/a/ - Animu & Mango

>>798744

>This is really pushing it.

Why? The Greeks developed napalm in 672 AD. The Archimedean screwpump was invented some time around 250 BC. It's not that difficult to imagine. Ancient societies had all the math and engineering knowhow short of calculus to accomplish a lot of shit. We've had the technology since about the 1700s to launch shit into orbit, it was just a matter of time, costs, materials, and ability for engineers/scientists to congregate on group projects.

>>799015

This is nothing great. Trigonometry was one of the things that was discovered independently by many peoples, because it is so basic.

>>799010

Not very good arguments.

>>799047

>This.

Please.

>>799010

>short of calculus

Nah m8, at least one Greek was working out some of the basics of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest

On that note, the Romans had a basic steam engine, but never figured out a use for it.

>>799048

I'm not sure you realize that Trigonometry is the precursor to calculus, and can even substitute in for calculus to a high level of accuracy to the point where most physics uses trig instead of calculus in their machine hardware unless they need a degree of accuracy to less than .01%. Trig is an extremely important concept for the utilization of practical mathematics in science/engineering applications. I realize it may seem like rudimentary knowledge in the grand scheme of things, but a civilization who knows trigonometry can effectively solve 95% of life science problems (Physics/Chemistry/Biology/Astronomy) making them capable of advancing technology much more quickly as compared to trial & error. Of course given limited resources, most of these societies developed it for weapons usage and defensive fortifications, but that's part of the equation since most military applications transfer into real world use in one way or another. Consider that it's not that many civilizations independently developed trigonometry, but those who did develop it were capable of ruling the surrounding regions with relative ease due to the knowledge granted from trigonometry. The only other non-calculus comparable mathematics are probably logarithms which are mainly used for star mapping and such. Basic concepts are "basic" by today's standards, but when you consider discovery rather than learning about these principles, and compound it with having to be able to actually use those principles, it's a big fucking deal.

Long story short, Babylonians having trigonometric tables is a huge deal since it means even ancient societies had the math and physics to get there, just not one sort of resource or another.

>Not very good arguments.

Why? Because they don't fit your fantasy you've got in your head?

>>799054

>Nah m8, at least one Greek was working out some of the basics of it

Can you imagine how much further along we'd be if Archimedes hadn't been murdered by some faggot soldier? I don't completely agree. Archimedes figured out how to solve problems for geometrically stable shapes using infinitesimals. This in and of itself is definitely an accomplishment worthy of being called a genius given the state of mathematics at the time and that he did this all on his own, but it's not true "calculus" as defined by Newton since it makes use of Trigonometry, center-of-mass, and geometric stability to solve a problem. It can accurately solve problems to the same level as Newtonian algebra-based physics, but it doesn't make use of derivatives, so it's unable to solve for variable objects with non-perfect shapes/centers of mass. It's still worthy of huge amounts of respect as Archimedes might have discovered the principles of differentiation if he had lived another decade or two, but I wouldn't quite call it "basic calculus" since it uses Riemann sums.

>On that note, the Romans had a basic steam engine, but never figured out a use for it.

Allegedly Hero of Alexandria used it to open temple doors, and had plans to implement it into water pumps for fighting fires, but he was stopped by the Romans since they became skeptical of a lot of technology that wasn't directly beneficial to the aristocracy by the middle of the 1st century.