Proginoskes Wrote:I suppose the question is, how sure are scholars that Columbian tech is wave-free? Because in the absence of evidence to the contrary, my assumption would be that the 'wave has been around much longer than previously thought, not that the people of Columbia managed to hack together greysci or darksci in its absence.
It's by no means a majority opinion yet, but the Emerging Historical Consensus(tm) is that Columbia represents the last premature flowering of wavetech, one of a long line of such things that dates back at least to the Qin Dynasty and has popped up all over the world. The hypothesis is that wavetech has shown up multiple times in human history only to die out due to outside factors (poor resources, the users being too isolated or closing themselves off from the world, the users being destroyed by their own creations, etc.) before it can spread to the rest of the world. Columbia's disappearance seems to bear that out; the people who built it were geniuses, but also isolationist, paranoid and most likely killed themselves.
(It should also be noted here that even in 20XX, nobody knows exactly what happened to Columbia. The city vanished from all observers somewhere between the death of King Edward VII and the beginning of the First World War, and very little in terms of artifacts have ever been recovered. "Today" most people have forgotten it, much like most people've forgotten the 1890s in general. Only historians and cranks know anything about the city period.)
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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