Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Greetings, all!

This more of a free practice for world-building, but I'm curious about possible differences that would make alternate worlds of a TL similar to ours (i.e. from TL7 to TL9, with almost-humans) look very different from ours. It seems that I'm not good at judging possible consequences, so both analyses of consequences and more examples are welcome. So, a few ideas of mine:

• No consumerism.
• No corporations at all.
• No makeup (okay, this one goes from than TL0 . . .).
• No skyscrapers and multilevel residences (only workplaces and hotels fall so low).
• No Superpowers (i.e. all countries are no larger than England, Poland, France etc.).
• No centralized cellphone systems (but radio relays are fully maintained by volunteers, linux-style).
• No patents - only copyrights and trademarks.
• No intellectual property, but only in the world of software.
• No governmental armies - only mercs.
• No mercs - armies started as militias and ended up as governmental armies.
• No social gender roles at all - wonder how that would affect technology from the onset.
• No internet.
• No GUIs.

Thanks in advance!

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

no war - world peace at TL7.
no cars - only mass transit and mopeds.
no space program - no satelites, gps, etc.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

I'm no government or economics expert, so I'm just going to stick to what I know here. Namely, life without the internet would be considerably different. Actually, I'm still in shock as to how dependent the world became on technology that only really took off 15 years ago.

No internet would mean that instant and non-personal communication becomes much, MUCH harder - the only way to get in contact with someone is to call them, visit them in person, or take the time to write a letter.

The time required to do any meaningful research probably triples or quadruples, as now you must go to a library, physically search for it, and copy the information you need.

No Google Maps. People with no sense of direction like myself. Enough said.

The entertainment industry would look remarkably different - as internet gaming would exist.

On the plus side, it makes things like identity theft that much more difficult, since millions of people aren't buying things electronically every day. And, it makes it harder for people like pedophiles and stalkers to do what they do, since the veil of anonymity the web provides suddenly disappears.

I'm sure there are other consequences, but these are all I can think of off the top of my head.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

For most of those, imagine a world that looks like Renaissance Europe, only with somewhat better toys. A lot of the things you mention (corporations, IP law, standing armies, extensive communications networks, tall buildings which aren't hugely expensive monuments, etc.) are developments of late TL4 and beyond. Economic and technological development are slower because it's difficult to bring a lot of capital to bear and long-distance communication is difficult and limited.

Technologically, could be no impact at all. You just get a different mix of the people doing the work. Socially...well, it'd be significant to say the least. Inheritance, sexuality, and family structure could get very complicated.

Computers never become a household item.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Umm, not necessarily all these things at the same time.

Well, there was a time when a typical user didn't always have Windows (back in the 3.1 days), and most couldn't afford a Mac.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

They've all got more or less the same effects (slowing economic and technological growth and/or complicating communication). The degree to which that happens depends on how many you have.

Yep. And at the time, the typical user wasn't...well, a typical person. Personal computers were owned by a small minority of enthusiasts, not the average person.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

IN my head, I love the idea of a world without or limited plastic.

I love Retro-futurisim/Solar Patrol type images of the future.

Brushed Aluminum reflects golden rays off of aspiring skylines and cylindrical Rocket ships. Things are built of Wood, Stone and Metal. Hefty and Durable. Things are controlled by dials, knobs and sticks and readouts are needles/gagues and analog numeric indicators. Lights are not just bright, but warm.

See what you did? Now I have to go watch Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow......

Nymdok

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Yep...and that time didn't see the kind of market penetration that we have today. The thing of it is that the "typical" user (if there is such a thing) back in those days was interested in the computer because either s/he was good a seeing the potential for it to be a game changer or was just interested in it from a hobbyist's perspective. So to say that the typical user did things a certain way is slightly misleading since the typical user didn't represent the typical person. Today, it does.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Yes, and computers were not used by nearly so many people.

