Plain and simple, without the transistor, technology freezes to a crawl at the levels of the late forties and early fifties. Intercontinental communication would be confined to old copper cables and the part of the radio spectrum that can bounce around the world.
As for any type of space programs, they would be minimal.
Of course, this is the twentieth century and electrochemical science is no longer confined to a handful of scientists like Michael Faraday as it was in the nineteenth. You have governments capable of building atomic bombs, not to mention corporations pouring effort into research like Westinghouse, GE, BASF, DuPont, Dow Chemical, etc.
This thread is not to address why progress stops. But if it did, computers would remain voluminous and energy intense, as would televisions, home audio systems, etc. It might be conceivable that pollution and other complications of higher energy waste might generate a backlash against certain types of technological progress. Perhaps transistor technology or research towards it gets sequestered by international agreements as potentially damaging, sort of the way nuclear is viewed.
As for any type of space programs, they would be minimal.
Of course, this is the twentieth century and electrochemical science is no longer confined to a handful of scientists like Michael Faraday as it was in the nineteenth. You have governments capable of building atomic bombs, not to mention corporations pouring effort into research like Westinghouse, GE, BASF, DuPont, Dow Chemical, etc.
This thread is not to address why progress stops. But if it did, computers would remain voluminous and energy intense, as would televisions, home audio systems, etc. It might be conceivable that pollution and other complications of higher energy waste might generate a backlash against certain types of technological progress. Perhaps transistor technology or research towards it gets sequestered by international agreements as potentially damaging, sort of the way nuclear is viewed.
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