Leonardo and the Resources/Power Crunch

[roseembolism]

When I visited the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit at the San Jose Tech Museum this last Sunday, one of the major things that stuck with me was how ingenious the Renaissance engineers were as a whole. They had a good practical grasp of physics, and put their knowledge of Euclidean mathematics to incredibly elegant and complex ends, as the designs for cathedrals, hoists, springs and other items in the exhibit hall show. They did not lack for intelligence and learning; they were not crippled by their culture. Indeed, I could see them performing great feats of mechanics, at our level of complexity, if not for two basic limitations.

The first limitation they had to deal with was materials. They were limited to various types of wood, rope, animal skins, and small amounts of wrought iron. As a result, the structures they made were heavy and bulky; consider this model of a crane by Leonardo's mentor Filippo Brunelleschi, to see both their ingenuity and material limitations:



The model points out another limitation that they faced: power. For power sources, they were limited to low-density sources like muscle (human and animal), wind, and water. Again they did highly ingenious things with what they had (as witness to aqueducts and proposals for siphons crossing mountains), but the power limitations combined with the heavy and bulky available materials to limit what they could accomplish. So no flying machines or submarines; many of their sketched out inventions that seem feasible to us, were toys or daydreams, because they lacked proper power sources, and the material scientists of the day were busy trying to turn lead into gold.


So, why does this post have an "Under the Green Moon" tag if it's about Renaissance inventors? Well, I've been trying to set the technological milieu of UTGM, and I'm thinking that for the most advanced Daemon states, the late Renaissance will work for the appearance of a lot of the engineering. This isn't so much a direct parallel, as a result of how I conceive a number of resources to be in short supply; specifically metals.

Since UTGM is set 30,0000 years in the future, nearly all the extractable resources will have been used millennia previously. And while most metals will still be around, many of them will be in a refined state that any low-tech civilization will have a hard time using. Consider how much difficult high-test steel is to smelt compared to pig iron- and now consider having to separate it from high-test concrete, or even higher-tech materials. And a lot of those metals will be in landfills or ruined cities where there's plenty of hazards for enterprising scavengers, ranging from pitfalls, to toxic materials.

So even before the current era, I see civilizations turning more toward natural substances; woods, fibers, ceramics, chitin. Unlike the Renaissance, I can imagine that with genetic engineering and eons of materials science, some of those materials could be very advanced; imagine wood as light as bamboo, yet as strong as steel.

The Daemons and other races have other advantages the Renaissance engineers don't have; they have magic. While the magic is far from all-powerful, and really resembles classic descriptions of psionics more than anything else, it can provide a fairly intense source of heat and motion.  While I don't see industrial level smelting, magic could power vehicles or the like.

All of which is saying that I can still have a more fantastical version of the Renaissance; I can have my zeppelins and other inventions that came about much later in history.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

It definitely sounds like the upper reaches of tech will be on the borderline between seriously advanced pre-industrial tech and steampunk. Zeppelins are definitely cool and definitely seem a must for that sort of setting. Guns are a more difficult question. With excellent materials, airguns might be more popular, since it's far easier to build what amounts to a bolt action air-rifle than a bolt action gunpowder rifle if you have materials that can be used to make a sturdy and leak proof pressure vessel. Steam cannon are also fairly obvious if you have the right sort of materials tech. Better yet, neither air rifles nor steam cannon lead to machine pistols, high powered rifles, or modern artillery particularly well and gatling guns will remain huge and limited, given the air reservoir needed to power them. So, weapons tech remains pre-20th century, thus making combat something that won't look much like the lethality of modern warfare.

You could also loot Benford's Beyond the Fall of Night/Beyond Infinity for ideas - a biologically rich and diverse solar system is nifty, especially with biological spaceships and space life. I quite like the idea of steam zeppelins docking at a biological beanstalk that lets people off in a living space station that living ships dock with.

Throw in biological street and home lighting as well as good quality plumbing, sanitation, and heating, and you have what is (to me at least) an absolutely wonderful setting for adventure - acceptably civilized in the civilized areas, but with the obvious potential for deadly wilderness and savage kingdoms (and a lack of weapons that allow the PCs to play nastiness like British troops vs. Zulu warriors particularly effectively).

It would be interesting if they didn't particularly use electricity. Also, if they had electricity, then aluminum would be in abundant supply, since even in 30,000 years, humanity is unlikely to make much of a dent in the amount of aluminum that's available - it's really abundant. Also, no electricity + high quality materials means that babbage engines might exist (or not, since they might be higher tech than you want).

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

Not just chitin, but keratin (horn, hooves) and animal skin should be exploited, and fruit-ivory such as tagua or coconut shell. Examples abound in real-world aboriginal tool use-- sharkskin sandpaper, porcupine quill embroidery and decoration (imagine a porky big enough to make lances from its quills!), you name it.