I vividly remember the class where I was introduced to word processing, on a DOS version of Word . . . I detested it so much that I swore never to use word processing again for the rest of my life. The only way to tell the program to do anything was to look on a scribbled list of F keys and what each one did, which had no mnemonic value at all. There was often no obvious on-screen indicator of what it had done or was doing. And when I ran into problems, the TA's advice was that I had to sit and fiddle around with the computer until I was familiar with how it worked . . . which was not welcome advice, first, because I was taking time out of my work week to use the computer lab and grudged every minute I spent there that wasn't actually getting my papers written (this was a writing class, not a computer class), and second, because fiddling around with a computer was as utterly unrewarding as any activity I could imagine.

Then I did some volunteer work where I was asked to use a Macintosh, and I've never looked back.

Obviously, there are people who like the arcane aspects of computer use: the memorized codes, the precise syntax, the logic puzzles, and so on. But that's a specialized mindset. And without GUI, computer use would be much more restricted to people who had that specialized mindset . . . to programmers, more than users.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

That would probably enhance the hacker mythos. The whole meme of the "hacker," especially as seen by the outside world, came about because computers were complicated yet powerful (like magic), so it took real study and enthusiasm to master one, but someone who did had access to tools and capabilities that others did not.

You'll note that the notion of the "hacker" is fading alot in the popular consciousness. TV characters make use of computers in their daily lives, and you no longer have "the computer user" constantly banging on his keys as people ask him questions and he interprets them into code. That's probably because, in real life, everyone uses computers and they've lost alot of their mystery. In a world without GUI, they retain that mystery.

A more interesting question might be "Why no GUI?"

Here's one I've been considering for an alien race: the presence of nuclear power, but not nuclear weapons. I'm not sure how plausible that is, though. Any thoughts?

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Pre GUI I don't think there was a typical user. Everyone had their own personal preferences as to which dos commands to use for example. Or how to set up their machines or system files.

For example, I was one of only a handful of people locally who seemed to even know about the dir/p command when everyone else seemed to just stick with either dir or dir/w.

One guy I knew had hugely complex autoexec.bat files to work around the 640k barrier. It involved about 80 lines of code telling the machine to load, run, and then unload the various TSR programs.

My preferred method was to add more than 640k of onboard memory to the motherboard (most boards before the 486dx2 had half a dozen chip slots for this).

The number of people using computers jumped dramatically when programs like Xtree showed up. That program used a GUI directory tree that is very similar to what is still used today.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Energy = Weaponry. I cant think of any situation where that is not the case.

Mechanical - Melee
Chemical - Bullet
Atomic/Nuclear - Nuke
Optic - Laser
Thermal - Steamships
Electrical - Taser


Solar could be and exception. I cant think of a single weapon in history that has been solar powered.....

That could be endemic to the human tendency to provide their own competition.

Nymdok

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

But people didn't start off with lasers, steamships or tasers. They used the technology for other things first, and then said "Hey! I bet we can use this as a weapon!"

Our first real nuclear technology was a weapon, and only later did we apply it to peaceful ends. Isn't it possible to do it the other way around, to create a nuclear technology for power, and only later go "Heeeyyy, I bet we can use this as a weapon."

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Archimedes is said to have set Roman ships afire with a battery of mirrors during the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

The only thing I can think of off the top of my head would be for nuclear power to have developed from radiothermal power by engineering experimentation rather than being developed from physical principles... a nuclear reactor and a bomb are very different beasts and whilst you might know from experience that you get a hell of a mess if you lose control of your core the idea that you could turn that into a practicable weapon might not be inutitive if you don't know the physics.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Democracy.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

That counts as weaponized in my book. ANy other NON weaponzied energy type/sources?

Nymdok

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

That was my idea. The aliens figured out, hey, these rocks are a bit on the warm side. If you bring them together, they get warmer. I bet if you brought alot of them together and dunked them in some water, you'd get even better steam power than you get with coal.

Or something like that.

