Es Geloybte Aretz - a Germanwank

[Jürgen]

The problem are how decolonisation happens without the massive losses in WWI and we won't see France focusing on getting the immigrant to France instead Algeria, if in 1960 the European population of Algeria are 26% instead of 13% the Algerian War of independence will trun even uglier. On the other hand a larger European population with more later arrivals, will likely have a less reactionary view of native rights.

As for USA without the state pushing for linguistic assimalation there's little reason for a German in South Dakota who own a farm and whose neighbours are also German speakers to adopt English as home language. In Europe the two things which resulted in the destruction of minority homelanguages was the rise of the state as a enforcer of a single language and the rise of mass media (television). Even here there have been limits, I want to pull out the Finnish region of Ostrobothnia up as example It's the only Finnish mainland region with a Swedish majority. It have a large Finnish speaking minority, who mostly live in the regional capital of Vaasa, while the Swedish speakers mostly live in the rural areas. This region have a population density of around the same as Nebraska.

In the same manner I expect the less densely populated states in USA function in the same manner the local Germans, Swedes and Norwegians live in relative isolation from the English speakers, they have their own schools. Of course if they interact across language border they likely use English as lingua franca. Which means that the bigger towns tend to be English speaking. As mass media rise, we don't see USA being dominated by one public broadcaster, so we see regional station broadcast in the local minority language. The dominance of English only end up dominate these states as increased urbanisation hits, but in rural areas people keep speaking their old languages.

 

[Shevek23]

I see little reason to assume the world is going to be advanced significantly over OTL standards. The Russo-German war presumably has given a jump start on some technologies but without another war in place of the Great War any bump wartime investment produces will come out in the wash by 1919. I think certain specific technologies such as rigid airships might make more of a splash, but that is not so much due to more advanced tech as to different parties being in an economically and politically privileged position at an earlier level of tech.

Anyway I am not convinced wars advance technology; the strongest reason to assume this TL would be more advanced is that the Russo-German war was less devastating and less overall intensive; we have Russian advance but most of that is forced catch-up under the Integralist aegis; we have German tech accelerated but OTL the wartime hothouse effect was on both sides, being peers in technological leadership generally. Russians support a high level of scientific work and engineering innovation considering their low per capita capacity, but that does take a toll in overall standing, which is why much less populous Germany is ahead of Russia in this TL for instance. So realistically the question is, will postwar Germany (and its larger sphere of client states and ramshackle ally Austria-Hungary) benefit so much from a superior overall situation bearing in mind debts and other liabilities, a lack of serious military challenges until the Integralists of Russia tip their hands, and the social changes worked in the Teutonosphere by the war? Early in this narrative, when I picked up some very fanboyish notions of Wilhelm III the Gernsbackian People's Prince, patron of Socialists and gadgeteers galore, then I had great enthusiasm for the notion that Germany would surge ahead as a quasi Utopian socialist-People's Monarchy technocratic Tomorrowland. But these have systematically been pruned back by author clarification and prophecy; there is no reason to think that either social or technical progress enjoys an overall leg-up though specific catastrophes such as Germany coming under a Volkisch dictatorship may be thankfully avoided.

The reactionaries are foretold to get their innings in very soon now and the stage is being set for that; these fools will no doubt fumble many otherwise easy plays in terms of German development, leaving the overall pace of global progress roughly parallel to OTL.

 

[Stendhal]

Anyway I am not convinced wars advance technology;

I disagree. I would say that technologies like radar, radio, rockets, quartz oscillators, television, semiconductors, miniaturization, are all based on Air Warfare. The latter's importance in turn is a result of geography: Britain as an island feels that their capital is too close to the coast for comfort. With the Russo-German War having come early, aerospace may be stymied.

 

[EWilanO]

While I must agree that the industry can at times make retarded decisions, in this case it might be better to write that it was held back or that innovation was stymied.

 

[Shard]

I disagree. I would say that technologies like radar, radio, rockets, quartz oscillators, television, semiconductors, miniaturization, are all based on Air Warfare. The latter's importance in turn is a result of geography: Britain as an island feels that their capital is too close to the coast for comfort. With the Russo-German War having come early, aerospace may be stymied.

