AHC: A more advanced Earth

How to solve the trash problem? Ionic liquids are the current high tech favoured solution. Unfortunately, scaling up from the current trial plants and research testbeds to a system that could cope with a country's rubbish problems is not yet remotely possible.

Carbon nanotubes are already yesterday's wonder material. They are still very useful but in terms of advanced materials research and new products graphene and its derivatives are far superior. Graphene will be the source of major advances and new products (ultralightweight construction materials, paper-thin TVs, computers the size of a credit card etc are just some of the targets of current research) over the next few decades. And graphene is something that could conceivably be discovered many years prior to events of OTL, it all started from a Friday afternoon what-the-hell experiment with a lead pencil and some sticky tape.

If you want to develop manufacturing in space you may have to do something about capitalism first. Outside of niche materials (perfect ball bearings anyone?), the costs are too exorbitant and I don't think that any company that relies on delivering a profit to the shareholders will see a benifit in increasing transportation and setup costs by lord knows how many times.

There is no such thing as a viriphage and there can't be. A virus hijacks a host cell's replication machinery because it cannot replicate itself. A virus won't be able to do the same thing to another virus as there is no replication machinery it could make use of. Trying to stop a virus usually comes down to attempting to block its cell receptors, which are usually sugars, or how it trggers replication of coat proteins, though I am not a virologist so could be wrong about specifics. I do know that it isn't easy.


"Two possibilities come to mind, although I've no idea if they would work. One is just better funding - say somebody in the DoD realizes the role of materials as an enabling technology in the early 50s and starts heavily funding basic research into advanced materials. However, that seems like something that might have happened IOTL and I just don't know about it"

Materials research was heavily funded in the 50s, and later. The DoD does support research but it is not the main research funder in the US.

The biological warfare programme run by the South African government during the apartheid era was nasty but it wasn't as advanced as that run by the USSR, US, UK or other more technological countries. South Africa's military industry did produce a relatively large number of good quality systems but in many areas South Africa's scientific base has always been limited.

I gather that most people here think about "more advanced science" as being shiny big ticket items that make the news or general science documentaries but you are really just scratching the surface here. Almost all of the technological advances that shape our world come from fundamental research into interesting problems, the applications come afterwards. If you really want a dramatically advanced level of technology then first increase the number of states willing and able to fund fundamental scientific research, as someone has already suggested i.e. a multipolar world or comparative equals. Next, have the world have enough stability to allow reliable investment and growth but enough threats to encourage funding into solving them. Third, allow scientists the time to actually do research rather than waste most of it doing paperwork.
 
On the 0% trash issue:

This is one thing that people need to understand. Everything produces what we would consider waste products and not all waste is bad. Our oxygenated atmosphere is a waste product of photosynthesis. Our entire planet (and solar system for that matter) is a waste product of stars that produced products via nuclear fusion and later went supernova. The ethanol some of us enjoy in our alcoholic beverages is a waste product of fermentation, which is simply an anaerobic respiration process.

If we can't eliminate simple natural waste, eliminating civilized waste altogether is a futile effort. There are certain things we do now to mitigate our waste situations that could improve over time, but the idea of a zero trash future is simply a pipe dream.

Advanced materials:

While I agree that graphene is the wonder material of the future, carbon nanotubes may still have future uses. We simply don't know that yet.

Now if you really want a breakthrough that will shake the world, go out searching for room temperature superconductivity. If you need an example of why this would be a big deal, think of the cost of liquid helium. Liquid helium is used to help cool really powerful magnets, the sort you need in MRI and NMR machines. Of course, you also need a jacket of liquid nitrogen to keep the liquid helium around its proper temperature. Helium is a pretty strained resource and the cost of liquid helium makes any sort of instrument that requires it expensive to purchase and maintain.

Depending on the sort of research being done, different government organizations participate in funding. The DoE and NSF are actually pretty big funding sources for materials science.
 
Well with the latest copper-oxide superconductors you can do away with the helium, they work at between 90°K and 133°K, with the boiling-point of nitrogen being down at 77°K.
 
"zero trash future is simply a pipe dream"

I don't think many people envision a zero trash future, at least outside of a Star Trek convention. But a partial to major reduction in rubbish production/long term storage is a viable, and worthy, goal.

I did say that CNTs are very useful, I'm not disagreeing with you.

