So Fallout is the nuclear version of Steampunk? In our universe, we focused on electricity and transistors; in Steampunk universes, they focused on steam power and mechanical contraptions; and in the Fallout universe they focused on nuclear energy and radioactivity.
nailed it. if you know about the "raygun gothic" genre, Fallout pulls very heavily from that. so... Raygun-Gothic Mad-Max-on-Foot Post-Apocalypse Nuke-Punk genre.
+E “Anonymous Nerdfighter” Hernandez Fallout's far from the only example of that, and Idea Channel's far from the first to pick up on it. tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PunkPunk Aside from steampunk and cyberpunk, either atompunk or dungeonpunk (I forget which, though the other shortly followed) was the first variation I'd ever heard of.
+E “Anonymous Nerdfighter” Hernandez Technological counterfactual histories aren't the most common in academic counterfactuals, but they're currently popular as fictional settings. I'm sure Mike, in using the term "retrofuture," is very aware of that parallel.
I find this interesting, actually, given I worked on electronics during my time in the Navy. The idea of the Transistor being a symbol of peace is an idea that actually goes beyond just the comparison to nuclear energy. The Transistor was partly created due to the post WW2 cooperation with Japan and building up their economy. Before then, and during WW2, we were using vacuum tubes to do roughly the same thing, but those are large, bulky, and (as I found out working with them in some of our older gear) prone to easily break. They also get extremely hot, which makes them difficult to handle and easily damaged, ironic given the proper function of one requires they reach a certain amount of heat to function properly. But after WW2, and as the cold war with the USSR started to simmer, Japan hit a breakthrough with the transistor. In short, the Transistor as we know it could not have come to being without Japan and their constant drive to make things smaller (which one could hypothesize is due to their limited space on what is essentially a string of islands, thus technology for them needs to take up as little room as possible). Due to this, what had been the American go-to belief at this time, that "Bigger is better", was flipped on it's head and the era of miniaturization came into being. According to the Fallout universe, this never happened. Japan was conquered by China because the US didn't stick around to stabilize the region as we did in our world/reality, and China went on to conquer the USSR, creating a very different sort of cold war than we knew in the 50s-80s. As such, one little country we befriended after WW2 lead to a technological advance we rely on heavily. One could argue that the message isn't just about Transistors, but the fact we befriended what was, at the time, a mortal enemy after their defeat, is why we are not that universe. An entire chain of events hinging on a single decision: to help or not to help Japan recover after their defeat in World War 2. Sure, the reasons we did help Japan stabilize may be varied, and some not so pleasant, but the end answer is that we did it, and in so doing prevented a far darker path the games hint could have been waiting.
Fallout missed out on the transistor. What if we missed out on something? Which of our technologies did we neglect? I think one of them might be the electric motor. Gasoline powered cars were definitely a mistake, but there are probably others.
@vargen1414 using a line from a quest as proof...great. Given how inconsistent the fallout lore with everything and the fact that in practice everything was still so bulky. Nope, the world still missed out on transistor. Don't give me that BS about transistor being eXpEnSiVe so no widespread use because that doesn't make any sense. Being "cheap" was the definition of transistor itself, aside from being simple and way more efficient than vacuum tubes. Idgaf even if Todd Howard himself saying the same thing about transistor was being invented prewar. The game depiction, the mechanics, and the tools were intentionally made with the absence of transistors in mind. You're just like a certain fandom I've heard of. J. K. Rowling and Todd Howard are similar when it came to consistency and logic. If that was the case and transistors did was invented in 2023 in fallout universe then why does the 2077 electronics era barely looked like past 1950s? 2023 - 2077 took 54 years jump. We should've looked at 2001 equivalent of electronics with our world from when the transistors were invented in 1947. But nope! I won't take hearsay from a game quest as proof.
@@nuclearwarhead9338I'd like to argue that. Like in most industries "if it ain't broke. Don't fix it" At the time, there wasn't much compatibility between vacuum tubes and transistors. And since there's a whole lot of vacuum tubes and not enough transistors. It wouldn't really warrant a quick transition. Much like our irl technology, most of the cheapest devices actually still use micro USB. And it's already beginning to phase out for USB C. And in my headcanon. There's also status. Like iPhones, they held on for superiority even when presented with a better product. I am playing through Fallout 3 and they are way advanced than ours. But they couldn't really could have downscaled a lot of things. Why does my stimpack weigh as much as my gun. Could have used a concentrated dose. I think starfield is the opposite of fallout
Philosopher Daniel Dennett has put forward a phenomenon which he refers to as the "Three Mile Island Effect" where he posits whether the accident at Three Mile Island was a good thing or a bad thing. The accident at Three Mile Island killed nobody, its economic costs were minuscule, and provided us information on how to prevent and respond to future meltdowns. Though it instilled in the public a fear of atomic energy, caused America to stop investing in a technology which its largest source of non-greenhouse gas emitting energy, and directly contributed to the further consumption of fossil fuels for decades. Right now our civilizations greatest concern is not nuclear war, it is global climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The greatest representation of this in 2007 when Bulletin for Atomic Sciences changed their famous "Doomsday Clock" from being a representation of how close humanity was from catastrophic destruction from global nuclear war to climate change. Between 2009 and 2011 I made a documentary film about the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant where I live on Long Island. By many nuclear engineers sight it as killing the nuclear industry in the United States. It ran $4 billion dollars over budget before the state shut it down in the 1980s without ever operating. After the Three Mile Island accident (which as we have established killed nobody) and the Chernobyl* accident there was a great public push by the residents of Long Island to shut down the plant. In my research I discovered a full page newspaper ad encouraging residents to protest the opening of Shoreham. In the bottom left corner it read in big bold letters "SOLAR NOT NUCLEAR". Directly underneath that in fine print it reads, "Paid for in the public interest by the Oil Heat Institute of Long Island."** In return for bailing out the privately owned utility that built the plant, LILCO, New York Governor Mario Cuomo had the state absorb the cost of the plant. Today Long Island gets no more of its energy from solar than the rest of the country (practically none). The Oil Heat Institute of Long Island is still in existence. And just recently New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (Mario's son) is trumpeting up minor tritium leaks, which endanger the public in NO way, as reason to shut down the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant. But right now there is a lot of interest in new modular atomic reactor technology. Everyone from Bill Gates, to Richard Branson, and Paul Allen are investing in atomic reactors. Barack Obama has specifically stated that nuclear power must be a key factor in fighting climate change and improve our energy mix. Under Obama the first nuclear power plants have been ordered, constructed, and began operation in this country in the past 20 years. The global COP21 conference on how to combat climate change was recently held in Paris, France, a country which receives 80% of its energy from nuclear. China is on its way to constructing dozens of nuclear power plants as a replacement for coal. We are even seeing nuclear advocacy from unexpected places like the publication Mother Jones. * The reactor at Chernobyl was a GEN1 reactor a type of reactor found nowhere outside the former Soviet Union. It lacked now standard safety features which would have prevented the accent. Plus the Soviets staffed the plant with coal miners and scheduled a very dangerous test in the middle of a shift change. The possibility of replicating the events which lead to the Chernobyl accident are precisely nil. ** You can see that ad in the documentary feature 'Pandora's Promise'.
The great war happened in 2077. We very well may suffer the same fate, there is nothing to say it won't happen. In fact, in our timeline we rely solely on petroleum, while in Fallout people also used lots of nuclear fuel pretty efficiently.
+Roflmayo Mann Aye. Solar power is basically impossible pretransistor, and is only starting to be useful now because we have size down and efficiency up. Now, we might still all die when the water runs out, but that's more directly Mad Max than Fall Out's inspiration. ;-) We're much less likely to do it with nukes though than we were during the cold war. We seem to at least have developed enough sense that "winning" does no good if everyone's dead.
***** I meant alternatives to petrochemicals such as plastics, which im pretty sure the resource wars in Fallout were about. I doubt they were to do with energy, as they have fusion working.
+Roflmayo Mann They did have fusion, but they couldn't get it into mass production before the Great War. There are a few nuclear cars in Fallout 4, but most things that weren't robots, Power Armor, or lasers were still powered by petroleum. That's why the European Commonwealth invaded the Middle East.
I know this isn't entirely relevant, but I had a weird dream last night where Kornhaber Brown and Michio Kaku were on the Walking Dead shooting zombies in Mordor and asked me to kill Frisk from Undertale for trying to make friends with the zombies.
This discussion of the transistor makes me think of the world of Frank Herbert's Dune. In the Dune universe computers have had their capabilities strictly limited after a long and costly war against AIs. This results in a humanity that while it explores the stars and harnesses unimaginable energy, has reverted to feudal governments and slavery. Dune takes place after that has been the case for nearly 10,000 years. I wonder if in both cases the transistor serves as a representation of a slavery of the mind. Perhaps these both show that peace and democracy are based on a liberation from mental labour in the same way that energy such as the harnessing of the atom was to free us from physical labour. The result are in both Fallout and Dune societies that have mastered massive amounts of energy, but are unfree and violent.
Transistors is why In Fallout we have the large heavy Pip-Boy while in our world we have the small lightweight Smart Watch. The only things we lack in ours is Fast Travel, the retro greenscale screen, and a cool appearance.
+Wolfee I'm honestly surprised no one has made a modern pip-boy. I'd imagine a lot of people would buy it, since you have room for more parts, bigger batteries and you don't have to worry about losing it. Plus fallout fans would be throwing money at whoever sold it.
+Tim Stahel (Moustached Viking) We have built that. It's called a smartphone. We put all of the pipboys functions and more into a space small enough to fit in our pockets then we built a bulky pipboy look-alike to put it in for role play reasons
Joseph Edmond What i mean is basically a slim pip-boy using modern technology, you'd be sacrificing the ability to move it around like a phone to instead have it much more secure on your arm, plus the space for it being physically bigger therefore more powerful and with a bigger screen. You could also have some things on the side facing away from you like a camera and flashlight, which could perhaps allow you to scan stuff. I mean simple smart watches are popular enough, and they can barely make it through the day..
