What if the rate of technological progress between 1900-1969 never slowed down?

[UnFisico]

Cure your desire for flying cars by watching pretty much anyone else [1] on the road now, then imagine the last breakdown, crash or near miss you experienced happening at 5,000 feet!

People keep saying this as though it makes the nature of 21st century technological progress less disappointing. It doesn't. Instead of progress in things like medicine and physical-world automation, we got smartphones, neural networks and blockchains. Amazing as the Internet can be, it has been an overall negative for human society. I would trade all of it for a cure for cancer in an instant and without hesitating.

 

[AresianEuropa]

A few PODs/Scenarios that I could think for TTL:

- Never-ending Cold War, or at least the passion/ferver between both sides. You can either have the USSR reform to Union of Sovereign States, China being buffed up from the get-go (no socio-economic disasters in the 20th century through earlier opening up/country development [or if needed be, KMT-victory]) - same goes for Japan but that's more of its 80's/90's state (no Lost Decades, continued Economic Bubble) and more standing up to US's competition. More competition means more expectations for advancement in science and technology and therefore, its funding. This especially when it comes to the Space Race, Arms Race and the likes of such back then, which more exploration of such fields may lead to better application of supersonic atmospheric flight, space flight, space/planetary colonies and more that could be gathered from those races. Consequence is that it may lead to flashpoints and armed conflicts, but more tensions means more potentials for advancement, I guess.

- No anti-nuclear power movement, or at least a very weakened one. Whether we like it or not, nuclear would've been a real competition to fossil fuel back then (and even now with cheaper renewables) with its energy density and capabilities. But lack of government interest and public fears (often exaggerated) prevented it from taking off. Except for France, which I expect should be kind of the model for what could be alternative energy composition in TTL. Should it take off, I expect stuff that needs more energy to be taken off better in TTL, with cheaper electricity and that more of its surplus being used somewhere means that it can be used for more scientific/technological research and breakthroughs. This could mean more cleaner and better environment than OTL as well.

 

[Workable Goblin]

People keep saying this as though it makes the nature of 21st century technological progress less disappointing. It doesn't. Instead of progress in things like medicine and physical-world automation, we got smartphones, neural networks and blockchains. Amazing as the Internet can be, it has been an overall negative for human society. I would trade all of it for a cure for cancer in an instant and without hesitating.

We got tons of progress in medicine, especially cancer treatment. For instance, the 5-year survival rate for breast cancer has gone from about 77% in 1980 to 92% today. For lung cancer, it's gone from about 13% to about 26%--still, you know, pretty bad, but a lot better than it used to be (and most of this took place after 2000, when the 5=year survival rate was about 15%). In other cases, while we haven't increased survival rates much, we have decreased incidence, e.g. cervical cancer has become much less common than it once was and is likely to continue dropping due to the HPV vaccine. And, of course, we just recently saw the development of RNA vaccines that are likely to provide greatly improved cancer therapeutics as well as permit vaccines for many diseases that seemed to be impossible to develop vaccines for.

 

[Workable Goblin]

Even with the oil crisis would could have had high speed rail proliferate, powered by thorium nuclear reactors virtually eliminating aircraft and cars from the 300-800km travel sector.

Without the oil crisis (by which you presumably mean the rise in prices), they probably would have been jet-powered, which is what everyone was investigating initially. Electricity came in because fuel costs went up.

Also, thorium reactors are greatly overhyped. They aren't really better than uranium reactors in the reasonably near term.

 

[Navigator]

To change what happened in aviation and space, you have to PoD in late 1944 or early '45. Lockspeiser was a large part of the problem. OK, the Miles M52 was only a year ahead of Bell's research, but MegaRoc would have put Eric Brown in space 12 years before Alan Shepard. Remove NASA from the equation and you're not stuck in the chemical propulsion dead-end, counting every ounce of payload.

 

[MKD]

Naturally, advances in aviation, medicine, computer electronics and consumer goods slowed down

have they really slowed down or have they changed?

An example: Even in my lifetime we have gone from most houses not having a phone to almost everyone having a portable mini computer in thier pocket that allows voice and video calls to be made almost anywhere any time.

We don't have flying cars or light speed or personal jet packs ( sadly) but we do have a lot of stuff that looked crazy or fantastical when it was shown on Star Trek!

