What interests me about all the noise surrounding the Antikythera Mechanism is the question of what would have been, I mean what would things be like now, what would the world look like, be like, had the technology that produced this mechanism not been lost.

Jo Marchant on Nature.com articulates the question:

I’m also interested in finding the answer to a more perplexing question — once the technology arose, where did it go to? The fact that such a sophisticated technology appears seemingly out of the blue is perhaps not that surprising — records and artefacts from 2,000 years ago are, after all, scarce. More surprising, to an observer from the progress-obsessed twenty-first century, is the apparent lack of a subsequent tradition based on the same technology — of ever better clockworks spreading out round the world. How can the capacity to build a machine so magnificent have passed through history with no obvious effects?

In an interview with E magazine (Epsilon, a Greek magazine that comes with Sunday’s Eleftherotypia) Xenofontas Mousas, an Athens University, Department of Astronomy professor, answers the question of why the technology was lost. He explains that while the Romans wanted the technology, they didn’t apply it practically. Mousas tells his students at the university that “…had Greeks remained free, had Antony and Cleopatra not lost the war, it is possible that we’d have an entirely different world today. Later, the Christians arrived and they had their own priorities…”Mousas also told E that the scientific knowledge required to build a mechanism of this sort, if it continued to be developed under favourable conditions, could well have brought the Industrial Revolution to Greece at around 200 AD and even seen Greeks on the moon by 300 AD.