Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/07/67/

by aoeuid • 15 years ago

280 130 15 years ago

fendrak• 15 years ago

"Such rapid and direct application of biomedical advances to humans is now inconceivable, not only in the US, but virtually anywhere in the world."

This is true, but for one very simple reason: at the time of these inventions, there was no other option. If someone needed a heart operation that required stopping the heart, they would die. If someone needed dialysis after kidney failure, they died. Rapid applications come in the face of dire consequences. In these cases, almost anything was better than death.

aoeuid• 15 years ago

The guy who wrote this post used to be president of Alcor (http://alcor.org), one of the two cryonics organizations in the US. Cryonics is in fact certainly a procedure where people will definitely die if they don't get it, particularly because it can only be done after 'legal death'.

Its efficacy can't be established conclusively right now, but it's certainly more likely you'll be revived if you undergo cryopreservation than if you are cremated or buried underground.

But because of various mostly psychosocial factors, practically nobody gets cryopreserved. I think this is the specific example he was trying to point out.

philwelch8• 15 years ago

There's a genuine plausibility difference between inventing new surgical techniques and freezing corpses in liquid nitrogen hoping that future generations will resurrect them. In terms of the high certain burden on the rest of society (in terms of expending resources, denying others the use of one's organs, denying the use of one's remains for medical research or education, etc.) and the very outside chance that one will be successfully and happily resurrected (which is itself the product of several probabilities, many small--the probability that even perfectly preserved corpses can even theoretically be resurrected, the probability that the tissue damage caused in the freezing process can be repaired, the probability that future generations will actually resurrect you rather than put your corpse in a museum or something, and the probability that upon resurrection you will, in fact, be the same person and not suffer extreme brain damage and lifelong mental retardation), cryonics doesn't sound like such a good idea anymore.

lionhearted• 15 years ago

Eliezer Yudkowsky has written about cryonics extensively at LessWrong - if anyone you know is forward-minded about living forever and at risk of passing away soon, you should probably start reading those articles and arguments for cryonics and pass them along.

(Actually, everyone should read it, but I think the state of medicine makes it unlikely that you're preserved if you die from random trauma like a car accident - so it's of more use to someone who has been diagnosed with a fatal disease, or is getting on in years)

dennisgorelik3• 15 years ago

The main reason why practically nobody gets cryopreserved is that Cryonics is a form of scientific scam.

It sells people confidence that their mind can be preserved by freezing it.

http://aidevelopment.blogspot.com/2008/12/cryonics.html

That said, the author seems to be a true believer in Cryonics (however that does not make Cryonics legitimate).

The article has interesting points, but cannot really be trusted, because of multiple outrageous statements.

For example, the author states: "In hindsight, it seems clear that if humanity had decided in 1939 to colonize space, instead of ... war [WW2], we would have ... very likely self-sustaining outposts on the moon and Mars."

As of today, the humanity does not have self-sustaining outposts even in Antarctica. Self-sustaining outposts on Mars are totally unrealistic in the next 100 years. Not only because of technological impossibility, but mostly because of no need for that.

The bottom line: the author is unrealistic dreamer. His ideas might be unusual (which is good), but it's better to be very skeptical and not to trust these ideas by default.

Avshalom• 15 years ago

Except cryonics is pretty much completely backwards of that situation. Heart and kidney machines were invented because we could fix the problem, but we couldn't keep people alive long enough to do it.

Cryonics, assuming the current techniques work, is founded on the fact that we CAN'T currently fix the underlying problem(s).

watchandwait5• 15 years ago

Actually, I think his point is that the U.S. legal system is a lot different now. You can't apply technology that quickly today-- there was no FDA in the 1950s, and no runaway trial bar.

Helianthus16• 15 years ago

Bleh. The moment you start thinking "one of the most powerful and off putting military advantages that could have been deployed, in either Ancient, or Renaissance times, would have been hot air balloons." is the moment you start thinking 'What if sharks had lasers?"

