Yeah, South and further North America seemed to be better off for that (would northern tribes have eventually domesticated caribou or bison as a meat source rather than open range hunting?)
Mesoamerica was kind of stuck though. Poultry and dogs, for the most part. And you can feed dogs your poultry waste or other bits of unwanted meat but not on a large scale to use the dogs as a reliable mass source of meat. Did anyone bother trying to domesticate and keep rabbits? I guess no one ever tried domesticating Rocky Mountain goats; I wonder if that would have had any success.
As for flying machines, maybe this is an odd question, but would the natives of the Americas have really discovered the airfoil and used it to generate lift? It’s not intuitive that a curved upper surface and flat bottom surface yields lift.
Anyone, in principle, could come up with a theory or practical method of flight. Why would you think it inherently European/Western Culture?
And have a look at this:
That’s a little far fetched, but it wouldn’t be impossible, and no great level of technology is needed for hot air ballons. Unforunately it takes quite a bit more to make flight a useful means of crossing oceans or enhancing local trade or transportation.
Irrelevant – he did fly well before they did, and before running out of money. Stringfellow used the same design principles developed by Cayley that the Wright brothers later used. If they didn’t look up and reference his examples, that’s not Stringfellow’s fault.
Stringfellow and Henson were going to go into the aerial transporation business. They had documents drawnm up and everything. Pretty ambitious, considering that no one had yet built a heavier-then-air craft of any sort yet (aside from toy helicopters), let alone one of carrying people. But Stringfellow wasn’t a one=off experimenter. He had his sights set on flight as a business. So, in a different universe, if he’d had capital behind him, he probably would have pursued his work*. Even if he didn’t produce a commercial flyer, he would’ve made a bigger dent in the problem, and likely the Wrights would have built upon it.
*Nevertheless, his machines WERE displayed at the Crystal Palace in London. Stringfellow was no – you should pardon the expression – fly by night.
The context here is the development of controlled, sustained, powered flight (as might be used to cross a section of the ocean that ships can’t). Stringfellow’s flying was neither controlled nor sustained.
Nice intentions - but they hadn’t even begun to understand the problem of controlling a flying machine, which meant that their business idea was doomed to failure.
Lucky the nanobots know to stay away from the coast or eating all woody biomass would play havoc with coastal regions ecostructure. I’d assume eventually some european would at least try something like concrete or steel for their ship hulls to make the crossing. The mid-ocean only nanobots would have to be very smart to stay away from shore and only eat boats instead of the minerals on the ocean floor. Since planes need someplace to land, and more than mild exploration needs a way to efficiently move resources back, I’m going to allow ironclads to make it past the nanobot fortress. Making it wait for even better air tech makes things even more disparate when contact comes.
Small changes in complex systems can always produce big changes. We’ll ignore the risk of massive social breakdown or stagnation on either side. Avoiding that generally Europe technological progress would have continued at or near the pace it did. Resources were the major benefit for the exploitation. Africa would have been exploited earlier and more effectively. Lack of New World resources probably slow things some. Exploitation by steel boat would happen somewhere between American Civil War and early WWII military tech depending on how motivated they were to try after centuries of ignoring the place.
At a European pace through the bronze age the New World would still be decisively bronze age. England’s bronze age was about 1700 years. So maybe about 3200 they’d be coming out of the bronze age if their other disadvantages didn’t slow them down in comparison.
The fight against the Spanish conquistadors was still heavily hand to hand supplemented with firearms. The cannon was a bigger difference than the smaller atlatl vs early firearm difference. Toledo steel against stoneage weapons produced massive victories.
Now think about bronze swords against at least post Civil War tech cavalry equipped with lever action rifles, revolvers, rifled cannon, and Gatling guns. Maybe fear delays trying the trip till later. A WWII era airborne unit against bronze age warriors would be less balanced than Braveheart (iron age) vs Band of Brothers. Think about something at the level of a fully manned and equipped Waffen SS Panzer-grenadier regiment rolling ashore supported by naval gunfire and carrier based dive bombers.
At that point it really comes down to what the Europeans wanted to do. Force disparity runs from massive at earliest contact to gods among men able to call down fire from the heavens and shake the very pillars of the earth.
Just because there are no ships coming to the New World, what about radio and TV broadcasts? Is there a possibility of New World development of wireless transmission prior to the year 3200?
Lacking a pack animal is a big deal. Set that aside. The Incas apparently were in the early bronze age.
Wikipedia defines the bronze age as, “a time period characterized by the use of bronze, proto-writing, and other early features of urban civilization.” That sounds about right: the Incas wrote with string and the Mayans earlier had a hieroglyphic system. The European Bronze age lasted from 3200-600 BC. The Near East was more advanced: their Bronze age lasted from 3300-1200 BC.
Give Native Americans an extra 450 years or so and the technological disparity would only increase. I’d expect the spread of bronze age technology and limited urbanization in the the New World, but that’s about it.
Would Australia and New Zealand have been as enthusiastic appliers of Enlightenment ideas as the United States? I’m not sure, but I would guess no. But in my alt history we still would have had someone like Karl Marx in Europe. I’m guessing the spread of democratic ideas would have been slower in Europe. But there also wouldn’t have been the widespread shipment of African slaves to Australia, New Zealand or other parts. Hitler wouldn’t have bothered with Russia: instead there would have been a mad scramble for various European powers to take over the New Hemisphere. The Axis, Allies and Ottoman’s would have made short work out of a double continent less developed than Ancient Athens.
ETA: As for flight, airships are another route to the sky.
Spanish cooks spend several hundred years knowing that “this is missing a bit of something” but not knowing quite what.
When our Biology teacher informed us that tomatoes came from America, there was a moment of silence before one of my horrified classmates asked “but… what did people here eat before?”
The Castillians would have moved south, since they did have all that momentum from the Reconquista which just had to go somewhere; the Portuguese would have continued their policy of mostly building coastal enclaves, but would have reached a lot further than their eastern neighbors. Possibly, nowadays half of Africa would speak Spanish while the Philippines would be the Henriettes and speak Portuguese.
I’d assume eventually some european would at least try something like concrete or steel for their ship hulls to make the crossing. The mid-ocean only nanobots would have to be very smart to stay away from shore and only eat boats instead of the minerals on the ocean floor. Since planes need someplace to land, and more than mild exploration needs a way to efficiently move resources back, I’m going to allow ironclads to make it past the nanobot fortress. Making it wait for even better air tech makes things even more disparate when contact comes.