# 40 000 Years Later. No changes?!



## King_Cagn (Nov 21, 2014)

So guys as I'm slowly structuring the world which my short stories play in, a somewhat troubling thought came too me. In Godlings, the mentor of the MC is very old... He's about 42 000 Years old - give or take. Amongst his sect he is known as the last godling to "kill" a grand abomination - I'm seriously talking about the unfathomable beings that come from Cosmic Horror here.

Anyway, the even happened about 40 000 Years prior to the current time line in the story. Now I know that that is a very long long time but this world is a fantasy world with elves and mythical creatures and what not, so technically progress is very slow, right? 

I mean I know we're all creatures of progress but when I look at it, again we also very traditional and scared of change, so could that be my "excuse"  to why the world is still the way it is an has marginally changed in those 40 000 Years? 

I'd like your input on this guys. Thanks.


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## Trick (Nov 21, 2014)

You can do whatever you want, if you can pull it off. Could  the godlings be holding progress back somehow? Is magic so easily attainable that there never arises a need for technological advance? Does technology even work in your world? Maybe the laws of physics are different than earth's? What technological level were they at 40,000 years before? Since this seems like a creation story, not evolution, the people could have been created without the natural tendency to improve things...

Just my $0.02


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## WooHooMan (Nov 21, 2014)

Over the course of 40,000 years, we in the real-world have gone from cave-paintings and hunting mammoths to having internet on our cellphones.  Saying little to no change happened over 40,000 years is totally unbelievable.  Like, "immersion-breaking" levels of unbelievable.

So, my suggestion is to make the guy younger.  I know it might seem that making him younger would cause him to lose his mysticalness but keep in mind that 2,000 years old still qualifies as "ancient" and 5,000 qualifies as "prehistoric".

In a setting I got, there are some god-ish guys that are controlling how much the world changes.  Initial, I had them all be 3,000 years old but I found that that wasn't really working.  Then I changed it to 700 years and that made the timeline way more believable.  And even then, I had to make it so the world did progress a bit over those centuries.


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## cupiscent (Nov 21, 2014)

I am reminded of Eddings' world in the Belgariad/Mallorean, but he makes a specific story point (at some stage, it might be a retcon) that that world is "stalled" until the prophecy or good/evil thing is resolved.

Like Trick said, you can do anything, if you can pull it off. But you'll need a way of explaining why human tool-using ingenuity hasn't generally progressed far in 40k years.


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## King_Cagn (Nov 21, 2014)

@Trick Now that I look at it, I did design the world in such a way that normal human beings are very dependent on the ingenuity of magi, which are few-ish. But in truth what hinders their progress is too much dependence on their protectors, The Godlings. 

The Magi are very manipulative because they lazy up monarch to believe that they are the solution to all their problems. The Magi control all forms of science and engineering just as they do magic. Being as equally as old as the older seers (mentors), they want to prove that they are equally capable of protecting the world from these monsters that plague them. But concerning the progress of humanity is traditional means, because humans there are far too traditional to change.

I also believe that because of the existence of magic itself, physics is totally different and because of that they concept of time differs to a certain degree.

@WooHooMan I could make him younger but than it kills off the importance of that event and what it meant to the world. He is the only godling with hindsight but after the fight his eyes got 'corrupted' and bled out for months, so he had to get them blindfolded - that's what the common myth about him goes. In actual fact, his precog ability intensified to such a degree that he could see all outcomes of everything at all times - he could literally all outcomes to everything around him, hence the blindfold.

It was ability that brought to the conception of the MC because all outcomes were bad, so he decided to bring out an improbablity to what was the an inevitability. It was a 40 000 year plan actually, it took very subtle manipulations in, hence the slow human progress.


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## WooHooMan (Nov 21, 2014)

King_Cagn said:


> @WooHooMan I could make him younger but than it kills off the importance of that event and what it meant to the world. He is the only godling with hindsight but after the fight his eyes got 'corrupted' and bled out for months, so he had to get them blindfolded - that's what the common myth about him goes. In actual fact, his precog ability intensified to such a degree that he could see all outcomes of everything at all times - he could literally all outcomes to everything around him, hence the blindfold.



