..or anything else like hexagons for instance, basically anything rollable. How far back would we be today?
What if we never invented the wheel?
r/whatif
..or anything else like hexagons for instance, basically anything rollable. How far back would we be today?
Comments
we’d still be in the pre-historic age.
That would require a significant change in the laws of physics, as lot of things naturally exist that are rollable on their own. So who knows.
I mean, that sounds basically impossible? It would require physics to be rewritten.
The wheel is one of those inevitable discoveries that was bound to happen at some point, just like discovering that fire could be used for heat and cooking. I can’t see any “whatif” scenario that the wheel is never invented, only when it is invented.
Technology is typically based on previous technology, and with the wheel, that would have been bilateral rollers as described. And that is probably (I’m no expert, so this is just a logical assumption on my part) came from watching logs roll down a hill. And that eventually would lead to a unilateral grooved roller, and eventually to the wheel itself.
So I think a more accurate question would be if the discovery of the wheel was delayed for a thousand years (or so). That probably would not have made much difference. We’re talking 5000 years ago instead of 6000 years (for example). And in the time since, we would have still had great thinkers that may have still advanced the technology when they did even though the wheel was delayed.
Not inventing the wheel means we went extinct or never evolved into homo-sapiens.
I find it entirely implausible that humans could exist for as long as we have without realizing that round objects roll and that there might be some utility there.
Google is saying that the earliest evidence for wheels is from mesopotamia ca 3500BC but even that seems incredibly recent.
Good luck pushing cars with square wheels
“Invented the wheel” is always taken to mean “invented the wheel, axle and bearing”. In other words a structure with two parts, one which rotates and the other is stationary. There are no examples of “wheel, axle and bearing” in the natural world, so it counts as an invention.
A set of rollers for moving heavy objects does not count as a wheel. A pendulum that rocks backwards and forwards does not count as a wheel.
Whether the ball point pen counts as a wheel is debatable. I’ll sweep that under the carpet. A spinning ball would certainly help in certain circumstances.
The wheel between us and the road as a means of transport is nothing. It wouldn’t hamper movement, there are plenty of other ways to get around, such as sleds, robotic legs and horses. Pistons can substitute for wheels in a lot of cases.
So let’s look at wheels that are not used as contact between vehicle and road. Start with the pulley. Without the pulley we’re left with the sheave. That’s not too bad, actually. Sheaves can be used on ships to provide mechanical advantage for lifting sails and for rowing.
Next up, the governor, flywheel. This stores energy in angular momentum. We’d need to find another way to store energy, such as the spring.
Gears. No rotating gears. We’d need to find some other way to change speed other than gears and pulleys.
Next up, the electric motor. Here things are getting serious. If we were limited to linear induction motors and oscillatory motors, then civilization would know that it had been nudged.
No propeller, no crankshaft. No jet aircraft or propeller driven aircraft.
Biomimetics would be much more important.
I think we’d survive as a civilization if we only had back and forth motion instead of rotor-stator motion.
Sheaves instead of pulleys. Walking vehicles instead of wheeled vehicles. It would require some new inventions, such as elastic boats that swim like fish and aircraft with flapping wings.
It takes me back to a quote from Douglas Adams about “invented the underarm deodorant before the wheel”.
We would have invented it. There’s no way around it.
What if we never invented social media?
I believe society might have advanced at a slower pace, if at all, and people would be concentrated closer together in communities and communities would probably not be so worried about each other, as there would be little to no way of influencing things far away in any sort of timely manner..wed have to jump from shoes to… Hovercraft…
Or perhaps we would have become more water based people, focusing on boating up and down rivers rather than traveling across land
OP: presents hypothetical
literally everyone: “wElL thAt wOuLdNT bE pOsSibLe” and never engages the question at hand
I don’t think it works with humans having not gone extinct before they figured it out. The idea that we’d be human beings but somehow lack the capacity to figure out how to adapt and apply the principle of rolling just doesn’t make any sense. We’d have to not be humans. And even then even dung beetles figured out rolling lol
If grandma had balls she’d be a grandpa
I think it was the Aztecs who never had the wheel. Or maybe the Maya. Some advanced indigenous culture. 🤔
Check out the Incas civilisation. They never discovered the wheel.
