tilmoph said:
Mylinkay Asdara said:
I see your point, and can one of my own; the radiation has mutated a lot of things in weird ways, so some of the old world's sciences need some degree of adaptation to cope with the new reality.
However, it's not just picking up the toys and starting over; the scientific basis itself, the how and why of inventing and producing those toys is readily at hand. We see more military tech because, at first, it's the most valuable and pressing; there's enough food left to scavenge, and enough giant bugs and lizards to hunt, that they really only need to know where to find more ammo or how to make more of their own.
However, as time goes on, and people start rebuilding communities to pool resources and begin domestication so they have some leisure time, they also have time to go over the old sciences, and to start trying to bring old-world tech improvements, like water processing and electricity, and things to use electricity, they'll have an easier time of it, since they don't need to discover the principals behind, oh say, and electrical generator; they have schematics and books explaining the schematics. Their most pressing issue isn't entirely research (though there is that, to adapt old tech to a new world, mainly in botany and agriculture), it's resources and labor power to harvest those resources and build things out of them, which overtime will become easier as populations grow.
So while they will most likely take a long, long time to fully rebuild to the level of the 2070's, getting to a largely industrial society from wasteland simply isn't only possible, it'll be done more rapidly than it was the first time, since most of the brain work and trial-and-error of technological improvements has already been done. At least that's my take on it; I suppose resource limitations (they did have resource wars before the Great War) might put a cap on their rebuilding efforts, but even then, they understand wind power and coal burning, right? Coals pretty damn abundant, more-so if the pre-war world wen from peak oil to full nuclear before the world went boom.
Okay, sure, I see your point: the knowledge is there, not just the stuff. What they seem to lack, however, is the time and - for lack of a better phrase - breathing space to undertake the learning and the engineering that would facilitate regaining the older techs that were quality of life improvers. You mention the connection between ease of this process and population numbers, and again I point out that small communities are small because of the lack of immediate resources (food, water, safety). Even without the exotic dangers and low survival rates in the Wasteland to contend with, the Industrial Revolutions of our own history required these immediate resources to be in enough abundance that attention and effort could be diverted into innovation and mechanization. The existence of the groundwork in the Fallout Universe might
reduce that threshold, but that reduction has to be mediated by the gulf between "education" as it exists in the Wastes and the advanced state of education expected by the authors of pre-war books.
Additionally, the conditions previously mentioned have to come together with the availability of not only the knowledge (which is at least portable to some extent, but requires initial access conditions and parameters of its own), but also the materials or correct location for the upgrade under consideration, i.e. a water processing plant or at least a river near a large portion of building materials. Tools (under similar accessibility restrictions of the knowledge). Motivated individuals. Decent Leadership and Coordination. An economy. A system of and access to trade options with other stable communities. The list goes on.
The conditions for building society are
partially present in every community we encounter in the Wastes. The major obstacle is that they are not
all present in any one of these or a number of these sufficient to band together and advance. That was our own barrier to highly productive civilizations in our infancy as well. The Wastes face this problem on a global scale and it's again an ecological issue: there are no plentiful lands to support the basic needs of human beings long enough for them to turn their attention to such social pursuits and stability that would foster community self-improvement on the scale you suggest.
This is why the G.E.C.K. is so damned miraculous and - speculating with sound reasoning here - why the scientists of the older days created such a thing in the first place: a knowledge that without agricultural resources, rebuilding society would be a severely stunted effort. There are numerous allusions to this in the series - the NCR farming projects, the search for terraforming devices, the interest in hormone growth serums, etc. There are also numerous examples of these communities and societies that lack some of the elements of stability sufficient for real rebuilding but are making attempts at some facet of that: The Pitt, where food and water resources are strained, stability is enforced by tyranny - these elements conspiring to produce a system of slave labor in order to attain the population requirements to produce in the Steelworks.
Another thing that stymies growth in this regard is a complication of the "safety" issue in the form of tyrants, slavers, Ceasar types, etc. Our own history would be of a totally different complexion if powerful weapons and strongholds had just been scattered about waiting to be picked up and employed by the unscrupulous and power hungry during our infancy. A "level playing field" cannot be assumed just because these toys seem to be scattered all over. It's very common in Fallout to see townsfolk armed, but less powerfully than their adversaries who - instead of devoting their time to an attempt at a functional society of morals and rules, put their primary effort into acquiring personal power and advantage.
Interesting wrinkle: perhaps the society that has developed is simply not of the same drives as historic societal beginnings. Or rather, not all of them are. It seems to me that there are societies that already do what you have suggested - the Enclave, the Brotherhood of Steel, the people of Rivet City / the Purity Project, etc. - and yet there are many more communities that are taking a relative pass on the technological rediscovery to work on sociological elements of society building, a repetition of the pattern we took, as they are both more readily accessible and more basic to human nature. Like Novac, Nelson, Goodsprings, etc.
If I got too long there: the social issues and the configuration of conditions are the two main problems, resources and knowledge to use them follows that, and the complications are varied across the whole human experience.
