how can Elven society exist for hundreds if not thousands of years and yet show almost no major technological advancements.
We went from the Wright brothers to the moon in a scant 100 years.
>>46740300
Have you tried not playing DnD?
>>46740300
because is fiction
Elves lack ambition
>>46740300
How could the Chinese be the first to invent gun powder, the printing press, and the blast furnace, yet end up so far behind the Europeans in the end?
>>46740300
Because elves' sense of time operates on a geological scale, which isone of the reasons why dwarves hate them. Despite their best efforts, dwarves can't think like the rocks they love so much, and the fact that some pointy-eared tree-huggers can is a very sore spot for them.
>>46740300
>Not making elves the most advanced race in your setting, magically, technologically, or just plain better in EVERYTHING.
But seriously, most of the games I've been in, they're usually the best at something, and that something is usually magic if the setting has it.
>>46740430
"Tradition"
>>46740300
Humankind also spent over 2000 years in the Bronze Age...length of time is not really a good way to judge whether a culture should have "moved on" to the next technological step
>>46740300
Well most of what made modern life possible only cropped up really recently if we consider all the time humans have been around. For most of our existence we were really primitive. Also consider how innovation would be stifled if the Old Guard and their prejudices never died. Remember, writing was considered a troubling innovation at some point as well. Just imagine if those same authorities who thought such things stayed youthful 20 somethings for centuries or thousands of years.
It also, of course, depends on the setting...
There are codes they may follow that prevent it.
They might have more of a divine role and are just so much better than humans because they're relatively passive angel stand ins and don't need inventions to make their lives easier.
Or, elves may be long lived but they aren't an older race than humans. That means their tech levels could be relatively same depending on whatever period of history the world is in.
>>46740300
>We went from the Wright brothers to the moon in a scant 100 years.
modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago, while agriculture started up about 10,000 years ago, meaning it took 190,000 years for humans to master the art of putting seeds in the ground
>>46740518
Just imagine how long it took elves then.
A few million I'd wager.
>>46740300
The widespread acceptance of new scientific discoveries is generally tied to the death or retirement of the scientists whose theories are contradicted by the new discoveries.
If guys like Archimedes and Isaac Newton were still running around, Einstein would have had a hell of a time promoting the theory of relativity.
Well in myyyyyyyyyyyyyy setting, the elf-analogs were carved from wood (not!goblins were sculpted from clay, two demigods were carved from stone and humans were forged from iron). They simply don't "get" technology and are happy living the way they always have. They don't really have problems primitive "starter" technology could really solve.
>>46740578
Elves don't farm, it hurts their precious forests.
>>46740300
Veiled HFY Thread?
>>46740613
That explains a lot.
>>46740300
>how come the Romans were so primative they never went to the moon
>>46740613
What about high elf types who don't care about that too much? What about non forest environments? What about controlled burnings to stimulate plant growth?
>>46740300
It's simple. Humans and Elves think differently and are in different levels of intelligences. Even if they are able to make and produce offspring, humans and elves are still from different species.
1. Elves are a type of supernatural creatures. They may pretend to be more intune with nature, but they are not. They are magical beings and magic is what they are able to use and what they are good at. Everything they build was through magic, which may seem powerful, but on the grand scale magic is pretty weak because it has limitations.
2. Humans are the ones truly in tune with nature because humans are another species of animals. However they are the highest class of animals with intellect beyond any other creature mother nature spitted out. As a result they are able to manipulate the environment to make things better for themselves. This is no different than bees making a hive to live at or a large ant colony. These species manipulated nature to suit their needs. Humans do the same thing although at a much more complex and grand scale. A city can be considered a "Human Hive". Added to the fact that they have a herd nature allowing them to act independently or in large groups. This along with the fact that they are animals is the reason Humans advance quickly. The main focus of all species of animals is to survive. By advancing society Humans chances of survival increases greatly.
Basically Elves are just supernatural creatures. They don't get diseases, they do not have to worry about anything. They just allow their magic to do all the work without truly finding out how the world works. Humans are animals and like all animals survival is important. Which is why they outclass elves and any other fantasy species at the end.
>>46740518
Really it just shows that technology grows exponentially.
Elves aren't getting into science enough to kick-start that multiplicative growth.
What if they got the idea to let us do the hard work for them and then go all chinese knock off on us?
>>46740962
Electronic data storage capacity has been doubling every 18 months since we've had the microchip. In 1955 a one-ton computer drive had a whopping 1MB of storage and cost $4,000~. In 2016 a 10 Terabyte (10,000,000 megabytes) hard drive costs $650~ and weighs little more than a single kilo.
>>46740709
What about you actually name the settings those elves are from instead of complaining that no one's answering questions you never asked?
>>46740841
I'm pretty sure that smashing / poisoning / burning / corrupting every fucking thing in your world does disqualify you as "in tune with nature".
>>46741227
Asking some questions isn't complaining, calm down. I assume it's from anon's setting.
>>46740300
If it's not broken, don't fix it.
They are satisfied with what they have, with the way they live, so they don't strive for anything else.
>>46741362
No it doesn't. All creatures do that to a certain extent. Humans tend to do in a far more destructive scale. Also all those things you have mentioned ends up affecting humans as well. The result is new diseases, increase rate of autism, cancer, etc. Since humans are just as part of nature as any other animal.
>>46741480
>increase rate of autism, cancer,
Yeah, does seem like there are more people on 4chan lately.
>>46741362
see the Black Death, Wasps, and Kutzu plants. Nature is constantly fighting itself horrifically. Humans might not be a balanced aspect of nature but they came from the dirt like panda bears and sharks. Elves are magical and therefor segregated from true nature
>>46740443 Underrated post.
They are content. Also, advancement was relatively slow for the first like, 9000 years, sometimes going "backwards" even.
>>46741480
>>46741559
No creature does what humans do.
I mena, yeah, a gorilla might break some little trees when it wants to show off who is boss, but it would never, dunno, see a kitten and break its fucking neck just because fuck you.
