I’m trying to put together an aesthetically pleasing thought experiment / narrative, and am struggling to come up with a way of framing it that won’t attract nitpickers.
In a nutshell, the premise is “what similarities and differences are there between real-world human history and culture, and those of a different human history and culture that diverged from ours at some prehistoric point but developed to a similar level of cultural and technological sophistication?”
As such, I need some semi-plausible way for the human population to be physically divided ~10,000 years ago with no cross-cultural contamination, and for both sides of the divide to each develop into a “global” culture, with one being very much like ours, and speculation of the nature of the other being the point of the thought experiment.
Current contenders are:
Aliens build a really huge impenetrable wall round the equator
Nitpicks are “what about air and space travel?” I could set the narrative in the early 20th century, when we’re only just developing means of circumventing the wall, which also frames the “what is the world like on the other side of the wall?” speculation. The trouble is that a lot of interesting cultural, scientific and technological developments have happened in the past century, and it’s hard to speculate if they’ve also occurred on the other side of the wall if they haven’t occurred on this one. It also smacks a little too much of alternative histories, with it being a tremendous strain on credulity to claim “this side” of the wall developed in line with real-world history in spite of a hemisphere being missing.
Aliens (who clearly have nothing better to do than fuck around with prehistoric humans) take a bunch of humans and put them on a Counter-Earth
Of course, they have to then replicate the biosphere of earth, and somehow retro-engineer the existence of fossil fuels, and populate it with a bio-diverse ecology of other earth life for the humans to eat, and really they may as well have started a several hundred million years earlier, by which point whatever life is on the Counter-Earth is just going to be classical aliens, rather than human beings, because transplanting them into an ecological niche they’re not optimised for is just asking for trouble.
So yes, a separate 10,000 years of human history, completely unrelated to ours, that we haven’t interacted with until now. How do I frame it in a narrative that won’t let people pick it to pieces without addressing what it’s trying to get them to think about?
It’s not clear to me why you don’t just appeal to Many Worlds, or more generally to alternate histories. These are fairly well-understood concepts among the sort of people who’d be interested in such a thought experiment. Why not simply say “Imagine Carthage had won the Punic Wars” and go from there?
I’m beginning to doubt my motives for this line of thinking, but I’m not abandoning it altogether.
The trouble with alternate histories is as soon as you say “imagine so-and-so won such-a-war”, people start coming up with stories that lead them to a very specific idea about what such a world would be like. I imagine your appeal to imagine Carthage winning the Punic Wars would involve someone picturing a world practically identical to ours, only retro-fitted with Carthaginian influences instead of Roman ones.
I also feel (and it is a feeling I have trouble substantiating) that when posed with a question like “there’s another society of humans over there; do they have [x]?”, it’s a much more straightforward pragmatic question to address than “in an alternate history where such-a-thing happened, do they have [x]?”
I see your point. Perhaps you could try to appeal to non-specific alternate histories? Not “imagine Carthage wins” but “imagine a butterfly zigged instead of zagging on August 3rd, 5823 BCE”.
Does that not sound like a super-abstract question to you?
I recognise it as asking pretty much exactly the same question as “an alternate several-thousand years of human history has taken place concurrent to, but separate from, our own; what’s it like?”, but the Many Worlds appeal is like saying “here is a blank canvas where anything can happen”, while the equatorial wall or counter-earth scenario is like saying “here is a situation: how do you deal with it?”
I think that’s what I meant by Many Worlds being too open-ended in my response to drethelin.
As such, I need some semi-plausible way for the human population to be physically divided ~10,000 years ago with no cross-cultural contamination, and for both sides of the divide to each develop into a “global” culture, with one being very much like ours, and speculation of the nature of the other being the point of the thought experiment.
So, this actually happened, right? At least, 95% of it. You could give the New World a few advantages (like more animals that are easy and useful to domesticate) and speculate other ways for them to develop.
Keeping parts of the world separated after you have ocean-faring ships and air travel seems hard / implausible / you can make a similarly interesting worlds collide experience without needing the first contact to be now-ish.
It’s not my intention to write a piece of fiction. It’s a thought experiment I am trying to prettify. I want to ask questions like “would they have something like women’s lib on the other side?” or “would they have public key cryptography?” or “what would their art have in common with our art?”