I don't think that making a smaller time frame would negate any of this, though.
I want to point out that Gilgamesh (if he existed) is less than 5,000 years old, Jesus is supposedly 2,014 years old and Buddha is in the ballpark of 2,500 years old.  And just think of all the myths, legends and influence those three are responsible of.

If your heart is totally set on making this dude 40,000 years old and nothing anyone says can change your mind, though go ahead and do it.  I'm just trying to say it'd be more believable story/setting-wise to make him younger.

I also still think it's unbelievable that someone, regardless of his powers, can totally halt civilization progress for so long.  Even the Fall of Rome, the Dark Ages and two World Wars didn't have that kind of devastation.
But whatever, it's fantasy, I guess.


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## King_Cagn (Nov 21, 2014)

@WooHooMan I'm not set on making him utterly halt the progress of the entire world, though I may look at it like this, in that span of 40 000 years moved from a primitive social structure when the world was ebbing away from the early millenia where there was utter chaos and magic was still raw.

40 000 years later, the world in the Era that I set it in. It seems more logical if I took that approach.


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## Asura Levi (Nov 21, 2014)

Well, we humans can always cause the right kind of catastrophe to brings us back to the stone age. If you have that kind of stuff happening..


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## Legendary Sidekick (Nov 21, 2014)

As WooHooMan says, do as you will since it's your fantasy story. But I just wanted to jump in and suggest you don't let your world-building get in the way of your storytelling.

What I mean by that: you have in the title of this thread, "No changes?!" with a question-mark-exclamation-point combo finish. That implies that you're wondering if readers would find that hard to swallow. Then you have people saying, yeah it is because the world progresses in 40 years, never mind 40,000.

I guess my question to you is: must the world have no progression? I think you can get away with having people still fight with melee weapons (stone => 40K yrs. => steel) and the linguistics would change, but you _shouldn't_ show that. Or there's the other question: must the plan be 40K years?



If you're interested, here's an example of my world-building getting in the way of my storytelling.


Spoiler: the example



This happened today.

I was just looking at a "Barbarian Schoolgirl" story written in the form of a diary/journal. I thought of how the MC's "high school" education would start at the age of 100 moons (14 years and 2 months; there are 7 months in a year) and each month has a name, such as Blood Moon for the late autumn hunting season… so an entry might start like "Day 52 of the Blood Moon." Then it hit me that I could just have the journal entries not be tied to any cultural calendar, but to the school day: Day 1, Day 2, etc. If the question of age comes up, she's 14.

In other words, my world-building stuff—which I liked—was making my story a clumsy read by including information that the reader doesn't need in order to be entertained. Instead, my reader would likely be asking questions I don't want asked, like "Day 52?! Why is a month so friggin' long?!" I had to ask myself if it's really that important, since the only place the names of months come up are the journal entry dates. It's like naming a chapter, but in a way that chapters have very similar names with numbers mixed in… and there are 180 of them.

By going the simpler route, I save myself the trouble of explaining stuff in a story that's meant to be fun, light reading from one character's POV.


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## WooHooMan (Nov 21, 2014)

I feel like you're underestimating just how much happens in 40,000 years.
Personally, I think a setting were very little happens in 40,000 years sounds like a boring setting.  

But if you're set on 40,000, go for it.


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## King_Cagn (Nov 21, 2014)

@Legendary Sidekick I think as a logical person I wouldn't deny a civilization progress but as a writer I believe I can only if it has significance which it does, right? 

Also he - the old guy - needed to find a way to manipulate certain things around him to achieve the (re)birth of the MC, unfortunately it took that long because he needed certain events to happen to create the window to what the MC is,  improbablity in an inevitability, a good outcome to the infinitely bad ones. 

I don't know if I'm making sense, if you get me?


