Designing a planet denser than earth

[sirocco]

uh okay... What about technical drawings, historical records, derelict satelllites still hovering around the planet?

I uderstand that most people will believe this is magic, but what about the occasional self-taught genius popping here and there ? One just need to be inspired by those fairy tales and making enough experiments to be able to recreate basic crude version of everyday tech. Well, not even a tiny pocket of technology in your setting ?

[Guardsman Bass]

uh okay... What about technical drawings, historical records, derelict satelllites still hovering around the planet?

What about them? Technical drawings are often quite difficult for many people to understand today without training, never mind people living in a much more primitive civilizations thousands of years after the collapse of technologically advanced civilization. Then add in the inevitable linguistic drift, unless your primitive civilization managed to keep the old language alive in some form.

Historical records are only as good as you can preserve them. If this is a civilization where most records are electronic, then those are effectively gone to their primitive successors as soon as the hard drives degrade and the technology to repair and run them disappears. Paper books are subject to degrading from the elements, which is why many of the ancient books that we did up intact at archaeological sites tend to either be lucky, in very dry areas, or both. I think it's easy to imagine the written record being degraded to the point where the few authors preserving it mix up truthful elements with all manner of nonsense and mistaken beliefs.

Most satellites won't even be visible until the civilization invents telescopes, and I question whether or not they'd know exactly what they were looking at for a long time after that.

I uderstand that most people will believe this is magic, but what about the occasional self-taught genius popping here and there ? One just need to be inspired by those fairy tales and making enough experiments to be able to recreate basic crude version of everyday tech. Well, not even a tiny pocket of technology in your setting ?

Geniuses can't create technology out of thin air, and technological innovation generally tends to be a product of its time. If you look at the history of tech innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries, you quite frequently had multiple inventors of the same technological devices, all coming up with the device in a close time period (the earliest, crudest versions of the telephone showed up in the 1850s, and Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell came up with the telephone within mere months of each other in the 1870s).

[Simon_Jester]

What's actually most likely to get preserved isn't what we normally think of as 'hard' technology. It's the subtle stuff, like the germ theory of disease, sanitary notions that boil down to "don't shit in the drinking water," widespread knowledge of mechanical advantage and the notion that yes, in a good life there should be machines to do things for you.

That doesn't equate to sudden booms of technology in tiny enclaves. It does make for a society that doesn't look much like the historical middle ages.