Colonising from space

[Dangerious P. Cats]

Originally Posted by RyanW

What I'm trying to figure out is why American diseases weren't killing Conquistadors as quick as European diseases were killing the Aztecs. Perhaps the lower populations had never created an environment for a runaway arms race.

What diseases (other than syphilis) come from the Americas? Most of Europe's diseases initially came from European animals and close contact with them. The Americans by comparison had little in the way of domesticated animals and didn't live quite as close to them as Europeans did, so diseases had less chance of jumping species. Jared Diamond is possibly better at explaining that than me though.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by RyanW

What I'm trying to figure out is why American diseases weren't killing Conquistadors as quick as European diseases were killing the Aztecs. Perhaps the lower populations had never created an environment for a runaway arms race.

One emerging theory is that it's less about population density causing an immune system arms race, with city-dwelling Europeans having acquired more immunities than more rustic native Americans ('cause significant chunks of the New World did have pretty considerable civilizations and population densities) and more about the underlying population genetics. It seems that Old World populations (not just Europe here; we're talking about Africa and Asia as well) have much more genetic diversity than New World ones because of bottlenecks at migration episodes. The way this plays out in immunity is that:

a) The more diverse your immune systems are, the greater the odds that a chunk of your population is going to have pretty good resistance to whatever comes down the pike. Conversely, if your genetics aren't very diverse, the odds are good that anything that can infect a few people will infect a lot of people.

b) An immune system is generally either good at resisting parasites or good at resisting microbes. In the New World, it tends to be the former. In Europe, it tends to be the latter.

So, then, at the Columbian exchange, everybody encountered a new range of microbes, but where the Old World had a wide range of pre-existing natural immunities which prevented the rise of a civilization-destroying plague, New World immune systems didn't have to tools to even begin fighting off the new diseases they encountered. This explains why there wasn't an "one-and-done" massive die-off from an initial wave of Old World diseases leaving behind people with better natural immunities, as you'd expect from a virgin field epidemic. Rather, there were centuries of successive waves of Old World diseases killing off pretty much the same proportion of people in the New World every time because there was simply no natural immunity to develop.

That said, there's a theory that syphilis comes from the New World, so at least there's that.

[martinl]

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

IRL, when an advanced race of colonists bumps up against a neolithic culture, the neolithic culture ceases to exist within a couple of generations.

This was true at TL5 and lower. I'm not sure it is guaranteed at TL8-9.

Now, it is possible the OP is looking for an "Colonial era - in Space!" game, or even an "Old West - in Space!," but even those do not require the worst excesses of these eras to be duplicated.

In the colonial era, there was little respect for the autonomy, property, or lives of native peoples. These things were justified in theory by religion and in practice by raw military, organizational, demographic and immunological power.

This is not as universally true today. I can easily imagine a TL8 society that worked hard to treat the natives fairly, either by restricting interaction or "gentle and voluntary" uplift. Heck, running the uplift and dealing with the attendant problems would be a pretty fun campaign.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

What diseases (other than syphilis) come from the Americas?

That was kind of my point. Why wasn't there a pool of diseases in the New World?

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

One emerging theory is that it's less about population density causing an immune system arms race, with city-dwelling Europeans having acquired more immunities than more rustic native Americans ('cause significant chunks of the New World did have pretty considerable civilizations and population densities) and more about the underlying population genetics.

By population, I didn't mean density so much as interconnected population over whatever area. There was trade between, say, China to the Middle East to Europe, and that would give a potentially enormous pool for diseases to expand into.

That, plus the general lack of domesticated animals, plus the Bering bottleneck (which meant they only had the genes and the microbes they brought with them), probably all combined to make the Americas poor ground for super-diseases.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by RyanW

By population, I didn't mean density so much as interconnected population over whatever area. There was trade between, say, China to the Middle East to Europe, and that would give a potentially enormous pool for diseases to expand into.

Don't discount trade in the New World, though. For example, the civilizations of Mesoamerica carried out extensive trade with one another and into the Caribbean and what's now the US southwest. Even the hunter-gatherers of the North American west coast carried on extensive relay trading, with goods from, say, central California penetrating as far away as Alaska and New Mexico.