Engines Without Empires
Hero of Alexandria built a steam engine that spun on jets of air, yet Rome never industrialized. Resources strained, politics unstable, and invention dazzled more than it transformed. Two thousand years later, the pattern feels eerily familiar. Energy and materials remain finite, political divisions run deep, and knowledge is often sealed inside corporate vaults. The lesson is clear: technologies advance only when context allows them to take root. A Kuhnian warning follows: revolutions arrive only when old paradigms collapse under crisis. Are today’s AI and quantum breakthroughs engines of transformation, or marvels still awaiting their moment in history?
Earlier Coverage: Engines Within; When Myth Became Mechanism.
