Electrical Civilization vs Steam Powered Civilization

[Zor]

In this scenario about 80,000 humans are harvested from around the world (including Meso-Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Europeans, Africans and Middle Easterners) around 1400 by a set of harvested vessels and transplanted onto an earth-like planet several hundred light years away as part of an experiment in technological evolution. In transit they are given immunizations (as well as a few general health cleanups that would extend their lives to about 150 yeas on average) and they have installed upon their minds two general memory templates via a cybernetic interface. Once they arrive on the planet they are deposited into one of two settlement clusters, each with 40,000 people (Which I'll call Gaben and Musk for sake of simplicity). Each settlement cluster has a central city that will be home to 5,000 people, 10 towns with 500 people and a large number of farms and some mines and similar over an are about 50km across. Each settlement has Terran crops and livestock as well as 19th century style animal powered agricultural equipment as well as 500 flintlock hunting muskets, as well as a distinct set of machinery which will be of significance here.

Among the programming the settlers receive is an artificial language (which exists alongside their previous language) distinct to each settlement cluster, as well as images of them being whisked away from earth by angelic beings to a new home to have Dominion over and to go forth and multiply across. They also have been granted universal literacy in both the Roman and Chinese Alphabets and knowledge of how to operate and the functionality of the respective machinery of each settlement cluster.

• In Gaben, they have a steam based civilization. Their is a steam powered railway connecting the central city with all the surrounding areas, steam tractors for powering and pulling agricultural machinery, paddle boats for navigating the main river. Steam engines power a number of factories and the main foundry in the city driving lathes, weaving machines, winches, belts and all the equipment required to build more steam engines and associated equipment. Gaben is situated in an area rich in coal and iron to facilitate production of further steam engines and is a thousand kilometers inland at the foothills of a mountain range with vast fertile grasslands between them and the sea. All the initial steam engines are made with advanced alien materials that will allow them to function continuously for centuries to come
• In Musk, they have a civilization based around electrical power. Like Gaben their is a railway going around it, though it's cars are electrically powered. In the central city their are electricly powered factories able to build new generators, wires, motors, batteries and similar. Each home has electric lights and a basic radio sets. There are several radio towers around along with some microphones. There are a small number of battery powered electric trucks and one of the factories makes lead acid batteries. The main city is built near an artificial lake created by a hydroelectric dam while there are a hundred 100-meter tall wind turbines to provide more than twenty times the Musk's energy needs. The ocean is about 14 km from the city (with one of the towns being a fishing village) and it is situated in a climate ideal for growing latex trees. Like Gaben, they have blueprints for junks and galleons. They also have the blueprints for Solar Thermal Generators and basic wind power stations.

Each settlement cluster is located on one of the planet's seven continents on opposite sides of the planet.

Each home comes with a fireproof book. Both Gaben and Musk have different versions and some differences but their function is basically identical. These books serves two roles: The first of which is as an engineering textbook for for steam power and it's applications in Gaben and for electrical engineering in Musk. As something of a holy text explaining in brief how these people were taken by a benevolent deity from earth to this new world to call their own. They also have a warning in their final chapter: that says that while they (the virtuous) were taken to this new world by a benevolent deity said deity has a malevolent counterpart which did the same with the wicked while giving them corrupt machines to blight this world (which they are forbidden to use, it's a mortal sin to build an electric generator according to the book Gaben got or to build a steam engine in the book Musk got) and that it is their holy duty to purify this world of their corruption. Each civilization will grow and expand before it inevitably comes into conflict with each other.

Which civilization will prevail in the end?

Zor

[Zwinmar]

Why? All things are equal except one...Electric City has the radio, this is a major game changer.

[bilateralrope]

Why? All things are equal except one...Electric City has the radio, this is a major game changer.

That's a big one. Lets ignore it for a moment. Electricity still wins.

The civilisations are very low population on opposite sides of a planet. Any conflict is going to take so long that technological advancement will happen. Look to modern Earth. Note how much of our technology requires electrical generation.

Can you think of any steam engines that are vital to modern civilization ?

So Musk, being the civilisation with electricity, will have the technological advantage.

Gaben only has two hopes:
- Steam power lets them grow their population and manufacturing capacity quicker than Musk. Giving them a numbers advantage when conflict happens.
- People start ignoring parts of their holy books after a few generations. Specifically the part about purging the other civilisation and/or the part banning electric generators.