Humans are not part of nature, humans begun as part of nature, but we have become something else. Something more attunned with the void and nothingness than with nature.
Deat and entropy exist to make room for new things.
We just fuck things up (forever, sometimes).
Progression is not simply by virtue of the passage of time. To put it into an RPG wargaming context to understand - there is no predestination to discovering gunpowder or steam power or electricity. There's no reason a setting is preordained to progress at the same tempo or perhaps even the same route (with exceptions) as our world. They might discover gunpowder but for centuries not get any further. Or they never discover gunpowder but do develop electricity.
>>46741362
Nature isn't touchy feely Gaia earth mother. It doesn't give a shit. Technological and cognitive abilities allow humans to transform it but given to any other animal they would as rapidly.
>>46741711
Quit with that faux intellectual bullshit. This isn't Lothric, there isn't an abyss. Animals, down to the very kitten you mention, do such things regularly. Also rape, cannibalism, necrotic rape,T. Kingseeker Frampt
>>46741711
>see a kitten and break its fucking neck just because fuck you.
it would also never see a box of kittens and try to rescue them and find them good homes
>>46741711
Bullshit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0BWPCzPNk4
>>46740518
>believing in evolution instead of believing that the world has been around for less than 10 thousand years and God gave us lots of knowledge and taught us enough to get us making progress.
>Not believing that the Jews were there to show what law and order and purity is.
DEUS VULT!!
>>46740300
>In that setting life hasn't existed for over 3.5-4 billions years
>They don't even have massive reserves of energy in the form of fossil fuels
>They can't even enter a proper technological evolution which could only be made possible by those fuels
Problem solved
>>46740300
>We went from the Wright brothers to the moon in a scant 100 years.
How many generations did we go through in that century?
How many generations do elves go through?
>>46740430
Like every other civilization, the answer always war, or a large-scale event which stops progress, such as disease or revolt
In the case of the Chinese, it's mostly due to war, pumping weapons and armours, innovations here and there, but it's clear they were focusing more on killing than leisurely innovations; it wasn't going to stop arrows, sever heads or burn boats down, and clearly writing orders or sending messengers were faster and more effective at the time
Also, the Chinese did not invent the printing press, but were the first innovators to print on anything, using printing blocks. A pretty significant difference.
Basically, when a good amount of your people are fighting for their lives, they'd rather use true and proven inventions such as spears and shit instead of concepting a Death Star in their mind
And if you've seen the fragmentation and assimilation of territories into what we now know as China, you'd know there was a lot of conquering and general dickery
>>46740300
It took us a hundred thousand years to go from hunter-gathering to building proper cities.
Technological innovate does not arise for its own sake, it requires a catalyst, a need for there to be innovation. Take China as an example. How could a nation who created so many great inventions -- gunpowder, the printing press, paper etc. -- fall so behind the West by the 19th century? Simple: China was doing well enough without the need for innovations while in the West these innovations arose from decades of need. Industrialization arose in the West due to a shortage of labor relative for the growing demand for goods in their markets, whereas in China you had literally millions of craftsmen who could meet the demand for goods operating in an unorganized and decentralized manner. Another example: Mesoamerican warriors did not utilize metal weaponry, even though we have evidence from archaeological artifacts (statues, for example) that they had at the very least Bronze Age level of metallurgy. Why is this? Simply put, for the purposes of Mesoamerican warfare, obsidian and wooden weaponry was perfectly sufficient, and now outside threat (until the arrival of Europeans) pressured them into weapons innovations.
So, how does this connect with the elves? If we go by the prototypical depiction of elves, those of Tolkien of DnD, for most of their existences, the needs of the elves are perfectly met. There are no internal pressures to innovate; hunger, overpopulation, disease, and other usual drives to innovate tend to be absent for the most part in elven society. When it comes to external pressures to innovate, such as human incursions, the elves seem to be content to just keep up with the toughly equivalent level of technology as humans; there is no need to ever be more than one step ahead at a time.
If there is no need, there is no innovation.
>>46741711
Yea no anon, you know nothing about nature. Humans are part of nature. That is why humans are still affected by diseases and such. Whatever destruction we cause on nature ends up hurting us just as much because we are animals and like all animals we rely on nature.
There are other animals that can act just as horrifying as us. For example, many species of spiders eat their own mother after being born. While other animals eat their young for food.
Mother Nature isn't that loving. She can be cold blackhearted and downright cruel. Her love is tough love. Either you grow up and survive or die.
Lack of scientific method.
Necessity dictates the adoption, or not, of technologies with practical applications. Necessity is the true mother of invention.
If the elves are related to Fair Folk, shouldn't they be allergic to Iron?
If elves are essentially humans but better in every way, how haven't they out-competed humans into extinction?
>>46742345
Because they aren't.
They're wood-vampires. Arrogant, stagnant, and incapable of the processes of inquiry that would actually allow them to advance.
Without easily accessible coal, there's no Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was what truly changed the course of human history.
>>46740300
Why do you pick our most productive century and use it as the baseline on which all should be based as opposed to the myriad previous centuries?
>>46742345
Because their con penalty.
>>46740300
Because they live in worlds were there's over a hundred legitimate threats to civilization. Rampaging orcs, subversive scheming drow, doomsday warlock cults, fucking dragons. The dead can literally rise in your graveyard and kill you in the night. Demons and even gods can appear at times and fuck with all mortal beings.
Any civilization that can even manage to survive the ages in these types of worlds already goes above and beyond what would be expected.
Not sure if that's whats in the authors/game designers' minds when they create these settings, but its sort of my headcanon explanation to why so many fantasy settings have cultures and civs with bloated histories compared to ours with little-to-nil development over the aeons.
>>46740300
19th and especially the 20th-21st centuries are anomalies. China almost triggered its own Industrial Revolution, but it failed to trigger for many different reasons.
>>46742381
Depends on the setting. Elves have a lot more agency than this in most traditional game settings, compared to Tolkien, where dwarves and elves were predictable forces of nature that you could almost set your watch by, but more or less the sentiment does have some merit. Elves don't tend to have much that motivates them or unifies them in most settings.