I don't think it's reasonable to call out one technology as peaceful and another as not so peaceful. Both technologies remain ambiguous in nature and their intent left to their users. For example, when the first transistor was designed at Bell Labs, it was the result of trying to find a way to make germanium diodes for use in radar. It wasn't until after the war that other users changed its applications (like to computers and phones and drones). The same can be said of nuclear research. The first experiments were to figure out the phenomena about the world and the internal structure of the smallest pieces of matter. Only later did the application shift from medical purposes to weapons to energy. In fact, Ernest Rutherford thought it impractical to apply nuclear research to energy production. In short, the object AND its interactions with the surrounding environment are what drives its intent. NOT JUST the object itself.
This is similar to something I said, only far more concise. Basically humans are the variable that makes things dangerous. Like Mike suggested at the end of the video "War never changes because people never change."
In FONV I once made an Asian nudist character named Dekana Nexiv, which is backwards for A Naked Vixen. She was stealthy and had the element of surprise. lol
In Ironman's first stories I remember that his suit was all about this marvelous technology called "transistor". It could solve any kind of problem, so it was TRANSISTORS! all the time
Glad to see this episode finally came together, and how! So many locations and neat machines, loved it. If you ever have anymore nuclear questions, send them my way! Speaking of, I better get back to making some more videos! Where does one find the time to work, go to school and be a youtuber?!
Hmmm interesting thought because of this video. In our own world, we don't have oil refineries on cars, we use the resulting product in them. Same for nuclear, a reactor in a car, never gonna happen, but electricity in your car? Well, that is already quickly becoming a thing! If battery technology was more advanced at the time of nuclear, and electricity ruled the roost, would the nuclear vision of the 50s-60s been realized?
+BeCurieus sounds like a world where we have a dumpster that reads "nuclear waste". wouldn't super efficient batteries eliminate the need for decentralized nuclear reactors?
Mike Freyrie I don't, I actually like him very much. All I'm saying is that Zizek is a really smart dude with a twisted sense of humor who seems to enjoy trolling philosophy. He has interesting ideas, specially when it comes to cultural criticism, but you can tell that half of the time he's just improvising and talking bullshit for the sake of it.
The transistor was invented later in the Fallout lore, therefore allowing to build those classic looking computers and pip-boys, if you look at the prototype pip-boy on the opening in Fallout 4, it was electronic, with wires and etc
I think we could still have a "Resource War" actually, at least if we don't be careful. Every population has a maximum amount of individuals it can sustain. If we don't manage are resources more carefully and switch to cleaner energy it kind of seems inevitable that we'll have massive wars over available resources. It might not even be things like oil and minerals that will be the most important, it could even be basic resources like water and food required for human life. May seem bleak but our timelines might not end up being totally different from Fallout's. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.
I loved this episode! It did make me suddenly realize how strange the robots in fallout 4 are. I don't see how they would be possible without advanced transistors (or something similar), and I don't see how you can make for instance a mister handy but not a decent computer... (I know it's a fictional world, and I shouldn't nitpick, but it does annoy me a bit)
+wiet111 Ya, they are kinda magical in that way, if you have robots you really should have advanced computer systems. Even so, that is more a problem with the fallout world lore than this theory :D
+wiet111 I could maybe, just maybe see scientists making robots like Mr. Handys, securitrons and protectrons without transistors if we accept that the fallout universe has super-advanced technology in the field of robotics. maybe, since they put all their resources into nuclear technology/robotics and nothing into anything else, they discovered something revolutionary that we have yet to discover. I can't see us having consumer robots like theirs in 2077, but we might one day. I'm tempted to say the synths would have been impossible in the fallout universe, but the Institute had another 200 years to develop them after the great war, and they were some of the smartest people in existence, so likely they did discover the transistor and improved it beyond what we have in our universe.
+wiet111 I'm not too familiar with the Fallout universe, but in cognitive science there is the understanding that faster computers don't really replicate human intelligence (computers will always be based on formal logic, whereas humans actually have to learn logical thinking and frequently think in illogical ways). In fact, experts in the field effectively abandoned standard computers in favour of neural networks. Neural networks are, of course, processor and transistor-heavy, but since computers in themselves weren't really instrumental in making human-like AI anyway, they could've found some other way to do it.
Matthew Lizst Hm, I didn't know that. I would guess that as soon as they got the human like AI they would be able to sort of convert it to computers, but that is a very decent explanation!
+wiet111 I think the reason isn't that they can't do it. It's that they don't think it's necessary and thus haven't begun thinking in that direction. You generally react to stuff like limitations. If you wouldn't go outside with your stuff there's no need to make it portable.
ZiplockBob here, and I got to make this pun but the fallout "earth" is a mad M.A.D. world. Now that that's out of the way, the interesting thing about transistors in the fallout "alti-verse" is this little snippet from the wiki. "The transistor, invented in our world in 1947, was not developed in the Fallout universe until the decade just before the Great War (2067), while its successor, the semiconducting microprocessor chip, may have never been developed at all." This a HUGE gap in time and if this also meant that the development cycle did not have time to take effect. The other thing I noticed missing was cultrural warning signs missing from pre-great war, that we had post world war to and pre cold war, such as Godzilla. Nukular technology in out time has been outed as "scary and evil" due to cherynoble, 3 mile island, and Nuke- Moster movies. Even the Transistor has is "warning movies" such as the terminatior. I would actually argue that because the people did not challenge the ultimate end is why the mutually assured destruction (see earlier pun) happened. Because we do worry about A.I. now because of those movies which is the destructive side the transistor has given us, well, possibly.
I have a bit of a hypothesis that suggests the Institute actually did master the transistor. As opposed to all the vacuum tube based tech that you see in use everywhere else in the Fallout universe. It would explain how they were able to make A.I. systems, capable of producing indistinguishable mimicry of human functions & mental processes, and put it all in such a small package. It would also explain just _why_ they feel as though they're the only real hope for the future of The Commonwealth.
The problem is, the transistor was invented in the Fallout universe, it was just developed late. 2022 to be exact. Most of the tech in fallout still uses vacuum tubes, but given the Great War happened in 2077, I'd imagine there was some transistors in there somewhere.
This is a very interesting discussion, but I feel there's an aspect that needs to be put forward a bit more: these two technologies (nuclear power and transistors) answer very different questions, they can't both achieve the same results. So no matter how much energy you're taking from the atoms, or how efficiently, this in itself doesn't get you any nearer to building (or even designing) a computer that can play Fallout 4 - let alone artificial intelligence. Conversely, you can reduce your transistors to the level where quantum mechanics becomes a problem (which we pretty much have already, btw) and you'll be no closer to solving large-scale energy problems. So I don't see them as competing, one having to be chosen over the other. And I'd add that neither of them is actually responsible for the results mentioned (in or out of Fallout's world), it's always us using the technology as we see fit (and "see" here can be more or less objective/conscious/precise depending on context). On another time-scale, this is very similar to criticism directed at The Internets or Those Damn Phones which accuses these technologies of isolating people. Poppycock and balderdash, I say, we started reading books in trains back in the 19th century specifically to avoid interacting with people during those long travels. More often than not, we use any technology from its very start (no matter its creators' intentions) to answer some need or objective we'd already had for a while.
One thing that I love about Fallout and Shadowrun is that in both worlds we advanced technologically, but still kinda stayed the same as a society, both have laser guns, super inteligent machines and other insanelly advanced technologies, but still kinda feel like a past age, in those two cases the 50's and the 80's
+Kyle McDonald nah was talking about the point where our reality split from fallout's reality. I don't honestly know thing one about nuclear power other than that it heats water to make steam to spin turbines.
1:50 Yes. All the vault dwellers were so very lucky... Like in 111 where all of them were unwittingly cryo frozen and died in their unknowing sleep, 112 where they became Dr Braun's human toys, or everyone's favorite: 87 which gave the world the East Coast Supermutants. So lucky.
1 and 2 are the best one, tactics is...acceptable BoS is a shitty xbox exclusive that nobody ever liked its like the shadow war in the deus ex franchise or the star wars christmas special
+friendlySkeletor The major events of BoS and Tactics are canon, but not everything else. In the other games, Fallout 3 kind of ignores everything and Fallout 4 DOES ignore basically everything aside from the existence of factions like the Shi and the NCR...but only for one scene.
This is a pairing of two things I truly enjoy...Idea Channel and Fallout...AWESOME! I also love how many Poe and Lovecraftian references there are in Fallout.
The terms you're searching for are "transistorization", "miniaturization" and then "micronization" folks... That's what defined the transistor & subsequent transistorized micro-processor movement.
I think something very interesting to point out is that despite the scarcity of petroleum there seems to be no limit to the amount of plastic that is seen everywhere which is a petroleum byproduct.
and they've come up with a way to do photonic splitters so small we'll have light powered computers soon. The beamsplitter, claimed to be the smallest ever created at just 2.4 by 2.4 microns (about one-fiftieth the diameter of a human hair), is designed to divide incoming light waves in two, thereby creating two separate channels of separately polarized information. Combined with other photonics components that replace their electronic equivalents, such as transistors, diodes, and other semiconductor devices, the beamsplitter adds to the growing catalog of devices being created for future photonic computing.
Hey you were in Boston!! As someone who lives in Boston just wanted to say, I have friends who play fallout just to walk around and see how accurate the map of Boston is. It's funny cause he'll talk to me and say stuff like I was walking around the city and went from here to there and then finally mention that all that was done in game >_
This is a really interesting theory because it fits really well, but it seems unlikely that the creators thought of that particularly specific analogy. As an artist, people find things in my work that I never put there all the time. And I think that's awesome! It makes the piece that much more meaningful - in this case, without taking anything away from the original, as many theories tend to do.
I find it interesting that so many like to compare out now with the future of Fallouts 2052-77 era (the resource wars era). That is still quite a bit in to out future and the scary thing is... That in our own future there might be our very own resource war. Transistor or not. I hope not of course. I hope we do solve our difference and learn to manage our resources better. And by the end of 2077 we might very well have surpassed even the technical achievements on the nuclear side of the Fallout universe.