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## King_Cagn (Nov 21, 2014)

@WooHooMan I think I might have initially summed it up and said it wrong, but I never was good at such complexities. Anyway, I'm willing to let the setting progress, I never underestimated what happens over a period of time, merely what would slow down the progress of advancement in that period. 40 000 years is a very long time, by logical standards way too long without anything happening. 

I will have the civilization advance but also have major factors that hinder the advancement of civilization over that period, such as wars, plagues, monsters and even conquest. Haha, I'm a person that likes too go hard on something, so I'm sorry if I sound a bit unwilling and hard-headed with the idea.


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## Penpilot (Nov 22, 2014)

Change never stops, but change doesn't always mean advancement. It can mean regression. Attitudes change and sometimes those changes go backwards. Think about the anti-vaxxers. Because of their efforts, diseases thought wiped out are coming back. That's a leap backwards. Right now there are people who deny science, and some of those people aren't just nutjobs. Some have great sway.

Here's a link to a historic decline of advancement.
Islamic Golden Age - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

Been poking around wikipedia for other stuff too.
Anatomically modern humans - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Behavioral modernity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Civilization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


So modern human behaviour came about around 50 000 years ago. Sure in that time frame we went from cave paintings to cell phones. But when you think about it, civilization only started developing around 10 000 years ago. So that's a 40 000 year gap where progress was very slow.

The modern world with flushing toilets, electricity, and concrete only came about within the last two hundred years. Before that, it was horses and carriages and swords and armor.

TL;DR? It's a fantasy world, and for me, as long as you set up the world right, a 40 000 year old character wouldn't make me blink.


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## Asura Levi (Nov 22, 2014)

Also, that is a need to state his age? He is freaking legendary just by being old and tales that he fought the grand abomination during 'creation'/ancient/beyond memory times would make him interesting without the need to state his age.

Take Gandalf, he is as old as Arda but that is never actually specified in the LotR books. It is just said that when bilbo was a young hobbit he was already old.


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## Queshire (Nov 22, 2014)

Medieval Stasis like this is a pet peeve of mine, mostly because I choose to let it be. It's a trope. It's a pretty common trope. If you use it I doubt enough readers will take offense to be a matter, however as this thread demonstrates it's not really something that stands up when a light is shined on it. The question is, can your pride as a writer withstand an intentional weakness like that for the sake of the plot of the story? That's up to you, looking back through the thread it looks like we have done a real shitty job of swaying you enough to include it.


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## Legendary Sidekick (Nov 22, 2014)

Queshire said:


> The question is, can *your pride as a writer* withstand an intentional weakness like that for the sake of the plot of the story?


Well put.

This is a struggle that (for me) doesn't end, or hasn't yet. I have to ask myself if the "experimental nature" of something I'm doing is really worth it. While my story is MY story, I still need to entertain readers. If I need to work hard to explain a story element so readers will get it or buy into it, I have to ask myself if that one element is helping or hurting the work overall.


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## Trick (Nov 22, 2014)

Penpilot said:


> Right now there are people who deny science, and some of those people aren't just nutjobs.



Can I ask what that's supposed to mean? Because it seems rather insulting to the billions of people who believe in creation. 

May I point out that the OP said this story involves creation, or at least heavily implied it, so evolution doesn't even enter into the story unless he wants it to.


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## psychotick (Nov 22, 2014)

Hi,

Your issue here as I see it is that forty thousand years is such a damned long time. Long enough not just for societies to rise and fall, but for the species himself to adapt. Consider humankind. Forty thousand years ago two very different species were vieing for the crown - Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. Whether they fought, interbred, both or what have you both of those species were quite distinctive from one another.

So when you talk about civilization not advancing in that sort of time period, you really need to come up with a reason why. In doing so you have to ask what is it about our ancestry tree that allowed us to advance. And it was essentially having an availability of food easily obtained which allows for free time and thus progress made during that time. And also environmental stresses that force particular survival strategies - i.e. learning. So your answer is either going to be that life was so easy for those forty thousand years that there was never any need to advance - no selective pressure inshort. Or else it was so harsh that every time progress was made it was lost because those making the progress were wiped out.