[Zixinus]

An important limiter: modern technology still relies on steam to create electricity, via generators spun by turbines spun by steam. That's how coal/oil/nuclear power plants work. Meaning that the Musk civilization has a cap (due to needing to create electricity directly) on electricity/power generation that the Gaben civilization does not have. They can't make a goal-powered power plant or even a nuclear one (unless they restrict themselves to stuff like RTGs). At least, until the tenants of the holy book are followed.

What environmental problems would the Musk civilization have due to their technology that the Gaben wouldn't? Assuming that they aren't directly compensated for. I imagine that lead and other heavy metals required by batteries could be a problem. It is significant because restricting yourself to certain technologies may force the civilization to use environmentally unfriendly machines that would impact on things like fertility of their agriculture.

[Vendetta]

Why? All things are equal except one...Electric City has the radio, this is a major game changer.

You'd think, but the electric civilisation has more infrastructural load than the steam one. The steam civ finds the electric one first because steamships are viable for heavier longer endurance voyages than solar electric (and if they're all renewable electric they don't have a path to diesel electric generator), solar electric is good for light long endurance, but not heavy long endurance, and steam trains carry their power sources with them rather than relying on rail electrification.

The steam civ expands as fast as it can build rails, the electric civ has to build rails and expand its power generation to deal with increasing load every time it does so. The steam civ can adapt to different mediums of transport more easily because steam scales up well. The electric civ might have a communications advantage, but it has a scale disadvantage.

[madd0ct0r]

Not so sure. Steam scales up well, but down poorly. The steam civ is caught between more effcient mega projects like a liner or a new railway and the lack of granularity that the smallest viable (but still more ineffecint) projects like roadsteamers to assist in logging.


ZOR - how are the muskies supoosed to use solar thermal generation when steam turbines are prohibited them?

[bilateralrope]

ZOR - how are the muskies supoosed to use solar thermal generation when steam turbines are prohibited them?

Four possibilities:
1 - These designs are in our holy books. Thus these are holy designs. Thus they are permitted.
2 - They find some difference between how these designs operate and how forbidden steam engines operate. For example, maybe these are allowed because they aren't using fire to produce steam.
3 - They use something other than steam to turn the turbines.
4 - They ignore parts of their holy books.

Both 2 and 4 happen in real life. So I'd expect them to happen here.

[Zor]

Four possibilities:
1 - These designs are in our holy books. Thus these are holy designs. Thus they are permitted.
2 - They find some difference between how these designs operate and how forbidden steam engines operate. For example, maybe these are allowed because they aren't using fire to produce steam.

Pretty much this.

Zor

[Vendetta]

Not so sure. Steam scales up well, but down poorly. The steam civ is caught between more effcient mega projects like a liner or a new railway and the lack of granularity that the smallest viable (but still more ineffecint) projects like roadsteamers to assist in logging.

Electric doesn't do particularly better at those scales either though. Sure, you could build electric road haulage but it wouldn't be particularly efficient due to draining batteries faster than lighter vehicles because of higher load on the motors. Roadsteamers might have been less efficient than diesel or petrol, but they're more efficient than using electric for mid scale haulage.

Steam tends to be self reinforcing in a way that electricity is not. Having steam power makes it a lot easier to do the sort of things that get you more steam power. You can run pumps to keep your coal mines dry and safe, you can run steam hammers to drive in rail spikes to extend your rail network, and all of that can be done on local power so you don't need to have your infrastructure already in place to do any of it.

Electricity, on the other hand, would need infrastructure already in place if it's all solar/wind generation. You want to use electrically driven heavy industrial gear you need to have your grid there first, and that means you need to have relatively heavy construction, buried wires, substations, transformers, etc. that are themselves nontrivial builds.

Electricity is not an infrastructure that spreads well under its own power. Steam is.

[madd0ct0r]

I suspect you are right, but arguing the point seems intetesting. We know steam spreads, largely, under its own power because at the time, steam was the only thing available at scale.

Electricity came later, so we've never seen an example of electricty spreafing under its own power. Certain things are much easier, electrical pumps and lighting is a massive boon for mining as they less explosive and dont consume oxygen. Of course, with copius electricity it would be intersting to see how quickly aluminium becomes a standard metal over iron*. Arc welding may mean riveted sections never take off.

*i assume coal for heating and iron smelting is still standard. Electrical pumps and fans would be useful here too.

[bilateralrope]

How long would it take the two civilisations to encounter each other ?

We are talking about two civilisations of only 40,000 people each. Each civilisation knowing the other exists, but not knowing where each other are.

How can we be sure that either will remain politically stable over that timeframe ?

