Poll of the Day > Roman Empire wasn't even that long ago.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Our 16th great grandmas could've been in the Roman Empire

The stone age, now THAT was a long time ago.

Western or Eastern?

shadowsword87 posted...

Western or Eastern?

Western

The era when Cleopatra was alive is actually closer to the present day than it is to the era when the Pyramids were built.

From the first unification of the Old Kingdom to the final death throes of an independent Egyptian empire was about 3000 years, and it's only been about 2000 (give or take a half-century) since Cleopatra died.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The era when Cleopatra was alive is actually closer to the present day than it is to the era when the Pyramids were built.

:O
Caesar got to bone Cleopatra too. And STILL went back to Rome even tho he could have just stayed in Egypt to tap dat ass

Cave Story is closer to the NES than to us.

The Donkey Kong arcade release date is nearer the Pearl Harbor bombings than it is to the present.

Roses are red
Rome has many regions
Publius Quinctilius Varus
Give me back my legions!

KJ StErOiDs posted...

The Donkey Kong arcade release date is nearer the Pearl Harbor bombings than it is to the present.

This is the only fact ITT to fuck me up yet

I was friends with Brutus.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The era when Cleopatra was alive is actually closer to the present day than it is to the era when the Pyramids were built.

From the first unification of the Old Kingdom to the final death throes of an independent Egyptian empire was about 3000 years, and it's only been about 2000 (give or take a half-century) since Cleopatra died.

The pyramids had to have been made by aliens how the fuck (and fuckin why) could they have done that shit back then

MICHALECOLE posted...

The pyramids had to have been made by aliens how the fuck (and fuckin why) could they have done that shit back then

Nah man. Alcohol makes you do crazy shit.

Revelation34 posted...

Nah man. Alcohol makes you do crazy shit.

Should we try and find food and water and fuck and stuff like that?

nah lets build some giant pyramids for.. ???

The roman empire lasted until about 600 years ago. So it wasn't that long ago.

MICHALECOLE posted...

The pyramids had to have been made by aliens how the fuck (and fuckin why) could they have done that shit back then

People back then generally having greater individual intelligence, free time, and motivation than most people today probably helped.

MICHALECOLE posted...

Should we try and find food and water and fuck and stuff like that?

nah lets build some giant pyramids for.. ???

Because I'm better than you. Literally all it is. I have this and you can't because I am more important than you.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

People back then generally having greater individual intelligence, free time, and motivation than most people today probably helped.

First of all,

1. bullshit, if they had greater intelligence they wouldnt have been building big pyramids that do nothing (unless they do something?)
2. wtf was their motivation?

Revelation34 posted...

I was friends with Brutus.

Apparently, the last words Caesar heard before his death were "Citation needed".

ParanoidObsessive posted...

From the first unification of the Old Kingdom to the final death throes of an independent Egyptian empire was about 3000 years, and it's only been about 2000 (give or take a half-century) since Cleopatra died

You were still in your 30s back then right?

"Oldies" were closer to Disco than Disco is to us.

Disco is Oldies
Fuckin' Grunge is Oldies now

Spice Girls' recording of "Wannabe" is nearer the year 1969 than it is to the present.

BlackScythe0 posted...

The roman empire lasted until about 600 years ago. So it wasn't that long ago.

Kinda: the Byzantines had moved on quite a bit from what most people think of as classically Roman. They're sorta Rome's equivalent to what the US would be if taken over by evangelicals...and forced into Canadian territory. They certainly weren't an "empire" by that point.

I find it rather more amazing that the Ottoman Empire survived into the 1900s. And the Holy Roman Empire survived into the 1800s.

MICHALECOLE posted...

bullshit, if they had greater intelligence they wouldnt have been building big pyramids that do nothing (unless they do something?)
wtf was their motivation?

This one is easy. If Trump had a bunch of slaves at his disposal as President do you think we would have a ridiculously large pyramid to honor him after his death?

Hint: we would have a ridiculously large pyramid to honor him after his death.

You get things like pyramids when individuals have a ridiculous amount of power and resources and they can't think of anything better to do. Or they don't give a rat's ass about doing anything better and simply want a pyramid.

Amazing to think democracy hasn't improved at all since the days of the Republic

wpot posted...

Kinda: the Byzantines had moved on quite a bit from what most people think of as classically Roman. They're sorta Rome's equivalent to what the US would be if taken over by evangelicals...and forced into Canadian territory. They certainly weren't an "empire" by that point.

I find it rather more amazing that the Ottoman Empire survived into the 1900s. And the Holy Roman Empire survived into the 1800s.

