Sustainable Tech Levels?

[Nathan Brazil]

So I feel the garden worlds would be wealthier, and since more output for every input, may have more technological progress over a long period of time (plus if trade routes fail, and war and disaster life support systems are more delicate than a garden world ecosystem. Maybe. Ahem.)

That basic garden worlds concept is reflected in different but direct ways in the Traveller rule systems over the years.

In GURPS: Interstellar Wars - World Generation creates a Resource Value prior to determining population. An initial value is rolled, then raised up the friendlier the world is (size, atmo, water). If RVM is positive, generate in a more or less standard way. If not, populate ONLY if there is a logical reason to do so (base to close a gap in Jump Route, base(s) near enemy powers, etc.). Even then population generated is lower (uses a different table).

Megatraveller, The New Era, and 1248 each have different methods to alter World Profiles reflecting collapse of empires back to something reflecting GGS due to extended war in Megatraveller (Hard Times), or total disaster due to Virus in TNE and 1248. The more a planet relied on Tech to survive or just having a super high TL (which imply more underlying infrastructure) the more severe the collapse.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

I THINK (maybe correctly, I can be wacky at times... :rofl: ) there are THREE models to look at:

The World Generation in GURPS;IW - While the Vilani worlds are forced to be stagnant due their government/culture, the World generation there could reflect empire in growth. People mostly live where it is easy to live and only in desolate outposts because "somebody has to".

More "standard" Traveller World Generation, as in CT, Mongoose and Cepheus imply an older, longer developed region of space. People live everywhere willy-nilly no matter how odd (a populated TL 3 Asteroid mainworld for example o. The implication being that sustainable TL by this point may be meaningless as it is no longer "every planet for themselves". Environmental infrastructure is imported from elsewhere.

The collapse models are "every planet for themselves" because no one is coming to help. The original reason for people to live therenmay be gone and the likely decades/centuries/millenia of underlying built up infrastructure is too (or soon will be :smirk. If a planet cannot do it by itself, the planet will become a Boneyard (TNE/1248 code) or Dieback (T5 code).

 

[Condottiere]

If you simplify it, it comes down to energy generation, plus a competitive culture, which allows access to, securing of, and exploitation of available resources.

 

[Bromo33333]

If you simplify it, it comes down to energy generation, plus a competitive culture, which allows access to, securing of, and exploitation of available resources.

The Diamond thesis in "Guns, Germs, Steel" contends that the main cause of wealth and technical disparities between cultures in the world has been the amount of energy expended for basic needs. The wet temperate zones on Earth had that advantage over the arctic and tropics which compounded over tens of thousands of years into the world we see today. He would contend it certainly did NOT have to do with cultural characteristics at all.

 

[vegas]

tldr - Diamond is a geographer and not a historian/anthropologist so of course he only sees environmental factors and ignores cultural ones. As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

***

Diamond's thesis, while interesting to be sure, is not without critics. Here is a selection of McNeil's reply to Diamond in his review of GG&S. (McNeil is famous for his own work on the topic The Rise of The West which emphasizes cultural exchange as the driver of growth.)

Much more powerfully than any other species, we change the environment around us; and have done so ever since our ancestors began to control fire and to use tools. Learned behavior, channeled along innumerable different paths by divergent cultures, is what allows us to do so. Human beings do indeed often “approach limits imposed by environmental constraints” only to find a way to overcome and escape those constraints, as the history of technology repeatedly illustrates. I hasten to add that failures also figure largely in the historic record when environmental constraints disrupted human schemes and drastic depopulation and cultural collapse ensued.

Of course Eurasia had basic advantages over the other continents, simply because of its size and internal variability; nor do I doubt that Europeans took advantage of that fact, and of their borrowings from parts of Africa and Asia when they crossed the oceans and began colonizing and exploiting the rest of the earth. But I do deny that their culture was an automatic product of their environment “sifted” (by what mysterious hand of nature, pray tell?) across millennia to conform to “environmental constraints” as Diamond so strangely asserts.

Secondly, Diamond accuses historians of failing “to explain history’s broadest patterns.” I answer that some few historians are trying to do so, among them myself, and with more respect for natural history than Diamond has for the conscious level of human history. He wants simple answers to processes far more complex than he has patience to investigate. Brushing aside the autonomous capability of human culture to alter environments profoundly—and also irreversibly—is simply absurd.

 

[aramis]

tldr - Diamond is a geographer and not a historian/anthropologist so of course he only sees environmental factors and ignores cultural ones. As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

My minor was Geography - you are seriously misconstruing the nature of the discipline.

Geography, at least in institutions across the northwest US, is about the interactions of people and place. It's part history, part sociology, and part geology.

Not saying the author in question does or does not, but the nature of the field is people and place.

 

[vegas]

The discipline is broad and covers a lot of things the same way anthropology and sociology do.

Don't like the exec summary? Read the long quote! I think it more or less says the same thing, particularly the last paragraph "defense" of historians.

Edit - just to further the thought:

what distinguishes geography from history/anthropology?
[rhetorical question that makes my point]

 

[Bromo33333]

At a 10,000 foot view Diamond refustes the idea of "cultural superiority" and the people critiquing him seem to ascribe to some version of it.

As far as Traveller is concerned, I'd say I'd take a page from that rulebook. a 1d6 + all the advantages and detractions from the biosphere and the population based factors.

i.e. Mostly Diamond with a dash of YMMV. But over tens of thousands of years the YMMV may tend to wash out.

 

[vegas]

"Refutes" is an interesting choice of words. Diamond certainly denies the centrality of culture and asserts the primacy of physical endowment in the rise of Europe, but does he prove it? Is it even the kind of hypothesis that is provable?