I was doing my chemistry degree when yttrium-barium compounds were the great hope for RT superconductors. I even got to make some (not quite as exciting as you might think - grind reagents, mix and bake in a high temp furnace, the product looked like a slightly opalescent shiny black plastic). Research still proceeds on those and other rare earth based compounds but superconductor research is currently paying for the past history of too much hype and too little reward. That may change again though.

NSF and DoE do fund a lot of research in the US (and elsewhere), but NIH is the main funder of medical and biological research. And that's not forgetting the funding agencies of other countries. Funding rates are still piss poor in the US, though are slowly getting better. Most good research ideas don't get funded now because of the national economic situation.

What do people think would be the single most stunning scientific advance that may happen in the next 20 years or so? I suggest that it will be artificial life, a non-sentient but still manmade viable and living multicellular organism. That might not sound as dramatic as a space elevator or a fusion reactor in your backyard but the potential ramifications are immense for the future of society. And possibly religion.
 
Materials research was heavily funded in the 50s, and later. The DoD does support research but it is not the main research funder in the US.

I thought something like that had happened.

Regarding the DoD, IIRC, their R&D budget is currently about half of federal R&D spending. I don't know what it was like in the 50s, but I'd be surprised if it was much less. Hence why I suggested them.

I gather that most people here think about "more advanced science" as being shiny big ticket items that make the news or general science documentaries but you are really just scratching the surface here. Almost all of the technological advances that shape our world come from fundamental research into interesting problems, the applications come afterwards.

I think it's more that a) shiny big-ticket items are easier to predict, and b) are more interesting to write about. Alternate History is, after all, a branch of literature, not history.
 
@ Asnys- not being an engineer, I was just spitballing redistributing power.

You make an excellent points about the conversion efficiency. Also your comments re AEC were exactly on point. You provided details to my vague proposition. Mainly what spooked a lot of nuclear critics was the AEC military culture of secrecy that made hysteria about TMI possible. Also BZ on enumerating the steps to a more robust nuclear industry.

@Ace Venom re 0% trash generation- it's a nice goal. Mainly you have to have a culture of recycling everything regardless of cost and convenience.
Where you run into problems is something like health care, where guaranteed sterile disposables save a lot of time and wear and tear on the sterile-processing equipment. It also creates a huge waste problem.
We're far more worried about blood-borne pathogens than wasting plastic at this time.

I'm not against orbital manufacturing per se. As many have stated, lifting the facility and materials and getting the products safely back is a commercial non-starter, even for C-tubes and other unicorn-tear rare stuff like perfect crystals and optics done in null-G.
Mainly I think it's a matter of too many iffy steps.

Do we have SSTO/mass-drivers/ion engines or better yet, space elevators to reduce launch/recovery costs from insane to practical? Not yet. Needs more work.

Do we have products worth making the trip up to orbit and back? Not yet.

Is there a market for that stuff? There could be.

NONE of these problems are insoluble, but deemed not worth really pushing it.

In biomed:

As to an AIDS vaccine (really difficult- the virus mutates so fast that any vaccine would only vaccinate against a narrow range of HIV variants)

IMO really spiffy gene therapies to allow folks to have the inborn immunity to AIDS now only available through marrow transplants from immune donors, you'd need to have a lot better guidelines on biomedical research, especially with gene mods and stem cell research would be what allows AIDS to be cured.
Also, treating STD's as a public health problem worthy of wiping them out like smallpox would be a help. Herpes virus is fascinating in that it infects, has a florid course, then goes dormant staying inert unless stress reactivates it.
An interesting area of research would be understanding the process of viral lysogenesis- where viruses don't proliferate madly, just stay under the radar more or less inert or suppressed by immune response would be a major help.
Something fascinating I discovered during general micriobiology was phage therapy pioneered by the Soviets. Good against bacterial infections. IDK about protozoan infections. Using phages against stuff like MRTB, flesh-eating strep infections, and so forth would be a million times better than antibiotic therapies. Of course, the cheapest, best thing is prevention.
Good hygeine is so simple it escapes us.
 
@ Asnys- not being an engineer, I was just spitballing redistributing power.

You make an excellent points about the conversion efficiency. Also your comments re AEC were exactly on point. You provided details to my vague proposition. Mainly what spooked a lot of nuclear critics was the AEC military culture of secrecy that made hysteria about TMI possible. Also BZ on enumerating the steps to a more robust nuclear industry.