This one is easy. If Trump had a bunch of slaves at his disposal as President do you think we would have a ridiculously large pyramid to honor him after his death?

Hint: we would have a ridiculously large pyramid to honor him after his death.

You get things like pyramids when individuals have a ridiculous amount of power and resources and they can't think of anything better to do. Or they don't give a rat's ass about doing anything better and simply want a pyramid.

Isnt it more thought now that the pyramids werent built by slaves, and that they were basically paid workers?

MICHALECOLE posted...

Isnt it more thought now that the pyramids werent built by slaves, and that they were basically paid workers?

It's more like peasants who were legally obligated to work as part of their taxes, in addition to paid professionals.

Blightzkrieg posted...

Amazing to think democracy hasn't improved at all since the days of the Republic

Makes me think of the Coliseum and the Gladiator games.
Apparently people getting killed regularly in the Coliseum was just a misleading Hollywood over-dramatization and people were just injured, not killed.
So it really was just basically UFC but in Ancient Rome?

MICHALECOLE posted...

Isnt it more thought now that the pyramids werent built by slaves, and that they were basically paid workers?

Not really. I should update my terminology from "slaves" to "serfs/peasants"/whatever, but from the vantage point of an absolute monarch there's not a lot of difference between them: they both have to do as instructed (so long as the political structure holds up) regardless of whether they're paid a small amount or not. The main "we would be building a pyramid if we were peasants and Trump was our pharoah" point still works.

Ferarri619 posted...

Makes me think of the Coliseum and the Gladiator games.
Apparently people getting killed regularly in the Coliseum was just a misleading Hollywood over-dramatization and people were just injured, not killed.
So it really was just basically UFC but in Ancient Rome?

Lots of people were killed, but they were usually prisoners of war or criminals and weren't the main attraction. "Gladiators" were professional fighters and were extremely valuable, so even though many were slaves care was typically taken to avoid deaths.

MICHALECOLE posted...

Isnt it more thought now that the pyramids werent built by slaves, and that they were basically paid workers?

They had to start paying people after Rameses got pwn'd by Moses

Acknowledge him

Blightzkrieg posted...

Lots of people were killed, but they were usually prisoners of war or criminals and weren't the main attraction. "Gladiators" were professional fighters and were extremely valuable, so even though many were slaves care was typically taken to avoid deaths.

This is true. back then a slave merely meant you were owned, that doesn't mean you can smash your slaves at random any more than you can smash your puppies nowadays. a mistreated slave would be re-homed by the state

1st Rebuild of Evangelion movie was closer to 1st NGE episode (11 years)

than last Rebuild movie was to the 1st movie (13.5 years).

MICHALECOLE posted...

if they had greater intelligence they wouldnt have been building big pyramids that do nothing (unless they do something?)

You're assuming that greater intelligence implies that their motives and desires would be the same as yours, which is a groundless assumption. What you consider a valuable use of time and resources isn't necessarily what they'd consider a valuable use of time and resources (and conversely, people a thousand years ago and people a thousand years in the future will probably find most of what we do today to be a laughably pointless waste of time and energy).

Also, by "intelligence", I was referring more to things like memory and mental processing power. Knowledge as a collection of information may be far more advanced now, but that's not really the same thing. Information alone isn't necessarily as important as how you process information.

Science generally accepts the premise that technology impairs mental acuity to some degree. It's related to the idea that the invention of the calculator has literally made people worse at math, phones with memory functions have made people far less capable of remembering phone numbers, etc. Our brains are essentially "lazy", and are pretty much designed to halfass things and take shortcuts wherever possible. It's been theorized that the invention of written language radically impaired the ability of humans to pass on oral history and lore accurately or otherwise remember things (why bother remembering when you can just write important stuff down?), and anthropologists have suggested that the development of a complex spoken language in general helped atrophy our ability to read body language (in the way many animals do).

People in the past may have had more flexible mental processing, combined with fewer variables to work with (ie, you're not going to worry about things you know nothing about), and fewer distractions from what you're working on (no TV, phone, texts, funny cat videos on the Internet, etc). Which may have allowed them to accomplish things we think of as borderline impossible or simply extremely impractical today. Especially when they were willing to devote decades to work on projects while we get bored after 15 minutes.

Modern people love the idea of shitting on people in the past for being stupid, but by most metrics, the average person back then was probably smarter than the average person now, just more limited by factors like lack of access to thousands of years worth of accumulated knowledge. And based on Internet social media, in many cases people in the past might even have known more in general than people today who are ignoring thousands of years worth of accumulated knowledge and who are basically walking talking examples of the DunningKruger Effect.