[Simon_Jester]

Honestly, I'm not sure forty thousand people could maintain the industrial bases described, let alone expand them, and it'd take many generations before either population grew enough to be considered a "country" in any meaningful sense of the word.

But we can just arbitrarily upscale the populations as needed- to four million, or forty million.

Why? All things are equal except one...Electric City has the radio, this is a major game changer.

That's a big one. Lets ignore it for a moment. Electricity still wins.

The civilisations are very low population on opposite sides of a planet. Any conflict is going to take so long that technological advancement will happen. Look to modern Earth. Note how much of our technology requires electrical generation.

Can you think of any steam engines that are vital to modern civilization ?

Sure I can: the ones that power the electric generators.

So Musk, being the civilisation with electricity, will have the technological advantage.

Gaben only has two hopes:
- Steam power lets them grow their population and manufacturing capacity quicker than Musk. Giving them a numbers advantage when conflict happens.
- People start ignoring parts of their holy books after a few generations. Specifically the part about purging the other civilisation and/or the part banning electric generators.

A lot is going to depend on whether the Muskites invent the internal combustion engine.

There are a fairly limited number of ways to provide mobile mechanical power for vehicles. Electricity really isn't the best option for that, especially not without some very rare materials to make batteries. Basically, the options boil down to:

1) Reciprocating steam engines, like 19th century designs used
2) Steam turbines, like 20th century ships used
3) Internal combustion (diesel, gasoline, or more exotic)
4) Gas turbines (a late 20th century option).
5) A distant last, electric batteries of the type described.

If the Muskites don't believe in steam engines, they will not have the engine technology to build large ships, nor self-propelled vehicles that can operate outside their own electrical grid and the area immediately around it. They will be a singularly... inoffensive... society, in that if they ever wanted to invade anyone, they'd have to do it in sailing ships and with armies that run on muscle power.

Moreover, if they remain ignorant of steam engines, their electrical grid will grow slowly and they will not have many sources of power they can reliably control. They will not be able to build oil or coal-fired power plants, and probably not nuclear plants either, even if they knew nuclear science and had the industrial base to do it. Even their solar thermal plants are doubtful, unless of course their ban on steam ENGINES does not include a ban on steam TURBINES.

If steam turbines aren't banned to Musk... then this RAR is grossly biased in favor of the Muskites. Because the Muskites 'give up' a more primitive form of steam technology but are freely awarded a more advanced one, while the Gabenites are banned from ALL forms of electrical power, be they primitive or refined.

Four possibilities:
1 - These designs are in our holy books. Thus these are holy designs. Thus they are permitted.
2 - They find some difference between how these designs operate and how forbidden steam engines operate. For example, maybe these are allowed because they aren't using fire to produce steam.

Pretty much this.

Zor

If so, then you have grossly biased the scenario in favor of the Muskites, because they can just take the 'holy, acceptable' turbines from their power plants and upsize or downsize them as needed to power, well, anything. That gives them access to 'best of both worlds' technological capability, unless they have a prohibition on setting things on fire as a source of steam, which is pretty stupid because that would involve a civilization banning fire.

Although having a prohibition on fire would tend to weaken the Muskites enough that it might bring them back down to a competitive level.

[Sea Skimmer]

An important limiter: modern technology still relies on steam to create electricity, via generators spun by turbines spun by steam. That's how coal/oil/nuclear power plants work. Meaning that the Musk civilization has a cap (due to needing to create electricity directly) on electricity/power generation that the Gaben civilization does not have. They can't make a goal-powered power plant or even a nuclear one (unless they restrict themselves to stuff like RTGs). At least, until the tenants of the holy book are followed.

You've got a point if we were dealing with millions and millions of people quickly turning into hundreds of million, but this is a baseline of only 80,000, which already has a wind and hydro power grid 20 times it's own needs. That's a lot of wiggle room, and they already have electric railroads.

In the long term they could use things like nuclear plants running on gas turbines, and coal fired Sterling engines can exploit said sources of heat without using steam. If they find natural gas then the first industrial gas turbine generator sets appeared in the 1930s. Problem solved once a source of fuel is found. Low end steam tech wastes fuel like crazy too so it's not a hard competition.

Modern earth power requirements are huge and hard to meet because we have billions of people, not because any one technology is all that important on it's own. Gas turbines are perfect complements to hydro and wind power. It'd be hard to produce them on such a low population count, but a low population wouldn't be able to build a 500 MW coal power plant either. Or at least it'd take forever. Building big hydro dams would be easier, you can build them up in stages, and start producing power at an early point, if you want.