>>46740300
>We went from the Wright brothers to the moon in a scant 100 years.
And before that it took us several hundred to advance from muzzle loading firearms to breech loading firearms. Technology doesn't advance at a constant speed you retard.
>>46742345
From what I gather from most elf tropes, the idea is that elves only appear to be better than humans, but aren't. They may be physically more beautiful, they might not age, their language, arts, and culture might be more sophisticated.
But they are insular, stubborn, aloof, and incredibly pragmatic. Humans as a whole don't have many hangups, they don't tend to think they are better than everyone else, and are incredibly motivated to get things done.
>>46741711
Killer whales kill seals just to play with their corpses.
>>46742800
and by pragmatic, I meant unpragmatic*.
>>46742345
Because we humans are fucking crazy enough to burn down half of the worlds forests to get rid of those stupid fucks.
>>46742345
Because their culture and to an extent their instincts stifle high birth rates lest the world become overpopulated with immortal beings. The gods told them to be nice too.
Keep in mind in some games they aren't 100% better than humans physically/crunchwise and it's possible they could be in danger of wiping each other out through interbreeding and end up with a world of half-elves.
>>46740300
We went from Wright Brothers to the Moon in 65 years, you asshole. Get it wright
Because there are far more of us to develop technology than there are elves in any fantasy setting
Next question
Because the Elves, like everything else about magic, are meant to be in decline. In almost every setting, they always have this glorious monumental past and legend, but something either self-inflicted or from an external threat has ruined them.
Honestly, this doesn't just apply to elves. Lots of fantasy settings have ludicrously deep but static histories, like 10 times that of China from settling to present, with less change (usually immediately have weird mix of Renaissance and antiquity technology as soon as they're crafted of mud or whatever, then never change in thousands of years).
Tolkien (as per usual, very unlike his imitators) actually avoided this problem. The entire point of elves is that they maintained and healed, not changed and advanced. Their purpose is meaningful and also complementary to Man's, on a spiritual Designed-In-By-God level. So elves spent their millennia fighting the depredations of Morgoth, and then got ready to leave the world completely as their age ended and that of humanity (agents of change and dynamism) began, including a pretty much immediate leap of technology.
Every other sapient species in Arda played second fiddle to those two because they were made by lesser beings, rather than Eru Illuvatar himself. Dwarves on their own, as much as they contributed, could neither have maintained nor changed the world.
>>46740300
In that 100 years we fought what, two major wars that forced the rapid advancement of technology to win the war by outgunning the other guy, which culminated in nukes.
We went from Wright Brothers to the Moon because the trip to the Moon was just a proof of concept for being able to drop a nuke on any city on Earth.
Elves don't have that going for them. They lack the sort of bitter, fierce wars that would push them forward, and the few fights they do involve themselves in tend to be winnable with shit they already have. They've had no need to develop dramatically.
Look at 40K and see what Elves manage to accomplish when death is at their balls.
>>46740300
Fictional civilizations!
Am I getting through to you...?
>>46742052
That's not a rule though, often war also fuels rapid advancement, see Nazi scientists in WW2, and the Cold War as examples of war feeding tech advancements.
>>46743641
Wars fuel shot-term advancement. All the independent technology research that would normally be directed toward civilian applications gets shelved and everyone works on military projects but nothing basically changes on the homefront. War tech also tends to stall out after a while once a development branch turns out to be a dead end and gets scrapped (see British WW1 tanks).
The Cold War wasn't a war but a status quo. It focused on both military advances (to crush the USA/Soviets) and civilian advances (to show how much better capitalism/communism was).
>>46740300
Cleopatra was born closer to the Moon Landing than the construction of the Pyramids of Giza.
Great Pyramid of Giza - 2580BC-2560BC
Cleopatra - 69BC
Moon Landing - 1969
Is it really so strange for a civilisation to not advance?
>>46743067
>(usually immediately have weird mix of Renaissance and antiquity technology as soon as they're crafted of mud or whatever, then never change in thousands of years).
>as soon as they're crafted of mud or whatever
That could actually roll in to making sense.
Everybody has innovative sterility. Everybody.
Gods crafted the living beings, gave them some skills to start with and left them to crawl around the mudball.
After that, there is simply no progress. At all.
The gods' designs were flawed and that's why you don't see them walking around since millennia ago.
ALL their creations have failed them. ALL of them.
>>46740300
>>how can Elven society exist for hundreds if not thousands of years and yet show almost no major technological advancements.
Because magic solves everything, no technology is required.
>>46742345
>>If elves are essentially humans but better in every way, how haven't they out-competed humans into extinction?
Because Tolkien said so! His words are worshiped as the gospel of Fantasy.
>>46747794
Elves are weaker than men in Tolkien anon. Elves are tied to the fate of the world and as magic fades, they too fade into the west and eventually from the face of history. They will return only during the end of the world, but in the end it is MAN who shall cast down Morgoth.
>>46747882
Most people do not know the "whys" of that they just do "the same way Tolkien did it" because that is how "it should be".
The point is that elves are support characters and the characters that matter are the humans. Even Gygax fanatically worshipped the white-male-warrior-protaginist hero ideal like a religion, he simply couldn't wrap his head around why people would want to be anything else than that.
>>46740430
As crazy as it sounds they invented ceramics too early.
Having perfected ceramics there wasn't much need for glass, which came to china long after the Europeans were using it.
Sounds strange doesn't it, but when you think that glass is a key component of optics, which encompass everything from telescopes and microscopes to the humble reading glasses the Europeans had superior surveying and ordinance, navigation, lamps and lighting, etc and a European scholar had on average a decade longer in work than his Chinese counterpart as he could remedy his failing vision.
>>46740518
>meaning it took 190,000 years for humans to master the art of putting seeds in the ground
Let's not forget that it took over a thousand years to figure out how to ride a horse.
>>46747882
Considering Elves are capable 1v1ing Balrogs, saying they are "weaker" seems like a stretch.
They are tied to fate and thus a pure NPC race, though, so you are right there.
