Looking at properly aligned buildings I realized school never prepared me into thinking city planner might have been a bronze age job. How come we call mobile phones progress?
> Looking at properly aligned buildings I realized school never prepared me into thinking city planner might have been a bronze age job.
Is related at all to this sentence:
> How come we call mobile phones progress?
Human sophistication and intelligence is not the same a technological advancements.
Progress in fundamental materials science tends to unlock whole new technology paradigms.
You can do city planning with sod and stone. Mobile phones, on the other hand, require a nearly incomprehensible level of materials innovation. It is everything from the battery to conductive touch screen glass to plastic casing to silicon microchip... Not to mention all the science of satellites and rockets and radio waves that make them useful...
By the way, the show "Connections" by James Burke is brilliant. A must-watch for any tech curious nerd.
It doesn't matter if someone has a PhD in steam engine engineering, if they went back in time to the Roman empire there still would be no steam engines because there are only a handful of examples of accidentally good enough steel in the entire world, which you don't even have a way to identify yet other than buying 10000x extra and spending years testing every sample to find the good stuff, not to mention you need even more of that high quality steel just to make the tools required to cut good steel into a capable boiler design.
If you can't bang something together with wood, stone, and dirt, it requires advanced material science and entire industries behind it to produce and be worth the effort. Yeah a steam powered water pump would be useful to the Romans, but not if it took 5,000 men working for years and dumping endless amounts of money into it to find just the right ore source and smelting procedures just to produce a single engine that only replaces the labor of 50 guys with buckets.
> Yeah a steam powered water pump would be useful to the Romans
According to Devereaux it wouldn't be useless for the Romans. They didn't pump water from coal mines, and when they pumped water they'd need to move fuel from somewhere else to feed it into a steam engine. It was not an an easy or a cheap task to do, because they had no railroads.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
Most materials up to the 1900s were readily available in Roman times, though.
The metal of choice for the first Roman steam engines would be slightly expensive copper and they built highways in cobblestone connecting their whole empire so they wouldn't shy away from some forward-thinking investment given a working demo.
The first application for them wouldn't be pumps, either. It would be trivial to have charcoal factories around the roads to quickly carry priority goods and military with even a rudimentary steam engine.
The cobblestone roads could be adapted to tram use with a few thousand guys equipped with standard width sticks and picks.
A random Roman maybe not but a Roman with connections could do it.
Hindu, then Greek then confuscian theologian-philosophers laid the foundations for the idea that their group had left behind simply being “animals” and sought out to distinguish human form (in their specific form) from all other forms of life.
Humans also approach things linearly and it fights intuition that regression is not just possible but the norm.
Heinrich Schliemann was probably the first to connect the myths with tangible proof through archeology in late 19th century. While Lévi-Strauss work was much later and more political and polemical rather than scientific.
If you read the actual Polybius you’ll see that there was no ideas of evolution or that we’re in the same category as other living things