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Old 05-14-2009, 09:58 PM   #13
Kelly Pedersen
 
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Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
Default Re: How is GURPS Alpha Centauri.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Barenziah58
You can have cave men make than stream engine in the stone age.
No, you really can't. They don't have the knowledge of the materials necessary to create a steam engine. A steam engine requires a certain minumum material strength of materials, otherwise the steam will simply burst the vessel rather than doing useful work. Which, incidently, was the issue with the Heronian engines as well. There couldn't have been an industrial revolution based off of them in Classical Antiquity, because the material technology still didn't exist. They were toys, at best, capable of some very limited tricks (the "opening temple doors" thing depended on some very well-balanced doors).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Barenziah58
I got into than verb fight with some people who said that cavemen didnot have than writen language. First it they wrote on leave,bark,or animal hide it is mostly they would survival the passage of time.
They did have clay and, as you yourself point out, they had stone walls which they could and did draw on. More importantly, the first farmers, in the Neolithic period, had all the same materials available to them (clay, wood, stone, etc.) that the later civilizations had, and yet we have no evidence of writing from them.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Barenziah58
Second the cave painting is also than form of written language.
Images need certain properties to be considered actual writing. They need to be regular, above all. If you put a picture of a man on a wall, you haven't written "man". At the very least, you need a standard form of that picture that can be duplicated by others. Cave paintings don't demontrate that.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Barenziah58
Third how long would the evidence survival that we have than written language last if we suffer than event which lead to the end of mankind,let say 50,000 years went by.
The problem is not that we have no examples of writing from 50,000 years ago. The problem is that we have no examples of writing from 8,000 years ago, despite having numerous artifacts that could have been written on. And then, all of a sudden, we have examples of writing appearing, and then spreading to other civilzations. If it were simply age eliminating examples, we should expect the examples to trail off slowly, with fewer and fewer examples as we go back in time, until finally it just fades away entirely. Instead, we have no writing whatsoever for thousands of years, and then suddenly a large number of examples all at once.

Last edited by Kelly Pedersen; 05-14-2009 at 10:07 PM.
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