What’s the moral of this story?
In June of 2016, an international team of experts revealed new information derived from tiny inscriptions on the devices parts in ancient Greek that had been too tiny to read—some of its characters are just 1/20th of an inch wide—until cutting-edge imaging technology allowed it to be more clearly seen. They’ve now read about 35,00 characters explaining the [Antikythera] device.
The writing verifies the Antikythera mechanism’s capabilities, with a couple of new wrinkles added: The text refers to upcoming eclipses by color, which may mean they were viewed as having some kind of oracular meaning. Second, it appears the device was built by more than one person on the island of Rhodes, and that it probably wasn’t the only one of its kind. The ancient Greeks were apparently even further ahead in their astronomical understanding and mechanical know-how than we’d imagined.
Simple. PUBLISH YOUR RESULTS. Because if you don’t, you’re more likely to lose all of your accumulated research if you ever have One Bad Day. And you will always end up having at least One Bad Day.
Publish your results.
I took this for a story/campaign-seed initially .. my bad?
.
Yes, publish your results .. or at least *document* them, and work out a way to keep one copy of said documentation *far away* from you – rent a mailbox at a FedEx Kinkos in another time zone and mail print-outs to yourself, use DropBox, copy everything onto a thumb drive and stick it in the glovebox of whatever your bug-out vehicle will be….
.
That said .. the Greeks were *really close* to the industrial revolution. They had trade, they had decent metallurgy, they had the beginnings of steam power ..
.
Heck of an alternate history here, or at least steampunk with Greek gods …
.
Mew
More accurately, the Romans had all of that. It was just the Greeks doing all the work under Roman rule, at least by the time that you get to the Aeolipile. Their metallurgy, however, was almost certainly far too primitive to handle the stresses that a true industrial revolution would involve. However, that was probably the main missing piece when it comes to the technical side of an industrial revolution, which is the side that gets all the attention. Not a year goes by that our estimates of Greco-Roman milling technology are not revised upward.
What the Greco-Roman world really needed was, in my opinion, a better way to utilize the masses of urban labor they had available to them (the slavery issue insofar as it stifles innovation is overblown, in my estimation), and a way to maintain said population against demographic collapse (plagues).
There is something to be said for valuing knowledge over plunder. It took the barbarians another 1000 years to value the engineering of those they overran. The Byzantines held on for a bit and invented Greek Fire, but it took all their exiles to jump-start western civilization again. Throw in Gutenberg’s press to share research, together with the coal-fields of the North to enable cheap steel, and a revolution is born.
I’d disagree to a degree. The technical know-how of the post-Roman societies of Europe was often much better than they’re given credit for. Metallurgy and agriculture, in particular, were two fields in which they surpassed their predecessors quite quickly.