I would perhaps argue that one difference between nuclear and transistor based technologies is the ultimate aims of such technologies, which (probably unintentionally) is kinda reflected in how the divergent timelines function. Whilst broadly one could argue that all technology is developed as a means to solve a problem, most of the developments with regards to nuclear energy, particularly in the context of Fallout's universe, is the energy itself; making more raw power to be then be harnessed to power other things. Whereas the development of the transistor, and computer technologies, is about management. We make our computers increasingly powerful and efficient in order to be able to handle more tasks. So one path leads you to develop raw energy and then try to figure out what to do with it, often leading to destructive applications - lasers, mini nukes, power armour, so forth - whilst the other leads to develop something that better enables the user (bar comment sections) to cope with the world around them, as the computer will do the job for them. For Fallout, the nuclear arms race proliferated society itself, whilst in our world, we found a way to relax, through the computer.
One point you touched on but I think could go a lot further is the difference in the kind of practical accessibilities the two technologies intrinsically have. Transistor technology can be and is made in such a way that there's no unique way of serious harm or death. This means that it can be safely accessed by pretty much anyone who can afford it, both in the forms of finished products and of components which can be used by amateurs to do all kinds of home projects. The term amateur is largely associated with amateur radios, afterall. As someone with an associates degree in electronics, I can also tell you that there's a huge thing in the industry about making things fairly imprecisely so that they can be made cheaply. For example, the defining value of some of the most common types of transistor varies between about 100 & 300. (It's referred to as either hfe or beta if you're interested.) That's a difference of a factor of 3. Even with such large variation, transistor devices can still be mass produced and function just fine. This is a big part of why transistor based technology has been able to take off like it has. By contrast, imprecision in a single nuclear device is a potentially deadly accident waiting to happen. Disregarding the materials, the facilities that would be required to mass produce nuclear devices would be ludicrously expensive to build and run.
While I would like to address the main issue I have to say... Thanks for the Shadowrun reference. It is always fun when a lesser known game gets some love. :)
I remember reading somewhere that the advent of satellite technology, spy planes and the overall space race, can be regarded as the most important element that prevented a nuclear war. The idea here is that for both sides to maintain a stalemate, and "trust" that other side meant business when it claimed that it had enough weapons to kill the other one, as well as to claim they _weren't_ going to attack first, both sides needed *total awareness* of what the other one was doing at all times. A bit like trying to play "Submarine" while watching the other person's board. This theory says that should history be different and neither US nor the USSR had satellite technology, they would have operated under the old WWII methods of educated guesses, which invariably leads to an unstable stalemate. This theory also says that the few moments we were on the brink of war, like during the Cuban missile crisis, it all began because of ignorance and a lack of information , and that the _influx_ of information is what ultimately stopped escalation. So in this sense, I think the comparison of the transistor with peace becomes more compelling. The transistor, and computing in general, has allowed more than ever for the possibility of all sides watching what the other one is doing. Simply put, without the transistor, spying is harder, more expensive, and impractical, leading to more war, not less. It's almost as if information not only wants to be free, but for the sake of peace, we _need_ it to be free.
I remember a long time ago reading about a person who claimed to have astral-projected into a parallel universe (I think it might have been Ingo Swann, but I'm not sure), and said that the people of that universe used nuclear power for everything instead of electricity.
I'm from boston, and Fallout 4 is one of the best games I've ever played. It's so cool to be able to wander about the game, then wander about the city, and see the same stuff.
One thing that makes the transistor a force for piece is that they are disabled by nuclear weapons and their Electro Magnetic Pulse blasts whereas vacuum tubes, the go to electronic components of Fallout, can still work after being exposed to EMP. The Soviet Union used vacuum tubes in a lot of their electronics for the same reason, so they could continue to operate after a nuclear war. One of the reasons we have avoided nuclear war may be because our electronics would be useless after one.
Brilliant. As I teach my intro to programming students the history of computers, I spend some time describing the transition from vacuum tube to transistor to integrated circuit. And how the fact that each transistor had to be hand wired led to a tyranny of numbers that stifled innovation. How innovation stayed stifled until the end of the 60's due to a near monopoly by IBM and its lack of interest in moving on from the cash cow that transistors and punch cards represented. How the space race and its culmination our landing on the moon and the integrated circuit computer the LEM required, with the publicity it garnered is what finally broke that monopoly. It is fascinating to think that JFK's very inspirational "We choose to go to the moon... not because it is easy, but because it is hard" speech may have been the difference between our achieving this modern wonder with the innovation that followed, and the cold war culminating in apocalyptic nuclear annihilation. Now the question is, going into our future, what innovation could save us from descending into the chaos, distopian, futures described by such works as "Children of Men" and "Rainbow's End"? Star Trek-esk utopia, or does hate bring us all down as terrorism becomes the norm? Things that make you go hmmm....
I think it's interesting that you brought up shadowrun, because I think it (and various other cyberpunk works) pick up with the transistor taking the place of fallout's (and atompunk's) nuclear power. While they might not be apocalyptic, many of them are pretty dystopic, showing just how dangerous this replacement can still be. (sidenote, I personally think in the same way the miniaturized transistor makes atompunk a divergent future from the 50s, I think the web, in particular social media, has made cyberpunk a divergent futurism of the 80s)
A few points this subject inspired. One is that we are long passed the pursuit of miniaturization and are now in an age of micronization. Also were there not several prototype fission/steam powered cars built by buick, ford, and others in the 50s? As well as the airforce's nuclear powered "steam bird" global bomber and even our current navy carrier ships and submarines. We are not nearly so far removed from the atomic age as we perhaps wish to believe. And my final thought on this is that the development of the transistor did not halt the nuclear armageddon in our timeline, but has only delayed or redirected it.
I like this comparison. Not just seeing the transistor as a sign of peace, but more as a sign of perseverance. See both nuclear power and the transistor had so many people of stature doubting them from the beginning. Ernest Rutherford, the man who originally split the atom said "The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine." An early figure in computing John von Neumann said the computing power had reached a maximum, back in 1949. With transistors and nuclear power, those at the head of the march doubted their capabilities, though through the perseverance of people like Leo Szilard (conceived the nuclear chain reaction) progress was made, despite doubt.
Interesting video but as I was watching it, I couldn't help but think "Nuclear vs transistors" is like an apples to horses comparison. One is a voltage switch, the other an energy source. While the 1950's modern era had some of that "atomic" flare, the roots of modernism go back to the 1920's and earlier with Bauhaus and so on. The analogies/parallels drawn by the speaker require a far stretch of the imagination - makes me wonder if he smoked something before he wrote this. Without nuclear, we wouldn't be sending any deep space missions so our version of "Fallout" became very practical - nuclear power, nuclear medicine, nuclear applied manufacturing processes, security applications, deep space travel and so on. One can choose to characterize nuclear as a thing of war but it can also represent peace. Transistors are the micro elements of our computing technology, they're not a power source like nuclear power. Two totally different things. Without power, all of our transistors are useless. Nuclear power is the "smaller, denser, cheaper" of all energy sources despite a sizeable footprint, a 1GW nuclear plant on a square mile property is millions of times more compact than any renewable energy source.
for some reason when i read that title i read transformer, as in a power transformer. and i was expecting a video about how the transformers we see on power line poles have brought about peace. this video made much more sense
i think it is vary important to note the parallelism between ghost in the shell and fallout with the relation to this discussion. the remove of Mad forces the Ghost world to both make better atomic technology as a way to solve its power problem but also to go after transistor based technology and turn the transistor in to a weapon because bombs were not enough.
I think the interesting aspect of this Fallout discussion is the social difference that led to different technologies. Both transistors and nuclear power have peaceful and hostile applications and I am hesitant to say one is actually superior for peace, even if one could argue that the transistor has a broader variety of peaceful uses. What I am more focused on is the topic of nuclear power and its aesthetic remaining in the public consciousness in the Fallout world, where it did not do so in the real world. So much of that, I think, actually hinges on popular culture. Not just the use of the bombs and accidents like 3 Mile Island, but also the creation of Godzilla, of the numerous Marvel and DC characters powered by or mutated by radiation, and of many of the thriller novels and movies of the time that created public fear about radiation and its effects. As an aside, the effect of those things has been so strong that even relatively safe activities like well-shielded nuclear plants to provide base load power to a region are met with hostility and any sort of long-term nuclear waste storage, no matter how well-protected it will be and no matter how transparent the plans are to public inspection, receives massive negative reaction from any community where it could be located.
Interestingly, the Fallout pre-occupation with nuclear technologies also meant that they figured out fusion long before we will. Fortunately, some nations are still pursuing fusion tech. It is worthwhile to say that war does change, as well. The practice of 'total war' was not even a practice until the American Civil War and the form of war we currently fight has little in common with the way wars were fought a hundred years ago. So, war changes. People's motivations do not.
13:04 War does change though, in the last hundred years even it has dramatically changed from it's previous line up and shoot system resembling mass duels to the almost guerrilla warfare we see now. Read Norbert Elias's On Changes in Aggressiveness to see how humans and our expressions of violence change.
There is one thing that i think isn't quite right in your discussion: in Fallout there are aslo intelligent robots, actual AI, that requires a huge amount of computational power in a relativly compact form. Therefore i dont think that is possible to achieve such a thing without going throught the same process that we went and still are going throught.
+Non ho nome Maybe they are analog robots?! Seriously though, there are some internal problems like AI that exist just like in the original alien movie. They had AI and comical computers. In that way, maybe AI can be treated as a special case and they still have simple computers, and magical AI, somehow :D
+BeCurieus Well we are analogical AI in some sense :) , so yah it is possible. The problem with every tipe of AI is that it requires huge developments in bouth hardware and software, and the software part needs a lot of resurces too. The point is that a society that is so fixated with nuclear to ignore transistors wuold never invest enough money into the software part of the AI.
Non ho nome Ya, they are a narrative problem in this story, but also the broader Fallout Universe of massive clunky machines. I give Idea channel a pass because fallout lore has some...I don't want to say problems but "charms" :D
You know, I think this nuclear/electronic comparison is a really interesting one, especially when you consider the USB port. Think about it, as computers became smaller and more compact due to the shrinking size of the transistor and other technologies, the 'PC' or personal computer came to be, and as the PC became a staple of most homes, addons were made for it (Mouse, USB drive, chargers, etc), and while it took a while for the USB to come around, when it did, there was this odd, almost universal mechanical translator. Where as power outlets across countries are this complicated mess, making travelers spend hours and money making sure they can use all that they brought, USB ports work regardless of the country you're in and what their standard may be. The USB port is important to consider in all this because it now works as 'let's meet halfway' port.