Wars, though, as a general rule, cause numerous people to be killed, and infrastructure to be destroyed. Technological advancement typically requires the abundance of labure typically available during peacetime. Otherwise one should argue that our Paleolithic and/or Neolithic ancestors should be infinitely more advanced than our society, arguably being in essentially a constant state of war.

How many technological advancements come from the war-torn ruins of Syria, as opposed to the peaceful Silicon Valley? Would you call Baghdad after it's sack a place of technological advancement? Certainly not.

 

[EWilanO]

That's true but one cannot deny that there would much less convenience food without American logistics research during WW2, or that WW1 had an enormous influence on trauma and reconstructive surgery, or how welding technology was driven by the demand of the armaments industry, to name just a few examples.

 

[Shard]

That's true but one cannot denied that there would much less convenience food without American logistics research during WW2, or that WW1 had an enormous influence on trauma and reconstructive surgery, or how welding technology was driven by the demand of the armaments industry, to name just a few examples.

It's a diversion of resources into war and related industries. You can't tell if those resources might have led to their own discoveries elsewhere.

 

[Stendhal]

Our Paleolithic and/or Neolithic ancestors being in essentially a constant state of war, infinitely more advanced, are us.

 

[Deleted member 94708]

War almost inevitably changes the focus of scientific progress; I suspect that the retarding and advancing effects of total war are roughly balanced, though.

What it does is decrease the total amount of resources a society can muster while simultaneously increasing the portion it is willing to devote to scientific and engineering development and dramatically shift what it chooses to research.

Applied physics and materials science almost always do better in wartime, while theoretical physics and research destined for the consumer market do worse.

It’s really impossible to say what the state of the art would be without either world war, but the safe conclusion is “very, very different”. I find it difficult to envision civil aviation, composite materials, anything nuclear-related, and consumer electronics being anywhere near what they are, while the biological sciences and certain fields of engineering would, on balance, maybe be ahead.

One thing which skews our perceptions of the relationship between war and technological advance is that World War II was essential to kicking off the IT revolution; without the advances in processing power that came about because of the large, publicly funded research programs during WWII and the Cold War, EVERYTHING would by today be behind OTL just for lack of processing power. WWII was almost certainly a net driver of innovation; not every war would be.

On the balance though, unless TTL finds a similar driver for solid-state electronics and semi-conductors it will start to lag behind OTL after 1980.

 

[Shard]

A massive state-driven research program with an objective would likely have all the benefits of war without the difficulties.

The Space Race, for example. IMO all that's really needed is competition - War is an extreme and destructive example of it, but ultimately unnecessary. The Cold War had numerous nuclear weapons development without an actual war or even use of the nuclear weapons, for example.

 

[Faeelin]

I see little reason to assume the world is going to be advanced significantly over OTL standards. The Russo-German war presumably has given a jump start on some technologies but without another war in place of the Great War any bump wartime investment produces will come out in the wash by 1919. I think certain specific technologies such as rigid airships might make more of a splash, but that is not so much due to more advanced tech as to different parties being in an economically and politically privileged position at an earlier level of tech.

Germany is not impoverished in the 1910s and 1920s the way it was in OTL. Eastern Europe, as party of Mitteleuropa, doesn't engage in a beggar thy neighbor approach to economics where everyone tries to build their own car factories. France and England, of course, don't have several hundred thousand potential inventors dead in Flanders.

 

[Daztur]

Also no Nazis doing stupid things to German academia.

 

[aldonius]

The transistor as a concept had existed for about 20 years before Bell Labs got one working. But the program responsible for the materials used (high quality germanium crystal) was the result of WW2.

It's likely even without a WW2 analogue that the silicon transistor would be developed eventually, although it would be very unlikely for the timeframe to match OTL. Once the transistor is a sufficiently well known concept and some clever person thinks up the integrated circuit, things should largely take care of themselves from then on. Implementing Boolean logic in electronics and discrete mathematics on top of that is a rather difficult concept to butterfly.

