Hyperdepression and technological regression

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

...Where are you getting the Eastern Roman Empire as lacking in technology, scale, and economy? Is there any actual historical basis for that claim?

I mean, if you're in the western Roman territories and were enjoying Roman hegemony before it broke down, it wouldn't do you any good that those benefits were still available at the far side the continent. But that's not what you're asserting.

If you read any standard reference work, you will see that the remainder of the Roman empire underwent a massive decline in shipping, book production, etc. around the 7th and 8th centuries CE. It was later and less complete than north of the Alps, but it still was a rough time. Part of the problem might be that Egypt, Syria, Carthage, Iberia, and Italia were all under foreign jurisdictions and piracy was coming back, and part of of it might be the Global Cooling Event of 536 CE and the Plague of Justinian, but a lot of things were going wrong at once.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Inky

Are you thinking of After London? Or is the one you were thinking of a different one?

Yes, that being the one that was easily discoverable by way of Wikipedia.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Inky

The basic idea of TENS was known to some doctors in ancient Rome. They used a live weakly electric fish in a bucket!
Given the above, I'm quite prepared to believe that the "Baghdad battery" was a battery. It would certainly be easier to use than a fish.

The potential difference for the metals used was less than half a volt, which doesn't seem likely to be medically effective, even if the setup actually was a functioning battery.

[Opellulo]

Originally Posted by Inky

Are you thinking of After London? Or is the one you were thinking of a different one?
Of course, before that, the idea that "the ancients" had had technologies far in advance of their own which were now lost was popular in mediaeval times. After London mentions one such legend, in fact, "malleable glass", supposed to have been known to the Romans, or the Egyptians, depending who you asked, and which was one of the things alchemists tried to recreate.

Individual technologies have definitely been lost for centuries and then rediscovered, it's happened many times.
Besides concrete, plumbing is a well-known example! (Don't know whether the people of, say, post-Roman Britain had really lost the knowledge of how to do it or just the infrastructure to pull it off on a large scale or the knowledge of why it was useful, but the fact remains).
The Ancient Greeks had clockwork devices of a complexity not seen afterwards for centuries.
The basic idea of TENS was known to some doctors in ancient Rome. They used a live weakly electric fish in a bucket!
Given the above, I'm quite prepared to believe that the "Baghdad battery" was a battery. It would certainly be easier to use than a fish.
And so on.

But dropping an entire TL as a whole is another matter. As somebody mentioned above, even if infrastructure was damaged and trade and travel reduced, some higher TL things are as easy as their lower TL equivalents once people know about them. However little equipment they may have brought with them, all time travellers with half a brain know always to boil the water and why. And a "TL8 - 2" civilisation, to use Agemegos's notation, would have things in common with being a time traveller!

I totally agreed on this take: if we are talking about no longer sustainable "fringe technologies" because the infrastructure, materials or skills are temporary lost, then I'm are totally ok with that, this has happened historically and will happen again.
But a "global societal collapse" that pushes back by one or two steps the global TL? This is a trope for sci-fi novels.

P.S. Now that i come to know the "After London" novels i think that this trope is another spin on the "lost civilizations" ones. I remember an old extra credits(?) video explaining that this trope emerged in Victorian times when British explorers were discovering complex city ruins in Africa and come out to the "only logical conclusion": Africans could not have build THOSE, so they must be the product of some ancient civilization that has collapsed.

Now just to be clear: I'm not saying that those tropes are racists, but for sure they spin a certain specific worldview, one that should be familiar if you ever watched an episode of "the walking dead" or if you ever debated about Roman Empire with an Italian (...ehm)

[Inky]

Ah, fair enough if so. Never mind the "battery", then. (Looking up the fish story further, it seems that the fish is specified to have been the torpedo fish, which generates about 45 volts. Some fish.)

[Tom Mazanec]

One thing that might keep our knowledge going (or make for a good game campaign):
The Memory of Mankind
https://www.memory-of-mankind.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_of_Mankind

Be sure to make your own contributions (I have done some, mostly obscure popular cultural stuff I like).

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Opellulo

I totally agreed on this take: if we are talking about no longer sustainable "fringe technologies" because the infrastructure, materials or skills are temporary lost, then I'm are totally ok with that, this has happened historically and will happen again.
But a "global societal collapse" that pushes back by one or two steps the global TL? This is a trope for sci-fi novels.

P.S. Now that i come to know the "After London" novels i think that this trope is another spin on the "lost civilizations" ones. I remember an old extra credits(?) video explaining that this trope emerged in Victorian times when British explorers were discovering complex city ruins in Africa and come out to the "only logical conclusion": Africans could not have build THOSE, so they must be the product of some ancient civilization that has collapsed.

I understand there was a similar phenomenon in South/Meso America where a previous civilisation had built significant cities, but then exhausted their water supply (fed from some kind of aquifer IIRC), causing their agriculture to collapse and the cities to be abandoned, with the survivors living as hunter-gatherers in the surrounding jungle. Explorers then found ruined cities which were abandoned for no obvious reason (the aquifer having re-filled in the meantime) and a local population who showed no signs of any city building technologies...

[ronwit]

Originally Posted by Opellulo

I remember an old extra credits(?) video explaining that this trope emerged in Victorian times when British explorers were discovering complex city ruins in Africa and come out to the "only logical conclusion": Africans could not have build THOSE, so they must be the product of some ancient civilization that has collapsed.

Similar thoughts were expressed by USA Americans as they spread into the Mississippi Valley. The "primitive savages" living next to the Mississippian Mounds could not have built them. Rather, they were the devastated survivors of a civilizational collapse worse than most of the examples that have been mentioned previously.

[Agemegos]

Also, when Pedro Teixeira explored the Amazon in 1637 he found no trace of the thriving agricultural civilisations that De Orellana had encountered travelling down the river in 1547. Instead of cities and farmlands he found a dense forest and scattered hunter-gathers. For three centuries or more De Orellana was written off as a liar; then archaelogists found the fragments of ceramics, the modified soils, etc.

[martinl]

If I understand correctly, in those cases relatively isolated civilizations were hit with a ridiculous plague event (~90% population reduction over several years) and just collapsed and returned to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Less isolated civilizations survived pretty bad plagues without whole TL regression. Merely by being less isolated they were more used to plagues in the first place, however, and nothing I know of hit 90% population reduction.

If the modern world experienced a 90% population reduction plague, and scientists and her educated folks were universally blamed for it [1], full GURPS TL technical regression seems plausible.

[1] The obvious answer is the plague was caused by biotech, but you could get similar results with a political or religious backlash against science.