The breathless "and then I thought"s and stupid hypotheticals: "How would the technological arc of the ancient world have been changed if Archimedes, and not Edison, had invented the phonograph?" are just another series of what ifs.

The universe didn't fucking happen that way. Archimedes doesn't have access to those ideas. You can't just wonder what would have happened if people had discovered the internal combustion engine in the bronze age, because that question is meaningless.

nitrogen3• 15 years ago

The entire genre of steampunk is devoted to asking the "What If?" of alternate technological history. Clearly the question is slightly less than meaningless. Understanding the history of technology and why certain things did or did not happen can help us to optimize our societal approach to technology and progress in the future.

Vivtek• 15 years ago

Clearly trains can't go at speeds approaching that of light, so Einstein's Gedankenexperiment is meaningless.

WalterBright2• 15 years ago

The Romans did not have the printing press. The press produced a sharp exponential increase in technological progress.

Without the press, the spread of new ideas and techniques is extremely slow, and there isn't much cross-pollination of technologies. Worse, an awful lot gets forgotten.

smhinsey4• 15 years ago

The more you think about it, the more impressive it is that they maintained such a far-flung and orderly bureaucracy (relatively speaking) without the printing press.

metageek• 15 years ago

What's special about the printing press is that it makes copying cheap; the comparable Roman technology was slavery, which makes labor cheap. (In the short term.)

pbhjpbhj5• 15 years ago

With wax tablets being used it's surprising too if none of the Romans thought to use an impression mechanism¹ to print with.

1 - Perhaps drawing initially on foil, backing with clay, heat and press and then wipe over an "ink" (which could also then be set on to paper). Or maybe simply forming letter shapes which are put together on a board and heating and impressing them in to the wax.

Indeed this brings me to think how easy duplication of clay tablets bearing cuneiform would be – impress a fired/set tablet on to a piece of wet clay, set that as the master and then "potato print" with that in to fresh clay pieces. It couldn’t really be simpler than that – why didn’t the Sumerians have printing presses in 4000BC?.

dwiel• 15 years ago

Just a thought, but paper is a much more information dense medium. Perhaps transportation of the clay tablets was expensive enough to make doing them by hand each time easier than printing them.

000104• 15 years ago

Printing, as a technology for creating duplicate images (eg, with wood blocks), was in use at least a millenium prior to Gutenberg in many societies, including parts of late Rome. Moveable type came much later, and it was Gutenberg's incorporation of this with a whole slew of engineering improvements that led to the printing revolution in Europe.

Gormo• 15 years ago

This is begging the question in a way, though. Why didn't the Romans have the printing press? Like the hot-air balloon, the concept of printing is clear and simple, and the technological prerequisites are minimal - you just need metallurgy, which the Romans had in abundance.

The printing press ended up being developed in a culture that was in many ways less technically sophisticated than the Romans'.

EdiX• 15 years ago

I vaguely remember that this has to do with more with the paper than with printing technology, the paper being very expensive until recently.

gwern2• 15 years ago

> Like the hot-air balloon, the concept of printing is clear and simple, and the technological prerequisites are minimal - you just need metallurgy, which the Romans had in abundance.

More details: the Antithykera Mechanism would seem to imply that the Romans had the metallurgy.

Interestingly, they or their predecessors also may have had the basic idea of block printing or movable type printing. The Phaistos Disc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc) from ancient Crete is a disc of fired clay onto which various symbols have been 'stamped'.

Set the symbols into a frame or carve them into a flat wooden block, and keep using clay as your printing material... Not as good as Chinese paper or Egyptian papyrus, but still better than scribes.

nitrogen3• 15 years ago

The informative first half of the article was fascinating, but it slowly deteriorated from there as I read the argumentative second half. In my view, things took a drastic turn for the worse around this sentence:

Mature genetic engineering, nanotechnology, strong artificial intelligence, and quantum computing, to name but a few, each hold many times the potential for systemic harm to, or destruction of our civilization; and they do so absent the inherent check on their proliferation that was present in the case of nuclear energy...