You can throw in some lacks that would slow progress. For example the region of the world in which people live is low in metals - thus limiting advancement to stone age technology. Or that the fertile river valleys that sustained primitive agriculture in our prehistory didn't exist, and so people starved whenever their population expanded too far.

Cheers, Greg.


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## Penpilot (Nov 23, 2014)

Trick said:


> Can I ask what that's supposed to mean? Because it seems rather insulting to the billions of people who believe in creation.



I never mentioned any one specific group, and I did this deliberately, because there are many groups that do this. Well, actually, I did mention one, the anti-vaxxers, but many others fall under this umbrella as well. 

But feel free to read into it what ever you want and apply it to what ever group you think fits. 



Trick said:


> May I point out that the OP said this story involves creation, or at least heavily implied it, so evolution doesn't even enter into the story unless he wants it to.




The original post asked if it was plausible for advancement to stagnate. I pointed out ways in which it has been stagnated and reversed. I never mentioned anything about evolution or creation. You did.


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## wordwalker (Nov 23, 2014)

If you really want the sense of "much older than Earth records" and the traditional 2-4 thousand years we all think of, you might use a timeframe like 10,000, 12,000, or maybe even 20,000. It's a personal thing, but all of those figures feel to me like they're longer than our frame of reference but not too far to be believed. You might ask around from your fellow readers (like this thread) about what figure each feels works.

Of course, the more important this is to your story, maybe the longer it should be, and the more visible reasons you should have to justify it. 

You could alter your world's physics, but with 40,000 years to hold back this only goes so far. Sure "advanced chemicals and controlled electricity" might simply fail in your world, but how long ago has someone tried an advanced woodcut and created a printing press? Does _steam_ just not work? And what about the flow of ideas besides technology proper, from democracy to the population-changing effects of just understanding sanitation?

The longer your world's had, the more you might need a cataclysm or two or a really nasty history of strife and wars to keep things in place. And you'd probably still have remnants of "strange ideas" popping up and being crushed out here and there, every time someone thinks the established order isn't doing enough for them and starts looking around for a way to do it themselves.


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## Legendary Sidekick (Nov 23, 2014)

Don't forget that we stand on the shoulders of giants. We have written documentation of discoveries and an effective way to communicate facts, theories and discoveries to the next generation. In earlier times, there was this:








It's fascinating, but I imagine this did little to progress society in a way that is apparent to people of our time. Even then, there would be some progress. This painting could be a story about how P.J., the chief's son, used to wear a bird mask and literally scare the crap out of bisons. Finally, he was gored as a result of his foolishness. He died while having an erection, which is an embarrassment to his tribe. Grokmar the Bellyacher did what smart hunters to: he used his spear thrower tool to kill the bison from behind, spilling its entrails in a single shot. If only P.J. had learned to hunt like Grokmar…

Point is, we see evidence of the spear thrower tool, but there's no record of hunting tactics and other survival lessons that may have been passed on, which may have been great progress for that era. Thousands of years from now, no one will know how much the phone advanced in our lifetimes. What is life-changing for us will be as insignificant to the people of the year 10,000 as the lessons of this cave painting are to us.


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## King_Cagn (Nov 24, 2014)

Okay everyone I looked at it and came up with a solution to what could have halted the progress of civilization, and that is there world's version of an Ice Age that lasted approximately 30 000 years, thus implying that the physics is different and that the Ice Age was magically induced. 

Though I'll have to look deeper into this one.


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## Terry Greer (Nov 29, 2014)

If you're dead set on such a long time frame the one way you could do it and keep it credible is to have some repeating catastrophe or global change. For example a regular solar flare every few hundred years.
That could then be used to generate world-wide events that repeatedly cull the population and decimate societies so they revert to more primate technology.

Add in the fact that the society used up all the 'easy to obtain' natural resources in its first boom and you have a society that will never again enjoy an industrial revolution.

It could then have settled into a cyclic rise/fall almost steady state.


