Considering 90% of human civilization existed before the advent of gunpowder, what would it take for human society today to still remain technologically as it was centuries ago? What would be the latest POD for such a situation to be possible?
What would it take for OTL 2018 to still be in the pre-gunpowder era?
- Thread starter Berkeley2017
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Or for progress to be stalled? I mean if humans had been living in the pregunpowder era for over 4000+ years since the dawn of civilization, what would it take to extend it by a few hundred more?
Airborne syphilis that gets transmitted to the Old World while smallpox and influenza ravage the New World. 95% of people die worldwide in rolling plagues and the ensuing famines. More centralized states survive as a skeleton, while more decentralized ones collapse into city states. After a century or two immunities build up, but the nascent trade networks of the pre apocalypse era are destroyed.
Why didn't airborne syphillis get transmitted OTL then to the old world?
There was apparently a thread on that very topic, now that I look, and people in the know seemed to say that syphilis has a hard time living outside the body.
So airborne is probably out. But I maintain a super plague hitting the Old World like smallpox did the New World would be the best bet. Perhaps syphilis transmitted via livestock or food prep, or another disease I'm not thinking of.
So airborne is probably out. But I maintain a super plague hitting the Old World like smallpox did the New World would be the best bet. Perhaps syphilis transmitted via livestock or food prep, or another disease I'm not thinking of.
Chinese invented gunpowder and it almost certainly would have spread with or without the Mongols.
The latest possible POD is probably a century or two before the OTL invention of gunpowder during the Tang Dynasty. You'd need to first avoid the OTL invention of gunpowder and then engineer a collapse of China so massive that alchemy would no longer be investigated. This collapse could be set up to affect all Eurasian economies, leading to widespread chaos. I'm not sure how much you could regress things technologically, but you could engineer a situation to prevent interest in alchemy somehow?
You'd need a whole battery of super plagues for the Old World given smallpox wasn't the only mass killer and those massive death rates are those over decades and often associated with warfare it not intense colonialism which disrupted the traditional societies.
You'd need first to prevent gunpowder being discovered in 9th century China, then you'd need to engineer a world in which people aren't interested in alchemy anymore on a global scale, and even then it'd all be down to luck. Gunpowder was discovered by chance, it can still be discovered by chance. Practically impossible.
Ooh, that's a good point. Slow us at the early stages, and we could languish in cities like Ur and rural communes for another thousand or so years. You don't even need to delay it that long, in the scheme of things. Have a nasty natural disaster or plague that devastates key early civs, and The "2018" equivalent might not come till our 5018.
Well, technically, a postponed neolithic/calcolithic isn't unthinkable.