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.