Why do alt-history people never focus on infrastructure or innovation? What would have happened had bikes been invented centuries before cars instead of around the same time? How different would the built environment and our culture have looked?
Personally, I think centuries of more established bike use would have created an infrastructure that limits how well cars take off. Cities would have entrenched themselves in a cheap, dense manner of transit.
I could be wrong, lots of dense cities were wrecked by the car when it was commercialized. I’d love to hear any thoughts :)
Other than the mobile need that same source of energy is needed to turn ore into metal. Refining ore as they did in BC days used a lot of energy - mines were located near forests (ore was more common then the forests and you needed a lot more wood than ore!). Modern refining uses a lot less energy on a per output basis. (It uses a lot more energy now, but produces orders of magnitude more output)
@bluGill @Nyssa @urbanism
This is essentially what I was wondering about – was it possible to evolve metallurgy with a different principal energy source and charcoal or coal used “only” for redox reactions?
Thinking about it, it would be necessary to discover electric power before industrial revolution in a geography with a product of precipitation and elevation drop like e.g. Norway or Costa Rica have (and this would have to be “normal” geography, not exceptional).
You can make things more efficient, but there is a reason many factories melting metal work third shift only, and close the factory for maintenance in December - the power company gives them a big discount for using the cheapest power. Even if you get 10x more efficient (which implies you are an expert in these processes - there are only a handful in the world) , that really isn’t enough to jump start manufacturing.
Don’t forget too that modern life is only possible because a large population means we can specialize a lot. The number of different experts to really make a difference is larger than you would guess: someone to refine iron, but they need someone to create electric, which needs an [steam] engine, which in turns needs a metal alloy expert (not the same as the first person though there is overlap). We are now in a circle as you can’t do any step without some other step. It took a long time to bootstrap the process.
If you went back to anytime after 1680 with modern knowledge you could bootstrap a lot of things faster - but that only is possible because the industrial revolution is already starting and so you can make a large strive in one area and it will help others who are already working in some other - both by creating demand for what they are producing and also by creating better inputs to what they are doing. Without lots of other parts of the industrial revolution happening at the same time there just isn’t enough parts in play for you to do anything alone.