>>46740300
The jury is still out on whether all that profress was really such a good idea. We dig up and burn rotten dinosaurs and fill our atmosphere with poison just so we can go fast for a little while. Maybe elves are smart enough not to kill off 90% of life on the planet for the sake of getting from one place to another in a shorter amount of time.
>>46748125
Your statement is sort of misleading.
Not ALL elves could face down a Balrog of Morgoth, only the mightier elf-lords. Guys like Legolas and his entire sub-race of elves would get thrashed, as would most of Elrond's elf-lords.
The guys who regularly fought Balrogs in the elder days were great champions of elvenkind, not average representations of their race.
>>46742345
Because progress entails people taking risks, often unprofitable risks, in mass. Think the industrial revolution and age of exploration. Many duds, few successes. But the successes we did have made up for the mass of failures. And elves are by their general nature not risk takers. They hate the idea of failure. And embracing failure as necessary is critical to developing a working scientific theory.
Elves lose because they're too perfect for their own good.
It really is that simple.
Look at it as two bell curves. The elves cluster around a stable middle but humans tend toward abject failure or stupendous success.
>>46740300
I want you to do me a favor and picture a world where The american founding fathers are still alive.
Jefferson, Adams, Washington, and all the rest nobody cares to remember. All of their outdated world views and biases, still holding influence centuries later.
Then I want you to remember that depending the setting your using thats anywhere from a third of an elf's lifespan, to a faction of a percent.
Then think that those people are just one part of thousands of generations that have lived that long, engraved their values and ways of thinking every generation after that, in a species that can take the better part of a century to reach adulthood.
Then factor in their strong sense of cultural traditionalism and value on nature & magic over
productivity.
The Better question is how do they ever change at all?
I quite like elves as preservers, who maybe hold the old ways in high regard despite technology advancing around them. Now that I think about it I'd love to run a game in not!WW1 with the elves being the japanese secluding themselves from the advancing technology.
>>46749611
In many respects elves are violations of the natural order in spite of their constant droning on about being closer to nature than industrial minded humans. Evolution is all about mass failures leading toward a single beneficial mutation.
Nature is never still. Never. So then what can a society of frozen intellectuals repeating the outdated assertions of their immortal fathers know about it?
Humans are the Earth's true children. Elves can never understand her like we do. Elves have adopted the Earth as their mother but we are the only ones actually of her blood.
>>46749674
>Elven forests turned into trenches and fox holes.
>Elven warriors substituting ancient family armor for mass produced gas masks and dough boy helmets.
Wow that's depressing.
>>46740300
Old people dying is what allows ways to change in a society.
Like how the novel was considered a brain-melting, anti-social fad that was ruining society. Those people didn't change their minds. They died, and the ones that grew up reading fiction enshrined it.
>>46748022
People forgot how terrible we were at horses for so many years. In ancient times, you had the most hilariously bad riding positions and ideas, but knowing horses was this amazing secret technology.
>>46741711
This is the most wrong, ignorant, and retarded post of the day.
>>46740430
Money.
Europeans had the economic systems to make a lot of money, and quiet a bit of greed.
>>46749674
>Now that I think about it I'd love to run a game in not!WW1 with the elves being the japanese secluding themselves from the advancing technology.
Boshin War might be a better analogy. Remember, the Japanese actually fought in WW1 and had just modernized the Orient's first European-comparable military. They defeated Russia just a few years earlier in the Russo-Japanese Wargranted that had a lot to do with Russian incompetence, pic relatedwhich stunned the West.
>>46749797
This is amazing. I want to know the fallout of all this.
>>46749985
Russia lost the war and its defeat was a huge upset. This emboldened Germany and made them feel an eastern war would be easily won, which was a contributing factor in causing WW1. This emboldened Japan too, which was a contributing factor in causing the Pacific war in WW2. Additionally, Russian incompetence was a major reason for the revolution, which created the USSR.
>>46742025
I'm surprised that this hasn't been mentioned more. We advanced as we have due to older people with stagnant ideas dying and younger people with new ideas taking their place.
I've heard the "because magic solves everything" excuse before, and I don't buy into it because not all of the elves are going to excel at magic and the ones who tinker are scolded by elders to not bother.
If everyone ridicules you for a thing you'll be less inclined to continue that thing in the open. When you can't do things in the open you have to be secretive. Part of what drive innovation would be the teachings left behind by minds that have come before.
I guess it all boils down to one thing.
Old people suck.
>pic related- the highest tech elvenkind has ever known
>>46741480
>increased rate of autism
to be fair a big part of that is probably increased diagnosis rate caused by increasing awareness.
>cancer
My sister lives in New Jersey and out by one of the parks there's a sign that says: "Do not eat the crabs found here, because if you do you WILL get cancer." It's not even one of those "you will probably get it" it's fucking 100% Guranteed.
>>46741711
Animals are much more cruel than humans. If animals could do what humans could do, they would do the same damn thing and worse.
>>46740300
Because when you're immortal, you just don't give a fuck about trivial things like that. There are more important things to occupy your time than something silly and mundane like inventing a flying machine
>>46750205
And then we have one elf who was seriously driven, went into hiding and then comes back 500 years later as a tech-based supervillain.
>>46742052
>Also, the Chinese did not invent the printing press, but were the first innovators to print on anything, using printing blocks. A pretty significant difference.
Point me out if I'm wrong, but wasn't the first printing press built in europe?
>>46747882
Elves are stronger in Tolien's mythos, by far. They just grew weary of the endless conflicts and were then outbred by most everything else as a result. The sole reason they take over is because the truly powerful of Arda all depart from Middle-earth after spending all their strength, but it was certainly not mankind who made it happen. Mankind was for the most part on the side of evil, and only after everyone else got together to defeat the capital Evils did humanity get their shot. The elves didn't fade either, they left, for a place where powers far beyond humanity resided.
>>46747933
Nigger what, humans were a tiny blip for most of Arda's history. They basically didn't matter at all until Nirnaeth Arnoediad, where their involvement was mostly negative.
>>46740300
> how can Elven society exist for hundreds if not thousands of years and yet show almost no major technological advancements.
