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The industrial revolution itself needed everything to align, though.
Even the Romans experimented with steam power, and later on the Ottomans got a bit further (I wrote here about their automatic spit turner once), but nobody ever got anywhere.
Consider the situation in early modern Western Europe, and in Britain in particular.
Due to the ban on cousin marriage, Western Europe was detribalized and relatively individualist. This ended up enabling cooperation between unrelated strangers on the basis of contracts; the basis of modern capitalism.
There was very little slavery, and after the Black Death, a manpower shortage. In combination with the proto-capitalism, this encouraged the development and use of machinery. Mills (wind or water-powered) were everywhere, and put to many uses. We still refer to factories as mills sometimes, even in the metaphorical sense, such as in the term "puppy mill".
Europe was politically divided, and everyone was fighting each other. This caused an arms race where everyone was trying to make more powerful cannons. This spurred development of better metallurgy to make stronger cannons. The exact same development also gets you stronger boilers and cylinders.
Due to deforestation, Britain had run out of wood for heating. Britain also had abundant surface coal deposits. Coal was disliked because of the pollution you get from burning it, but it is for sure better than nothing, so they switched to coal out of necessity.
Then they ran out of surface coal too and started digging, but the mines filled up with water which had to be pumped out. At first this was done by horses. But Thomas Newcomen came up with a proto-steam engine. It wasn't that much better than the earlier attempts, but this one had an actual use case: it could pump the water out of the coal mines, and it could run on the coal dust that couldn't be sold, so it was basically free to run in the context of a coal mine, no matter how inefficient it was.
There now being a commercial use case, proper development of the steam engine commenced. Here's where the cannon metallurgy comes in: more pressure means more powerful engines. Neither the Romans nor the Ottomans could've managed that, for lack of metallurgy alone.
At the same time, the spinning jenny had been invented. At the same time as that, Britain was expanding its empire, and cotton from India was flowing in faster than it could be spun. At the same time as that, the flying shuttle had been invented, which meant the weavers were weaving so fast they were running out of yarn. All of this can be traced back to the "cooperation between unrelated strangers" bit. Turns out if you hook up a spinning jenny to a steam engine, you can make a whole lot of yarn. If you just so happen to have an oversupply of cotton and there just so happens to be a sudden large demand for yarn, this could make commercial sense.
Once you have a properly elaborated external combustion engine, the internal combustion engine is just a little development away.
Nothing else will really do. Windmills were perfectly adequate for milling grain. The bottleneck there was the farming. To improve the farming needs tractors. Steam tractors did exist but that's far into the refinement of the steam engine, you're not getting to that point from scratch. A small spinning jenny can be hand-cranked; and it can't really be wind-powered because the power delivery is not regular enough. And again the spinning jenny is constrained by its inputs which have to be farmed, unless you perhaps have a huge world-spanning empire that produces a lot. And before that you need to have a culture that's used to developing machinery, and a culture in which it's usual to work together and pool capital to set up businesses.
Everything happened to line up just so.
Steam power is an interesting case and Thomas Newcomen the key figure. You cannot build steam engines without good quality steel. The problem is the boiler, without good quality boiler plate it will leak and perhaps even burst. Scalded to death by steam is a bad way to die. But steel making needs steam engines to drive the fans to provide the blast for the blast furnace, and is generally an industrial enterprise. Before the industrial revolution, steel making was a small scale craft industry; the steel never got hot enough to actually melt, and purifying it took endless hammering. You had little bits of steel for wood working tools, swords, wire to make mail, maybe even plate armor if you were seriously rich and could afford the vast expensive. Since it was a matter of life or death you would pay if you could. It was too small scale and expensive for engine building.
It is a bit of dead lock. You have to have steam engines before you can make good steel. You have to have good steel before you can have steam engines.
Thomas Newcomen's special genius was to spot a loophole. Obviously you needed high pressure steam to push the piston up the cylinder. Or did you? There was that weird business with hemispheres in Magdeburg. Newcomen built his steam circuit at atmospheric pressure. The same pressure inside the boiler as outside. No bursting. Confused steam at the bad joints: was the steam supposed to be leaking out, or the air leaking in? And then he condensed the steam to create a vacuum and have the atmosphere push the piston down the cylinder. He still needed a robust cylinder, which was the really expensive component (Wikipedia says brass, but I couldn't confirm that in Rolt & Allen, so I still want to guess bronze, like a cannon). But he had solved the problem of how to build a steam engine despite not having good enough steel to make a proper, high pressure boiler.
I'm arguing that the narrowest bottle neck obstructing the industrial revolution is needing the sequence of first Otto von Guericke and then Thomas Newcomen.
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"Would Song China have industrialised if they hadn't been curbstomped by first the Jin and later Genghis Khan" is one of the great what-ifs of history. I am not a China expert, but based on schoolboy history they had high-trust commerce-supporting institutions (1), widespread use of water power (2), better metallurgy than the pre-industrial west (3), and underground coal mining (4).
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I generally agree with you that the industrial revolution was somewhat miraculous (and I appreciate all the historical detail!). I'm just not as certain that history couldn't have taken a slightly different path to the same endpoint - are you confident that each of your 8 steps are an inseparable part of the path to industrialization? Or, indeed, couldn't the same factors instead have aligned 3,000 years later, which would make zero difference to the Fermi Paradox?
There's a classic question of just how inevitable history is. There's Great man theory, which posits that it's highly dependent on the tiniest chaotic factors: the existence of particular individuals. On the other hand, a lot of innovations in math, science, and engineering were developed in multiple places simultaneously (calculus being one famous example), suggesting that technology might just progress in a somewhat straight line until certain advances "crystallize" out of it.
And at the timescales of the Drake Equation, you can't just argue that we were lucky to hit the industrial revolution quickly; you have to argue that, without X, we wouldn't have hit it in a million years (or however long it would take for a thriving medieval-level species to get wiped out by a global event). X = "cheap accessible hydrocarbons" does make for a reasonable hypothesis here.
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