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Original post by Esys Given that the native Americans are more attuned to nature and their place within the balance of nature, their technological advancement would have been slower because it would have kept pace with their moral advancement; something that European derived cultures sorely lack.

they might have been decades ahead in nutrition and natural medicine though. Something we're really only now starting to even become aware of.

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Original post by superpig Industrialization itself doesn't mitigate existential risk, but it's an absolute requirement for enabling a greater ability for us to adapt to change.

If one looks at nature for counter-example: greater procreation. Birth rates are dropping in developed world as response to better living standard, but that is a consequence. Conversely, more children were common to better deal with higher mortality.

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Are you saying that you think pre-industrialized society was better at coping with existential risk than today's society?

Maybe.

If we exclude deus-ex-machine extinction events, pre-industrial society was considerably more self-reliant and coped with lesser chances of survival with fertility.

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There are two strategies for mitigating existential risk: decrease the rate of change, or increase the capacity to adapt.

Adaptation can take many forms.

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we can't presently control when the sun will go supernova - but we do have control over increasing our capacity to adapt.

Survival is a fairly vague term. We could shoot prokaryotes on one way trip, thereby ensuring the DNA survives.

Or, maybe supernova is slightly weaker as predicted, and Earth is not destroyed, and lifeforms adapt over the billions of years into some crystaline form.

As for saving society and culture? Even at best, planetary exodus would be one way trip. The colonists would arrive at the destination, then form their own interpretation of society and culture, which would be as much the same as New World has in common with Spain, Portugal and England.

So the question arises - what has survived (aka existential risk)?

Adaptation implies change, but survival implies preservation of something.

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There are also many that we have, like smallpox.

But small pox existed for tens of thousands of years and it did not affect survival of the species. Life span, quality of life, ... but not existence.

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Sure it does: It frees up time and money that can be used instead to find ways to help those people.

Yet money, especially modern financial systems could be argued to cause more misery than they solve.



What I'm arguing here is the definition of advancement (survival, existence) via current modern society values (big screen TV, good job, free time, safe long life, machines, electricity, communications). They obviously address the hedonistic side of human nature and support the system that provides them.

But there is nothing universal about that. Human species always adapts to environment. Our current adaptation, partly guided by our history, is (post-)industrialization - but it's a consequence, not driving force. We adapted to environment by industrializing, rather doing something else.

Especially given that the most rapid part of this advancement occurred over past 100 years and is almost exclusively dependent on oil (plastics, medicine, vehicles). This recent advancement is especially volatile and fragile. Obviously not from perspective of our lifetimes, not all that much will change, but given 500 years, things may look completely different.

Which is what I originally argued - "advancement" is hard to define, since everything is mostly adaptation to external factors. The side effects often perceived as improvements are much better classified as unintended consequences of Jevons paradox. The fact we live longer and need less offspring is a side effect of our adaptation to environment, not the ultimate goal or driving force.

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Original post by way2lazy2care Quote: Original post by Esys Given that the native Americans are more attuned to nature and their place within the balance of nature, their technological advancement would have been slower because it would have kept pace with their moral advancement; something that European derived cultures sorely lack. they might have been decades ahead in nutrition and natural medicine though. Something we're really only now starting to even become aware of.

There is a story which goes something like this:

A businessman is walking on the shore and runs across a fisherman who's preparing to cook a fish they just caught:
B: That's a nice looking fish, do you catch many of those
F: Sure, one a day, they are biting like crazy
B: Have you considered selling them on the market
F: Why would I do that?
B: You'd make money
F: But I don't need money
B: With money you could buy a boat, and catch more fish, and then hire some people to fish for you
F: But what would I do then?
B: You'd branch out, control the ships, open franchises, maybe a fishing restaurant, in 20 years you would be a millionaire
F: But why would I do that?
B: Well, when you'd want to retire, you'd sell everything and never need to worry about anything again
F: But that would be boring, what would I do with all my spare time
B: Well, you could spend your days on the beach, fishing
F: Ah, but what am I doing now?

Human progress is propelled by competition with other humans. Humans are more than intelligent enough to conquer their environment ie (see people living in Arctic, see people living in middle of the Sahara etc..) and realistically the only other force great enough to propel human technology are other humans.

I suspect almost every major human invention is related to direct human 2 human competition somehow.. ie farming was the result of humans settling onto a fertile fields to prevent other humans from "claiming" it.. metallurgy was result of weapon advancements to kill other humans.. money was invented to facilitate trade with other humans etc..

