Belle Ivers:
Okay we're arguing past each other.
Again the different cultural traditions of different people doesn't matter here. Let's consider a non controvertible example: clean water. Every society needs to figure out a way to deliver clean water en masse.
If you have cities. Which we don't (culture), and your positing of economic disparity requires specific unparalleled developments on only the European side (culture) which may well not happen anyway without access to the resources and land conquered in our world, besides the setting going off on an entirely different technological tangent - and ideas about standards of living (culture) - due to the hothousing of science between traditions (culture).
The Black Hills have plenty springs. Also, bonfire firing, not that you need specifically ceramic pipes for anything, cf. Skara Brae again.
...but everything th' batrean said, too. Gosh, I'm glad there's someone who can be up all night and talk sense also.
Belle Ivers:
The contention being made here is these people will become more technologically advanced with a higher standard of living because they are culturally better than everyone else.
Wha...I have no idea how to dismantle this because I have no idea where it came from (unless you just believe
that hard in cultural superiority, eww). No, the contention being made is that White Science Progress, that results in the exact replication of technologies we have now, is not the
only kind of progress possible in any universe. Especially and specifically the fantasy one under discussion.
Picture electricity, right? All the changes that made that were unthinkable to some Neolithic farmer pensively picking her nose as she worked out which way to make beans grow best. Now picture something comparably game-changing that you can't even imagine because we don't have it, and the advances that could be made with that power.
That's the effect of the Great Summoning. Would we get telephones, ever? Maybe not. Would we get something
else, earlier and more efficient, affecting later and mechanised changes? Quite possibly!
This is like giving the Internet to Neolithic people, with an off-planet infrastructure. What could happen is not necessarily wonderful or terrible, but it's certainly not
static just because it's not plodding along from the domestication of the ox upward. I'd argue it's entirely the opposite. You drop the internet in the Neolithic, people are going to do more learning, thinking...and what's more doing it
shielded from their Iron Age neighbours who want to cut them down, so they don't have to get forced into an Iron Age first and work up from scraps. They can
talk to their nighbours,
exchange stuff with their neighbours, create new things over the fence because they're not dead and trampled into the dust.
I may be a 'soft' scientist according to chem/bio/physics specialists (and a 'hard' one according to social scientists...Archaeology, it's the Engineering of the Humanities), but the prospect of that much scope for innovation makes me do the happy chirp noise, and
I don't even have the objective knowledge buddying up with a spirit is a possiblity. Imagine being able to just
ask physics shit, like "yo, universe, you made of strings?". All right, it might lie, but I guarantee the concept alone would get any scientist I know (which is a lot) scrambling off their chairs to try out the effects of the answers.
tl;dr I do think Unobtanium can be plastic if you need it to be, but if tech did not require plastic, why would you need it to be? A Mad Scientist who couldn't picture a highly motivating future with
extra scientific diciplines just because they don't fit setting-current colonial academic categories would be crippled in imaginative capacity (and thus broken as a scientist in their own right to start with - it'd be all manitou).
...and oh gods, I just realised you could probably grow lighttrees from lightbulbs. In fact, I think I just worked out how to do it.
On the theme of innovation driven by cultural rivalry (hard-capitalist vs. socialist art, in this instance), the mock-drama between Kapoor and Semple continues to crack me up. I'd need to have a project in mind before getting some of this, but look at it on the tinfoil,
damn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpM9CksS__8
I wonder if you could paint yourself in that and not die?
