Ancient engineering
 

I have some science channel and history channels among my channels I have.

I see a lot about ancient Egypt and Greece and other countries from that time period.

I am very amazed about their engineers

How they, with the tools they had, manage to solve problems when they build Pyramid and other known historical buildings.

Truly amazed.

Markus

I think humans have been pretty smart for a long time but hindered by politics. Present day accepted.

How about those Greeks that invented phosphoresce (is that spelled right)
You know that stuff they would sling at other ships and burn them up.

I would call that almost equal with gun powder for an invention. :yep:

I tend to think that people were smarter in the past, than they are today. that is not to say they had more knowledge in an academic understanding, obviously our science generally today is more advanced. But they had to be more creative and witty to master ordinary day life and surivival, and to solve pragmatic challenges and problems. Today'S comfort level is so high that people can afford to intellectually degenerate, and still they will not suffer much loss, materialistically. Also, the fruits of technology, namely compouter and robots, take the burden of thinkling away from most.

There must be reasons why researchers say we had peak IQ in the mid 70s, and since then the IQ globally is declining again.

If somebody thinks people were in general dumber in past centuries, I think chances are that he is very wrong. I expect past people to be able to master practical survival challenges better than we would today, us poor degenerated civilization products. :) For the same reason think that we civilization animals are very ill suited to know how to survive any future civilizational breakdown. "Primitive" societies probably have better chances to survive such a fall in the longterm. They may be less complex and advanced, but then: they are more robust. Things fall apart in reverse sequence in which they have been build.

The simple wheel, need I say more ?

I'm afraid, yes.


http://en.f1i.com/wp-content/uploads...-ferrari-1.jpg

Is that 'ancient' ? :hmmm:

From 2015. Four years old. In F1, that is "ancient".

How in heavens name do you make a comparison between ancient Egypt and Greece with something less than five years old? :doh:

http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/prope...s/fk030403.jpg:O:http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/prope...2dc593dbb2.jpg:Dhttp://www.cartoonistgroup.com/prope...s/fk030418.jpg

Some weeks ago I saw an episode of Blowing up the history

In this episode they went through the building of Giza.


It was remakeble who the engineers could manage to get the corner so exactly correct with only 1/20 of a degree miss or something and that without todays modern tools.

(some off topic to my thread)

There are also a series I like to watch beside those science and history program and that is Ancient Aliens

According to them, these ancient engineers got help from aliens from outer space

I see this as non-serious science

(End of off topic to my thread)

Markus

I think there is a typical "high-tech" bias in most people. Once they know there is a high-tech way to do something, they scoff at "low-tech" ways to do the same thing. Even if the low-tech method is very functional and not that less accurate than the high-tech way.

Mike

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfinished_obelisk

This thing was clearly meant to be transported and erected. It weighs 1,200 tones, 4 times heavier than the obelisk at St Peter's Rome which required an enormous effort to raise using the best that Renaissance Italy could provide.

There's a lot of Ancient technology that remains to be rediscovered.

Today, stuff from Greece or Egypt is not ancient, but "made in China".



An F1 car five years old - now that is ancient. :03: Note that the wheel is anything but round. Back then, they still were practicing.

So it wasn't the aliens from the history channel?