Constantinople has fallen.
The last embers of Rome have gutted out.
But from this ending comes a new beginning,
a rebirth.
BUM BUDA BUMP BOM BEM
BUM BUM BOM BEM, BEDA BUMP BUMMMMMMM
This series is sponsored by the awesome folks at Digital Extremes,
developer of the free to play co-op shooter Warframe, that also just so happens to take place in space.
Ha! What are the odds?
So after this episode, check out the game at the link below.
As refugees fled the shattered Byzantine Empire, they brought with them
texts and learnings that had been hoarded over the ages.
The legacy of ancient Rome,
the Scholarship of Greece,
the wisdom of the Islamic empires.
All of these things they took with them to the nearby Italian peninsula.
And with this infusion of ideas, a remarkable change began to occur.
A Europe that had languished for a millennium trying to recapture the glory of the old Roman Empire,
began making startling leaps forward in the arts, in the sciences, and in production.
But for our tale of how humanity reached out to the Stars, we must really begin with a man named Copernicus.
Timidly, almost hauntingly, afraid of its reception more from the intellectual community than the church,
this man put out a new idea, a new theory in astronomy.
One that contradicted everything everything that Ptolemy had said.
One which reordered the very worlds.
He proposed that the Sun, not the earth, might be at the center of the universe.
Now, he wasn't the first one to say something like this; even in ancient Greece some had proposed such a notion.
But he was the first to back it up with fairly rigorous math.
His system was simpler than the Ptolemaic system
It didn't have to have epicycles, those wheels within wheels, and it got results that were basically as accurate.
Encouraged by everyone, from members of the church to his own pupils,
in 1543, in the final days of his life, he published his book, and...
not many people cared.
(f in the comments for Copernicus)
He printed 400 copies and didn't even sell out of the original print run.
But those few copies that were bought, were bought by the right people.
and his ideas started to take root with some of the most forward-looking astronomers in Europe.
Then...
BOOM!
Literally.
In 1572, something unthinkable happens: a new star appears in the sky.
Now, today we know it was a supernova, but to astronomers at the time, it was a revolution.
The famously gold nosed Tycho Brahe (who, get this, as a little aside,
lost part of his nose in a duel with his cousin because the two were arguing about who was the better
mathematician at a very alcohol-fueled engagement party) took copious notes and released a treatise on this new star to the world.
He proved it was no atmospheric phenomena,
but truly something happening out past the moon.
And this,
was earth-shattering.
Why?
Well, remember how last episode we talked about Ptolemies hang up with the celestial bodies being perfect
and that being the whole reason he thought they had to travel in perfect circles?
Well, that perfection was tied to an old Aristotelian notion that the stars were immutable.
After all, if something was by definition perfect, it couldn't change.
Otherwise, it would no longer be perfect.
Q.E.D.
Yet change had occurred that had been proven beyond doubt.
But even Tycho Brahe wasn't ready to wholeheartedly embrace Copernicus' notion that the Sun was at the center of the solar system.
That would take another man.
Galileo Galilei. (hey, that name sounds familiar)
Magnifico-o-o-o-o-o!
(thou art for real?)
Galileo was the first major astronomer to use a telescope; and with this device, he made a whole host of discoveries
that would push astronomy forward, including finding non terrestrial moons
and so showing beyond question that things could orbit bodies other than the earth.
This led him to defend Copernicus notion of a sun-centered cosmos,
which led him to a friendly discussion of the theological merits of this notion,
which led him into being the target of the Inquisition,
which led him to spending most of the rest of his life under house arrest.
(more f's in the comments for Galileo)
In the end, the Inquisition forced Galileo to recant, but it was too late.
His case was too public, his arguments too well put together.
That genie could never be put back in the bottle, no matter how much the Inquisition tried.
But Galileo wasn't only an astronomer.
He was also a physicist and some of his physics influenced a young man named Isaac Newton.
(that name seems awfully familiar...)
Now, we've talked about Newton before on this show, but suffice it to say, he changed everything.
He invented calculus (though, Libniz would disagree)
to help him elucidate his theory of gravity and how it would make the planets orbits work.
His books, Opticks, and the Principia Mathematica served basically as the foundation of modern physics
and it's gonna take a literal Einstein to show him where he went wrong.
And with the creation of modern physics comes a subtler idea a shift in the understanding:
the belief that, through mathematics and observation, we can truly know the world.
This is a revolution.
From a world that largely thought that understanding came through revelation and Scripture this changed everything,
and the fundamental laws that Newton laid down kicked open the door for practical application.
Machines, real machines as we think of them today, powered by steam and driven by coal, would be right around the corner.
As new means of production began to arise so did a new hunger for a way to refine that production.
Alchemy gave way to chemistry
and rapidly the first wild chemical theories were brushed aside for the ideas we still accept today.
It was an Enlightenment, an age where reason dominated, and science and logic looked to be the path to all things.
The scientific method had been firmly established,
and science is now empirical rather than based on interpretations of ancient texts.
