h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What if the Ancient Greeks had had an experimental approach to science, and access to coal?

We are all used to the idea of the Ancient Greeks, right? The guys who wore white robes and sat around philosophising all day under porticos?

This period of philosophical debate really only flourished for a hundred or a couple of hundred years in about the 4th and 5th centuries BC. They all knew each other. Athens was a small town.

What is interesting though, is to speculate if that energetic drive for understanding had been driven not by inductive reasoning but by experimental experience, and if the Greeks had had access to the mineral deposits - specifically coal and iron ore - which made that other pivotal century, the 18th Century British Industrial Revolution a time of such technological expansion.

Let's take a swift look at 18th Century Briton first. It opened without machinery. Agriculture and manufacturing (weaving and pottery and other things) were still done by hand. The economic units were the village and the cottage. Banks and merchant houses were larger, but there were no industrial organizations because there was no industry. Leather was cheaper meter for meter than cloth because it took less time to finish leather than fabric. Even a hundred years later, the Great Western Railway had to buy raw materials (iron, wood, etc) so that they could make the tools that made the screws that made the railways because there were no manufacturing sub-contractors to supply them.

But this society of rural artisans in the 17th and 18th century had an educated and experimental leisured class. Galileo was the first to realise that large objects fall at the same speed as small ones because he verified it by experiment. He realised that the period of a pendulum is the same no matter how long or short the arc it describes because he verified it by experiment. It was realised that blood circulated. Newton outlined the laws of physics based on experiment and observation. These people published their works. Sure, there were trade and craft secrets, but the scientific advances did not come from within the Guilds, it came from lone experimenters who published.

And crucially, the mechanisation of agriculture and cloth manufacture (the seed drill and the spinning jenny) was contemporanious with the invention of steam power (Watt) to drive the new machines. Steam power was only utilisable because coal was available to turn wrought iron into steel. You cannot build a pressure chamber from iron, you need steel to make it strong enough to withstand the internal forces.

Moving back to the ancient Greeks. They had clock-work. (A mechanism has been found which is indisputably Ancient Greek). They even had steam engines, but they were unstable compared with the 18th century ones because of the lack of steel, and they were used to mysteriously open temple doors. They were the machina for the deus to appear from.

What the Greeks did not have was an intelligent experimental class to counterbalance the concept that techne should be a mystery. As a result the mysteries of Greek knowledge are lost. We do not in fact know the boundaries of their knowledge, because the lines of transmission broke down. The Greeks *did* have mechanisms, but they lacked the cultural view that knowledge should be shared.

The other difference between the Greeks and the 18th Century gentlemen experimenters is that educated Greeks did not tinker with the physical world. Experiment involves manual activity. Eddison famously made tens of thousands of attempts at the light bulb. No educated Greek citizen would do something so manual. And no Greek slave would have the freedom, the time or the resources to do so.

The Greeks were fantastic theorists, they could have managed Newton's work on calculus, but they were not practial people and they would never have done is work on light and on physics for example, which involved experimentation.

So in Ancient Greece you have a low status given to physical experiment, which is the only way to prove hypotheses; you have a culture where knowledge is arcane and a mystery to be protected, hidden and if neccesary lost; and you have no access to coal and limited access to iron ore to make strong mechanisms. You DO have mechanisms, but you do not publish and patent them, and they are not robust enough for industrial application. And finally, you don't actually NEED industrial applications, because labour is virtually free.

But say that the Greeks had invented an industrial-strength steam engine, and had used it industrially. Say that the technological advances which took place from the early 1720s onwards had started at the time of Aristotle, ie about 300 years BC. And let us assume a comprable time-line.

Alexander the Great would have conquered the world with guns. Say his empire imploded as it actually did. The Romans would have defeated Carthage with ironclad ships. Julius Ceasar would have crossed the Rubicon by train, and the English Channel with landing craft and tanks. Nero would have played CDs while watching Rome burn on tv. Christ could have had a website. (God would have been on-line). The first man on the moon would have planted a Roman Eagle, not the Stars and Stripes.

And flipping into future technologies: Captains Kirk, Picard and Janeway would have picked their crews from the Norman Dukes of William the Conqueror, Eric's Vikings and Harold's Saxon Eorls.

