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human
[MCU] How did Wakanda industrialize?

Unlike most of the rest of the world, Wakanda developed its technology with little to no input from the global science/engineering community. 

Wakanda is a tiny nation, with only six million people, but this rapid development is plausible because of their access to the miracle material Vibranium.

I’m guessing that the prosperity from Vibranium made Wakanda rich enough that they could invest large amounts of time and resources into technical/scientific education and research and development.

Coupled with mass automation, maybe Wakandan society is such that a good half of the entire population are the equivalent of PhD holding experts in various fields, which lets them remain competitive against a global population of 7 billion. (Population is roughly 6 million, 3 million experts and their robot/AI assistants is nothing to sneeze at)

So far, so good.

The problem comes from the intermediate steps in between going from a primarily agrarian society (like the vast majority of pre-industrial societies) to an industrialized one.

In the rest of the world, this was made possible by better agricultural techniques and crops from the New World like potatoes and corn, which allowed for much larger populations, leading to mass urbanization and factories that took advantage of economy of scale. 

Improved metallurgy and wood shortages led to the heavy use of coal in Britain, which led to the development of the steam engine, trains, electrification, the Haber Process, Green Revolution etc. 

I’m grossly oversimplifying, but I think you get what I mean, tech is somewhat evolutionary, you don’t jump straight from mechanical looms to moon landings, you have to go through the requisite intermediate steps first.

Having a material good for advanced technology doesn’t mean the area will develop rapidly - China wasn’t making microchips back in the Shang Dynasty even if they had tons of rare earth. 

People didn’t develop steam engines because one day that would lead to satellites and Internet, they developed it because they wanted to pump water out of mines easily.

Presumably, Wakandan technology developed along vastly different lines. I’m pretty sure they skipped right past the “steam engine” stage, but what gave them the necessary push?

In other words, what were the transitional technologies that Wakanda developed in order to transform into an industrialized society?

Like, maybe they started out by automating farming with crude, magnetically levitating tractors? Nothing complicated, just a big vibranium plow that floated and drove itself forward. 

Or maybe some sort of hyper effective vibranium enhanced fertilizer/plant growing aura or something. 

Then the increased crop yields led to more robust logistics and transportation infrastructure, like vibranium maglev wagons and carts that can haul massive amounts of food back to the cities, fueling urbanization.

The large urban population quickly figures out how to turn vibranium into a power source or solar panel or whatever, and they electrify everything. 

From there, they develop vibranium factories, trains, cars, telecommunications, and it’s all downhill from there.

Is that a plausible path to development? It still sounds a little strange to me.

Like, everything is totally plausible once Wakanda develops a solid manufacturing base. 

But I’m not sure about how they got there in the first place, not sure floating plows and fertilizer is sufficient to make that jump. 

Any ideas? Like, a rough (speculative) timeline of Wakandan technological development? When they hit major milestones, how one technology transitioned into another etc.

EDIT:

On that note, I’m also wondering what the DC universe Atlantis tech tree would look like. Being underwater means no fire, and smelting is tough. How did they go from primordial slime to hyper advanced underwater civilization?
gpt
I like to think of it like this;

First off, Wakanda didn't actually industrialize as quickly as the rest of the world. They just started a lot earlier, and took a lot longer. This is why their culture is still so traditional - they never had a big 'shake-up' caused by rapid technological development, because they sat on 'transitional' technologies for so long.

Basically, Vibranium is such a complex, miracle material that simply learning to work it necessitated they develop the rest of the 'tech tree', so to speak. Vibranium was also the lynch pin of every culture in Wakanda - any tribe that figured out some new way to use it would have an advantage over everyone else, fueling a sort of endless technological race that probably only cooled in modern, more united times. 

The true Wakandan advantage is not just that they have Vibranium, but that Vibranium and their unique environment/starting conditions necessitated that they develop their own version of the scientific method all the way back in pre-history. Wakanda had something no other culture had - a concrete, physical 'mystery' they based their entire culture around trying to understand. Vibranium gave Wakandans an almost religious tendency towards science. Wakandans have been doing 'experiments' and conducting 'studies' for longer than some cultures have even existed, all in the service of understanding and using Vibranium. Wakanda has been 'scientific/academic' for so long (at least in the comics) that they actually are ruled by a Philosopher King/Emperor Scientist right out of Plato's wildest dreams - The Black Panther. 

This process was quite slow. Whatever the Vibranium equivalent of the Steam Engine is, they probably 'sat' on that technology for so long their culture was able to adapt to it fully before they moved on to the next big thing. This is not only because Vibranium is hard to work and understand, but also because a Vibranium 'Steam' Engine is probably so much more useful than the 'mundane' version that they had no real pressing 'need' to improve on it (except for the aforementioned cultural pressures). 

And yet Wakanda started this process so early that they still managed to reach the modern age (and the resultant acceleration of progress) long before the rest of their world, cementing their place as the most advanced nation on Earth. Their unique circumstances led them on a pretty distinct technological path that let them preserve their original culture to a remarkable degree even as they became hyper-advanced.