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Notes -
I wonder if there might actually still be, even in our modern world, some major intellectual insights that future generations, once those insights have appeared, will think of as relatively low-hanging fruit and wonder why it took so long for their ancestors to come up with them, and wonder why their ancestors did not come up with them given that they already had every necessary bit of knowledge to come up with them, and maybe only lacked some spark of genius.
Some examples from history:
It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.
There are at least two things here that are worth noting.
One is that prerequisites required, both in terms of knowledge and (market/social/political/geological/etc.) conditions for a technology or piece of engineering to first appear are often not obvious to us at first glance as we look in retrospect. @MadMonzer discusses the example you gave of calculus, but I'd like to consider the steam engine for this. After all, the aeolipile as described by Vitruvius and Hero is a rudimentary thing with a turbine powered by steam, and the Romans had sophisticated and complicated designs like the Ctesibius water pump; surely they could've gotten to steam engines by the 2nd century!
Except that the steam engine that was eventually found useful required several technological and scientific developments that were simply not available to the Romans. It required a concept of pressure differentials, in particular the idea of a vacuum, as well as a sophisticated understanding of thermodynamics; it required advances -- with respect to both technology and scale -- in metallurgy (e.g. cast iron, which made the entire thing much cheaper, was available in classical China but would not be known in Europe until the early modern era) and manufacturing (e.g. machining techniques and precision tools) for steam engines to be feasible or economical to manufacture. (This list is by no means exhaustive.)
And even that isn't enough to spur the development and adoption of the steam engine historically! Many of these conditions were met in Europe, which certainly had tinkerers working on steam-based engines and contraptions in the 16th and 17th century, including a steam-powered cannon by da Vinci. They may even have been present in China, even with the relative decline in Chinese science by that time.
The conditions required for adoption of the primitive steam engine was present in England, which had a persistent relative labour shortage (so that it's worth investing in an early machine to do work) and coal mines with groundwater that needed to be pumped out; in one fell swoop you had a fuel and a method to get rid of groundwater flooding the mines!
From that point, incremental improvements start to occur fairly rapidly; but even these improvements required the existence of an economy that is growing to a scale where these improvements would've paid off. (In this case it seems like it was a virtuous cycle.)
There are other low-hanging-fruit examples like wheels not taking off in the Incan empire -- they had the concept of a round thing turning on an axle in toys and such, but due to the geography of their land and lack of pack animals, primitive wheeled transport wasn't really efficient -- and so it wasn't further developed!
I suppose what I mean is that for a technology (or an industrial revolution, for that matter) to take off, many things have to align at the same time -- in terms of technological knowledge, but also in terms of the right political institutions, social and population trends, financial incentives and economic landscape, geographic luck, and so on.
The other point is that historical cultures may have had similar insights, but -- due to circumstance, ideology, etc. -- these insights are applied in different and sometimes diametrically opposite ways.
You can find many classical Chinese texts extolling the virtues of laissez-faire governance, as well as texts discussing supply-and-demand, business cycles (and an early form of Keynesian economics), inflation, issues with monopolies, early forms of regulatory capture and the principal-agent problem, recognition of economic speculation, economic inequalities secondary wealth and capital accumulation, appreciation of differences in incentive and efficiency between the public sector and the private sector, and other ideas in economics and political economy. The ancient Chinese had a nuanced, if unsystematic, understanding of market forces.
But these texts, drawing from a zeitgeist of a different era, operating under different assumptions, and penned by a bureaucrat class under an imperial government, advance arguments and rationales that are often bizarre to our modern ears. Laissez-faire governance (of markets as well as of society broadly), often discussed as wu wei (無為), is often not recommended for price-finding efficiency, improved market incentives, or on grounds of liberty; but because of an idealisation of a distant government that does not interfere with the natures and desires of men so as to turn them greedy and capricious (rather than simple and honest agriculturalists), and from a Confucian idea that rulers should lead by example, and when they do the entire nation will follow suit.
As an aside, you see a smidge of this influence in the development of modern classical economics, as the Physiocrats drew significant inspiration from China; the word laissez-faire is in fact a loose translation of wu wei!
As I've said before: "flooded mines" isn't an independent variable. If you dig a mine beyond the depth of the water table, it will flood. This is true in all locations and had been a major limit on how deep mines could be dug since Roman times. The independent variable is whatever's creating a demand for coal big enough to make dealing with the flooding worthwhile.
You're right in geological terms, which I definitely missed in the original comment, but I think it's more circumstantial than "high demand for coal". Imperial China, for example, had similar issues with deforestation as Britain did, and had widespread adoption of coal both as a daily fuel and as a metallurgical resource in response to this especially in the Song dynasty; Marco Polo notes the predominance of coal as a fuel, for a European source that's a couple hundred years down the line.
I'm not completely sure why Britain had the need to artificially drain its waterlogged mines while China didn't, despite widespread use of coal. I do recall that the Chinese generally didn't employ shaft mining until quite late, that shaft mines would just be abandoned rather than drained even in the late Qing, and that some Chinese mines had relatively efficient natural drainage that made them less flood-prone; perhaps the geological details of the mines themselves, and the mining techniques necessary for them, were significant factors. I'm also of the impression that viable mines in Britain were able to be operated very close to waterways in a way that e.g. China's (or perhaps other European countries, as well) didn't, which may have lead to different financial bottlenecks.
Speculatively, I also wouldn't be surprised if coal and firewood consumption fell significantly, at least at a per capita level, after the Yuan (14th century or so), which would at least partially explain why there was lower demand for further improvements in mining.
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