Honestly, the AEC had no one to blame but themselves for losing public trust. You do crap like CASTLE BRAVO, and that's bad enough, but then to have Lewis F'ing Strauss get up in front of God and country and lie about it, and lie so stupidly, what did he expect to happen? Fixing public radiation phobia requires a lot more than just keeping the AEC from discrediting itself - and Strauss as far from the chairmanship as humanly possible - but it's a very good start.
 
Zero trash may not be credible any time soon, but there is a reason to work toward it: there's money in it. Companies have already learned throwing out less can cut costs & increase profits. So, a "green" government encouraging recycling could do it in the name of profit, too.
 
Michael Busch mentioned in a thread in FH that you have about 50% losses in converting to microwaves. If you're going up and then going back down, you're spending 4 kWh to get 1 kWh at the other end. Unless you have a REALLY cheap energy source, or can find a much more efficient way to do the power transmission, I don't see a way to make this work.
Errr... I don't know what the efficiencies are for converting TO microwaves are, but converting FROM has efficiencies up to 95%. Moreover, instead of absorbing microwaves in orbit, and regenerating the waves, simply use a large mirror (i.e. wire mesh with mesh size smaller than the wavelength). Your total efficiency should then be about the efficiency of the microwave generation. A quick google suggests that microwave ovens manage 65% efficiency, and I'd imagine a large dedicated array could be made rather more efficient than that.
 
Phage therapies are indeed an interesting what if, especially considering their history in the Soviet Union. Plus there's the human tragedy side of the story - their chief proponent George Eliava being executed in one of Stalin's purges (it's rumoured that he was a rival of Beria's for a woman's attention). I've been interested in phage therapy since one of my colleagues in the US tried it as a last ditch treatment for a life threatening infection years ago. Thankfully it worked. Phage therapy still has big problems gaining broad acceptance though because of issues about injecting such infectious agents into humans, plus there have been a number of failures involving their use.

I would like to see some supporting evidence for the claim that the DoD is the major science funder in the US, because I doubt that very much.
 
Errr... I don't know what the efficiencies are for converting TO microwaves are, but converting FROM has efficiencies up to 95%. Moreover, instead of absorbing microwaves in orbit, and regenerating the waves, simply use a large mirror (i.e. wire mesh with mesh size smaller than the wavelength). Your total efficiency should then be about the efficiency of the microwave generation. A quick google suggests that microwave ovens manage 65% efficiency, and I'd imagine a large dedicated array could be made rather more efficient than that.

<shrug> I'm just quoting another poster, I don't have any knowledge of it myself.
 
Here's a thought. We've talked about funding and projects and so on. What about finding more talent? For example, the representation of women in the sciences, even today, is pretty lacking. That's a bit more than half of the Earth's population, and presumably therefore half the potential scientific talent, being under-utilized. Could we get more women into the sciences earlier?
 
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Here's a thought. We've talked about funding and projects and so on. What about finding more talent? For example, the representation of women in the sciences, even today, is pretty lacking. That's a bit more than half of the Earth's population, and presumably therefore half the potential scientific talent, being under-utilized. Could we get more women into the sciences earlier?

Yes, but it would require fixing problems with the education system and immense sexism against women entering technical fields at points, latter being more cultural.

For the former? Fix the education so it doesn't depend on women not being able to get any other job than teaching to get decent teachers.

Speaking of, if you really want to get better technological research, and get more talent, FIX the education system. That means teachers getting much better pay so they don't need to Unionize.
 
Aliens land and give humans advanced technology on 2nd January 1950.

Now that I've opened my first ever post here with a (terribly bad) joke, perhaps greater rivalry during the height of the cold war leads to more nations becoming involved, increasing the manpower and funding to key scientific developments.

Presumably mostly as defence stuff, but it's possible some of it would have offshoots into civilian technology.

Alternatively, Kennedy is not assassinated, the USA and USSR stage a joint space venture (sure they were in talks, I'll try and post a link if I can find one.). The project works flawlessly, leading to greater sharing of research and a building of mutual research between the two nations. Instead of both competing to put things into space, developmental tasks are divided up, allowing for a higher rate of development.


Did I do that right?
 
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