The suggestion that strong artificial intelligence and quantum computing are more likely destroyers of civilization than nuclear energy seems laughable without further argument. As with nuclear weapons, problems only arise in the application of technology by humans, not in the concepts themselves, and I see far more potential for physical and societal devastation in the application of nuclear weapons than in AI or QC.

Tuna-Fish2• 15 years ago

With nuclear tech, humans have to be the ones pushing the buttons, making pure accidents quite unlikely. If moore's law holds and we make a strong AI, it might theoretically be possible for it to "go FOOM" -- use most of it's thinking power to make itself exponentially smarter, hitting the ultimate physical limits of computing in a relatively short time. If that happens, and the ultimate physical limits of computing are sufficiently far away, the entire human race no longer has any say on it's future -- whatever happens from then on is decided by a singleton entity.

A good overview of the arguments from both sides can be found from the Hanson - Yudkowsky debate on the subject: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Hanson-Yudkowsky_AI-Foom_...

Disclaimer: I have not studied the issue deeply enough to be on either side.

adrianN3• 15 years ago

The Ultimate Physical Limits of Computation:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9908043

nitrogen3• 15 years ago

Even with a rapidly-developing strong AI, though, humans have to give the initial machine the ability to limitlessly acquire resources and alter its own hardware. Despite the likelihood that a highly intelligent AI could easily convince some humans to do its bidding, the resource acquisition limitation gives me some measure of confidence that strong AI will not be the downfall of our civilization.

I would be more concerned about unexpected emergent behavior in our existing networks as more and more intelligence is added to various systems than a purpose-built self-modifying AI.

olalonde• 15 years ago

Even nuclear energy is arguably a net win for humanity despite its destructive power (at least in an utilitarian way). In fact, it is debatable whether the use of the atomic bomb saved more lives than it took away. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings...

jimrandomh• 15 years ago

The inclusion of quantum computing in that list is stupid, but strong AI is a real and very serious danger. I can't really do the topic justice in a quick comment, so here's a link instead: http://singinst.org/upload/artificial-intelligence-risk.pdf

Eliezer2• 15 years ago

I don't know what quantum computing is doing on that list, but a mere glance around you will confirm that small increases in intelligence and brainpower, such as that involved between humans and the LCA of humans and chimps, can have rather large effects. Marvin Minsky once said, "Nuclear weapons are not really dangerous because nuclear weapons are not self-replicating." To this I would add that nanotechnology is not really dangerous because nanotechnology is not smarter than you.

bzbarsky2• 15 years ago

Maybe, and maybe not. Worth at least reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible if you haven't for a counter-argument.

jasonkester• 15 years ago

In hindsight, it seems clear that if humanity had decided in 1939 to colonize space, instead of expending ~$17 trillion and ~74 million human lives on war and destruction, we would have reached the moon in a robust and durable way by no later than the mid-1950s

He kinda gives away the answer to this earlier in the article, while explaining why the cool edge-case technologies the Romans had never took off:

the truth is that all technological advances are dependent upon a complex mix of social, political and environmental factors which we still do not understand, and thus cannot predict

The implication then is that, had WWII not happened, 1950 would have looked a lot like 1939. Instead, the world saw nearly 10 years of rapid technological advances, with nations inventing amazing new things as though their life depended on it.

Plot the rise and fall of the Space Program alongside the Cold War, and you can see the pattern again.

Charuru2• 15 years ago

Are you saying that war increases technological growth? That's crappy pop-history that's largely been discredited. Competition invites advancement, blowing up your competitors does nothing.

JanezStupar3• 15 years ago

So what you're saying that intense competition between national armies is not the kind of competition that humans are willing to stake almost anything and commit endless resources on?

War itself may not increase technological growth. But preparations for war certainly do. And please show me another competition that has yielded lets say 50% of technological advances that various arms races have?

