Worldbuilding Wednesdays: Adaptive Pressures

Welcome to Worldbuilding Wednesdays!  Every Wednesday, we spend what is probably far too much time walking through our worldbuilding process.  This week, we're going to walk through the various pressures that will impact the developing culture on The Hill.  Some will be obvious; others will be obvious in hindsight.

What We Have So Far

We'll go ahead and call the particular culture that we're looking at the Hill Culture as we move forward.  As of last week, we have a culture made up primarily of three subcultures that cooperate for mutual benefit, but don't necessarily blend in a giant metaphorical melting pot.  These people have not put out a call any time recently to send them your poor or huddled masses.  As time goes on, they'll form a collective cultural identity, but for now, we can treat them like subcultures wearing a trench coat.

This particular trench coat contains a colony of scalies who have a fondness for gladiatorial combat and mad science, a forest of furries that are both wealthier than and protective of the other two species, and nomadic tribes of nu humans that roam the open spaces between the shore and the trees, gathering and trading information with the others.

This is the status quo at present, but as the adage goes, "Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time."  What we're going to do this week is look at the various hits our Hill Culture might take... and which ones they probably won't take.

The Hits Start Coming

Global change is unlikely, given the way we've set up our world.  While the interplay between The Lantern (our world's moon-sized sun) and the two moons creates some crazy tides, the world is simply too large to have much of anything affect it at a large scale.  Normally, the mass of the planet would encourage violent behavior, but our world is much less massive than other planets of its scale.  So it is that, like Jupiter, the global systems in place will encourage storms that last for centuries... but unlike Jupiter, they'll never be stronger than heavier-than-normal rain or the occasional mild lightning storm.

As far as environmental effects go, the most likely to have an impact on the area are tectonic in nature.  We haven't gone too far in this direction, but we can make some assumptions about tectonic activity due to the combination of mass, plate size, and the presence of the Inland Sea.  Those assumptions indicate that the western half of the continent is slowly splitting from the eastern half, much as Madagascar is slowly moving away from Africa (and, relatively soon in terms of geologic time, Eastern Africa will follow suit).  Fault lines will very roughly follow the coastline, with low spots indicating spreading plates and higher spots indicating subduction.  This means that our basic map will have higher and steeper areas near the coastline, as the continental plates try to float over the oceanic plates.

Surprisingly, despite its proximity to quite a bit of coastline, the Hill won't see a lot of earthquakes.  New crust is being formed, pushing the two sides of the Strait at the end of the Inland Sea to slowly spread apart.  Earthquakes are not a problem.  Volcanoes might be.  Still, the closest volcanoes to the area will be beneath the waves, so until our culture starts sailing, the only eruptions we need worry about are of the "catastrophic" variety.  And even then, we don't have to worry about it, for the simple reason that if such an eruption occurred, the Hill Culture wouldn't be changed.

It would be wiped out entirely.

They Don't Stop Coming

Resources are not limited in this world.  The landmass we're looking at is 25 times larger than all of Earth's, and has roughly the same resource quantity per unit area.  This means that resources for our three species as a whole are 25 times as abundant as those on Earth.

Habitable, arable space is also not at a premium.  Rainfall is shockingly regular, so fresh water is abundant.  The amount of resources and space, in fact, is so great that a wholly different kind of pressure presents itself- it's hard to gather a population in one spot.  Far harder than it would be on Earth.  Small communities can grow from two separate social units encountering each other more or less by chance, but the natural inclination of all three species is to build hamlets, not cities.

Cities will make an appearance eventually, but not for the same reasons that drove the initial gasps of civilization on Earth.  The issue will be logistical in nature.  Due to the massive distances involved in travel, hubs will naturally form.  At a certain distance, people will be more inclined to travel to one hub than another, eventually giving rise to unofficial borders.  Improved logistics will create nations in our world, rather than conquest.

Conflict at small scales is inevitable.  Person to person, there will always be people who don't get along well together, and there will always be people who solve such tensions with violence.  However, the same logistical problems that will cause people to form a nation rather than travel all the way to the next nation over will also make nations far more hesitant to send armies.  The question of organized warfare has a different answer when you can double your territory with a three-day march, as opposed to spending six months just to get to the edge of your territory, let alone reaching the enemy's capital.

What does this say for the Hill Culture?  Well, mostly that the Hill Culture is on its own.  As long as the closest culture is months or years away, its influence on The Hill is incidental at best.

Now, inevitably, some might think, "Wouldn't the population grow to fill the space over time?"  And the answer to that is both yes and no.  Yes, the population will definitely grow, but it will also spread.  On Earth, once you reach a certain point, there is no more room; you run out of planet.  In our world, that point is 25 times further away.  And even if you managed to fill the entire continent, there are three more.  Combine that with the fact that our population growth won't work the same way, simply because we are dealing with three very different species, who couldn't interbreed if they wanted to, and we have slower population growth overall and a population capacity several orders of magnitude greater than any seen on Earth.

Ultimately, this hammers home what the most compelling pressure is going to be for the Hill Culture: distance.  When civilization does develop, it will be in the form of a single city-state, expanding only as far as it can easily reach.  Smaller communities will pop up at the edge of its reach, either serving as smaller hubs to draw in needed materials from further away or forming out of outliers who, for one reason or another, did not blend in with the developing society.  Mass combat won't be a thing, and thus the massive technological push that comes with war will also be absent.  Development will mostly work with the environment rather than shaping it, since reshaping such a large environment is so energy-intensive as to not be worth it.  Technologies regarding resource distribution will be relatively simple, since a human can lift ten times as much without issue; the benefits of machines are not as significant at the early levels.  Mechanical applications of force will be more important than ever; people will have a much greater incentive to develop the saw when their alternative is trying to cut through a 50-foot thick trunk with an axe.

Last but not least, technologies and techniques that can shorten travel time will be of vital importance and developed first.  Thanks to the furries, it is entirely possible that gliders are developed before the wheel.  When wheels are developed, however, vehicles will have one unique issue they must address that vehicles on Earth don't: staying on the road.  Lower friction and increased speed mean that vehicles can much more easily slide off any route and into potential danger.

Conclusion

We now have some idea of how culture on The Hill will develop.  Over time, the blended community will begin to develop into a singular city, with perhaps a few satellite towns later.  Its technologies will revolve around moving faster and farther, and instead of building city walls, the people of The Hill will build up into the trees.

Because we're slowly segueing into a discussion of technology, we should first take a look at how our current world lines up with the work done in our side-project, The Magic of Magicbuilding.  It won't change what we need to develop next, but it can change the flavor of those developments.