If we meet the other galactic civilizations, could we get a better deal?
]]>However, the Babbage approach wasn't the only one. Jacquard looms were programmable graphic displays, after all. And Tinker-Toys can be programmed to beat you at Tic-Tac-Toe (known to some as Noughts and Crosses, I think?). This Tinker-Toy computer is basically a finite-state machine programmed by a "piano roll" made of Tinker-Toys.
]]>So: you can get at least as far as a society that has blacksmiths who know how to get metal to do very complicated things. Probably clockmakers as well.
I agree that steam engines are unlikely, but steam didn't power Jacquard looms, at least not at first --- water did. Huge factories were built driven by water wheels, with long rods and pulleys used to distribute the motive power throughout the factory to the machines, and the machines weren't just looms, but also machine shops with lathes and drills and polishing machines.
Wind and water aren't going to move plows, however, so there will still be a lot of labor going in to food production. But didn't surplus food production preceded steam-powered farm equipment by centuries? That may have been new genetic material (e.g., the potato and all the other genes from the Americas), and possibly new forms of organization.
So: I think you could get well beyond Newton, perhaps all the way to the mid nineteenth century.
In order to pass technological knowledge along, you have guilds and apprenticeship.
]]>Not that I cared for that resolution much. I did enjoy the ride leading up to it, though.
My shibboleths have already been mentioned: Lord Nelson in space, an interstellar empire based on trading anything other than information (unless you have a good reason why it's cheaper to transport something between stars systems than it would be to just break up a few local asteroids for raw materials). At which time: what makes it an empire? Intellectual property laws?
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