It was only later, as they understood the principles involved (to better engineer their super steam-engines), that they realized they could make a weapon out of them. As a very warlike species, they're grudgingly admiring of humans for figuring out the super-weapon first and then "reverse" engineering the power aspect. I figure it's one of those "in hindsight, that's really obvious" kind of things, but I'm not sure if it's so obvious as to be absurd, hence why I'm asking.

It's easy to devise alternate Low Tech, because some a plethora of real-world examples exist. It's easy to devise alternate Ultra-Tech, because sci-fi is loaded to the gills with interesting ideas. It's hard to devise alternate High Tech, because most discussions of TL 5-8 consist of things that really happened, rather than neat ideas some TL 4 guy had. You have a few examples of alternate-tech (zeppelins, steam-tech, and the difference engine), but it'd be nice if we had some more.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

If you're willing to consider "alternative physics", perhaps the nuclear reaction produces the same amount of energy, but over a much longer time. The difference between something that explodes and something that burns is merely the rate of the reaction. I don't, however, know what implications such alternative physics has...

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Good one. It doesn't necessarily involve fascism (that's already used quite a lot in sci-fi and alternate history fiction). It could be feudalism? How would a TL9 Feudal world be?
Or Greek-style democracy (only landowning free (male) citizens may vote)? That would be interesting, especially around TL6-7 IMHO.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

I don't think that's really how it went. We did have nuclear bombs before nuclear power plants, but I think that's got more to do with the technology arising on the way into WWII, and all the early reactors thus being either for research or military plutonium production.

If I'm reading right, a nuclear pile intended to generate power was patented in 1934...

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

It'd wind up as a dictatorship, except instead of it being led by the Leader, it's led by the King, and instead of a cabal of followers heading various agencies, he's got various nobles doing the same thing.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Huh. So it's really not that crazy an idea at all, then? If you're correct, we invented nuclear power before we invented the nuclear bomb.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Then perhaps assume a Reich-5 Japan-style Samurai/Feudalism fantasy, where all ruling parts have the ideology required to keep it a feudal society...

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Well, if you really want to stretch your imagination, how about this:

Modern and even post modern levels of tech, but no written language... yet everyone has perfect photographic memory to compensate.

Thus anyone interested in learning the basics of a skill (where you and I would be if we had to consult a manual every five minutes) they attend a lecture series by or spend some time as the journeyman of a skilled practitioner.

Just about everything we have or do now would be in reach, but the potential paths where we use computers would be almost totally shut down. They can see how to build the devices in theory, but they can't figure out how to 'teach' the devices what to do.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

There's the legend of Archimedes' "burning glass". (That link describes an attempt to replicate the effect with a large array of mirrors.)

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Considering that you need pretty highly enriched nuclear material to make the bomb, by my understanding, I'm not sure you could make a bomb without first having reactors capable of generating power. Not necessarily actually used to generate power, but capable of it.

(I am not a nuclear engineer...)

Inventing nuclear power without coming up with the idea that it could be used as a bomb at about the same time, that I'm not too sure about the likelyhood of.
Why couldn't it be more like feudalism? That sounds like absolute monarchy to me, which isn't quite the same thing.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

On superpowers - England was a superpower in its own right a hundred or so years back. I cant imagine a world without superpowers. It seems as if there would always be a power vaccuum. World powers polarize and focus the people of the world withtheir ideologies. Its not nessesarily a bad thing.

Switchboards run by voulenteers - Seeing the untapped potential for research, psychology,sociology, criminology, political science and marketing majors line up for their opportunity to hear first hand whats on the minds of the people of the world. Its not unlike the searh bars that report your webtraffic. People accept outright that anything you broadcast is by definition NOT private and are therefor NOT bothered by it, but they are a bit more careful about what they say.

No intellectual Property - Software is developed in sourceforge style and offered freely. Sadly it is largely second rate and poorly written. What does survive is largely goverenment sponsered but, like so many goverenment projects, is over written, poorly executed, over staffed, under productive and treated with suspicion.