Whilst their civilisation functioned, it was not as advanced.
Pretty far back. We’d have had a lot more reliance on sleds and probably lubricants.
A wheel like object would’ve eventually materialized in nature, by just pure chance.
The wheel is just the physical representation of a concept. To “what if” that away basically means what if we didn’t have the ability to reason. In which case we’d be very capable monkeys.
But really the first overturned tree you found would do the same thing. You try to move it by pushing and pulling which ever way and eventually notice it’s easier when rolling it.
This entirely depends on why.
The physics of the wheel don’t work – we’d probably develop tracks or sleds and use that instead, it would hinder progress but not so much that we couldn’t work arround it.
We never thought about it – if we as a species could never put together the concept of roling things then apes would be the dominant intelligence on the planet. And not in the planet of the apes way more the “world without humans” way.
Humanity died out before inventing the wheel – no prgress, we died
Humanity found a better way of moving objects – progress likely speeds up, in the same way sleds or tracks slows us down this hypothetical speeds up development, to a point of course.
Using the wheel was shunned culturally – any culture that shuns technological progress won’t progress technologically.
with the hypothetical, it would change the world as its known. no wheel would mean we probably wouldnt have discovered the ability to use anything round, such as a pulley, so i guess it comes down to, how much hypothetical do you want? without the wheel, you lose any kind of transit/mass transit like buggys, trains, cars, so anything for shipping would probably be impossible for long distances without being pointless. you might be able to drag things, but it would be with horse, so it would be limited. without the wheel, we would barely be past the midevil times, if that
Human culture didn’t change much for many thousands of years before things took off in Mesopotamia, 5,000-6,000 years ago, aided in no small part by the wheel. Carts made agriculture much more efficient and allowed for a larger fraction of the population to live significant distances from cropland. There’s no reason that the early, pre-wheel level of Mesopotamian type culture couldn’t have continued in a very similar vein up until today.
Then: We wouldn’t be having this conversation.
The less obvious answer is that your Tesla wouldn’t have been vandalised.
Tesla would be making boats.
We’d most definitely be clicking the up and down arrows on the sides of our web browsers.
The Inka didn’t invent the wheel (at least they didn’t usually use them), because of the terrain it was easier to carry things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_road_system
the Incan empire comes to mind, and are interesting to read about. they never invented the wheel, because they lacked draft animals to pull them. they also lacked a written language, yet built an empire half the size of a continent
I guess we’d be carrying things a lot more. We wouldn’t be as technologically advanced, but the same could be said for any valuable thought put inton practice.
we’d be further back than you might think; the wheel was first developed as a pottery tool and was exclusively used for pottery for a while before anyone tried rolling anything on it
so wave goodbye to a lot of food preparation and storage techniques– even fishing equipment and lighting would be setback without pottery
What if the reason it’s not developed is because it’s colder. Like an ice age that lasts longer so wheels aren’t as useful as sleds. Somebody else mentioned sleds but what if this is just more common because the world is frozen. And by the time the world thaws sleds have been much more advanced
Perhaps we have figured out how to have animals pulling the sleds. And then we even go further and find ways to create wind sales for sleds.
And because we love sleds so much. Even though the ground isn’t smooth as it melts, we start making roads smoother for our sleds.
So when we start looking at combustion engines we are still thinking about smooth surfaced roads.
It just so happens. This also works on ice. This also works on hydroplaning across a liquid
I don’t think it would stop the development of the world using this scenario, but it would change what countries are the most powerful. In a world that cold ships wouldn’t be as useful. But something that can slide across the ice Bridges would.
Additionally, mountainous countries would become isolated. And countries that are very flat would become much more powerful. So in this world Australia North America, their vast stretches of pretty flat land. Perhaps these are where powerful empires start growing.
We’d just sprout wings and learn how to fly instead. Nature finds a way.
If you auntie has balls she’d be your uncle
I’ve never found hexagons inherently rollable…
Does that imply that we wouldn’t know about the circle either? If so we’d be screwed – aahm wait screws are circular too.
We’d be rolling everything around on googolplexagons
I can’t imagine a world without my heelys