Has everyone here seen the "We should be colonizing the Solar System by now' thread.....

[LongTomH]

....over in General Discussion: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021206415

Edited to add: As of 4:08 PM CDT, it was up to 6464 views and 508 comments.

[Drale]

1. I agree but

if it had not been for the Dark Ages we would be colonizing deep space by now not just the Solar System so its easy to say "well we should have done this". The past is the past and we can't chance it, we can only focus on the future and plan for the future.

[Odin2005]

5. Not to nitpick, but popular notions about the "Dark Ages" are mostly myth.

The intellectual culture of the Classical world was very elitist, didn't spread beyond the upper classes, and was for the most part anti-Empiricist. Also, the Eastern Empire survived and morphed into Byzantium and the Arabs also preserved Classical knowledge, there was no "Dark Ages" in the East.

The "Dark Ages" in the West were because it always had a low population density and had a population crash in the mid 200s that made things worse and devastated the Western Empire's tax base, by AD 400 it was simply too depopulated to hold together and keep the infrastructure maintained. Italy was densely populated but then was devastated and depopulated by the reconquest of Justinian.

Additionally, technology actually ADVANCED during Late Antiquity. Water mills and windmills were invented in late Imperial times, but only became common AFTER the Western Empire collapsed. In the 700s a heavy plow was invented that allowed the thick, dark soils of the Northern European Plain to be farmed intensively for the first time. The notion that Medieval people never washed is a myth, many medieval towns had public baths, it was not until after the Black Death that superstitions against bathing became common.

Why did technology advance just as the Western Empire was falling apart? The decline of slavery, Roman slavery retarded technological development. A primitive steam engine was developed by an Alexandrian Greek named Heiron, but nothing came of it. The Roman Emperor was quoted to have said "but what would we do with all the slaves?" when Heiron tried to sell his invention to the Roman government.

[Drale]

6. I know that but

it was a period of 1000 years in which technology became stagnant or regressive and in my opinion that is a "dark age".

[Odin2005]

7. Uh, read my post, technology ADVANCED during that time period.

It actually stagnated under the empire because of cheap slave labor.

[Posteritatis]

2. One of the bigger threads I've seen on DU in awhile

Odin's got a knack for rolling a rhetorical hand grenade into the room now and then for certain.

Still chuckling at "the shed went away."

[Odin2005]

4. I didn't even mean for it to be a grenade, LOL!

The shed post left me laughing so hard by ribs hurt.

[Odin2005]

3. Sadly, I got locked out of my own epic thread because of a stupid angry comment I made.

[Posteritatis]

8. It's now exceeded three quarters of a kilopost. (nt)