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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

I do find this quite hard to believe. Iron would be considered an expensive material to use in roadbuilding even today. The pictures aren't all that convincing.

> But lead author Eric Poehler of the University of Massachusetts Amherst writes that stray iron drops found on the street suggest that the molten metal was carried from a furnace to the repair site.

If the hypothesis is that they were capable of carrying molten metal from a furnace to the road, isn't it more likely that these are splashes or spills from molten iron en route to a blacksmith?

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You say "even", as if the Roman empire wasn't on par with the western empire today. I disagree. Even though we're at the tip of the ice berg, the human history is episodic in a way.

> as if the Roman empire wasn't on par with the western empire today

Huh? I mean, no, technologically it... definitely wasn't. Remind me how many teraflops the most powerful Roman computer was capable of?

The Romans were plenty advanced, sure, but that's just a nonsense statement.

> Remind me how many teraflops the most powerful Roman computer was capable of?

Bad metric. We could go to the moon in the 70’s, and had supersonic passenger planes, and we could build at scale.

Today California can’t build a train, building a nuclear powerplant takes 20 years and we can’t go to the moon and don’t have supersonic passenger planes. So we have partially regressed despite having more terraflops

"Can't" vs "won't" is a huge distinction. All the examples you provided are either economically non-viable, bureaucratic landmines, or believed to be pointless. You can argue whether those arguments are justified, but the point is we didn't forget the technology.

Indeed politics, culture and posturing can be strong incentives that change the economics balance.

If the Roman empire had one thing as advanced as our modern states that wasn't technology per se but the politics, the politicking the perverse incentives to do something to show for and a public whose murmur mattered.

If some city official decided to impress visitors with some smooth roads perhaps he found a solution that wasn't strictly the best economically but perhaps it had other advantages that helped him getting a promotion?

I think this is pure copium. It’s use it or lose it - if you ‘won’t’ and chose not to build nuclear reactors for 40 years, then wake up one day and decide to do it, you will find that you can’t.

Experience engineers will have retired or found other jobs. Knowledge is gone. The books have been lost, etc. If you haven’t been to the moon for 40 years, then you can’t any more. That’s two generations of people.

Ability is not like a statue that you keep in a museum. Even a car will not start after sitting the garage for 10 years. Organisations and people fall apart even faster.

But we do go to the moon om a regular base. Just not with humans, as robots are cheaper.

They had huge stadiums, though.

Modern people had very little idea why you would have a stone stadium until around XX century.

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