What technology is dependent on Satellites/space program lessons?

[iterantunicorn93]

I'm working on a story that takes place in a sci fi world that was disinterested in space travel. So while in some ways it has things we could only dream of its also missing many things that we take for granted.

I'm just as happy to get obvious answers as I am obscure ones, since I might not have thought of them yet.

Comments

[redsixwing]

GPS. :)

That's the big one people forget about all the time.

Edit: GPS affects everything from airplane and container ship navigation, to the convenient maps in cars and smartphones, to the entire sport of geocaching (much more difficult without coordinates) to agriculture (automated tractors are fully reliant on GPS) to search and rescue.

It's almost easier to find domains GPS *hasn't* touched.

[voidampersand]

GPS was developed by the Defense Department as a weapons-guidance platform. The question is whether a world without space travel happens to have large missiles. If they have missiles, they can totally launch satellites, even if they are not interested in launching people into space.

[azurelunatic]

And even if the world were uninterested in missiles, I have a hard time picturing a sufficiently advanced society uninterested in a view from a high perspective. Thus ballon-related high perspective could potentially give rise to balloon-based stationary waypointing and messaging -- both for whatever means of air travel, and for on-ground wayfinding.

(My dad was involved in space weather, which in the US was born out of the need to figure out how to predict the solar storms that played merry hell with telegraph lines in Alaska.)

Edit: The problem with ground-anchored balloons in both perspective/wayfinding is that they require either actual land as an anchor point, or artificially built land. So tiny islands could become strategically important in modern shipping, as would making artificial land -- or at least something anchored buoy adjacent. I would imagine that a balloon system would need a base station with [insert gas of choice -- helium or hydrogen, likely, each with their downfalls] to maintain it, so you couldn't just tie a balloon to the ocean floor without either some land to house the equipment, or some very specific ships.

[alnaperera]

About this, If GPS was never developed, people would still be looking for accurate ways to find their location. The requirements for this would also be very different based on what they're trying to do (ships are generally fairly okay with very accurate clocks, which were developed for positioning at sea in the first place) but this wouldn't work for a plane. They can still maintain a fairly accurate position with radio beacons, but this doesn't work over vast areas of open ocean, so you might need to put radio stations on tiny sandbars and still deal with holes in navigation. For vehicles, cell towers could be used (accuracy is not great, but if your object is to stop your map drifting, it's usable). If you have the tech for it, something visual may be more accurate.

[beatrice_otter]

A quick google pulled up this article: https://www.howtogeek.com/831363/these-nasa-innovations-are-all-around-us-everyday/

But it's not anything like definitive. Here's a link to the wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies

Every time I look at this list, I see some other crucial technology that transforms everyday life.

[azurelunatic]

The thing I was thinking of in particular is space-age textiles.

And it occurs to me that while some of the technologies are space-specific, the real reason for a lot of them was a whole lot of money getting poured into a big project that involved smaller, lighter, faster, stronger -- which could be applied to any military goal, really. So OP could probably invent a particular race-for-profits (maybe gold rush adjacent? or some other scarce resource that was suddenly in great demand, and whoever could find/mine/exploit it faster had the edge) that involved a high-budget, high-creativity funding spree. And then any technology that it would be useful to have could be attributed to some offshoot of that.

[octahedrite]

Weather monitoring and prediction

[ffutures]

Intercontinental TV - TV is very difficult to transmit over really long distances. You can use cables, but they have very limited bandwidth compared to satellite, and are a lot more expensive, especially if anything goes wrong. With satellite everything but the satellite itself is readily accessible for repairs etc., and that's a big factor in how reliable TV is now. So probably no real-time coverage of wars, sports, and other events, if they aren't happening fairly close to the TV transmitter.

[conuly]

This has come up in multiple fics recently and annoyed me every time: With no space race, nobody will use the expression "Earth to X!" to get another person's attention if their mind is wandering.

That's not a tech answer, but....

[lilacsigil]

Other people have covered some big ones!

Intercontinental broadcasting. Rural/remote internet. Remote area communications at all (no satellite phones). Emergency communications when mobile/cell phone network is overloaded. International phone calls will remain more expensive.

