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 Haighus wrote:

Antiseptics and a better understanding of why soap is important would maybe be a better option. The Romans had the plumbing and industry to support this if they wanted to.

Though on that note, not making the plumbing out of lead would've been useful advice for them.

While certainly not a great idea, lead pipes are far less of an issue than using it as a damn sweetener.

Voss wrote:

 Haighus wrote:

Antiseptics and a better understanding of why soap is important would maybe be a better option. The Romans had the plumbing and industry to support this if they wanted to.

Though on that note, not making the plumbing out of lead would've been useful advice for them.

Given that I saw an article recently about the continued use of legacy lead piping in large areas of the US, because there’s no (or lax) regulation on the concentration of lead in public drinking water, I’d be careful about pointing fingers in that regard!

Found it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67585011

Voss wrote:

 Haighus wrote:

Antiseptics and a better understanding of why soap is important would maybe be a better option. The Romans had the plumbing and industry to support this if they wanted to.

Though on that note, not making the plumbing out of lead would've been useful advice for them.

I read somewhere that Romans were aware that lead was unhealthy, but they didn't have any other options to line the pipes with.
Don't know how that squares with using it as a sweetener; perhaps they found out it's bad afterwards.

People do lots of things they know are bad for them in the long run for short term effects. Look at the use of arsenic as make up.

I mean just look even at today with smoking and drinking, health is sacrificed pretty easily for the sake of getting a hit or buzz of some kind.

I avoided addictive substances because they sap the choice out of the situation. Most people who smoke start before the age of 18 (when they are not legally thought to be competent to make that choice) and are then chemically and psychologically addicted. Alcohol less so but smoking is often considered a paediatric epidemic. It just takes the next 50 years to actually disable and/or kill you.

It isn't an accident either, tobacco companies have worked very hard to get kids interested in their products, most recently in vapes.

We already have "quit vaping" ad campaigns now.

 Overread wrote:
We already have "quit vaping" ad campaigns now.

Having just taken delivery of this month’s vape capsules? Rightly so there should be quit vaping campaigns. And yes, they are targetting children.

Remember those cola flavour ice poles from when you were a kid? Cola flavour vapes taste exactly the same.

Tabs at least smell and taste rank. But vapes are sweet, and come in wider varieties.

Sure, vaping is better for me than tabs, at least so far as anyone is aware (they’ve not been around long enough for long term study). But it’s still an addiction to a pretty pointless drug.

I mean, booze gets me tiddly and can genuinely help one to unwind. And it’s pretty sociable when you’re out for food and drinks with friends. Heroine, Coke, MDMA all have tangible effects on your brain chemistry and make you feel good until the comedown, and a need to constantly increase your dose to chase the high.

But nicotine? Well, once addicted it makes you an intolerable anus when you don’t get it. But it doesn’t actually do anything.

The UK government is (was? It’s election year, so who knows) looking at banning flavoured vapes. And I’m absolutely in favour of that. The addiction is bad enough without adding fruity tasty flavours.

Yeah Vaping is big business and I can see a good many big smoking firms are pushing it and getting behind it because they can see that traditional smoking is being pushed out more and more and Vaping got an early free pass because it was one of the big "help you quit smoking" methods.

So the quit-vaping has a big uphill battle to fight to get there. I've also heard stories that some kids end up buying illegal vaping flavours which are like drugs - not overseen nor approved and can include nastier chemicals than standard.



I could certainly see a ban on flavoured vapes being a big help in cutting its popularity dramatically.

Cool. I've had limited opportunity to keep up with this thread, and its super-interesting to see where its led so far

Focus has definitely been on the romans due to my poor labelling. Are there any fundamental differences in how the Romans could have used the below compared to other early civilizations from elsewhere in the world?

There are some interesting groupings turning up.

