How would you do a TL 4 (+4) Earth?

[David Johnston2]

Leviathan is a book setting that has two different 4+3 technologies, one biotech and one dieselpunk. And of course they're at war.

[DocRailgun]

Maybe steal the biological Darktek from Dark Conspiracy?

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I was just curious how people would do a TL 4(+4) Earth without superscience and without alternate physics? What point of technology divergence would you choose and what would the technology that comes from that divergence look like? I like the idea of a biological TL 4(+4) Earth, triggered by the Columbian Exchange, with the Earth of 2020 possessing organic technology rather than digital technology.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Alcohol is a viable liquid fuel, and you can make that from any sugar.

The quality alcohol of varies wildly and burns too hot and fast to be a replacement for oil, gas, and coal. That is ignoring the time requirements needed to make alcohol that would be usable as a fuel.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Oils are also viable liquid fuels, and you can make them from any lipid. I imagine that a biological civilization would have used selective breeding to make high sugar and/or high oil crops suitable for alcohol and oil production..

The problem there is that it wasn't until Rudolf Diesel in late TL5 early TL6 that an engine able to utilize vegetable oil was designed.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The real limitation for a biological civilization is capacity, but they would also be able to limit population growth. A TL4 (+4) civilization would probably have only a population of 2 billion in 2020, but it may have the same nominal GDP as our civilization, meaning that per capita income would be $40,000 per year rather than $10,000 per year. Of course, our civilization could have also been like that if we had made different choices in 1960s.

There are so many variables that claiming that the GDP would be anywhere our own is ridiculous. Look at our own world and see the wild variation seen among TL7 cultures (North Korea and the USA are both TL7-8 but are wildly different). Never mind that GDP is not a measure of personal wealth so one can have much of the wealth held by a handful of people ala Mexico, Russia, China, etc. with the majority of the population poor as church mice.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by maximara

The problem there is that it wasn't until Rudolf Diesel in late TL5 early TL6 that an engine able to utilize vegetable oil was designed.

In principle you could burn vegetable oil in an external combustion engine. That's a simpler proposition than Diesel's work on internal combustion.