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Hot take: if the Library of Alexandria hadn't burned, we'd have colonized Mars by 1800
I got into a 2 hour argument at a bar in Pittsburgh three weeks ago about this and I still can't let it go. My buddy kept saying one library doesn't matter because knowledge spreads anyway, but I don't buy it. Think about it, we lost who knows how much math and engineering that took us 1,500 years to figure out again. If that stuff survives, the printing press shows up earlier, the scientific revolution starts sooner, and suddenly it's 1750 and somebody's building a rocket. Am I crazy here or does the timeline actually check out?
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hall.joel14d ago
Used to call this nonsense but the lost math argument got me.
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