Pretty good Solarpunk prompt with some medium-hard sci-fi thrown in.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    First, this is a great video and a thought provoking topic. While she touched on it in the last 45 seconds, I think the timeline at +10Y and +15Y would have more vacuum tube solutions for simple “computing” electronics. I also think that the ideal of social media would be too hard for modern society to abandon, and we’d revert to prior technologies for electronic social communication like “party line” telephones and HAM radio, neither of which require advanced semiconductors.

    Analog broadcast television (also tube driven) would make a comeback and be well in place by +15y after so much of the spectrum was freed up from lack of digital devices consuming it. Larger use of shortwave radio would come back too.

    Lastly, I’m embracing her premise as “the technology to create new semiconductors disappears”. Perhaps this is because the world’s single source of quartz crucibles in North Carolina needed for high end semiconductor manufacturing exhausts its supply. or some other reason. With that though, it doesn’t mean progress forward would stop. She touched on part of this in the last 60 seconds with video talking about groups trying to rediscover or restart semiconductor manufacturing, but she didn’t explore an alternative advanced computing medium: light. Optical Computing exists today as laboratory experiments and are far inferior to general purpose semiconductor based computing, but if semiconductors are off the table optical computing starts looking very attractive. Consider however, that this technology is the basis for most quantum computing implementations today. So we wouldn’t be starting from scratch technologically.

    One note on automobiles too: I think many modern cars would be retrofit with simplier electronics to keep them on the road. Gone would be the days of advanced ECUs yeilding high performance and fuel efficient operation, but I’m betting much more simplified ECUs could be made with single mode operations that would make the car operational for general (and inefficient use). Mechanical timing would come back into play, fuel injection would be replaced with carburation again, and coilpacks with mechanical distributors.

    I think I’d be okay with my Commodore 64 as my primary computing with a bit more evolved connectivity with something like Fidonet for global email communications to be maintained.

    Still with my minor notes, I really enjoyed her idea and glad she did the video.