Study math for long enough and you will likely have cursed Pythagoras’s name, or said “praise be to Pythagoras” if you’re a bit of a fan of triangles.
But while Pythagoras was an important historical figure in the development of mathematics, he did not figure out the equation most associated with him (a2 + b2 = c2). In fact, there is an ancient Babylonian tablet (by the catchy name of IM 67118) which uses the Pythagorean theorem to solve the length of a diagonal inside a rectangle. The tablet, likely used for teaching, dates from 1770 BCE – centuries before Pythagoras was born in around 570 BCE.
literally 90% of human history has gone unrecorded, and what has been recorded usually gets destroyed, ransacked or deliberately destroyed, Caligula’s pleasure barges, Tower of Babel, Library of Alexander. Humans have tried to keep knowledge retained. and some people take that personally.
remember when ISIS was at its peak they were just destroying artifacts like it was a kid in a candy store. And that’s just been in the 35 years I’ve been alive.
when Rome fell it took another century for civilization to rediscover the technology and applied lessons used then.
and im a dumb idiot, I’m just making a broad skim, if you could ask a historian they’d likely tell you all the things humans have lost, purposefully destroyed or forgotten along the way.
It’s even more amazing than that in the case of Rome. To cite just one example, by the time of Constantine I in the mid-300s CE, Rome could support armies totaling 650,000 men. The logistics and organization required to do that are staggering. After the fall of Rome, it would take until the time of Napoleon’s Grand Armee in the early 1800s before numbers like that were fielded again. Even today, there are relatively few countries with an active military force of that size. They weren’t just sitting around either. Rome was always fighting someone. It speaks to the ability of ancient peoples to organize and support truly massive endeavors and sustain them over literal centuries. I mentioned Napoleon’s Grand Armee earlier. It was large, but it only lasted for about 5 years.
So, yes, a ton of technology was lost for a long time, both physical and social/organizational.
And during the second Punic war, when Rome mostly just controlled the Italian boot, Hannibal ravaged the peninsula for a decade but Rome just kept raising more armies to fight them. You could say that war wasn’t very well understood at that time (like Hannibal was very good at battles, but couldn’t turn that dominance into its own advantage), but it’s still crazy to me that Rome just had an enemy army just roaming around, surviving on plunder and foraging, destroying the armies Rome sent to oppose it, but otherwise Rome was still able to function as a state to the point where they could raise, organise, equip (actually, they might have had to equip themselves at this point, I think the Empire providing that was one of the innovations they later started), train, move, and feed armies despite it.
Romes navy during the punic wars was basically a boss that always had another stage you would have to beat
And the final stage came years after the previous one had already beaten Carthage because they had the audacity of continuing to be more successful than Rome (in richness of the city), so they had to go back and completely destroy it and enslave the population that was left after the siege. And by destroy it, I mean they literally burned down the wooden parts and carried off the stones that couldn’t be burnt and forbade anyone to make a new city in that location.
Honestly it’s stuff like that that makes me wonder if I’d rather live in a warlord country like Rome back in the day or live in the boring dystopia that is becoming amarica today
We’ve supposedly just rediscovered how to make Roman concrete in the last few years!
try this year
https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-casts-0106
Time flies so I thought it was longer. Thanks for the reminder!
We are haven’t figured out how to make Damascus Steel
if you’re an idiot, you’re one of the best I’ve seen yet
We’re discovering this fungus that breaks down plastics and I’m wondering… How many times have we independently invented plastic?
With the required manufacturing tools and source materials, probably not a lot of times.
Manufacturing? Like this? [Antikythera Mechanism on Wikipedia] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism)
Or this? Metalworking in pre-Columbian America (Do scroll down to the South America section)
Or just like… waves broadly The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC,…
Small amounts of natural gold have been found in Spanish caves used during the late Paleolithic period, c. 40,000 BC
If that fungus (or the wax worm for that matter) was more widespread at any point in the last 40,000 years, we just wouldn’t know about any use of plastics.
We have phylogenetic techniques to interpolate when certain genes might’ve appeared in evolutionary history. Not surprisingly, the ability to breakdown plastics is quite new.
Not only that, but the very few microorganisms that can degrade some plastics only express those enzymes under extreme pressure, when no other sources of carbon are available. Literally every sugar is a better alternative than plastic, as the process of degrading it is massively inefficient.
Making a usable polymer out of the absolute insane mixture that is crude oil is also way beyond what any human civilization could ever achieve without industrialization.
I get your point of “but we did amazing things in the past! look at the complexity of steel!” but artificial plastic polymers is in another league.
Also my point is not “we were so awesome”, it’s “why do we think every generation before us was a drooling caveman”
We do not. But there’s a massive jump in logic from the idea that we could handle bronze versus we could make plastic.
And once again, the biological portion of your statement makes no sense.
The process is significantly more complex for plastic, not comparable to metalworking
The closest comparable material is variants of wax
oh, hundreds
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I wasn’t being serious.
That’s very hard to tell, and that’s on you.
I’m comfortable with that.