I like to think that they chose to increase the amount of power, whereas we chose to increase our efficiency without power. This let them do things we just can't pull off, such as lasers and such, but it's wildly inefficient, as you've noted
it was a huge Ad. So many things would be told about transistors in the real world and how it changes that. miniaturization, heat, ok but also speed linked with size and thermal cooling, and never forget Moore's Law
I agree that the transistor and the trend towards miniaturization of most technology does have a "joining effect" on human culture. In addition to the reduction of resource usage that you mention in the video, the Internet in particular makes the world feel smaller. Almost everyday I'm communicating with people thousands of miles away from me, potentially exposing me to alternate ways of thinking and different views of the world. The Internet is a natural progression of the miniaturization of the transistor. Smaller transistors allow for a greater density of computers within a population and connecting cables to allow these computers to talk to one another is an obvious next step.
"Those wandering around the wasteland today might find it hard to believe that 200 years ago the richest nation in the world existed here. No deathclaws, no ghouls. Most folk back then didn't have to fight to survive, scavenge for supplies. Factories could produce everything a person could want-by the millions."~The Storyteller, Shoddycast We see how the universe diverged but yet remained the same. The transistor allowed for the shrinking of electronics and acted as a way of alleviating the draining of resources. Fallout didn't have that, but the people were still the ravenous consumers that they are in the real world. They consumed themselves into destruction.
11:35 I think it is stated explicitly somewhere, though I cannot remember the source, although slightly differently. While the resource costs of Nuclear Power are not addressed and may indeed be a contributing factor, from what I understand it was the inefficiency of a world that does not have transistor-based technology which drives the quest for resources. Really wish I knew where I read this, somewhere on the Fallout Wikia, I'm sure.
To be fair, the resource wars are still 40 years ahead of our current date, and many predictions are estimating that is when resources will begin to become more rare than today, which has always been a reason for conflict.
I think you forget that Fallout's retrofuture is still 60 years ahead of our current timepoint. Give peak oil, peak water, peak metal and peak everything a chance and I think you'll see we won't fare all that better. Plus, their transistor tech had to be as good as ours, because things like semi-sapient Mr. Handys require more computing power than a Watson, in a much smaller space. My personal theory has always been the information revolution was something prevented or actually scaled back by the Old Enclave to maintain and expand their control of society.
Maybe in the "Fallout" universe scientists realized the transistor was prone to EMPs (electro-magnetic pulses) early-on... and-so the development of transistorized technology was abandoned.
That's a very interesting point! One could also argue that the transistors and its miniaturization allows for some form of equality, as opposed to atomic age science. By this I mean, the miniaturization made technologies in our reality to be cheap enough for public consumption, so that most of the populace, and not just the select few, can have the power and the ability to participate in, as you said, the community. While nuclear/atomic science, at least in Fallout universe, is available mainly to the middle class and up, and especially the govt and military, allowing for political realism to flourish, for the select few of nuclear-abled countries to exercise their strengths over its neighbors.
The analogy Mike made makes a lot more sense the more you think about it. Nuclear fission is related to the separation of people the same way electricity is related to connecting and organizing people. I don't think electricity is necessarily related to unity, or at least not absolute unity. But what is related to absolute unity? Nuclear fusion. I think nuclear fusion is a good analogy for human unity, where as it is pretty much impossible outside of extreme pressure, but it is still somewhat necessary for our survival (the Sun). Using this logic, if there was an alternate universe where we managed to master cold fusion, would that result in a more unified society?
The point about miniaturisation is reminiscent of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" novels, where an enclave of technologists and scientists on a planet with a dearth of resources is forced to innovate and miniaturise technology by the circumstances of their situation. This makes the eventual rejoining of larger scale society one with an interesting power dynamic, as on the one hand you have remnants of old society with big things built on big scale, and on the other you have small efficient things.
I can't say much about Fallout because I haven't played it, but I can definitely weigh in on the intertwined history of nuclear weapons and computing technology. The first people to work on what would be a good candidate for the first modern computer (the MANIAC, also known as the JOHNNIAC) were building it for the purpose of simulating hydrogen bomb detonations, and were literally the same people who invented the idea of mutually ensured destruction and similar cold war era memes. They also invented a large part of the technical background of computing in the process of trying to get this horrible pre-transistorized machine to work. However, another large chunk of technical advancement (along with a lot of culture) came out of the group of mostly brilliant drop-outs at MIT surrounding the TX-0, one of the first transistorized computers. This group leaned young and felt more comraderie with anti-war protestors (later, when that movement heated up) than with the people doing ICBM targetting tech on very similar computers down the hall for the navy. Later, on the opposite coast, the economies of scale made possible by military contracts for various high-tech devices in california intersected with hippie movements more directly at the genesis of home computing, helped along by people like Stewart Brand. There were (and still are) sort of two worlds in computing, and while the less scruffy of these worlds now has less to do with literal nuclear weapons, the cultural divisions still exist in ways that lead to (for instance) the director of the NSA being welcomed at some computer security conferences as a keynote speaker and being completely unwelcome (heckled or banned) at others.
Something that I noticed is the scale of the particle that are being harnessed, the electron is smaller than the atom. As was mentioned in the video, the transistor kept getting smaller and smaller. Would it not stand to reason that there is some suggestion that it might not even be that the transistor is the symbol of peace, but the ability to harness the infinitesimal. We might even see a series of games in the future that follow what would happen to humanity if we stick with electrons for power rather than moving on to subelectrons. I almost feel like it is looking at what happens when the majority of a population stops and says "This is good enough," and actively chooses to stop progressing. I've looked at progress as three things, breaking ground, efficiency, and obsolescence. We needed to break ground with atomic energy, then refine it until we find something that will make it obsolete. In this case it was the power of the electron. But in fallout, they chose to not allow atomic energy become obsolete. It was the simple choice to let atomic energy become an unquestionable king.
I thought that the reason their technology remained large wasn't because they didn't continue transistor development, but because they never invented transistors. I was under the assumption that the still used vacuum tubes. However, if they were using vacuum tube that would make the PipBoy much smaller than reasonably possible.
I want to start by saying this video is one of the best videos you've done so kudos to you and your team. I never really though about the Fallout Universe in that way before and I think it is a very good idea to think about. I think the message of transistors is a little, incorrect. While the idea that Fallout glorifies the atomic era and the idea of nuclear everything, we live in an era, like you claim, by the electron. However, I think Fallout represents more of what the atomic age romanticized with it's horrors (nuclear war, irradiated people and creatures). In modern society, it could be said that while scientists try to romanticize the idea of curing cancer through gene therapy, one could point out how messing with genetic code could lead to a super virus wiping out humanity, or the idea of creating artificial intelligence could lead to a uprising of the machine, or that exploring and venturing into space could give us some unwanted visitors who could be peaceful or destroy the planet.
Three Mile Island, in Middletown, PA. You were about five miles from where I live. I am actually kinda surprised they let you film there. It was forbidden for a couple of decades, and officials are still a little skittish about it.
So Fallout is the nuclear version of Steampunk? In our universe, we focused on electricity and transistors; in Steampunk universes, they focused on steam power and mechanical contraptions; and in the Fallout universe they focused on nuclear energy and radioactivity.
nailed it. if you know about the "raygun gothic" genre, Fallout pulls very heavily from that.
so... Raygun-Gothic Mad-Max-on-Foot Post-Apocalypse Nuke-Punk genre.
+E “Anonymous Nerdfighter” Hernandez
Fallout's far from the only example of that, and Idea Channel's far from the first to pick up on it.
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PunkPunk
Aside from steampunk and cyberpunk, either atompunk or dungeonpunk (I forget which, though the other shortly followed) was the first variation I'd ever heard of.
+E “Anonymous Nerdfighter” Hernandez Technological counterfactual histories aren't the most common in academic counterfactuals, but they're currently popular as fictional settings. I'm sure Mike, in using the term "retrofuture," is very aware of that parallel.
***** you are correct, they both funciton by boiling water have it move a pistion.
It's called atom punk
I find this interesting, actually, given I worked on electronics during my time in the Navy. The idea of the Transistor being a symbol of peace is an idea that actually goes beyond just the comparison to nuclear energy. The Transistor was partly created due to the post WW2 cooperation with Japan and building up their economy. Before then, and during WW2, we were using vacuum tubes to do roughly the same thing, but those are large, bulky, and (as I found out working with them in some of our older gear) prone to easily break. They also get extremely hot, which makes them difficult to handle and easily damaged, ironic given the proper function of one requires they reach a certain amount of heat to function properly. But after WW2, and as the cold war with the USSR started to simmer, Japan hit a breakthrough with the transistor. In short, the Transistor as we know it could not have come to being without Japan and their constant drive to make things smaller (which one could hypothesize is due to their limited space on what is essentially a string of islands, thus technology for them needs to take up as little room as possible). Due to this, what had been the American go-to belief at this time, that "Bigger is better", was flipped on it's head and the era of miniaturization came into being.
According to the Fallout universe, this never happened. Japan was conquered by China because the US didn't stick around to stabilize the region as we did in our world/reality, and China went on to conquer the USSR, creating a very different sort of cold war than we knew in the 50s-80s. As such, one little country we befriended after WW2 lead to a technological advance we rely on heavily. One could argue that the message isn't just about Transistors, but the fact we befriended what was, at the time, a mortal enemy after their defeat, is why we are not that universe. An entire chain of events hinging on a single decision: to help or not to help Japan recover after their defeat in World War 2. Sure, the reasons we did help Japan stabilize may be varied, and some not so pleasant, but the end answer is that we did it, and in so doing prevented a far darker path the games hint could have been waiting.
Fallout missed out on the transistor. What if we missed out on something? Which of our technologies did we neglect? I think one of them might be the electric motor. Gasoline powered cars were definitely a mistake, but there are probably others.
@vargen1414 not until 2067.
They still missed it out.
@vargen1414 using a line from a quest as proof...great.
Given how inconsistent the fallout lore with everything and the fact that in practice everything was still so bulky.
