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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 5680329" data-attributes="member: 463">Maybe you're a glass half full kinda guy and I'm a glass half emptier, but I just can't see this.  Stuff gets forgotten all the time.  You even mention the Chinese treasure fleets - right after, China goes into a 500 year decline she's only been pulling out of for the past 30 years or so!  And even in the West, while technology has mostly advanced pretty consistently in recent centuries, stuff does get lost and rediscovered.  It's most noticeable for me in the soft sciences like history and anthropology - looking at pre-WW2 sources I see a lot of stuff which seems to have then been forgotten during and after WW2, just disappears down the memory hole.  The sources are still available, but they get left out of the stream of knowledge transmission.  Some of it gets rediscovered later.  It's the same with biology, natural history and other stuff - things are discovered in the 19th century, published, then forgotten.  I see the same thing reading classical Latin sources; eg on the first page of Ovid's 'metamorphoses' - a book of myths/fairy-tales for a wide readership, not esoteric science - he describes how the early Earth was formed into a spherical shape through the power of its own gravity(!).  A thousand years later, who knew about gravity?  Just maintaining civilisation and an existing knowledge base takes a huge amount of effort.  Entropy is natural to the universe; without that effort things fall apart very fast.  We just had a major demonstration of that here in England.</blockquote>

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