It doesn't seem likely. You wrote above "He would contend it certainly did NOT have to do with cultural characteristics at all." That interpretation could be rendered thus: "regardless of the culture of the Europeans, it was inevitable that they would come to dominate all other populations on Earth."

Written that way, it seems a lot less plausible, right?

Just food for thought. I don't think it is the kind of thing that can be known.

 

[aramis]

Edit - just to further the thought:

what distinguishes geography from history/anthropology?
[rhetorical question that makes my point]

History is about knowing what has happened.
Geography is about the effects of people on the land and the effects of the land on people.
Anthropology studies the cultures.
History studies the records
Archaeology studies the artifacts and physical remains.

All of them overlap a little... but the approaches of each to a geopolitical situation are different, and true understanding requires all of them.

Europe's dominance is not an obvious outcome, but a mediterranean culture forming a large empire with many smaller states being incorporated piecemeal is a geographic probability, because the geology and topography are conducive to many small polities, thanks to the Balkans, Pyranees, and Alps. Some mediterranean power is an inevitability; it could just as easily have been Syrian or Egyptian in origin, given only a mild change.

The trade flows of the mediterranean are almost assured of generating a major power. The relative harshness of the middle east and north-west Africa argue against those as the origin. Iberia could have been a source, as could the Nile, Carthage, Syria, Turkey; Italy, Syria, and Iraq have in fact generated empires, all of which have fallen, but all of which have fallen.

If the Nilotic civilization had won its wars, then become an empire, the majority of their civilization would likely, much like Rome, have been around the mediterranean, but it would also have spread the east coast of Africa and likely also the south of the Saudi Peninsula.

If Carthage had become an empire before Rome, pretty much all of the med, but also much of the West African coast. And, they fell to Rome... but if they had been a bit bigger, they might have managed to hold Rome off, or even taken Rome.

Why? because the mediterranean is a natural trade aid. Someone along it will inevitably get a trade network, and then build an army and conquer.

Arguing that it would be inevitable for them to dominate the world? unsupportable. Likely? Yes - because Sapiens seems to have developed tech out of climatic need as much as curiosity, and the climatic needs were Europe and the Himalayas...

 

[vegas]

Last bit first: when you write your book, you can title it "Trade, Germs, Guns, & Steel" and do Diamond one better.

I'll give you MY answer to the rhetorical question.
The focus of geography is on the physical; from there we widen our view.
The focus of anthropology/history is on people(s).

Yes, they all overlap. It is the central focus and scope that differs between them.

(An aside, I think that historians would bristle at your suggestion that they study "records", as if records are studied for their own sake or that they constitute the scope of a historians tools.)

 

[atpollard]

The Diamond thesis in "Guns, Germs, Steel" contends that the main cause of wealth and technical disparities between cultures in the world has been the amount of energy expended for basic needs. The wet temperate zones on Earth had that advantage over the arctic and tropics which compounded over tens of thousands of years into the world we see today. He would contend it certainly did NOT have to do with cultural characteristics at all.

Does Diamond explain why the technical advancement in the Western Hemisphere occurred in tropical MesoAmerica rather than Temperate North and South America?

Europe seemed to have both a climate that gave surplus resources and migration of conflicting people groups that gave competition for those resources as a motivation for technical advancement ... and most of the real advancement in technology we owe to labor shortages caused by plagues spread from contact with other lands that got the ball rollling.

 

[atpollard]

Sustainable TLs (atpollard's House Rule)

My RULE OF THUMB for sustainable TL is that Sustatainable Tech Level is equal to the basic unit of organization for the Population.

• A Family (POP 0 = 1-9 people) can sustain TL 0 with no outside resources, like a hunter-gatherer group.
• A Village (POP 2 = 100-900 people) can sustain TL 2 with no outside resources, like a self-sufficient Medieval Manor.
• A City (POP 5 = 100,000+ people) can sustain TL 5 with no outside resources, like an Industrial City supporting factories and the farming communities.
• A Nation (POP 8 = 100 million+ people) can sustain TL 8 with no outside resources.
• A Starfaring Community (POP 11 = 100 billion+ people) is needed to sustain TL 11 with no outside resources since POP 11 is typically beyond the capability of a single planet to support. It can barely be done on a single world with high urban densities, massive space resource extraction, and vast orbital agriculture all drastically raising the cost of living, but most TL 10+ worlds require interstellar trade to survive.

Higher populations at lower TLs simply indicate that there are multiples of the basic unit that are more isolate than working together. For example, the Grain Empires (Egypt, Greece and Rome) were TL 1 or TL 2 because the dominant unit was Hundreds of people (Small farming community that grew the grain that supported the empire) and 80-90% of the population lived in these small communities. Note that where you had larger populations like the Thousands (POP 3-4) of the Greek City States or the Millions (POP 6) of Rome, you start to see innovations common to later TLs appearing like the Mechanical Devices and Libraries of Greece and the central heating, running water and indoor plumbing of Rome. They are still limited by the majority of the population living in POP 2/TL 2 Agricultural communities.

 

[Condottiere]

No man is an island.

Cultural and genetic appropriation is a natural occurrence, as would be technological.

The Chinese invented printing and gun powder, but internal socio economic political pressures ensured that they could never fully exploit them.

The Mediterranean served as a communications hub, and when those civilizations that bordered there stagnated, their intellectual properties were exploited by more robust cultures, packed full of ambitious opportunists.

 

[BwapTED]

No man is an island.

Cultural and genetic appropriation is a natural occurrence, as would be technological.

The Chinese invented printing and gun powder, but internal socio economic political pressures ensured that they could never fully exploit them.

The Mediterranean served as a communications hub, and when those civilizations that bordered there stagnated, their intellectual properties were exploited by more robust cultures, packed full of ambitious opportunists.

Have you read Fernand Braudel's histories of the Mediterranean? These might be up your alley.