Steam power was really important to early industrialization because it allowed 'power' to be a thing anywhere you wanted, not just beside a river with useful gradient as had been the case with water wheels before. Once you have AC electricity tech that problem can be easily solved by putting up wires, power can easily flow hundreds of miles with pretty low end equipment. The one place this would really hurt is easy ship power, but 80,000 people don't need lots of big ships anyway. They'd probably go diesel-electric. For mining and railroading the same, with wires added where traffic can justify it, for a real low population that won't actually be much.

Banning the Musk from all fire save for cooking would be more even, but only once the steam people make airplanes for warfare. It'd be pretty absurdly dumb.

[Starglider]

Wouldn't gas turbines running directly on coal dust have been viable much earlier than contemporary liquid fueled turbines? I know the USSR built working turbines that ran on coal sludge (dust/water mixture) back in the 1950s. With 1800s materials the efficiency would doubtless be poor and the service life horrible, but I'd guess they'd still be viable for powering ships and generators.

[Simon_Jester]

I suspect that the turbine blades would wear out so quickly, and break/fracture/explode so often, that it would just be pointless to even try. Ship engines that wear out after one thousand miles aren't good, because they have a high probability of breaking down in the middle of an ocean.

[Sea Skimmer]

Wouldn't gas turbines running directly on coal dust have been viable much earlier than contemporary liquid fueled turbines?

People prototyped the hell out of coal dust turbines for about 50 years, including multiple variations on the fuel (many had liquid added) and they've never worked out decently. Basic problem, if you can swallow how complex they end up being due to the fuel prep stages needed, is that coal is not a very pure fuel. They always ended up with heavy deposits of material on the power turbine blades. That means rapid overheating failure, something early metallurgy certainly could not deal with.

By the time you could seriously deal with any of this you could certainly build a gas turbine running off coal gas or natural gas. This would not be well suited to mobile use but it works perfectly fine for a power station. Either way your turbine will ingest far less solid material.

Major point of steam being easier is its closed loop working fluid stays cleaner and thus all the blades and bearings last much longer given limited metal qualities. It's also pretty easy to use pipes of steam and manual throttles to run all the auxiliaries on a realistic installed power unit. A gas turbine would use a combination of direct drive and electrical equipment. That's complicated...but this one side already has fairly advanced electrical engineering to do that.

I know the USSR built working turbines that ran on coal sludge (dust/water mixture) back in the 1950s. With 1800s materials the efficiency would doubtless be poor and the service life horrible, but I'd guess they'd still be viable for powering ships and generators.

Germany-US-USSR all built working coal dust turbines, the US even did put one in a railroad locomotive and kept work going through the second gulf oil crisis for grid power. Going to a liquid fuel made it easier to control fuel injection, which improved efficiency, and it kept the turbine a little cleaner, but the fundamental problem remained that you're burning junk in the engine.

By the 1980s I'm sure it'd work okay, but you'd already have pretty good gas turbines by then real gas turbines had already hit a couple tens of thousands of hours between overhauls. This civilization will have serious trouble independently reaching high levels of engine technology just for scale reasons. Around 1977 is when engine design in real life hit the temperature limit of conventionally cast alloy turbine blades. This is good enough to give you a MiG-29A.

[Zor]

Honestly, I'm not sure forty thousand people could maintain the industrial bases described, let alone expand them, and it'd take many generations before either population grew enough to be considered a "country" in any meaningful sense of the word.

I would assume it would be a century or so before they encountered each other during which their civilization will have expanded and grown. Assuming a population grown rate of 0.02 within 250 years the population that arose from each settlement cluster would be just shy of six million.

If so, then you have grossly biased the scenario in favor of the Muskites, because they can just take the 'holy, acceptable' turbines from their power plants and upsize or downsize them as needed to power, well, anything. That gives them access to 'best of both worlds' technological capability, unless they have a prohibition on setting things on fire as a source of steam, which is pretty stupid because that would involve a civilization banning fire.

Both the Muskites and the Gabanites have steam turbines in their holy books and Gaben has a few working steam turbines. Even so their is a strong warning that the only acceptable way of powering a steam turbine is with sunlight.

Zor

[Simon_Jester]

Honestly, I'm not sure forty thousand people could maintain the industrial bases described, let alone expand them, and it'd take many generations before either population grew enough to be considered a "country" in any meaningful sense of the word.

I would assume it would be a century or so before they encountered each other during which their civilization will have expanded and grown. Assuming a population grown rate of 0.02 within 250 years the population that arose from each settlement cluster would be just shy of six million.