Nope, the world still missed out on transistor.
Don't give me that BS about transistor being eXpEnSiVe so no widespread use because that doesn't make any sense.
Being "cheap" was the definition of transistor itself, aside from being simple and way more efficient than vacuum tubes.
Idgaf even if Todd Howard himself saying the same thing about transistor was being invented prewar.
The game depiction, the mechanics, and the tools were intentionally made with the absence of transistors in mind.
You're just like a certain fandom I've heard of.
J. K. Rowling and Todd Howard are similar when it came to consistency and logic.
If that was the case and transistors did was invented in 2023 in fallout universe then why does the 2077 electronics era barely looked like past 1950s? 2023 - 2077 took 54 years jump. We should've looked at 2001 equivalent of electronics with our world from when the transistors were invented in 1947.
But nope! I won't take hearsay from a game quest as proof.
@@nuclearwarhead9338I'd like to argue that.
Like in most industries "if it ain't broke. Don't fix it"
At the time, there wasn't much compatibility between vacuum tubes and transistors. And since there's a whole lot of vacuum tubes and not enough transistors. It wouldn't really warrant a quick transition.
Much like our irl technology, most of the cheapest devices actually still use micro USB. And it's already beginning to phase out for USB C.
And in my headcanon. There's also status. Like iPhones, they held on for superiority even when presented with a better product.
I am playing through Fallout 3 and they are way advanced than ours. But they couldn't really could have downscaled a lot of things. Why does my stimpack weigh as much as my gun. Could have used a concentrated dose.
I think starfield is the opposite of fallout
Philosopher Daniel Dennett has put forward a phenomenon which he refers to as the "Three Mile Island Effect" where he posits whether the accident at Three Mile Island was a good thing or a bad thing. The accident at Three Mile Island killed nobody, its economic costs were minuscule, and provided us information on how to prevent and respond to future meltdowns. Though it instilled in the public a fear of atomic energy, caused America to stop investing in a technology which its largest source of non-greenhouse gas emitting energy, and directly contributed to the further consumption of fossil fuels for decades. Right now our civilizations greatest concern is not nuclear war, it is global climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The greatest representation of this in 2007 when Bulletin for Atomic Sciences changed their famous "Doomsday Clock" from being a representation of how close humanity was from catastrophic destruction from global nuclear war to climate change.
Between 2009 and 2011 I made a documentary film about the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant where I live on Long Island. By many nuclear engineers sight it as killing the nuclear industry in the United States. It ran $4 billion dollars over budget before the state shut it down in the 1980s without ever operating. After the Three Mile Island accident (which as we have established killed nobody) and the Chernobyl* accident there was a great public push by the residents of Long Island to shut down the plant. In my research I discovered a full page newspaper ad encouraging residents to protest the opening of Shoreham. In the bottom left corner it read in big bold letters "SOLAR NOT NUCLEAR". Directly underneath that in fine print it reads, "Paid for in the public interest by the Oil Heat Institute of Long Island."** In return for bailing out the privately owned utility that built the plant, LILCO, New York Governor Mario Cuomo had the state absorb the cost of the plant. Today Long Island gets no more of its energy from solar than the rest of the country (practically none). The Oil Heat Institute of Long Island is still in existence. And just recently New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (Mario's son) is trumpeting up minor tritium leaks, which endanger the public in NO way, as reason to shut down the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant.
But right now there is a lot of interest in new modular atomic reactor technology. Everyone from Bill Gates, to Richard Branson, and Paul Allen are investing in atomic reactors. Barack Obama has specifically stated that nuclear power must be a key factor in fighting climate change and improve our energy mix. Under Obama the first nuclear power plants have been ordered, constructed, and began operation in this country in the past 20 years. The global COP21 conference on how to combat climate change was recently held in Paris, France, a country which receives 80% of its energy from nuclear. China is on its way to constructing dozens of nuclear power plants as a replacement for coal. We are even seeing nuclear advocacy from unexpected places like the publication Mother Jones.
* The reactor at Chernobyl was a GEN1 reactor a type of reactor found nowhere outside the former Soviet Union. It lacked now standard safety features which would have prevented the accent. Plus the Soviets staffed the plant with coal miners and scheduled a very dangerous test in the middle of a shift change. The possibility of replicating the events which lead to the Chernobyl accident are precisely nil.
** You can see that ad in the documentary feature 'Pandora's Promise'.
You look really cold dude.
+CaptainMcSmoky Dude. It was *really* cold. We're learning a lot about shooting, y'know... outside.
I've heard stories about the "outside," it sounds terrible.
+PBS Idea Channel Haha welcome to Boston my friend. Greetings from Boston :)
+CaptainMcSmoky Yeah, I still wonder how they change that giant lightbulb.
+CaptainMcSmoky haha I was about to type this exact comment.
The great war happened in 2077. We very well may suffer the same fate, there is nothing to say it won't happen. In fact, in our timeline we rely solely on petroleum, while in Fallout people also used lots of nuclear fuel pretty efficiently.
+AlHoresmi Except we are developing alternatives rather than preparing to fight over the scraps
+Roflmayo Mann Aye. Solar power is basically impossible pretransistor, and is only starting to be useful now because we have size down and efficiency up.
Now, we might still all die when the water runs out, but that's more directly Mad Max than Fall Out's inspiration. ;-) We're much less likely to do it with nukes though than we were during the cold war. We seem to at least have developed enough sense that "winning" does no good if everyone's dead.
***** I meant alternatives to petrochemicals such as plastics, which im pretty sure the resource wars in Fallout were about. I doubt they were to do with energy, as they have fusion working.
+Jessie le Fey Water won't run out though, we'd just have to filter it/condense it.
+Roflmayo Mann They did have fusion, but they couldn't get it into mass production before the Great War. There are a few nuclear cars in Fallout 4, but most things that weren't robots, Power Armor, or lasers were still powered by petroleum. That's why the European Commonwealth invaded the Middle East.
I know this isn't entirely relevant, but I had a weird dream last night where Kornhaber Brown and Michio Kaku were on the Walking Dead shooting zombies in Mordor and asked me to kill Frisk from Undertale for trying to make friends with the zombies.
Michio Kaku armed with a large gun is all I have ever needed in life.
+XerxesTexasToast Michio Kaku tried to kill the Cassini mission, that man has a taste for blood and science!
XerxesTexasToast I was mostly just being silly. Ya, he doesn't like nuclear even a little bit, enough to want to not use RTG's for space exploration.
This discussion of the transistor makes me think of the world of Frank Herbert's Dune. In the Dune universe computers have had their capabilities strictly limited after a long and costly war against AIs. This results in a humanity that while it explores the stars and harnesses unimaginable energy, has reverted to feudal governments and slavery. Dune takes place after that has been the case for nearly 10,000 years.
I wonder if in both cases the transistor serves as a representation of a slavery of the mind. Perhaps these both show that peace and democracy are based on a liberation from mental labour in the same way that energy such as the harnessing of the atom was to free us from physical labour. The result are in both Fallout and Dune societies that have mastered massive amounts of energy, but are unfree and violent.
Transistors is why In Fallout we have the large heavy Pip-Boy while in our world we have the small lightweight Smart Watch. The only things we lack in ours is Fast Travel, the retro greenscale screen, and a cool appearance.
+Wolfee I'm honestly surprised no one has made a modern pip-boy. I'd imagine a lot of people would buy it, since you have room for more parts, bigger batteries and you don't have to worry about losing it. Plus fallout fans would be throwing money at whoever sold it.
+Tim Stahel (Moustached Viking) We have built that. It's called a smartphone. We put all of the pipboys functions and more into a space small enough to fit in our pockets then we built a bulky pipboy look-alike to put it in for role play reasons
Joseph Edmond What i mean is basically a slim pip-boy using modern technology, you'd be sacrificing the ability to move it around like a phone to instead have it much more secure on your arm, plus the space for it being physically bigger therefore more powerful and with a bigger screen. You could also have some things on the side facing away from you like a camera and flashlight, which could perhaps allow you to scan stuff. I mean simple smart watches are popular enough, and they can barely make it through the day..
You mean lack of Transistors.
***** Yes that's what I was saying...
I don't think it's reasonable to call out one technology as peaceful and another as not so peaceful. Both technologies remain ambiguous in nature and their intent left to their users. For example, when the first transistor was designed at Bell Labs, it was the result of trying to find a way to make germanium diodes for use in radar. It wasn't until after the war that other users changed its applications (like to computers and phones and drones). The same can be said of nuclear research. The first experiments were to figure out the phenomena about the world and the internal structure of the smallest pieces of matter. Only later did the application shift from medical purposes to weapons to energy. In fact, Ernest Rutherford thought it impractical to apply nuclear research to energy production. In short, the object AND its interactions with the surrounding environment are what drives its intent. NOT JUST the object itself.
This is similar to something I said, only far more concise. Basically humans are the variable that makes things dangerous. Like Mike suggested at the end of the video "War never changes because people never change."
This is one of the most fascinating episodes that I've watched in a long time. Thank you!
+phampants Thanks, Pham! :D
1:04 You named yourself "Harry Poopsalot"?
+Lucky Fox Who didn't?
In FONV I once made an Asian nudist character named Dekana Nexiv, which is backwards for A Naked Vixen. She was stealthy and had the element of surprise. lol
In Ironman's first stories I remember that his suit was all about this marvelous technology called "transistor". It could solve any kind of problem, so it was TRANSISTORS! all the time
Glad to see this episode finally came together, and how! So many locations and neat machines, loved it. If you ever have anymore nuclear questions, send them my way! Speaking of, I better get back to making some more videos! Where does one find the time to work, go to school and be a youtuber?!
Hmmm interesting thought because of this video. In our own world, we don't have oil refineries on cars, we use the resulting product in them. Same for nuclear, a reactor in a car, never gonna happen, but electricity in your car? Well, that is already quickly becoming a thing! If battery technology was more advanced at the time of nuclear, and electricity ruled the roost, would the nuclear vision of the 50s-60s been realized?
+BeCurieus sounds like a world where we have a dumpster that reads "nuclear waste".
wouldn't super efficient batteries eliminate the need for decentralized nuclear reactors?
