The wouldn’t have the time in that they will not be ‘one alien culture’ - they will in my view be multiple cultures competing, and the one inventing the wheel is likely to be the dominant one or contributing to another one managing such.
Delays in technological development tend to mean you get stomped by the place that isnt delayed.
Otara
A hive species of some kind comes to mind.
Even a hive mind cant be in touch with the entire world though, unless one invokes telepathy or the like.
Some level of separation or autonomy seems likely, or you’d presumably run into trouble sooner or later from communication delays if nothing else.
Otara
Your word choice “delay” is exactly the issue that we are debating. “Delayed development” implies that there is a “normal” progression and that is just slow to get there. I am arguing that there is no “normal” progression. Progression occurs in response to needs, in response to happenstance.
I am supposing a world that was all similar to the Mayans in that there was no technologic need for the wheel. Oh they knew about the idea, they had toys based on it, but without draft animals it served no early technologic niche. None of this alien world has draft animals. But they have metals and they have explosives. They have advanced mathematics , the ability to make precise observations and they develop a scientific method. Oh, just a little imagination … transportation is mostly across water or ice and, across mountains. No advantage to wheels or roads. Rocket powered sleds and ships. Balloons. Submarines. Food production and resource superiority is not from agriculture but from mining and from harvesting their seas in more efficient manners. “Farming” when it develops is aquaculture and utilizing underground caverns to grow edible … stuff. Heck even imagine an enclave there that invents the wheel as technology because they have some limited arable space that they have learned how to farm and draft animals but who have not yet discovered metals or explosives. They are found by the culture that has the metals and explosives and no need for a wheel, at a point in which that culture is progressing by hunting and by taking over the resources of others by dint of their superior weapons (metals and explosives do make for good weapons). Which culture dominates and derides the toys of the other?
“Hive mind” isn’t what he said. A “hive species” was. I do not know if an ant colony or a bee hive has an emergent consciousness or sentience (although I see no reason that if individual cells communicating across gaps, in particular patterns, can give rise to human sentience, that individual bodies communicating across gaps couldn’t give rise to a different sort of sentience albeit one that would operate on a different time scale). Assuming that it does not, it still functions as a single intelligence solving novel problems and individual parts of the whole still serve the needs of the whole rather than competing against each other. Perhaps the drive for technology was to expand the hive’s domain and to subsume less powerful hives into its structure.
These are issues that the better science fiction authors have been addressing for decades. But there are social options that this culture has not taken.
For instance in the way you wrote your post you place math in front of physics. That is the way this society presents them most of the time. Personally I think that is backwards. Physics was running the universe long before math was invented. Math is used to play mind games in our schools.
But considering that double-entry accounting is 700 years old in European culture why hasn’t it been mandatory in the schools for decades? Some other culture elsewhere in the galaxy could have done that.
This culture does a lot of information hiding as part of the social power games. Mostly it does not even get discussed in social science books supposedly about how the society operates. So another society could operate very differently.
Almost all of our computers are von Neumann machines but the term is hardly every used and it is even more difficult to find a book with a good explanation. But because the design is so basically simple if there are thousands of advanced civilizations in the galaxy then it has probably been invented thousands of times. But the machine instructions sets are undoubtedly different everywhere. Like ARM processors won’t run Intel code and vice versa.
Check out the book SCIENCE FICTION: today and tomorrow by Reginald Bretnor. It is from 1974. I found it at a library book sale. It is a collection of essays about science fiction by SF authors. I think reading sci-fi at an early age is mind expanding although sci-fi has gotten less scientific and more idiotically stimulating in the last couple of decades. Babylon 5 is the best example of good SF I have seen on TV.
psik
Presumably, they would need to build factories for the space travel components. Due to their pitiful strength, they’d be rather inclined to produce vehicles capable of mining and moving the massive amount of materials needed to build that infrastructure to build a spaceship, and more machines to build and move the factories to make the parts for it, and more machines to move them all, and aid in assembling them.
So it’s a safe bet that they figured on using some roads and wheeled vehicles. Tracks is possible, but they are so damned complex and maintenance intensive comparatively, i can’t see it being the primary vehicle type unless they inhabit an environment completely unsuited for roads. Someone would eventually figure out that hey… I can smooth this ground and just use the wheels already inside the tracks and ditch those expensive tracks entirely
Sure, I’m not saying they would have gunpowder, just that if they did have guns, their form and function would be pretty similar to ours. If gunpowder was dangerous, but they had other missile weapons, they would probably be visibly recognizable as bows or crossbows, or maybe ballista, trebuchets, or the other hundred varieties of siege engine we’ve created, spear levers, slingshots(both elastic and centrifugal), blowguns, or even just simple throwing darts. Maybe they won’t have any missile weapons at all, but if they do, Its pretty reasonable that they will follow a form developed somewhere on earth. I won’t say we’ve thought of all the possible methods of propelling a projectile, but we’ve thought of quite a large number of them.
Legs work, after you’ve built up a massive tech base and infrastructure dedicated to building the robotic legs. If that happened, and they completely abandoned wheels, i bet somewhere in the archives we’ll see pictures of the wheeled vehicles they used to build infrastructure in the past, and there will be similarities. Unless you just mean animal legs… I doubt they could maintain much industrial capacity purely with the strength of draft animals or their own backs.
Zeppelins have no wings, but we have zeppelins, and if they use lighter than air craft, theres a good possibility some of their designs are similar to some of ours, same with aircraft. They may not have a current airship in service that is the shape of the Hindenburg, but if they’ve experimented much with the technology, somewhere there will likely be a prototype thats eerily similar, or a series of units built in the distant past.
Anyway, its not ego, its just that some things just work, and sometimes there really is a best way to build things. Certainly a good portion of why designs are like they are is due to some tradition, or deliberate styling, but a lot of the time its because thats how the mechanism works best as well. And I’m not saying that they would have all the same tech, and take all the same steps we did, just that if they did have machinery and vehicles that fulfill a function similar to something on earth, those contraptions would tend to similarities, and there will be a number of items(again, not even close to all) that would fool people into thinking they were made on earth. Partially due to random chance, and partially because its possibly the ideal configuration for a machine performing that particular function.