(AKA, “reorder the Civ tech tree.”)
This question is being prompted by a weekend viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey and subsequent contemplation of The Edit, i.e. the famous moment when the flying bone turns into a high-tech satellite. If you know that in the filmmakers’ mind the satellite is an orbiting nuclear-missile platform, then the collapsing of millions of years of history by cutting from one weapon to another might be interpreted as a specific anthropological assertion by the film, i.e. that the basic driving force in the development of human civilization is and always has been the arms race: Whichever tribe is most effective at attacking its neighbors and/or defending from attacks gets to take the lead in making the rules everybody else has to follow.
That’s not the central question of the thread. It’s just my starting point.
As I pondered this idea, I thought about the sweep of history to see whether or not the thesis would hold water. And in particular, I wondered whether or not there was any particular reason our technologies had to develop in the specific order they did — that is, if the web of conceptual prerequisites, associated developments, and investigatory technologies means the march of intellectual progress had to proceed more or less the way it did in our history, or if there might have been other paths.
So that’s the main question I’m offering for consideration: Are there possible alternate histories of science and technology? Obviously some breakthroughs would not have been possible without prior breakthroughs (you don’t get radio until you understand electromagnetics, for example), but how dependent, hypothetically, might the whole structure of discovery and application really be on the relationships between its mulifarious components?
(For those who know the games, it’s possibly useful to think about the question in terms of the tech tree in Sid Meier’s Civilization series. You don’t get chariots until you know horses; you don’t get modern hospitals until you understand sanitation; you don’t get soldiers with rifles until you’ve had soldiers with muskets; and so on. It’s a simplification, obviously, but it’s still a useful construct. In Civ III, at least, within a given “page,” you’re free to drive toward a given advance and disregard the other threads of investigation for the time being: e.g. “the Monarchy gambit.” But it’s still necessary to complete the required items on a given historical page before you can move on to the next period: stone age to bronze age, industrial to modern, etc. The question is how reflective of reality, even hypothetically, this really is.)
For example: Is there any particular reason telescopes did not arrive in Europe until the Renaissance? Would it have been possible, with the proper conceptual leap, for the Romans to have figured out how to fabricate, grind, and polish their own lenses? The idea to do so aside, is there any technological barrier to their having done this? Is there anything else they might have stumbled across “ahead of their time”? (Along these lines, I vaguely recall a Dope thread in which somebody observed that the technology behind Edison’s wax-cylinder “record player” was more or less available for hundreds of years before it was assembled in the proper combination.)
Now, obviously, there needs to be a guiding principle by which we can evaluate whether or not an alternate path is plausible. That principle, to me, is this: the immediate practicality of the knowledge in question. Consider: Since mathematics is almost entirely conceptual, I see no reason why a few decades of concerted effort by the ancient Greeks would not have produced the calculus millennia early, except that without practical benefits arising from the work, there’s no reason to devote the effort to it. Yes, humans are curious creatures by nature, and we figure stuff out all the time without any reward for it. But at the same time, the cultural infrastructure must exist to support its intellectuals and free them to pursue their investigations: the society must be rich, and they must be stable for long enough to permit continuity of research. With these in place, good ideas can be pursued and brought to fruition. That’s why I used the telescope as my first example, because in the context of the military applications with which I began this post, the telescope confers a real, inarguable, and immediate benefit to its user. A seaside city that gets a few hours of additional warning before the invading horde arrives will have a huge advantage in organizing and executing its defense, or at least its evacuation. By contrast, I can’t think of a single really compelling reason why a voice-recording-and-playback contraption would have caught on in Imperial Rome or China. The telescope, therefore, is an invention that will “stick” whenever it appears; and the observation of heavenly bodies, and the conclusions drawn from this, will naturally follow sooner or later.
(This makes me think about a larger associated question, regarding whether great swaths of modern science are in danger of stalling in their practical applications — we’re afraid of genetic engineering and are throwing up social and political roadblocks, we’re not capable of traveling to the stars we study long-distance, we haven’t been able to figure out how to make computers truly think, we’ve squeezed just about every drop of efficiency out of our current petrochemical, nuclear, solar, and mechanical energy generation technologies, and so on. We’re still progressing by leaps and bounds in other areas, but with the exception of the Internet, it’s been a while since we’ve had a real Killer App like the automobile or a flight to the moon to reassure the mainstream population that our investigations are bearing tangible fruit. Indeed, the opposite force, the Pandora’s Box idea, a fear that is always with us that we’re learning too much too fast, might be gaining power as our scientists work on more and more distantly obscure research that fails to filter in any meaningful way into society at large, and as simultaneously the spread of previous knowledge increases our risk and anxiety, e.g. “make ricin at home for fun and prophet.” We might have entangled ourselves in a life-and-death race, whereby the stability of civilization depends on the scientists and technologists delivering on their promises, either explicit, e.g. space tourism, or implicit, e.g. the general idea that an active, energetic, and independent knowledge-producing industry is actually a good thing. In other words, I’m wondering if history can be viewed as a cycling of Birth, Death, and Rebirth of what we now call Modernism. Obviously, this is a much larger question, and really deserves its own thread, whenever I get around to better refining the idea.)
So, anyway, my own attempt to hijack my thread aside ;), what do you think about the main question I raised above? Could a lucky happenstance of coiled wire and rotating magnets have brought the mastery of electricity centuries before it happened? Might a fortunate breakthrough in optics have put a microscope on the desk of Vesalius? What impact would the development of even a primitive form of movable type have had on the Library of Alexandria and its overall mission to produce and distribute books and knowledge?
Please, O Genius Dopers, speculate away. 