+warxdrum Ya, it would allow for increased flexibility for whatever you wanted to do really
Thank you for this great video. Keep up the good work.
Finally a standard episode, shorter ideas are fine but it's been two weeks man
7:27 is... is that Slavjov Zizek?
+Noble Mushtak Ah, Zizek! Philosophy's best comedian and bullshitter. He's awesome, and so on, and so on.
+welwitschia lol comrades i think mike maybe communist but to quote sum slovenian guy communism will win and so on lol
+welwitschia Why do you dislike him, if I may ask?
Mike Freyrie I don't, I actually like him very much. All I'm saying is that Zizek is a really smart dude with a twisted sense of humor who seems to enjoy trolling philosophy. He has interesting ideas, specially when it comes to cultural criticism, but you can tell that half of the time he's just improvising and talking bullshit for the sake of it.
+welwitschia I mean yeah, he's the guy who keeps a Stalin portrait at home in order to start arguing with his guests.
The transistor was invented later in the Fallout lore, therefore allowing to build those classic looking computers and pip-boys, if you look at the prototype pip-boy on the opening in Fallout 4, it was electronic, with wires and etc
Well I guess the computers did have some fusion power in it
is...is your phone background a picture of Slavoj Zizek?
+Tom Bouwer And his macbook
*sniff* Beautiful ideology....
+Tom Bouwer Damn pinko! Unsubscribed!!!
+Tom Bouwer kidding, I'm a leftist my self
PBS is commie popagander. Unsubscribbled.
I think we could still have a "Resource War" actually, at least if we don't be careful. Every population has a maximum amount of individuals it can sustain. If we don't manage are resources more carefully and switch to cleaner energy it kind of seems inevitable that we'll have massive wars over available resources. It might not even be things like oil and minerals that will be the most important, it could even be basic resources like water and food required for human life. May seem bleak but our timelines might not end up being totally different from Fallout's. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.
I loved this episode! It did make me suddenly realize how strange the robots in fallout 4 are. I don't see how they would be possible without advanced transistors (or something similar), and I don't see how you can make for instance a mister handy but not a decent computer... (I know it's a fictional world, and I shouldn't nitpick, but it does annoy me a bit)
+wiet111 Ya, they are kinda magical in that way, if you have robots you really should have advanced computer systems. Even so, that is more a problem with the fallout world lore than this theory :D
+wiet111 I could maybe, just maybe see scientists making robots like Mr. Handys, securitrons and protectrons without transistors if we accept that the fallout universe has super-advanced technology in the field of robotics. maybe, since they put all their resources into nuclear technology/robotics and nothing into anything else, they discovered something revolutionary that we have yet to discover. I can't see us having consumer robots like theirs in 2077, but we might one day. I'm tempted to say the synths would have been impossible in the fallout universe, but the Institute had another 200 years to develop them after the great war, and they were some of the smartest people in existence, so likely they did discover the transistor and improved it beyond what we have in our universe.
+wiet111 I'm not too familiar with the Fallout universe, but in cognitive science there is the understanding that faster computers don't really replicate human intelligence (computers will always be based on formal logic, whereas humans actually have to learn logical thinking and frequently think in illogical ways). In fact, experts in the field effectively abandoned standard computers in favour of neural networks. Neural networks are, of course, processor and transistor-heavy, but since computers in themselves weren't really instrumental in making human-like AI anyway, they could've found some other way to do it.
Matthew Lizst Hm, I didn't know that. I would guess that as soon as they got the human like AI they would be able to sort of convert it to computers, but that is a very decent explanation!
+wiet111 I think the reason isn't that they can't do it. It's that they don't think it's necessary and thus haven't begun thinking in that direction. You generally react to stuff like limitations. If you wouldn't go outside with your stuff there's no need to make it portable.
This makes me think of the old Iron Man comics from the '60s in which Tony Stark would go on about the wonders of his "transistorized armor".
I think that calling the people who got into the Vaults "very lucky" is a huge overstatement haha
ZiplockBob here, and I got to make this pun but the fallout "earth" is a mad M.A.D. world. Now that that's out of the way, the interesting thing about transistors in the fallout "alti-verse" is this little snippet from the wiki. "The transistor, invented in our world in 1947, was not developed in the Fallout universe until the decade just before the Great War (2067), while its successor, the semiconducting microprocessor chip, may have never been developed at all." This a HUGE gap in time and if this also meant that the development cycle did not have time to take effect. The other thing I noticed missing was cultrural warning signs missing from pre-great war, that we had post world war to and pre cold war, such as Godzilla. Nukular technology in out time has been outed as "scary and evil" due to cherynoble, 3 mile island, and Nuke- Moster movies. Even the Transistor has is "warning movies" such as the terminatior. I would actually argue that because the people did not challenge the ultimate end is why the mutually assured destruction (see earlier pun) happened. Because we do worry about A.I. now because of those movies which is the destructive side the transistor has given us, well, possibly.
I have a bit of a hypothesis that suggests the Institute actually did master the transistor. As opposed to all the vacuum tube based tech that you see in use everywhere else in the Fallout universe. It would explain how they were able to make A.I. systems, capable of producing indistinguishable mimicry of human functions & mental processes, and put it all in such a small package. It would also explain just _why_ they feel as though they're the only real hope for the future of The Commonwealth.
I loved how you could very briefly see Žižek on the screen of the laptop and phone around 7:20 and so on, and so on.
The problem is, the transistor was invented in the Fallout universe, it was just developed late. 2022 to be exact. Most of the tech in fallout still uses vacuum tubes, but given the Great War happened in 2077, I'd imagine there was some transistors in there somewhere.
This is a very interesting discussion, but I feel there's an aspect that needs to be put forward a bit more: these two technologies (nuclear power and transistors) answer very different questions, they can't both achieve the same results. So no matter how much energy you're taking from the atoms, or how efficiently, this in itself doesn't get you any nearer to building (or even designing) a computer that can play Fallout 4 - let alone artificial intelligence. Conversely, you can reduce your transistors to the level where quantum mechanics becomes a problem (which we pretty much have already, btw) and you'll be no closer to solving large-scale energy problems.
So I don't see them as competing, one having to be chosen over the other. And I'd add that neither of them is actually responsible for the results mentioned (in or out of Fallout's world), it's always us using the technology as we see fit (and "see" here can be more or less objective/conscious/precise depending on context).
On another time-scale, this is very similar to criticism directed at The Internets or Those Damn Phones which accuses these technologies of isolating people. Poppycock and balderdash, I say, we started reading books in trains back in the 19th century specifically to avoid interacting with people during those long travels. More often than not, we use any technology from its very start (no matter its creators' intentions) to answer some need or objective we'd already had for a while.
Three Mile Island shut down last September. RIP, Three Mile Island.
Wow. He actually counted the easily forgotten Fallout games to. Well done! (Though we forget one specific game for a reason.)
Fallout 3 wasn't THAT bad
+Cythil Oh come on Fallout shelter wasn't that bad.
(yes i do know it is the one that must not be named)
Todd Howards probabably going "Uh yeah... yeah that's what we ment. Transistors saved the world,".
Mike: mentions Retro-futurism
Vaporwave: allow me to introduce myself
Thank you for giving the cycling cap some love.
One thing that I love about Fallout and Shadowrun is that in both worlds we advanced technologically, but still kinda stayed the same as a society, both have laser guns, super inteligent machines and other insanelly advanced technologies, but still kinda feel like a past age, in those two cases the 50's and the 80's
"...very few, very luck* people..."
*Luck not guaranteed in all cases of people entering vaults.
I think it's also that nuclear technology cannot exist without the risk of nuclear weapons, whereas transistor technology is much 'safer' to share.
Thorium fission and Hydrogen fusion reactors dude...
+Kyle McDonald but did they have that kind of reactor back in the cold war era?
+Min Lungelow I thought you were talking about now, but Thorium? Yes. Fusion? No, we still can only barely get it working.
+Kyle McDonald nah was talking about the point where our reality split from fallout's reality.
I don't honestly know thing one about nuclear power other than that it heats water to make steam to spin turbines.
1:50
Yes. All the vault dwellers were so very lucky... Like in 111 where all of them were unwittingly cryo frozen and died in their unknowing sleep, 112 where they became Dr Braun's human toys, or everyone's favorite: 87 which gave the world the East Coast Supermutants. So lucky.
"claps hands" wow one of the most interesting videos about fallout ive ever seen. this guy deserves my subscribe and like
fallout 4 is the 7th fallout game
BoS isn't cannon and we do not discuss it
Bos is to fallout what the prequels are to Star Wars
+Jeff Solis Except the prequels have fans.
1 and 2 are the best one, tactics is...acceptable
BoS is a shitty xbox exclusive that nobody ever liked
its like the shadow war in the deus ex franchise or the star wars christmas special
+friendlySkeletor The major events of BoS and Tactics are canon, but not everything else. In the other games, Fallout 3 kind of ignores everything and Fallout 4 DOES ignore basically everything aside from the existence of factions like the Shi and the NCR...but only for one scene.
+friendlySkeletor can we ignore the fps shooter that is fallout 4 too?
I can't tell if that's Richard Matthew Stallman or Vermin Supreme as the wallpaper of your phone.
At this point, Shadowrun is about as retrofuture as Fallout in some places. (Particularly Japan)
You had mentioned Shadowrun, and made me realize how much I would love to see a PBS Idea on Shadowrun. I can wish.
"A few very lucky people are ushered into vaults"
Yes..."lucky", thinks of vault 87 and Necropolis.
This is a pairing of two things I truly enjoy...Idea Channel and Fallout...AWESOME! I also love how many Poe and Lovecraftian references there are in Fallout.
I love that you put the glasses on the nuclear towers.
The terms you're searching for are "transistorization", "miniaturization" and then "micronization" folks... That's what defined the transistor & subsequent transistorized micro-processor movement.
I think something very interesting to point out is that despite the scarcity of petroleum there seems to be no limit to the amount of plastic that is seen everywhere which is a petroleum byproduct.
and they've come up with a way to do photonic splitters so small we'll have light powered computers soon.