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## psychotick (Nov 29, 2014)

Hi,

I would seriously avoid the idea of a continuing ice age. Or of any calamity. Because eventually they'll all lead to one of two things happening. Either the people will die out or they'll move to somewhere better. Instead stick to the limitation of resources and ask yourself questions like why have many stone age tribes alive in the world today, not advanced?

As I said before, usually advancement occurs when people have free time - i.e. don't have to hunt and gather so much etc because there is abundant food. And free time plus the increased population that this allows - one or two of whom will be creative geniuses - will allow for advancement. But even then you can only advance in a way that your resources allow.

Cheers, Greg.


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## SM-Dreamer (Nov 30, 2014)

Do want to point out the Sumerian King List[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List where rulers are said to exist/reign for hundreds and thousands of years. 

Also, the world could have in that 40,000 years waxed and waned, cycled between periods of growth and stagnation, but ultimately still be the same because it never managed to get anywhere. Reasons could be warring, catastrophe, and the like not allowing the world to advance. 

We humans have been around for tens of thousands of years, and except for migrating and evolving, civilization is a relatively new thing. That's tens of thousands of years where we were too busy just trying to survive.

Is it sometimes irritating to see the "eternally middle ages" setting? Yes. Can it be explained properly and be made acceptable to the reader? Yes.


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## Saigonnus (Dec 1, 2014)

Not sure if it came up, but perhaps things in your world are cyclic. Perhaps 40K years ago was a "medieval setting" that advanced to the point where they "nuked" themselves back to the stone age, and since it would take a while to fully return from an event such as that, once more they advanced to the "medieval era" again... relearning old tricks as it were. Just a thought I had.


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## WeilderOfTheMonkeyBlade (Dec 4, 2014)

In my world, where there's only a TINY amount of iron, so all humans 'ave really got to work with is bronze, humans have gone, in 10,000 years, from down-trodden hunter gatherers - down trodden by the "elves" , wyverns and brownies and the Children of the Southern Storm, to ruling the world, basically, with basic and slow trains, airships, and powerful magic to  shape stone and build really well (and implement an amazing sewer system! Its so nice to be able to write about clean cities and have an proper reason as to why I'm doing so!). And this is without iron/steel, and with lots of monsters - Wyverns, various barbaric tribes of elves and Angels- winged and super powerful humanoids trying to kill them - so yeah, even with an attempt at a reason, I'm not buying 40,000 years of stasis. In another work I've had to include the Grey Plauge- something that makes the black death look weak - and which occurs every few thousand years, to explain why, in sixteen thousand years humans are only at late medieval/early modern period!


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## Saigonnus (Dec 4, 2014)

Just wondering why, if a plague occurs fairly regularly (in geologic terms), hasn't the humans developed an immunity to it. It stands to reason if you are infected by the black plague and live, you will be immune to it, and pass that immunity on to your off-spring. That is whay happened with the bubonic plague in south and central America. When the spaniards brought it with them and it wiped out much of the population, the rest developed a natural immunity. Now, mexicans, nicaraguans etc all have the same wonderful immunity that white European had from their exposure to it.


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## AllegedObserver (Dec 23, 2014)

Have you made a timeline?

I am putting together a fantasy setting where some of the race (Humans in this case) were originally space-faring colonists who crashed onto my world. Over the fullness of time (thousands of years) have grown in population, lost their mastery over technology, then discovered things, and so on. But I've made a basic timeline of events and have found it really useful. Especially when it comes to things like traditions, languages, regional histories and so on.


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## evanator66 (Dec 28, 2014)

I've got one: cycles of total dark ages. Every few thousand years, the <insert powerful entity here>s have gone to war against each other and wiped out all recent progress, causing the world to constantly be stuck in a medieval/ancient state. Also, there could be buried ruins, which contain mind-eating plagues (for humans) that cause a generation at a time to become complete idiots, setting back progress, however, the disease is magical and can only emerge once every few thousand years.


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## Philster401 (Dec 28, 2014)

Or it could that They decided to use magic instead of technology.


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