 

[CaptainCalvert]

have they really slowed down or have they changed?

An example: Even in my lifetime we have gone from most houses not having a phone to almost everyone having a portable mini computer in thier pocket that allows voice and video calls to be made almost anywhere any time.

We don't have flying cars or light speed or personal jet packs ( sadly) but we do have a lot of stuff that looked crazy or fantastical when it was shown on Star Trek!

Personal jet packs do exist, though not widely available,
We also have (for good or ill) steerable artillery shells, long range guided missiles, predator drones that can (more or less) do remote controlled assassinations from half a world away, 3d printers that can print food, plastics and metal items with remarkable precision, can replace hips and knees with very high ates of success, split fundamental particles into pieces, unravel Earth's history, read the human genome, identify evidence of cross breeding betweeen diffrrent types of ancestral humans, see almost to the earliest observable universe and image black holes. A lot of people have been very busy!
Oh, and virtually abolished privacy, and monetised everything.

 

[DracoLazarus]

People keep saying this as though it makes the nature of 21st century technological progress less disappointing. It doesn't. Instead of progress in things like medicine and physical-world automation, we got smartphones, neural networks and blockchains. Amazing as the Internet can be, it has been an overall negative for human society. I would trade all of it for a cure for cancer in an instant and without hesitating.

It's not like cancer is a single disease. It's several similar diseases, which makes a cure-all impossible.
And progress is constantly being made on making those more surviveable and curable before they reach the metastatic stage.

 

[Kalga]

It's not like cancer is a single disease. It's several similar diseases, which makes a cure-all impossible.
And progress is constantly being made on making those more surviveable and curable before they reach the metastatic stage.

Yes but his point is that they're promised all curing pills like those you see in in that one hospital scene in star trek iv. The question is whether a more conventional tech advancement would actually deliver those results rather than perhaps those predictions back in the day vastly underestimated the hurdles involved.

 

[DracoLazarus]

Yes but his point is that they're promised all curing pills like those you see in in that one hospital scene in star trek iv. The question is whether a more conventional tech advancement would actually deliver those results rather than perhaps those predictions back in the day vastly underestimated the hurdles involved.

Definitely the latter.
There is no such thing as a cure-all. The human body is a complex chemical mechanism. You can't fix all that ails it with a simple set of chemical compounds.

 

[Aisha Clan-Clan]

Operation unthinkable leads to a war the western allies lose. You get a cold war with geography like Stross's timeline 3 in emprie games. The US with the americas, australia and Japan in it's orbit with the old world being soviet.

 

[DougM]

Don’t be that impressed with an improvement in cancer survival rates at any give year. There is a trick in that. take for instance Breast cancer. It used to be that we only detected it once it was. Advanced enough to be physically felt and noticed. Now most women get screened regularly so it is detected much much sooner and at early stages. Two things result from this,
1) is a math trick we start the clock on that 5 years early. Maybe months early maybe YEARS early, as it is based on when cancer is detected vs when it starts. Looking back on it my Grand father died in 1960 of cancer less the 6 months after it was “detected” but it is very very obvious that he had had cancer for several years at that point. So he probably had cancer for 3+ YEARS at that point but is listed with a six month survival. Today people with the same cancer have a 3-3.5 year life expectancy. Why? Mostly because we detect it sooner. Only a small part is because of improvements in treatment. And while detection is part of medicine it is not typically what folks mean when they say they want improvements. To medicine.
2) the other advantagecyo early detection is it is much much easier to treat cancer.

Another technology that many thing has improved but that has hidden things is batteries. We all think that our cell phones or our cordless tools or our modern electric cars have batteries that last much better then the old batteries, and to a degree they do, But most of the extended run times is owed to more efficient use of the power. A modern electric motor uses a LOT less electricity to give a give amount of power output than old motors did. Go find a 30+ year old electric cordless drill or an old car or an old wireless house phone. Plug them into a modern battery and they are not going yo run much (if any) longer as the motors or electronics back then just sucked down power. A first generation Pentium computer generated so much waste heat that I could use it as a room heater in my spare bedroom. And old Light bulbs were horrible for heat generation. My hobby room with its track lighting didn’t need heat if I ran all the lights.
So medicine and batteries many technology have not improved in the conventional sense as much as we may think. It is often the other factors that make us think these things have improved.