The beamsplitter, claimed to be the smallest ever created at just 2.4 by 2.4 microns (about one-fiftieth the diameter of a human hair), is designed to divide incoming light waves in two, thereby creating two separate channels of separately polarized information. Combined with other photonics components that replace their electronic equivalents, such as transistors, diodes, and other semiconductor devices, the beamsplitter adds to the growing catalog of devices being created for future photonic computing.
Hey you were in Boston!! As someone who lives in Boston just wanted to say, I have friends who play fallout just to walk around and see how accurate the map of Boston is. It's funny cause he'll talk to me and say stuff like I was walking around the city and went from here to there and then finally mention that all that was done in game >_
This is a really interesting theory because it fits really well, but it seems unlikely that the creators thought of that particularly specific analogy. As an artist, people find things in my work that I never put there all the time. And I think that's awesome! It makes the piece that much more meaningful - in this case, without taking anything away from the original, as many theories tend to do.
I find it interesting that so many like to compare out now with the future of Fallouts 2052-77 era (the resource wars era). That is still quite a bit in to out future and the scary thing is... That in our own future there might be our very own resource war. Transistor or not. I hope not of course. I hope we do solve our difference and learn to manage our resources better. And by the end of 2077 we might very well have surpassed even the technical achievements on the nuclear side of the Fallout universe.
I would perhaps argue that one difference between nuclear and transistor based technologies is the ultimate aims of such technologies, which (probably unintentionally) is kinda reflected in how the divergent timelines function. Whilst broadly one could argue that all technology is developed as a means to solve a problem, most of the developments with regards to nuclear energy, particularly in the context of Fallout's universe, is the energy itself; making more raw power to be then be harnessed to power other things. Whereas the development of the transistor, and computer technologies, is about management. We make our computers increasingly powerful and efficient in order to be able to handle more tasks. So one path leads you to develop raw energy and then try to figure out what to do with it, often leading to destructive applications - lasers, mini nukes, power armour, so forth - whilst the other leads to develop something that better enables the user (bar comment sections) to cope with the world around them, as the computer will do the job for them. For Fallout, the nuclear arms race proliferated society itself, whilst in our world, we found a way to relax, through the computer.
One point you touched on but I think could go a lot further is the difference in the kind of practical accessibilities the two technologies intrinsically have. Transistor technology can be and is made in such a way that there's no unique way of serious harm or death. This means that it can be safely accessed by pretty much anyone who can afford it, both in the forms of finished products and of components which can be used by amateurs to do all kinds of home projects. The term amateur is largely associated with amateur radios, afterall.
As someone with an associates degree in electronics, I can also tell you that there's a huge thing in the industry about making things fairly imprecisely so that they can be made cheaply. For example, the defining value of some of the most common types of transistor varies between about 100 & 300. (It's referred to as either hfe or beta if you're interested.) That's a difference of a factor of 3. Even with such large variation, transistor devices can still be mass produced and function just fine. This is a big part of why transistor based technology has been able to take off like it has. By contrast, imprecision in a single nuclear device is a potentially deadly accident waiting to happen. Disregarding the materials, the facilities that would be required to mass produce nuclear devices would be ludicrously expensive to build and run.
While I would like to address the main issue I have to say... Thanks for the Shadowrun reference. It is always fun when a lesser known game gets some love. :)
Really love the direction you're taking the channel. Your videos are becoming much more interesting and engaging!
I remember reading somewhere that the advent of satellite technology, spy planes and the overall space race, can be regarded as the most important element that prevented a nuclear war. The idea here is that for both sides to maintain a stalemate, and "trust" that other side meant business when it claimed that it had enough weapons to kill the other one, as well as to claim they _weren't_ going to attack first, both sides needed *total awareness* of what the other one was doing at all times. A bit like trying to play "Submarine" while watching the other person's board.
This theory says that should history be different and neither US nor the USSR had satellite technology, they would have operated under the old WWII methods of educated guesses, which invariably leads to an unstable stalemate. This theory also says that the few moments we were on the brink of war, like during the Cuban missile crisis, it all began because of ignorance and a lack of information , and that the _influx_ of information is what ultimately stopped escalation.
So in this sense, I think the comparison of the transistor with peace becomes more compelling. The transistor, and computing in general, has allowed more than ever for the possibility of all sides watching what the other one is doing. Simply put, without the transistor, spying is harder, more expensive, and impractical, leading to more war, not less.
It's almost as if information not only wants to be free, but for the sake of peace, we _need_ it to be free.
11:23 I was laying behind that railing one day when a security guard said I needed to get up! :D
I remember a long time ago reading about a person who claimed to have astral-projected into a parallel universe (I think it might have been Ingo Swann, but I'm not sure), and said that the people of that universe used nuclear power for everything instead of electricity.
I'm from boston, and Fallout 4 is one of the best games I've ever played. It's so cool to be able to wander about the game, then wander about the city, and see the same stuff.
One thing that makes the transistor a force for piece is that they are disabled by nuclear weapons and their Electro Magnetic Pulse blasts whereas vacuum tubes, the go to electronic components of Fallout, can still work after being exposed to EMP.
The Soviet Union used vacuum tubes in a lot of their electronics for the same reason, so they could continue to operate after a nuclear war. One of the reasons we have avoided nuclear war may be because our electronics would be useless after one.
Brilliant. As I teach my intro to programming students the history of computers, I spend some time describing the transition from vacuum tube to transistor to integrated circuit. And how the fact that each transistor had to be hand wired led to a tyranny of numbers that stifled innovation. How innovation stayed stifled until the end of the 60's due to a near monopoly by IBM and its lack of interest in moving on from the cash cow that transistors and punch cards represented. How the space race and its culmination our landing on the moon and the integrated circuit computer the LEM required, with the publicity it garnered is what finally broke that monopoly.
It is fascinating to think that JFK's very inspirational "We choose to go to the moon... not because it is easy, but because it is hard" speech may have been the difference between our achieving this modern wonder with the innovation that followed, and the cold war culminating in apocalyptic nuclear annihilation.
Now the question is, going into our future, what innovation could save us from descending into the chaos, distopian, futures described by such works as "Children of Men" and "Rainbow's End"? Star Trek-esk utopia, or does hate bring us all down as terrorism becomes the norm?
Things that make you go hmmm....
You were straight Pauly Shore with the improv slang on this one.
I think it's interesting that you brought up shadowrun, because I think it (and various other cyberpunk works) pick up with the transistor taking the place of fallout's (and atompunk's) nuclear power. While they might not be apocalyptic, many of them are pretty dystopic, showing just how dangerous this replacement can still be.
(sidenote, I personally think in the same way the miniaturized transistor makes atompunk a divergent future from the 50s, I think the web, in particular social media, has made cyberpunk a divergent futurism of the 80s)
Say, that room at 4:26 is a room in the Venture Compound.
+Patrick D Ryall Oh I saw that too!
+Patrick D Ryall Right?
A few points this subject inspired. One is that we are long passed the pursuit of miniaturization and are now in an age of micronization. Also were there not several prototype fission/steam powered cars built by buick, ford, and others in the 50s? As well as the airforce's nuclear powered "steam bird" global bomber and even our current navy carrier ships and submarines. We are not nearly so far removed from the atomic age as we perhaps wish to believe. And my final thought on this is that the development of the transistor did not halt the nuclear armageddon in our timeline, but has only delayed or redirected it.
I like this comparison. Not just seeing the transistor as a sign of peace, but more as a sign of perseverance. See both nuclear power and the transistor had so many people of stature doubting them from the beginning. Ernest Rutherford, the man who originally split the atom said
"The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine."
An early figure in computing John von Neumann said the computing power had reached a maximum, back in 1949. With transistors and nuclear power, those at the head of the march doubted their capabilities, though through the perseverance of people like Leo Szilard (conceived the nuclear chain reaction) progress was made, despite doubt.
Interesting video but as I was watching it, I couldn't help but think "Nuclear vs transistors" is like an apples to horses comparison. One is a voltage switch, the other an energy source. While the 1950's modern era had some of that "atomic" flare, the roots of modernism go back to the 1920's and earlier with Bauhaus and so on. The analogies/parallels drawn by the speaker require a far stretch of the imagination - makes me wonder if he smoked something before he wrote this.
Without nuclear, we wouldn't be sending any deep space missions so our version of "Fallout" became very practical - nuclear power, nuclear medicine, nuclear applied manufacturing processes, security applications, deep space travel and so on. One can choose to characterize nuclear as a thing of war but it can also represent peace. Transistors are the micro elements of our computing technology, they're not a power source like nuclear power. Two totally different things. Without power, all of our transistors are useless. Nuclear power is the "smaller, denser, cheaper" of all energy sources despite a sizeable footprint, a 1GW nuclear plant on a square mile property is millions of times more compact than any renewable energy source.
for some reason when i read that title i read transformer, as in a power transformer. and i was expecting a video about how the transformers we see on power line poles have brought about peace. this video made much more sense
i think it is vary important to note the parallelism between ghost in the shell and fallout with the relation to this discussion. the remove of Mad forces the Ghost world to both make better atomic technology as a way to solve its power problem but also to go after transistor based technology and turn the transistor in to a weapon because bombs were not enough.
Anyone else saw 'Transistor' and was disappointed that the episode was about Fallout and not Supergiant's Transistor?
+Canon Whitecandle
Indubitably.
yes.
This was a really cool episode. Delving into the history of things and really exploring the idea was fantastic, good job guys.
I think the interesting aspect of this Fallout discussion is the social difference that led to different technologies. Both transistors and nuclear power have peaceful and hostile applications and I am hesitant to say one is actually superior for peace, even if one could argue that the transistor has a broader variety of peaceful uses.
What I am more focused on is the topic of nuclear power and its aesthetic remaining in the public consciousness in the Fallout world, where it did not do so in the real world. So much of that, I think, actually hinges on popular culture. Not just the use of the bombs and accidents like 3 Mile Island, but also the creation of Godzilla, of the numerous Marvel and DC characters powered by or mutated by radiation, and of many of the thriller novels and movies of the time that created public fear about radiation and its effects.
As an aside, the effect of those things has been so strong that even relatively safe activities like well-shielded nuclear plants to provide base load power to a region are met with hostility and any sort of long-term nuclear waste storage, no matter how well-protected it will be and no matter how transparent the plans are to public inspection, receives massive negative reaction from any community where it could be located.
