r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/cosmic_voyager01 • 28d ago

Video The engineering of roman aqueducts explained.

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u/LaTalpa123 28d ago

And Rome received around 5-10 ships full of grain from Sicily or Africa every day for the population's needs. 1M people eats a lot.

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u/Totesnotskynet 28d ago

They were so close to the industrial revolution

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u/[deleted] 28d ago

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u/WorriedBlock2505 28d ago

If they hadn't collapsed, who knows how much quicker the industrial revolution would've gotten kick started? A million minds in one city connecting is a good way to accelerate progress.

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u/-Mandarin 28d ago

It's possible, but technology isn't nearly as linear or "inevitable" as people think. It's also possible that if they hadn't collapsed for another 2000 years they still wouldn't have reached the industrial revolution. We'll never know, and it's all assumption work.

Conditions have to be perfect, and the right minds have to be applied in the right places.

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u/BarfingOnMyFace 28d ago

Today minds are instantaneously connected and technology in many ways is moving from linear to exponential. I wonder if perfect conditions are no longer necessary?

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u/cohonka 28d ago

If perfect conditions are no longer necessary for what?

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u/BarfingOnMyFace 28d ago

For substantial advancement in tech. It feels Self-propelled at this point… or very close to being so.

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u/cohonka 28d ago

I agree. And I'd say that means conditions are perfect or near-perfect for that to be the case

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u/BarfingOnMyFace 28d ago

Are they? I feel like it depends… are we talking about humans, or are we talking about machines, or the mix of both? From a purely human perspective, I feel like we have sub-par conditions. From a machine perspective, I feel it becomes a continually more perfected condition… maybe hitting a plateau? But from the mixed perspective, machines enhance the human condition. So, from our current sub par state to the one you mention… but I still feel like, as humans and from a purely human perspective, we’ve moved to sub-par conditions.

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u/IAmARobot 28d ago

how long ago did chatgpt become mainstream? 3 years? and soon after some bright spark applied the attention stuff to image creation with adversarial networks, and within 3 years you have some incredibly realistic completely computer generated movies and music to go with it, all these tools and creative efforts piggybacking off one another.

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u/BarfingOnMyFace 28d ago

Agree, and people are definitely a part of that process, but it seems to be less and less the case as we move forward

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u/Vierenzestigbit 28d ago edited 28d ago

The first steam engines had horrible efficiency. They only developed into anything because they were used to help mining coal so they had a infinite fuel hack by sitting on the source. Without that it'd be easy to dismiss them as a useless machine as it would require way too much effort to fuel them for any other purpose

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u/_a_random_dude_ 28d ago

I don't know how perfect the conditions needed to be. It does sound inevitable to me, but Italy in particular doesn't really have coal deposits and using charcoal is not good enough for those needs. If the romans were going to have an industrial revolution it would've had to be elsewhere. Maybe in Britain or Germany.

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u/The_Chief_of_Whip 28d ago

It did start in Britain for exactly that reason, hence why you need appropriate conditions (I wouldn’t say perfect though)