I'm interested to know the opinion of some historians and sociologists on this topic.

From a game perspective technology levels, albeit in a simplified form, are one measure of a civilisations advancement. When you look at many universes that are out there, in particular Millers Traveller genre, technolgy levels normally follow the main era's of development.

Namely:

Stone Age
Bronze Age
Iron Age
Fall/Diaspora
Dark Age
Medieval
Renaissance
Industrial Age
Atomic Age
Information Age (presumablly our current level of development)

I'm going to go through a "what if" scenarios now.

Namely, "what if the Roman Empire hadn't collapsed when it did"? What if it hadn't collapsed at all? Would we have avoided the Dark Ages? If so, would we have then avoided having to have a Renaissance to "get us back on track" so to speak? There's a reason why Renaissance folks were so interested in the Classical Era...

A lot of blame for the collapse of Rome has been chalked down to the size of the Roman Empire. The difficulty in administering and controlling it. The difference in cultures from one region to the next. That sort of thing.

But if you could have solved the communications issues, and by that I mean sending orders and moving things around a little faster, could the Romans have kept it togther?

You see, shortly after the birth of Jesus Christ, an historically noted event whether you believe in him as the son of God or one of the Prophets or just as a man, a chap called Hero (that's his real name by the way) who lived in Alexandria invented the Steam Engine around 100 A.D ish.

Really. I'm not kidding. A steam engine. Grecko-Egyptian technology was more than up to the task.

Only he called it an Aeolipile and unfortunately it was chalked down as an amusement.

Hero, being a genius, was an Alexandrian state secret. It's one of the reasons why some of you probably haven't heard of him. Whereas the likes of Heroditus and Pythagoras were also genius thinkers in their own right, what they came up wasn't a huge military advantage to a nation. Hero of Alexandria also wrote books like "Cheirobalistra", which was about making really good catapults. The Alexandrians wanted to keep that sort of information to themselves.

Hero was a bit like Q is in the James Bond universe, and so a lot of his inventions were kept under wraps limiting the number of others who could have taken Hero's ideas further.

Now, the Greeks already knew about rails. The folks back in Corinth had invented them some 600 years before Hero twigged that steam was a pretty cool thing.

If Hero's steam engine had been stuck on rails and managed to move a carriage, how long would it have been until the very practically minded Romans thought "Hmm, these railways, they're pretty nifty, we're impressed. They're like our roads, but a bit better..."?

So, I ask of you all, is a Dark Age a common Era for a burgeoning civilisation or have we humans been set back 1,500 years in our development?

Is the Dark Age and the Renaissance that followed an exception to the rule in the development of civilisations that we humans have, typically for us, stumbled over?

Should we really have jumped from the Bronze/Iron Age directly to the Industrial Revolution thanks to some nifty Classical inventions and skipped all of the pogroms in the middle?

Oh, and by the way, Hero was believed to be an Atomist. That was a group of thinkers who were theorising that everything was made of these incredibly tiny building blocks called Atoms. It was only another 2000 years until Einstein came up with E=MC2...