AHC: Earliest Space Colonization

The PoD would probably not be later than 1500 AD, and something around 500 AD or so would be more believable. Maybe if Julius Caeser had survived he'd have made Vitruvius a master architect (Vitruvius served under him as an engineer and artilleryman), bring forward the discovery of steam power (Vitruvius mentioned the Aeolipile by name), and thus kick-starting a Roman renaissance under Julius/Augustus.
 
. In fact, it's probably the shaking up of geopolitics that make scientific progress possible at all - OTL invariably teaches us that huge, long-lived empires inevitably stagnate socially, economically, scientifically, etc.

Actually China grew and prospered for millenia and changed as a "huge empire", albiet with occasional interruptions, and was highly innovative technologically at least until Ming times, when that "High-Equilibrium Trap" situation seems to have set in. Don't believe everything about OTL you hear on TV. :D

Bruce
 
Actually China grew and prospered for millenia and changed as a "huge empire", albiet with occasional interruptions, and was highly innovative technologically at least until Ming times, when that "High-Equilibrium Trap" situation seems to have set in. Don't believe everything about OTL you hear on TV. :D

Bruce

I think China has been "shaken up", as I put it, many times over the centuries. Many polities have risen and fallen in China - just because they evolved out of each other and all claimed a common heritage doesn't change this fact.

Bollocks. Europe went from cities of over half a million people during the Roman Empire to nothing over 50,000. It took 1500 years just to reinvent a public sewage system!

Demographic decline does not equate to technological decline - it causes stagnation and slowing of growth and development, but it does not do away with the material already put to paper. As long as a literary society perseveres, as it did in the Eastern Mediterranean if not so much in the west during the so-called dark ages, the majority of knowledge remains intact.
 
As long as a literary society perseveres, as it did in the Eastern Mediterranean if not so much in the west during the so-called dark ages, the majority of knowledge remains intact.

Don't try to baffle us with your clever sophistical talkiness. :) When we talk re the Dark Ages nowadays, we're usually talking northern/western Europe.

Bruce
 
A lot of knowledge was lost between 300 AD and 600 AD in Europe, partially due to the Plague, partially due to pillaging, and partially due to religious fervor. If you tweak St Augustine to have science and learning valued as a virtue instead of something to be rebuffed, where the Papacy grows to encourage intellectual development instead of stifling it, who knows. There is evidence of the Bessemer process or a close analog emerging in England in the 15th century, several larger monasteries sequestering "Islamic knowledge" in the first millenium, and possibly an early use of antibiotics in France in the mid 14th century *despite* everything. Promote the knowledge instead of squelch it and perhaps with a little kick-start from Tang Dynasty China we're in orbit by 1300 AD and on the moon to stay by 1400 AD. I wonder what our world would look like today had we been able to pull that off...
 
Don't try to baffle us with your clever sophistical talkiness. :) When we talk re the Dark Ages nowadays, we're usually talking northern/western Europe.

Bruce

Sorry if I'm not being clear... just trying to explain myself. :(

What I meant by my previous post is that however much the economy in the western part declined, it didn't cause any loss of scientific knowledge because it was already sequestered in the more prosperous East. Gaul, the Rhine region and Britain were the least developed parts of the Roman Empire... the dark age there wasn't so much a decline of science and technology in that region - there wasn't much there to begin with - as a loss of contact with the eastern parts of the Empire where all this progress was being made. This is why I call the whole concept an illusion.
 
Bollocks. Europe went from cities of over half a million people during the Roman Empire to nothing over 50,000. It took 1500 years just to reinvent a public sewage system!
-The demographics falled during the Roman Empire. The causes are both the climatic changes (I'm pretty sure than no ancient or medieval civilisation can avoid these effects) and the diseases caused by the existance of a common market trade called the Mediterranea.

But more than calculing the population of cities, you have to ask what are the populations of regions : indeed in places like Hispania when you had 6 millions people you had only 3.5; in Gaul you had 15 and you had only 8.
It's clearly more low, but nothing that usual if you see the main causes : again climatic changes, diseases.
The most amazing thing is that the cities loose proportioanlly more people than regions : in fact you have a country resettlement due to 1)Fleeing the full-diseases city 2)Using more taskforce in campaigns.

For the sewers : they're not as many roman cities with a sewer system that you seems to think. Many used the ol' good system of "i put everything on the river and get used to". Only the important cities or the ones in the most ancient and more urbanised places have that.
Besides Early Middle-Ages didn't ignored the sewers, they just didn't had enough taskforces and wealth to maintain them while the decreasing population of the cities rended them more useless.