Sadly when human develops new kind of tech and is looking for money to get it widespread - the first and deciding question is: "Can it be used as a weapon?"

Think of the nuclear bunker gap!

masklinn• 15 years ago

> Are you saying that war increases technological growth? That's crappy pop-history that's largely been discredited.

That is not quite entirely true, war -- especially long-term -- results in huge funds being funnelled towards things that can blow up the other guy, which can then move into more peaceful realms. Not to mention the requirements for research safety and grants are often quite different.

Without WWII, would we have operational jets in the early 40s? What about rockets? All of rocket science from the late 40s and early 50s came from WWII germany. Likewise for fission and fusion research, how much longer would it have taken without Los Alamos?

> Competition invites advancement, blowing up your competitors does nothing.

That's crappy pop-history that's largely been discredited. Inventors generally don't need motivation, only funds (of time, of money, of equipment, of relations). And the reason for those funds and where they come from is the lowest of worry, as long as they are provided. Competition is irrelevant to invention and advancement.

btilly• 15 years ago

Are you saying that war increases technological growth? That's crappy pop-history that's largely been discredited

Citation needed.

I can certainly say that without WW II and then the Cold War, Silicon Valley would not have looked anything like it does today. Read everything in http://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-val... and watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo for evidence for that assertion.

mrleinad• 15 years ago

So... isn't war a form of competition that was there and then, previous to the global competitive market of today?

ThomPete• 15 years ago

As far as I remember to have read somewhere.

The Nazi doctors did quite a lot for the advance of the medical field simply because of all the horrible experiments they could do.

herval• 15 years ago

been discredited by who? I still take this as logical and true to many levels... would love to read a reasonable oposite opinion

000104• 15 years ago

You could argue that a great deal of the technological advancement of the later 20th century is a direct result of the CIA's paranoia and inability to correctly assess the real capabilities of the USSR (and the attendant fervor and fear of the public, which enabled the vast level of government expenditure on the Space Program). A content and secure populace would surely have preferred the money to have been spent elsewhere (on, eg, feeding the poor).

What does it mean for technological innovation if the 'complex mix' of factors it depends upon includes the enthusiasm of a propaganda-fueled public? After all, the (relatively) content societies of contemporary northern Europe have never produced anything like the level of innovation seen in Cold War America, despite their unusually high appreciation of scientific rationalism. Uncomfortable thinking...

qw2• 15 years ago

You can't compare the output of a country with over 300 million people with Northern Europe. The money spent on technology alone is probably larger than the combined national budgets of those countries. Of course this will produce more noticeable results, but that doesn't mean that they don't contribute to innovation.

watchandwait5• 15 years ago

Actually if you study the history of LBJ's "Great Society" expansion of the U.S. welfare state, a major argument was that we had to spend more on food, housing, and health care for the aged and poor in order to win the PR war against communism.

Plimsoll• 15 years ago

If I recall right during second world war many jewish scientist emigrated from Germany to America. It was these emigrated scientist, their students and American scientist who played the scientific part of cold war. With so many new scientist moving in and political motivation to beat those communists, it sounds only natural that there was an outburst of technology at that era.

Meanwhile in northern European countries (I'm seeing this mostly in Finland's perspective) had to play nice and humble with the Soviet union it being geologically right next to it. In addition to that Finland had huge amount of war reparations to pay due to losing winter and continuation wars against Soviet Union. Also since Soviet Union was the other big player of that time, with its own space programs and so on, it was only natural that the brightest minds in technological perspective went to Soviet universities and did their possible contributions there (I'm not expert of this matter but I remember reading there was at least some level of brain leakage during that era) Fall of Soviet union wasn't either that good of a change for Nordic countries since Soviet Union was one of our biggest sources of export.

