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Should Safeholdians say NO to Gbaba war?

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Re: Should Safeholdians say NO to Gbaba war?
Post by SWM   » Tue Aug 19, 2014 2:12 pm

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cralkhi wrote:
rakenan wrote:Unless the mean time between failures for Federation tech is infinity, eventually the Rakurai system is going to fail. Without that, the corruption of the church will inevitably lead to a technological resurgence on Safehold, which will lead eventually to space exploration.


See, I don't agree that it would inevitably lead to technological growth. Depending on the way the corruption goes, it could lead to disregarding some of the useful knowledge in the Writ and thus a 'dark age' (especially given the need to laboriously prepare land for Terran crops, etc.)

Anyway, I tend to think that if you dumped a bunch of people without knowledge of technology on a planet with no modern tech or records of it, no records of scientific method type ideas, etc. you'd be very unlikely to get science and technology to happen again (at least in any reasonable timeframe) even with no effort to suppress it. I just don't read history as showing that sustained progress is at all inevitable or even the normal direction of things.(Which provides a pretty good explanation for the Fermi Paradox, IMO.)

What do you consider "a reasonable timeframe"? We are talking about timescales of thousands of years. Safehold has already been here for a thousand years. How far do you see Safehold falling? Back to medieval technology? Bronze Age? Unless you want to push it back to Stone Age, it is still only a matter of thousands of years, and even Stone Age is only tens of thousands.

And if you push it so far back that they never regain technology, it is still a failure of the Langhorne Plan. As I said in my earlier posts, there are several possible outcomes that result in failures for Langhorne. One of them is the destruction of human civilization. No matter how you cut it, Langhorne was doomed to failure, which has been my point all along. Trying to keep Safehold static was the wrong decision, could not possibly work, and was likely to result in the destruction of human civilization one way or another.
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Re: Should Safeholdians say NO to Gbaba war?
Post by ecortez   » Tue Aug 19, 2014 4:50 pm

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The scientific method and mindset is so useful human beings would be bound to rediscover it no matter how many times you wiped all evidence and memory of technology from the world and started over. The discovery is more likely to come in times of crisis, when a whole society is thrown into chaos and the established order breaks down, but this is hardly a requirement. There are a thousand ways it could happen.

I came up with that scenario about the Gbaba being a galactic scale threat by thinking about this very issue, asking myself what sort of race could make glacially slow progress (thousands of years for even the most minor improvements) or none whatsoever.

The most likely possibility, as far as I can see, would be a truly ancient species which carried a detailed racial memory; genetically stored information that resulted in infant Gbaba being born with social etiquette, language, and other assorted skills and information pre-loaded into their brains. Much of their technological activity would be instinctive, like wasps building a hive or beavers constructing a dam. They might not be sentient in a true sense anymore, or just borderline sentient, having enough intelligence to make use of their genetic memory but not enough to come up with new concepts or devices. This is one of the speculations that Merlin talked about in the books.

It's hard to imagine another circumstance where a race could possess advanced technology but make no further headway. And humans are about as far removed from that as as it's possible to get. We could always be exterminated but there's no way to hold us still for long. When talking about forever you need to ask yourself how long that is - a thousand years, a million, a billion? Recorded human history is about six thousand years at present, give or take. Ten or twenty thousand is a lot more time than you think.
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Re: Should Safeholdians say NO to Gbaba war?
Post by Thucydides   » Tue Aug 19, 2014 8:31 pm

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You might consider that anatomically modern humans have been around for about 100,000 years, but there was not much measurable progress until something like 20,000 years ago. After an ice age or two, humans were at the Neolithic age at @ 12,000 years ago as the glaciers receded, then another long period until agriculture and the first unambiguous signs of civilization something around 5000 years ago.

Even then, there are long stretches of quiet, the enlightenment, scientific method and industrial revolution are very recent events (practically yesterday compared to things like the invention/discovery of agriculture etc.)

So I don't think science or technology was ordained, and looking at our own history, there is plenty of reason to suspect that the fate of the human race may well have been to remain as hunter-gatherers until the next asteroid dropped on us except for some sort of lucky accident....
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Re: Should Safeholdians say NO to Gbaba war?
Post by n7axw   » Tue Aug 19, 2014 9:58 pm

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Science is not inevitable. Indeed, the natural state of humankind is not science, but superstition, all too frequently fostered by religion. In fact we might consider Safehold's story a parable of the consequences of the misuse of God's name to promote ignorance.

Science happened as a consequence of a set of historical circumstances that were unique; the enlightenment and the Protestant challenge to church authority. There is no guarantee that these circumstances could be repeated to produce the same result. Consider that even today large parts of earth's population is prescientific in outlook. Even in so called 1st world USA, we have lots of both superstition and ignorance.

Don
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Re: Should Safeholdians say NO to Gbaba war?
Post by Weird Harold   » Wed Aug 20, 2014 12:30 am

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n7axw wrote:Science happened as a consequence of a set of historical circumstances that were unique; the enlightenment and the Protestant challenge to church authority. There is no guarantee that these circumstances could be repeated to produce the same result.


That's a very Euro-centric view of history. Just as one example, our number system is called "Arabic Numerals" for a good reason; Arabic Numerals make the mathematics required by "science" possible. (which is why Arabic numerals were one of the very first innovations Merlin introduced.)

China, Japan, India, Persia, and reportedly several ancient African empires, rivaled and surpassed Rome in engineering feats and pioneered many of the innovations that led to England's eventual Industrial Revolution and "world domination."

