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Author Topic: Revolution
TempestDash
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quote:
Originally posted by Robert Nowall:
Think again...cars have batteries.

I've had the alternator die in my car before, and while the radio stopped working and eventually the headlights went out (when the battery died entirely) I was able to keep driving the car. I just couldn't idle (electronically managed) and I couldn't start it again after I finally stopped it (the primary purpose of the battery in a car). And that wasn't like an 1964 Mustang or anything, it was an '85 Corolla.

But that's a manageable change. No batteries means you need a different means of starting the engine, but if fire works, an engine can work. In Revolution, cars are gone and replaced by horses. Why? Trains existed before the electronic circuit, why were steam engines brought back into service? The first episode even skips 15 years past the 'event' that destroys technology, even without the benefit of a computer, you could build factories to make new steam engines in that time. Even if chemical and metallurgical properties were subtly altered, you could find alternatives in that time.

No, this anti-technology field or however they're selling it makes no sense at all. If you REALLY wanted to accomplish the effects of this 'event', I would say your best bet would be fear. Create some event that SCARES everyone into not using technology. That would far and away be the most effective technique -- and even there, you'd only get a percentage of the population without some form of advanced mind control.

As it is, I find it hard to believe in much of the background of this show.

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Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
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Sounds to me as if they heard of the handwavium we use in the Hatrack Utility Belt and have applied that to whatever they don't want working.

Either that or it's just plain Bad Science (aka movie and tv science). <shrug>

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Robert Nowall
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I've had the alternator die on a couple cars, and, after I got a jump, I was able to start the car and drive home normally.

But a gasoline-powered engine wouldn't work without the battery, without electricity...if something prevented the eletric spark that ignited the gas from sparking, that's it.

Steam power would definitely be an option if electricity failed---I think that Frederic Brown story I mentioned above worked steam power into the story---it worked, of course, in trains, and in things like the Stanley Steamer, but it was abandoned in cars because it smoked too much and gasoline was just a better fuel source...

*****

I suppose a number of "what if electricity fails" options would present themselves besides cars. For instance, without electricity, you wouldn't have air conditioning...so until some alternative form of air conditioning was developed (which would probably be low on a list of priorities), the American Sun Belt would be largely uninhabitable...likely sparking a mass exodus in the first few years...

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rcmann
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Electricity itself cannot be made to stop working, which I have seen some stories try to present. If electrons stop flowing, then all chemical reactions of any kind cease, and so does life. Electrical equipment can be destroyed of course. But it doesn't take much to re-wind some wire around a magnet and make a crude generator. Hand cranked even. Which could give you an electro-magnet. Which could give you a more powerful generator. Which could give you the means to purify metal more thoroughly. Which could give you the tools you need to re-build.

Once you know how it's made, our modern civilization isn't really that complicated. Up to the point of solid state electronics anyway. Even a major EMP, or a revolution type situation, couldn't stop us from maintaining a tech level equal to the 1930's at minimum. Hand cranked telephones aren't very long trange, but they work. As do 'cat's-eye' crystal radios.

And there's always ice boxes.

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MattLeo
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quote:
Originally posted by rcmann:

Once you know how it's made, our modern civilization isn't really that complicated. Up to the point of solid state electronics anyway. Even a major EMP, or a revolution type situation, couldn't stop us from maintaining a tech level equal to the 1930's at minimum. Hand cranked telephones aren't very long trange, but they work. As do 'cat's-eye' crystal radios.

Which reminds me of the classic Doc Smith novel *Spacehounds of the IPC*, in which castaways on a very Earth-like Ganymede use local resources and ingenuity to build the technology they need to build an "ultra-radio". They progress up from forging metal to generating electricity, even blowing glass, but the toughest piece of the job is to fabricate a 50kw power transmitter tube. Smith is *very* up-to-date with 1940s manufacturing technology, and the toughest job the castaways face is evacuating the tube (Ganymede has an atmosphere) without a "mercury-vapor vacuum pump" or a "getter" material.

This is *very* technologically accurate. In the 80s I worked on a plasma fusion project where we used vacuum like a roofer uses nails. After you've pumped down a chamber as low as you can get with a conventional pump, you reach the point where the mean free path of a molecule approaches the size of the pump chamber, and a mechanical pump does essentially nothing. Then you've got to bat the molecules away from the chamber, or absorb them chemically as they randomly bounce into your getter. Actually getting even to that point with nothing but blacksmith level technology is pretty questionable, but Smith solves this by having the castaways able to raise their lifeboat above the atmosphere long enough to evacuate their tube.

The processes in *Spacehounds of the IPC* represents the highest level of "low tech". "High tech" usually is taken to mean "cutting edge" -- a moving target -- but I contend there's a kind of boiling point in technology development where further advances require the support of a wide base reaching across an advanced society.

Captain Nemo can build the *Nautilus* on his secret island base without being traceable through his supply chain, although no doubt being able to buy steel of a specified grade (and of course brass and mahogany fittings!) no doubt simplified his job. But if you needed to produce something like an iPad to get off Ganymede, you'd be stuck.

