are now because "For sure someone would have done it" argument? I highly doubt that.

Reminds me of Hero's engine [1]. Had a single person decided to build a working industrial steam engine back then, then it is possible that the industrial revolution could've happened two thousand years ago.

I believe the technology to build it was there, nobody had the imagination to see the potential for this though.

Humanity missed its opportunity back then, thankfully we had another chance almost 1800 hundred years latter and this time there were people that seized the opportunity [2],[3]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine

Considering how fragmented the pre-modern historical record is and how little attention is paid to technology in most of the sources we do have, it's quite possible that someone did build a Newcomen style engine 2000 years ago, it could even have happened many times.

However, it was probably only worth using one once labor costs reached a certain threshold. e.g. if you were an ancient roman landlord with abundant slave labor, why would you go to the trouble and expense of building steam engines to remove water from your mines rather than just having some workers work the pumps?

Moreover a Newcomen engine was so inefficient that it was really only usable when sited right at a coal mine, and in ancient times there were plenty of surface coal sites that didn't require deep mines (and thus pumps).

It's hard to imagine someone leaping straight to a Watt engine, especially given the metallurgy required.

I think that people who are engineers or fascinated with engineering frequently dismiss or belittle economic and social context, and the interrelation of any new technology with all the other technology in the world. The idea of a steam engine producing the industrial revolution 2000 years ahead of time strikes me as incredible as the idea of producing a human from some DNA in a petri dish.

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