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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

I have a personal opinion on this, which is not scientific, but then again for such a huge question I’m not sure science can give us a very useful answer anyway.

After visiting Pompeii and a number of other ruins in the area, I sense they were close. You can see it in their highly organized society, advanced construction techniques, complex economy, and vast amounts of labor at their disposal. This was an incredibly advanced society. They where clearly riding some S-curves. If the party had lasted a little while longer, a century, 3 centuries, it seems very possible they could have lit the great spark a thousand years early. We can never know, but I absolutely sense that this was an accident of history and it could have gone another way.

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If the Roman Empire had lasted 3 centuries longer, that would have been 55 years after Savery's steam engine.

I suspect they meant the Roman Empire at its organizational peak, ie around the 2nd Century AD.

Yes I was not referring to the Byzantine empire because as culturally interesting as they were, their economy was no match for the complexity of Rome.

It’s not at all obvious to me that the economy of Rome in 1st century A.D. would have been that much more complex than that of Byzantium in 11-12th centuries.

Is there any evidence showing this?

The vast amounts of labor (including slave labor) might have been more of a hindrance than a help. It takes a labor shortage to create an incentive for innovations that increase productivity.

I have read that argument before. And I totally get that Rome as it existed did not have the right conditions for a British industrial revolution, but it did check many boxes and you could play out many what-ifs had it survived a bit longer. What if slave revolts caused labor prices to sky rocket, what if deforestation had continued, what if some other nice use case for steam power has caused an innovation s-curve on that tech, and so on. History is weird and so are humans. It could have been some hot new toy or religious ritual of the spins that did it. Saying it had to be coal mining is pretty baseless.

It also could have even driven more slavery, like the cotton gin did to the antebellum south.

Indeed. Why bother developing engines to power turbines for your ships, when you can just chain up a hundred slaves in the galley and give them oars?

Galley oarsmen in the Roman empire were mostly paid professionals, not slaves. The images you might have seen in cheesy old movies aren't historically accurate.

Roman law and customs are still a thing somehow in Southern Europe.

Roman insulae were pretty close to modern low-med buildings having four or five stories here.

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