Missed Inventions
The Nazcan desert drawings are awesome. Gigantic line drawings of spiders, monkey’s and spirals that can be seen from space but not from the ground. Literal-minded people find this incomprehensible. Erich Von Daniken insisted they were built for the visiting spacemen. Less obviously insane is the claim that the Incas had hot air balloons. They made the drawings because they could see them from their hot air balloons.
This is stupid, they made them because it was cool, and they didn’t have television, but it raises a fascinating question. The Incas did not have hot air balloons, but they could have had. Hot air balloons require rope, baskets, cloth and fire. Rope, baskets, cloth and fire are neolithic technologies.
At any time in the last 10,000 years or so humans could have made hot air balloons. They wouldn’t have worked very well, and they would have been horrendously dangerous, but that’s never stopped us before or since.
If I ever find myself down a wormhole, back in the Roman Empire, I’m going to invent hot air balloons.