Small population size. It's not like would've made it to the moon if there was less than 1 million people on the planet.
>>46750507
>The sole reason they take over is because the truly powerful of Arda all depart from Middle-earth after spending all their strength
"They" being humanity.
>>46743567
As horrific as this is, it's mostly right. However, it's a small part of a bigger truth. Progress is provoked by limitations and obstacles. We needed to make the most out of our lands so we developed agriculture. We needed to organize ourselves so we invented kings and kingdoms. We needed to keep our neighbors off our land so we learned to smelt metal.
>>46742005
I've always wanted to do a fantasy dieselpunk setting where fuel is the processed blood from ancient eldritch beings buried in the earth. Like Dishonored if the whales were the Ogdru-Hem.
>>46740300
You dont need to look any further than Japan and their Isolationism.
>>46740348
>Everything is DnD
>>46750517
>"They" being humanity.
And the only reason this happens is because the entire setting has a pre-ordained future: It's supposed to be our world, just a long-ass time ago.
>>46740300
Elves have the attitude of "well we live for fucking ever (or really long) so lets just do it later"
Humanity burns bright and fast because it knows it has a short time
>>46743567
The World Wars get far too much credit. What decided them was oil, and the oil boom began before the World Wars. Improvements in transportation and information are the driving forces of the technological boom we've seen lately, because more people could get together and come up with new ways to understand how to discover and interpret more things. Not to mention the rapidly growing population, because the importance of a single discovery isn't diluted by any per capita average. The opposite, if anything.
>>46740300
Because technological development advanced glacially for most of history
>>46750602
>Humanity burns bright and fast because it knows it has a short time
Does it really, though? Concerning social or technological development, we're usually pretty damn slow to adapt.
>>46750570
OP pic was based on a DnD campaign, so either provide the setting you meant by that extremely generalized description or shut your dirty human mouth.
>>46741997
Wait...so....Jews are elves?
I'm confused.
This give me an idea, where the rest of the setting would be typical fantasy stuff, the elves live in modern style cities, with cars, sky scrapers, suburbs, and internet
>>46742075
So utopia is actually the death of progress
Mountain elves, perhaps? I mean the type that lives high up on mountains. Nobody fucks with mountain people, because mountain people don't have anything of worth. They also aren't known for being very keen on inventing stuff. Lots of spiritualism though. Seems like a good place for elves.
they're different
>why doesn't elven society advance in the same manner as human society
Because that would make elves just humans with pointy ears, and that would be boring.
>>46750769
You didn't know that?
>>46750769
People talk about 'utopia' like it's some futuristic thing.
Consider prehistory, where food was that abundant that a migratory hunter-gatherer lifestyle could easily sustain the human population at the time. Sure, you didn't really understand the diseases that killed you, and there was the danger of losing your life in some predator attack or squabble with another tribe, but wouldn't the prospect of being able to sustain yourself entirely by wandering around picking fruit from trees instead of working, and doing whatever craft little hobby you feel like in your free time seem pretty utopian?
>>46750789
Put that goalpost back where you found it, anon.
>>46750349
Yes, 1439, the printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg
The world's first movable type system however, was invented by Bi Sheng in China, around 1040
It didn't pick up in China because the Asian character sets in general (aside from Korean Hangul) aren't as simple to implement as alphabet sets (Hangul, Latin, Cyrillic, Georgian, etc)
>>46742970
Which is totally from Tolkien and the foolish war they fight against Morgoth. It literally ruined them. The Lord of the Rings is about the transition of the last vestiges of that war into the mists of time, to make way for man, and our era.
It's like coming into a post apocalyptic story towards the end of the period when all the men and mutants and mean mean robots and A.I.s are dead or dying off to see the last of them die off, in favor of newly evolved chimpanzees.
What you see of the Elves is the wrack and ruin of their great kingdoms, the ones who are left more than the ones who were great, a few tiny refuges. (Galadriel is not inconsiderable, of course, but it's hard to call her "strong" compared to some of the people who are dead/fucking left and went West or never came to Middle Earth to begin with.)
>>46749376
As stated up-thread, any animal given the means at humanity's disposal would likely act similar, if not /worse/.
Beyond that, however, is the idea of 'necessity.' When nature fights you at every turn when all you want is to /eat/, you get very used to TAKING rather than asking. On the other hand, when nature bends over backwards for you like it does for elves in far too many settings, you tend to want to keep it that way - hence, the whole 'tree-hugging' thing.
>>46740300
Population size, lack of materials, lack of dedicated effort...
The exponential scientific advance the West experienced required huge numbers of literate people working in industries that could produce the materials and expertise needed to advance science. The Wright Brothers could only build their plane because the technology and infrastructure provided by thousands of people already existed.
Elves might just not have that infrastructure, especially if there isn't a need for it.
>>46750646
Slow and fast are all relative and what you call slow humans can be comefast when compared with slower people.
Since humans are and should be the reference (since we're humans) this makes elves slow.
>>46740430
To add to the list of reasons: Language. The Chinese language is too complex to allow for mass printing of anything but a handful of texts. One of my favourite "What If" questions has always been what history would look like if China had adopted the Greek alphabet.
>>46751469
ä½ èªªä»€éº¼,m8?
I've personally toured a printing shop that used little lead dies to print chinese characters for newspapers. It's difficult, certainly, compared to English, but they just have a row of shelves rather than a single box of letters. Not that hard.
>>46751531
It isn't now, but back when every printing block had to be cut from wood by hand, it was prohibitively expensive. Every new word requires a new block.
The printing press in China basically existed for printing a handful of novels, because they were the only thing popular enough to make it cost-effective.
>>46751595
>Every new word requires a new block.
Not really. Most commonly used words are combinations of common characters, and you only need about 10,000 characters to cover nearly all printed Chinese. That's a good, solid rack of lead blocks, but it's not cost prohibitive. Chinese newspapers were still being printed by this method in the 80s, using hand carve lead dies.
>>46751085
What?