In Al-Andalus, again, the Islamic newcomers repared and maintenaid the old roman installations : irrigations, and sometimes sewers. That clearly helped christian europeans to made new sewers in the XIII (1200 for Paris, not 1500).
I hope these corrections would be useful.
 
What I meant by my previous post is that however much the economy in the western part declined, it didn't cause any loss of scientific knowledge because it was already sequestered in the more prosperous East. Gaul, the Rhine region and Britain were the least developed parts of the Roman Empire... the dark age there wasn't so much a decline of science and technology in that region - there wasn't much there to begin with - as a loss of contact with the eastern parts of the Empire where all this progress was being made. This is why I call the whole concept an illusion.

I'm sorry, but i have to strongly disagree with you.
Gaul was considered as the pearl and the most achieved realisation of the western Roman Empire.
Not only the trade didn't slow in the III and IV, but it grew again after the great crisis. New techniques of transportations apparead making the old roman roads slowling becoming obsoletes (but still maintained by a strong power for moving armies).
Furthermore, the gallo-roman base was strongly technologically developed : many invenvtions regarding agricultural needs were gaul. Celts and the celto-roman variation weren't particularly cavemen.

The Rhine region became a new economical hearth of Europe during the Dark Ages, both by the need of new markets in North and East but aslo because of the settlement of merovingian and carolingian eras.

Britain wasn't ravaged by anglo-saxons. In fact, christianisation by Papacy of these people helped to maintain contact with the continent, while the christianized (of "celticS", i insist on the plural, rites) tended to close it. Everyone agree that the roman infrastructures helped greatly the continuation of Britain/Gaul trade in the VII/VIII.

Hispania would be rather the exemple you would search, except that it was caused by a continuous civil war among the visigoths since 650's. After a time, the Arabo-Berbers, as i said, repaered and maintained the roman infrastructures making again the province very prosperous.
 
Gaul was considered as the pearl and the most achieved realisation of the western Roman Empire.

I myself have to disgree on your interpretation of that statement. Gaul was seen as the most succesful realization of the Roman dream of "Romanization" but not as the most developed and crucial area of the Empire.

In fact, there was a period of a few decades, I believe, in which Gaul had its own independant Emperor who controlled it and Britain- but of course, the little splinter empire was due to the chaos enveloping the rest of the Roman World...
 
I myself have to disgree on your interpretation of that statement. Gaul was seen as the most succesful realization of the Roman dream of "Romanization" but not as the most developed and crucial area of the Empire.
Please re-read the quote : western Roman Empire. But even with that, Gaul didn't have to be ashamed of its prosperity in the III : pottery, wine, stone, luxury goods from the provinces could be found as far that Syria.

In fact, there was a period of a few decades, I believe, in which Gaul had its own independant Emperor who controlled it and Britain- but of course, the little splinter empire was due to the chaos enveloping the rest of the Roman World...
Oh, you mean the Gaul Empire? It's a name like Byzantine Empire, that was in fact a pure roman state, with roman institutions and all. It was created not by using the chaos, but by trying to answer the recurrent invasions and bagaudes with a coherance. Besides, at the contrary of Palmyrenian Empire, the Empire of the Gauls never considered itself as separated from the "regular" Roman Empire. Furthermore its control was loose on Britain and Hispania.
In fact the constitution of a "Gaul" empire show the prosperity of the province : considering that they had too much to loose, they organised themselves for security. Aurelianus didn't had hard times to get back Gaul when the situation became more cool. In fact the resistance of Tetricus is considered as "symbolic" and no mesure of retorsion was taken.
 
The OP says "before 1900", so all that's needed really is a POD anywhere between 1450 or so and say 1650. Space flight requires at a minimum sufficient knowledge of physics and chemistry to create vehicles capable of leaving the atmospere with a crew and returning safely. Metallurgy must be advanced enough to create the alloys needed and chemistry to create fuels that can supply enough energy The scientific revolution began (arguably) around the time of Galileo, or if you like, earlier with Copernicus. Religious turmoil and the tendency of the Holy Inquisition to view innovations in thought with great suspicion and science moved northwards to Germany, Holland and England.

So a POD that (a) reduced suspicion by the Church of science and new areas of knowledge, or (b) reduced the influence of the Church over such developments should advance technological growth by say 50 to 100 years.

