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Old 11-13-2016, 02:29 AM   #61
David Johnston2
 
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Default Re: Roads Not Taken

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
I did mention how fun it is making up alternate realities with alternate physics. But that's not how I always interpreted the title phrase. I think of my own life and roads not taken. To be taken or not taken, they have to at the very least be possible.
.
Except that the title actually refers to the Turtledove science fiction story where everyone in the galaxy is a moron except us but we were so clever that we overlooked easily discovered antigravity and faster than light movement in favour of discovering other things.
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Old 11-13-2016, 02:59 AM   #62
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But removing all computers more complex than mechanical Babbage engines would take some serious historical manhandling.
Well, if you remove electricity you're going to be left with mechanical computers and a few oddities like fluidics.
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Old 11-13-2016, 05:11 AM   #63
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Default Re: Roads Not Taken

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Except that the title actually refers to the Turtledove science fiction story where everyone in the galaxy is a moron except us but we were so clever that we overlooked easily discovered antigravity and faster than light movement in favour of discovering other things.
I didn't see any specific book reference. The expression long predates that series, so I can't be the only one working without unwritten context.
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Old 11-13-2016, 12:39 PM   #64
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The OP lists a number of physics-breaking changes. I wouldn't worry about it.

I think it might be especially interesting to remove integrated circuits. It might be as easy as having the first few experimental batches fail due to contaminants or some small design error, and then basically have the idea kiboshed as "unworkable in practice."

Personal computers remain a hobbyist's toy, networking doesn't take off. I hesitate to say that society would remain stuck in the '70s, but lacking widespread computerized communication, society certainly could stagnate. Nothing would keep the USSR standing, though, so we might kind of get a '90s and '00s that resemble the '80s, just with the USA as sole superpower.

By 2016 we might be entering into a 7+1 TL with very small and expensive multitubes powering a lot of systems where we currently have microprocessors. Much of the equipment in High-Tech would be functionally identical, but have subtle differences due to the fact it was designed by hand instead of on a computer. In general, people from this timeline might have TL 8 skills, but they would have bought them up higher than equivalent people in other settings in order to work off the penalties for not having computerized tools.

"Secretary" would be a somewhat more common position. Industry (particularly in the western world) would be far less efficient than it is today, with many more workers doing jobs currently done by machine. While luddites might rejoice, these jobs would likely be poor-paying and even more prone to export to the outside world.

What computers there are consist of immense tabulating machines, perhaps one megaframe for a business or a city, which acts mainly as a spreadsheet. There might be a few terminals, but it's so expensive and finicky that nobody would seriously consider buying one for the home.

Tabletop roleplaying games would be the essential entertainment of the era. They take all forms and all settings. A few games are hulking, bookshelf-filling behemoths requiring a Dungeon Master, electronic tabulators, and a small book of notes for each player character. Some are for a single player to explore, where every turn of the trail is determined by dice as it happens. A number of play-by-post services exist, where each player writes a short letter to a commercial office describing their actions and comments, then waits one or two weeks for a response, which may include the consequences of other players from around the world.

One especially successful game has thousands of players living in the same imagined world for more than a decade now, and more than a few players have "married" their characters together.
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Old 11-13-2016, 10:50 PM   #65
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I think it might be especially interesting to remove integrated circuits.
The problem here though, is even if you can wipe ICs right off the map, transistors are still around (hard to eliminate those, invented independently twice). Even if ICs fail because of contamination, they'll still be trying to shrink the transistors down, and you might see hybrid IC computers replacing microcomputers. If it's not a contamination problem, I doubt electrical engineers would fail to design a NAND gate in a package that many times. Computer Aided Design will probably be a little behind, if design flaws were stopping ICs, an IC simulator might be pushed.