Of course this is all just historical blabbering the real deal being imho the fact that in Nordic countries are good places in average, which means we do well in global rankings like PISA tests, but for technological innovation and economical rise it usually is the right side of gaussian curve that is needed. Also in eyes of Finn (I really don't know how these things are in states) due to more or less powerful labor movement and being "Nordic welfare state" (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nordic_welfar...) we have high labor expenses for employer. Add this to seemingly high bureaucracy to start a company, I don't see it that odd that we don't have any startup culture and every one just goes to work for Nokia (this is of course just extrapolation as there are interesting startups here and there but I feel the general culture isn't that motivating towards innovation).

api3• 15 years ago

The average person is only motivated by hate, fear, and superstition. That is the main constraining factor.

gaius• 15 years ago

The average person just wants to survive. The problem comes when they believe, whether it is true or not is irrelevant, that their survival requires someone else to die.

iwwr• 15 years ago

Fascinating article, with just one quip I'd have:

Plutonium-238, the material in nuclear batteries is very different from Plutonium-239, a material for nuclear weapons. There is great stigma against Plutonium, but mainly because of Pu-239. If you remember some of the news around the launch of the Cassini probe, there was opposition because of the Pu-238 pellet powering the RTG.

Compared to Pu-239, Pu-238 is non-fissile and also produces a lot of heat (which is the point, really). Pu-238 poses almost no proliferation risk. Even the radioactivity is in the form of alpha radiation, which needs very little shielding (hardly even penetrating the skin). The only problem with Pu-238 right now is that it's very expensive to produce and also very scarce. If Pu-238 were abundant, it could find many applications and pose very little security risk; building a dirty bomb out of it won't really work (as a matter a fact, neither making one out of Pu-239).

In general, our civilization has an irrational fear of nuclear energy. Even more egregious since there is a variant of nuclear technology that's almost completely proliferation-free, namely the thorium cycle.

daniel-cussen• 15 years ago

Chile is already moving toward building the first thorium nuclear reactors: http://diario.elmercurio.cl/detalle/index.asp?id={183364cc-d...

wazoox4• 15 years ago

> building a dirty bomb out of it won't really work (as a matter a fact, neither making one out of Pu-239).

Plutonium is chemically extremely toxic. Even throwing some powdered plutonium in air somewhere would cause serious harm.

Edit : In fact it's not :)

Symmetry2• 15 years ago

Thats actually an urban legend (though one thats often repeated in the media). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/pl...

The radiological toxicity of plutonium is _way_ higher than the chemical toxicity.

petervandijck• 15 years ago

There are some good theories on this in social science; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism and the book "The co-construction of users and technology" http://www.amazon.com/How-Users-Matter-Co-Construction-Techn...

ableal• 15 years ago

A 17th century attempt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolomeu_de_Gusm%C3%A3o

meric• 15 years ago

The article mentioned:

"The Montgolfier brothers came up with the idea while lying beside a fire and watching hot ash and embers float upwards – and they thought about this in a military context – namely how to take Gibraltar from the British."

And later

"However, Hero of Alexandria (10–70 CE) was well known for constructing complex automata, had powered a pipe organ using his wind-wheel (windmill) and developed a variety of steam driven devices using his aeolipile; a primitive turbine type steam engine with surprising motive capacity."

From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon "Unmanned hot air balloons are popular in Chinese history. Zhuge Liang of the Shu Han kingdom, in the Three Kingdoms era (220–80 AD) used airborne lanterns for military signaling."

"In fact, von Braun was engaged in designing and building the V-2, and much more sophisticated rockets, solely because he wanted to achieve the exploration of space; both personally and for the human species."

In each example above where technologies were invented / discovered, you can see that these innovations were driven by individuals and their purpose. In the case of the automata and the hot air balloon, both were invented by a leader of their own respective society - "Hero of Alexandria" and "Zhuge Liang" - the chinese military genius. Von Braun wanted to invent rockets for the purpose of space exploration... but his effort was redirected into war and destruction.

Comparing to innovations we've made in the past, say, 30 years, you can see the same. Bill Gates commoditized hardware and brought computers onto many desks cheaply. And Steve Jobs... you know the rest.

