New answers tagged civilization
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At our tech or slightly better? It will matter most which species is in control of the robots. Physical differences among humans are becoming less and less relevant over time as our tools improve.
Given disability access in more and more nations, medical devices to restore or augment the body, and mass manufacturing creating specialized tools... it’s all ...
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It doesn't matter
Both will be able to get manual labor jobs unavailable to the other. The elephant will be favored for jobs requiring strength while the mouse will do better with jobs requiring fine detail. But neither of those jobs will pay well.
The best paying jobs will be those that require thinking. Unless the physical size comes with different ...
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It is all on a sliding scale. Most of the basic knowledge to keep civilization alive will remain in the libraries of most major universities. If there are 10 plants than make computer chips and they are ALL gone it will take a while to build a new factory. If all the manufacturing plants are destroyed it will take a while to rebuild them. If all the ...
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Easter Island-sized landmass is probably a reasonable minimum to sustain a civilization.
As @Klaus Æ. Mogensen reflected in a comment, the history of Easter Island can suggest that this landmass can be both sustainable and unsustainable for a civilization. It was a home for a sophisticated nation of Polynesian origin for 500-1000 years before the eventual ...
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Assuming an Early human population of ~20K homo sapiens
And 40 hectares per person for a hunter gather culture under ideal circumstances. Given the abundant water on this world, i’d think the sea would provide enough food that ideal circumstances would be a reasonable assumption. Otherwise use 100 hectares per person
Then to give rise to an early ...
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Given a historical sample size of exactly one? 84,980,532 square kilometres.
Humans evolved in Africa, and we have no way to know whether or not the same species could have evolved on a smaller landmass.
Due to the fact that Africa is joined to Eurasia, I have considered them together as a single whole.
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North Sentinel Island is a 23 sq km island off the coast of India which has supported an un-contacted (and very hostile) tribe estimated to be in the population range of 50-400 individuals and believed to have called the island home for 6,000 years with contact with the outside world limited to a handful of documented incidents. Their nearest cultural ...
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There is a view in philosophy that civilization start to grow when you have everything in excess. I think it was Władysław Tatarkiewicz who said that Roman, Greek and Egyptian culture and philosophy flourished because they had warm long days, olives and cheese to eat and wine do drink. And they just go around and wonder.
Of course they were all having wars, ...
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It's not entirely a matter of size, but of natural resources. An island like Britain did fairly well in developing technology up to the Industrial Revolution level without a lot of imports, because it had a diverse geology, with lots of mineral resources. OTOH, a volcanic island like Hawai'i would have little in the way of minerals.
As comments point out, ...
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Tradition
Elves might have an unlimited amount of magic as you said, but that doesn't mean they should cast endless spells. Maybe it's a cultural/religious tradition to only cast magic on emergency periods, and not all the time.
For those non-emergency events, you should rely on weapons.
Not everybody knows magic
Elves are very well known for their ...
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Yes, it will surely practical!
Using magic obviously denounces you as an elf.
For some type of kills you prefer that humans are blamed, and humans have no magic. So it is wise to use human weapons.
religious prescriptions.
There can be also places where using magic is forbidden by the elves religion. Using a human weapon would allow the pious elves to ...
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Consider Japan during the Age of Exploration. This example suggests that the key was not geographic isolation but a strong government that could and did reject contact.
In Medieval times, there were even more countries which managed to resist colonization. An interesting question here is if the spread of Christianity and Islam would be colonization. ...
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We'll get more religious
The thing that seems likely in a post-scarcity society, given current demographic trends, is that many people will stop having children altogether. With all the entertainment and birth-control options available, life will be distracting enough for most people to stay self-focused and less interested in reproducing.
As Brythan ...
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Evolution will be guided by design rather than natural selection. Even today, we are able to change the genes of children before they are born and (possibly) give them higher intelligence. It is generally believed that in the future, "designer babies" will be increasingly common, with parents adding and removing genes to get the desired traits. Genes from ...
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Natural selection does not care about purpose or happiness. The only thing that matters for natural selection is propagation of genes. Someone who is miserable but has lots of kids is a natural selection star.
Some things natural selection might select towards:
Not liking condoms. Whether it's due to laziness or comfort, someone who does not use a ...
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Now you can't tell me that does anything for his survival. What's worse is the lifespan of creatures like elephant seals, the trauma from the battles between males on the beach significantly reducing their lifespans relative to the females.
In fact survival isn't that strong a driver of evolution except by correlation, the factors that we deem to be ...
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Natural selection requires pressure. If the "weak" still propagate, then evolution will stagnate and humanity will stop changing.
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Less than 500 million
The Georgia Guidestones were created by "a small group of loyal Americans" "which had been planning the guidestones for 20 years" and was able to pay "several times higher than any project the [construction] company had taken" earlier. If this information is true, then we can assume they had hired actual economists to give an accurate ...
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I'll point out that there are quite a number of humans who are born without arms, or their arms were amputated, and learned to use their feet as hands to varying degrees.
There are a lot of examples of this, so I'll let you Google/Bing/YouTube that yourself.
Granted, these people have the advantage of 4 limb-ed people to learn from, and maybe these other ...
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Here's an example, from Second Dawn by Arthur C. Clarke
Highly intelligent, telepathic, unicorn-like aliens without hands who have developed advanced maths and philosophy but lack any technology. They form a partnership with another monkey-like species that has hands but limited intelligence.
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Instead of thinking of these aliens as having 2 legs and no arms, consider that you are really describing a race with 2 arms and 2 legs, but not at the same time. As their ability to manipulate things with their feet increases, their ability to run, jump, etc will decrease. This will force an evolutionary reliance on technology to not get eaten.
As their ...
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Frame Challenge: This species will not develop a civilization akin to that of humans without something spectacular happening.
I'm imagining they invent some sort of assistant robots or cranes for them to operate, perhaps cybernetics.
Great! You have an end goal. The problem is: How did you get there? (And I suppose that's what you're asking here.) The ...
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Your question includes the answer: they have prehensile feet. As long as their body plan allows for balancing on one foot and manipulating objects with the other, or sitting and using both feet as we'd use hands, there are few barriers to their ascent to a technological civilization.
Carrying objects in their mouths will have to suffice until bags and ...
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In Albert Montey's "Universe!" series, there is an armless alien race that was able to stablish a simbiotic relationship with a kind of snake-like parasite to manipulate objects.
It's a short story, so it doesn't have a lot of details of the "why's", but it shows in quite a lot of interaction between the simbiont and the character.
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