Challenge: A man on the Moon by 1891

Well, the Greeks had olive presses (and most likely, wine presses) more than 5000 years ago, and I'm pretty sure they had ink - the Romans certainly did, called atramentum. It really is a very simple idea, one of those things that easily could have come up sooner. So, and ancient Greek or Roman printing press, possibly with movable type, is not unreasonable, and is one of the things the monasteries might preserve, if the situation ever gets similar to the OTL 'Dark' ages. Mind you, we call them the Dark Ages mostly because we don't have many contemporary records, and mass production of books would change that.

The other limiting factor, of course, is something to print on, as anything you could use would be fairly expensive. It could be that someone will offer a reward for less expensive printing surfaces, which could lead to an earlier invention or importation of the process of papermaking (which was invented in 105 CE, in China)... or greenhouses to grow papyrus in (so it needn't be imported, thus reducing its cost), but the latter seems unlikely.

Mind you, such an early development of paper and printing presses deserves a TL of its own.

Isn't necessity the mother of invention? With the invention of the printing press the subsequent proliferation of books and literacy would spike demand for paper resulting in the invention of cheaper paper...A similar process happened in OTL. The only difference is that it would be happening much earlier in TTL...
 
Isn't necessity the mother of invention? With the invention of the printing press the subsequent proliferation of books and literacy would spike demand for paper resulting in the invention of cheaper paper...A similar process happened in OTL. The only difference is that it would be happening much earlier in TTL...

Ignoring the basic problem that the chain more or less goes the other way... Something like a printing press is simple enough, but fairly pointless to even think about without an easily and cheaply available medium for it to work with.

Nonetheless, gotta agree that a Roman paper + printing press TL deserves to be written.
 
Steam and Zero

The Romans had a few proto-steam engines (Hero's demonstrator, for instance), but they lacked calculus, which proved to be essential for designing useful steam engines in the future. Zero didn't exist in the Roman numeral system, but did exist in Arab states within the Roman Empire at the time. With the Zero, eventually, you get calculus, and the steam engine becomes more than a simple curiosity to be lost with so much else when Rome collapses.

Now, lets assume you have a steam engine (primitive Newcommen designs...), which in turn gives you vastly enhanced transportation (it isn't hard to imagine railways built along the Roman roads...), irrigation, mining, etc. Add to this the printing press (interesting speculation in the previous few posts), the rise of a new merchant class (pretty much inevitable as the biggest impact of steam will be cheaper transport), and it is entirely possible that Rome (or something that grows out of Rome) survives and flourishes.

<a bit of hand waving>

And voila! Technology is advanced by 78 years (less than 4%) over a 2000 year span, and man lands on the moon and returns safely.
 
The Romans had a few proto-steam engines (Hero's demonstrator, for instance), but they lacked calculus, which proved to be essential for designing useful steam engines in the future. Zero didn't exist in the Roman numeral system, but did exist in Arab states within the Roman Empire at the time. With the Zero, eventually, you get calculus, and the steam engine becomes more than a simple curiosity to be lost with so much else when Rome collapses.

Now, lets assume you have a steam engine (primitive Newcommen designs...), which in turn gives you vastly enhanced transportation (it isn't hard to imagine railways built along the Roman roads...), irrigation, mining, etc. Add to this the printing press (interesting speculation in the previous few posts), the rise of a new merchant class (pretty much inevitable as the biggest impact of steam will be cheaper transport), and it is entirely possible that Rome (or something that grows out of Rome) survives and flourishes.

<a bit of hand waving>

And voila! Technology is advanced by 78 years (less than 4%) over a 2000 year span, and man lands on the moon and returns safely.

Minor quibble that the first place you're likely to see steam used, especially with primitive engines really designed by experimentation is in ships. Roman railroads are possible, and interesting, but more complicated and difficult than steam shipping in the Med. The point here is really that while railroads, when they do happen, are almost inevitably going to be built by the army like the roads that isn't nearly so true with steam shipping. Combined with the Empire's total domination of the Med and there's a real opportunity for some people to get VERY rich VERY fast. Wouldn't entirely surprise me for a shipowner to become emperor sometime within a generation of their introduction.
 
Excellent point...

You make an excellent point, and in fact this only reinforces my broader one...that steam will make roman survival more likely. Steam would make grain shipments from Egypt much harder to intercept, and make communications with the East easier. Piracy would be less of a problem as well...

As for rail, you are right that the Army would be the first to do it, but civilians would piggyback on it over time....a first century equivilient of the Interstate Highway system perhaps?
 
But I don't see steampunk Rome, if we can get it, falling nearly as far. Maybe the Empire, as a state, is doomed to fail, but successor states, with or without a change of management over to conquering "barbarians" (who would have to be much acculturated to alt-Roman high tech society and/or getting in mainly by political intrigue, but both that absorption of Roman technique and their interfacing with Roman "domestic" politics were par for the course OTL) or via internal schisming, will take over the new technology and retain or improve it. Then, we are off to the exponential-curve-of-technical development not 100 but something like a thousand years early (if this is possible, which I doubt) and that moon landing, perhaps by someone with a Hunnish or Nordic or Arab or Magyar name (or something in Frankish or Latin, even:p) happens before 1091!