Interestingly, the Fallout pre-occupation with nuclear technologies also meant that they figured out fusion long before we will. Fortunately, some nations are still pursuing fusion tech.
It is worthwhile to say that war does change, as well. The practice of 'total war' was not even a practice until the American Civil War and the form of war we currently fight has little in common with the way wars were fought a hundred years ago. So, war changes. People's motivations do not.
13:04 War does change though, in the last hundred years even it has dramatically changed from it's previous line up and shoot system resembling mass duels to the almost guerrilla warfare we see now.
Read Norbert Elias's On Changes in Aggressiveness to see how humans and our expressions of violence change.
There is one thing that i think isn't quite right in your discussion: in Fallout there are aslo intelligent robots, actual AI, that requires a huge amount of computational power in a relativly compact form. Therefore i dont think that is possible to achieve such a thing without going throught the same process that we went and still are going throught.
+Non ho nome Maybe they are analog robots?! Seriously though, there are some internal problems like AI that exist just like in the original alien movie. They had AI and comical computers. In that way, maybe AI can be treated as a special case and they still have simple computers, and magical AI, somehow :D
+BeCurieus Well we are analogical AI in some sense :) , so yah it is possible. The problem with every tipe of AI is that it requires huge developments in bouth hardware and software, and the software part needs a lot of resurces too. The point is that a society that is so fixated with nuclear to ignore transistors wuold never invest enough money into the software part of the AI.
Non ho nome Ya, they are a narrative problem in this story, but also the broader Fallout Universe of massive clunky machines. I give Idea channel a pass because fallout lore has some...I don't want to say problems but "charms" :D
+BeCurieus Like aliens? :P
You know, I think this nuclear/electronic comparison is a really interesting one, especially when you consider the USB port. Think about it, as computers became smaller and more compact due to the shrinking size of the transistor and other technologies, the 'PC' or personal computer came to be, and as the PC became a staple of most homes, addons were made for it (Mouse, USB drive, chargers, etc), and while it took a while for the USB to come around, when it did, there was this odd, almost universal mechanical translator.
Where as power outlets across countries are this complicated mess, making travelers spend hours and money making sure they can use all that they brought, USB ports work regardless of the country you're in and what their standard may be.
The USB port is important to consider in all this because it now works as 'let's meet halfway' port.
This was a really cool, nice and inspiring video. As a big fan of Fallout I enjoyed it a lot! Nice job dude.
I like to think that they chose to increase the amount of power, whereas we chose to increase our efficiency without power. This let them do things we just can't pull off, such as lasers and such, but it's wildly inefficient, as you've noted
In 1959 The Santa Susana Field Laboratory (Rocketdyne) had a nuclear meltdown that is far worse than the Three Mile Island meltdown.
it was a huge Ad. So many things would be told about transistors in the real world and how it changes that.
miniaturization, heat, ok
but also speed linked with size and thermal cooling, and never forget Moore's Law
I agree that the transistor and the trend towards miniaturization of most technology does have a "joining effect" on human culture. In addition to the reduction of resource usage that you mention in the video, the Internet in particular makes the world feel smaller. Almost everyday I'm communicating with people thousands of miles away from me, potentially exposing me to alternate ways of thinking and different views of the world. The Internet is a natural progression of the miniaturization of the transistor. Smaller transistors allow for a greater density of computers within a population and connecting cables to allow these computers to talk to one another is an obvious next step.
I've been watching this show every week for years, and this is one of the coolest and most fascinating episodes I've seen. Nice work!
"Those wandering around the wasteland today might find it hard to believe that 200 years ago the richest nation in the world existed here. No deathclaws, no ghouls. Most folk back then didn't have to fight to survive, scavenge for supplies. Factories could produce everything a person could want-by the millions."~The Storyteller, Shoddycast
We see how the universe diverged but yet remained the same. The transistor allowed for the shrinking of electronics and acted as a way of alleviating the draining of resources. Fallout didn't have that, but the people were still the ravenous consumers that they are in the real world. They consumed themselves into destruction.
Pip-Boy and the robot AIs and such are strange anomalies in the lack of miniaturization in Fallout universe.
11:35 I think it is stated explicitly somewhere, though I cannot remember the source, although slightly differently. While the resource costs of Nuclear Power are not addressed and may indeed be a contributing factor, from what I understand it was the inefficiency of a world that does not have transistor-based technology which drives the quest for resources. Really wish I knew where I read this, somewhere on the Fallout Wikia, I'm sure.
To be fair, the resource wars are still 40 years ahead of our current date, and many predictions are estimating that is when resources will begin to become more rare than today, which has always been a reason for conflict.
Unrelated question: are office hours still a thing that you do?
I think you forget that Fallout's retrofuture is still 60 years ahead of our current timepoint. Give peak oil, peak water, peak metal and peak everything a chance and I think you'll see we won't fare all that better.
Plus, their transistor tech had to be as good as ours, because things like semi-sapient Mr. Handys require more computing power than a Watson, in a much smaller space. My personal theory has always been the information revolution was something prevented or actually scaled back by the Old Enclave to maintain and expand their control of society.
Maybe in the "Fallout" universe scientists realized the transistor was prone to EMPs (electro-magnetic pulses) early-on... and-so the development of transistorized technology was abandoned.
If you turn the schematic symbol of the transistor on it's side it bears a striking resemblance to the peace sign.
That's a very interesting point! One could also argue that the transistors and its miniaturization allows for some form of equality, as opposed to atomic age science. By this I mean, the miniaturization made technologies in our reality to be cheap enough for public consumption, so that most of the populace, and not just the select few, can have the power and the ability to participate in, as you said, the community. While nuclear/atomic science, at least in Fallout universe, is available mainly to the middle class and up, and especially the govt and military, allowing for political realism to flourish, for the select few of nuclear-abled countries to exercise their strengths over its neighbors.
The analogy Mike made makes a lot more sense the more you think about it. Nuclear fission is related to the separation of people the same way electricity is related to connecting and organizing people. I don't think electricity is necessarily related to unity, or at least not absolute unity. But what is related to absolute unity? Nuclear fusion. I think nuclear fusion is a good analogy for human unity, where as it is pretty much impossible outside of extreme pressure, but it is still somewhat necessary for our survival (the Sun). Using this logic, if there was an alternate universe where we managed to master cold fusion, would that result in a more unified society?
Fun fact: The radiation released in the Three Mile Island incident was less than that of a chest x-ray.
The point about miniaturisation is reminiscent of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" novels, where an enclave of technologists and scientists on a planet with a dearth of resources is forced to innovate and miniaturise technology by the circumstances of their situation. This makes the eventual rejoining of larger scale society one with an interesting power dynamic, as on the one hand you have remnants of old society with big things built on big scale, and on the other you have small efficient things.
You really don't want to go into the Boston Statehouse without some heavy firepower
I can't say much about Fallout because I haven't played it, but I can definitely weigh in on the intertwined history of nuclear weapons and computing technology. The first people to work on what would be a good candidate for the first modern computer (the MANIAC, also known as the JOHNNIAC) were building it for the purpose of simulating hydrogen bomb detonations, and were literally the same people who invented the idea of mutually ensured destruction and similar cold war era memes. They also invented a large part of the technical background of computing in the process of trying to get this horrible pre-transistorized machine to work. However, another large chunk of technical advancement (along with a lot of culture) came out of the group of mostly brilliant drop-outs at MIT surrounding the TX-0, one of the first transistorized computers. This group leaned young and felt more comraderie with anti-war protestors (later, when that movement heated up) than with the people doing ICBM targetting tech on very similar computers down the hall for the navy. Later, on the opposite coast, the economies of scale made possible by military contracts for various high-tech devices in california intersected with hippie movements more directly at the genesis of home computing, helped along by people like Stewart Brand. There were (and still are) sort of two worlds in computing, and while the less scruffy of these worlds now has less to do with literal nuclear weapons, the cultural divisions still exist in ways that lead to (for instance) the director of the NSA being welcomed at some computer security conferences as a keynote speaker and being completely unwelcome (heckled or banned) at others.
Something that I noticed is the scale of the particle that are being harnessed, the electron is smaller than the atom. As was mentioned in the video, the transistor kept getting smaller and smaller. Would it not stand to reason that there is some suggestion that it might not even be that the transistor is the symbol of peace, but the ability to harness the infinitesimal. We might even see a series of games in the future that follow what would happen to humanity if we stick with electrons for power rather than moving on to subelectrons.
I almost feel like it is looking at what happens when the majority of a population stops and says "This is good enough," and actively chooses to stop progressing. I've looked at progress as three things, breaking ground, efficiency, and obsolescence. We needed to break ground with atomic energy, then refine it until we find something that will make it obsolete. In this case it was the power of the electron. But in fallout, they chose to not allow atomic energy become obsolete. It was the simple choice to let atomic energy become an unquestionable king.
I thought that the reason their technology remained large wasn't because they didn't continue transistor development, but because they never invented transistors. I was under the assumption that the still used vacuum tubes. However, if they were using vacuum tube that would make the PipBoy much smaller than reasonably possible.
I want to start by saying this video is one of the best videos you've done so kudos to you and your team. I never really though about the Fallout Universe in that way before and I think it is a very good idea to think about.
I think the message of transistors is a little, incorrect. While the idea that Fallout glorifies the atomic era and the idea of nuclear everything, we live in an era, like you claim, by the electron. However, I think Fallout represents more of what the atomic age romanticized with it's horrors (nuclear war, irradiated people and creatures). In modern society, it could be said that while scientists try to romanticize the idea of curing cancer through gene therapy, one could point out how messing with genetic code could lead to a super virus wiping out humanity, or the idea of creating artificial intelligence could lead to a uprising of the machine, or that exploring and venturing into space could give us some unwanted visitors who could be peaceful or destroy the planet.
This video is the first one (that I'm aware of) that I've watched from this channel... and it's made me a subscriber! :D
Three Mile Island, in Middletown, PA. You were about five miles from where I live.
I am actually kinda surprised they let you film there. It was forbidden for a couple of decades, and officials are still a little skittish about it.