cde: Superfluous Instrumentality

sturmpony:

c-d-e:

sturmpony:

Yes, because clearly the only technological advancements that matter are the white, european ones right?

Obviously the only progress could be made by them, it’s not like there were other civilizations around the world advancing the sciences at a startlingly rapid rate, right?

Without doubt the only reason we don’t have colonies on Titan is because Europe is the only place that actually matters because that was where all the smart white people were.

Can I point out that while those are true points, the biggest thing about it is that those advancements only barely scratched into the modern world. The chinese press? Made thousands of years before the european press, yet never flourished. Most knowledge pre-alexandria, lost. Considering the advancement that the western world had achieved, and the essentially unshared knowledge of the eastern world (compounded with constant in-warring and conquests), it’s not unfair to say this is accurate. If it is, where are the advancements that the rest of the world provided (aside from being destroyed by the western world)?

The only thing I have against this image is the fairly arbitrary scaling of advancement. Most technological advancement in the last 200 years has been greater than the rest of human history, imho.

All those advances were the Renaissance.

That big explosion of knowledge across Europe, that sweeping tide of decades of booming advancement that finally broke the shackles of the Dark Ages? That was because, for the first time, you had the free flow of ideas from the Eastern world, you had the backlog of all the innovating they’d done in medicine and science and mathematics, all the sailing and the astronomy and hell, even the cooking that they’d developed, all of that was flooding into Europe and they were adopting it left and right and lining up front and center to translate and to collate and to spread all around.

The world didn’t stop moving just because Europe did.

And hell, you could even argue that Europe didn’t stop moving, there was still development and they didn’t exactly go backwards as this chart might imply, they just pursued some more theologically inclined routes and lost access to certain infrastructural technologies since the Romans hadn’t been assed to teach anyone before jumping ship back to burning Rome.

The whole thing with this chart though, disregarding it’s terrible Eurocentricism, is that it assumes that technological innovation is a straight, linear progression, that if you’d just have one bit of technology before a certain point in time then everything would have sped up.

Hell, the Greeks had steam engines that were baubles, toys for rich children to ooh and ahh over. Them having access to that technology didn’t mean they developed a train though, that came much later, after the principles of the steam toys they’d constructed were already mostly forgotten, rediscovered by some other culture.

Innovation is fun like that. 

So that leaves just two conclusions. One, that without europe, none of those ideas would have been consolidated and expounded upon, and two, you were channeling 10th Doctor wibbly wobbly.

(Source: asklotus)