My point is, if Classical Rome can sustain and develop any sort of economically useful steam engine, there is probably nothing short of eventual nuclear or biowar Armageddon to stop the rise of a technical civilization with all the trimmings; vice versa if one argues that they'd hit some limit that would merely advance the overall technical clock by a mere century after 2000 years, then that argument probably proves there was no way to have even a Newcomen type engine that early at all.

Of course we could have the "clock advanced by say 700 years" situation (subtracting a couple centuries in there to allow for less development of the rest of the world in general, more discoveries having to be "in house" and presumably later, fewer to appropriate from others, and less economic development for economic/military conquest to commandeer) so that a moon landing by say 1250 would be possible--but before they get around to Man In Space ("Homnes in Caelum"?, they have that nuclear/biowar first. Then humanity has about six centuries for the first moon landing by a post-holocaust society, which ought to allow time for much of the radiation or mutated plague bugs to die down.

But I think Roman Steampunk requires a lot more than a few more clever tinkerers in Alexandria avoiding getting flayed as sorcerers or whatever...
 
To elaborate from another perspective, look at this chart. Taking population growth as a rough metric of the "curve of human progress" in general, there was a major transition (presumably due to the widespread adoption of sophisticated more or less centralized states based on agriculture) in the thousand years or so before the Roman Classical period (and roughly contemporarily, the foundation of China as we know it today) followed by a long stagnation.

It is often remarked here that the "Dark Ages" are an illusion or myth and however miserable Western Europe may have been in most of the first millennium other parts of the world were doing just fine, but that sure looks like a period of general, overall stagnation to me--of course it wasn't "everyone stands still;" it was "people in various places doing OK for a while but then something terrible happened to them while meanwhile someone else was doing better only to get wiped out in their turn..."

Anyway, establishing the technological-industrial revolution in Roman times seems to me tantamount, on the eventual global scale, to snipping out that flat part of the curve and scooting the whole curve as many centuries between "POD=Newcomen type steam engines developed X centuries early, hilarity ensues" and 1750 as you like. One might argue the general pace will be slowed by the lower development of the world at large but again it looks like somewhere in the world, maybe not the same places our OTL Early Modern Europeans found them, there would be people to conquer and draft into the Industrial Moloch. Once there they too will undergo demographic transitions and variously Pull A Meiji or join the anti-colonial/NonAligned movement of the 20th century Minus your POD.

So, putting it in Rome means you advance the clock a thousand years or more. If you want just 100 years, look for much more recent candidates for tech-wanking. Sometime around 1000 AD seems reasonable; try T'ang China. Or the Caliphate. Rome's too early. (And so is Han China!)
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Here's another chart, on a log scale, that I think illustrates the periodic nature of advance and stagnation more clearly.

What it looks like to me, based on my understanding of broad human history, is that there are broad and deep systems of human organization that have to be worked out to sustain given levels of human development. The near-thousand year hiatus evident here between the late Roman decline and the High Middle Ages, corresponding to other Dark Ages happening elsewhere interspersed with Renaissances and new times of trouble, is I suspect a time when the previous period of growth on the basis of the sorts of empires that dominated in the Classical time had reached limits and there was a ferment of abortive social experimentation before a new level of global trade and cultural cross-communication was reached in the time we might call "Age of Gunpowder Empires," and it was this later fertile level on the cusp of globalization that the European civilization emerged from and assimilated. That's why I don't think Romans could have done it; the groundwork of a thousand years of trial and error for the basis of some kind of post-Imperial society hadn't been done yet and without it, neither Rome nor any other Classical era empire could solve its long-term problems.

I think similar things had happened before; agriculture I think first spread on an opportunistic basis with limited commitment by pre-existing gatherer-hunter human bands. Only some of these developed the most ancient forms of civilization which I personally suspect were run on rather different lines than we'd assume, with more continuity with a gatherer-hunter mentality that among other things would not permit too severe a class society or too much exploitation. But, as later happened to the Classical era empires, outsiders who were not fully assimilated into the new societies picked up a selective batch of cultural tricks, and overwhelmed the original societies, leading to a Time of Troubles while new cultural forms were worked out, which culminated in the next phase with the Classical civilizations, which in turn attracted their own swarm of barbarians that eventually, transformed themselves by cultural radiation from the centers, swept in and started another round of chaos, again later reaching a new strong basis for another phase of growth--one we are in today.

So there might be another round of chaos and (if the world survives it this time around) eventually some new phase of growth. Or we might have crossed some singularity that guarantees we won't have this collapse.

But I don't think we can splice together the end of the prior cycle and the beginning (really, the middle) of our own viably. Again I urge the search for PODs to look at the later centuries, well after 1000 AD. Or, if one can plausibly splice together Classical and modern periods after all, accept you've just skipped a thousand years of (probably vitally creative) Dark Ages and the clock goes way more than 100 years forward.
 
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