Engineering based:
- Steam power
- Metallurgy (independently, and as part of other things like steam power)
- Balloons!
- Electricity
- Improved sail/ship design
- Solar powered calculator... (implicitly including electricity, microprocessors and LCD screens, which might be a bit of a stretch to maintain a logistics train for )
- Black powder
- Industrial metal production

Public health:
- Antibiotics
- Antiseptics/germ theory
- Safe water supplies
- Chemical safety in food and personal items (I would also add that things like asbestos have always been known to be hazardous, but they were used anyway as their benefits outweighed the perception of hazard at the time)

Communications/logistics:
- Semaphore
- Rail travel

Theory-based improvements:
- Scientific method
- Calculus
- Economic theory
- Abolishment of slavery

Not much on agriculture I note. I wonder if thats a symptom of the specialities and leanings of Dakkaites

I would therefore maybe add crop rotation (unless that was already known in antiquity and just rediscovered in the 17th century) and nitrogen fixing theory as a prelude to discovering synthetic or industrial production of fertilisers. Even in a slave owning society this should lead back to less effort required to feed the populace and therefore more people can spend more of the time thinking about things. There is even potential that the lower labour needs reduces the need to constantly source slaves, leading to pressure to stop the trade entirely.

A lot of the engineering examples above kicked in with the industrial revolution that was in turn fed by the agricultural revolution.

Definately agree with the possibility of knowledge being held secret and not being available to develop through group effort, so I will modify my OP conceit to consider this is effectively the development of a technical university intended to train successive generations of antiquitans.

The agriculture thing might be because we're all techy nerds, but as far as I know the Romans had a pretty good handle on agricultural productivity (certainly for the time), so I think it's just lower down the priority list.

 Jadenim wrote:
The agriculture thing might be because we're all techy nerds, but as far as I know the Romans had a pretty good handle on agricultural productivity (certainly for the time), so I think it's just lower down the priority list.

Ehh, still pre americas and therefore an improvement in agriculture wouldn't hurt.

Also slave based economy that morved into serf based economy isn't great for an empire, far too many hands on plows.

Improving their agriculture could actually be a bad idea if you don't also add other means of industrialization. Lots of unemployed former farm workers flooding the cities without any jobs for them to fill would be a recipe for disaster.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Improving their agriculture could actually be a bad idea if you don't also add other means of industrialization. Lots of unemployed former farm workers flooding the cities without any jobs for them to fill would be a recipe for disaster.

I don't think this would be a huge issue for the Romans.

Firstly, most of the agricultural labour (at least in the heartlands) was property, so in the worst case scenario they could just sell all their slaves to the gladiator pits.

Secondly, the Roman empire would probably try and recruit excess labourers into the military and use them on civil engineering projects. Very FDR when I think about it...

 Grey Templar wrote:
Improving their agriculture could actually be a bad idea if you don't also add other means of industrialization. Lots of unemployed former farm workers flooding the cities without any jobs for them to fill would be a recipe for disaster.

Well, the plagues took care of that beforehand considering the collapse of the WRE.

 Haighus wrote:

I don't think this would be a huge issue for the Romans.

Firstly, most of the agricultural labour (at least in the heartlands) was property, so in the worst case scenario they could just sell all their slaves to the gladiator pits.

Secondly, the Roman empire would probably try and recruit excess labourers into the military and use them on civil engineering projects. Very FDR when I think about it...

It would definitely be an issue for the empire, which was rich but constantly battling the weight of the size of its own economy. A big reason why they started paying frontier tribes to do the task of defending their borders for them was because they couldn't afford to do it themselves.

A big issue with a lot of more modern farming practice is that its focused on high yield high intensity farming. It relies on a whole bunch of other technologies to actually work in a sustainable way for longer than a few years. In fact in some areas (tropical) western style farming doesn't even work long term at all.

Transport would be a huge bottleneck. Sure you can make loads more food, but you still have to move it around to make it effective.

That said a lot of the lower densities of farming workers is based on the use of machinery. So if you gave them enough that they have farming machines and tractors then there's the ground roots right there for a transport revolution at the same time.

Otherwise if you don't give them mechanised farming then a LOT of the farming work is still labour intensive.