Yes, which means they're still on opposite sides of the planet, tightly clumped up in two industrialized heartlands, especially the Muskites who have extremely limited ability to operate machinery beyond the boundaries of their own electrical grid. Aside from a few far-flung colonies intended to extract specific resources that aren't available in the homeland, that will be it.

Neither side will have the population or infrastructure to wage a war over intercontinental distances against an enemy with at least broadly comparable weapons. It doesn't matter if they've been told to fight a holy war, because by this point they've had eight to ten generations of little or no real contact with the Unholy Enemy. They're going to forget why they wanted to fight, reinterpret the relevant passages of their books as a metaphor, and so on. That goes double because both sides have only the other as a potential trading partner, and both sides are likely to have goods the other covets.

Besides, by the time either side DOES have the capability to fight an intercontinental war, technology will have started advancing, resulting in conflict over the contents of the holy books when new inventions (say, gas turbine engines) arise that don't quite fit with the random engineering restrictions.

Moreover, with colony populations starting at forty thousand, both sides are very vulnerable to totally random disasters like a hurricane or a major disease outbreak making too big a dent in the early years and causing crippling long term damage.

You'd do better if, say, you gave both sides large countries and put them on opposite sides of a large gulf or narrow ocean, so that they'd come into contact (and conflict) immediately. Before both sides had time to forget their original bizarre RAR-created cultural values of not using electricity and hating people who do or whatever.

Both the Muskites and the Gabanites have steam turbines in their holy books and Gaben has a few working steam turbines. Even so their is a strong warning that the only acceptable way of powering a steam turbine is with sunlight.

Is this because they somehow have a religious prohibition against fire or something?

Someone's going to start pointing out how stupid this is. You can't have a literate culture with functional engineering skills who obsess over stuff like this forever. If they're hidebound and narrowminded enough to not adapt their existing steam turbines into gas turbines or to use coal, oil, et cetera to generate steam... How are they ever going to be adaptable enough to design new infrastructure and vehicles to fit new situations they encounter while settling this unpopulated world?

You can't do engineering by mindlessly copying designs out of a book. An organization like the Adeptus Mechanicus simply would not work in real life. And even if it did, it would require total stagnation... and in the context of the setup you've created, a stagnant faction will die out sooner or later, because it will never grow enough to sustain its own industrial base.

So no stagnation in technology or culture, change happens, and the conflict won't really blow up for generations. So prohibitions on who uses what technology aren't going to be sustainable over the century-long periods they would need to last for.

[madd0ct0r]

Well, would the civilisations even stay coherent? Roll a dice. On a one you get a civil war, on a two to three a colony rebels, on a four to five a religious schism or political intrigue results in a significant outflow of people to a new location. On a six all of the above. Roll once every fifty years.


EDIT. I think more consideration to the basic technologies of sail, draft animals and non tech farming is needed in this disscussion. What % of the population are farmers?

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah.

Lack of industrialized agriculture and infrastructure to maintain it are going to be problems. Forty thousand people isn't really enough for a self-sustaining economy; if they can't import foodstuffs from elsewhere the way REAL industrial cities of forty thousand do, how do they keep all the factory workers and clerks fed? Or does the industrial machinery just rust away for a few generations while they breed enough people to operate it?

[Zor]

Lack of industrialized agriculture and infrastructure to maintain it are going to be problems.

Both groups have a solid mix of new and old world crops, domestic animals and (as mentioned in the OP) industrial era machinery such as mechanical reapers, disc plows, seed drills, threshing machines and similar. They are also both located in fertile tropical areas able to support multiple harvests per year. Also about 80% of the population are farmers.

Zor

[Simon_Jester]

That leaves eight thousand people to run the rest of the industrial infrastructure.

This Will Not Work.

[Swindle1984]

Can you think of any steam engines that are vital to modern civilization ?

The majority of power plants used in the modern world?



And the steam civilization isn't necessarily out of the game entirely; using something like the Coffman Starter (essentially a shotgun shell), they can operate trucks, tractors, tanks, aircraft, even jet engines, without using an electrical system. Their primary disadvantage would be in computers (they'd be stuck with analog systems like we had prior to WW2) and radio; otherwise, both civilizations would basically have the same technology until they develop things like microchips. Just substitute electric lights with gas lamps, battery starters with Coffman starters (or air compressors), etc. Most things you can do with electricity, such as refrigeration, lighting, transportation, etc. can be done with steam, gas, electricity, whatever. Factories would be largely identical until modern computers enter the scenario. Meanwhile, I'm wondering how the hell a society that can't build a steam engine would develop an internal combustion engine, hydraulics, etc.

