(01-24-2017, 07:25 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: If Edison never invented the light bulb, we'd never have had a light bulb! No one else would have ever created it; It simply wouldn't exist outside of that specific date and time.
...I know the lore establishes that DRKs in Ishgard discovered the arts but I'm content to let people dwell in that rather expansive grey area.
I'm content to let people dwell on whatever they like. I'm not here to judge...
Your example works only if you position yourself in a later timeframe of Edison (or whoever of the various previous inventors of the lightbulb you fancy).
If you position yourself at the exact timeframe of Edison, then nobody invented it elsewhere. It starts to get muddled since the world was already open and globalizing, but the analogy can work even better with inventions like black powder, which was indeed already used on the other side of the known world back then by the chinese among others.
But if you start taking as a frame of reference the time when they invented black powder there, and not in the western world where it was ported centuries later, then I believe to be fairly certain that they were the first to have done that and that it wasn't used anywhere else in the world.
So, my point is, maybe it happens elsewhere. Or maybe not. It's out of the lore current boundaries, and thus, fanon at best.
Balmung:Â Suen Shyu