>>46751771
You're making a bunch of big assumptions about the methods of printing but, for a moment, let's say you're correct and you "only" need 10,000 characters. That's still 10,000 unique carvings needed for -one- printing press, not counting duplicates you'd need to use on the same page. If the same word is used more than once, you need an extra block of that type.
Let's assume you need 10 uses of the same block per page. That's 100,000 blocks that need to be carved. That's almost 1700 man-hours of labour, assuming you can make one block a minute. That is 139 twelve-hour work days by a craftsman - and likely ones of some skill.
All for one printing press.
Compare that with English, where you need an average of about 3,000 characters per page.
You can see the cost difference, right? You can see why Chinese printing methods - until up about the 1800s - found it cheaper consistently for over a millennium to make prints of whole pages at once, rather than individual words?
>>46750769
Yeah basically, though it assumes that we've reached a point where we don't need any more technologies because we reached a perfect, untroubled and harmonious lifestyle.
If everyone has uploaded their consciousness into a supercomputer where they can live in eternal, ageless paradises, never to be troubled by the physical realm, what need would their be for innovation?
>>46752068
Ensuring, improving, and expanding your utopia, one imagines?
There are desires that can't be fulfilled inside a supercomputer, like exploring and encountering novelties.
>>46740300
One word: AFRICA
>>46750714
So the elves aren't even magic, just modern day level in a fantasy world?
>>46752068
But would that supercomputer survive the death of the universe?
>>46752330
No, but nothing else would either - not the stars themselves, nor the planets, nor even the black holes.
So why would said supercomputer even need to care? It is pointless to fight the inevitable.
>>46742052
>war
>halting scientific progress
K m8.
>>46752406
Even assuming this is correct, there are questions to be asked about how the time until the heat death is spent and in what way. Properly shepherded resources could be the differences of factors of ten in the lifespan of the supercomputer. If there is time dilation of perception going on for those inside, those numbers matter more and more.
we went from Wright Brothers to the Moon in less than a century, but how long did it take us to go from figuring out bows to obsoleting them with firearms? That was multiple millennia when figuring out new ways to kill people is one of the biggest drives behind technological progress in our history.
And a D&D world is typically set in a timeframe that doesn't exist -- they've got rapiers and advanced plate armor but no gunpowder, which doesn't match our technological history. So something weird is already going on. Maybe it's magic. Magic is pretty weird. When your best and brightest can become wizards and rape physical law there's a lot less incentive for inventors to arise, and a higher bar set for the first halting steps of a technology to get the acceptance it needs to continue development, because it has to compete with what magic can already do.
Then you ask about elves. Elves are not humans. Even when they aren't hippies that lack ambition for bettering themselves they tend to be conservative and traditionalist. You know how old people don't like their world changing? Every fucking elf is the most ancient fogey you've ever met. They are set in their ways before their society considers them adults. As a result, they'd seem to invent far less than they 'perfect'. They'll make a new model of an old thing rather than a new thing entirely. That both gives them an edge for the time being and prevents possible advancement: Bow mk. 781 holds more interest for them than Gun mk. 1. So will bow mk.782 (Slightly altered the shape of standard arrowhead serrations for improved aerodynamic qualities, showing a 2.2 bullseye per 10k shots improvement over mk 781 for master archers) the elf KNOWS what that is, it's the same thing but very slightly better, which is more appealing to the elven mind than something that is crude but might be revolutionary. The old ways are always best.
>>46749755
China had a lots of ways to make money, it had a lot more resources than any European country be a few orders of magnituds and lots of desirable commodities like Silk.
>>46742345
>better in every way
Yeah, no. That's true in approximately Tolkien (At which point the elves aren't competing with the humans for Middle Earth, they were either competing against Morgoth or just kinda chilling until they decide to go home to Valinor) and his least-skilled imitators. More depictions will have elves possess a lot of advantages -- Long life, unearthly beauty, refined culture -- but be incredibly deficient in other spheres. Often they are both arrogant and without drive. If you want a picture with the problem of elves, watch Zardoz. The entire movie could easily be recontextualized.
>>46740300
I always assumed the reason that Fantasy settings had technologically stagnant settings was because physics doesn't work the same way. For unknown reasons gunpoweder doesn't work, or combustion engines are impossible.
If the world was created by gods, the setting might be lacking in fossil fuels, for example.
>>46751095
>1439
They had printing presses (or woodcut presses) long before that. Gutenberg was the first movable type printing press (in Europe, 'cause obviously the chinese made it first.).
With my first party we started a new campaign. We are set in the lower-midhive on Desoleum. We are making a cult/crime syndicate. Currently we are starting fresh and had only 3 recruits. 1 died due to being high on drugs while in a firefight. One ran away and the toughest bastard named Sergei stood his fucking ground like a boss.
We are currently hunting out the leader of this small gang for us to overtake.
In the process we got our ramshackle vehicle in a carmageddon arena. 4 cars free for all with firebombs, heavy stubbers, explosive barrels and exploding vehicles.
I haven't had so much fun in Dark Heresy since ages.
Me playing a Research Station- Heretek - Ace.
>>46753001
the oldest EXISTING metal press is made in korea, dating 1377. however, there are records of older presses existing in china. unfortunally, no existing real material exists for china, so the 'made the first metal press' 'officially' goes to korea. quite unfortunate for china really, since even old korean records mention the existance of chinese press, but nothing has ben found yet.I'm bet the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution(read:mass vandalism) killed it.
>>46754066
That's not how history works, if we needed the actual original piece to prove everything we could not even teach history in elementary school.
Written documents can be enough proof.
>>46740300
elves are lazy assholes
>>46740300
>We went from the Wright brothers to the moon in a scant 100 years.
And when we got there, we found goddamn Moon Elves. They're always three steps ahead of us, the wily buggers!
>>46743798
>Wars fuel shot-term advancement.
Only on the surface. A lot of military research is then reviewed and rearranged for civilian use, so though war fuels short-term advancement, it later often provides a strong base for long-term advancement.
>>46740300
> We went from the Wright brothers to the moon in a scant 100 years.
