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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32319 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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I mean, I agree that we likely have no value to a civilization that can build an Alcubierre drive, but if hyperspace/jump drives/whatever is real then it's because our physics are wrong, not because exotic technology made it that way. We might conceivably only be as far behind such as civilization as the Aztecs were behind the Spanish.

Maybe more like between Aztecs then and the Spanish now. Modern technology - and modern military - has powers that for a pre-technological person would not be otherwise appear possible, such as clairvoyance, instant communication over any distance, power of flight, ability to deliver overwhelmingly destructive strikes at any point within minutes, near invulnerability to most weapons, etc. Maybe 16th century Aztec could conceptualize many of these things - in a way that we could conceptualize FTL - but they certainly wouldn't be able to even imagine how one could achieve such feats, and certainly any resistance they could put up to somebody who can do all that would be doomed from the start. But also, modern Spanish probably wouldn't attack them anyway.

I think you’re underestimating just how extreme the tech difference was. The Spanish brought canon, steel plate, pit bulls, horses, large ships, etc, which were all more or less inconceivable to the Aztecs, much less imitable.

Not Aztecs, but other American tribes adopted horses, guns and other nice stuff pretty quickly, I think, so I don't think they had any serious conceptual barriers with it. One thing when you have a big house that floats - I'm sure they had boats and rafts on the rivers and lakes before, same thing, just bigger - another thing is when this thing flies and drops a volcano on your head. The latter would probably be much harder to deal with.

And we, too, have flying death machines that kill with fire. Not hard to figure out how to deal with.

Our machines can't do FTL. Machines of the civilization that can do FTL probably would be just as far ahead of ours as a ballistic missile is ahead of a spear. With similar chances of mounting a resistance.

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