Lengthening Low-Tech History

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Xplo

In my experience playing Civilization, war does a fantastic job of retarding scientific progress - or failing that, retarding infrastructure development utilizing the science.

Conversely 4x games often makes people who are pushing technological advancement to the absolute max speed weak to other people who invested anything in militaries. As that's generally my "mandatory strategic weakness" much of the fun of such games for me is trying desperately to avoid getting parable of the tribes'd. Of course even when starting with basically nothing in the way of defenses or logistics my units are individually crazy enough advanced compared to everyone else that bleeding the enemy dry enough as they try to overwhelm me with sheer cannon fodder that someone else decides to wipe them out works a surprising amount of the time.

Originally Posted by Xplo

Aside from that, Ji ji touches on an important point: just because something is obvious to us in hindsight doesn't mean that a culture can't realistically go for countless years without discovering it (of course, there you run into the problem of players trying to invent it). And modern society is a historical oddity in the sense that we actively try to learn and invent new things, AND do so in a highly organized and collaborative fashion. If all your scientists are homeless philosophers and wealthy dittelantes who rarely share information, and/or a lot of what is shared is reinvented wheels and crackpot theories that are never adequately tested or peer-reviewed, or the culture regards sitting around daydreaming about how the universe works instead of doing productive manual labor to be unvirtuous, you're not going to get a lot of scientific advancement.

Hmm. Not sure how to reduce the amount of information sharing other than just making everyone less social which is a dangerous thing to do if you want there to be much in the way of societies though of course there must be an acceptable degree. It's quite easy to visualize societies that dislike people sitting around thinking about stuff without any apparent end but this is one of those solutions that works better for one area than everywhere.

Originally Posted by Yorunkun

Interesting question, and many good answers already.

I'd add that it becomes progressively harder to stall or delay technological progress the further along the societies in question are.

Lack of cereal crops, domesticable animals, plus poor soil and climate can keep a civilization at Tl 0 or 1 probably forever - c.f. Australian aborigines.

If you have a stable source of food, more complex, stratified societies, population centres and all the rest of it seem to arise almost inevitable and you would need to come up with obstacles to retard them - an ice-age, indomitable predators, lack of key resources (i.e. workable metal) or an ideology or religious conviction that actively suppresses learning and the accumulation of knowledge.

Once you have writing I'd say the cat is out of the bag - there may be temporary setbacks or even local collapse, but the amount of knowledge is bound to grow irreversably.

Yeah I agree. Without huge degrees of collapse or similar problems there is a point where the bag is sufficiently de-catted that staying entirely static is too unlikely.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Plenty of societies with cities and writing have lost both. The Late Bronze Age catastrophe is a good example, as are many South American and Central American societies. Similarly, at least 99% of Greco-Roman literature (and essentially all Aramaic and Punic literature) has been lost. The loss of technical skills was almost as bad ... it was only around the 18th century that Europeans could do everything that the Romans had (although starting around the 12th century they could do some things that the Romans could not like build Gothic cathedrals).

There is an element of technological "progress" in world history but its very faint before 1800.

And yet losing cities and writing generally seems to be only a partial setback. There wasn't much that the Romans could do that no Europeans knew how to do in theory. The main reason they didn't was because there wasn't the same sort of Roman empire for them to do stuff in.

[Ji ji]

Originally Posted by Sindri

When you are working with a similar planet to earth it seems hard to avoid having at least one region with a similar collision of factors to enable it to function in the same way if not the same efficacy as the west. I'll have to look into the hypothesis regarding Greek and Latin's roles in technological advance.

For cognitive linguistic argument on Greek, you can check de Kerckhove.

[Landwalker]

Originally Posted by Sindri

More attention has been paid at earlier tech levels but how far do you think the 2-3 and 3-4 transitions can be stretched? For that matter how long can you stay at 4?

I'm just looking at Low-Tech, page 6, here, so take that for what you will.

The shift from TL 2 to TL 3 seems to rely largely on a few key technological elements: First, machinery (mills, artillery, etc.). Second, advanced metallurgy. Third, agricultural innovation.