MICHALECOLE posted...

wtf was their motivation?

Devout belief in gods and an afterlife, faith in divinely inspired leadership (or at least leadership powerful and influential enough to murder the shit out of you if you don't do what you're told), and the surety that comes from knowing that what you're doing matters in some way? That sort of mindset can move mountains.

Though I was actually talking more about the motivation to maintain work on a project for literal decades.

The Burj Khalifa was build over the span of about 5 years. Now imagine working on a skyscraper for 30 years (give or take). The Big Dig - which has become notorious for being a never-ending project that was a massive waste of taxpayer money - only lasted 15 years. The largest pyramids took twice as long, and likely used far more of Egypt's existing wealth at the time.

For all that people say things like "We could never build something like that today!", we totally could. It would just require far more time and money and effort than we'd be willing to commit. Because we don't care enough to consider it worth the bother.

I mean, hell, we can't even be bothered to fund NASA because trips to the moon seemed pass after the sixth trip (and hardly anyone ever even remembers any of the astronauts who went other than the first two). The space shuttle was invented as a way to save money while flinging humans into the Outermost Void, and we weren't even willing to keep paying for that after a while. If we can't finish a job in about 20 minutes as cheaply as possible, we start complaining.

THAT'S what I meant by motivation - they had the desire to do something and the willingness to see it through, regardless of setbacks or how long it took or how much it cost.



Metalsonic66 posted...

You were still in your 30s back then right?

Early 20s, actually.

wpot posted...

Kinda: the Byzantines had moved on quite a bit from what most people think of as classically Roman. They're sorta Rome's equivalent to what the US would be if taken over by evangelicals...and forced into Canadian territory. They certainly weren't an "empire" by that point.

Nah.

The Byzantine Empire is what you get when Romans conquer the Greeks, assimilate the entirety of their culture until it almost overwrites their own, then double/move their capital to a Greek city hundreds of miles away, which then separates and slowly morphs into a Greek Empire in a thinly-veiled disguise.

In US terms, it would be like what you'd get if half the country (say, the western half) essentially fractured off while being slowly taken over by Native Americans and Hispanics who gradually overwhelm and replace most current culture and social assumptions with mainly elements and worldview from pre-Columbian native culture, while still claiming to be an Anglo-European nation descended from (and heir to the legacy of) the British.

(And to complete the metaphor, the eastern half of the US would slowly fracture down into individual states that would declare themselves as kingdoms and then fight each other for the next sixteen-hundred years or so).

(And then the savage Canadian barbarians would attack from the North)

And to be fair to the Byzantines, they were still an empire after the Western Empire fell, just a much smaller one. That slowly eroded away, bit by bit, over hundreds of years. Sure, they were kind of a joke at the end (and arguably never really recovered from the debacle of the Fourth Crusade, and they were already on the wane even before that), but they arguably spent more time as a legitimate Greek empire than they ever did as an actual Roman one.

po why do you manually type the posted by message when you quote

https://youtu.be/xuCn8ux2gbs

ParanoidObsessive posted...

For all that people say things like "We could never build something like that today!"

Who the hell says that? Anything built back then could be done today in the fraction of the time and effort. Cranes make building most anything trivial.

Hell, the Luxor casino is more impressive of a structure by far than any of the ancient Egyptian pyramids. Someone would have to be daft to make that claim.

It's extra annoying when people won't elaborate on what part of the pyramids is impossible... like, the whole thing? I mean, at its most basic level it's just a stack of rocks... that's not impossible, that's caveman

MICHALECOLE posted...

nah lets build some giant pyramids for.. ???

billionaires take day trips into space while 600 million people are malnourished, new era same shit

ParanoidObsessive posted...

o be fair to the Byzantines, they were still an empire after the Western Empire fell, just a much smaller one.

Yes, to start. I abbreviated the fall of the Romans into a sentence to fit in a post/make a fun point, but there were certainly several factors. Religion was one, assimilation was - yes - another, barbarian attacks were another, political instability/corruption was another.

In the big picture Rome changed from an empire full of people motivated to make it great into a zombie state full of people trying to use it for their own means. It is, unfortunately, a rather good analogy of the West...and the US in particular.

Metalsonic66 posted...

They had to start paying people after Rameses got pwn'd by Moses

The sea was red with blood.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's been theorized that the invention of written language radically impaired the ability of humans to pass on oral history and lore accurately or otherwise remember things

Oral history would obviously be less accurate since the human brain forgets things. Especially if it's old people telling the history.