Each story of humans' invention seems to just as much be a story of the individual who led its discovery, rather than the environment surrounding him/her, and when the environment is taking into account, it seems it does more to stifle innovation than to foster it.

HeyLaughingBoy• 15 years ago

What you are ignoring is that while the individual is definitely the catalyst for the innovation, the environment is equally important.

Considered another way, there are countless people around the world with the intelligence and drive of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but they live in impoverished villages in India and Africa and struggle just to stay alive. They may do better than their neighbors, but without the support of a technologically and financially advanced society, what they can accomplish is severely limited.

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

Even people living in affluent societies may be steered from the path we imagine them to take. Bill Gates was very lucky to have access to a computer at an early age. If he'd lived in, say, San Antonio, would have have achieved what he did?

wazoox4• 15 years ago

> Each story of humans' invention seems to just as much be a story of the individual who led its discovery, rather than the environment surrounding him/her, and when the environment is taking into account, it seems it does more to stifle innovation than to foster it.

We can argue that the WWII may not have taken place without Hitler, however the personal computer revolution would have occurred with Commodore instead of Apple, and CP/M instead of MS-DOS, because most inventions essentially "are breathed with air" when their time's arrived.

philwelch8• 15 years ago

You'd also need to stop Mussolini, Stalin, and Hirohito to stop a world war from breaking out at the time. At minimum.

varjag2• 15 years ago

The Greeks and Romans were societies of slavery, with very little need to industrial innovation.

simonsarris• 15 years ago

Oh come now, there was certainly abundant industrial innovation in those soceties.

The sawmill (like at Hierapolis), grainmill, shipmill, cranks and connecting rods, roman cranes, the first book (codex) had many advantanges over scrolls...

The first recorded (buttress) dams, cements, camel harnesses, foot-powered looms, force pumps, glass blowing, hydraulic mining, hushing (flood mining), reaper, lateen sails.

Almost all of these were not toys; they filled a very real need.

varjag2• 15 years ago

Some of those where invented there, but, not unlike Hero's turbine, never enjoyed a widespread adoption. A lot of other is non-machinery processes that can't really be easily replaced by manpower alone (sails? dams?)

Industrial innovation (as in replacing manpower with machines) was not really catching up in ancient times, mainly because there is little incentive to save on labor if you have a steady supply of slaves.

Perhaps the best illustration of social dynamics at play there we have is North vs. South states, pre civil war. Same people, same starting point, but such a dramatic difference.

philwelch8• 15 years ago

In America, the invention of the cotton gin increased, not decreased, the demand for slavery. This is an instance of the Jevons paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

deadmansshoes2• 15 years ago

Kudos to the Montgolfier for inventing the hot air balloon based on a need to invade a strongly held fortress.

But when did the idea of slowly floating towards your fortified, gun-toting enemy in a giant gas filled balloon seem a good idea?

pbhjpbhj5• 15 years ago

>But when did the idea of slowly floating towards your fortified, gun-toting enemy in a giant gas filled balloon seem a good idea?

You don't fly in the balloon your soldiers do. That is what makes it as good an idea as trying to climb to the battlements whilst having rocks, hot pitch, arrows and sword blows rain down on one from above.

Even if the balloon simply diverts attention from your siege ladders then it might give enough advantage, it could also probably be used at distance to gain information vital to a successful siege - can you starve them out quickly, how strong are the numbers, where are cannon or arsenals located, etc..

deadmansshoes2• 15 years ago

"You don't fly in the balloon your soldiers do."

Strangely, I wasn't suggesting the Montgolfier brothers were going to take Gibraltar single-handedly.

There is a huge difference between climbing a wall with seige ladders where once you get a few men across everyone else can follow, and 2-3 men floating in a wooden basket and trying to land (!) in a fortress.