Starting from the bottom:

3) There are some agricultural advances that are only inherently TL 3 because that's when they happened to occur in our history—to my knowledge there's nothing preventing three-field crop rotation from occurring in an earlier TL. However, if agriculture is sufficiently dangerous, progress and innovation in that field may be retarded. Maybe you have a world with fortified towns and a harsh, unforgiving wilderness in between, with roving monsters / barbarians / orc tribes / whatever that makes farmers far more concerned with simply staying alive than with maximizing production. If all of the land is already fertile, you'll never need a moldboard plow to turn the soil over. If the setting has no heavy horses to operate new farm equipment, then you may never reach a mature TL 3.

2) I don't know enough about metallurgy to comment on what conditions might retard the progression from iron to steel, so I'm not going to beyond saying that if the setting has "some sort of conditions" that preclude or obstruct such things, it could take it many, many centuries to stumble upon the necessary advance.

1) This could be difficult to stop, since it's not so much the invention of machinery as it is new applications of machinery (in the form of counterweight artillery and mills substituting natural power sources for physical labor). Windmills might be slow to develop in a "hostile countryside" setting—and if the peoples don't depend on cereal crops as their primary source of sustenance, they might never develop. Societies that spend a lot of time hiding behind walls might not develop advanced methods of attacking walls (although if whatever is making the countryside inhospitable is capable of constructing its own siege equipment, the city-dwellers might develop it anyway in order to exchange fire at trebuchet ranges).

I don't see any reason why the jump from TL 3 to TL 4 could be made altogether impossible simply by a setting not possessing the necessary ingredients (or, perhaps, physics) for gunpowder—or perhaps it does, but the historical accident that was the discovery of gunpowder never occurred (maybe the society simply isn't conducive to eccentric imperial alchemists sitting around trying to transmute lead to gold). Furthermore, a hostile ocean (perhaps the world has extremely powerful, violent, and unpredictable tides, or the ocean is beset by interminable and devastating storms) would make significant advances in the area of nautical travel and navigation practically impossible.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Sindri

And yet losing cities and writing generally seems to be only a partial setback. There wasn't much that the Romans could do that no Europeans knew how to do in theory. The main reason they didn't was because there wasn't the same sort of Roman empire for them to do stuff in.

You'd be surprised, but the bigger test is "did they do it?" because TL isn't about what an outsider thinks you could do if you wanted but what you actually do. It wasn't until the 18th or 19th century that Europeans built any ship as large as had been common from 200 BCE to 200 CE; crop yields took a similar time to recover; for artillery the ancient tradition appears to have died out, with only one Latin source available in the west and very few engineers able to read any more (although there are a few vague references in early medieval sources to artillery, so its possible that the tradition was passed down until the traction trebuchet was invented). The use of waterpower in industry collapsed, until again approximately the 11th or 12th century. The practical technical and organizational skills necessary to support a city with hundreds of thousands of people were lost, although by the 12th century cities usually had regulations to control waste disposal, require fire-resistant construction, and so on.

It took Greece something like 500-700 years to recover from the Late Bronze Age catastrophe, and much of that recovery depended on influence from areas like Egypt and Mesopotamia which had not been devastated so badly.

[Seneschal]

Originally Posted by Landwalker

2) I don't know enough about metallurgy to comment on what conditions might retard the progression from iron to steel, so I'm not going to beyond saying that if the setting has "some sort of conditions" that preclude or obstruct such things, it could take it many, many centuries to stumble upon the necessary advance.

I may have some suggestions:

• The first factor in the advancement of metalworking is devising better furnaces, especially those with controlled airflow. Maybe people never needed to make pottery (e.g. if they used conveniently-shaped, easily obtainable seashells or bone for their dishes) so they never bothered with firing clay, which in turn retarded the invention of the smithing furnace.
• Maybe working other metals is convenient (e.g. wizard-fire which only comes in the copper-melting variety, but is very handy just for that). This works very well if soft metals like copper and tin are common (which is untrue on Earth, where iron is orders of magnitude more present in the crust). You could make bronze, which has similar hardness to iron, but a lower melting point.
• If good stone is rare, most construction will be using wood, making furnaces a serious fire hazard anywhere near cities (plus, they'd have to be built out of clay or bricks, making them less permanent).
• You could make the dominant plantlife flammable or even explosive (like the spore-trees from the Alternity Star*Drive setting, which are essentially solid-fuel rockets that take off into space when they grow sufficiently big), or make sufficiently hot fires attract fire elementals, both of which make smithing more dangerous.
• You could also make meteorite iron very common - if it regularly falls in decently-sized chunks, people could reliably count on it. It's already smelted, so you wouldn't need to know how to process iron ore, just how to work it.

