Matthew Peckham I’d have to imagine that, if the skies were so simple (perhaps the atmosphere is so dark that we can’t make out individual stars at night) we’d not have so much astronomy-oriented development, not so many Stonehenges and the like.

But we’d still probably have ENIAC and other computers. The motivation for much of this development was accounting. Much of the advancements in punch cards, the machinery of the Pascaline, IBM adding machiens, Lotus 123 and cuneiform, all of this was about keeping the books. This stuff borrowed technologically (a bit) from the gearmaking we know of clocks—clocks that were built around the regularity of the sun, not the moon or stranger objects in the heavens.

Accounting and (as mentioned with the ballistics example) warfare are enough to get us most of what we have, nevermind the heavens.