If the Roman empire didn't split into separate east and west and remained whole through the early middle-ages and beyond what kind of innovations would we have seen technical, military, agricultural assuming there was no western collapse?
We actually know how to make Roman concrete today we just don’t use it because it’s more cost-effective to use concrete that needs to be replaced every few years rather than Roman concrete which could last for hundreds to thousands of years.Just holding onto Roman concrete would be huge.
I'm not sure he's referencing the present era but instead the ~800 years between 500-1300 when concrete was basically never used and the ~300 years after that when concrete was slowly reintroduced.We actually know how to make Roman concrete today we just don’t use it because it’s more cost-effective to use concrete that needs to be replaced every few years rather than Roman concrete which could last for hundreds to thousands of years.
We actually know how to make Roman concrete today we just don’t use it because it’s more cost-effective to use concrete that needs to be replaced every few years rather than Roman concrete which could last for hundreds to thousands of years.
The problem with this is that keeping the Empire togheter doesn't prevent the technology from being lost. Already by the 4th Century Roman concrete pretty much dissapears in its traditional form. While the Romans could make similar structures to the Pantheon, such as the Hagia Sophia, it didn't use Roman concrete.Just holding onto Roman concrete would be huge.
The other question is how many Roman concrete structures failed within a few years or decades because of the inherent variability of building with natural materials without any understanding of how they actually interacted. Just because there are thousand-year old wooden buildings in existence it does not mean all wooden buildings are capable of lasting a thousand years....I think it has to do more with the fact that Roman concrete is insufficiently strong for modern purposes... it is resillient, yes, and can last for thousands of years, but you definitely cannot build a skyscraper out of it.
Agreed. Many of Rome's successes in city-building and public hygiene were not due to some sort of intelligence or reasoning that was not present in the Middle Ages, but because the Roman government had vast numbers of slaves at their disposal. Hordes of cheap/free labor are good up to a point, but it ends up stifling economic growth and innovation in the long run (China and India are good examples).I don't think that the presence of a big slave market would be so great for technology.