Moore's Law and Time to Railroad
The author of The Intel Trinity makes an excellent argument that Moore's Law is not just descriptive, but also predictive: try to get ahead of that curve and build a "super-chip," and you're going to get burned, bad. As evidence he offers the sad example of Gene Amdahl's Trilogy Systems, which had as its flagship product a super-chip so powerful it had a giant heat sink towering over it. However, it proved inadequate and the microcircuitry literally melted -- and with it the company's future.
The author also discusses how Moore's Law has come to be seen as applying not only to integrated circuit development, but to technology in general -- which made me think of Robert A. Heinlein's idea of "time to railroad," which appears in The Door into Summer. He too posits that one cannot rush technological development, that even a brilliant inventor cannot achieve the mass adoption of a technology before its time.
This leads me to some thoughts about alternate histories that deal with an accelerated development of technology. Obviously, some involve avoiding some major setback, but a lot seem to depend upon someone having a bright idea significantly earlier than in this timeline.
There are some things that are actually easy to implement, but non-obvious, such that multiple opportunities to invent them are passed by. The ancients could've developed a primitive stethoscope, since even a tube of rolled-up paper pressed against a patient's chest makes it much easier to hear the sounds of the heart, lungs, etc than simply pressing one's ear against the patient's chest. But it wasn't invented until well into the modern era, when a physician wishing to avoid the appearance of impropriety rolled up a sheet of paper to listen to a female patient's lungs. From there it was a matter of incremental improvements in the ability to collect and transmit sounds as better materials became available, until we have the modern mass-produced sthethoscope we see around the necks of health professionals at hospitals, clinics and nursing homes all over the world.
But a lot of things are heavily dependent upon a large number of factors -- technological, social, legal, etc -- being in place to make it come together. At best, an early inventor may be able to create a curiosity, rather like the steam-driven "self-opening" doors of the ancient Greek temples, or the elevating thrones Emperor Justinian of Byzantium is said to have invented (although the source is highly suspect). It sticks around as long as someone wealthy and powerful enough finds it amusing, then fades away to be rediscovered later, perhaps several times before it finds a society that is fertile ground for it to become a transformative technology.
When we look at it in that light, maybe it's unsurprising that a lot of steampunk has moved to the blurry boundary between sf and fantasy, where the handwavium that allows for more rapid development of technology takes on the feeling of magic. That goes back all the way to Nabokov's Ada (named for the protagonist's cousin and love object, not Ada Lovelace), with its water-based telephones in the place of banned electricity, although the first major steampunk novel, The Difference Engine, provides a much closer to hard-sf extrapolation of its central what-if, of the early adoption of Charles Babbage's computing technology.
OTOH, sometimes it's just plain fun to imagine a Victorian Era/Gilded Age space program, especially if coupled with the Old Solar System of a jungle Venus and a dying Mars of ancient and wise civilizations by the banks of the world-girdling system of canals.
The author also discusses how Moore's Law has come to be seen as applying not only to integrated circuit development, but to technology in general -- which made me think of Robert A. Heinlein's idea of "time to railroad," which appears in The Door into Summer. He too posits that one cannot rush technological development, that even a brilliant inventor cannot achieve the mass adoption of a technology before its time.
This leads me to some thoughts about alternate histories that deal with an accelerated development of technology. Obviously, some involve avoiding some major setback, but a lot seem to depend upon someone having a bright idea significantly earlier than in this timeline.
There are some things that are actually easy to implement, but non-obvious, such that multiple opportunities to invent them are passed by. The ancients could've developed a primitive stethoscope, since even a tube of rolled-up paper pressed against a patient's chest makes it much easier to hear the sounds of the heart, lungs, etc than simply pressing one's ear against the patient's chest. But it wasn't invented until well into the modern era, when a physician wishing to avoid the appearance of impropriety rolled up a sheet of paper to listen to a female patient's lungs. From there it was a matter of incremental improvements in the ability to collect and transmit sounds as better materials became available, until we have the modern mass-produced sthethoscope we see around the necks of health professionals at hospitals, clinics and nursing homes all over the world.
But a lot of things are heavily dependent upon a large number of factors -- technological, social, legal, etc -- being in place to make it come together. At best, an early inventor may be able to create a curiosity, rather like the steam-driven "self-opening" doors of the ancient Greek temples, or the elevating thrones Emperor Justinian of Byzantium is said to have invented (although the source is highly suspect). It sticks around as long as someone wealthy and powerful enough finds it amusing, then fades away to be rediscovered later, perhaps several times before it finds a society that is fertile ground for it to become a transformative technology.
When we look at it in that light, maybe it's unsurprising that a lot of steampunk has moved to the blurry boundary between sf and fantasy, where the handwavium that allows for more rapid development of technology takes on the feeling of magic. That goes back all the way to Nabokov's Ada (named for the protagonist's cousin and love object, not Ada Lovelace), with its water-based telephones in the place of banned electricity, although the first major steampunk novel, The Difference Engine, provides a much closer to hard-sf extrapolation of its central what-if, of the early adoption of Charles Babbage's computing technology.
OTOH, sometimes it's just plain fun to imagine a Victorian Era/Gilded Age space program, especially if coupled with the Old Solar System of a jungle Venus and a dying Mars of ancient and wise civilizations by the banks of the world-girdling system of canals.