There were maybe 4 shots at such a breakthrough: the height of the western Roman empire; China after their 4 great inventions, circa 1100 CE; the Islamic golden age; and the Renaissance.
I strongly disagree. Let's say A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court visits those eras and attains supreme political power and has knowledge of all the wonders of the late 19th century and how to recreate them sequentially from stone tools.
His attempt to create an Industrial Revolution in all four cases would explode in his face. The explosion comes in the form of a sword jammed in his eye from an angry nobleman who, while appreciating the revolvers and electric furnaces,... (read more)
I disagree heavily with a technological perspective to the Industrial Revolution. For a few reasons:
Looking at human history:
The transition from Stone Age to Iron Age is fairly straightforward. It's been independently achieved all across the world in very different conditions, there's no reason to think it wouldn't be the same for xenos.
The transition from Industrial Age to our modern age is the same. It hasn't happened as often, but given the wide variety of governments and economies that got there from very different starting conditions, it's not much of an obstacle. And I assume that it would be the same for aliens.
The transition from Iron Age to Industrial Age is the pisser. Despite the technological and population prerequisites being there for centuries, it only happened in... (read more)
I have some observations about pre-industrial civilization and their relationship to why we don't see evidence of aliens. These observations, which in my opinion were consistent across human history despite very diverse cultures, can apply even to alien cultures.
Because this Great Filter isn't biological, temporal, or even technological -- it's structural and inherent to how civilizations develop in the first place.
The road from Stone Age to Iron Age seems pretty obvious. Humans have independently experienced this phenomenon several times in history. So is the road from Industrial Age to Information Age; not as obvious or dramatic, but going from steamships to spaceships seems to be a pretty inevitable progression, done by polities... (read 811 more words →)
We are NOT in agreement, because I claim that those other three times were NOT possible. They were false dawns that only appear plausible because people think that technological progress, given enough time, can overcome any systemic political barriers.
If you have a biology and/or technology-centered view of civilizational progress, what I say seems nonsensical. Nature finds a way and all and you have so many chances over millions of years. I am telling you that those chances NEVER existed and could never led to industrialization on their own terms.