Lost Futures

The Fighting Temeraire. 1839, by Joseph Mallord William Turner. (Source: Wikimedia) Editor’s note: Post 2/30 for Inkhaven Why did the philosophers fail to anticipate the industrial revolution? I often find myself wondering. On the one hand, you could argue that they weren’t in the business of predicting the future. But...

"A medieval European painting by Giotto Di Bondone of a hot-air balloon flying above a city as onlookers watch" by Dalle-2 TL;DR Hot air balloons certainly could have arrived at least decades earlier and there's a high chance they could have arrived centuries, possibly even millennia earlier. Jason Crawford asks,...