[fred_mouse]

some thoughts

• Weather data will be less reliable, and less current. Lots of the weather data modelling has benefited greatly from satellite data. Having said that, in terms of incoming rain, a lot of that is done with radar. But 'how hot was it everywhere' is done with automated weather stations reliant on telecommunications, so reduced telecommunications --> reduced easy access.
• stock (animal) monitoring - the more remote the actual movements are hard to track, but there is a thing called 'pastures from space' which gives people a heads up when there are going to be issues
• lightning strikes and resultant bushfires / wildfires are monitored using satellites. Monitoring for hot spots, and thus 'go check here' is also done with satellites.
• available water sources are monitored with satellites - in Australia that is 'how full are the dams' but I gather elsewhere they also keep track of glaciers.
• any communications that requires line of sight (eg radio) that doesn't have a satellite to bounce off will have much restricted range. Which means more on the ground repeater stations.

Having said that, radio, radar, and lidar aren't necessarily technology related to space travel, and alternative methods of speeding communications would presumably have been developed. And even now, lots of weather monitoring stations are along major roads, because those are easy to get tech crews to, so that aspect wouldn't change.

[armiphlage]

Smuggling and invasions by land and sea would be easier without satellite surveillance to see past the horizon.

Depending on whether or not the planet's atmosphere allowed bouncing radio signals, continents separated by oceans wouldn't have real-time communication without laying underseal telecommunication cables.

[armiphlage]

I meant "undersea", but "underseal" works too.

[voidampersand]

A big question is whether there was a missile program. In our timeline, the space program started as a "peaceful" missile capability demonstration. Similarly, was there a Manhattan Project? A Cold War? A WW II with jet engine development? They are the roots of the space programs in both the CCCP and USA.

Besides NASA, a lot of the early R&D for micro-electronics happened at AT&T Bell Labs and IBM, or was funded by DARPA. Does the other timeline have a telephone monopoly and effective computer monopoly? Does it have a defense-industrial complex? I would expect that any timeline will eventually have micro-electronics, but the path to it could be completely different, and it could be decades behind ours.

[iterantunicorn93]

As I currently conceive it, there was no Cold War or WW2 equivalent. The historical powers were akin to Carthage or Venice. As such, rather then direct empire building soft power projection is the norm. In the modern day nations are no longer even the primary actors, but are instead beholden and dependent to corporations. Competition and profit motive are the primary causes of conflict. As such there is a thriving defense-industrial complex.

I'm undecided on missiles. I had been thinking of including advanced missile artillery because missiles are cool. But this comment of yours+your GPS reply is making me rethink this. I don't want to undermine one of the core concepts.

[ffutures]

Before missiles there were pre-programmed unmanned aircraft used as weapons such as the German V1. Not very accurate compared to modern weapons since no GPS etc., steered by gyrocompasses and timers, sometimes radio signals, prior to computers and GPS.

The American Snark missile, actually similar to a V1, could carry a small nuke, but its navigation (using stars etc. since there was no GPS) was very poor and it was 20 miles or more off target in a lot of long-range tests.

But if you want actual ballistic missiles without GPS there was always the German V2 which wasn't so much guided as aimed in the right direction, with gyroscopes keeping it more or less on course until it left the atmosphere.

[ffutures]

A lot of astronomy is much less detailed, and some parts of it e.g. most infra-red and x-ray astronomy probably doesn't exist. Probably no knowledge of exoplanets, much less knowledge of asteroids etc., much less warning of approaching asteroids and other potential problems. This may also impact some aspects of geology and paleontology, e.g. they may not be aware of the causes of some extinction-level events.

[full_metal_ox]

Don’t forget to consider what shape the in-universe speculative fiction is going to take; are they going to focus on terrestrial Lost Civilizations? What’s the attitude toward undersea exploration?

Atomic Rockets

[(Anonymous)]

Check out Atomic Rockets: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/prelimnotes.php

"The point of this website is to allow a science fiction writer or game designer to get the scientific details more accurate. It is also to help science fiction readers and game players to notice when the media they are enjoying diverges from scientific reality. Because sometimes it is hard to tell."

[silveradept]

Warfare-at-great-distance elements like missiles will be missing, as will a significant amount of nuclear research, battlefield communication, and precisely-targeted attacks, so it's entirely possible this sci-fi world never has their equivalent of the Cold War and all of the research and development that arms race spawned. It probably also had less proxy war fighting and potentially less jingoism all around.

GPS/GLONASS is definitely one of the big ones, though.