A non-fossil alternate history for
civilization and computing

For some years now, I have been thinking about the question of what kind of civilization we'd have now if we never had found the fossil fuels to power our steam engines with. This counterfactual speculation has led me to all kinds of interesting details and possibilities, so I think I should probably summarize this alternate world now, even though the project will probably never be "finished".

I have attempted to be realistic, but I've also concentrated on the cultural history and what the world would "feel like" rather than on exact political or economical details. The computing-related speculations in the end are of course something I think I can justify quite well and may even be worth considering to those interested in permacomputing.

This scenario is not intended to be utopian. It certainly has its problems but the problems are largely different from ours. But I still think it could very well function as a historical background for a Solarpunk-like utopian world. I have always felt that the hopeful imagery of Solarpunk would work better if the history hadn't gone so wrong in the first place.

This idea is close to Pargman & al's Coalworld project with the difference that they put the point of divergence in the 1970s whereas mine is much earlier. I was unfamiliar with this project until I saw their Computing within Limits paper titled "Meeting the future in the past - using counterfactual history to imagine computing futures" (from 2018, but I saw it in 2021). An important point here is that it is difficult to envision different kind of futures when we've had a past like this, so counterfactual scenarios could help unleash our imagination.

Summary of the alternate history in general:

• Point of divergence: no new coal or oil resources have been found after 1800.
• Since fossil fuels were not available, steam engines never took over industrial production. Industrialization continued the way it had started, on water power.
• Electricity research was taken very seriously once the potental of the electric motor was demonstrated. Electrophysical theory was formulated 14 years early, which led to earlier invention of radio, transformers and amplifiers.
• Less urbanization in the 19th century, because 1) water-powered industry couldn't be freely relocated and 2) heating was a huge problem in densely-populated areas (charcoal production was wasteful compared to just burning the wood as fuel, but burning wood in an urban scale would have made the air unbreathable).
• As there was no coal mining, the mining/extraction industries in general didn't grow very big. There were fewer developments in metallurgy, and petrochemistry is nonexistent. Plant-based materials are far more common than aluminum or plastic. Synthetic pigments developed slower, so natural hues are still quite common in clothing and everyday objects. Agriculture uses complex crop rotation patterns and other "soft" techniques instead of petrochemical fertilizers.
• When heat engines and generators became more common, strict forestry laws and heavy taxes were implemented all around the world in order to secure the availability of wood fuel. Energy efficiency became the most essential aspect of all technology dependent on wood fuel. Economic theories centered around moderation rather than endless extractability.
• Canal networks got the role of railways in the 19th century.
• Due to less urbanization and slower transportation, there was a great need for advanced telegraphy to be used instead of the very slow mail. Telefax was already mature and commercial by the early 20th century and it was particularly important in countries whose writing systems weren't easily mechanizable.
• The American civil war and the Crimean war had opposite outcomes mainly due to the lack of steamships. Abolition of slavery was postponed in both North America and Russia until about 1906.
• Also due to not having fossil technology, Europe lost its colonies in Asia and Africa earlier. India became several independent states after the succesful 1857 rebellion. Japan remained isolated and non-Westernized until 1954. China's Qing dynasty also gained 50 more years.
• Because of less European influence in Asia, the international world is more pluricentric. Europe and East Asia base their science and technology on quite different philosophies even though they also actively study each other's approaches. South Asia had adopted the European academic tradition in the colonial times but later started to embrace its local ways. Relativity and quantum mechanics originated in Asia because questioning the Newtonian and Aristotelian dogma was easier there.
• Due to less urbanization and less horrific labor conditions, Marxism never got foothold. Anarchism and French-style utopian socialism remained the dominant types of socialism. Monarchs would get overthrown but no one implemented anything like "the dictatorship of the proletariat". Instead, political idealism centered around water-powered industrial facilities and communal farms that often became utopian micro-societies of their own.
• The equivalent of the first World War was very much about forest and land resources and thus concentrated on colonizable areas. European nations and Japan took over North America (displacing the weak governments of Confederate States and Comancheria). Most states later regained independence but never formed a global superpower.
• Much of European international politics is based on cultural blocks, the main three of which are Latin, Germanic and Slavic. UK and Ireland identify with the Latin block (dominated by France) and most of the non-Slavic central/eastern Europe with the Germanic block.
• Metric system is in common use, but some units have different names: Smeaton in place of Watt, cycles per second (c/s) in place of Hertz, Boltzmann in place of Kelvin. Even the UK and North America are metric because they're politically too weak to oppose the international trend. Japan, however, exclusively used its own traditional system until the 1960s.
• Giuseppe Peano's Interlingua from 1903 (a.k.a. Latino sine flexione) got the role of Esperanto. Many politicians of the Latin block strongly supported it and it became a major international language (eventually even a global lingua franca). Slavinski, its pan-Slavic counterpart, is its main rival in Europe. Germanic and Indic attempts at pan-Germanic and pan-Indic auxilary languages failed, so these areas eventually ended up using Interlingua as well. Classical Chinese writing remains in international use in East Asia, although with some internationally agreed simplifications.
• Blues and jazz never became global phenomena, due to an earlier radio and a later abolition of slavery. Their place was taken by popular music genres from India and Latin America, and further pop genres (including those similar to rock'n'roll) were based on those. Polyrhythms, microtones and drones are therefore quite common in everyday music. "Universal" music theory has been actively developed in Europe since the 1920s in order to better accommodate all the intercontinental influences.
• There have been fewer lifestyle changes related to cheap energy and fast movement. No supermarkets, no car-centered urban design, no disposable fashion. Televisions, refrigerators and washing machines are relatively expensive and are thus more likely to be found in communal spaces than in private homes. Community life in general is more valued than "family life".
• Due to a slower and less urbanized life, there was never a recognizable Futurist-Modernist movement. Most other early-20th-century art movements are recognizable but notably lack any Japanese influence. Art Nouveau was particularly prominent and long-lived. The spirit of "La Belle Époque" is still very much present in the European-dominated parts of the world.
• Airships are still common in air travel. Heavier-than-air aircraft, also including rockets and spaceships, are late offshoots of the lighter-than-air business. Airship and airplane personnel are both called "aeronauts", whereas anyone who travels beyond the atmosphere is a "cosmonaut".
• Since communities are small and have relatively flat hierarchies and often very good libraries, there is no strict separation of "high" and "low" culture in literature or music. Genres are less restrictive. Weird experimental works are often considered more "high-brow" than the classics, because even the masses know the classics.
• Speculative fiction (phantastica) is a well-respected type of literature and also includes many authors we call "postmodern", such as Jorge Luis Borges. Space operas are less common, while metaphysical and parallel-universe speculations are more common. Utopias used to be a staple in the 19th century but they went out of fashion when they became mainstream politics.
• Hitler's war was short and local because the Latin and Slavic blocks were capable of forming an alliance quite early. Fascist-like parties were eliminated from politics in many countries in order to avoid the "Hitler effect", but the swastika can still be used as a traditional luck symbol without being immediately associated with Hitler.
• Also, because of the shortness of the war, development of nuclear technology never became military-oriented but remained an object of international energy technology research. No "cold war" took place.
• Due to smaller generational gaps, counterculture didn't manifest primarily as "youth movements" but recognized its intergenerational continuity. Psychedelics were never stigmatized by loud countercultural advocacy but remained a valid object of medical research. Youth-specific subcultures therefore always had more to do with popular culture than with big ideologies.
• The full commercial opening of Japan in 1954, motivated by the prospects of building a commercial empire, led to a huge wave of Japanophilia in Europe and an even bigger wave of Europhilia in Japan. Influences were first seen in counterculture and art but quickly diffused to all aspects of culture. Japanese industries were generally quite good at exploiting this phenomenon.

