When Two Worlds War...

Kaptin Kurk

Banned
In Science Fiction it's not uncommon to assume that two worlds, seperated by light-years, could arrive at nearly the same technological level at nearly the same time. Now, this might or might not be a preposterous assumption. Looking at our own terran history, its even hard to tell whether or not certain advancments, like the ancient agriculural revolution in the middle east and the far east, were related or happened in isolation. One might even ask the question as to whether or not there was a 'first' language from which all others arose, or do the basic language families represent true 'unique' groups...

Anywyas, my challenge is this. Have a civilization arise in the Americas, North or South, that roughly parallels Europe's technological development and trajectorry towards the embrace of the scientific method by 1492...

Indeed, in homoge to the the science-fiction that so many of us enjoy.....can you create a timeline that has a native american society sailing East....in 1492...at the same time columbus sails west.

Sure, it's would require true 'Alternate History', and less than a firm belief in the prophethood of Jared Diamond, but I think it'd be interesting to see a timeline...or speculate on one...where one region of the globe (Europe, Asia, Africa, Very Rarely the Americas) doesn't dominate but has to compete with another regions that's on par....however unlikely parallel development might be.....
 
Things does sound like an interesting idea in fiction altogether. I can not wait to see what YOU write. If even half the people that posted challenges in fact wrote an acutal alternative timeline we may get some interesting timelines around here rather than be bogged down in debates.
 

Kaptin Kurk

Banned
Things does sound like an interesting idea in fiction altogether. I can not wait to see what YOU write. If even half the people that posted challenges in fact wrote an acutal alternative timeline we may get some interesting timelines around here rather than be bogged down in debates.

Touche, but a worthwile challenge.
 
Maybe the Peruvians establish alchemy and develop gunpowder?

Even without metal casting, grenades would still be effective against the Europeans.

Peru, armed with grenades, is an amazing conqueror (a bit ASB, maybe), and uses ships to administer the various districts of its empire. Eventually, these ships follow the Gulf Stream to Britain.

Just a thought. However, the lack of any domesticable grain besides corn prevents a population on the scale of the Old World. Plus, we still have the diseases to worry about...

Maybe the increased travel through the Americas results in a more dangerous variety of syphilis.
 
I Believe there were other Grains under development, before Maize drove them out, You could butterfly them .
 
An even more interesting scenario is in which two parallel civilizations meet at the crossroads, but they are very different in society and technology. For example, instead of using guns, our New World civs might have different but equal weapons like grendade (as somebody said) and advanced siege engines. On the same scale, society in Europe would be drastically different from society in the New World.

One way to make this plausible is if we take out the New World's main disadvantage: lack of competition. There were only a handful of 'true' centralized states in the New World at any one time, and as a result, societal and technological advancement was drastically slowed down. Make dozens or hundreds of states solidify earlier on (Classical Period, perhaps) and we could have a situation similar to Europe, where everybody's locked in a deathmatch, and the borders are constantly morphing as each nation attempts to get a point up on their neighbor.

Because this would be harder to formulate in the New World, I reccomend that the AmerIndian states are kept fractured very small for a long, long time, allowing the New World to catch up techwise because of competition. Larger states will eventually form, making use of new technological and societal systems and advantages to tip the balance of power, reworking the system to produce a counter to these advantages.

Using this, and tweaking the New World slightly in the GGW theory's favor, and we could very well have AmerIndian civilizations that are not too far behind or even rival that of their European counterparts.

So now I'll get to how we could change the situation in the New World according to the GGW theory.

For the Germs part of the theory, it's actually rather easy. Keep some prolonged contact between AmerIndian traders and Africa and we could have mutated forms of African diseases adapting to the Americas.

Now we need domesticatable creatures for the AmerIndians to use. As we know, before the end of the Ice Age, there were many types and species of megafauna living in the Americas. However, humans contact and the changin climate killed almost all of them off. Horses could easily be saved though, so we cand rely on those. The bovine situation is more of a predicament, because there weren't many domesticatable types of said hooved animal to tame. So tweak the behavior of buffaloes slightly and now we have a tame-able bovine. Alternatively, you could have a species of auroch or ox coming into America rather lately and surviving the climate change.

Steel and guns aren't too hard to come up with now that we have a more technologically 'fertile' New World. Thoughts?
 
