Today I went to see a wonderful exhibition of giant walking robot vehicles. They are still a work in progress, but when these machines are complete, their operator will be able strap into a kind of control harness, and stride around on enormous electrically powered legs. I know of similar projects elsewhere, but this is the first one I’ve ever seen in person.
And it got me thinking about what modern life would have been like if we had never invented wheeled vehicles.
The Maya civilization built a great many things without the invention of wheeled vehicles — except as children’s toys. What if, for whatever reason, our own civilization had gone the same way? In particular, suppose we had developed electric motors, internal combustion engines, integrated circuits, and and a host of other modern advances, but not the rolling wheel as the basis for moving people around.
In this alternate version of history, might we be walking around on power-assisted legs? Would we have devised industrial walker drones to carry our freight across earthly terrain? Just how far could an advanced civilization evolve on that basis? And in such a world, what would have been the steps along the way to modernity?
Maybe such questions — how technologies that never ended up existing might have evolved — belong to a field of study that could be called crypto-techno-evolution.
I wonder, in that alternate version of reality, whether people would be flying around in ornithopters.
Real life wars would look like the Empire’s attack of the rebel base on Hoth, and our science fiction would show armies invading in little wheeled vehicles, to which we’d say “look at how impractical those things are! They can’t even step over obstacles!”
Haha, that’s brilliant! 🙂