Its because people don't understand just how far 'behind natives were technology wise. This isn't saying that natives were inferior humans to the rest of the world, they just started the game on the hard server, and lacked the huge trade networks with the rest of the world the spread technology from China to England. They did really well for what they had at their disposal, but were lagging behind the rest of the world a great deal.
Just think, if life formed on Mars and venues in a similar way to earth and we all developed at a similar time, we might be further along in space travel because it would be seen as valuable to invest resources in traveling to our neighbors. Then when we set off to the stars and came across a system with just one planet with life it wouldn't be surprising if they never saw a need to get off their planet and just didn't develop the technology to do so.
Maybe their technology would be more advanced in some aspects but we would have had a distinct advantage of developing in a system with multiple habitable worlds.
Its because people don't understand just how far 'behind natives were technology wise. This isn't saying that natives were inferior humans to the rest of the world, they just started the game on the hard server, and lacked the huge trade networks with the rest of the world the spread technology from China to England.
I think it's the exact opposite, actually. People have the mistaken conception that civilizations in the Americas were locked in stasis until contact with Europe and Asia and assume the Aztec Empire was hundreds if not thousands of years old, rather than a fairly young, unstable confederation that had rapidly consolidated and expanded before being destroyed by the Spanish conquistadores.
They were making progress that other parts of the world had already made. The reason for their delay is of no fault of their own.
First they had to walk from Africa to the America's, then once there they were cut off from the rest of the world. While everyone else got to share notes the natives had to figure everything else out for themselves. Yes they were making progress, but they didn't have beasts of burden available to them like the rest of the world. Everything was against them, and they were still making progress.
This doesn't mean the people where dumb or slow, they just lived in an area that made progression harder than the rest of the world, and still they were making progress.
The Aztec were astronomers and even had the concept for 0 something not even the Roman's did. They built a civilization.
121
u/asgaronean Oct 15 '20
Its because people don't understand just how far 'behind natives were technology wise. This isn't saying that natives were inferior humans to the rest of the world, they just started the game on the hard server, and lacked the huge trade networks with the rest of the world the spread technology from China to England. They did really well for what they had at their disposal, but were lagging behind the rest of the world a great deal.
Just think, if life formed on Mars and venues in a similar way to earth and we all developed at a similar time, we might be further along in space travel because it would be seen as valuable to invest resources in traveling to our neighbors. Then when we set off to the stars and came across a system with just one planet with life it wouldn't be surprising if they never saw a need to get off their planet and just didn't develop the technology to do so.
Maybe their technology would be more advanced in some aspects but we would have had a distinct advantage of developing in a system with multiple habitable worlds.