Timeline for What could prevent my world from progressing past the early industrial age?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 1, 2021 at 18:10 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @Otkin Knowledge can not be advanced if you don't also maintain it. Time periods of mass illiteracy are often accompanied by far greater losses in technology than new innovations. The Renaissance happened because despite centuries of scarce literacy, many old writings were still maintained allowing civilization to quickly catch back up to the Classical Era in the ways they had fallen behind. The ability to read can ebb and flow while you still make progress, but without writing there can be no Renaissance because lost information is lost forever. | |
| Mar 31, 2021 at 22:35 | comment | added | The Sophomore | Honestly, this can be applied to the numina that I came up with. Perhaps numina wander libraries at night, erasing information. Of course, if you are able to drive off numina, you could keep information safe. Maybe a recent innovation occurred that revealed a way to deter numina, and that caused the discovery of the steam engine and other industrial technology. | |
| Mar 31, 2021 at 22:03 | comment | added | Otkin | @Nosajimiki You are talking about maintenance of knowledge, not advancement. In longer living species older generations can suppress new ideas for much longer and they can spend more time instilling their own ideas in new generations. It is also questionable there will be more overlapping generations since longer living species may have the same fertility rates as species with shorter lifespans. Please also consider that high levels of literacy are a relatively new phenomenon. An enormous amount of pre-industrial and early industrial technologies was passed down via apprenticeship. | |
| Mar 31, 2021 at 21:38 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @Otkin "...because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it..." <- Planck's Principle assumes no knowledge is ever lost just because someone dies because it's all written down for the next generation to be able to be familiar with. Without writing, your young can't just read about all the ideas held by every previous generation like we humans do. So, instead of an overload of knowledge that they must filter down to a manageable breadth, these dragons have a scarcity of knowledge that they must live long enough to gather and share before they die. | |
| Mar 31, 2021 at 19:31 | comment | added | Otkin | Longer lived races are more likely to be less technologically advanced since they will have fewer new talents and traditions will be maintained more strictly. The authority of elders will, probably, be enforced more as well. Science progresses one funeral at a time: wikiwand.com/en/Planck%27s_principle | |
| Mar 31, 2021 at 19:12 | history | answered | user22917 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |