Ways we could have been technologically advanced/backward?

Would anyone care to speculate how certian events going differently might have affected our levels of technological development, i.e. if the French Revolution had failed, Prussia lost the 1870 war or if Charlemagne died in childbirth what effect would it have had on how advanced we are now? Are there any single events which had a huge effect in this respect?

If Leibniz had thought of combining his obsession with constructing machines to count and calculate, his other obsession with how to store and categorise information, and the binary mathematics he invented one morning when he wasn't doing anything more important and never did anything much with, things could have got interesting.

If the Berber Muslims had gotten too Paris and beyond the Rhine in the 8th century we would still be living in the medievil ages.

Quackers said:

If the Berber Muslims had gotten too Paris and beyond the Rhine in the 8th century we would still be living in the medievil ages.

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I would have though that's the opposite of what would have happened

RedRalphWiggum said:

Would anyone care to speculate how certian events going differently might have affected our levels of technological development, i.e. if the French Revolution had failed, Prussia lost the 1870 war or if Charlemagne died in childbirth what effect would it have had on how advanced we are now? Are there any single events which had a huge effect in this respect?

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I suppose if we were enslaved by an advanced alien race 3500 years ago, successfully rebelled 2000 years later and acquired the hyper-advanced alien tech, then arguably things might be different from today.

RedRalphWiggum said:

I would have though that's the opposite of what would have happened

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Well I think the Islamic Golden Age ended like 2-3 centuries later - and so we would arrive nicely in the Medievil ages and remain so. Remember the secrets of the universe and metaphysics are ALL in the Koran .

I suppose if we were enslaved by an advanced alien race 3500 years ago, successfully rebelled 2000 years later and acquired the hyper-advanced alien tech, then arguably things might be different from today.

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Don't you realize that is actually what happened and certain TV shows are in fact based in truth but the US government lets them be made so that they can say anyone who comes out is crazy and referring to the shows.

If the crusades had not happened we would not have the hostility between the West and the Middle East.

The same could be said about France and England being a bunch of douchebags when drawing borders there.

RedRalphWiggum said:

Would anyone care to speculate how certian events going differently might have affected our levels of technological development, i.e. if the French Revolution had failed, Prussia lost the 1870 war or if Charlemagne died in childbirth what effect would it have had on how advanced we are now? Are there any single events which had a huge effect in this respect?

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Maybe if England had lost India to France the industrial revolution might not have happened? Or at least, it might've been delayed.

Plotinus said:

If Leibniz had thought of combining his obsession with constructing machines to count and calculate, his other obsession with how to store and categorise information, and the binary mathematics he invented one morning when he wasn't doing anything more important and never did anything much with, things could have got interesting.

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I will have to find out more about his counting machines!

There may be a possibility that even if Leibniz had made a combined machine as you describe it might have been considered just to be a kind of curiosity, like the later automata, as I think he and his contemperaries were so busy investigating nature at first hand, they had little need for computerised 'number crunching'. Perhaps, astronomers might have had more use for a machine like this than a chemist/philosopher ?

I think the need for powered computation came about later, with the invention of stastistics, increase in number of scientific/engineering tables being published, the census information needing processing ect. The US census organisation was worried that it could take longer than 10 years to process each census at one time!

But, I suppose if Leibniz had made this machine all of this could have happened sooner.

PS. Thanks for the 'early middle ages' answer.

If Zheng He had not circumnavigated the globe, discovered America, reached the South Pole, became the first man in space and did his Chinese Muslim thang, then the Renaissance would not have started.

Tabster said:

I will have to find out more about his counting machines!

There may be a possibility that even if Leibniz had made a combined machine as you describe it might have been considered just to be a kind of curiosity, like the later automata, as I think he and his contemperaries were so busy investigating nature at first hand, they had little need for computerised 'number crunching'. Perhaps, astronomers might have had more use for a machine like this than a chemist/philosopher ?

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Well, these machines did exist. I don't recall if Leibniz ever actually completed his (he was terrible for starting projects and never finishing them), but Pascal had certainly built his. Leibniz' would have been an improved version. You are right that they were little more than curiosities - just like Charles Babbage's later, more famous designs. But if they'd thought of making them binary, perhaps they could have become more than that. (Probably not, really, but it's nice to imagine.) I'm sure Leibniz would have found a million uses for such a thing - he was far more than just a chemist/philosopher (he got the idea of binary from the I Ching)! As I said, he was very interested in the problem of how to store and categorise information, and even posited a scheme where you assign a primary number to every "basic" concept, and then complex concepts can be assigned the number you get from multiplying all the numbers of their constituents. For example: the concept "man" is a combination of the concepts "rational" and "animal". Assign 2 to "rational" and 3 to "animal", and "man" gets the value 6. Of course this rapidly becomes unworkable, because even if you can analyse the relationships between all the concepts, the numbers get astronomically big. But stop thinking in base 10, and things become easier. (Don't ask me how.)

BananaLee said:

If Zheng He had not circumnavigated the globe, discovered America, reached the South Pole, became the first man in space and did his Chinese Muslim thang, then the Renaissance would not have started.

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You beat me to it.

Plotinus said:

But stop thinking in base 10, and things become easier. (Don't ask me how.)

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I'll try to explain why.

Let's say I am trying to make a decimal adding machine. What I can do is add the first digit of each number together and save the amount that overflows a single digit. For example __7 + __5 = 1 with a carry of two. I can then repeat the process an arbitrary number of times but with taking into account the carry of the previous step. So my machine would only need to be able to add 0 + 0 + 0, 0 + 0 + 1, 0 + 1 + 0, 0 + 1 + 1, ... 9 + 9 + 0, 9 + 9 + 1. That is 200 different things just for addition.

Now lets say I am making a binary adding machine. I do addition but this time in base two. My machine has to only be able to add 0 + 0 + 0, 0 + 0 + 1, 0 + 1 + 0, 0 + 1 + 1, 1 + 0 + 0, 1 + 0 + 1, 1 + 1 + 0, and 1 + 1 + 1. That's only 8 things. This makes a binary machine much more simple and efficient than a decimal machine.

If Hitler had died in 1936, WWII wouldn't have happened - at least not in the same way, there's always the possibility of RED ALERT - and our technological development in many areas would be significantly slower. Aircraft and radar, for instance, not to mention the A-bomb.

Dachs said:

You beat me to it.

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I am the High Priest of Zheng He, he is my lord and master

BananaLee said:

I am the High Priest of Zheng He, he is my lord and master

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I'm the Prophet of Zheng, he is my lord and savior. So thar.

Masada said:

I'm the Prophet of Zheng, he is my lord and savior. So thar.

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I AM Zheng He, currently making my greatest discovery - an internet message board with one or two intelligent, open-minded people on it. Most out there thing I've ever done.

Racsoviale said:

If the crusades had not happened we would not have the hostility between the West and the Middle East.
.

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I see no connection between any present hostility and the crusades. The clash of two cultures and religions was inevitable as soon as the Sword of Islam burst out of the furnace of Arabia, 500 years before the crusades. The crusades were just another round of an ongoing conflict, which Europe lost. There was considerable rapprochment with leaders in the Muslim world in the last century; the current wave of fundamentalism is among other things, part of a reaction to globalization and the need for societal change under the old regimes.

If communism was never invented we'd have hyperdrive by now.