[sushisource]

> as if the Roman empire wasn't on par with the western empire today

Huh? I mean, no, technologically it... definitely wasn't. Remind me how many teraflops the most powerful Roman computer was capable of?

The Romans were plenty advanced, sure, but that's just a nonsense statement.

[ClumsyPilot]

> Remind me how many teraflops the most powerful Roman computer was capable of?

Bad metric. We could go to the moon in the 70’s, and had supersonic passenger planes, and we could build at scale.

Today California can’t build a train, building a nuclear powerplant takes 20 years and we can’t go to the moon and don’t have supersonic passenger planes. So we have partially regressed despite having more terraflops

[firen777]

"Can't" vs "won't" is a huge distinction. All the examples you provided are either economically non-viable, bureaucratic landmines, or believed to be pointless. You can argue whether those arguments are justified, but the point is we didn't forget the technology.

[thriftwy]

They had huge stadiums, though.

Modern people had very little idea why you would have a stone stadium until around XX century.