[dcarson]

No coal should slow down an industrial revolution. Making large amounts of steel or powering steam engines with charcoal should be hard. They were having major shortages of it before switching to coal.

[DCB]

Originally Posted by Sindri

Once you get a hold of the technology you would normally start to mess with it.

I don't think that's a given. Our way of thinking about technology, ideas, and knowledge is thoroughly influenced by the scientific method and other Age of Enlightenment concepts that were not available for most of human history.

If the method known for removing impurities from iron was...

Place the iron in the furnace as you recite the Lord's Prayer. Take it out and smite strongly as you thrice-repeat the prayer of St. Patrick. Continue, and every tenth time place the iron in the Holy Water for two Hail Marys. Done with piety from Matins to Evensong, the righteous smith will cast forth the corrupting spirits from the iron.

...then it's not clear that messing with it would be something that would easily occur to people, or even be socially, culturally, or religiously acceptable. (Especially in a setting where the prayers are actually for effect, not just timing.)


Something else that stifled innovation historically was controlling organizations with an interest in preserving the status quo. European guilds were at times an example, with rules either implicitly discouraging innovation (e.g., set prices for goods, set wages) or explicitly forbidding it (e.g., no new weaves). If a powerful group is comfortable with the current setup, they can potentially see themselves as better served by preventing change than by being the agents of it.

Similarly, it's been argued that centralized control on a societal level can retard change. For example, the Chinese treasure fleets reached Africa in force well before Europeans were at that level, but the next emperor wasn't interested, so they were cancelled.


As a result, I would argue that it's quite plausible for a society to remain broadly in TL 3 for quite a long time. The examples in Low Tech, based on European history, are ~2 millennia for TL 2->3 and ~1 millennium for TL 3->4, so millennial timescales are clearly plausible.

Slower-than-historical development is very reasonable -- European advancement from TL 3->4 was in many ways accelerated by outside influences (particularly Islamic and Greek/Roman knowledge) -- so IMHO it does not at all strain credulity to have multiple millennia between TLs. The outer edge of plausible -- with centralized control favouring the status quo at multiple levels of society (state, religious, guild, social, caste, etc.), societal disdain for intellectuals, no outside influences to spur change, and periodic catastrophes knocking the society down a peg -- is IMHO > 5,000 years.

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Ji ji

For cognitive linguistic argument on Greek, you can check de Kerckhove.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by Landwalker

3) There are some agricultural advances that are only inherently TL 3 because that's when they happened to occur in our history—to my knowledge there's nothing preventing three-field crop rotation from occurring in an earlier TL.

For a long time agricultural advances in general seem to have relied more on things like conceptual advancements than your typical technical prerequisite heavy advances so yeah they are comparatively easy to hold back.

Originally Posted by Landwalker

If all of the land is already fertile, you'll never need a moldboard plow to turn the soil over. If the setting has no heavy horses to operate new farm equipment, then you may never reach a mature TL 3.

Unfortunately holding things back by making the land fertile means you can't make the land less fertile to slow down other developments. Getting rid of horses and similar animals suitable for domestication is going to seriously set back agriculture.

Originally Posted by Landwalker

I don't see any reason why the jump from TL 3 to TL 4 could be made altogether impossible simply by a setting not possessing the necessary ingredients (or, perhaps, physics) for gunpowder—or perhaps it does, but the historical accident that was the discovery of gunpowder never occurred (maybe the society simply isn't conducive to eccentric imperial alchemists sitting around trying to transmute lead to gold).

Well gunpowder starts in TL 3 but yeah given how long it took to develop from when it could have theoretically it's quite reasonable to extend it a bit. Interestingly alchemy like practices seem to be fairly widespread historically although of course at least part of that is people spreading the ideas.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

You'd be surprised, but the bigger test is "did they do it?" because TL isn't about what an outsider thinks you could do if you wanted but what you actually do. It wasn't until the 18th or 19th century that Europeans built any ship as large as had been common from 200 BCE to 200 CE; crop yields took a similar time to recover; for artillery the ancient tradition appears to have died out, with only one Latin source available in the west and very few engineers able to read any more (although there are a few vague references in early medieval sources to artillery, so its possible that the tradition was passed down until the traction trebuchet was invented). The use of waterpower in industry collapsed, until again approximately the 11th or 12th century. The practical technical and organizational skills necessary to support a city with hundreds of thousands of people were lost, although by the 12th century cities usually had regulations to control waste disposal, require fire-resistant construction, and so on.

