What else?! A relic from the past!
I'm reading an extraordinary book - abandoned on the street, of course - about population density and behavioral manifestations as culture-formed and culture-shaping mechanisms in human society. Highly recommend.
Our senses are able to absorb non-visual information in a much more integrated, less conscious way than the learned visual interpretation mechanisms. So, when we delve into the past without sound, smell, touch, temperature, we only get half the experience.
The point I am getting to is this: a digital replica of Rome is utterly meaningless.
The desire to go back to this "golden" (ha!) age of Western history is a yearning for ...whatever is the opposite of evolution. Not destruction, exactly, but a desire to regress into the unknown safety of a past that did not exist.
Without the sensory feedback, the digital realm completely lacks the social and environmental information that we could absorb and apply to our present, and more importantly, our future. A US citizen, walking down the "street" in this rerun, has no sense of what Rome was like, especially for its inhabitants.
Great architecture, maybe, but shit in the streets? The smell of rotting flesh emanating from every crevice in the structure? The unwashed poor crowding you, heating your flesh and rubbing their scents all over you as you are pushed towards the hard stone seats of the Coliseum?
Does this sound good? Does this sound like the Rome you imagine?
Without it, does it come anywhere near "replicating" the original?
I am all for the use of virtual world technology to explore the impacts of our past and the implications for our future.
Maybe I'm just too demanding [maybe I'm just like my father, too...], or maybe the use of "high level" technology to reminisce over a past that wasn't that great anyway (cycles, people, cycles!) seems about as pointless as anything I can imagine.
Like a winged computer mouse, or an automatic electrical tent collapser (for the elite nomad), or...
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