Maybe... Maybe... To Friday, it appears that Otherday is not undead, but unalive instead. What's the difference you may ask? One is dead, but is very animated and craves fresh human brains all day. While the other is alive, but is not very animated and lets its brain rot reading webcomics all day.

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Ah, that's why it took them so long to advance this far. Not enough capitalism and greed. I can actually accept that.

But I would expect them to have advanced a lot farther because they wouldn't keep killing each other in wars, internecine rivalries, turf battles, etc.

My brain isn't rotting with all these webcomics. It's a fun what-if scenario! Difficulty hiding emotions apparently leads to more sharing, which in turn leads to a happy, although technologically stagnant economy.

I'm having fun!

Don't forget the red anima guys and the huge monsters! Growl!

Right, the monsters have only been gone for "like" 1000 years. Riff is only assuming that greed is the reason. It could very well have still been the monsters keeping everything in medieval stasis. Add to that 1000 years to get to something around the mid 20th century and they are doing pretty well.

"Daebo wonder if Riff ever work for profit"
"(Thinks of Hereti Corp)..... nnnnnno"

I would have gone with war generating more tech than capitalism. After all it made us produce nukes before CPUs even though it should be the other way around (in an alternate history theoretical kinda way). And its not like Aristotle or Galileo or Tesla or Einstein were in it for the money. Riff probably could get this dimension to plunge into a violent war; what with this proven track record in 4U City, the Anime Verse, the Vampire Civil War, and I want to say the Star Trek verse from way back in the day. Heck, if his maybe fully charged phone still has the [game app that turns animals into semi-zombies] he could get halfway there in minutes.

So if it was 1420 to 1920s that would be 500 years (so these guys are 10 times slower), but Columbus times was 1492 so lets push back the previous cycle to 1320 (a bit before the Black Death) which gives 8.3X slower.

As the jedi say, greed can be a powerful ally.



The desire to not die on the end of a pointy stick can work absolute miracles for technological advancement. Just look at armour. Or blood transfusion. Or airplanes.

Yes, this is why they don't develop. But how long can you keep technology at the level where you can only dig up the easiest minerals, get the oil right below the surface, and the easiest uranium deposits? After that you need more advanced methods and technology to go deeper.

Which is why, as Isaac Asimov wrote, if there would be a "post-apocalyptic" scenario now, you could never re-create technology. There are no rare minerals and no oil easily accessible right below the surface. We would be stuck in perpetual repetition of just one stage, until the sun expands far into the future and kills all life on the planet. And then ... the end of life.

This is why there must be progress, to ensure the survival of life.

As for trade, I guess Riff would use words like greed, since it's funnier that way. But there's no need to make it sound negative. Mankind lived for hundreds of thousands of years with constant starvation, and only by having trade could we move away from that.

Trade, and innovation where you risk ending up with nothing. Four men leave a city to search for gold, each sailing away in a different direction. Three find nothing and live in poverty. The fourth found great wealth to bring back. This is how we advance - the risk-takers know there is possible wealth to be had. Such people aren't content to live the same rote-task lives as others. But they must have a chance for a great reward for their efforts.

Why would a man make an effort to invent if he cannot reap the rewards? If the rewards are shared equally by ... thousands, millions of others, who did NOT spend years trying to make an invention work.

Note how the Soviet Union was scientifically sterile, unable to invent, except through spies in the West sending them information. No entertainment either. We had popular bands in the West, but there was nothing like that in the Soviet bloc. No famous actors, nothing. If there is no reward for making an effort, barely anything will be achieved.

The first American colony, where the Mayflower landed, starved because the land was owned by all, and so were the crops. And all the tools were held communally, and anyone could go there and get them. Starvation was the result. The laziest 20% or so won't work, and the second laziest will then ask themselves why they should work when others don't have to. The first colony had only about 20% working hard - society's best.

And this was in a community where they had all CHOSEN to live together this way, communally. And they felt close to each other because of religious ties and other ties in their personal history. Still owning everything together failed miserably.

Eventually the captain came back and divided the land between the families. So that each family could keep what it grew, and each family had to grow its crops to survive. And farming skyrocketed. They had a three times larger harvest. The experiment with voluntary communism failed, and that was that.

So Edison is completely replaced with Tesla now, is he? Hollywood bosses really did a number there, presenting Edison as a villain in various movies. He invented the film camera and the invention was stolen from him in Chicago, and the thieves moved to California to set up shop, far from Chicago courts.

Thomas Edison was America's greatest inventor, one of the greatest inventors in the history of mankind. He invented the system for electric lights, turning night into day. He invented the motion-picture camera. Bifocals - the list goes on and on, more than 1,000 patents.

And horribly, he made money from it. The nerve. He should have invented with no thought of profit, like the great inventors in the communist bloc. See how far they got. Not just in inventions, but in day-to-day business and production. Outclassing profit-seeking people like the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford, the inventor of penicillin Alexander Fleming, and the gentlemen Ohm, Volta and Watt.

Columbus, you mention? Who blazed the trail across the Atlantic Ocean. And he did it for personal gain. Money, and fame. Practically every great improvement of human life has been the result of someone who profited from inventing it. A person, in the distant past, or a team in a business, more commonly today. At the same time that they also want to help people.

But people learn in school that "profit" is a dirty word. They hear this from teachers who will never invent anything and whose wages are stagnant, having chosen a static work environment as their priority - not exactly the most reliable people to talk to about how society moves forward.

No, Silverwalker, the Mayflower did not land at Jamestown.

Huh. That looks like the Sluggy Freelance version of the CNW E4. Pete is cool.

The native Americans had a socialist system, and they did pretty well until Europeans came and ruined everything.

Sure, we *may* have come as far in 2000 years as they did in 5000 .... and have flying machines and faster cars.

But we STILL don't have flying cars!

Other than inflatable hoverbikes, of course. Which were from another dimension.

I miss those!
I'm reading an unsettling but fascinating book called "Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military" which argues that, since the beginnings of celestial navigation, the advancement of the two are linked, having parallel goals, and "the overlap is strong, and the knowledge flows in both directions" and later "Whenever the War Department supplies the funding, part the curtains and you'll see the needs of conflict masquerading as the needs of science" (p. 194).

In our history, astronomers and inventors can have ideas about amazing things that fulfill needs (like telescopes to see the stars) but without funding, they cannot be mass implemented. So conflict supplies the funding and policy that allows astrophysics to advance, whether or not the astrophysicists approve of it.

It's an unsettling idea, but certainly parallel to the DFA development, funding, and conflict in Sluggy Prime and DoR.

This is focused on astrophysics, but I think the important ideas for us here are need and funding.

I know it's for the best that I leave SW on my ignore list, but every now and then when someone else quotes SW, I burst out into laughter.

Thank you.