Antoine Lavoisier gave us an understanding of oxidation and how things burn.
Benjamin Franklin established the idea of positive and negative electricity, and conservation of charge.
And Adam Smith presented the world with "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations",
providing the basis of classical economic theory, and made the heads of state around the world start thinking,
though sometimes disastrously, about how to grow their national economies to be mega producing powerhouses.
Then we hit the French Revolution, another moment that transformed the world.
Because it was a revolution in the truest sense.
Everything was turned on its head.
Kings were replaced with committees, printing presses were as dangerous as bayonets,
and not even the names of the month remained the same.
The chaos of the French Revolution sped up the world's pace of change, as massive armies had to be deployed
provisioned production processes were improved.
As napoleonic armies broke ranks of ancient monarchies, the ideas of
democracy or constitutional constraints began to take hold across Europe.
And as battles raged on a scale never seen before, new weapons of war were introduced.
One of course was the Congreve rocket, the very rocket that Francis Scott Key was talking about when he
penned the line ''the Rockets red Glare'' in the US national anthem.
Inspired by, or, arguably reverse-engineered from, rockets
the Mysore Kingdom deployed against British troops as they tried to stay Britain's ever-growing control over India.
These are the first Rockets to see serious use in Europe.
The Royal Navy and the Royal Marines used them to great effect in Napoleonic war,
and as such, they represent the first time rocketry was really studied with the full benefit of
enlightenment science and production technology.
But the revolutionary conflicts also saw another technology that took humanity one step closer to the Stars.
For the first time in human history,
an observational balloon was deployed to a battlefield, a mere decade after advances made human balloon travel truly practical.
So now humanity was no longer limited to the terrestrial plane.
Once the wars had petered out, and Napoleon met his lonely end on the island of St. Helena,
the world plowed forward, delivering scientific and engineering wonders at a pace never before seen.
By the end of the century, electricity was coming into widespread use.
The first primitive radio signals had been sent and received,
and heavier-than-air flight had moved from a theoretical novelty to the beginnings of an experimental possibility.
Aerodynamics were moving forward as a field of research,
and gliders carrying human beings saw flight for the first time.
But there's one more revolution I want to discuss, before we move out of the revolutionary age:
The Industrial Revolution.
Because we never would have reached the Stars without the raw production power this revolution brought.
It began in England with the textile industry in the middle of the 1700s,
as machinery began to vastly increase the output of weavers.
Soon, new methods of smelting, and for the first time in history,
the mass production of chemicals became the norm.
While at the same time, a different revolution in production was occurring, one that we don't talk about as much:
Standardization.
Now, imagine a world where all the screws are made by hand,
where you might not be able to find two with identical heads or of an identical length.
Imagine a world where you had to measure every chair you bought to make sure it would fit through your door.
Yeah, that's most of history.
But with the Industrial Revolution, the idea of setting a standard by which all manufacturing would be done comes into play,
and it'll be a huge part of what's sometimes called the Second Industrial Revolution
that happened toward the end of the century, where railroads and telegraphs connect the world,
petroleum starts to be refined, and factories begin their first steps towards the modern assembly line.
But as economies grew in this great era of relative peace, and great factories belching black smoke poured more goods into the world than ever before,
as steam ships crossed the oceans, and great empires divvied up the globe,
as electric lights began to push back the dark, and vaccines began to free us from age-old fears,
the weapons of war also became more destructive than humanity had ever seen.
So join us next time, as the Industrial Revolution
leads to an age of industrial war which, when at last over, leads humanity to truly reach for the stars.
*free sound effect from the YouTube library plays*
Your earth history is fascinating, non-tenno.
Gah! Oh, hey Lotus. Nice to see you're sticking around for the story, and still rubbing in that whole non-Tenno thing. That's nice.
Of course. Also, I was getting reports of strange forge activity on this orbiter. Is it malfunctioning?
Well, I was inspired by how the Industrial Revolution truly enabled eventual space travel, not to mention
I wanted to give Zoey something to ride on, so I used the on-board forge and made this.
(they see me rollin', they hatin')
The activity I charted was far greater than the forging of one domestic drone.
It was akin to multiple warframes.
Who said anything about one?
(OH LAWD, MORE BE ROLLIN'!)
I am both horrified and impressed at the same time.
Yeah, those are both valid responses.
While my orbiter is getting
s u p e r
spotless, you should go check out Warframes upcoming expansion Imperium.
It's taking all the space ninja combat that you know and love and
doubling down by letting you play co-op ship infiltrations in real time with pilotable railjack combat, all across the solar system!
But how will these new Tenno find their way to Imperium through all these drones?
Good space robots.
Ridiculous, but effective
(why does this music remind me of james bond)
(no, seriously, this could be in a james bond action sequence)
(somebody get ian fleming on the phone, tell him i have a soundtrack idea)
(dangit, he hung up)
(ooh, i can record it and download it!)
(maybe i can submit it to warframe, the best sci-fi shooter game in the galaxy)
(aw dangit, nevermind, it ended)