Is America a New Rome?

"This is a really mind-blowing way to start looking at the world and thinking about these things. What, what, where's the energy flowing? This guy smell analyzes it in terms of energy flow," he says. "He estimates that in the height of the Roman Empire, about one one thousandth of all the energy was coming from what we would see as machines." He argues analogies with Rome might be interesting to play with, but they're ultimately useless because of this just completely fundamental difference in transformation between then and now.