No Internet - The internet never develops in its current form. Instead, BBS remain the dominate digital social interaction and at seperate times during the day each BBS will shut down to upload E-Mail to a cluster of BBS creating a digital Pony Express.

No GUI's: In a law suit against Microsoft and Macintosh that claims that Graphic User interfaces discriminate against the visually impaired, all computers shipped MUST have Graphic/Audio/Tactile interfaces installed. Audio interfaces require the use of voice recognition and require that the computer be able to differentaite commands from conversattion. To facilitate this, computers only respond to commands in Khoesian 'clicking' languages of africa. Tactile interfaces use the Keller-Sullivan model of spelling into the palm using a special glove.

Nymdok

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

No celebrities.

No reality TV.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

No Paparazzi...

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Feudalism is actually a kind of federalism except that the leaders are selected on the basis of inheritance instead of being elected or appointed. The problem of course is that in the era starting with radio, it's too each to consolidate a wide-scale following producing an absolute monarchy/dictatorship or democracy. It would be easier if their TL omitted the advancements in long distance communications that causes people to identify with each other on a wider scale. Then again, it would also work to vastly increase the scale you are dealing with so that communication will once again be outstripped by scale.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Nationalism seems to be doing pretty well today, so modern communications aren't enough to ball us all up into one big happy blob. Why couldn't strong, savvy feudal lords keep the consolidation a layer or two further down?

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

In many cases, it's because the process to release a lot of energy in an uncontrolled fashion is discovered first. It's only after that process is investigated, better understood, and then controlled and harnessed does it move from weapon to energy. It's a lot easier to explode TNT and use that as a weapon than it is to harness exploding gasoline vapours and turn them into an internal combustion engine.

That being said, as I recall, the Manhattan Project had a working reactor (the squash court at Columbia University comes to mind, but I could be incorrect). But, they were looking for a bomb, so a bomb is what they built.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Um... you're right that you'd probably be able to build a small controlled nuclear reaction before you'd build and set off an uncontrolled one, but that has nothing to do with enrichment.

Enrichment of uranium means using gas centrifuges to select U-235 out of a mix of U-235 and U-238. Gas centrifuges are non-nuclear technology and don't require a reactor to build or operate.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

I think that is an excellent likelyhood and 'Recklessly enthusiastic curiosity' is a kinder charachterization of humanity than what I had written upthread. :)

Nymdok

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

The world's first working nuclear reactor was built by Enrico Fermi fairly early in the Manhattan Project, well before the Trinity test (the world's first working nuclear bomb). The world's first practical nuclear reactor was the Hanford B reactor, which produced plutonium. Again, this was up and running before Trinity (it had to be, that's where the Trinity bomb got its plutonium).

If we were not so deadly focused on building a nuke to Win The War and Save Us All, it is quite conceivable that nuclear power reactors would have come before nuclear explosives. Axis countries that put some thought into nuclear weaponry tended to end up with designs closer to reactors than to bombs.

Luke

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

They could. But then they'd be independent monarchs, not feudal lords. The thing you need is to have people be loyal to the remote king to a certain extent, without him being able to exert much in the way of hands-on control. Otherwise, you end up with either balkanization or consolidation.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

No freight containers.
They make a huge difference to loading/unloading times when shipping cargo.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Wow. I never thoguht of it that way, but your right. Withotu freight containers, ships would just be big floating free market bazaars with people walking onto and off of the boats to transact buisness because loading and unloading the boat would be such a pain.

Neat. I like the idea.

Nymdok

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Contraceptives.

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And the glove spells back to you. Then one day someone puts the glove where it shouldn't go and "feelie porn" is born.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Monothiesm.

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Natural nuclear reactors were hypothesized in 1956, and an example was found in 1972.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Religion is fertile ground for wild permutations.

Rather than just eliminating Monotheism, go whole hog and and eliminate gods (particularly anthropomorphic gods). Religion never got past generalized "spirit" type of religions.

