TL4 Without Iron

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

My initial point is that there would be no TL4 society on Earth without iron. You can't simply replace iron with bronze. There isn't enough accessable tin and copper on the planet.

That's always a tough thing to demonstrate, because of the way known reserves tend to depend on how profitable it might be to look for them, and because the ambiguity of "accessible" vs "economic".

Current tin production is about 250 kilotons per year. That's plenty to make a megaton of bronze (and with 19.2 megatons of copper produced last year tin is clearly the limiting reagent). That exceeds the world's iron production until sometime around 1810, so there was enough metal on the planet, and accessible without superscience even since we aren't using any, to completely replace iron with bronze at TL4. The hard to answer question is how much more it would cost to extract that much, particularly with TL4 rather than TL8 methods. Almost certainly too much to be anywhere close to economic, but that's not quite the same thing.