09-27-2021, 02:10 AM | #31 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
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Thankfully, we didn't get to see if anyone was morally bankrupt enough to test a counter-recovery strategy.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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09-27-2021, 09:02 AM | #32 |
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Rome, Italy
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
History-wise there aren't that many good examples in favor of "global technological regression": the "great collapse of 1200 AC" is still a theory (and the scarce evidence found so far point to climate change more than "invasion from the sea people"), the Fall of the Roman Empire is questionable since things in Constantinople went on just fine. Another examples that's often used is Middle Ages, that were instead a period of fervent changes and inventions; the "Dark Ages" trope is more a modern reinterpretation than proper history.
This concept is a child of the Cold War "M.A.D." mentality and to an infamous quote wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein about the "WW4 fought with stick and stones" so more a cautionary tale about man-made (and enforced) holocausts than natural ones. Everything is fine if you want to use it a story device but at least don't make it "natural".
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09-27-2021, 11:05 AM | #33 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
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It definitely doesn't originate there. There's at least one clear example of a catastrophic technological regression story published in the late 19th century. (And more examples earlier than the 1940s.)
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09-27-2021, 11:05 AM | #34 |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
I don't think an economic depression "alone" could cause a sufficient regression to drop a TL, but anything called a "hyperdepression" may well have enough add-on effects - including worldwide unrest that basically result in civil war at the least - to eliminate enough knowledge (in the form of destroyed records and slain experts) to cause such. Because, really, TL is arguably more about knowledge than stuff. Certainly, destruction of key infrastructure is going to be problematic, but so long as the knowledge remains you're probably only looking at a generation or two before that infrastructure is largely rebuilt - potentially in a more efficient manner, given it's being rebuilt to a plan rather than how it sprung up initially. Of course, that time period between the collapse and the rebuild is one that is ripe for story and roleplaying potential.
Of course, secret knowledge - like the formula for Roman concrete IIRC - is very susceptible to destruction. Fortunately, loss of KFC's secret recipe isn't going to cause a TL regression, even if for some it makes life seem less worth living.
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09-27-2021, 02:57 PM | #35 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
You might manage some tech regression if you got everyone in the world so angry at the scientifically and technically educated that any survivors went into hiding and stayed there. This is tricky because any region that didn't do this would probably have a huge advantage, but humans in large groups have done some very inadvisable stuff.
A hyperdepression would certainly accompany such a development. |
09-27-2021, 05:53 PM | #36 | |
Join Date: Dec 2020
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
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If the repercusions of that failure are big enough scientists of all kinds will have a hard time. This was often a theme in scify or distopic novels. Also remember historically a lot of leaders / gouvernments tried to restrict tech they didn´t like for more reasons i can count. The more backward, idelogical or fanatic the more often it happened. Even if not a new technique with disruptive potential was often stopped by the gouvernment which feared unrest and instability. Not to mention that some "leaders" will try to use such problems to gain power. A lot of cults had such a background or even tried to make a doomsday scenario happen. |
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09-27-2021, 05:55 PM | #37 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
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In some ways, it was a bit like modern Japan or India, with a Western-style government ruling a very non-Western culture and society. The native culture had a Roman overlay, but they weren't Roman. They weren't even really of Classical Civilization. Even the population demographics and female fertility rates of the Eastern and Western Empires were different. The Western Empire did indeed Fall, and more importantly, it did so because its cultural and religious foundation had rotted away. Which is part of the 'regression' memory-trope, because even if the tech theoretically remained, the cosmopolitan large-scale society and economy that had enabled it was gone, so the tech became de facto gone as well. The tech that continued to advance after the collapse was that which could be done on a local scale, or at least on a smaller scale than the Empire had managed. Sometimes that actually accelerated things, as people have noted: the sudden lack of slavery-power encouraged the development of other energy sources like water power.
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09-27-2021, 06:23 PM | #38 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
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I always like to note that destruction of transport systems and damage to (or degraded performance of) the systems that assign and deliver inputs to firms and products to consumers can effectually reduce the scope for specialisation and production at scale. After war and kleptocracy, the strongest correlates of stagnant poverty are slow and ineffective commercial courts and gross lack of transport infrastructure. Anyway, the point is well made that the situation after a collapse of industry will not be exactly like a lower tech level that is on the way up through a process of research and development. Perhaps they would be even less alike than TL3 in China and TL3 in northern Italy, or the late neolithic in Mesopotamia and the late neolithic in Mexico. May I suggest the notation “TL8 - 2”?
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09-27-2021, 09:52 PM | #39 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
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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.
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09-27-2021, 09:58 PM | #40 | |
Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: UK
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
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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!
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