St Louis Mounds

AmerIndians in St Louis were building a civilisation from 1000AD but collapsed due to internal problems.
Anasasi people began to create the first urban dwellings, abandoning nomadic life. The first signs of their presence in the area can be traced from 850 a.d. until they enigmatically abandoned them in late 1200/s.
Also the Central and South American nation create an interesting opportunity

Europe/Asia grew because they had nations in competition so an external threat generally kept nations together and improving their technology

Say the American nations send out scouts for whatever reason and come into violent contact.
This would override their internal problems and force them to compete with each other.
The St Louis civilisation is the most likely to develop a naval ability as they have to deal with the flooding of the Mississippi and would lead them to exploring and colonising the Caribbean islands

Unfortunately the Texas desert will keep these nations apart so the coastline will become important

In 1000 the technology in America and Europe where generally equal but in different areas by creating a conflict technology will increase dramatically. Over the next 400 years anything is possible particularly if these nations come into conflict over the occupation of the Caribbean islands
 

The Sandman

Banned
You have to find some way to stop the epidemics, though. Perhaps have the Polynesians and/or Phoenicians heading further afield? They could end up introducing domesticable animals, along with diseases, when they come ashore. If you want, have their colonies die out but the animals and diseases remain. Given another 1000-2000 years, the Amerindians may have developed at least some level of resistance.
 
It would be interesting seeing Columbus' ships meeting up with some Aztec and well a scuffle breaks out if you get what I mean. I'm sit on this idea for awhile and figure something out.
 

Kaptin Kurk

Banned
One thing I'd consider, visa-vie disease wise, isn't greater immunity to old-world disease....but perhaps New World diseases that deadly to old world populations. This is where I'm comming from:

New disease evolve when they jump the human-animal barrier, or a disease already in the human population mutates and gains added characteristics. So, if the Native American civilizations were more advanced, it'd be reasonable to assume they were more urbanized...and this increase in urbanization would lead to greater opprotunties for new and exotic and distinctly American diseases to develop among urban populations than hunter-gather populations...


So I could envision a situation were both the Old World and the New World suffer from Epidimics from disease which they aren't used to upon first contact.

At least the chance of such a thing, i think, is probably higher than Americans developing immunity to old world diseases if their own explorers don't put them into conact with the Old world until the late 1400s.
 
one of the big problems is the lack of animals that can be domesticated in the new world - this could be solved by a POD around the time when humans first entered the americas where they don't wipe out all the megafauna (assuming for the moment that the cause of the megafauna extinction was human)

the other POD would be to have one of the civilisations like the Maya grow larger, last longer and then fall in a similar way to Rome, so that a number of competing successor states arise. That would ensure that there's the constant death match that happened in Europe

Also, having a larger, more urban empire in the america's would also in all likely hood mean that there were endemic diseases around. If this were the case it would a) help reduce the effect of virgin field epidemics when europeans arrive and b) give europe some of it's own medicine

the states in America wouldn't have had to have gunpowder, metal working would have been good but even this wouldn't have been essential. What they needed was a more 'modern' approach to war and diplomacy. This way they could have prevented themselves being conquered by 30 or so men who were more sophisticated diplomatically.
 
You have to find some way to stop the epidemics, though. Perhaps have the Polynesians and/or Phoenicians heading further afield? They could end up introducing domesticable animals, along with diseases, when they come ashore. If you want, have their colonies die out but the animals and diseases remain. Given another 1000-2000 years, the Amerindians may have developed at least some level of resistance.

I like this thought. I don't think its too much of a stretch to see that Central America and Northern South America became more advanced in some ways than the Native Americans elsewhere, due to the fact that much like Mesopotamia and Egypt, they were at a crossroads of both ideas and the exchange of possibly benificial genetic material, (not to mention exposure to cooties that might wipe out farther flung societies), this doesn't explain China's success per say, but perhaps they had a bit of the same kindof exchange of ideas and whatnot going on there also.

Polynesian/Carthaginian influence might be the very thing.

Exchanging draft animals for using the sea, to allow for a more rapid evolution of Native American culture. It goes without saying that earlier contact with Old World cooties would definitely benefit the Aboriginals in the longer haul. Add to that the potential of new animals, even swine, might make quite a difference to the New World.

just a thought....
 
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