Just watching SG-1, and they’ve met the Tollan for the first time.

Daniel Jackson points out the Dark Ages, at least in Europe, held society back under a pall of religious oppression for around 800 years. And without that, we might already be exploring the galaxy.

Now artistic license aside, what could we have given The Romans that might help avert the Dark Ages?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Just watching SG-1, and they’ve met the Tollan for the first time.

Daniel Jackson points out the Dark Ages, at least in Europe, held society back under a pall of religious oppression for around 800 years. And without that, we might already be exploring the galaxy.

Now artistic license aside, what could we have given The Romans that might help avert the Dark Ages?

The big problem with the Dark Ages is its not actually a time of primitive technolgy. It's just a period in history where written records are less well preserved and archived after the Roman era that was both insanely well documented and preserved on material that survived. Couple that to a few decades of media presenting it as a "dark age" and even the name itself. It's a quirky thing because its also the time King Arthur is supposed to be around which is always shown as an age of enlightenment, but "the Dark Ages" and "King Arthur" tend to be fairly well separated in common media presentations and such.

I'd also argue that the Dark Ages is a time of smaller empires than the vast Roman Empire that came before (even though there still major empires/kingdoms and so forth).




Also in Stargate terms they "could have" advanced into space in those 800 years but I suspect he's including "Because we discovered the Stargate centuries earlier and so forth" in that as well. Then again SG Dark Ages also has the Alien Merlin and super-tech rocking around so it gets a bit messy.



As for averting the Dark Ages and the fall of the Roman Empire, you likely have to go a long way back into it to help stop the eventual corruption/breakdown and so forth that happened over multiple generations that led to the weaknesses and fragments that eventually broke apart through internal pressure; and also to conquer and push out more so that the external threats were weaker

There was suppression and oppression of new ideas, where it seems the Greeks and Romans welcomed such advancements, or at least didn’t actively persecute someone for suggesting a heliocentric model etc.

That of course has to be balanced with widespread basic education being one of the reasons we’ve advanced so quickly in the past 150 or so years, and before that the wealth created by the agricultural and industrial revolutions (and the exploitation of worldwide empires) that allowed ever more young men to go off to University, spreading and building ever more knowledge.

So…perhaps the lessons of the Agricultural Revolution would pay dividends? After all, if your populace is well fed, they’re less likely to be disgruntled. And with agricultural labour pools reduced due to innovation and technology, we might see those workers redeployed to dig canals, build bigger road networks etc, to help better distribute the agricultural bounty?

I think the "Dark Ages" have been so heavily debunked as a concept that the name is avoided and the time period is generally referred to as the early medieval period now.

 Jadenim wrote:
The agriculture thing might be because we're all techy nerds, but as far as I know the Romans had a pretty good handle on agricultural productivity (certainly for the time), so I think it's just lower down the priority list.

There’s some kind of plow invented in China that doesn’t make it to Europe until the age of explorers that more than doubles the productivity of the oxen pulling the plows (ploughs?). Bringing that over a thousand or more years earlier could have huge ramifications for labor, possibly even starting g something like an Industrial Revolution.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There was suppression and oppression of new ideas, where it seems the Greeks and Romans welcomed such advancements, or at least didn’t actively persecute someone for suggesting a heliocentric model etc.

Eh.

In which way? The Late Empire was basically just reaching back and applauding Plato as the best around. Is that really a 'new idea?' Education throughout the Roman period wasn't worth praising much. I mean their system basically consisted of Grammar, Grammar, and more Grammar. They didn't actually teach much else in general, and it remained Greeks who were largely responsible for many of the artistic and cultural achievements of the age. There's a reason the Eastern Empire became increasingly more Greek than Roman through the Middle Ages, though they still called themselves Romans.

The suppression and oppression narrative is largely a product of the Enlightenment and the Protestant reformation, who ascribed to the Catholic church of the early Middle Ages a level of power and influence the church would not possess for centuries after. But it was a version of events that people of the 16th and 17th centuries found very compelling for contemporary reasons and persists especially in the Anglophone world especially as a result of cultural momentum.