I am quite surprised to find “prettify” is already in Chrome’s spell check dictionary.
Are you interested in what the cultures / economics / politics look like, or are you interested in what the technologies look like? It seems to me that stuff like public key cryptography is in some sense the optimal answer to an engineering problem- and so if you have the problem and the engineering skill, then you will find that answer eventually.
For the cultures / economics / politics, then it depends on your view of history. Would the idea of liberty have happened the same way without a New World to expand into? It’s really not clear. Could you have an Enlightenment that is politically traditionalist while being culturally and economically radical?
If you’re interested in those sorts of questions, it seems like you’re better off directly trying to build good models of the cultural / economic / political shifts and memes than you are trying to imagine the outcomes of a general thought experiment.
[Edit] You may be interested in phrasing things as “What would have to change to result in an Enlightenment that is politically traditionalist while being culturally and economically radical?” to build those models and constrain the deviation from reality.
The broader point of the thought experiment is “is [artefact X] an accident of history or is it somehow inevitable that humans will end up with [artefact X]?”
More pointedly, when looking at various academic works and disciplines, I’ve been using it as an intuition pump for the question “are you describing something present in all human environments, describing aspects of our history, or just making stuff up?”
I have privately been using it to my own satisfaction for about six months. I’m trying to come up with a way of aesthetically presenting it to other people in such a way that they won’t get bogged down in how a separate 10,000 years of human history, with different humans, has happened somewhere.
The broader point of the thought experiment is “is [artefact X] an accident of history or is it somehow inevitable that humans will end up with [artefact X]?”
Right, and I think the question (that I put in an edit) of “what would have to change for X to (not) have happened?” is relatively good at answering that question for X. It seems to me like to not get public key cryptography you would need math to be different, but to not get women’s lib you would need either biology to be different or the idea of personal autonomy to not have become a cultural hegemon, both of which could have been the case (and point to where to look for why they weren’t).
It seems to me like to not get public key cryptography you would need math to be different
Just because the equations would have to be the same, it does not mean the other society would know them and use them like we do. Maybe they don’t have Internet yet. Maybe their version of Internet has some (weaker) form of cryptography in the lower layers, so inventing cryptography for higher layers did not feel so necessary. Maybe they researched quantum physics before Internet, so they use quantum cryptography. Or at least they can use different kinds of functions for private/public key pairs.
I think that question is better for more thorough analysis but less good as an intuition pump.
I’m now trying to figure out whether I find the does-the-alternate-human-society-have-it more tractable as a way of thinking about it, or whether I’m simply attached to it. The question “there’s another society of humans over there: do they have [x]?” certainly seems a lot easier to me than “what needs to have happened for this counterfactual to be true?”
Depends on what you mean by “interest”, presumably. I don’t think people have necessarily lost interest in live music since the inception of recorded music; they just have a cheaper substitute for it.
The universe glitched, and an exact duplicate of the entire solar system appeared two lightyears to the right? Contact happens when radio telescopey is invented. Divergence from a new star appearing in opposite places in each ones sky.
I was ignorant of this novel until about five minutes ago. As a result, I’m still pretty ignorant about it.
That seems to be an implementation of something like this scenario using an alternate reality sci-fi trope. I really want to avoid Sliders-style alternate realities because they’re (a) too open-ended, and (b) too heavily influenced by existing fiction on the subject.
In what way is an alternate separate earth population functionally different from an alternate universe? You say you’re trying to avoid a scifi scenario but your two proposals are already pretty silly scifi.
If open-endedness is a problem, simply limit your universes to 2, like in Hominids.
Also, it would be easier to give recommendations if I knew what argument you were trying to win with this thought experiment.
I’m not trying to win any arguments. I’m trying to reason about artefacts of human culture that are parochial (accidents of history) or human-universal (practically inevitable products of human history). More to the point, I’m trying to equip other people with tools to reason in a similar fashion.
I’m also not trying to avoid sci-fi scenarios, but I am trying to avoid scenarios which have such a long history as a sci-fi trope that they will inevitably influence people’s intuitions.
I’m not writing a story (although I do want to frame the thought experiment as a fictional narrative). I’m not writing specific details about what’s on the other side of the wall / solar system / interdimensional gateway. The whole point of the thought experiment is that we don’t know what’s on the other side, apart from the fact that it contains a bunch of humans with as much chronological history as us. Based on that knowledge, what can we reason about them?