You'd need gold from Canada, copper from Chile, tantalum from Congo, petroleum from Saudi Arabia. Nearly all the circuitry you'd need would come as pre-fabricated ICs from Singapore and flash memory from Japan. Your software wouldn't be built entirely in-house; iPad is based on the Mach Kernel from Carnegie Mellon and U Cal Berkeley's version of the Unix operating system. If you printed out all the standards used as engineering specifications (3G, 4G, Internet Protocols, Web protocols, file systems, etc) the stack would probably be fifty feet high if not more.

The absolute limit of craft-oriented technology probably came in the 1950s. In WW2 the British manufactured state-of-the-art fighter planes out of plywood. They built them in piano factories. The engines could be built in factories that built cars and trucks because they were the same tech, just a specialized design. Compare that to a modern F-35's composite materials and jet engines. Practically every bit of that plane has to be made by a specialist company in purpose-built facilities.

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Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
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quote:
Originally posted by rcmann:
Electricity itself cannot be made to stop working, which I have seen some stories try to present. If electrons stop flowing, then all chemical reactions of any kind cease, and so does life.

Therefore, the tv show is fantasy, not science fiction.
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Robert Nowall
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Of course there are lots of things the loss of electricity would make happen...us SF-types, we can't help but turn the possibilities over in our minds and think things through.
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rcmann
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I am trying to remember the last time I saw a hard sf tv show or a hard sf movie with science that didn't insult the intelligence of a grade school dropout.
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MattLeo
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quote:
Originally posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury:
quote:
Originally posted by rcmann:
Electricity itself cannot be made to stop working, which I have seen some stories try to present. If electrons stop flowing, then all chemical reactions of any kind cease, and so does life.

Therefore, the tv show is fantasy, not science fiction.
By that logic, stories that involve time travel or faster-than-light travel are fantasy as well, because as far as we know they are impossible.

I'd say that FTL scenarios are more inconsistent with known physics than something which stops electrical doo-dads from working. As I pointed out in a prior post, it's only necessary to postulate something that alters the conductivity of elements in group 11 of the periodic table to produce a world in which even simple electronic circuits don't work but biochemistry does.

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Pyre Dynasty
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Nanobots. Nanobots cure everything. Nanobots are magic.

Although perhaps it doesn't have to be as much of a cheat in this instance. Program them to interrupt electrical processes. Possibly build them out of insulating and/or magnetic materials. Either way they intercept the juice, whatever the source and use the energy and materials to replicate. That way they can spread over the earth fairly quickly. This could also explain the "amulets" that restart the electricity, they are the control mechanism for the bots, and they are set to deactivate.

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TempestDash
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Ultimately, my biggest problem with the Revolution pilot is the implication innovation largely evaporated with the electricity. I am okay with a MacGuffin causing electronic circuits to fail, I'm not okay with the idea that 15 years afterward the best we have been able to recover is civil war technology. I'd buy that for villages but not Chicago. Even if the ENABLING technology gives out the knowledge remains. Alternatives would be explored and some of them would work. Unless the anti-technology event recurs with alarming frequency And people simply give up on trying, but there is no sign of that in the pilot.
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Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
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quote:
Originally posted by rcmann:
I am trying to remember the last time I saw a hard sf tv show or a hard sf movie with science that didn't insult the intelligence of a grade school dropout.

Wow, rcmann, have you ever seen a show like that?

I'd offer NUMBERS as a possible candidate, but it isn't science fiction per se.

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MJNL
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quote:
Originally posted by MattLeo:
quote:
Originally posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury:
quote:
Originally posted by rcmann:
Electricity itself cannot be made to stop working, which I have seen some stories try to present. If electrons stop flowing, then all chemical reactions of any kind cease, and so does life.

Therefore, the tv show is fantasy, not science fiction.
By that logic, stories that involve time travel or faster-than-light travel are fantasy as well, because as far as we know they are impossible.

I'd say that FTL scenarios are more inconsistent with known physics than something which stops electrical doo-dads from working. As I pointed out in a prior post, it's only necessary to postulate something that alters the conductivity of elements in group 11 of the periodic table to produce a world in which even simple electronic circuits don't work but biochemistry does.

I don't know--suggesting something could change the basic properties of elements sounds far more scientifically unsound to me. Especially since many theoretical physicists postulate there could be numerouse ways to achieve an FTL effect (if not literal FTL travel).

Changing the fundamentals of physics seems way more psudoscientific than changing cosmological principles that many already acknowledge could be incorrect.

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rcmann
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*grabs a bag of popcorn and settles back to watch*
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Robert Nowall
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quote:
Nanobots. Nanobots cure everything. Nanobots are magic.
I abandoned my last try at an SF novel, a hundred thousand words in and nowheres near the end, because I was using nanotechnology as a magic wand and giving my heroine so many superpowers I couldn't keep track of them all. I may return to it and weed out some of 'em, some day...I liked the story and characters well enough...

*****

I think with SF you're allowed to make radical assumptions in violation of the laws of physics, provided you work out the details of it all as you go---and entertain the reader in the process.

(That definition might make Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings SF, though...)

*****

quote:
I am trying to remember the last time I saw a hard sf tv show or a hard sf movie with science that didn't insult the intelligence of a grade school dropout
I can't think of an SF TV series that was as firmly scientific as the best written-form hard SF---they were all either for kiddies, or descenced into mysticism---even Star Trek.
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