Computing-related differences

• Transistors and microchips arrived earlier, but "Moore's law" has been slower. There was less need for performance maximization and supercomputing in the early days, because there were no superpowers competing in computing-intensive research. Instead, development efforts focused on small and energy-efficient computers. The slower growth gave computing more time to mature, and there are less tensions between academic and commercial circles.
• Transistors are called "semiconductor triodes" or just "triodes", and the term "triodics" covers most of what we call electronics.
• Remington didn't start a typewriter industry after the civil war, so typewriters, teleprinters and computers ended up using piano-like keyboards with layouts that don't resemble QWERTY at all. Also, typewriters came to use non-monospaced fonts in order to use paper more efficiently, and this carried on to computing as well.
• Emanuel Goldberg succesfully commercialized his microfiche viewer-searcher ("Statistische Maschine") in the 1930s. Microfiche became a common format for encyclopedias and other big reference books, and many viewers were even purchased for private use. Briefcase-sized "portable libraries" with integrated viewers became commercially available in the 1950s. "Fiche" is now the common term for all kinds of machine-readable removable physical media such as disks, tapes and chip cards, as well as for "virtual fiches" (which are essentially the same as file system directories).
• Early visions of personal computing were thus dominated by the microfiche world, particularly by the ideas of Goldberg and Paul Otlet. Desktop computers were seen as natural successors of Goldberg-type devices (and desktop calculators) rather than as something entirely new and revolutionary. Telecommunication was part of the visions from the early days (Otlet had the idea of viewing library materials remotely).
• The early desktop computer business of the 1970s was thus dominated by established office equipment manufacturers (Goldberg, Olivetti, Olympia, Fuji, Trzmiel) rather than by eccentric "garage startups". Newcomers such as Sinclair Radionics Ltd. concentrated on cheap hobbyist hardware and pocket calculators and never shook the mainstream office equipment market.
• Graphic rendering was already prominent in paper-based output devices, thanks to the well-established telefax technology. Rendering of non-European writing systems or mathematical notation was never a huge problem.
• Televisions, even black-and-white ones, were still rather uncommon in private homes in the 1980s, so the cheapest hobbyist computers from that era more often have small LCD screens than video chips. However, the small screens were often compensated with interesting sound hardware, so the early microcomputers could often be described as "big pocket calculators you can make music with".
• Like televisions and cars, "full-screen" computers are more often communal investments than something bought for private ownership. Buying them was originally justified by their universality, i.e. how they could replace typewriters, calculators, telefaxes, microfiche browsers and other formerly separate devices. Telecommunication services, including electronic mail, became mainstream quite early.
• Programming languages are considered to be closer to mathematics than to human languages (and are still sometimes called "calculuses" especially in the Germanic block). Their notation is very mathematical, and the human-language-like elements come from Latin and Chinese rather than English. International standards govern the use of the symbols, so learning one language makes most other languages readable as well (although not necessarily understandable).
• Edsger Dijkstra never abandoned computers, because he found most of the industry somewhat tolerable. There was no IBM or BASIC to hate, "software engineering" never got not too far from the academic ideals, and "software crisis" never became wicked.