It doesn't require "universal genius" or even "universal education" for a few radical thinkers to come up with innovative ideas. All that is required is a lack of suppression, and a way for innovators to communicate their ideas to a wider audience. Safehold has everything needed for an explosion of innovation except for the "lack of suppression" and that was crumbling through corruption before Merlin woke up. Church reform was coming whether Merlin interfered or not.
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Re: Should Safeholdians say NO to Gbaba war?
Post by evilauthor   » Wed Aug 20, 2014 12:46 am

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SWM wrote:What do you consider "a reasonable timeframe"? We are talking about timescales of thousands of years. Safehold has already been here for a thousand years. How far do you see Safehold falling? Back to medieval technology? Bronze Age? Unless you want to push it back to Stone Age, it is still only a matter of thousands of years, and even Stone Age is only tens of thousands.


Concur with this. Given enough time, even low probability events will occur. SOMEONE would eventually formulate the scientific method, Arabic style numeral systems, an industrial revolution, etc etc etc. And once one group adopts these innovations and everyone sees how good they are, they'll spread like wildfire. It would happen more slowly than what we see in the series, but it WILL happen.
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Re: Should Safeholdians say NO to Gbaba war?
Post by ecortez   » Wed Aug 20, 2014 2:32 am

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Over the long term I think science and technology were always a foregone conclusion - provided something like an asteroid impact didn't intervene first. It couldn't happen while humans lived in scattered bands of hunter gatherers, because they were always on the knife edge of survival and everyone's efforts had to be focused in that direction. Once we discovered agriculture and the domestication of animals, our population could expand to the point where the smarter members of society could dabble in things not immediately essential to staying alive. That increased population also meant a labor force big enough to build large structures and our first cities.

The scientific revolution might have kicked off in ancient Greece. They had enough raw data and knowledge of mathematics that someone could've made the same leap of insight which led Isaac Newton to the law of gravity in 1666. Why this failed to happen I don't know. Maybe someone more familiar with the period could hazard a guess. Roman civilization adopted many of the Greeks' ideas but despite some impressive engineering accomplishments never experienced their own enlightenment. China, as well as the Middle East during Europe's Dark Ages, had the necessary ingredients. And in America both the Aztec and Inca civilizations could have developed advanced technology in time.

Strong authoritarian leaders may have played a part in stalling progress. While scientific advance per se poses no threat to dictators and ruling elites, the climate of free thought it requires certainly does. Still it's hard to imagine twenty thousand years going by without a king or emperor anywhere taking an interest in promoting it.

Tens of millions of years will probably pass before the next mass extinction. Granted it could hold off for another three hundred million, or happen out of the blue tomorrow. We have no way of knowing. But when you say never, you're implying that even over timescales hundreds of times longer than the human race has existed so far we might've run around picking berries and hunting bison without developing any further. I find that impossible to believe.
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Re: Should Safeholdians say NO to Gbaba war?
Post by John Prigent   » Wed Aug 20, 2014 5:30 am

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Since both Arabic numbers and Greek mechanical philosophers (to define them loosely) have come up in this thread it prompts me to ask: what kind of numbers did Pythagorus etc use? Were they what we now call Arabic numbers, Roman numbers, or something else?

Cheers

John
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Re: Should Safeholdians say NO to Gbaba war?
Post by Weird Harold   » Wed Aug 20, 2014 6:27 am

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John Prigent wrote:Since both Arabic numbers and Greek mechanical philosophers (to define them loosely) have come up in this thread it prompts me to ask: what kind of numbers did Pythagorus etc use? Were they what we now call Arabic numbers, Roman numbers, or something else?

Cheers

John

Greek numerals are a system of representing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. These alphabetic numerals are also known by names Ionic or Ionian numerals, Milesian numerals, and Alexandrian numerals. [Click for more]
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Re: Should Safeholdians say NO to Gbaba war?
Post by n7axw   » Wed Aug 20, 2014 6:47 am

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Weird Harold wrote:
n7axw wrote:Science happened as a consequence of a set of historical circumstances that were unique; the enlightenment and the Protestant challenge to church authority. There is no guarantee that these circumstances could be repeated to produce the same result.


That's a very Euro-centric view of history. Just as one example, our number system is called "Arabic Numerals" for a good reason; Arabic Numerals make the mathematics required by "science" possible. (which is why Arabic numerals were one of the very first innovations Merlin introduced.)

China, Japan, India, Persia, and reportedly several ancient African empires, rivaled and surpassed Rome in engineering feats and pioneered many of the innovations that led to England's eventual Industrial Revolution and "world domination."

It doesn't require "universal genius" or even "universal education" for a few radical thinkers to come up with innovative ideas. All that is required is a lack of suppression, and a way for innovators to communicate their ideas to a wider audience. Safehold has everything needed for an explosion of innovation except for the "lack of suppression" and that was crumbling through corruption before Merlin woke up. Church reform was coming whether Merlin interfered or not.


I don't think that what I am saying is Euro-centric. You are correct to point out that there have been advances other places than Europe. Nevertheless it remains true that the scientific point of view did not transform those societies in the same manner as Europe's. So the impact of those advances remained restricted and limited. What was missing was not only communication but a way of thinking that allowed the ideas of those few radical thinkers to multiply and be reapplied on a culture wide basis.

There is much more to this than church reform. Church reform has happened many times and usually what happens is fresh application of old thinking, house cleaning to deal with corruption, and renewed religious fervor that can be a very positive thing or take off in less constructive directions...sometimes both at the same time. So church reform is not the only ingriedient needed for the stew.

Safehold will face many of the same issues as we faced and in some respects continue to face in our own story. Take away the tyranny of the church and the inquisition and what remains is tyranny of the mind. There will be places where the "new thinking" will be enthusiastically embraced and other places where people will flee back into traditionalism. It's one thing to introduce Merlin and what he represents in Charis, quite another to do so in Harchong and Desnair. In fact I doubt that progress is going to get a free ride even in Charis.

Don
When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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