Granted reconnaissance may have been useful, but if after 4 years of seige you haven't worked out your enemy through espoinage and being shot at, a balloon is not going to help.

elwin• 15 years ago

The Montgolfier balloons could reach altitudes of 2000 meters, which would have been impossible to hit with 18th century muskets or cannon. Landing would have been dangerous, of course.

gohat• 15 years ago

I don't think this question is as profound as it seems. Basically, it is asking: If a civilization had access to the resources to create a technology, why didn't they?

Take perspective, or drawing things so that they look real. Closer things are bigger, further things smaller. Until it was invented around the Renaisance (1400/1500), all art was flat and kinda clumpy. Why couldn't people draw nice things until then?

That's what new technology is. A profound change in how we use resources.

jodrellblank• 15 years ago

I don't think this question is as profound as it seems. Basically, it is asking: If a civilization had access to the resources to create a technology, why didn't they?

But it is a profound question. The turnaround version of it is: what do we have the resources to create, but aren't doing? What aren't we looking for? What aren't we seeing?

tlear• 15 years ago

Best example of a technology that we have not followed is Nuclear powered space flight project Orion. One such launch would lift more material into orbit then all the rockets we launched so far. Flight to Mars would be trivial, staying on it would not but thats another issue

elptacek2• 15 years ago

There's a somewhat negative cast towards the end of this article where the author discusses "the fundamental inability of most humans to handle such technology responsibly" and how "psychosocial factors" retard progress. And then you have some dire, terminal outlook for humanity. This reads like correspondence bias to me. At first, it seemed contradictory to the first paragraphs of the article, which seemed to be leading up to, "this is another engineering problem and we must analyze it for a solution before we can continue to progress technologically." So I reread the whole thing... and it seems that was just my own bias inserting itself between the lines.

And I still don't understand why the political components of the dynamics of social and technological progress cannot be approached as an engineering problem.

dkarl• 15 years ago

Engineering requires some coherence of vision. Coherence of vision in society is hard to achieve and probably undesirable -- the best systems of government, in my opinion, are the ones that protect difference and function in spite of it. In other words, if you successfully solve the engineering problem of designing a system of government, the resulting society will not be amenable to social engineering. If society and politics are amenable to engineering, then the system of government is almost certainly poorly designed. In a democratic society you can only achieve coherence through perceived ethnic and cultural uniformity, but that perception is manufactured at great cost to everyone who doesn't fit the imposed national identity.

nazgulnarsil4• 15 years ago

only in those traditional forms of governance that are semi-compulsory to one degree or another. free immigration between competing systems of governance allow each unit to have coherence of vision while still allowing people to choose freely about what sort of ideological vision they agree with.

This was a genius political invention. The result was called something like the "unified states", but it was destroyed in a civil war and lost to history. I hear books from that civilization survive, but no one reads them.

elptacek2• 15 years ago

All governments appear historically do have been designed by a small group of people with coherence of vision. All of these systems, based on idealism, fail to account for the complex requirements of administrating a functional society. As a result, our "democracy" is incessantly patching itself -- ask any law student. Despite being currently the most popular ideal, democracy is a terrible design. The result is that countries like the United States are definitionally socialist, despite what we prefer to beleive.

I have no criticisms of any form of government. Criticisms have the net effect of polarizing people, which is counterproductive at best. Unfortunately, any discussion of the political component of any dynamic is perceived as criticism, if not an outright attack. The intensity of the reaction to perceived criticism varies greatly from culture to culture. This is horribly unfortunate, because it discourages critical thinking and contributes to these 'psychosocial factors' that retard progress.

Of course, the author assumes that his concept of progress is what is desired. There are a thousand ways one could pick this article apart.

gacek• 15 years ago

Any idea how the air for first baloons was heated?

api3• 15 years ago

"Transhumanists must come to realize that in order to control history, and thus their own destinies, they must leverage their way into a position of control over the ideology, morality and direction of this civilization. To fail to do so at this juncture in time is to accede to the end of our history – not by the practical abolition of death, but rather by its universal application to humankind, and perhaps to all life on earth."

The followers of hate, fear, and superstition spend virtually every waking hour attempting to leverage such control. Why not visionaries?