This reminds me of a short story by Sergei Lukyanenko called "Evening Conversation with Mister Special Ambassador".
The gist is basically a wandering alien race that doesn't have enough place to live in finds humanity that is cooped up on Earth with basically modern technology.
Aliens easily destroy California, and the embassy is quickly established.
During the few months the aliens are in contact with humans, they manage to develop planet-wide terraforming and take Venus and Mars.
They give away their space dreadnoughts they arrived in like it's nothing claiming those are "old junk that belongs in a museum", and offer a tract of land on terraformed Mars equal to the size of destroyed California to humanity.
The alien embassador off-handedly comments that his ancestor invented the wheel 800 years ago, and that their race will make sure to keep humans safe just like other space-faring races did before.
And the embassador's final quote is: "After all, the humans are so... pitiful".
>>46741365
> "anonymous" imageboard
Everyone besides tripfags is "anon". Please specify whose setting you mean by >>linking to the post.
>>46740300
I just made up a setting where elves went from scattered groups of cavemen to an intergalactic super-society in a span of three and a half weeks. All thanks to technology.
>>46740300
Science does not advance beyond incremental improvements until the old guard of acclaimed, respected, experienced, and firmly established scientists die off and let the next generation throw out the pet theories that they'd built their reputations on while unaware that they were fundamentally flawed.
With elves, this takes a REALLY long time.
![[ReinForce] Lodoss-tou Senki - 01 (BDRip 1436x1080 x264 FLAC).mkv_20160418_133435.569.png](https://i.imgur.com/KA0O8Dw.jpg "[ReinForce] Lodoss-tou Senki - 01 (BDRip 1436x1080 x264 FLAC).mkv_20160418_133435.569.png")
>>46740300
I'm going to ignore the thread and just post an image to replace that ugly cap from the terrible DVD release Lodoss got.
>>46740430
Because something really historically freakish happened in Europe. It's bizarrely backwards to ask 'why didn't the scientific/industrial revolution happen in (China, India, Japan, the Americas, the Ottoman Empire, etc etc etc?' The sensible question is 'why did they happen in Europe'?
>>46747990
That's interesting. Makes sense I guess
>>46743641
Nazi scientists fueled fuck all you dumb wehraboo
>>46756682
Nazi advances is rocketry got us to the moon.
Go look up Operation Paperclip.
>>46756697
So what you're saying is thatGerman science is the best in the world?
>>46756804
If it was so good, why didn't they come close to an atom bomb?
>>46756697
>>46756682
I just want to point out that Nazi science is overrated - although Von Braun is one of the few areas it isn't - but WWII itself -did- produce a fuckton of new scientific advances.
Radar, for example, was developed in preparation for the war, as was sonar. The United States poured money into the development of nuclear reactors because reactors are how you get the material you need to build a bomb. The Enigma led to the development of Titan and other early computers.
The Second World War really did make technology jump, it just wasn't the Nazis that did most of it.
>>46749435
Shield skateboard
>>46756804
it sure kicked those panzy ass vampires didnt it?
>>46754227
>Written documents can be enough proof.
And where did you hear this from? Give me the official source that proves this matter.
>>46740300
>playing medieval stasis
>>46740300
People progress at different rates. There are fuckers still living in caves out there.
>>46740300
>Search thread
>Not one mention of Egypt
Seriously /tg/? They are *the* example of what OP is describing.
Thousands of years of civilisation (they arose sometime around 3000BCE) , slow technological development. As the society didn't need it, it worked and prospered.
>>46747990
That's flat wrong. European cultures had very complex pottery just as early as South Asian ones, so saying that China "perfected it too early" is fucking dumb. Additionally, China has had glass productions as early as 1000BC, which centuries before the use of glass for optics. So to say that they didn't develop optics because they didn't have glass is just straight bullshit that you pulled out of your ass.
>>46740706
They did. Who do you think resisted the lunar invasion by the Nazis?
>>46755850
Okay. >>46740613 or OP's setting. Either one works which is why I said 'anon'.
Elves cannot into science.
magic = illogical
magic brain = illogical brain
illogical brain = no scientific method
>>46740300
Magic.
Also plot.
>>46741711
>see a kitten and break its fucking neck just because fuck you
Yes, yes it would. And there are literally thousands of species that would do something similarly cruel.
Do you think humans have a monopoly on being assholes? No, we just have the intelligence to carry out our asshole-ry on a larger scale.
>>46740300
Reading through this thread, I now kinda wish for a story where the whole topic gets brought to forefront.
Let's say, collision of worlds of elves and humans. Elves are the only intelligent ones in their world, no magic (to rule out how it affects our world) but ridiculously well-adapted to their environment, with standard fantasy technology level and standard elf way of life, maybe with huge hints to Egypt and China culture. Human world is ours. And explicitly point out the fact that the civilizations are more or less equal in age, maybe not straight away, but eventually.
And just go wild with cultural and moral dissonance (the whole thing can have a little strife, but limited and overall assumed peaceful to not dilute the things the topic). The fact that elves are thought of as "an epitome of perfection" in our world contrasted with the fact that we are more advanced and how that changes our perception when we actually see them. How the elves would treat advanced technology, and how they would treat ecology, and whether they have the right to bitch about it. How the conflict that we so loathe is actually to blame for our progress, and what it means for our ideals of peace. Who is more natural in the first place (here things can differ depending on whether the elves are outliers in their own world, if they are, should probably mention the way humans are outliers in our world besides intelligence).
And then, maybe, to develop the theme, how the cultural integration would go, what would elven drive for perfection bring or not bring to the science and invention, have a whole plot with interbreeding and how it affects the population (but not make it into magical realm somehow), how the new world with a ton of resources affects the economy.
The whole thing would be pretty contrived and /tg/ as fuck, especially the "no fighting" part, but it could probably be pretty interesting.
Maybe I should actually write something like this when I'm not a lazy bum.
Elves are perfectly adapted for their environment, humans adapt their environment to themselves.
