Earth if no Dark Ages?

[actuallyliam]

Is this episode saying this is what Earth would have been like if the dark ages never happened? They were created 2000 years ago, which is practically the same amount of time Christianity has been around. Theories? Both these recent episodes have had this feeling. Maybe I'm imagining things?

[tomaso88]

yea but these people had a huge tech boost since eli and stuff already new alot about technology and wrote books and stuff about it before they died so they advanced really quick

[escyos]

They didn;t have to deal with religious persecution and technology as heresy so they would be further ahead.

[D Toccs]

The Dark Ages only effected Western Europe.
For those 600 years all scientific and cultural progress continued in Greece and the Middle East which were already more advanced than the West. It is progress from those areas that forms the basis for modern Western civilization.
Asian countries were completely unaffected by the Dark Ages, China, Japan, Korea and India all continued to progress.

It is a myth that we would be so much more advanced if the Dark Ages did not occur, they were an incredibly localized event.

[padr49904]

Actually if you look back at SG-1 Sam compared the Tollan civilization to what Earth would of been like if there was no Dark Age.
If they were new starting out they wouldn't of been even a quarter that advanced, what was brought with them and what all the people knew helped a lot with everything. The medical advances would never of happened without them getting the boost from the original colonizers, since it would be been a large number of years before they even knew how to do surgery, but with TJ there they didn't even have to really learn anything.

And I wonder if any of the books Eli or any of the other crew had read were rewritten from memory for the enjoyment of others. I can just imagine a Harry Potter, Eli edition, everywhere on the planet.

[tomaso88]

yea but we didnt only have dark ages effect us we have many plagues and diseasers, a hell lot of wars etc

[Trinary]

Understanding about their universe made their civilization grow faster. They don't have to argue a century long whether their planet is sphere or flat.

[senilegreen]

As others have indicated, the "Dark Ages" weren't so "dark" and that pop tv/film tries to pin some sort of effect on that period of Western history is way, way overdone.

And, as I and a few others tried to point out last week in commenting on the previous episode, the 2000 years allowed in the story really is too short. In my write up about this episode I didn't want to dwell on that weakness of the story as I thought episode 18 had too many charms to rain down heavy criticism upon it. Yet again I will point out that the Destiny crew suffered a labor shortage for the purposes of building a civilization, something which "Epilogue" glossed over.

[thekillman]

2000 years ago they thought disease was magic. they couldn't even forge proper iron and steel didn't even exist.


there are thousands of simple principles we have developed over time that 2000 years ago were unimaginable.


also the Dark Ages weren't that dark. it wasn't significant in terms of science but it was in terms of culture.

[Daralundy]

We might be considerably less advanced. The Roman Empire wasn't particularly scientifical inovative.

[Keeper]

The Dark Ages only effected Western Europe.
For those 600 years all scientific and cultural progress continued in Greece and the Middle East which were already more advanced than the West. It is progress from those areas that forms the basis for modern Western civilization.
Asian countries were completely unaffected by the Dark Ages, China, Japan, Korea and India all continued to progress.

It is a myth that we would be so much more advanced if the Dark Ages did not occur, they were an incredibly localized event.

not entirely localised - trade would have have been affected to some extent too, and information/ideas travel alongside trade.

the immediate ramifications of the dark ages were, indeed, fairly localised. but eastern and asian progress wasn't welcomed within western europe, preventing western europe from contributing their own ideas, making their own changes, or trying to compete. with the reverse effect of eastern/asian developments having less to compete with, allowing them to take longer in developing, but also with less 'foreign' ideas to provoke them into further development.

i also agree that the ideas some people have as to how far advanced we would be without them is a bit mythical - i was discussing it with a friend lately who said something about our being 2000 years behind in our development because of it.

however, between the dark ages, various wars, the burning of the library at alexandria, the various persecutions of new ideas - throughout our history, we've set ourselves back a good few hundred years, at least in local areas and i'd believe globally, simply by virtue of our own inability to save, share, and elaborate on various technologies and ideas.

among all the disasters we've inflicted on ourselves, as well as various plagues and other things, i'd guess about 800-1000 years max - over at least the history of civilisation.




novus has a major advantage because they haven't gone through all these disasters - they're developing ideas held by the modern-day destiny crew, and even if there are gaps in knowledge - e.g. medicine - with a basic starting point, a general understanding of science, and people like eli, rush, the rest of the scientists, and likely genius offspring somewhere along the way, they can develop things - even if they don't like having to do the stuff, they're smart enough to understand, and figure out what might be going wrong.

[The Destiny]

The Novus civilisation had a shortage of labour and tools ( not suprising if you're only starting out with about 60 people ), but made up for that with the knowledge left behind by the Destiny crew. Eli wrotes a boatload of books, most of that's gotta be useful. They also did not have to deal with war, plague, supression, stagnation etc. like we did on Earth. I imagine their history to be a lot more peaceful with the occasional skirmish. With that in mind Novus came out slightly ahead if us, being able to build spaceships although without FTL capabilities. The knowledge of destiny's crew must have been of immense value.

And the funny thing is that they are most likely better at their history than us, because their early history was entirely recorded, which is unique.

[g.o.d]

they had an opportunity to learn from Earth's mistakes a thanks to their fresh start, it was easier for them to advance. I bet our civilisation won't be as advanced as Novas' in 2000 years

[Steelbox]

One of the main "cause" of stagnation in the Dark Ages was because religion had an such upper hand on custumes the daily lives. In fact, there was not even one mention on Religion nor the panoramic view show any structure resembling a Church. Also when technologies advance new finds are make a lot quiker so the advancements of a society are geometric so you can't judge simply by looking.

Can someone make the math, can a society started by 60 odd people reach 1 million in 2000 years?

[Kaiphantom]

The Dark Ages only effected Western Europe.
For those 600 years all scientific and cultural progress continued in Greece and the Middle East which were already more advanced than the West. It is progress from those areas that forms the basis for modern Western civilization.
Asian countries were completely unaffected by the Dark Ages, China, Japan, Korea and India all continued to progress.

It is a myth that we would be so much more advanced if the Dark Ages did not occur, they were an incredibly localized event.

Not entirely true. Europe was far beyond other civilizations for a long time; the dark ages allowed the rest of the world to catch up quite a bit. If Europe had no dark ages, we would be several hundred years more advanced by now.

The dark ages were partly a result of things like the black plague wiping out humanity, and religions. Knowledge of proper medicine helps the former, and for the latter, we need to analyze exactly why religion came about.

When someone had a seizure back in olden days, no one else could explain it. No one could really explain dreams. So, people made up explanations that involved higher powers, and treated things like coincidence as really being signs from spirits or gods, etc. The Novian civilization already had knowledge of these things with a good grounding in the scientific mindset, so religions wouldn't have been able to take hold.

The other major reason for religion, was a way to control groups larger than a certain number. As long as they believed an omnipotent god or gods was watching them, they'd behave and act the way you wanted them to even if you weren't around (and you just need to hand out holy edicts to keep them acting your way). The Novians got around this, since they drew up things like a constitution early, and thus based rule on law, instead of on a divine entity.

Without religion or disease holding them back as much, it wouldn't have surprised me to see them advance far beyond Earth of today.