We've found out a lot in the last 40 years from archaeology around the world about how much smarter, more organized, and more thoughtful than we thought. The pacific rim had a bunch of very large previously undiscovered trading populations and they were not small ones. There are areas in central and south America where we have found a lot more empty ruins (vast numbers) that nobody knew were there before and which would have supported large numbers of people and in a very structured setting - multiple cities with linking roads, and so on.

We've long kind of thought our ancestors weren't that bright, but I doubt the human intelligence is greatly higher than any other time in the last 4K years at least (maybe a bit because the plastic brain may adapt to our new requirements and that might show out in some tests). I have no trouble believing that some problems of nations are still with us from those times.

Traffic jams is one, corrupt government is another, the insanity of a system lacking enough checks and balances, demagogues wanting power, etc. The authors of antiquity also recorded a number of fairly useful understandings of solutions and ways to bolster a society against those sorts of problems.

So it isn't necessarily much of an act to predict 'a traffic jam'.

To predict a 3D traffic jam with flying cars, if you don't know what a car is or what a plane is or that cars might fly one day, might be a bit more of a stretch.


On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 11:29 PM Thomas RUX <xxxxxx@comcast.net> wrote:
Hello shadowgard,

In a program about Pompeii they showed several roads that had features that directed wagon traffic flow. IIRC there was small raised section with a channel in between next to the side of the road.

Tom Rux

> On 06/23/2020 7:21 PM shadow at shadowgard.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
>

> On 20 Jun 2020 at 18:49, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 11:19 AM David Johnson <xxxxxx@zarthani.net
> > > wrote:
> >     Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org > wrote:
> >
> > I tried to find Rodenberry's Axiom, but Google and DuckDuckGo give me
> > blank stares.  
> >
> >     You had me at "no more consideration than 'what do I need to make
> >     this story work'" but, unfortunately, lost me at "engineers."
> >     Frederik Pohl--who Wikipedia says dropped out of Brooklyn
> >     Technical High at 17 and served as an air corps enlisted
> >     weatherman--had an interesting editorial about this sort of thing
> >     in ~Galaxy~ way back in 1968:
> >
> >     https://archive.org/stream/Galaxy_v27n05_1968-12_modified
> >
> >     I love the last bit about "a good science-fiction story" being
> >     "able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
> >
> > To be fair though, if you don't sufficiently understand the
> > automobile, you can't predict the traffic jam.
>
> Actually the traffic jam didn't *need* to be predicted as they
> existed at least as far back as Rome (Rome had laws forbidding wagons
> and the like inside the city dost the day *because* they caused
> traffic jams)
>
> On the other hand Larry Niven *did* predict flash mobs...
> --
> Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
> shadow at shadowgard dot com
>
>
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