Mifletz said:
Dominus cries about how Hero almost started an industrial revolution in Ancient Greece. But there was no real industrial revolution for 2000+ years. Why? Some believe in a "Heavenly Timetable" - the "Preordained Theory of History". The Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Babylonians, Hebrews, Druids etc may have known less than we know today (btw how did they build those pyramids - could we build even a small one even with power tools?!), but they were more intelligent than we are today. Why didn't massive technological advancement occur in their eras? Or in any other era; only 150 years ago, in which it literally exploded? Some point to the Zohar that predicted that it was preordained that only in 5600=1840 would a world knowledge explosion occur, not gradually as in previous eras.
I doubt that the Druids, Egyptians or Romans were more intelligent than we are today. The writings that survive show us a literate, educated and able administrative class and upper class, and archeology can show us some spectacular solutions to problems, but the same goes for modernity. We are, if anything, very likely smarter than our ancestors by a tiny fraction due to a selective process that is biased towards braininess (though frankly, I doubt the effect would be measurable). The important distinction is that when we read the writings of our ancestors or look at their works, we see a selection made canonical by centuries and limited by the accident of survival. When we read the writings of our contemporaries, we read what comes our way. That is why we thrill to the Gettysburg Address and wonder why we don't get speakers like that any more. Take solace, ye sufferers from Clinton's "I did not..." and Bushes' "These are Bad People" performances, in the fact that the 19th century had only two or three, either, so we're well within quota for the twenty-first. Much the same goes for philosophers, politicians, and writers. We're still sorting out the twentieth century - expect a very impressive canon in a few decades' time. In the meantime, wait for an archeologist somewhere to come up with fragments from Greece's most forgettable philosopher, complete with the dustjacket that says "Forget Plato! Forget Aristotle! The New Truth is Here! only 6 drachmae 99 obols in papyrusback"
As to the pyramids - yes we can, and a team of archeologists recently did. The amazing thing about Egypt's pyramids is not the architecture, it's the scale. Pyramids are fairly easy - you just pile up square stones from a broad base to a pointy top. I stand in much greater awe of Ancient Egypt's hydraulic engineering works. AS to scale, that takes immense effort, but again nothing that couldn't be solved by adding resources. Bear in mind that they had decades and billions of man-hours to deploy.
Neither am I convinced that the explosion of the industrial revolution required divine intervention. There are factors like knowledge transmission (for the first time, large segments of the population are systematically taught to read, write, and reckon), knowledge dissemination (there are printed books for all those new readers, public libraries, and a new comunicativa based on numbers and statistics), labor-efficient production (iron, one of the basic ingredients of Europe's industrialisation, went through a quantum leap of efficiency between 1300 and 1600, another one by 1800, and by 1900 steel was as cheap and plentiful as iron had become by 1800. Before 1300, iron was rare and costly.), food (agricultural productivity in England between 1650 and 1750 increased massively, and the potato and maize brought two new staples to Europe that could support vastly larger populations on a simple, but viable diet) and transportation (by 1750, sea and river transport in Europe had become efficient enough to make carrying ultra-cheap bulk commodities like coal, sand, and clay economically viable, which made large-scale concentrated production of even the most basic stuff interesting. Then came the canals and railway.). None of these had been in place in Hellenistic Greece, Roman Europe, Song China, the Ummayyad Caliphate, or Mughal India. Thus, the industrial revolution was a possibility in 250 BC, 100 AD, 700 AD, 1100 AD or 1500 AD, but it hadbecome an almost necessary development (if not, perhaps, with the rapidity it showed OTL) by 1750 AD.
