AHC: Advance technological development

Replicator

Banned
Could it have been possible for humans to develop technology faster so that we would be more advanced then now??

Perhaps no Church hindering technological development or something more happening in Africa/Australia/America?
 
Could it have been possible for humans to develop technology faster so that we would be more advanced then now??

Perhaps no Church hindering technological development or something more happening in Africa/Australia/America?

The church was the only thing keeping a lot of knowledge alive during the dark ages.

I don't think more happening elsewhere would help. I can only really see modern civilization emerging first in Eurasia (inc. North Africa). Mainly Europe, India or China.
 
No superpower emerges in the Mediterranean which gobbles up everything.

If you're looking for a PoD after the rise of Rome, try Rome having more stable successor states (like, not just Byzantium) or the Muslims establishing themselves more solidly in Europe.

EDIT: There is also of course the matter of no Mongol invasion and a surviving Song dynasty...
 
Depends how recognizable you want the world to be compared to OTL... The farther back one goes, the more butterflies spawn. You could theoretically (but not necessarily) get a more technologically "advanced" world by...

- More domesticated animals/metallurgy in the Americas (though this COMPLETELY changes the Americas as we would know them).

- Avoiding the Bronze Age Collapse. Mind you, this would create a world completely unlike our own...

- Either doing away with the more mystical/"faith based" belief systems (i.e. early Christianity) in favour of more rationalist, proto-scientific philosophies/world-views OR alter the aforementioned mystical world-views to be more rationalistic. Also, you could keep the Islamic Golden Age going longer by A) Having the Mu'tazili and/or Isma'ili schools become predominant, B) Having the rationalists within those school triumph over the conservative reactionaries, and C) Keeping the major centres of Islamic culture and science alive and prospering (so Al-Andalus survives as a single entity, Baghdad is not temporarily erased, less political fragmentation in the Islamic world as a whole).

- More Industrial Revolution events in more parts of the world. Examine the factors that prevented the Middle East, India, China, Southeast Asia, and West Africa from developing as Europe did roughly from the 17th Century, and figure out how to circumvent them.
 
The manuscript done by Archimedes was lost for centuries until it was rediscovered only in the last century due to a copy being recycled into a medieval prayer book. The technology to render it readable has only existed in the last decade. The subject of the text concerned concepts that would not be discovered again until the eighteenth century.

If a copy of this manuscript had survived unaltered the field of mathematics would be decades or more further along.
 
Have the flying shuttle invented earlier. With that you'll see a significant boon in production of cloth and wool will be higher in demand and price. To compensate you'll have people raising more sheep and you'll see the enclosure of common land accelerate. Enclosure will, as in OTL, lead to easier management of agricultural goods and you'll have the (literal) growth of livestock happening early. More food and a better diet leads to a larger, healthier population which leads to more "Inspired" people who come up with more efficient means to produce goods for the larger population. Instead of hitting the 5 million person cap England had for centuries, they'll be able to break it easily and develop faster.
 
In my "Caesar is not assassinated" TL the printing press is invented in Alexandria around AD 50 and paper is developed about 50 years later. This prevents the Dark Ages even when the Roman Empire collapses in the mid 200s. The industrial revolution will not occur for a while ITTL, but it will happen sooner than in the OTL, I have not gotten that far yet, but maybe in the AD 1000 to 1300 range in the Rhineland.
 
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