In any case, the scenario won't really work: the populations of both civilizations are too small, and they're on opposite sides of the planet. The most likely scenario is that neither civilization finds the other for a very long time, by which point they'll likely have thought each other to be a myth. A simple plague or other disaster could wipe one civilization out entirely before they ever encounter their designated opponents.

And, despite being given a common language and handed a book on how to do things that ends with some psuedo-religious babble, each civilization is still made of different cultural, ethnic, and religious groups. You're going to have cultural and ethnic clashes (isolationist Japanese, imperialist Europeans, African slavers, Aztec let's-sacrifice-a-neighboring-village, etc.), as well as religious clashes (Christian, Muslim, Shinto, Buddhism, etc. won't be the only religious conflicts: you'll also get those who believe the book's story about being transplanted by a deity and those who don't, those who ascribe their own religion as the source of this deity and attempt to impose it on others, etc.). Neither the steam nor electrical society will be coherent, and these people come from a time before political correctness and shooting/stabbing those dirty *insert cultural/ethnic/religious group here* was socially acceptable. Thus, it's more likely that both civilizations will break down into conflict long before coming into contact with the other.

Example: Europeans declare that since they're the most civilized and educated peoples, they'll be in charge of this new society and Africans and Meso-Americans, as loincloth-wearing primitives who don't even have a system of writing, will be laborers at the bottom tier of society. The Arabs, having done quite a bit of business selling Africans as slaves, will happily agree. Meanwhile, an Aztec priest, whose people DID have a system of writing and considered themselves the pinnacle of human civilization, are freaking the fuck out and trying to sacrifice some uppity Italian to their sun god, and the Chinese are angrily insisting that they're the most civilized and educated people and should be in charge. Then somebody starts a holy war and it all goes to shit from there, and the entire steam vs electricity experiment goes nowhere.

[Zor]

A simple plague or other disaster could wipe one civilization out entirely before they ever encounter their designated opponents.

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?

And, despite being given a common language and handed a book on how to do things that ends with some psuedo-religious babble, each civilization is still made of different cultural, ethnic, and religious groups. You're going to have cultural and ethnic clashes (isolationist Japanese, imperialist Europeans, African slavers, Aztec let's-sacrifice-a-neighboring-village, etc.), as well as religious clashes (Christian, Muslim, Shinto, Buddhism, etc. won't be the only religious conflicts: you'll also get those who believe the book's story about being transplanted by a deity and those who don't, those who ascribe their own religion as the source of this deity and attempt to impose it on others, etc.). Neither the steam nor electrical society will be coherent, and these people come from a time before political correctness and shooting/stabbing those dirty *insert cultural/ethnic/religious group here* was socially acceptable. Thus, it's more likely that both civilizations will break down into conflict long before coming into contact with the other.

You are ignoring the significance of the fact that they've received a Common Language, the images of being whisked away to a new world by angelic beings where there are incredible new machines. 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. 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.

Also Japanese isolationism and European Imperialism were not a thing back in 1400.

Example: Europeans declare that since they're the most civilized and educated peoples, they'll be in charge of this new society and Africans and Meso-Americans, as loincloth-wearing primitives who don't even have a system of writing, will be laborers at the bottom tier of society.

Everyone's been made literate.

Zor

[Simon_Jester]

A simple plague or other disaster could wipe one civilization out entirely before they ever encounter their designated opponents.

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?

By BC you mean British Columbia?

For one, the primitive tools are actually an advantage here- you don't need a large population of specialists to keep a Stone Age hunter-gatherer society running. There's no equivalent to having the only trained engineer in town get killed by a tornado or something.

For another, you will notice that when 1000-5000 people spread through the Americas into a population of tens of millions:

1) It took thousands of years, during which time their culture drifted and changed enormously, and
2) Their descendants were not culturally uniform.

Having such small groups spread into huge groups over vast areas takes so long and involves so much 'spread' that uniformity becomes impossible.

You are ignoring the significance of the fact that they've received a Common Language, the images of being whisked away to a new world by angelic beings where there are incredible new machines. 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. 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.

There are still going to be enormous cultural differences between these people, which affect how they resolve any disputes or differences.

If you don't want the multi-ethnic nature of your starter civilizations to matter and have consequences... Why aren't you just asserting that people will magically be created out of nothing?