14 KiB
[D] The limits of a society without electricity
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Author: u/Faust91x Iteration X*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3r0psa/d_the_limits_of_a_society_without_electricity/
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Score: 9
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Created: 2015-10-31T22:41:55
Post:
Hello everyone. Last night I was watching some Steampunk pictures and wondered this. If human society hadn't managed to generate and store electricity either because of cultural changes or simply because of some physical law that prevented us from harnessing it, would we have been able to reach the level of development we do today?
I read there were mechanical computers and complex contraptions before that were powered by either mechanical or fossil fuel sources, but our understanding of electrical current and magnetism allowed us to generate electronics, and with them to create microcomponents that in turn allowed for the implementation of algorithms to automate and optimize our society.
Do you think we could reach an equivalent level of progress without it? And how much do you think human society would change if electricity and electronics hadn't developed?
Comments:
u/Transfuturist [+24] Carthago delenda est. (55 minutes later)
If human society hadn't managed to generate and store electricity either because of cultural changes or simply because of some physical law that prevented us from harnessing it, would we have been able to reach the level of development we do today?
No. Electromagnetics was key to human development even in the 19th century. Without electricity, you don't get any of the long-distance communication innovations that revolutionized warfare and commerce. No telegraph (see American Civil War), no radio, no telephone. No appliances that use electricity. You have to transport power through gas lines, and you would have to burn it on-site to produce steam that doesn't lose too much pressure before powering various fixtures around the house. You wouldn't have electrical lights, even arc lights, so both in lighting and in heating applications like stoves, ovens, and water heaters (not sure if this needs to be separate from the steam engine) you have to burn it in many locations around the house. This represents a much greater fire hazard.
Mechanical computers could very well be miniaturized, though you are not going to see parity with electric computers for quite a long while. See The Diamond Age for technology that uses nanomechanical rods for computation (and they still use electricity, I believe). To get miniaturized mechanical computers on the level of ASICs, you essentially have to invent nanotech. Even then, you're not getting anything like an internet. At best you have near-field communication with HF audio. Still, you're going to see some pretty intricate mechanical components after Turing makes his mark. Not sure what the hell an efficient steam-mechanical computer would use, but binary is a questionable assumption to make.
Production and automation continues. Until mechanical computers become cheap enough to control general machining components (minicomputers with little to no communication in the components themselves), humans will be a part of the assembly line for a much longer time. Farming will be similar, though I don't know exactly how.
For entertainment. Film will be fairly unhindered (though audio will suffer). Music as well: steampunk vinyl. Magnetic tapes will never be a thing, so no cassettes or VCR Television will never be a thing. Radio will never be a thing. Books and comics would be the primary source of entertainment while you're waiting for the next Hollywood release to be shipped to your town, or for a touring concert to reach you. Plays and musicals would also be very big. Lasers won't exist. Light shows will be nonexistent.
I don't know exactly where electromagnetics is used most in medicine, but I imagine it will be severely hindered. No pacemakers, no defibrillators, no imaging save manual X-rays (using radioactive isotopes), a lot of medicine never gets invented, no monitoring patients remotely (electrocardiograph? Psh.). A lot of things. No DNA or fingerprint databases. No paperless storage of any data, until you get good steam-mechanical computer memory. Even then, you would have no way of scanning things, because computer cameras use EM to detect light.
All in all, societal progress would take a good long while to get to the level we're at today. Electricity saved all our asses.
Please note that nuclear-steam is still an option here. There are no batteries until nuclear. And in the future, you will have people driving around and powering their houses with thermonuclear isotopes. Also note that this world is as much dieselpunk as it is steampunk. Gasoline does not go away.
u/Faust91x [+7] Iteration X (an hour later)
This is exactly what I wanted to read, really good, detailed and on point post. I was curious because most of what I've seen from Steampunk shows a pretty idylic society and doesn't touch too much on how much of an impact the inability to create ASICs and similar microdevices/algorithms would have.
u/Transfuturist [+5] Carthago delenda est. (3 hours later)
There are a lot of details to think of. It's like a fractal of considerations.
u/rakov [+3] (4 hours later)
Without electricity, you don't get any of the long-distance communication
What about optical systems? Like Chinese Wall where there were many towers with guards, and when guard saw fire on tower next to his he burned his fire as well. If only they had invented any kind of encoding they would communicate messages pretty well.
u/Transfuturist [+4] Carthago delenda est. (16 hours later)
A monument to overthinking:
I already considered this. What you're talking about is called free-space optical communication, achieved by laser or parabolic reflector.
First of all, a short relay length like the Great Wall (as depicted in Mulan, because I don't know anything about the actual Wall) is not going to cut it for long-distance communication. The Great Wall was one signal path with many relays staffed by many guards, and the average signal change speed was about 1/3600th of a baud. Sure, they set the wood on fire real nice, but how the fuck are they going to put it out? The Great Wall is not the best lead-in for your proposal; it is closer approximated by a fuse than a cable.
