I just looked it up cause I was curious, and cannons were in-between. Then as industry evolved cannons became smaller and more deadly and eventually turned into personal firearms.
I’d say it wasn’t that long, relatively, to figure out that we could point them at each other. I mean hell, the Chinese used fireworks as weapons like I immediately after inventing them, bringing with them the first flamethrowers.
Stalin’s Organ (Katyusha) ain’t got shit on the Hwach’a:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwacha
I would very much like to know more about Chinese use of ‘fireworks’ as weapons, if you could point me to something on it!
Well, you could have pointed them at people as soon as they were invented 🙃
Then the gun would have been invented in 200 BC. 🤣
no, you might have a rocket propelled grenade though
True!
Making something that goes boom is easy. Making something that can contain a boom and channel the boom into only one direction is difficult. Quality metallurgy and precision metal work is actually difficult. Making a tube and a projectile that fit each other nicely is very hard to do at scale.
No, but rockets were a thing
Bold of you to assume people weren’t stupid enough to aim them at each other for fun before then.
Now you can kill someone with code…
deploys LLM to convince vulnerable teens to commit suicide
Heron of Alexandria invented an ‘almost a steam engine’ in ~40 AD/CE.
He also invented basically early robots, vending machines, and floor pressure activated doors.
They just… did not catch on widely, or were viewed as toys or one-offs.
Again, roughly in the same timeframe ascribed to the life of Christ.
The problem he had is the same problem some scientists face today - forgetting to / being unable to also invent a way to mass produce it.
Pressure doors for example used way more resources and labor than today’s automatic doors.
Vending machines were limited on what they could vend and again, weren’t ready to build.
Not to mention all this type of information back then had to be hand copied, as blueprints &tc didn’t exist either, so any scribe errors would hinder spread further.
Well yes, but, the irony is that, had he gone a bit further with his device, connected it to say, a shaft, and a gear, and then ground millet with it…
Welp, thats how you get an industrial revolution.
Which then lays the ground work for a society to be able to develop mass production.
this is percival fredrickstein von musel klossowski de rolo III erasure
