[colechristensen]

In a lot of ways roman civilization fits much better into “nearly industrialized” than “millennia old” and you have to remember that a whole lot of what became western civilization was invented by romans.

Really there were only a few missing big ideas and a few organizational failures in the way of, say, someone landing on the moon a thousand years ago. The fall of the empire set the species back perhaps as much as 1500 years.