Or, go entirely opposite. One major trend of advancing technology (not just the use, but the process of developing it) is secularization. Assume (for whatever reason) that secularization does not happen. The "sacred" remains extremely powerful. They know God is there and still influences the world, even with modern technology.

Push it, even, and have God directly interact with the world such that it is obvious. There are no unbelievers, as the evidence is unassailable. (Whether God is really God, or whether God is a sham, or whether God is a time traveller/space alien/transendental/whatever is completely left up to the setting creator.)

Or, completely eliminate religion. For whatever reason, during the development of the species, religion never occurred. If it is here, it exists. If it isn't, it doesn't exist. Maybe in primitive times they had no need to explain the unexplainable. They didn't know why the seasons changed; they just knew they did. Later they figured out why, but it didn't cause problems because they had no wrong explanations as tradition that competed for belief. They don't worry about what happens after death; they only focus on their life while they have it.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

But what would the Beatles be more popular than then?

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Sliced bread.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Alternatively, a situation akin to that before standardization of railroad gauges. Each shipping company uses its own containers; to shift to a different shipping line, you need to change containers. This worked with rail since, often, the rail company owned its tracks and trains; you couldn't simply move stock across. For ocean and river shipping, we'd need the shipping companies to have a similar monopoly over seaports; at specified ports, only Outer Eastern British Cambodian Company cargo vessels can land, etc.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Unbelievers might admit God's existence, but not consider God worthy of worship.

That's how I justified my True Neutral gnome thief's agnosticism in my college D&D group. None of the campaign's demonstrably extant gods ever smote him, though.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

We just met the Gods in our group's fantasy campaign. Our mage was an atheist. Boy was that awkward. @:-)

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

I've got a good one. No mass media. News would be disiminated purely by word of mouth, by individuals. (if the Internet existed, the blogosphere would be most people's main source of news from outside their immediate area.)
think it would work?

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

A world without Tolkien. I wonder if fantasy would have taken off like that, and what RPGs would be like?

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

Well, Conan, most likely. Or even some other cultural group of fantasy - e.g. Eastern mythological fantasy.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

No halflings, no orcs, no elves, no dwarves...

A world without racism - people still hate each other, of course, but race is never the defining attribute.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

A world where, once we start looking for them, the sky is FULL of signals coming from planets with intelligent life. No FTL travel or communication though, not even at higher TLs.

Every broadcast you hear now is from hundreds of years in the other world's past at a minimum and not all of them have adjusted well to their *own* discoveries that there are... people... out there.

Okay, that's more of a world with something we lack rather than lacking something we have. I still think it would make a cool SF story or even campaign.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

That would be pretty interesting from a dramatic standpoint. These 'letters from aliens' broadcast would lead to some interesting events. We wouldn't have FTL, and maybe barely started to explore space, so we have no way of trying to get to the source of the broadcast, and our own replies will take centuries to reach any of the 'others'. Of course then things get mixed up when one of the alien broadcasters start sending out plans for a hyperdrive...

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

It's not like he was the only one to have heard of European myths.
Toning down elves to something more like modern day games makes more sense than the dying race of whiny superpowered creatures Tolkein used.
(I just hope my gf doesn't read this, or she would hurt me for that.)

If I had to create from myths, I would have used the old ones of dwarves being dark elves, cruel and magical but controlled by certain supernatural rules that others could use to protect themselves.
I maybe would have used tunnel Kobolds or Knockers as cannon fodder monsters so common in gaming.

See, it isn't hard to come up with something. It just wouldn't have a nigh universal campaign world.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

As other threads have said, that would require radio waves to propagate much farther than they do in the real world. Still interesting though.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

This, more or less. Between Dunsany, ERB, REH, and their related circles, modern fantasy was already pretty well developed before LotR was published. Even Vance and Moorcock were active before LotR really took off in the 60s. Modern PRGs might look a bit more like a swords-and-sandals epic and a bit less like Anglo-Saxon mythology, I think.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

What's the effective range on radio transmissions then? I never heard this as hard figures.