Let's look at the output of our relay stations. The lamps can't use electricity, meaning the only way we actually have to produce light is by burning fuel. So we have mechanically-modulated gas fires, and parabolic reflectors to get the signal to the next relay station. We already have problems here. Gas fires are better at producing heat than light, so increasing light output means increasing heat. Parabolic reflectors are not very efficient at redirecting from a point source like a flame, either, so you need a lot of light to make a usable signal out of the tiny fraction you have to work with. You need facilities that can withstand and dissipate the waste heat from the fire that provides all this light, and you need a large flow of fuel so you can make your signal as bright as possible. This means you want as few relays as possible, because they drain fuel like a motherfucker. It's true that increasing the distance between relays increases your energy costs, but there's an optimal medium between fuel flow and relay distance.
Now input. There's no way to take a light signal and use it to automatically modulate the relay station's signal fire. We have no way of detecting light because we don't have electromagnetism. That means human relay operators, which are fucking expensive themselves. This is different from telegraph operators, too, because if a telegraph operator is absent, the signal still propagates, because its medium doesn't actually pass through the human. In our system, the operator has to be present to modulate the flow of fuel to the signal fire. Our feasible relay distance is pretty short due to the cost constraints on fuel flow, which gets worse the shorter the relay distance is, and the small usable fraction of the flow energy, which gets worse the longer the relay distance is. Now with humans added, and their presence necessary to even continue the propagation of a signal? That is incredibly expensive and unreliable, and this isn't even bringing up things like the cost of human operators living in remote locations.
You can find the most cost-effective relay distance from these variables, although this is a simplification to begin with. You'll notice, though, that these are massive costs for any level of reliable communication across long distances. What you're saying is that you can communicate through a series of fire-lit lighthouses. I mean, yes, technically you can. But the most cost-effective way of communicating through human-manned lighthouse relay is still fucking expensive. When you add materials and construction costs, unreliability of human operators, the cost of providing and maintaining fuel lines, the cost of multiple human operators in every relay, no matter how remote... I doubt even the Civil fucking War would inspire this kind of insane infrastructure. The value added by these monstrosities is retardedly small next to the investment required. It just isn't tenable. The bandwidth this Rube Goldberg machine coughs out is nowhere near the bandwidth a mail train provides, and it's an order of magnitude more expensive and less reliable for your efforts, too.
I doubt real-world experiment or rigorous calculation will show my analysis to be incorrect, unless I've made some serious errors in my estimation of the visible light output of gas fires through parabolic reflectors at a distance. However, even with the small chance that I'm wrong, this is exactly the sort of analysis that would prevent this idea from ever being tried in the first place. You're not going to see optical communication in this setting.
u/DataPacRat [+8] Amateur Immortalist (16 hours later)
You're not going to see optical communication in this setting.
Counterpoint: Heliographs.
u/Transfuturist [+7] Carthago delenda est. (17 hours later)
...or you could use the fucking sun. Goddammit.
I am not a smart pony.
u/Gurkenglas [+1] (3 days later)
Couldn't you use hydraulics to transport power instead of pneumatics to get around the pressure problem?
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (3 days later)
I don't know, can you?
u/BoilingLeadBath [+1] (7 days later)
Pressure drop through the transmission lines would mostly be a problem with steam, as a consequence of it only being useful when hot... fairly long pneumatic transmission lines are still used today, limited (mostly, probably) by the high cost of pipe, compared to electric line.
(Mechanical power is recovered at the end of the line by an engine working within the limits of the Carnot cycle; as any pipe full of steam loses heat through its insulation and the steam cools, both available energy and efficiency go down.)
u/aldonius [+1] (5 days later)
good steam-mechanical computer memory
I suspect we'd probably end up with some sort of digitised phonograph for long-term storage.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+6] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (14 minutes later)
Isn't that basically steampunk? Why don't you check out Gibson's The Difference Engine?
u/Faust91x [+2] Iteration X (16 minutes later)
Thanks for the tip, will check it!
u/nerdguy1138 [+4] GNU Terry Pratchett (8 minutes later)
I think Discworld's clacks system, and rail powered everything, is just about as far as they could go. Also, the Igors knew about batteries.
u/Nighzmarquls [+3] (3 hours later)
I did something similar to this, but that society used a near magical ability to perform surgery and selective breeding to fit living creatures to a lot of computer/electronic problems.
it was a fun exercise and they managed to through various forms of overpowering the labor capacity of adversaries to get to space travel without realizing what radio really was.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (3 hours later)
Why did the deep ones not use electricity?
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (4 hours later)
over all? It was easier to use muscle power fed with carbon rich materials to do most things then burn valuable carbon rich materials to forge metal to make circuits to convey energy.
They did eventually discover electricity and used it in manufacturing and eventually gather and direct power directly but the entire convoluted sort of journey to ever think of using it to transfer information never caught on because teaching a piece of brain in a fleshy life support system to process light sent over a fibreoptic wire reliably was easier then trying to invent a microchip.
Then again Deep nobles over all are not actually very innovative. Good at recognizing ideas when they find them but not particularly prone to inventing disruptive ideas.
u/None [+3] (3 hours later)
u/None [+1] (an hour later)
[deleted]
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (3 hours later)
Justification?
u/OrzBrain [+1] Fingers to dance, hands to catch, arms to pull (2 days later)
No brains in that setting if it is a law of nature. Human brains use electro-chemical reactions for neurons to work. If you can have neurons I think you must also have electricity.