 

[ShortsBelfast]

and consumer electronics

Actually these were retarded by and large by the war as the manufacturing and raw material resource wasn't available to give practical application to theoretical ideas (like Baird's or Farnsworth's ideas for colour TV as mentioned above). Nor were the team developing the transistor given any huge resource priority -as no military force anywhere used them they weren't desperately needed -yes, might be handy for lightening airborne radar but no Manhattan Project Also, even if there is no "Great War" in a TL, there will inevitably be small wars and arms races -mini cold wars that will fund research spending in many areas.

Also no Nazis doing stupid things to German academia.

And no Communists doing stupid things to Russian/Ukrainean/Belarussian/Baltic and Chinese academia or economies. Possibly no "licence Raj" in India either. And, if only one half of one percent of the 30 odd million killed in the Great War, Russian Revolution and Civil War, Russo-Polish War, Turkish Revolution and Finnish war of independence were capable scientists, technicians or engineers then the Great War robbed the world of 150,000 such.

 

[Deleted member 94708]

A massive state-driven research program with an objective would likely have all the benefits of war without the difficulties.

The Space Race, for example. IMO all that's really needed is competition - War is an extreme and destructive example of it, but ultimately unnecessary. The Cold War had numerous nuclear weapons development without an actual war or even use of the nuclear weapons, for example.

I don’t disagree; I am just more agnostic than most here about whether a war can speed up progress as well as retard it. I agree completely that the Cold War had an accelerating effect with little to counter-balance it.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

Nor were the team developing the transistor given any huge resource priority -as no military force anywhere used them they weren't desperately needed -yes, might be handy for lightening airborne radar

Transistors were not developed so soon after WW2 because they were wanted by any military during the war, they were developed because multiple different militaries decided they wanted better diodes for better radar resolution and range (not lighter radars), and were suddenly willing to pay millions (in 1940's money!) to make that happen. The best way known to make the diodes better was to improve the substrate material, by making purer germanium monocrystals. Nothing about this was new or exiting -- the Czochralski process that would be used was invented in 1915. The issue was just that doing it in the scale required for pure results requires massive industrial investment, which did not exist before the war because no-one knew it would lead to transistors, and there simply wasn't any known uses for pure monocrystalline germanium that seemed worth the investment.

But after the war, the production facilities for pure monocrystalline Germanium now existed, and multiple different groups of people who worked with the samples soon figured out that you could maybe do all kinds of interesting things with them.

The reality of major technological improvements isn't states or companies choosing to prioritize things they want and making them happen, it's making connections between things developed for entirely different reasons, and finding out properties you didn't expect to find from them. The exclamation that drives scientific process isn't "Eureka!", it's "that's funny...".

The specific case of the transistor did not require any particularly smart inventors, scientists or engineers. It required an investment of metric assload of money into industrial facilities and process to make a certain technology used almost exclusively for warfare slightly better (the civilian world worked on tubes, solid state diodes were known about but really only used for radar because they were more expensive and only better in ways that mostly only benefited radar). That investment could have been done decades before, but wasn't, because there was no perceived economic return or military need for it. Only when some general somewhere decided that making radar that few % better was now a life-or-death matter, was that investment actually done and, as a byproduct, modern transistors developed. Had there not been such a life-or-death situation, that made money concerns almost completely irrelevant, any military would almost certainly have spent that money on something else.

The reason computer development would be retarded by the lack of WW2 is that it is hard gated behind monocrystal semiconductors, and no-one ITL knows that. Eventually someone is going to produce a sample of pure silicon or germanium or gallium arsenide or anything in a lab, figure out it's properties, build good transistors out of it, and get filthy stinking rich out of it. (even more than IRL, probably, because IRL there was a lot of competition in transistors from the start because everyone got the pure germanium, while in this world there would likely be only one party working on it). But there is no reason to expect this to happen anytime soon, or even within four decades or something.

 

[Deleted member 94708]

@Tuna-Fish Agreed.

Modern, total wars provide a lot of fodder for those “that’s funny” moments, as governments go dig into all sorts of theoretical research from prior decades as they grasp about for anything to give them a leg up. Modern petro-chemicals wouldn’t exist without WWI; a whole host of fields from solid-state electronics to jet engines would be unrecognizable or severely slowed down without spin-off research stemming from the sheer mass of experimentation done by the US and Commonwealth in WWII.