And us? We would have been updating the hitch-hicker's guide to the galaxy using our sub-etha-sensomatics.

Forgive the sloppy timelines, and go with the concept.

What do YOU think?

a girl called Ben

Hm... It would be interesting if you could post a timeline of major events of our time as to when they'd happen in the alternate timeline, assuming that the availability of machinery did not change anything.

Another question: Would the Greeks have created the same things that Europe did? Or would the demands of their society have lead them down a different road?

The timeline should be fun to put together, and is a pleasant enough way to waste a Sunday morning.

The other question is more interesting. Would the Greeks have created the same things that Europe did? Or would the demands of their society have lead them down a different road?

The Greeks knew how big the world was, and that it was round. (Another example of a piece of knowledge they had which was subsequenty lost). They were inquisitive explorers though, it was the Romans who were acquisitive ones. I am thinking directly onto the keyboard here... The conquest and colonialisiation of the Americas was well underway by the time the 18th Century spawned indusdrialism. If the Greeks had had an industrial society, I think we should assume that the Romans would be the ones to really take it on and use it for military and economic conquest.

We have to assume that they would be at least as militarily successful. Possibly more so. Maybe they would actually been speaking Latin in Latin America....

Would there have been what we have here - a global tecnological base-line which is either aspired to or achieved globally? Answer - probably yes. Would the Mongolian Hoards have swept in? Answer - probably no, they would have been treated in the same way as the Native Americans. Maybe Vladivostok would have been California, though.

The key is actually what prevented Greece and Rome from doing it in the first place: an abundance of slave labour. I suspect that progress would have been similar to progress in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the spur to that was (Cold) War. Maybe Greece and Rome would have been the two superpowers - or perhaps Alexander would have swept into India and India and Europe would have been non-Christian and non-Islaamic superpowers. Now that IS an interesting thought.

My real question - and indeed the whole thing - is borrowed from Carl Sagan. If the industrial revolution had taken place in the 3rd Century BC instead of the 18th Century AD would we have conquered space by now? Would we be living in the worlds of Asimov and Arthur C Clarke?

Interesting, isn't it?

Ben

Here are a couple of timelines:

http://www.education-world.com/history/anc_history/anc_timeline_regional.shtml#europe and

http://www.education-world.com/history/anc_history/anc_timeline_full.shtml are timelines covering the classical period.

http://britishhistory.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fcampus.northpark.edu%2Fhistory%2F%2FWebChron%2FWestEurope%2FIndRev.html here is one of the Indusdrial Revolution.

What I have not found is a simple timeline covering the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. There are lots of specialised ones, but no single simple one.

Ben

One of the crucial words you used in an earlier post was "published". Another thing it would be necessary to invent before you could have a flourishing technological society is a way to reliably preserve and disseminate information.

If your society is going to experienece a tech explosion the way Britain did during the Industrial Revolution, you need to have in place some publishing infrastructure. This then massively increases your inventor base. The Greeks and to a lesser extent the Romans had the cultural thing that learning was for the learned, work was for the workers, and never the twain should meet. One of the great things about the Industrial Revolution was that if you had the intelligence, and the resourcefulness, you could be a successful inventor without having been to the hoity-toity Universities, because the results of their research were available, and you didn't have to invent thermodynamics for yourself at home before starting work on your improved steam engine. In this way you have machines and automation springing up all around the country, new applications being developed in all directions in all industries, instead of some tiny core of thinkers in one city working only what interests them.

I think the biggest difference would be sociological. Our current global world-view is pretty much based on the ideals of equality and freedom. It is interesting to consider whether this would have been the case if the slave-owning societies of Rome or Greece had not collapsed. One of the difficulties the Roman empire had was one of simple communication - it's difficult to administrate a territory when a message takes months or years to be transmitted from the centre to the border. We will one day find this out when we try to administrate a galactic empire. It's interesting to consider whether they would have collapsed if they'd had wireless telegraphy.

