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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2455867" data-attributes="member: 7240">But you can see how the evidence you are using is defeating your argument. How can you argue the development of indoor plumbing is inevitable in any human society when you can only come up with one that developed it? Imagine trying to make this point in the 1800s! "It is inevitable that any human society will develop indoor plumbing because... we just thought of it the other day... and every other society that has adopted it on an institutional scale (Greece, Rome, medieval Europe) has mostly abandoned it. The fact is that urinating and defecating are not especially fun activities anyway. They are always going to be inconvenient and unpleasant to varying degrees so I just don't buy that our particular civilization's strategy of mitigating a small portion of this unpleasantness is the inevitable conclusion any society would reach.The Ancient Greeks assumed that God or whoever was pressing the big red reset button on the side of the world every few thousand years and that what made Egypt unique was the fact that it was immune to this catastrophic loss of knowledge. Aristotle and others argued that the gradual and continuous accumulation of knowledge was, in fact, a defining and unique property of only one society in the entire world. And these guys were a pretty learned bunch. Indeed, it is not until the discovery of the Americas that European society acquired its present-day belief that society gradually accumulates knowledge over time. Up until that time, it was generally assumed, when what we now term "discoveries" were made, they were, in fact the re-discovery of the knowledge our forbears had and lost.It would harm my suspension of disbelief too if a society's technology did not change in any way over a long period of time. That would be silly. Change is in the nature of society. Where I am disagreeing with you is that this change is part of some kind of unilinear progress. In the early Middle Ages, for instance, we lost a huge amount of architectural and geometric knowledge; at the same time, our milling and ploughing tech improved considerably. Not to sound like a Western triumphalist here, because I'm really not, but I think you need to look at the fact that Western Europe is the only society ever to have gone through the Scientific Revolution. To argue that going through the Scientific Revolution is an inherent property of every human society is kind of absurd when the historical record maintains that it has only ever happened to one. 1,000,000 years in sub-saharan Africa, 200,000 years in Australia, 50,000 years in America, 250,000 years in China did not produce societies with especially similar narratives in terms of the development of either science or technology. And let's not forget that these two things don't have nearly as much to do with eachother as we like to think.Here I am 100% in agreement with you. That's one of the reasons I hardly ever read fantasy novels.I see the point you are making but my main disagreement with you is that technology develops in a predetermined, unilinear, teleological way. Technology comes into play through social forces that are simply not predictable. You flood an economy with cheap labour and people walk away from their machines if the machines cost more to run. Many industrialists in India lost their shirts buying automated cotton mills in the 19th century because they kept waiting for automation to be profitable but desperate poverty and urbanization, the things caused by automation in Britain, effectively prevented automation in India. There is no cataclysm to explain the reliance on stone tools in pre-contact Australia. People lived there for a long time and, due to various factors, most of which we don't even know, aboriginal society did not learn to make the porcelain they periodically bought from the Indonesians. The written word is no guarantee either of a society adopting this unilinear course. We find examples like the Mayans who lost their written language.Look at the Germanic societies that succeeded versus those that failed. The ones that succeeded, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Swedes, Franks, etc. all insisted on living in agriculturally marginal regions of Northern Europe where crops grew horribly inefficiently and urban population densities could not be sustained. Those that went south to the good places are all gone -- no more Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, etc. Being in a bad place is sometimes what allows you to triumph. Technological failure can sometimes turn into success and vice-versa. Europeans could not have conquered the Americas so effectively if our sanitation, cleanliness and understanding of disease had been as good as in Asia or even as good as in Europe 1500 years previous. If AIDS mutates to become airborne at some point, the prostitutes of Bangkok and Lagos will end up winning the Darwinian lottery.Well, the only reason I'm doing this is because the more of your assumptions I can tear down, the better time you will have reading people's alternate histories. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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