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Why the technology has been lost in the world?

space-telescope

Perhaps the most important assumption of the setting is that, after the collapse of the company due to magic, technology has dramatically, forcing then relegated the Empire to recreate everything from scratch.

Why is it so important? because it allows Aegis Aurea to get rid of the nightmare of all Sci-Fi settings: the author’s inability to predict the future. The problem of the whole science fiction that deals with the near future is that every technological innovation is likely to completely disrupt the structure. If tomorrow the organs did not have more need to be transplanted but could indeed be grown (as are actually doing), all settings including organ trafficking would be out of phase with reality. Every detail of the setting based on these technologies would be seriously compromised, to get to the end to sound ridiculous. My solution to curb this problem was radical: the technology that the Empire has is not the same that we own ourselves, but an equivalent developed on the basis of the reports of our time, in a relatively short period of time.

This choice has had a series of happy consequences: the Empire is basically isolated, then the orientation of the stories is mainly aimed at domestic politics and not the external one (which lends itself to simplifications like “good vs. bad”); the lack of technological competition allows  Empire to use technology as a key to the maintenance of the Empire (wonders of monopoly); territories outside the Empire degrade in rural areas with medieval technology, adding new types of possible stories (western steampunk, anyone?); other world areas where culture has flourished (and there are plenty) are essentially isolated, and this enables greater richness of possible evolutions of the setting (especially considering the huge increase of time spent compared to the present) with no problems of continuity.

All these advantages, however, are based on the assumption that technology is lost. The skeptics will wonder how this is possible. Once the discovery was made and written about books, there is no way to lose, right? The issue is very complicated, and sociologists evolutionists discussed for years, but there are enough reliable evidence that when a company has a too small number of individuals and not enough cultural exchanges, knowledge quickly becomes depleted. These studies have also been done on primitive cultures, where knowledge and technology required the work of a small group of people. In the case of modern technologies, the whole discussion becomes much more influential.

The first effect is due simply to population reduction. The specialist knowledge required for an advanced technology require many years and are very varied. A country of a thousand people can hardly maintain a tradition of nuclear physics to manage a nuclear central. This is true for all major modern specialisations. During the second medieval times the small villages where people took refuge were well separated, with the outside contacts scarce and foreigners viewed with distrust. This obviously made the situation worse. Furthermore, our civilization is extremely dependent on specialized high efficiency: in a small town, probably more than half of the population is necessary for the production of food because they are forced to use inefficient methods, while in the modern world people need to support are a small percentage of the total population, leaving even more free to engage in highly specialized activities.

We must not forget that many activities depend on production capacity worldwide. Most modern works takes place in front of the computer, and would be impossible (if not meaningless, think programmers) without these. Consider also that computer processors are manufactured in a handful of immense industries scattered around the world, using rare materials which in turn are extracted from a few scattered mines in the world (well, mostly in China). What do you think might happen with the collapse of globalization which follows the magical crisis? No more rare earths, no more, no more computer access to much of modern knowledge, to simple and inexpensive telecomunications and so on.

This implies that combination of effects following the magical crisis  the loss of technological knowledge was swift (with lethal consequences for a good part of the population). Much of the world of Aegis is still trapped in this vicious circle, kept imprisoned by the difficulties and magical creatures. The Empire has revived (along with his counterparts around the world) and managed to regain much of this knowledge, but it is also a giant with feet of clay barely able to support the technology and growth that is experiencing, even without counting the other internal and external dangers.

In short, it will be a hard job stop it from collapsing, good luck to you that you will try!

REFERENCES ON THE LOSS OF TECHNOLOGY IN PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATION:

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/08/08/why-did-the-tasmanians-stop-ea/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20392733

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25646448

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25048625

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22848419

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22555004

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040580912000482

 

 

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