Either way, you still get timesharing systems (PDP-10 was a big timesharing computer, no ICs.) Even without timesharing systems, anyone operating a computer will be buying three (1 spooling input, 1 output, 1 processing). Industrial robots are probably drastically delayed, at best.
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Old 11-14-2016, 08:51 AM   #66
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Except that the title actually refers to the Turtledove science fiction story where everyone in the galaxy is a moron except us but we were so clever that we overlooked easily discovered antigravity and faster than light movement in favour of discovering other things.
That's a great story. Turtledove is one of my favorite authors.
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Old 11-14-2016, 03:44 PM   #67
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Heck, let's go full Turtledove:

A group of Neanderthals, pushed against the wall of the ice age, develop a kind of psionic gestalt form of Jumper. It works best with about 60 individuals in a given group - more and it gets unpredictable, fewer and the per-individual FP cost gradually increases.

Freed from the physical limitations of a hunting and gathering in a specific world, the Neanderthals travel in bands of between 20 and 100, splitting as they grow and merging when weak.

Over the millennia, they've learned a few things -- they have metal tools, they wear cloaks and togas, that sort of thing -- but if they can be said to have a real TL, it's functionally TL 1, with individuals having High TL in specific skills. They just happen to have world-jumping capability.
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Old 11-16-2016, 06:05 AM   #68
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Early discovery of penicillin and sanitation. What would the world look like without, let's say, the black death? Massive overpopulation, no economic boom and higher living standards afterwards? Widespread starvation? What about armies that didn't lose large amounts of soldiers to disease during long campaigns?

Would it result in a longer and darker medieval period or would it be a golden era with more people and less suffering? Disease has played a large role thru history after all.

Now this is very eurocentric, but that's because I am woefully ignorant of the role of disease in other parts of the world. If someone has other thoughts that's be interesting too
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Old 11-16-2016, 07:35 AM   #69
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Early discovery of penicillin and sanitation. What would the world look like without, let's say, the black death? Massive overpopulation, no economic boom and higher living standards afterwards? Widespread starvation?
Widespread starvation is the normal human condition.

It's not medicine that's responsible for the recent population boom, but fact that since about the 18th century the world has been expanding its food supply so fast that this is no longer totally true. Indeed most plagues are only so severe because the people they're spreading through are half starved. Black death is certainly one of those - in modern times most people bitten by plague infected fleas never have any symptoms at all, and the survival rate of those who do is something like 50% even without treatment. Though tetracycline has gotten cheap enough it's rarely untreated this last half century. In the days when it was killing whole villages it probably wasn't any worse, it's just people even in third world places with lousy healthcare systems are mostly better fed now than medieval Europeans in winter.
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Old 11-16-2016, 08:00 AM   #70
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Widespread starvation is the normal human condition.

It's not medicine that's responsible for the recent population boom, but fact that since about the 18th century the world has been expanding its food supply so fast that this is no longer totally true. Indeed most plagues are only so severe because the people they're spreading through are half starved. Black death is certainly one of those - in modern times most people bitten by plague infected fleas never have any symptoms at all, and the survival rate of those who do is something like 50% even without treatment. Though tetracycline has gotten cheap enough it's rarely untreated this last half century. In the days when it was killing whole villages it probably wasn't any worse, it's just people even in third world places with lousy healthcare systems are mostly better fed now than medieval Europeans in winter.
Widespread starvation is indeed the standard. However: Medieval Europe was on the verge of overpopulation at the time the black death broke out. While the black death was a terrible tragedy that killed large parts of europe, those who survived was rewarded with much higher living standards and much less starvation due to the resources now freed up. Food was relatively plentiful and wages for those without own land was driven up due to the shortage of workers. Life in post-plague europe was probably as good as life got in medieval europe. Without the black death, the renaissance would probably have been severely delayed. The population of europe didn't recover to pre-black death numbers for hundreds of years.

And beyond the black death, with penicillin and sanitation, death during childbirth, from infection, from dysentery, pneumonia and cholera etc. would be dramatically reduced which would also mean a much faster population growth. Saying that medicine is not responsible for the recent boom is definitely not true. The means to produce much larger amounts of food per acre means we have the means to support the larger population.

Last edited by DeathDaisy; 11-16-2016 at 08:09 AM.
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