One Sci-Fi Universe To Become Real

[amigocabal]

I personally don't buy the idea of tech advancement stopping once you develop a certain tech. It makes no sense. Any species that is curious and inquisitive enough to develop any kind of technology doesn't just stop, they always will experiment and keep trying new things.

The story doesn't go into details about the tech-freeze, but it could be that once they developed the FTL capacity, they went into the stars and spent all their time conquering/exploring, rather than developing new tech. Since all the other races are much less developed they haven't explored everything yet and are still distracted by doing that, rather than significantly advancing technology. At the start of the story it does mention some discoveries, if not advancements - some kind of glow bugs kept as lights, for example. So perhaps the 'tech-freeze' that the races in the story experience might not be a law of the universe so much as a side effect of the discovery of FTL combined with the desire to expand.

Yeah, I read that one. It's not a universal law. It's that the discovery of FTL/antigravity at such a primitive state of technology tends to throw the philosophy of science as we know it into disarray.

On Earth, it took a very long time for the 'scientific revolution' to happen. Conditions had to be just right for it to take hold.

Turtledove's story, I think, posits that that the chaos caused by developing FTL travel and frequent contact between primitive 'civilized' alien species tends to disrupt those conditions.

What were these conditions required for the scientific revolution to take hold?

[Panzersharkcat]

3001: The Final Odyssey. Humanity has more or less gotten rid of religion. We're pretty successfully colonizing the Solar System to the point where it takes only a week to get from Earth to Jupiter and we're attempting to terraform Venus. They have a super-Internet of sorts which feeds right into your brain and there are instant knowledge tablets that give you a college degree's worth of information. They've also cloned dinosaurs, including raptors, and managed to get them to not eat us. The downside is that there's no more real meat.