#Not like interdisciplinarity isn’t great but like

[rotzaprachim]

definitely an issue with the general pan-humanities think piece from people who are not actually polymaths. Many have status but not expertise

[script-a-world]

How much futuristic tech can I put being invented in the past (in secret by a single person or a civilian group) and not break the world or sound too implausible. Could there be space travel in Ancient Egypt? Or maybe there might be an internal timeline issue and how it aligns with other future tech? Or not since the people inventing them generally are not sharing? My story is not meant to be fantasy otherwise space travel in Ancient Egypt is absolute no problem.

Constablewrites: Short answer: for this premise to work as stated, you’d have to accept and embrace the fact that your story isn’t going to reside in the same post code as historical plausibility. Never heard of her, don’t think she even goes to this school. And that can work if you lean into it: make it explicitly an alternate timeline, or acknowledge in the story that it doesn’t make sense but we’re gonna go with it, or be just generally zany enough that something like this doesn’t stand out.

It’s not that you couldn’t make the general premise (some early civilization creating tech that is more advanced than what we have today) hold up. But specifically space travel, and specifically ancient Egypt, each stretch that premise beyond the breaking point.

First off, the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with pretty much two things: figuring out what lies beyond our world, and writing down absolutely everything in a form that won’t get destroyed by the desert. If they’d figured out some way to get off the planet, you’d better believe they would have recorded it in great detail and spread it around to all their trading partners as more evidence of their awesomeness as an empire. We know so much about ancient Egypt, so there aren’t a lot of holes in that historical record to squeeze in fabrications, let alone something with that many implications, while trying to keep the rest of it intact.

Then there’s the technology side. The thing about technological advances is that they build off each other. So you’re not gonna have an engine that can get you off the ground if everyone else is still relying on draft animals and carts. Getting to those engines was a collaborative effort that took decades of scientists building off the improvements of others. You can argue that it’s a closely-guarded secret, but the incentives to share that information are pretty strong (maybe you feel it would make people’s lives better, and/or you feel you’d make a lot more money with a broader customer base), to say nothing of the possibility of someone else independently developing something similar.

And that’s just one aspect of it. Getting people into space requires significant advancements in biology, propulsion chemistry, textiles, fuel and battery capacity, food storage and preparation, communications, astronomy… It’s a very long list of stuff that all has to come together, and it requires a level of resources and coordination that necessitates a strong and stable government (or a private organization that can function at the same level).

So, the answer to “Could there be space travel in ancient Egypt?” is pretty unequivocally “no.” That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to tweak the concept to make it work, though. Some suggestions:

A different civilization Egypt is one of the most extensively researched and documented histories on the planet. Go hipster and choose a civilization that’s pretty obscure, you probably haven’t heard of it--something with those gaps in our knowledge where you might be able to fit something like this. (A caveat: if the descendents of that civilization are presently marginalized and that’s not a history you share, that’s pretty solidly not your lane and you should proceed with extreme caution if at all.)

A different technology Maybe it’s the engines or the communications or the metallurgy individually that was secretly very advanced. Some other technological advancement far beyond its time is fairly plausible, especially considering that we’ve found devices that employed technologies that wouldn’t otherwise be in use for hundreds or thousands of years. There’s still some interdisciplinarity required for a lot of those, but not nearly to the extent of space travel, which is pretty much the final comprehensive exam for all human knowledge.

Embrace the fantasy This is an inherently sci-fi concept, so leaning into that is probably going to provide the most logical consistency. Maybe it was aliens (insert meme dude) or maybe it was just something like vibranium which has the specific chemical property of “whatever the writers need it to do at a given point in time.” Just something from outside our world that can counter the difficulties explained above.

Embrace the nonsense Yeah, it’s not remotely historically plausible, but we don’t mind because it’s That Kind of Story. Maintaining plausibility can help maintain a reader’s interest in the story because you’re avoiding those little niggling doubts that can pull them out of it. But the internal logic of a story is far more important than ensuring it adheres rigidly to real-world logic. And people will generally allow quite a bit of leeway for a story that is enjoyable and fun. Basically, if you know you aren’t going to get audience buy-in based on their believing this story could have actually happened, seek that buy-in through other means.