If You Could Change History

[Mother Cocanuts]

I think Weeping Sore may have been a bit tongue-in-cheek. At least, that's how I interpreted it. Certain parts seem as though as they're food for thought, while others seem exaggerated, particularly "matriarchal sex-communes."

[Weeping Sore]

On ‎10‎/‎23‎/‎2017 at 9:49 PM, TrueMetis said:

But humans relationship to chimps and bonobos is basically the same. Chimp and Bonobo related hominids did have the advantage. With how closely related chimps and bonobos are it would be pretty much impossible to give an advantage to an animal that was only related to one.

I see that you're right, I've fucked up my forks. We're the Orthodox splitting from the Catholics (chimps) who later split with Protestants (bonobos).

 

[TrueMetis]

Not that it wouldn't be interesting to know what a bonobo descendant that gained human level intelligence would be like. Can't imagine they'd fair well against aliens though.

[GAROVORKIN]

I would tell Xerxes I of Persia to avoid the Spartans , the battle of  Thermopylae and  the whole war with the Greeks. 

[TrueMetis]

Why? He won that battle, tell him to change his strategy at the Battle of Salamis or the Battle of Artemisium. It was the Naval battles that cost Persia the war.

[GAROVORKIN]

On 10/31/2017 at 10:25 AM, TrueMetis said:

Why? He won that battle, tell him to change his strategy at the Battle of Salamis or the Battle of Artemisium. It was the Naval battles that cost Persia the war.

Marathon did delay him, long enough for the Greeks to ready themselves.

 

[Lordsteve666]

Something small and it's entirely possible this wouldn't be significant to world events, but i'd stop the multiple burning's of the library at Alexandria. It didn't really get burned down once by Caesar as many believe, it probably suffered a similar fate several times through its history, but either way it was a massive loss of knowledge that might well have had a bigger impact on the world as we know it.

[GAROVORKIN]

16 minutes ago, Lordsteve666 said:

Something small and it's entirely possible this wouldn't be significant to world events, but i'd stop the multiple burning's of the library at Alexandria. It didn't really get burned down once by Caesar as many believe, it probably suffered a similar fate several times through its history, but either way it was a massive loss of knowledge that might well have had a bigger impact on the world as we know it.

 

Caesar set fire to Ptolemy's fleet which in the process  burned part of the library. It's estimated that Caesar's set back civilization about 1000 years. 

[maarsen]

10 hours ago, GAROVORKIN said:

I would tell Xerxes I of Persia to avoid the Spartans , the battle of  Thermopylae and  the whole war with the Greeks. 

Just curious but why? Was Persian civilization a better way forward than Greek? 

[GAROVORKIN]

9 minutes ago, maarsen said:

Just curious but why? Was Persian civilization a better way forward than Greek? 

 

Because  it would have saved a lot of lives on both sides it they hadn't gone to war . 

King Leonides and his men wouldn't had to die at Thermopylae 

 

[maarsen]

22 minutes ago, GAROVORKIN said:

 

Because  it would have saved a lot of lives on both sides it they hadn't gone to war . 

King Leonides and his men wouldn't had to die at Thermopylae 

 

Hmmmm.  I was wondering if you were thinking that if Persia had won, Alexander would not have been given as much of a chance to defeat them himself. If Leonidas had not died at Thermopylae, him and his men would have killed and been killed by  Athenians and their allies instead. I doubt much in the way of lives would have been saved overall. 

[GAROVORKIN]

14 minutes ago, maarsen said:

Hmmmm.  I was wondering if you were thinking that if Persia had won, Alexander would not have been given as much of a chance to defeat them himself. If Leonidas had not died at Thermopylae, him and his men would have killed and been killed by  Athenians and their allies instead. I doubt much in the way of lives would have been saved overall. 

It was just a thought.

[mankytoes]

23 hours ago, Lordsteve666 said:

Something small and it's entirely possible this wouldn't be significant to world events, but i'd stop the multiple burning's of the library at Alexandria. It didn't really get burned down once by Caesar as many believe, it probably suffered a similar fate several times through its history, but either way it was a massive loss of knowledge that might well have had a bigger impact on the world as we know it.

Would it have been a huge use of resources to just keep making copies of books and sending them all over the place? Make students do it. Maybe that would have made a big difference to the retention of knowledge, and thus the speed of progress and improvement of quality of life.

