New Reality Seeds

[AlexanderHowl]

Well, that would have required much more investment in city infrastructure, as natural gas, sewage, storm water, and water pipes, as well as buried cable, phone, power lines, subway lines, and tram lines, usually follow streets due to relative ease of access (at least in the USA). In order to compensate for the cost of additional city infrastructure, you would need one of higher density cities (such as seen in Europe), higher service costs, or lower service quality. While it might have made for more attractive cities, you would have probably hindered the expansion of cities because of the even higher costs associated with living in them.

[adm]

Originally Posted by PTTG

US cities had a moment in the early 19th century when they could have departed the grid. There was an experimental movement to what were called "garden cities," among other terms, which were essentially cities built on curving, "natural" lines. They most closely resemble modern suburban subdivisions.

The experiments failed, the designs considered too fanciful to put into practice.

Suppose that different economic forces came to the fore. After all, the only real difference is that it's slightly harder to survey and market. Let us ignore, for these purposes, the exact causes. Just that it's nothing supernatural. What's important is that by the present day, the dominant form of citybuilding in the USA is not the grid, but rather, a flowing, organic-seeming series of intertwined streets.

As someone who has delivered pizzas for a living, the current non-grid system sucks if you make deliveries for a living. The grid system is far more efficient for delivery and infrastructure use.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by adm

As someone who has delivered pizzas for a living, the current non-grid system sucks if you make deliveries for a living. The grid system is far more efficient for delivery and infrastructure use.

Yeah. My first reaction was "what a nightmare to navigate".

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by adm

As someone who has delivered pizzas for a living, the current non-grid system sucks if you make deliveries for a living. The grid system is far more efficient for delivery and infrastructure use.

I remember this SciFi story where the subway system was modified to allow the cars to go to any point in the system directly from any other point. Several cars got lost in an acidental mobious loops and disappeared from this universe. I just had a vision of a USA were the streets are topologically unstable causing bizarre dimensional instability.

[Astromancer]

Try this idea. Galileo liked Kepler, at first, but then came to think of the man as a religious crank. Well Kepler was both a genius scientist and a religious crank. Which greatly slowed down the spread of Kepler's ideas.

Picture a worldjumper, who admiring both men, shows Galileo Kepler's best ideas extracted from Kepler's turgid prose and mystic obsessions. Galileo promply adds them to is publications, as usual without explaining where he got the information.

Kepler is ticked, and the adoption of heliocentrism is speeded up. Homeline doesn't much care. Centrum is hunting Kepler, Galileo, and the worldjumper. And Homeline doesn't want half to two-thirds of the German and Italian intellectual communities slaughtered to sooth fools, either from this parallel or another. Added fun, Kepler was a religious crank, and Galileo was a charming megalomaniac, both would be wonderfully complicated people to protect.

[PTTG]

How about different primate evolution resulted in hominids with canine-level olfactory discrimination? If you want the template to match the human template, then give them poor vision penalties to balance it out.

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Yeah. My first reaction was "what a nightmare to navigate".

I know I'd hate it, and every city planner I ever spoke to referred to that as "suburban mush."

Maybe cities wouldn't have a real "business district," because the difficulties of travel mean everybody lives close to work?

[Astromancer]

I'm starting a book about the Lords Baltimore. An interesting point came up in the introduction. The Calverts, like the Penns, started their proprietary colony with full religious tolerance. But while Penn and Roger Williams both started, in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island respectively, traditions of tolerance that lasted, the Calverts lost control of their colony and Maryland lost its religious toleration.

This leads to a question. What effect would another colony, and a southern one too, embracing religious toleration have on American history?

[dcarson]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

This leads to a question. What effect would another colony, and a southern one too, embracing religious toleration have on American history?

Would a major history of religious tolerance possibly get Quebec to join the revolution because the French Catholic majority felt they could trust the colony side more then the UK.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by dcarson

Would a major history of religious tolerance possibly get Quebec to join the revolution because the French Catholic majority felt they could trust the colony side more then the UK.

Maybe. The British were smart though. They were worried the Quebecois would rise up alone, so they passed laws to appease them. The Americans called them the Intolerable Acts and that was one of the reasons they went to war. You could argue that there could be no American Revolution with enough religious tolerance.