Wars don’t necessarily do this, but our world wars did. That’s why butterflying them will change virtually everything about the 20th century.

You’re right that someone will eventually play enough with a semi-conductor to figure out what it can do, but it won’t happen soon enough to have laptops and smartphones in 2007.

Likewise, someone will eventually turn jet engines into a reliable piece of machinery that can power civil airliners, but without the pressure of our WWII, it won’t happen in time to have an all-jet airliner before 1960.

The list goes on and on; there is every reason to believe that there will be dozens of fields in which TTL is substantially behind OTL by the present, and the gap will worsen until semi-conductors are advanced enough to provide the sort of processing power which has become essential to every aspect of theoretical science today, from gene sequencing and protein biochemistry, to high-energy physics and machine learning.

The simple fact of the matter is that when it comes to modern scientific research people count for less than resources; it is the latter which allow researchers to spend hundreds of millions of hours in the lab and stumble onto the serendipitous coincidences which are the raw material of “that’s funny...”

Having a few hundred thousand more inventors and scientists playing around in the period from 1910-1930 will be completely outweighed by the lack of bottomless pits of money which were given to OTL’s surviving scientists in Germany, the US, the USSR, and the Commonwealth between 1939 and 1945 and in the US and USSR for three decades thereafter. Those laboratories birthed the modern world and won’t just magically appear ITTL.

 

[ShortsBelfast]

Thank you. I defer to your superior knowledge on transistor development. However, my key point is that "No Great War" does not equal "no wars", "no arms races" or "no war scares". A few spyplane panics for instance, and a couple of airborne bombings perhaps as part of a small local war or a British/French/German/Italian colonial counter-insurgency exercise and some defence money starts to go into improving radar. Arrival of the first WMD (probably nerve gas rather than nuclear in TTL) and quite a bit of money starts going into improving radar.

 

[ShortsBelfast]

Having a few hundred thousand more inventors and scientists playing around in the period from 1910-1930 will be completely outweighed by the lack of bottomless pits of money which were given to OTL’s surviving scientists in Germany, the US, the USSR, and the Commonwealth between 1939 and 1945 and in the US and USSR for three decades thereafter.

In aggregate you are correct regarding research funding, but remember that most of the projects funded OTL weren't the Manhattan Project but were done on a relative shoestring, competing with all of the other projects governments and industry were funding for resources and quite results dependent.
The average individual private venture or state defence project won't be much more or less generously funded that the OTL state funded projects as an individual project. Fewer projects overall yes possibly even probably (though do factor in more buoyant and less protectionist 1920s and 1930s economies and less political meddling in Russia and Germany, continued post war research in Germany and Italy, Hungary and Czechslovakia in the 1940s and a stronger Russian and, from the 1960s on Chinese and Japanese) economy). Further, I agree that nuclear power will be slower in coming (and energy production given priority over the bomb) but the average project will be around as well funded as OTL (i.e. not very - antibiotics and bacteriophages weren't initially produced in particularly well funded labs for example). So some advances will not come as quickly but others will advance at more or less the same speed. And some possibly faster- more countries will be competing as individual players rather than members of huge blocs like NATO/EU/COMECON/Warsaw Pact.

 

[wietze]

And no Communists doing stupid things to Russian/Ukrainean/Belarussian/Baltic and Chinese academia or economies. Possibly no "licence Raj" in India either. And, if only one half of one percent of the 30 odd million killed in the Great War, Russian Revolution and Civil War, Russo-Polish War, Turkish Revolution and Finnish war of independence were capable scientists, technicians or engineers then the Great War robbed the world of 150,000 such.

and very likely a much reduced or no spanish flu pandemic, which adds another 150M+ people

On the balance though, unless TTL finds a similar driver for solid-state electronics and semi-conductors it will start to lag behind OTL after 1980.

the transistor was invented twice before bell labs had pure germanium (and they actually used earlier transistor invention as 'inspiration') i am thinking they might actually be ahead of the curve