It took Greece something like 500-700 years to recover from the Late Bronze Age catastrophe, and much of that recovery depended on influence from areas like Egypt and Mesopotamia which had not been devastated so badly.

I'm willing to be surprised and certainly there was some loss especially with the sort of things that organically grew up over time and didn't get written down much in the first place and there is also a degree of people preferring to do things that turned out to be worse ideas but I have to strongly disagree about TL being what you are actually doing right now. TL is what you could do if you were persuaded with a reasonable amount of quickness. Just not being able to afford or feel like doing things you know how to do isn't a decrease in TL until people actually start forgetting things.

Originally Posted by Seneschal

I may have some suggestions:

• The first factor in the advancement of metalworking is devising better furnaces, especially those with controlled airflow. Maybe people never needed to make pottery (e.g. if they used conveniently-shaped, easily obtainable seashells or bone for their dishes) so they never bothered with firing clay, which in turn retarded the invention of the smithing furnace.
• Maybe working other metals is convenient (e.g. wizard-fire which only comes in the copper-melting variety, but is very handy just for that). This works very well if soft metals like copper and tin are common (which is untrue on Earth, where iron is orders of magnitude more present in the crust). You could make bronze, which has similar hardness to iron, but a lower melting point.
• If good stone is rare, most construction will be using wood, making furnaces a serious fire hazard anywhere near cities (plus, they'd have to be built out of clay or bricks, making them less permanent).
• You could make the dominant plantlife flammable or even explosive (like the spore-trees from the Alternity Star*Drive setting, which are essentially solid-fuel rockets that take off into space when they grow sufficiently big), or make sufficiently hot fires attract fire elementals, both of which make smithing more dangerous.
• You could also make meteorite iron very common - if it regularly falls in decently-sized chunks, people could reliably count on it. It's already smelted, so you wouldn't need to know how to process iron ore, just how to work it.

Interesting idea about pottery. I also favour making copper and tin more common then they were historically. Not sure about the fire hazard thing since that's already quite a problem and there are clay or bricks after all. Meteoric iron is cool and I certainly have no problem making it more important.

Originally Posted by dcarson

No coal should slow down an industrial revolution. Making large amounts of steel or powering steam engines with charcoal should be hard. They were having major shortages of it before switching to coal.

Yeah this is a good point. As I understand it coal is mainly useful for providing a sufficient volume of fuel but is there also anything that you can't do with sufficient amounts of charcoal?

Originally Posted by DCB

I don't think that's a given. Our way of thinking about technology, ideas, and knowledge is thoroughly influenced by the scientific method and other Age of Enlightenment concepts that were not available for most of human history.

If the method known for removing impurities from iron was...

Place the iron in the furnace as you recite the Lord's Prayer. Take it out and smite strongly as you thrice-repeat the prayer of St. Patrick. Continue, and every tenth time place the iron in the Holy Water for two Hail Marys. Done with piety from Matins to Evensong, the righteous smith will cast forth the corrupting spirits from the iron.

...then it's not clear that messing with it would be something that would easily occur to people, or even be socially, culturally, or religiously acceptable. (Especially in a setting where the prayers are actually for effect, not just timing.)

It's certainly not a given but it seems like most times a society gets it's hands on something that appeals to it enough to manufacture it itself in notable quantities it rapidly starts to mess around with it. Religion of Scienceing it is one way to help stop this.

Originally Posted by DCB

Something else that stifled innovation historically was controlling organizations with an interest in preserving the status quo. European guilds were at times an example, with rules either implicitly discouraging innovation (e.g., set prices for goods, set wages) or explicitly forbidding it (e.g., no new weaves). If a powerful group is comfortable with the current setup, they can potentially see themselves as better served by preventing change than by being the agents of it.

