Irrelevant. A tribe of stone age primitives is not comparable to attempting to operate an industrial society with newly-trained people trying to maintain an infrastructure while simultaneously trying to feed themselves and obtain raw materials (fuel, metal, etc.) with not enough people to do all of it particularly well. You're trying to say that a disease isn't a threat to industrial London because the Sentinelese have a much smaller population and cruder tools and have survived into the 21st century; the comparison isn't even apples and oranges, it's apples and quartz.Zor wrote: You do realize that the population which spread BC to Tierra del Fuego started with a narrower founder population of about 1,000 to 5,000 people with much cruder tools?
Nor is it all relevant to the fact that the entire population, or at least enough of it to cause societal collapse, could be wiped out by a single disease. The black plague killed between 30% and 60% of the European population (coincidentally, only 50 years prior to this scenario), and smallpox wiped out an equivalent percentage of the Native American population. Further, the scenario is mingling peoples who were historically susceptible to diseases endemic in other peoples (black plague wasn't a major issue in Asia where it originated, but the Europeans had no resistance and suffered massive depopulation; smallpox was a continuing problem in Europe, but a serious one for the Americans who, again, had no resistance). Better hope when these people were scooped up and deposited on a new planet, all of them were screened for infectious diseases.
Because a common language has been such a barrier to preventing ethnic cleansing, religious wars, and cultural clashes in the past. You also assume that these people wouldn't prefer to converse in their native tongue whenever possible and only use this common language out of necessity when dealing with others.You are ignoring the significance of the fact that they've received a Common Language,
Machines which wouldn't be all that incredible to the Europeans and Chinese, particularly in the steam civilization. They, at least, would understand that they were just that: machines.the images of being whisked away to a new world by angelic beings where there are incredible new machines.
When your neighbors are people with completely different social values, don't look anything like you, and do not share you religion, history, or customs, and are therefore potentially dangerous, you tend to forgot about a vague, nebulous threat off in the distance and focus on the one on your doorstep. Particularly since many of these civilizations you've mashed together thought of themselves as the center of the universe and the pinnacle of human civilization. China's Middle Kingdom, Europe's, well, eurocentric view of the universe and the sun and stars revolving around the Earth, the Aztecs, Japanese, etc. Suddenly having to share their civilization with others who are also of the opinion that they're the greatest people on Earth is going to inevitably result in cultural conflict.Those things would be for all practical matters works of the divine and would be things they could not ignore. There is also the fact that out their, somewhere, is an external threat.
The Bible also says to "turn the other cheek" when someone commits an offense against you; that didn't stop the nominally Christian nations of Europe from slaughtering each other for centuries. Hell, Buddhism is an inherently pacifist religion, and Buddhists are killing the shit out of Muslims in Myanmar and neighboring countries. Islam has the whole "slaughter the infidels and enslave the survivors" thing going for it, and the Aztecs sacrificed their neighbors to their gods on an industrial scale. I don't think a book that vaguely mentions an unnamed deity transporting them to a new world and saying they should settle their differences peacefully is going to do diddly-squat to prevent conflict, religious or otherwise, between all these groups that have been crammed together against their will.I'm sure some of them would work Jesus or Mohammed and definitely the Buddha into the narrative. The books also tells them that the elect should resolve their conflicts from the old world without the shedding of blood.
In 1400, Spain was undergoing the Reconquista, the Byzantine Empire was waging war with the Turks, Italy was fighting Muslims, France was jockeying for power with England, Spain, and the German states, and there was growing interest in Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world that led to the voyages of discovery, the New World, and the era of imperialism. And this follows a thousand years of conquest, empires, the Hundred Years War, etc.Also Japanese isolationism and European Imperialism were not a thing back in 1400.
And while you are correct that Japan didn't have an official policy of isolationism until the 1600's, by this point Japan was pretty damn isolationist, what with the Mongols having been an existential threat 120 years prior, and the rest of the period after that was one of relative isolation, with power struggles for control of Japan and very little foreign influence on the country. While contact with outside civilizations, primarily China and Korea, continued, they didn't exert much influence on Japan, which at the time was self-centered; major trade with the rest of Asia didn't take off again until after your 1400 cutoff date, and influence from the West didn't begin until the 1500's. So no, Japan wouldn't give two shits about any of the foreign devils they were suddenly forced to mingle with.
You act as if a European who can read and write and has been introduced to a classical education isn't going to think himself superior to a naked African living in a grass hut whose people never developed writing. You could have taught that African to speak and read Greek, but that doesn't the fact that his people have no writing or advanced culture of their own; therefore, just because everyone can now magically speak and read a common language doesn't change anyone's attitudes about anyone else.Everyone's been made literate.
Sorry, but teaching everyone Esperanto and having a book of technical data that includes a few paragraphs devoted to vague psuedoreligion isn't going to do anything to mitigate cultural, religious, and ethnic conflict in either the steam or electrical civilizations.