Roads Not Taken

[David Johnston2]

There are two basic approaches to creating divergent technologies. The first is to take away away something we had. A resource, a breakthrough, a need. The second is to give something we never had, frequently some kind of super science since it's difficult to imagine major breakthroughs that could have happened but did not.

An example of the first one would be my recent suggestion of a world which had never invented the concept of a "firing chamber" and were slow to develop electricity. So instead of having rifles they had small rocket launchers, and instead of having the internal combustion engines, they just had improved steam engines.

An example of the second would be the discovery of a plentiful room temperature superconductor at TL 6 or the integration of functional magic into advanced physical technology.

So what can we take away?
What can we give?

List of things to take away:

Petroleum
Alternating current
Fire
The computer chip
Iron and denser metals
Rubber
Wood
Radioactivity

List of things to give

A racial superpower
Magic enchantments
Exotic negative mass matter.
Fully developed Babbage machines
A heat source that requires no fuel
A way to detect (and generate) tachyons

[McAllister]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

A heat source that requires no fuel

This might be a fun thought experiment: what's the lowest TL at which you can give a society the ability to break the law of conversation of energy, and they can leverage it into a post-scarcity economy? At least, it's interesting to me.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by McAllister

This might be a fun thought experiment: what's the lowest TL at which you can give a society the ability to break the law of conversation of energy, and they can leverage it into a post-scarcity economy? At least, it's interesting to me.

By definition, a post-scarcity situation, could one exist, would not be an "economy": You would have unlimited amounts of everything you wanted, so you wouldn't need to economize.

But breaking the law of conservation of energy wouldn't give you post-scarcity; it would just make something other than energy the limiting resource. Maybe land area to occupy; or maybe time to send and receive messages, if you spread out across the sidereal universe. Or maybe just heat sinks; if you created all that extra energy, it would have to go somewhere, or you'd have global warming big time.

The law of conservation of energy was formulated at TL5, so that's where it could be broken by intent. At lower TLs you'd be creating some specific form of energy out of nothing. The Renaissance already had the idea of the self-turning wheel or perpetual motion machine; would that do?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by McAllister

This might be a fun thought experiment: what's the lowest TL at which you can give a society the ability to break the law of conversation of energy, and they can leverage it into a post-scarcity economy? At least, it's interesting to me.

It would be higher than TL 8. But don't take it too literally. I only meant that it would be some method of producing heat that could go at least for years without requiring any more fuel. A fuel that was consumed extremely slowly would do the trick.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

A fuel that was consumed extremely slowly would do the trick.

A natural nuclear reactor, a la Oklo?

[tanksoldier]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

It would be higher than TL 8. But don't take it too literally. I only meant that it would be some method of producing heat that could go at least for years without requiring any more fuel. A fuel that was consumed extremely slowly would do the trick.

The problem with that is that you're adding energy to a closed system. That's the "reason" for the conservation or energy law.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by tanksoldier

The problem with that is that you're adding energy to a closed system. That's the "reason" for the conservation or energy law.

Not if I am using the aforementioned slow burning super fuel. Nor for that matter if I am using let's say an "ether furnace" that "burns" ambient dark matter. And even if I am...so what?

[jason taylor]

Reliable contact fuse grenades edging out the musket.

Hyper accurate parachutes preventing the drop being replaced by the heliocopter(on one occasion in Vietnam a general ordered a drop because he was desperate to get a lot of men in the AO on time even at the risk of scatter; accurate chutes would make that less of a tricky decision).

Wire fences in the Middle Ages. Wire springs in hollow bows(like a Kernmantle rope). Allowing Sedentarists to gain an edge over Steppemen much sooner then they did.

Medieval Multitool knives.

[Flyndaran]

Rubber, leather, wood, etc. are all amazing biological materials important to ancient and modern technology.
Why not give some equally amazing but novel hypothetical yet realistic material?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Rubber, leather, wood, etc. are all amazing biological materials important to ancient and modern technology.
Why not give some equally amazing but novel hypothetical yet realistic material?

Fibers are pretty amazing too, and suggest the difficulty of doing this. Who would look at fluff around cotton seeds and predict rope or cloth or cardboard paper?