[deutschew]

The roman empire had steam powered contraceptions or prototypes too but lacked the machinery to produce them in large scale but more importantly their demographic were not very open to automation since they had human robots they could control aka slaves.

Why build an elaborate steam powered textile factory when it costs nothing to use slaves to do it for you?

Why do you need UFC on 4k television when you can watch gladiators duke it out live with no censorship?

Why do you need porn when...okay I will stop here but you get my point.

These mechanical constructions were always in the back of engineer's minds but nobody wanted it. If Romans invented the car, they would shun it for a horse.

I believe it is the development of commerce, colonialism and laws that really made it impossible to rely on human labor alone. Like the Dutch East Company and British one, the difference really came from increased need to manage the looting, I'm sorry, "legalized taking".

Wars also were increasingly more catastrophic and costly, an arms race if you will that really made them sit down and start engineering how to do real damage to one another.

[animal_spirits]

Slave labor in the roman empire was not as cheap as one would think. Garrett Ryan goes into this in his latest videos, "Were the Romans close to an Industrial Revolution?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uqPlOAH85o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5HDQUuI6_E

[deutschew]

haha i actually saw that video, very fascinating

[ghaff]

The Roman Empire is presumably the point (in the Western core) where an alternate history could have plausibly accelerated the industrial revolution if maybe not by a millennium at least some number of centuries. If you dig into the social development data the fall of Rome is where social development actually significantly regressed in the West and the East was even arguably ahead for a stretch.

[bpiche]

Wasn’t it Philip K Dick, in VALIS, who wrote “the Empire never ended”? Not in the sense that it didn’t end; it did in the 14th c. to the Ottoman Empire, but that the past is laminated onto the present.

[deutschew]

yes it feels a bit like today, the society increasingly became complex due to ever-changing norms and social morality.

[ghaff]

The videos upthread pretty much argue that a lot of pieces were in place but the cultural, economic, and societal pieces mostly weren't. Which, presumably, the right leadership could have shifted to some degree over time.

[inglor_cz]

They also had insufficiently developed metallurgy for anything steam-related.

Steam vessels need to withstand pressures that contemporary metal was incapable of tolerating.

Metallurgy is a huge player in technical progress. See current SpaceX efforts to prevent their Raptor 2 engines from ever so slightly melting when fired in overdrive.