What if the Library of Alexandria never burned?

I was at a history talk in Chicago last month and someone brought up the Library of Alexandria burning down. It got me thinking, what if it survived? Would we have steam engines or germ theory a thousand years earlier? Any guesses on what tech would have showed up way sooner?

3 comments

3 Comments

lilyp3712d agoOG Member

Doesn't all that lost knowledge just feel like how we forget good ideas too easily?

keith90012d ago

Can't believe you just said that, lilyp37. It's like we're walking around with a mental filter that dumps the good stuff before we even get to use it. I remember reading once how the Library of Alexandria had all these scrolls that could have changed medicine or farming, and now we're stuck with half the picture. It drives me nuts to think about what we've lost just because someone didn't write it down right or a fire got out of hand. We need to do a better job of keeping the important ideas safe.

jason_lewis312d ago

Writing stuff down in a notebook helped me a ton. I just jot down ideas as they come and actually go back to look at them later.