Here’s the hypothetical; It’s 1490 A.D. and I’m releasing a load of nanomachines into the oceans that will dissolve the hulls of any ships from the Old World that pass within 500 miles of the coasts of North or South America, or 200 miles of New World Islands like Hispaniola (50 miles in the Bering Strait, to make things fair for Kamchatkan fishermen). The Age of Discovery is cut brutally short, although trips around South Africa are still ok.
Columbus is never heard from again, nor are any subsequent explorers. European thinking gravitates to the idea that there is a vast and treacherous ocean between them and Asia, impossible to reach Cathay, Cipangu or the Indies by as everyone who tries vanishes.
So, the New World is left completely unmolested by the Old (except by the Vikings, but they’re too badass to drown).
How do things develop in the Americas without European interference - and how long does it take before the Amerindians take to the seas and discover the Old World? What happens in the Old World in the meantime?
Tech progress is hard to guess at. Sooner or later, the native Americans will develop sailing ships…and steam engines, flight, and launch-to-orbit. At some time, the Europeans would develop long-range flight and orbital photography.
Possibly, before physical contact, there might be radio contact. (“Who are these foreign blighters speaking their gibberish on our radio frequencies?”)
Does any of this save the day when it comes to smallpox? One of the first 5,000 visits will either involve carrying it over, or giving it to a visitor who takes it back with him. Then…hell on wheels. (And a higher concentration of population in the Americas could lead to the breeding of new nasty diseases of their own, which would do immense harm to the Europeans.)
Ya know…I think your scenario leads to a much greater horror in the long run.
One problem is that in all of North and South America in 1490 there is exactly one draft animal – the llama. Without draft animals, there is probably no impetus to invent the wheel. Agriculture is limited to what can be done through human labor. There are also very few native animals for domestication. Horses, dogs, sheep, cattle and pigs were all introduced by Europeans. The native bison are still today very difficult to raise via farming/ranching.
Yes, there were some major urban groups in the Americas, but I tend to doubt they would have gotten as far as major sailing ships for a very long time.
Europe will suffer from a lack of resources/overpopulation driving them faster into Africa, Asia, and Australia. Technology continues along the same lines as in our timeline, so eventually they reach the Americas using aircraft.
In the Americas technology maintains it’s slow pace. No iron, no horses, no wheels, overpopulation could be a problem too. Their only hope is a major kingdom arising that produces ample food leaving people free to build, experiment, and develop new problems that need solutions.
Reindeer are used to draw sleighs, could they be domesticated to draw wagons? There were wheeled toys in the New World, it would just be a matter of linking their use to draft animals.
Certainly there is plenty of iron in the Americas in the ground, but the Native Americans weren’t even good at smelting copper, they were no where close to smelting iron.
I think he means no mining/use of iron on any large scale. At the time of Columbus, the New World was still largely in the stone age and hadn’t yet even yet started working with bronze. They had gold, silver and copper aplenty, of course, but nothing suitable for fashioning metal tools.
There’s been hints found that some South American groups may have been on the cusp of discovering/using bronze but the fact remains that they had a long way to go yet before making use of iron.
I’m assuming the nanomachines patrolling the exclusion zone won’t be able to distinguish between inbound Old World and outbound New World vessels.
Ergo, I can’t see what would allow the New World to bridge the technology gap in isolation before contact is made via air traffic.
Maybe if contact did not occur before the Old World had developed health sciences e.g. immunology and embraced civil rights that eclipsed notions of manifest destiny that the American populations would survive the event. Elsewise it’d be the Conquistadors & Wild West again, but on speed.
Wheeled toys existed in South America. Some caribou/reindeer are native to arctic and sub-arctic North America. Lots of real estate in between.
The indigenous people of the far north certainly hunted caribou, but I don’t know of any group that attempted to use them as beasts of burden or to tame them.
Even with wheels, llamas aren’t great for pulling loads. You can see pictures of people sitting in light wagons pulled by llamas but you won’t find them hauling heavy cargo or pulling a plow.
Given enough time, I don’t know if it would have been possible to domesticate bison into a draft animal but they certainly wouldn’t have had the job done and made anything out of it before the Old World develops flight.
AFAIK this is incorrect. Bronze work seems to have appeared with the Moche at least, with arsenic-bronze alloys being common in the northern Andes and tin-bronzes in the south ( reflecting relative abundance of ores ). Bronze-work seems to have been well-established in South America at least hundreds of years before Columbus arrived in the New World.
What is the case is that you don’t seem to see much utilitarian use of bronze before late-period societies like the Incas and Chimu. Previously bronzes like all metals was overwhelmingly used for ceremonial or decorative items. One of the things interesting about the spread of the Incas archaeologically is it seems to coincide with a rapid spread of tin-bronze implements ( the tin percentage was low, but seem a deliberate addition possibly to help manufacturing/working the copper more than for the improved hardness of the finished product per se ) .
But of course the Inca conquest state was youngish when they went down, less than a century old in terms of their expansionary period. And not that it would have mattered in terms of the development of an iron age. Unlike copper, which they were very rich in, there was no readily available deposits of iron ore in the Inca region to exploit. I don’t think any iron ore was discovered in Peru until the 20th century.
The increased population would certainly lead to a higher death count if a New Wolder brings back smallpox with him. Let’s hope Edward Jenner is around first.
Our magic only isolates the New World from the Old, not vice-versa. Should they develop ocean faring ships, that is. Air traffic would render out magic obsolete, but it’s still a good few centuries of shelter from the machinations of Europe. Or possibly longer, as I doubt Kitty Hawk would be the location.
Speaking of no U.S., anyone foresee a whole lot more trouble in Europe? Anyone with pesky ideas has to stay rather than think ‘screw this, I’m off to America’. Or maybe an African colony or Australia would be this worlds equivalent of the U.S…
Experiments in heavier than air flight were taking place all over the world. The Wright Bros. just happened to be the first to develop controlled, powered, and sustained heavier than air flight. Had they failed, someone else would have done it within a very short period of time.
I’ll trust your recollection over mine but, as you mention, it was a relatively new technology. Given that the Old World “Bronze Ages” were thousands of years long, I don’t see a few hundred years on either end making much difference in the OP’s scenario.
No matter what, it’s going to be like those games of the computer game Civilization when your tanks and destroyers bump into a new land with archers and spearmen.
The “What about European expansion” question is probably richer since the answer to “What happens in the New World” would likely be “Not much”. I’d guess more attempts to really colonize Africa, North America style. No idea how successful they would be without the real-history New World benefit of arriving at a new land and finding that all the previous inhabitants conveniently died of smallpox.
The Aztecs drinking water becomes infused with nanobots and in a few generations it becomes integrated into their cellular structure, altering them in ways we can’t imagine.
They become a xiborg culture producing hyper-technology and experiment in warping the space time continuum in an attempt to replicate themselves across the galaxy. This attracts the attention of an alien race who invade Earth, killing about 90% of the population and making off with our gold.
Okay, then, the hulls of their ships pick up nanobots as they sail east. When they arrive in the Old World, the nanobots drift free and see all those tasty Old World hulls and the American navy is suddenly the only fleet in the water. As the only culture capable of shipping, the Americans rule the seas and commerce in the Atlantic.