[maarsen]

1 hour ago, mankytoes said:

Would it have been a huge use of resources to just keep making copies of books and sending them all over the place? Make students do it. Maybe that would have made a big difference to the retention of knowledge, and thus the speed of progress and improvement of quality of life.

From what I remember any book that was brought to Alexandria was seized, copied and then the original returned to the owner. The library was filled with copies. The vicissitudes of history is what doomed the books. The conquest of Baghdad by the Mongols probably lost many irreplaceable volumes also. The sacking of Rome by the Vandals again doomed priceless books. Even the Nazis had book burnings. 

[mankytoes]

1 hour ago, maarsen said:

From what I remember any book that was brought to Alexandria was seized, copied and then the original returned to the owner. The library was filled with copies. The vicissitudes of history is what doomed the books. The conquest of Baghdad by the Mongols probably lost many irreplaceable volumes also. The sacking of Rome by the Vandals again doomed priceless books. Even the Nazis had book burnings. 

That's good, but if they really had a culture of mass copying, with a deliberate look towards preserving knowledge, it seems like knowledge could have been better preserved. So the Romans could have spread books all over the Empire, from England to Spain and right out East. Then those individual destructions wouldn't have been nearly as destructive.

[DireWolfSpirit]

I love Lordsteve666's idea of preventing the burning(s) of that precious cradle of knowledge, the Library of Alexandria.

[Jo498]

While the loss of many writings from antiquity is deplorable, I think the possible impact it could have had, is strongly exaggerated. Many of the things deemed important, did survive (because there were lots of copies at different libraries) and it is not that there had been a lot of scientific development after the hellenistic period. (Most of the stuff lost also wasn't science by a long shot but rather commentaries on Homer, speculative philosophy etc.) Basically, the development had stalled already when that stuff got lost in late antiquity. And most importantly, the breakdown of the western part of the Roman Empire had nothing to do with  "not enough knowledge". Lots of knowledge was preserved in the Eastern/Byzantine Empire and they did apparently not get a boost forward to modernity because they had more antique writings.

[mankytoes]

3 hours ago, Jo498 said:

While the loss of many writings from antiquity is deplorable, I think the possible impact it could have had, is strongly exaggerated. Many of the things deemed important, did survive (because there were lots of copies at different libraries) and it is not that there had been a lot of scientific development after the hellenistic period. (Most of the stuff lost also wasn't science by a long shot but rather commentaries on Homer, speculative philosophy etc.) Basically, the development had stalled already when that stuff got lost in late antiquity. And most importantly, the breakdown of the western part of the Roman Empire had nothing to do with  "not enough knowledge". Lots of knowledge was preserved in the Eastern/Byzantine Empire and they did apparently not get a boost forward to modernity because they had more antique writings.

Who says? The Byzantine Empire did achieve quite a bit, like the laws under Justinian, which have had a lot of impact still visible.

But I get your point, it's not a clear good. One big problem in the development is that people basically saw Aristotle as unquestionable, when a lot of his scientific ideas are just wrong.

But the general logic around progress is about people sharing ideas, and books are a great way of doing that, which is a key reason many of us see the printing press as one of the most important inventions in human history. It seems logical that saving books would cause more progress.

[maarsen]

18 hours ago, mankytoes said:

That's good, but if they really had a culture of mass copying, with a deliberate look towards preserving knowledge, it seems like knowledge could have been better preserved. So the Romans could have spread books all over the Empire, from England to Spain and right out East. Then those individual destructions wouldn't have been nearly as destructive.

There was no mass culture of copying. Only the librarians at Alexandria did so. I wish there had been. The Arabic culture did preserve a lot of what would otherwise have been destroyed and that was the basis for the reflowering of western thought, particularly in mathematics. 

[Lordsteve666]

Yeah it's really hard to gauge the possible impact. I've seen people claim we were set back 1000 years by the loss of that knowledge...if that is true we could be living on Mars by now.
But it's so difficult to work it out. All that knowledge could have led to more wars, or less wars, or less diseases, or it might have made no difference at all. Or it might have been lost later on instead.

On the subject of copying the texts, from what i understand a lot of the stuff had already been disseminated around the region by that time anyway, so it wasn't just a single location full of scrolls who's loss was catastrophic. It was the start of the creation of a lot of learning institutes across the region due to knowledge being passes around and taken off for study.
So potentially the burning had zero affect, or it were a disaster.