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What if the Library of Alexandria never burned down?
Stumbled on a history podcast last week that got me thinking. The Library of Alexandria supposedly had hundreds of thousands of scrolls - math, astronomy, medicine, philosophy. Popped in 48 BC during Caesar's siege. But what if it survived? Would we have skipped the Dark Ages entirely? Imagine skipping 1000 years of religious dogma blocking science. We might have landed on the moon by 500 AD. Anyone else wonder if that one fire set humanity back more than any other disaster?
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corablack1d ago
Used to think the opposite but you totally changed my mind on this one.
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dakota4151d ago
Man, not this "what if" rabbit hole again. So we skip the Dark Ages, land on the moon by 500 AD, and what - everyone's wearing togas on the lunar surface complaining about Caesar's tax policy? Realistically, Rome was still collapsing anyway, and a bunch of scrolls wouldn't have stopped the Visigoths from sacking the place. We probably would have just gotten faster at writing "we should wash our hands" before everyone ignored that advice for another thousand years.
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