I’m trying to put together an aesthetically pleasing thought experiment / narrative, and am struggling to come up with a way of framing it that won’t attract nitpickers.
In a nutshell, the premise is “what similarities and differences are there between real-world human history and culture, and those of a different human history and culture that diverged from ours at some prehistoric point but developed to a similar level of cultural and technological sophistication?”
As such, I need some semi-plausible way for the human population to be physically divided ~10,000 years ago with no cross-cultural contamination, and for both sides of the divide to each develop into a “global” culture, with one being very much like ours, and speculation of the nature of the other being the point of the thought experiment.
Current contenders are:
Aliens build a really huge impenetrable wall round the equator
Nitpicks are “what about air and space travel?” I could set the narrative in the early 20th century, when we’re only just developing means of circumventing the wall, which also frames the “what is the world like on the other side of the wall?” speculation. The trouble is that a lot of interesting cultural, scientific and technological developments have happened in the past century, and it’s hard to speculate if they’ve also occurred on the other side of the wall if they haven’t occurred on this one. It also smacks a little too much of alternative histories, with it being a tremendous strain on credulity to claim “this side” of the wall developed in line with real-world history in spite of a hemisphere being missing.
Aliens (who clearly have nothing better to do than fuck around with prehistoric humans) take a bunch of humans and put them on a Counter-Earth
Of course, they have to then replicate the biosphere of earth, and somehow retro-engineer the existence of fossil fuels, and populate it with a bio-diverse ecology of other earth life for the humans to eat, and really they may as well have started a several hundred million years earlier, by which point whatever life is on the Counter-Earth is just going to be classical aliens, rather than human beings, because transplanting them into an ecological niche they’re not optimised for is just asking for trouble.
So yes, a separate 10,000 years of human history, completely unrelated to ours, that we haven’t interacted with until now. How do I frame it in a narrative that won’t let people pick it to pieces without addressing what it’s trying to get them to think about?
It’s not clear to me why you don’t just appeal to Many Worlds, or more generally to alternate histories. These are fairly well-understood concepts among the sort of people who’d be interested in such a thought experiment. Why not simply say “Imagine Carthage had won the Punic Wars” and go from there?
I’m beginning to doubt my motives for this line of thinking, but I’m not abandoning it altogether.
The trouble with alternate histories is as soon as you say “imagine so-and-so won such-a-war”, people start coming up with stories that lead them to a very specific idea about what such a world would be like. I imagine your appeal to imagine Carthage winning the Punic Wars would involve someone picturing a world practically identical to ours, only retro-fitted with Carthaginian influences instead of Roman ones.
I also feel (and it is a feeling I have trouble substantiating) that when posed with a question like “there’s another society of humans over there; do they have [x]?”, it’s a much more straightforward pragmatic question to address than “in an alternate history where such-a-thing happened, do they have [x]?”
I see your point. Perhaps you could try to appeal to non-specific alternate histories? Not “imagine Carthage wins” but “imagine a butterfly zigged instead of zagging on August 3rd, 5823 BCE”.
Does that not sound like a super-abstract question to you?
I recognise it as asking pretty much exactly the same question as “an alternate several-thousand years of human history has taken place concurrent to, but separate from, our own; what’s it like?”, but the Many Worlds appeal is like saying “here is a blank canvas where anything can happen”, while the equatorial wall or counter-earth scenario is like saying “here is a situation: how do you deal with it?”
I think that’s what I meant by Many Worlds being too open-ended in my response to drethelin.
So, this actually happened, right? At least, 95% of it. You could give the New World a few advantages (like more animals that are easy and useful to domesticate) and speculate other ways for them to develop.
Keeping parts of the world separated after you have ocean-faring ships and air travel seems hard / implausible / you can make a similarly interesting worlds collide experience without needing the first contact to be now-ish.
It’s not my intention to write a piece of fiction. It’s a thought experiment I am trying to prettify. I want to ask questions like “would they have something like women’s lib on the other side?” or “would they have public key cryptography?” or “what would their art have in common with our art?”
I am quite surprised to find “prettify” is already in Chrome’s spell check dictionary.