Similarly, it's been argued that centralized control on a societal level can retard change. For example, the Chinese treasure fleets reached Africa in force well before Europeans were at that level, but the next emperor wasn't interested, so they were cancelled.


As a result, I would argue that it's quite plausible for a society to remain broadly in TL 3 for quite a long time. The examples in Low Tech, based on European history, are ~2 millennia for TL 2->3 and ~1 millennium for TL 3->4, so millennial timescales are clearly plausible.

Guilds also have the "disadvantage" of bringing people focused on the same trade together and preserving what knowledge already exists though.

Why did guilds forbid things like new weaves? Was it an attempt at assuring quality?

The treasure fleet thing suggests not only centralized control over once society but also societies being larger and thus less numerous.

Originally Posted by DCB

Slower-than-historical development is very reasonable -- European advancement from TL 3->4 was in many ways accelerated by outside influences (particularly Islamic and Greek/Roman knowledge) -- so IMHO it does not at all strain credulity to have multiple millennia between TLs. The outer edge of plausible -- with centralized control favouring the status quo at multiple levels of society (state, religious, guild, social, caste, etc.), societal disdain for intellectuals, no outside influences to spur change, and periodic catastrophes knocking the society down a peg -- is IMHO > 5,000 years.

Greek/Roman knowledge wasn't really an outside influence though and Islamic knowledge and especially the Islamic knowledge that Europe was interested in had a lot of influence from Greek/Roman stuff. It was a substantial part of the basis which allowed them to reach TL 3 in the first place let along work at TL 4 and so it's really part of European TL history. And since you need that sort of basis to develop TL 3 and 4 it means that you either have the same sort of historical connection to Greek/Roman knowledge or are youselves a Greek/Roman thing that just survived longer. That said I don't really disagree about slower development.

[Anthony]

It would be tough to reach TL 2 without decent metal resources, and TL 5 without fossil resources (or at least, an energy source less limited than wood being grown at renewal rate), but one simple way to slow progress is to limit the size of the research community -- a population of 100k without outside trade in information can survive, but the rate of technological progression will be grossly slowed. This generally requires significantly different geography from Earth as a whole, but archipelagos and landlocked mountainous regions where the valleys are farmed are both ways this limited population and trade can occur.

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by Sindri

Not sure how to reduce the amount of information sharing other than just making everyone less social which is a dangerous thing to do if you want there to be much in the way of societies though of course there must be an acceptable degree.

Well, start by assuming there's little or no scientific community, because why would there be, right? To the extent that researchers exist at all, they're largely unaware of each other. Boom, no communication.

After all, historically speaking, the idea that knowledge should be actively collected, advanced, and disseminated for the good of mankind is somewhat unusual. Even Classical Greece and Persia, so far as I know, treated science as more of a hobby or an abstract philosophical exploration than an institution. It wasn't until the late Renaissance that we had universities and academic societies and something we would recognize as modern science, and formal pedagogy (creating a large educated population, if not necessarily well-educated) came even later, from the Industrial Revolution.

Even if two or more scientists do know about each other, letters travel slowly (if at all), and travel can be dangerous. Research notes can be destroyed by accident, or time, or war, or by illiterate peasants using them for kindling or building material. So even writing isn't proof against technological stagnation.

Practical inventions could spread quickly, if they were adopted by the peasantry - but the inspiration that leads to a novel invention is essentially luck. In our own history, there are numerous inventions that could have happened much earlier, but didn't because no one thought of them or stumbled on them by accident. There's no reason why that state couldn't go on basically forever. And more esoteric theories might never develop or spread at all, having no obvious application.

And who's to say that your scientists are even right? A treatise on how the diseases of the body are caused by certain elemental spirits, whose presence can be divined by examining the shape and color of the feces, and who can be purged by striking the body with certain minerals associated with each element, isn't the sort of thing that's likely to lead to better medicine.

Artisans are unlikely to experiment much, particularly if the underlying scientific principles are poorly understood; after all, they already know their crafts, so why would they waste time and valuable materials performing their craft wrong? A skilled artisan might have at best a few sons or assistants to learn the craft, and no time or care to write a book; if guilds exist, they might jealously guard their knowledge rather than sharing it. In any of these cases, nothing new is discovered, and the pool of people who could conceivably advance the state of the art remains comfortably small.