Well by that logic if you have nothing, there's nothing you can do to it, so you will always have nothing, which reconciles quite nicely with multiplying numbers by 0 resulting in 0.
I think humans could predict solar eclipses and solve quite a few differential equations before they managed to give that answer. The normal answer to that question was “It hasn’t rained this week” or even “What do you mean? It hasn’t rained this week”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmagupta#Zero: ”The Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta is the earliest known text to treat zero as a number in its own right, rather than as simply a placeholder digit in representing another number”