Are you interested in what the cultures / economics / politics look like, or are you interested in what the technologies look like? It seems to me that stuff like public key cryptography is in some sense the optimal answer to an engineering problem- and so if you have the problem and the engineering skill, then you will find that answer eventually.
For the cultures / economics / politics, then it depends on your view of history. Would the idea of liberty have happened the same way without a New World to expand into? It’s really not clear. Could you have an Enlightenment that is politically traditionalist while being culturally and economically radical?
If you’re interested in those sorts of questions, it seems like you’re better off directly trying to build good models of the cultural / economic / political shifts and memes than you are trying to imagine the outcomes of a general thought experiment.
[Edit] You may be interested in phrasing things as “What would have to change to result in an Enlightenment that is politically traditionalist while being culturally and economically radical?” to build those models and constrain the deviation from reality.
The broader point of the thought experiment is “is [artefact X] an accident of history or is it somehow inevitable that humans will end up with [artefact X]?”
More pointedly, when looking at various academic works and disciplines, I’ve been using it as an intuition pump for the question “are you describing something present in all human environments, describing aspects of our history, or just making stuff up?”
I have privately been using it to my own satisfaction for about six months. I’m trying to come up with a way of aesthetically presenting it to other people in such a way that they won’t get bogged down in how a separate 10,000 years of human history, with different humans, has happened somewhere.
Right, and I think the question (that I put in an edit) of “what would have to change for X to (not) have happened?” is relatively good at answering that question for X. It seems to me like to not get public key cryptography you would need math to be different, but to not get women’s lib you would need either biology to be different or the idea of personal autonomy to not have become a cultural hegemon, both of which could have been the case (and point to where to look for why they weren’t).
Just because the equations would have to be the same, it does not mean the other society would know them and use them like we do. Maybe they don’t have Internet yet. Maybe their version of Internet has some (weaker) form of cryptography in the lower layers, so inventing cryptography for higher layers did not feel so necessary. Maybe they researched quantum physics before Internet, so they use quantum cryptography. Or at least they can use different kinds of functions for private/public key pairs.
This is the sort of reasoning I’m looking to generate.
I think that question is better for more thorough analysis but less good as an intuition pump.
I’m now trying to figure out whether I find the does-the-alternate-human-society-have-it more tractable as a way of thinking about it, or whether I’m simply attached to it. The question “there’s another society of humans over there: do they have [x]?” certainly seems a lot easier to me than “what needs to have happened for this counterfactual to be true?”
I recently ran into the question of whether photography would inevitably lead to loss of interest in representational art.
Depends on what you mean by “interest”, presumably. I don’t think people have necessarily lost interest in live music since the inception of recorded music; they just have a cheaper substitute for it.
The universe glitched, and an exact duplicate of the entire solar system appeared two lightyears to the right? Contact happens when radio telescopey is invented. Divergence from a new star appearing in opposite places in each ones sky.
this is the premise of Hominids.
I was ignorant of this novel until about five minutes ago. As a result, I’m still pretty ignorant about it.
That seems to be an implementation of something like this scenario using an alternate reality sci-fi trope. I really want to avoid Sliders-style alternate realities because they’re (a) too open-ended, and (b) too heavily influenced by existing fiction on the subject.
In what way is an alternate separate earth population functionally different from an alternate universe? You say you’re trying to avoid a scifi scenario but your two proposals are already pretty silly scifi.
If open-endedness is a problem, simply limit your universes to 2, like in Hominids.
Also, it would be easier to give recommendations if I knew what argument you were trying to win with this thought experiment.
I’m not trying to win any arguments. I’m trying to reason about artefacts of human culture that are parochial (accidents of history) or human-universal (practically inevitable products of human history). More to the point, I’m trying to equip other people with tools to reason in a similar fashion.
I’m also not trying to avoid sci-fi scenarios, but I am trying to avoid scenarios which have such a long history as a sci-fi trope that they will inevitably influence people’s intuitions.
I’m not writing a story (although I do want to frame the thought experiment as a fictional narrative). I’m not writing specific details about what’s on the other side of the wall / solar system / interdimensional gateway. The whole point of the thought experiment is that we don’t know what’s on the other side, apart from the fact that it contains a bunch of humans with as much chronological history as us. Based on that knowledge, what can we reason about them?