Here's two PODs: Caesare Borgia lives long enough to succeed in unifying Italy into a kingdom in the 1400s. A prosperous Italy, which already had some of the best technologists in Europe, begins the development of modern science a full century earlier.

or,

(b) butterfly away the Thirty Years War in central Europe. By itself it managed to kill something like 1/3 of the population of Germany and impoverish and disorganize Central Europe for generations. That by itself could allow science to grow faster and further in northern Europe than it did IOTL
 
I don't think that stumbling on the "philosophy" of modern science is a pre-condition, because I believe that that academic structure has arisen in the wake of capitalist development. Practically speaking, there was a great deal of innovation going on all over the world, regardless of its relationship with the formal academic structures favored by the various ruling classes of their time and place. What is needed is that something like capitalism arises somewhere in the world; if it can take off it will tend, as European capitalism did OTL, to sweep the world before it and gather the whole world's resources to its exponential growth. The continual self-revolutionizing technical innovation is part and parcel of capitalist development and it will devise its own philosophical integument as needed, as happened in the Euro-Atlantic world of our time line.

So, it can happen based on Europe as OTL, or it can conceivably happen somewhere completely different if that somewhere diverges early enough to pre-empt Europe. What we need to do is define the criteria of the sort of capitalism that did arise in Europe, broadly enough to capture the essence, and look for possible candidates.

I suspect that the key to what happened in Europe was a balance between centralizing and centrifugal tendencies in social development. That is, in general if a region of the world develops a particularly successful form of civilization, there is a tendency for some political power to arise there that seeks to consolidate it under its control, and when this happens, broadly speaking stagnation is the result. A region that can't be brought under central control is also generally one that can't sustain a rising general intensity of pragmatic technical development, so there is as it were an energy barrier or a dilemma to be overcome.

In Europe, the quest for centralization never ceased, but various factors held it in check. Enough intercommunication between the realms of Europe persisted to allow for ongoing general development, but the stubborn refusal of the powers there to be fully united gave play to competition that forced the various rulers to keep their options open lest some innovation by a neighbor left them fatally behind. So, gradually, the groundwork to allow capitalist methods of "organizing" the regional economy (scare quotes because capitalism operates by as it were internalizing and embracing the chaos of anarchic competition) to develop, which in turn meant the door was open to continual innovation unstoppable by any one state (or rather, stoppable only at its own eventual peril), and this gave the Europeans the means of assimilating innovation, both of their own and appropriated from others, routinely. This meant the gradual multiplication of European technical power and their eventual ability to reach and then dominate powers all over the world, and on that basis, rising exponentially on its own and also feeding on the assimilated resources of the world as a whole, technology and science developed to the point that spacecraft could be launched in the 1960s.

So, where else in the world could something like this have happened?

I'm tempted to suggest, working backwards in time:

An earlier-developed Southeast Asia/ Indonesia region;

Other parts of the Islamic world that might have had different breaks, notably on the interface of Persia and India but also possibly West Africa or a central Caliphate run on somewhat different policy lines, perhaps;

Some indigenous shift in the development of India might have possibly given place to such a technical-social arms race;

China might have failed to typically form a unified empire and instead persistently remained divided into large but still diverse rival zones.

And returning to Europe, perhaps someone can show how what eventually was well under way there OTL by say 1400 might have, with somewhat different breaks, have gotten going by say 1200. (I stuck in an extra century on the surmise that the farther back you go, the less development in the world in general, on the average, and so you have to allow more time).

That kind of exhausts my laundry list of possible candidate regions, and people might beat every one of them to death with well-taken objections; meanwhile I hope other more imaginative people might identify others.

I rather doubt that the Classical civilizations of the Mediterranean world could have surged a lot farther ahead than they did OTL before suffering the crises that pretty well wiped out Rome in the west and disrupted the East; I think you can't have capitalism without a certain degree of broad development that was far from mature at that point.

But moving it back a century or so does seem doable to me without going back to Sumer or the invention of fire. And a distant POD would probably wind up looking like just arbitrarily shifting the whole known structure and pacing of OTL back a bit rather than giving us a tighter timetable for development

To sum up, I think that broadly speaking there is a curve of human development that builds upon itself more or less exponentially, and it takes the time it takes to achieve certain levels of result. But with broad, fuzzy error bars; the detailed process is quite chaotic, sheer chance might blight a promising zone of OTL or vice versa such a zone might have been randomly blighted in OTL and in an ATL shift the process forward, locally. Centuries seem about the right time scale for chaos to have play; shifting it back thousands of years probably would require PODs many thousands before that involving more successful early human development and dispersal, maybe changes like earlier ends of the previous glaciation and so on.
 
NikoZnate, notice, that's certainly bad luck for the Caliphate, as I suggested. Making the Caliphate luckier with that'd be one way is one way to get earlier space travel and colonization. And, they had plenty of scientific and other evidence-based Greek scrolls to work with.


Or, Munro, instead of bringing out the straw men, you could try reading the source I listed - it's available online. And, the Achaean League also had a representative legislature, an executive, and a judiciary, like us; my source there is Polybius' The Histories.

And I'm curious - what makes you cranky in this thread? Is it something about how I wrote?
 
Top