Join me, will you, in a little thought experiment.

Imagine earth, our Earth, that we've lived on all our lives, as it was eons ago, when multicellular life was just starting out. Now, imagine that metal ores, sources of convenient resources for making hard and resilient weapons and tools, are much less prolific on the surface of our planet. If you want, you can also imagine that the environment is much more energy intense, with more radiation, heat, and movement.

Now, assuming that life could develop in such violent and rapidly changing conditions, what would we be like at this point today? We've followed a similar path of history, society, exploration and science, but we have very little metal, most of it from meteorites that have hit Earth from time to time.

Assuming that we managed to get to the same technological level without metallic resources means that we would have to develop another source of tools, weapons, transportation. Now, here's where you may have to suspend disbeleif a bit. Presume we've discovered the secret of engineering organic life, and have used its principles to create biological, self-repairing, long lasting equivalents to the technology of the metal rich world we actually live in. What living, breathing 'gadgets' would we come up with?

I'm going to start off on the subject of weaponry, since that's been on my mind for the last two weeks (several consecutive all-nighters of Half-Life will mess you up a bit), and presume some sort of organic flamethrower, which decomposes and converts various wastes into methane, then releases it at the operator's discretion (though if you overfeed them, they set themselves off to keep from exploding, and not feeding them will result in their demise).

Any other suggestions for organic transportation, communication, weaponry, household appliances (No Flintstones Jokes, please)?

With few matalic ores, we could probably rely heavily on plastics for our mass produced items.

Given advanced biotech, there would be all sorts of cool things that could be done. Think housetrees. Trees that are hollow inside, have transparent sections of bark for windows, a natural opening for a door, divided into chambers like bamboo for multiple floors, with natural ridges that can be used as stairs. Include a fertilizer pit, where the tree takes in nutrents from your wastes. Add hollow tubules that you can get water from, which the tree has gotten from the ground. Have it produce all sorts of fruits.

That would be the epitimy of biotech.

I've ALWAYS wanted a Tree-House!

quote:

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Originally posted by abstractAffect:
I've ALWAYS wanted a Tree-House!

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I can imagine what a chore routine for a tree-house would be. Watering the roots would be vital.


Honey, dont forget to flood the basement!

[This message has been edited by gombowlzombie (edited 12-21-2002).]

Weapons are always fun, and there is puh-lenty of inspriation through all the Sci-Fi stuff around. So I like to think outside weapons, therfore instead I'm gonna list problems for people to circumnavigate.

A) Communication, How are you gonna beat the phone with no 'inert' materials.
B) Tools, What are you going to use to dig, make/grow the stuff we are creating, mop, ect.
C) Shelter, duh.
D) Warmth, how are we going to keep warm? Big bodyheat bugs?

You get the idea. And just a thought I had while typing this (and to be actually useful), Communication : Trained & Modified (for efficency, mimic skills, Life expectancy, Reproduction, ect) flying mammals that carry a set message to a location (bonus is it can 'find' people as well)

An amazing amount can be done with plastics and silicates. Many tools that are currently made of metals could be made of plastics. Others could be made from wood or other organics. More durable materials could be made from stone, everything from silverware to plows.

Communications wouldn't be a whole lot of trouble. The senerio calls for a limited amount of metal, not a complete absence. There should be plenty of metals to create a type of shortwave cellphone. I say shortwave, because the signals could bounce off the ionosphere to a single centeral exchange. Radio transmition would have to be the primary form of communication, because with a limited amount of metals it would be impractical to run phone lines all over the world.

The same problem would happen with power. Perhaps the "tree houses" I describe earlier could have a bioelectric system built into it that could be tapped into. Splice some genes from electric eels, and use ionized conduits in the "tree house" insted of wiring.

Heating could be largely derived from wood stoves, although the "tree house" could again have an organic means of heating.

Damn I love that treehouse concept.

The more I think about it, the more useful this exercise would apear. Most of the technologys being described would be ideal for a fledgling community on an alien or terraformed planet.

If the human race developed on a planet w/o large reserves of metals, it's development would have gone in a completely different direction from the very beggining of it's development. There is no way to know what kind of technology we would have created.

Weapons would reply on posion and designed on how some plants can project their seeds.


Or a seed cannon for a weapon that grows its own ammo within its own magazine over time.

Or milkweed bombs. Bombs that float in the wind and scatter its destruction upon a village. You could make milkweed airplanes or gliders.

Barb wired fences would be made out of thorny fire reistant, posion resistant plants.

Venus Rat Traps or for farming uses, A venus scarcrow trap.

Use a petrifing process to make minerals.

Sky scrapers would be redwood tree offices.

Since this about an imaginary world, I will give an idea for the redwoods.

It takes a long time for a tree to grow large and if trees are used as homes, you are going to have old houses.

What is in an old house?

Ghosts.

`

[This message has been edited by gombowlzombie (edited 12-23-2002).]