Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell)

Of course, the Roman Empire was around into the 1400s. We just call them something else and pretend they weren't the Roman Empire after Odoacer declared himself king of Italy.

Yeah, some people's refusal to acknowledge that the Roman Empire only ceased to be as a political entity in 1453 ultimately comes down to them unwittingly continuing a geopolitical slap-fight started by a Pope over a millenium ago.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Oct 23rd 2022 at 4:19:53 PM

That's a bit disingenuous, guys. The Western part most certainly fell. It may have technically survived as the Byzantine empire, but losing over half their territory is really a rather consequential collapse.

Also, the barbarians overrunning Rome were definitely a decisive factor, as were the many migrations of Germanic and other tribes into the empire. It may have been a bit more complicated, but dismissing it entirely is equally wrong.

... Wait, why are we talking about this? Oh, you're responding to a two month old post, alright then.

Edited by Redmess on Oct 23rd 2022 at 4:54:52 PM

Except they weren’t barbarians. The Germanic tribes were invited into the Western Roman Empire by imperial officials, they were then semi-Romanised over a period of time and had became simply one of many factors in the fall.

Bret Devereaux (a classics professor focused on Roman history) has done some writing on this and the entire “Barbarians turned up and burnt Rome” narrative has a done fo problems with it.[1]

Hey, I know that guy! He wrote about AC Valhalla too.

Oh yeah, that reminds me, I was going to read his blog. Thanks Silas.

The point is that the Roman Empire was still around, even if territorially diminshed.

Also, it didn't "technically survive", it did survive. Byzantine Empire is a term used by historians to denote a specific period of Roman history, which has then been picked up by people on the internet to act like it's somehow a completely different entity and "not Roman".

Again, some people nowadays are still continuing a slapfight that was started by people who've died ages ago - this whole idea of the Byzantine Empire not being the Roman Empire was propagated by Western European monarchs and the Papacy.

The whole idea of the "fall" is also a product of Renaissance thinkers' whole "Europe went into a dark age where everyone was stupid and superstitious after Rome went poof" shtick - completely ignoring that the Roman Empire had still been alive and kicking in the east for another millenium.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Oct 23rd 2022 at 6:15:56 PM

Yeah, the whole "Holy Roman Empire" thing depended on people not realizing that the Roman Empire was totally still around.

Who you acknowledged as Roman Emperor pretty much depended on where you lived.

As I said, it was pretty much a geopolitical slap fight. And it started because of the Patriarch of Rome (i.e. the Pope) and the Patriarch of Constantinople butting heads.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Oct 23rd 2022 at 6:38:41 PM

As Voltaire said, the Holy Roman Empire was "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire".

Blaming it on people on the internet is rather silly when this disagreement has been going on since at least the Renaissance.

Didn't the Nazis call their (early 20th Century German) regime the Third Reich because they considered it the third in the legacy of the Roman and Holy Roman empires?

I think Russia did the same at some point, although they traced their "Third Rome" through the Byzantine empire instead of the Holy Roman Empire.

Edited by Kayeka on Oct 23rd 2022 at 8:12:47 PM

I do know that both "Kaiser" and "Czar" are etymologically linked to "Caesar".

You can tell the ERE was Roman from all the infighting.

You are correct, they considered themselves a successor to Rome, as did the Germans, and a bunch of other people. Tracing your country's lineage back to Rome was a very popular nationalist pastime for the longest time.

And I guess the Nazis couldn't very well call themselves the Second Reich, what with Germany having been the core of the HRE, but the connection was clearly supposed to be directly to the Romans.

They were the Third Reich by way of the Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire, not by way of Rome. I assume the nazis vaguely approved of Rome, but they certainly didn't call themselves the third reich by descent from rome.

Oh, my bad, you are right.

They did draw a lot of inspiration from Roman architecture though, that much I know for sure. Albert Speer was basically a Neoclassicist gone mad.

So is this discussion relevant to this thread?

Edited by DoubleOG on Oct 23rd 2022 at 2:51:43 AM

If you look back, there was a Kurzgesagt video on the collapse of civilizations, so yes, it is related to that.

Why we don't just shoot nuclear waste into space

Ooh, ooh, I already know this one!

1. Nuclear waste is not as big a problem as public opinion makes it out to be compared to waste from other power sources.
2. Launching it "into space" would be tremendously expensive.
   • Caveat: Something like SpaceX's Starship could make it much less so.
3. It's much safer on the ground than in a rocket. If even one launch fails (current global success rate is around 99%), that's a huge mess to clean up.
   • Caveat: It is possible to build containers that could survive the breakup of a rocket. We do it for radioisotope thermal generators like the ones on the Voyager spacecraft and the Perseverance Mars rover.

Whimsically, I like to imagine aliens visiting our solar system in the far distant future after we've gone extinct and detecting weird energy signatures in solar orbits. Investigating, they find canisters full of nuclear waste and think, "It's no wonder that those idiots killed themselves." (Not because of the use of nuclear power but because we decided to put the waste on rockets.)

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 8th 2022 at 11:03:41 AM

"Burying stuff deep underground" is hardly an ideal solution either, considering the huge underground facilities required, the time it takes just to build them and the fact all this waste will have to stay there for god knows how many years. Like, people seem to imagine that you just have to make a big hole with a shovel and dump all the waste into it. That’s not how it works.

Keeping it in secured warehouses on the surface remains the least worst solution I think, at least until we find a way to recycle it effectively.

> Nuclear waste is not as big a problem as public opinion makes it out to be compared to waste from other power sources.

The two things people generally know about nuclear waste 1)It's hazardous 2)it's can't simply be dumped in a landfill and has to go through a process

Therefore although it's a Big Problem in their minds when they think about all the other types waste they can throw away that's not going to be radioactive

People aren't operating nuclear power plants in their homes. Many industrial and commercial processes produce hazardous waste, including hospitals and coal plants. Coal waste is fairly radioactive.

Except the facilities are already built and exist now, and are so deep no future civilization could reasonably find them at any time before it's no longer dangerous.

It really is basically digging a big hole and dumping it in, it's just the hole is in rock salt which is excellent at burying things. The only thing stopping it happening are people who DON'T live near the facility in nevada don't want it stored in the facility they live nowhere near.

Edited by Florien on Nov 8th 2022 at 8:55:54 AM