WI: the transistor was never invented?

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.
 
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It is now because the breeders for it have been shut down. It would be trivial to get the amounts needed if eg we built more isotope breeding reactors or maybe if we just reprocessed nuclear fuel.

Yes, provided they need it there's really no issue. But that much Pu-238 is a big hazard during launch ops. Solar thermal is less of a problem, especially if you don't use mercury as the working fluid. It's actually been studied as a replacement for solar cells--more rad hard, less area per watt--but hasn't ever flown. It seems the most likely replacement for me.
 
But as someone pointed out, no transistors means no solid state lasers means no fiber optics, so ocean cables are still copper. Which means satellites are going to happen even if they are blasted expensive.

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Wow. Its even worse than i thought. A bit more googling suggests that the maximum capacity transatlantic cable using tubes was 138 voice links. The copper cables that carried thousands all used transistor amplifiers.

Of course, they could have done higher capacity with tubes, but it could easily top out below a thousand.
 
For the transistor to NEVER get invented, you have to prevent any sort of solid state physics. Which probably means no one ever discovers diodes or crystal radios, since if you have either of those, physicists will want to know how they work.

Or, i suppose that the world could degenerate into a set of antiscience power blocks, eg Nazis vs a fundamentalist US. But that would likely take a pre1900 pod.

I just cant see transistors NOT getting invented. Delayed a decade? I suppose. But not never.

Crystal Radios were out in the 20's, the US, late 50's early 60, launched loose copper wires into space to test the use of them as a back to satellites in a war.
 
Crystal Radios were out in the 20's, the US, late 50's early 60, launched loose copper wires into space to test the use of them as a back to satellites in a war.
Right. Which means that you have to push the PoD that far back. Crystal radios rely on crystals, obviously, with functions that classical physics can't explain. If they ARE widely used, physicists WILL investigate them, learn about solid state physics (energy levels in semiconductors, etc.), and you WILL have transistors.

So you have to prevent crystal radios, as only one of the crazy things about this challenge.


The mylar coated balloon (Echo) was probably a better passive reflector than the needles. And passive relay has already been mentioned.
 
Dathi THorfinnsson said:
manned for tube replacement. Sorry, crewed:)
You mean "staffed", don't you?:rolleyes::p

If satellites have to be bigger & heavier, the lifters do, too. Which makes SPS more practical, doesn't it? Or, if manned comsats, something like Mir/Skylab in GEO? Which makes building in L4/L5 more attractive, no?
Mark E. said:
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.
So clear up for me why pumped gas lasers & fibreoptics can't be used?
 
Also, having poked around vacuum microelectronics a bit, they weren't developed until the 1970s OTL and relied on IC fabrication techniques to be created, at least at first, so I am highly skeptical that they will arrive as replacements for vacuum tubes before there is interest in building satellites. Generally, if something's never been heard of IOTL except in specialized circles, there's a good reason for it...

The good reason in OTL is that discrete transistors were vastly superior to discrete vacuum tubes; and transistors are easy enough to miniaturize that there hasn't been a compelling reason to research alternatives to them (except for defense and aerospace applications where high radiation tolerance was needed). If ASBs mindblock humans from inventing semiconductors, the next-best alternative would be VMEs (in my opinion), and there would've been a lot more research dollars poured into it.
 
So clear up for me why pumped gas lasers & fibreoptics can't be used?
How fast, and on how many frequencies, can you get a gas laser to signal?

Your data rate would be WAY down, and the power consumption for all the repeaters WAY up.

It might be doable, but I doubt it would be practical.

Remember, it took years and years of research to get glass fiber clear enough for long distances, and the appeal is going to drop massively if the lasers are bigger/slower/bulkier/more expensive. So that research is much less likely to happen.

Glass fibers good enough to transmit light a metre or two (e.g. for endoscopies) are trivial. Good enough to transmit light hundreds of km, are most definitely not trivial.
 
The good reason in OTL is that discrete transistors were vastly superior to discrete vacuum tubes; and transistors are easy enough to miniaturize that there hasn't been a compelling reason to research alternatives to them (except for defense and aerospace applications where high radiation tolerance was needed).

Except that those applications use hardened transistors, not VMEs.

In any case, your points about lifetimes are mostly besides the point...modern satellites are killed by running out of propellant, not be electronics failure. Increased radiation tolerance won't actually help them live any longer in most cases.
 
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