I am assuming, all though I could be very wrong, that once the first couple signals get picked up a lot of effort gets put into building better and more comprehensive receiver arrays. There might even be regular 'how to upgrade your radio transmitter/ receiver' messages from the aliens.


Edit note: I think that most all the aliens that got to the level of being able to produce a working hyperdrive of any sort would by that point have been listening to the sky for quite a long time. By that point they would be smart enough to keep it quiet. If you can get to the aliens that's okay - but if they can get to you it might not be.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

After reading the other replies, what about TL7 should remain? Might as well stagnate at TL3.
Isnt a lot of the meritocratic culture, equality, freedoms we are getting from TL7-9? I mean you can't have freedom from slavery, and sexism until there was enough critical mass to afford that change.

Since there are so much of the modern world has to be removed, what should remain in a while leaving everything TL2-3 why call it TL7-9 without X?

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

I think the point of this thread is not to design a TL 7 without all these things, but to pick and choose. Aliens might have Nuclear Power without Nuclear weapons, but they still have corporations and consumerism, or religion and intellectual property, etc.

This is one of those threads that are all about "How far can we stretch this TL, and still be in it," which is quite handy for alternate world creation.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

The freight idea reminded me of an old idea of mine. Pre WW II someone comes up wit the idea of container shipping. The containers would be smaller than what we use today, smaller trucks and ships. The idea is adopted by the military for logistic in the war. Lots of army 2 1/2 ton truck with container bases instead of covered backs. Liberty ships designed to load an unload standard containers quickly. A slight impact on the war, better logistics and fewer troops tied up moving supplies. After the war instead of pushing the interstate system the way he did Eisenhower supports an expansion of the modal switching yards that transfer the containers from trains to truck to ships. So no interstates, most major roads are similar to the old US Routes like the classic Rt 66.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

This was absolutely busted on Mythbusters.

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BMR's posts there remind me that a whole bunch of technological development is—like so much history—a matter of the right place at the right time… and therefore you can fudge a lot of invention dates by a decade or two either way. So instead of not having the thing exist at all—have it delayed. (Or early.)

In our timeline, television was a curiosity just before WWII, saw some development in the late 1940s, and hit the mainstream in the 1950s. I once developed an alternate where television was invented over a decade earlier, and matured more quickly; really fancy late-1920s/early-1930s night-clubs would have cable television set ups to carry live music and early "music videos."

So you could go also the other direction—for whatever reason, no one figures out to throw a decent image on a CRT and sell people on the concept until the 1960s. First thing that comes to mind: Newsreels and all the other parts of classical cinema culture endure another decade. The second thing that comes to mind: the Vietnam War would have had little to no television news coverage! Or, alternatively, would have been the first thing anyone saw on TV.

Consider a world where seatbags and airbags were invented and implemented earlier—James Dean survives his car crash?—or a world where Detroit beat Nader and American cars were mostly safety-device free up into the 1990s.

Can do the same for social movements, too.

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

That kind of depends on your definition of "effective range". Effective for what use? Here is one of the threads where it was discussed.

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Yep. I did a world where Color TV was common in the early 1960s and Modern Rock started alongside Do-Wop. I was trying for a Streets of Fire vibe.

Another possibility is a world with nothing much past the transistor and Moore's Law. You can have many of the current devices and even decent size ones (with microtransistors say) but no PC, No Internet. It would be a very different world

As for car safety. Imagine Tucker a Man and His Dream was pure fact and Tucker won his fight with the car companies. Cars would have have been safer earlier and that might make a huge change

Re: Things TLs 7-9 would be interesting to see WITHOUT
 

It might be interesting to consider a world in which teleportation became useful on a mass scale before any chemically powered propulsion systems. You could beam to other planets and perhaps build orbiting space stations, but no ships/cars/missiles. Optionally there could be no guns. Instead of roads there would be a complex series of cross-dimensional gates. When waging war there would be no siege weaponry, you would have to beam your troops in (armed with force swords, or some futuristic light-metal swords).