If we accept that premise, given a large enough population, human 2 human competition will result in technological advancements no matter what.. humans will seek better metals to make weapons, better farming methods to outproduce food, better social structures to out organize other human tribes, etc..

Why would the Native Americans be excluded from such processes? The rate of human technological progress is so open to chance though. What if Newton died as a child? What if Tesla died in WW2? What if Plato died before he wrote his books etc.. Maybe the South American Newton died as a child..?

The Incas have a writing method using knots which we to this day have not deciphered.. maybe a great mathematical Inca genius developed a non-verbal mnemonic language which never appeared in the western world..

-ddn

I'm hard pressed to imagine that native Americans would have developed industrialization or anything resembling capitalism given their conceptions of collective ownership. I also don't think would have had any need to either.

Homo sapiens is thought to have existed in its present biological form for much longer than recorded history or even the development of agriculture. This raises the interesting question of what mankind was doing all those tens of thousands of years, and what change spurred the development of agriculture and civilization.

I recall reading that there is speculation about physiological changes in the brain occurring as recently as a few tens of thousands of years ago, leading perhaps to things like spoken language and an improved capacity for symbolic reasoning.

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Original post by ddn3 Why would the Native Americans be excluded from such processes? The rate of human technological progress is so open to chance though. What if Newton died as a child? What if Tesla died in WW2? What if Plato died before he wrote his books etc.. Maybe the South American Newton died as a child..?

You could make an equally compelling argument that chance has little to do with anything. That the cultural zeitgeist itself helps develop and propagate seemingly revolutionary ideas. There would likely have been another Newton, another Tesla, another Plato.

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Original post by Zipster Quote: Original post by Kaze watch this: Guns Germs and Steel Or even better, read the book.

In case you are interested in untestable feelgood speculation, id warmly recommend it.

Heres a thought: going from stone age to bronze age to iron age to what have you was a process that took tens of thousands of years. It would be exceptionally silly to expect pretty much isolated populations to follow this course of development at the exact same speed; infact, whats a thousand years on this timescale? Why conjure up fancy theories when simple randomness does suffice?

That said; bigger gene pools tend to be more adaptive and change faster. Its never the Australian animals forming a plague elsewhere, but always the other way around. On similar grounds, one may reasonable expect a gradation in the time it would take a given population to develop the steam engine.

Then again, if you prefer feelgood, you probably want to avoid 'genetics' and 'humans' in the same sentence.

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Original post by LessBread I'm hard pressed to imagine that native Americans would have developed industrialization or anything resembling capitalism given their conceptions of collective ownership. I also don't think would have had any need to either.

Why do you need greedy capitalists to develop industrialization?

We see aspects of the foundations of modern industrial processes in North America before Europeans came, such as assembly line production for harvesting and preserving fish: Group A is in the water to actually catch the fish. Group B takes the fish from the shore to Group C prepping/gutting, Group D takes the gutted fish and preps them for drying/smoking.

Everyone helps, everyone eats.

They also had fairly developed trade routes between other tribes/groups. If they had developed the materials to produce better tools, why wouldn't they use them? Why did they use better tools when they were introduced by Europeans?

I also don't know where your idea of 'collective ownership' comes from. I can't think of a single culture in the Americas that had truly collective ownership. Many had a different view on land ownership, but we have clear ownership of personal items in every instance I can recall. The closest I can think of is that most groups were more focused on larger and extended families which encourages sharing with and aiding each other.

Read a paper once that indicated that the native americans never invented the wheel because they never had a need for it. They didn't have any pack animals such as horses or bulls to pull things, and therefore never bothered to invent it.


History is full of examples of environment affecting technological development. Since Europe/Asia/Africa had a much greater landmass they had much more resources and many more problems to solve, leading to faster technological development.

Here's another example; The ancient Egyptians invented the steam engine hundreds of years before the industrial revolution, but never applied it to anything because there was no need to; slave labour was cheap and plentiful, so why bother using a machine to do work?


So in my opinion, due to the circumstances the Native Americans were in, I doubt they would have progressed very far technologically; there were no means to do so. It all starts with the wheel; animal-drawn vehicles have to come before you invent things like the steam locomotive or the automobile. Without that step inbetween, the leap is that much harder to accomplish.