A "what if" born from boredom

[Mikey]

Excellent point, Seafort. I think the US involvement in WWI is underrated (at least in the US) because of the relatively short duration of it.

[Sionnach Glic]

Quite true. Hell, if the First World War had continued for another year Hitler may very well have been killed during it. And even if he wasn't, the situation post WWI would be completely different.

[Tsukiyumi]

Would Mexico have taken Texas in the war back in the 1800's? Probably with out the support of the other states.

Short answer? Nah. We beat them on our own, and then the US bitch-slapped them after we joined. In fact, I think we're the only state that was its own country before joining the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Revolution

[Graham Kennedy]

Here's a thought. The US has been a truly massive source of technological innovation for at least the last hundred years. A very large nation, built from the ground up on modern principles rather than gradually evolving from the middle ages, with a "can do" ethic that encouraged individual effort but allowed collaboration. And then for most of the last century they had the superpower competition with Russia to drive progress.

Without the US, a lot of that is gone. Which could mean no computer revolution, no communications revolution. How different would the world be if even half the things America has invented had never seen the light of day?

[Captain Seafort]

Pfft. The US contribution to inventing stuff has been minimal. It's great at implimenting ideas on a large scale, but not so good at the original idea.

Take computers for example - the brainchild of Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers.

[Sionnach Glic]

And the internet was from Switzerland, IIRC.

[Graham Kennedy]

Um...

The airplane
Nuclear reactors
The laser
The integrated circuit
Optical fibers

To name but a few.

[Sionnach Glic]

And is there any reason they couldn't have been devised in other countries?
Sure, that 2008 might be a little behind our 2008, but I doubt the difference would be decades or centuries long.

[Captain Seafort]

The airplane

What's that?

Nuclear reactors

Based on the research of a German, and built by an Italian.

The tank
The jet engine
The programmable computer
The World Wide Web *looks around*

Four of the most important inventions of the 20th century.

The biggest US contribution wasn't an invention, but a process: mass production. I.e. what won the 2nd World War.

[Mikey]

Based on the research of a German

Which German's research was didained in Germany and only expressed in Princeton, NJ, USA.

Anyway, I don't know if it would be a big deal - in this alternate timeline, there would still be North American nations of similar derivation.

[sunnyside]

And the internet was from Switzerland, IIRC.

How do you figure that?


And computers in any practical form were developed in America. While I think some universities compete with each other on who did what first and what was the most significant I don't believe there is much going on in the rest of the world during the early times.

Still though with nearly any major invention it is likely as not only a question of how much longer it would have taken if the origional inventors didn't do it. Well. I suppose something different could have shown up instead sometimes.

[Captain Seafort]

And computers in any practical form were developed in America.

I'd say winning the Battle of the Atlantic counts as "practical", in which case they were invented in a country house in Buckinghamshire.

[sunnyside]

And computers in any practical form were developed in America.

I'd say winning the Battle of the Atlantic counts as "practical", in which case they were invented in a country house in Buckinghamshire.

Ok. It was a useful machine. I'm not trying to dis on that or Flowers, who I give mad props to especially for deciding to build the thing on his own after being told it wouldn't work.

But what I mean is that the colosi were electronic Heath Robinson machines using the (American) invention of vacuum tubes, and an unknown number of ideas that were floating around at the time such as he work of MITs Shannon. At any rate the colosus was preceded by computers like the (American) Atanasoff-Berry Computer and the (German) Z3.

Really computers were less of a sudden spark of genius and more of a race. Even at the earliest stages people in different countries were independently coming up with similar stuff as they tried to improve upon mechanical devices. I think most if not all of the "revolutionary" advances even after the war had researchers in(or at least origionally from) multiple countries coming up with the stuff often independently of each other.

It's just that eventually America left everyone else in the dust, which is why most people think of computers as an American thing.

[Graham Kennedy]

And is there any reason they couldn't have been devised in other countries?

Take that argument and we can say that the lack of America would make no difference whatsoever to history, because anything and everything it accomplished could be done by others.

[Teaos]

I believe that is exactly what we are saying. It would just take a bit longer.