"More big tanks and jet planes, less man portable military stuff. Dungeons kind of helped end the cold war a lot, I think?"

"Yeah, they distracted everybody's militaries. Probably behind a lot of regime change anywhere that couldn't get its shit together well enough to rescue the kidnapped."

"I'm imagining no espers either, if it matters."

"There'd be less mystery. Fewer unsolved fronts of science. We'd still be a long way off from a fusion powered utopia though."

"Yeah, if anything the fusion power's probably closer because of the dungeon materials bootstrapping us up the tech tree bit by bit."

"Dungeon materials are such BS. Dungeons don't exist in my fic."

"A lot of stories do a no-dungeons AU but it's just going to get weirder and weirder to extrapolate over time. It's basically its own subtype of science fiction now."

"My favorite no-dungeons AU was this one set in 2040 where global warming has messed everything up and all the fossil fuels are mostly used up."

"That would be a lot of fossil fuels, but I guess maybe dungeon materials matter more than I thought they did to wind and solar transition?"

"Graphene batteries, the huge banks they use for grid management, were made feasible by studying debris from a lightning themed dungeon that emerged in 1991!"

"Cool, I didn't know that one."

"We can make those without dungeons. Would have gotten to it eventually. I'm more annoyed by the stuff that's inherently magic."

"Like the power batteries? I'm signed up to try if they ever find batteries that might be able to soak up my power, it'd be good if more people could operate in psychic dungeons without taking up the capacity of the same people who are also clearing the victims of the influence but I can't share it unassisted."

"...Now that I'm thinking about it, why don't robots work to help with psychic dungeons?"

"You need to train robots to recognize targets and they're not alike between dungeons."

"And you can't have it recognize victims and shoot everything else because humanoid monsters and high risk of messing up, I guess... Well, probably a lot of very serious people have looked into this already. I have no particular advantage."

"Humanoid monsters and dungeons that don't leave people at their most recognizable, yeah."