Was there a downturn in 'high culture?' Yeah, but it's a bit presumptuous for us to assume any culture that isn't high culture is inherently less valuable. If something set Western Europe back, it wasn't backwards thinking but economic strangle preventing the investment of significant resources into those pursuits, which would persist until the High Middle Ages. The 'dark age' was not the product of the people being backwards, but of a lack of opportunity to engage in the same forms of conspicuous consumption that defined the Empire's height.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
There’s some kind of plow invented in China that doesn’t make it to Europe until the age of explorers that more than doubles the productivity of the oxen pulling the plows (ploughs?). Bringing that over a thousand or more years earlier could have huge ramifications for labor, possibly even starting g something like an Industrial Revolution.

Also the mighty swine. Scale cultivation of pigs took time to fully set in in the western world and finally coincided with the aftermath of the Black Plague. Pigs made the production of meats much more accessible and affordable for commoners and the wealthy alike.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Just watching SG-1, and they’ve met the Tollan for the first time.

Daniel Jackson points out the Dark Ages, at least in Europe, held society back under a pall of religious oppression for around 800 years. And without that, we might already be exploring the galaxy.

Now artistic license aside, what could we have given The Romans that might help avert the Dark Ages?

The problem with that is it’s massively Western biased. Even if you subscribe to the “Dark Ages” concept (which most archaeologists now do not, as others have observed), it didn’t happen in China. Or Japan and Korea. Or the Middle East, which actually ends up preserving a lot of the knowledge of the Classical World. Or even the Eastern Roman Empire, which keeps knocking around for another thousand years or so. Etc., etc.

The Roman Empire was unique in terms of its size and diversity, but not particularly in terms of technology or learning. There have been plenty of advanced civilisations over the millennia, but it’s only the last 300-years or so that we’ve pushed beyond them. That suggests that the Industrial Revolution was more of a fluke confluence of events than an inevitable progression.

Technologically, the "Dark Ages" actually saw basically no regression other than the loss of roman concrete.

It was really nothing more than a political fracturing which in retrospect was believed to be a dark age.


If you want a real Dark Age, the time after the Bronze Age Collapse would be a true one. An actual loss of technology and learning, though there was still some progress. We likely would not have gotten better at iron working for a long time if the Collapse never happened.

Well, do the Romans need improvements to their agriculture?
They were already a heavily agrarian society. Most of the improvements to our agriculture today came from the Industrial Revolution, which was, well, engineering.

So if you give the Romans tractors to increase their carry capacity, you're just giving them another bit of engineering.

I'm just not sure what we could offer them farming wise, given that they already seemed to have been doing just fine with what they already had.

The rise in agricultural pressures we have today is a direct result of improved living and health standards and access. Basically because we now have an insane population boom we need more food. It's often humbling to think that these grand ancient times had populations VASTLY smaller than we have today.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Well, do the Romans need improvements to their agriculture?
They were already a heavily agrarian society. Most of the improvements to our agriculture today came from the Industrial Revolution, which was, well, engineering.

So if you give the Romans tractors to increase their carry capacity, you're just giving them another bit of engineering.

I'm just not sure what we could offer them farming wise, given that they already seemed to have been doing just fine with what they already had.

Food preservation, distribution, crop rotation to improve yield.

The more food you can produce, the better you can preserve it, and the more able you are to distribute it all helps mitigate the risk of localised famine or drought and social unrest that might arise from that.

It also benefits trade, as you can flood the market, lowering international prices, potentially impoverishing rivals and giving you the upper hand economically, or use food relief as a negotiation tool - especially handy if you’re expanding, and need to persuade at least some natives you’re the bees knees and to fight for you, because they’re guaranteed full bellies and as such healthier, longer living family members and children.

I'll give you crop rotation, but preservation and distribution requires industrial techniques and technology. You'll have to give them an entire technology base for those.