But there is a counterpoint too. The ideology of some sectors of the transhumanist/visionary community is uncomfortably reminiscent of superstition itself. I am referring to Ray Kurzweil and his Singularity University cult, and others. It looks very much like a religious movement reminiscent of Scientology or flying saucer contactees in the 1950s. It doesn't strike me as being much more rational than many other superstitious religious movements.

Unseelie• 15 years ago

If we work on the assumption that the majority of people aren't rational scientists, then harnessing the superstition towards such things as progress and invention rather than conservatism seems a very brilliant move by those persons trying to leverage political discourse. Its likely much easier to convert the followers of hate, fear, and superstition on their terms than to convince them that rational science is better.

api3• 15 years ago

You have a point, but what I'd really like to see is something more "meta."

First a little background.

I had a discussion with a business guru around MIT once about marketing. He related a story (possibly apocryphal) about Larry Ellison of Oracle and how he would run into meetings of Oracle's sales guys in the early days and berate them for not lying enough. "If you don't lie nobody will believe you!"

Anyway, this guy was saying that this is exactly true. If you don't lie people won't believe you.

I've kind of seen it myself in the business world. I also think that it explains much of what we see in the world with regard to religion, political ideologies, superstition, etc.

The problem is that the primate social part of our brain interprets uncertainty, skepticism, doubt, and even caution as signifiers of low primate social status. Huge, gargantuan claims, boldness (even if wrong), and certainty are seen as signifiers of alpha status.

Thus a certain-of-themselves idiot or nutjob is of higher social status than a cautious, skeptical, rational person.

Salesmen exploit this by intentionally telling audacious lies (of a sort) in order to elevate themselves socially in the perception of potential buyers. People buy from alphas, not betas.

What I want to see is a detailed neurological and psychological deconstruction of this. I want to see it hacked, targeted, dismantled. That would be progress.

To give an example, a spray-on pheromone that fucked with this subsystem of the brain in some way would be awesome. (Not sure if that's possible since humans might not react this way, but just an example of the sort of thing I'd like to see.)

kjhghj• 15 years ago

The problem is their numbering system which makes it difficult to do countdowns.

ex, eye-ex, eye-eye-ex, ve-eye-eye-eye, ve-eye-eye, ve-eye ve, eye-ve, eye-eye-eye, eye-eye, eye

now what's next ? What's less than eye?

don't know - we have to wait for somebody to invent zero...

sovande• 15 years ago

Yeah, well I'm still waiting for my flying car.

Nugem• 15 years ago

I came to read about Roman hot air balloons, instead everyone is talking about plutonium and nuclear weapons. Thanks guys, I am probably on a watch list now.

Reported.

VladRussian• 15 years ago

The governmental analysis around 1997-99 concluded that nuclear fusion power woulnd't be cheaper than 4c/kwt (i.e. than coal based electricity) and thus it wouldn't make an economical sense (thus that close to 0 investment in that research - only LLNL's NIF which is deep in petty managerial fights (and laser driven approach isn't really the one what will get it) and Sandia which finally got back to the experiments at the level they left in 99 (though now they use different target which allows for a lot of new articles on plasma behavior (deja vu of Tokamaks, one can spend whole life looking at and describing patterns of flowing water under the bridge), yet that type of target is much worse for the fusion than the type used 10 years ago) .

It is easy to imagine an outcome of the battlefield maneuverability analysis by a Rome DOD bureaucrat of horse driven chariot vs. hot air balloon and the resulting decision on the development of the balloon technology.

kujawa• 15 years ago

"Research into stem cell therapies, cloning, and gene therapy technology have also been greatly slowed by psychosocial concerns."

Dear humanity: you are simply too dumb to have nice things.

nradov• 15 years ago

I wonder what history would have been like if the Roman empire had gunpowder and bronze cannons? Just like with hot air balloons, they had all the necessary basic technology but never thought to put the pieces together.

Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

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