From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue May 04 1999 - 08:11:30 MDT
Most of the texts of the great library were likely copies of the
Illiad and Odyssey. By all accounts there were a great redundancy
among the books (keeping many versions was of course a good way of
getting around copier's mistakes).
Would the hellenic culture have brought us to a technological
revolution a millennium earlier if the library had remained? I
seriously doubt that, because the problems of classical technological
development were more social and cultural. A widespread view among the
thinkers that practical work was beneath them and that abstract ideas
with no empiricism was the most elegant form of knowledge,
anti-rational mystery cults, a society based on slavery and heavily
centralised command economies were some of the reasons the library
doesn't appear to have been the key to technological development.
Still, one can dream about a world where Archimedes wasn't killed and
his tradition lived on, uniting with the Epicurean ideas described by
Lucretius. Then we might have been on our way towards the stars in
nanotech spaceships now. And half the crew would be named Marcus,
Gaius and Titus :-)
Andreas Arenamontanus
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