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Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

featherlessbipeds.substack.com

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Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#331

Post by [deleted] »

smallerfish wrote: post #215
rendall wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, you missed the author's footnote to your excerpt. > Yes, strictly speaking dinosaurs aren’t needed for coal as coal mostly is made of plant biomass, you fun ruining hack of a pedant. https://featherlessbipeds.substack.com/p/why-didnt-gandalf-o... Commenters beware, the article is filled with such gotchas for the careless reader.

Haha. Granted I didn't check his footnotes, but that's pretty lazy writing, and feels more like he corrected it as an afterthought rather than editing his core text.

[deleted]

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#332

Post by fsloth »

danjac wrote: post #238
timoth3y wrote: post #190

The article presents an engineering answer to s sociological question. The reason technology did not advance in Middle Earth is because innovation was not rewarded. Innovation and experimentation were punished. Mine a little too deeply? You awaken a balrog that kills you an everyone you have ever known. Want to expand into that verdant area across the river? You didn't expect giant spiders, did you? Build a disruptiv…

How is that different from real world history? Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. Mine for coal? A coal heap will bury your town or you'll die in a collapse. Start a trading enterprise? Your ship will get raided by pirates or you die of tropical diseases.

Innovation was heavily discouraged throughout history by vested interests it challenged. Printing did not pick up in the Ottoman empire due to guild of scribes, for example (I heard).

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#334

Post by hguant »

antifa wrote: post #305
CrazyStat wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Being a paleoantologist, he made a question to Tolkien's book: why the Middle Earth had such strange land mass distribution, which is geologically impossible. And this started the "Last Ringbearer" book. Unfortunately he missed the answer: at the time Tolkien was writing, plate tectonics was still considered an absurd hypothesis, the subject of mockery by "serious" geologists. As such the understanding of "geologica…

> the Middle Earth had such strange land mass distribution, which is geologically impossible I would love to watch a YouTube video explaining the geology of Middle Earth and the geology science explaining why it's impossible.

>geology science explaining why it's impossible.

Mordor is...it just doesn't work. It's a hard scrabble plain with a large inland sea bounded on 3 sides by jagged, abrupt mountains that are entirely isolated from any other ranges, and form right angles with each other...oh and the surround a cone volcano that just emerges from the ground.

Any one of these things (minus the, I repeat, NEAR PERFECT RIGHT ANGLES formed by the mountain range around Mordor) can be explained, but the conditions that lead to one preclude the other.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#336

Post by dylan604 »

alibrarydweller wrote: post #192
dylan604 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weren't orcs made by Sauron rather than being a natural species though? So they were never really born in the normal mammalian method.

You might be thinking of the "genetically enhanced" Uruk Hai orcs created by Saruman.

Quite possibly. I was never that deep into it, but have many many friends that are so I had heard them discussing various aspects. Clearly got some wires crossed

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#337

Post by simonh »

KineticLensman wrote: post #267
simonh wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot more than just Orcs. Bilbo and the Dwarves almost get eaten by trolls in The Hobbit. There's intelligent giant spiders. The occasional Dragon. But frankly Orcs are bad enough. They're cunning, actually genuinely intelligent tool using predators. They're mainly carnivorous by preference, but can probably survive on stuff that would make you sicken and die if they have to. As soon as a rural population ge…

> The mission for the rangers isn't to militarily defend the region as a garrisoning force, it's to suppress any news or investigation of the Shire to keep it secret. Reference please. The Rangers do protect the Shire but there are no references to a 'secrecy' mission in the book IIRC. There are main roads that pass nearby that are travelled at least by Dwarves and Elves. Frodo and the other hobbits themselves see Dw…

The rangers are highly secretive, so much so that the people of Bree and the Shire don't even know they defend them. Of course they let Elves and Dwarves travel the road, why would they want to stop them?

Saruman's enthral to Sauron is relatively recent, and he never took Hobbits in any way seriously, he has no direct control of Mordor's forces anyway. Frankly they dodged a bullet a bit on that one, Saruman's betrayal could have been far more damaging if he'd been even slightly less arrogant and dismissive of others.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#338

Post by winReInstall »

peter303 wrote: post #328

Why didnt many human civilizations like Egypt, Rome, China, etc have an industrial revolution? Many of the technologies like steam engines and clocks were in Rome and China. However they were mire curiosities and never scaled up.

Slavery, cheap labour is a poison for inventiveness. Why build alexa, if you can buy a alexa. Why build with concrete 3d printers, if slave-labour is plenty.

One of the reasons of pushing UBI is, that without it, complex artifacts (lawn cutting robots) are slowly replaced by their wage-slavery equivalent and innovation becomes nothing but a curiosity to be displayed on some southern domus terrace during a orgy.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#339

Post by vkou »

timoth3y wrote: post #190

The article presents an engineering answer to s sociological question. The reason technology did not advance in Middle Earth is because innovation was not rewarded. Innovation and experimentation were punished. Mine a little too deeply? You awaken a balrog that kills you an everyone you have ever known. Want to expand into that verdant area across the river? You didn't expect giant spiders, did you? Build a disruptiv…

Don't forget 'forge the most beautiful, magical set of jewels in the history of history, and then Satan will steal them from you, so you and the boys go on a bloody, genocidal crusade to retrieve them, bringing everything you touch and everyone you meet to ruin.'

That, and 'structure your society towards acquisition of material wealth and technological advancement, so you start plundering and enslaving your neighbours, and eventually, under the guidance of Satan Jr, you decide to invade heaven. And get Atlantis'd.'

Asking why ME didn't have an industrial revolution is looking through a very particular, very uninteresting cultural lens. (It's uninteresting because 'economic growth at any cost' is a common, and rather uninteresting modern view on life, and rarely takes into account it's externalities. Which Tolkien really, really dislikes.)

Tolkien's Middle Earth doesn't need, or want more clever, vain people. Most of the horrible things that happened in it were caused by them.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#340

Post by gilbetron »

smallerfish wrote: post #204

> But uh, prehistoric biomass, raises a bit of an issue. We have the entire history of Middle Earth written down and I… didn’t notice the part where Tolkien mentioned dinosaurs? Misconception. Coal doesn't come from dinosaurs; primarily it comes from plants (algae, trees) and plankton. It was formed in the carboniferous period, during which the evolution of plants had preceded the evolution of microbes that were able…

There's actually some doubt about the lignin hypothesis: https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/technology/2016/05/12/ge...

Which I found out about recently.

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