It is entirely possible that the Romans or Greeks would have embraced industrialisation despite the fact that labour was effectively "free" - you still have to feed a slave, house him, train him, guard him, cloth him etc. And when you've done all that, he's still only human. But a machine needs no food, clothes, training, guarding, won't attempt escape, and will turn out reliably identical copies of the guns, armour, car engines or whatever for as long as you maintain it. These would be attractive features. But they wouldn't change the idea that the natural order of things is that there are people, and slaves. People own slaves, slaves work for people. Slaves, if they are good enough, can earn their freedom and become people. People, if they are in debt or are captured by their enemies, may become slaves. This casual acceptance of slavery would probably not change, unless there was a significant sociological upheaval to initiate it.

To the question of "would we have conquered space"? I think the answer is almost certainly "yes". I'd go further than that, even. My personal view is that, no matter what the sociological circumstances, if we'd had Industrial Revolution stage technology before Christ, we would long ago have gone into space. We would by now have a permanent presence on the moon and would probably already have started terraforming Mars. In other words, we'd have done space travel PROPERLY, for the right reasons, instead of the stupid, dilettante poncing about we're doing now.

ALL of space exploration up to about 1985 was done for political, rather than scientific or explorational reasons. The ONLY reason Sputnik went up was to get the jump on the Americans. Ditto Gagarin. The ONLY reason Armstrong made it with a few months to spare was because Kennedy had been assassinated. If JFK had lived, Apollo would have probably been quietly shelved at some point and people would have shaken their heads and said "I can't beLIEVE we wasted all that money while we were trying to fight a war." Pioneer and Voyager used Saturn V launch vehicles developed for Apollo. So did Skylab. EVERYTHING we did in space until very recently, we did in order to "beat the other guy". Which is pathetic. It's also the reason why, as soon as Armstrong landed, everyone went "great, we beat the Ruskies. Hand me a beer. What's on the other channel?" and the Apollo programme died the death of a thousand cuts. Thirty years later there are still precisely one dozen humans who've walked on the moon. Why? Because it costs money and we don't care. We're not explorers, we're not conquerors, we're navel-gazing parochial little people who don't deserve to live. A few years ago a comet (Shoemaker-Levy) slammed into one of our neighbours so hard that if it had hit us instead there wouldn't be a higher life form left on the planet. Evolution would probably have started again with the few remaining bacteria, viruses and religious fundamentalists, but that's not much comfort. We watched the single most destructive event ever witnessed by humans in the solar system and the most common response was "ooh, that's pretty. What is it?". The proper response was "S**T! That could have be US! We'd better get the hell off this rock RIGHT NOW!". But no. We mess and play about building fragile little Meccano space stations. We cut the budget for that to the bone so that we can't afford more than one lifeboat (can you say "Titanic"?). This puts a limit on the crew size. THREE, and they'll all be need to run the thing, so there won't be time to do any WORK. Pathetic.

The Romans would have done it RIGHT. They'd have gone into space because they OWNED it, along with everything else. They'd go to the moon and they'd damn well STAY there. To get an idea of the Romans' implacable will, not to just to conquer territory, but to OCCUPY it, to BE there, in force, check out Hardknott fort, in the Duddon valley in England's Lake District, preferably on a day when it's raining and blowing a gale. Don't worry, there are about 300 of those every year.

Today, in the twenty-first century, Hardknott is difficult to get to. There are three roads in, and two of them are two of the steepest in England. It's a bleak, desolate spot, without trees. And right in the middle of nowhere, there's the remains of a Roman fort. It was staffed in the main by auxiliaries, Spaniards, Africans, Greeks and others, and they must have wondered what they'd done to deserve posting to such a place. The empire that built that fort would not have messed about sending a couple of ships to the moon. They'd have buried the place in soldiers, no matter what the cost. They would probably, by now, have colonies on Mars. They'd would inevitably have invented/discovered the concept of terraforming, and would probably have started doing that by about 900AD. In which case, by now, they'd almost be finished. Mars would have a breathable atmosphere, running water, and an ecosystem all its own. And the human race would safe from passing rocks, because all our eggs wouldn't be in one planetary basket.

I have of course ignored what would have happened when the Romans met the Chinese, or the Indians for that matter. But either way, if the technology existed, and there was a single superpower to exploit it - we'd be out there now. Those of us who weren't slaves, of course.

H.

Blimey, Hoovooloo, that was a rant!

Thank you. I need to go and digest it now.

B

I see what you mean about needing a smiley!

H.

You should always believe everything I say! (You are getting sleepy...)

B