>>46756581
Magna Carta happened. Or rather the myth of magna carta. That men were created equal on Earth. That authority does not equal all knowing. Paved the way for men to question kings, emperors, popes, and bishops. Even God.
>>46741711
this is the most retarded post on 4chan right now
>>46740300
They have magic. When an elf wants to walk on the moon, he doesn't strap himself to a giant tube of kerosene and liquid oxygen and ram through the firmament riding a pillar of flame. The elf enchants a boat to fly and sails there powered by jewels wrought from the souls of trespassers.
>>46740300
You can remove exactly 10 individuals from human history and we'd be 500 years or more behind technology wise. It's actually our (comparatively) fast turnover rate that increases our technological progress by increasing our chances of a genius pioneer.
That said, if individuals like Tesla and Einstein had lived for 1,000+ years, we could be pretty ballin'. Maybe. I've always wondered just how limited genius are in fields of innovation.
>>46760685
This is a minor part of a setting I have been working on in my head for a while. It all flows from the idea that there is a reason elves live for hundreds of years. Elves are small scale hunter gatherer tribes mostly. When bands get to large, they just split up. They survive by just not being there when major shit goes down. They have just adapted to keep moving, and know when things are about to get dangerous. Given this setting is an infinite plane, sometimes things going to shit can have a really silly minimum safe distance... so the elves have been known to have been slowly running from problems for hundreds to thousands of years. They are incredibly good trackers, and incredible hunters. They also are nearly impossible to tempt out of the wilderness.
I worry it falls a bit into the "Noble Savages" things... but they aren't really noble. Just overly cautious.
Just because a few got it right, don't mean anyone else wouldn't of gotten to those concussions. And besides, the fact that it could of happened differently isn't as important as the fact that it did happen they way it did.
>>46763224
For every great human advancement, there was another person somewhere else less than a year away from inventing or discovering exactly the same thing. Progress on the scale of a civilization is driven by societal factors, the great minds we attribute to individual successes are merely the people who were in the right place at the right time.
>>46763620
meant to link >>46763224
>>46740300
>We went from the Wright brothers to the moon in a scant 100 years.
Less than 70.
Theoretically a cognizant person who saw the flight at Kitty Hawk could live to see the Moon landing.
>>46762851
Fuck that gay shit. I will take "riding an exploding phallus to glory" for 500, Alex.
>>46752442
It speeds it up fro a few years and then grinds to a halt as more resources are devoted to war.
Two years every twenty would seem to be the magic number to me.
>>46740300
<mfw this nigga read Animorphs
>>46740300
it was 65 years you dip shit.
>>46742880
Hi fien.
>>46740300
ecologically conservative with long enough lifespan to see the effects of agriculture/limited manufacturing on the forest, thus never develop unsustainable industrial economy?
Because elf are basically toned down version of Fae, they are actually deranged by human standard. Why you ever need to build steampowered tank, if your only purpose is playing a pre-scripted part in a recurring legend?
>>46751095
IIRC hangul wasn't invented until sometime around Gutenberg's time anyway. I'm pretty sure Japanese kana would work perfectly well in a movable type system, but the Japanese don't like using pure kana, I think.
>>46742312
The Fey may be dicks, but they got nothing on those elven bastards.
>>46740300
Well in AD&D and in Tolkien, elves had spaceships (and in the former case, advanced robotic prosthetics, guyvers and zombie bug evangelions, and drow had conventional mechs too).
>>46740300
Because you couldn't think of any. Some of us don't have this disability.
Your example is a bad one because it is a whole other era with big distinctions from the time most settings try to portray.
>>46756887
Case in point, the USA had a functioning Doppler radar in the early days of the war.
Maybe they have, and are only piddling around on your fantasy world because they are members of some Luddite religious sect or have an SCA/ARMA-like affinity for older technology and martial arts.
>>46741127
anon did you calculate that with inflation adjusted?
>>46741127
Moore's law is hitting diminishing returns due to butting up against hard physical limitations.
>>46767189
Where the shit were there spaceships in Tolkien?
Vingilot at a stretch, but that was just a flying ship. It's not like Arda was in fucking space.
>>46740300
Magic is "better" than technology
>>46767755
Anon, please.
Don't spew things you don't know shit about.
Sure, MOSFET-microelectronics are done for, but graphene microelectronics are
JUST
GETTING
STARTED.
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/09/graphene-band-gap-electronics-transistors-semiconductor
>>46759378
Underrated post.
>>46740300
>people say elves are the most intelligent race
>still lives in the woods in the middle of buttfuck nowhere completely and utterly irrelevant
haha
>>46740300
You do know that we are created by space elves right? The ones at war with reptillians.
>>46778014
Angels = space elves
Fallen angels = s.elves who rebelled against the main fleet
Dragons = flying/fire/shrieks fucking spaceships
Atlantis = rebel HQ, it was never an island, it was a capital ship floating above ocean
Polydeistic religions = people who saw the great battle between the rebels and loyalists
Pointy ears = more like antennae that also has other uses, like creating atmospheric and bacterial barriers aka HALO
Great Flood = super weapon used to destroy Atlantis via high frequency waves, the fucking tsunamis are just a side effect
Demons/Ghosts = Rebel/neutral/loyalists disintrigated by the super weapon, their very composition locked in perpetual hyperdimensional shifts.
>The Loyalists dont want humanity to know they exist, so whats the best way to wipe out the rebels without leaving a trace? Exactly, a super weapon that turns those caught by its AOE to become nonexistent or at least non existent enough that they cant manipulate anything in this dimension.
I'll explain more when I get home from my Job interview.
Who said the Elves never advanced?
They look pretty advanced to me in 40K.
Eldar = space Elves
>>46750769
Yes, luckily humans have a superpower in which their reach always extends their grasp.
Simply put happiness and contentment is the death of necessity but humans will never attain that state. Desire is our greatest sin and our greatest advantage, if we had the world we would no longer want it, we would want more.
A lot of times in the lore of various settings, elves don't reach sexual maturity until much later than humans and even then they do not have similar birth rates. Population density is a pretty good indicator of technological advancement in pre-industrial societies.
