June, 2003
British engineers are preparing to push the limits of aeroplane technology.
Zephyr 3, a solar-powered propeller-driven vehicle, is set to fly to 132,000 feet (40 kilometres) in the next few months.
-- As far as Hi-tech disappearing, I have to wonder if the 'pundits' (Literally: Brahminic Scholars) at the end of the Bronze age were bemoaning the impending changes, since the world would clearly no longer have the ability or inclination to manufacture wheels or anything sharp and pointy anymore.. I don't see the end of cheap oil as an automatic deathknell for HardDrives or Even Satellites. They will be seen as valuable enough to warrant the investment in keeping them coming, probably UNlike the 3-car family model..
Technology does sometimes disappear. The Egyptians no longer know how to build pyramids. The Minoans invented flush toilets and the printing press - inventions that were lost for thousands of years when their civilization collapsed. The Maya no longer used their raised beds and irrigation systems when their society collapsed.
The problem is that complexity has an overhead, and it's hard to keep paying that when resources are scarce.
It wasn't so long ago that many Americans did not go to school for more than a fea years, maybe even didn't learn to read. Children were needed as cheap labor on the family farm, and education was seen as a waste of time. If Kunstler is right, and we all must spend most of our time farming if we want to eat, who is going to building hard drives, mining the raw materials for them, working in the factories to build them, educating the people who will do all this? Especially when most people cannot afford them any more.
I don't expect them to disappear overnight, but I don't expect to maintain them forever, either.
I don't deny that 'all this will one day pass', and we certainly qualify for the 'Complexity Award', though future historians might call our top-heavy designs something other than 'intelligent' per se.. I am really wondering if there are facets to our situation that give the sciences we've developed any advantages that the other examples lacked.
1- With the education of Maths/Sciences/Languages/Arts cross-pollenating and existing massively in print throughout the inhabited world, I have to believe that our knowledgebase has a level of archival security that didn't exist when all the knowledge was kept orally, or at a central library in Alexandria or Constantinople, so that the ability to relearn from generation to generation cannot be cut off so easily.
2- Our mass-production techniques using the classic, (but never out-of-date) 'Interchangable Parts', via an international system of weights and measurements (well, two systems, and don't talk about it to NASA for a couple years), to mention only a couple of the most elemental aspects of it.. these give us clear energy advantages in accomplishing so much of the physical work that is to be done that they will clearly be key to our chances of survival through an energy falloff. I don't know that this thinking necessarily keeps the 200gb IPOD off of the endangered specious list, but it is my contention that however many steps back we find ourselves taking on one continent or another, that these techniques will be part of the success that will allow other places - perhaps regions with more inherent energy stability or agro-capacity - to thrive and maintain at least the main elements of a technologically sophisticated society.
Perhaps that just begs the doomers to pop in and say that just leaves us all as the 'Haves and Have nots' again, or the 'Have Guns'.. Whatever.. is that actually different from today, or the Raj?, or Ghengis? It's the primally fixated 'New Stone Age' arguments that I'm arguing against, or at least the notion that it will occur planet-wide. If Transp fuels plummetted and the world was quickly fracturing into a newfound isolation, then Inhabited Regions would undergo both some intense and disruptive migrations, and they would also undergo a wide array of new innovations, as people sought to rework what was getting undone by energy crises. It would certainly have violence popping up, sometimes running rampant, but it would have other solutions and reactions going on as well, and with these various places acting more on their own than before, I fully expect that there would be countless 'Galapagos' situations developing, with unique inventions and adaptations fueling a range of new ways for humans to live on the Earth.
Technology loss never takes place evenly. Things got much worse, at least in the West, at the end of the Roman Empire; but several inventions actually appeared or spread during that era including the organ, stirrups, and, crucially, the parchment codex.
I have this vision of a dreadful future where we're all freezing to death in a lean-to while watching high definition 3-dimensional TV.
There is a great science fiction novel that covers the issue of collapse of sophisticated societies and how they attempt to save their technology. Its called "The Mote in God's Eye" by Niven and Pournelle. Sometimes there's more truth in fiction than there is in data.
Agreed, definitely three thumbs up. Why, I was just describing these works to my wife the other day....
Prevaling themes of interest:
Cultural isolation
Finite resources
Overpopulation
Societal collapse
Importance of preparation, knowledge preservation
The Romans knew how to make what we call Portland Cement. Post-fall, this knowledge was lost until the 19th Century.
Even earlier, the ancient Egyptians must have had some sort of ability to illuminate dark and distant, subterranean chambers, or how else did they paint such elaborate artwork on the walls without a trace of soot from any burning substance (eg, Suqqhara burial chambers)? Today we can only speculate. We still do not know, except to attempt to reconstruct elaborate mirror-systems to transmit daylight. But there is no real evidence of these contraptions.
I like to think radio will be around - lots you can do with people and morse code, read the book "The Victorian Internet" about the pre-radio morse code world, that ought to stay around too.
Sigh. I still think Fred Hoyle is probably right, technical civilization is a one-shot deal and we've probably blown it.
I have to believe that our knowledgebase has a level of archival security that didn't exist when all the knowledge was kept orally, or at a central library in Alexandria or Constantinople, so that the ability to relearn from generation to generation cannot be cut off so easily.
Computer storage technology is rapidly displacing the ancient printed word. More and more of our knowledgebase is stored on disk drives and other weirdly encrypted storage media. It is highly likely that much of this accumulated knowledge will be lost if we suffer a collapse. "We" are not that much smarter than were the librarians of Egypt's Alexandria.
(As a side note, and to their credit, the librarians of Alexandria, Virginia; the ones who work for the US Patent Office have established backup microfiche depositories around the USA so that if Washington DC burns down, there will be a back up eleswhere of the accumulated technology. It is not clear though how long the microfiche substrate can last --maybe 50 years? or how you would view it without an electrically powered reading machine.)
Good Points, but I would counter that the false promise of the 'Paperless Office' has left us continually producing just fantastic volumes of printed material, not the least of which would be the university textbooks, published scientific journals, and as you've said, patent materials. Naturally, most of these are well represented as digitally stored and utilized files as well, but we haven't gotten over keeping a 'hard copy' of much of what we treasure. Even if our printed science records ended at the start of the PC age, we'd have a great compendium of 20th C. discovery in Physics, Electromagnetics, Materials Sciences, Manufacturing Experience, Aeronautics, Microbiology, Medecine, Optics.. etc, etc..
Microfiche without Electricity? Mirrors and the sun. The rest is pure optics.. but we're NOT going to throw away all our copper wire, magically and tragically forgetting that coils of it moving through a magnet's field will produce electricity. I don't think it's cornucopian to suggest that we'll still use sewing machines and scalpels, we'll still fly, we'll still talk over distances with radios and telephones.. I don't know how technology will be adapted, but it is a part of us now. It's part of our software, from Agriculture through Language and Symbology to the use of copper wires instead of thumping a hollowed out log to tell the next town that 'There's a storm a brewing'.. as Sarah Conner so aptly noted..
No doubt they had skills we don't, and vice versa. I don't claim we're smarter, we're just later. WE still have THEM, whereas they did not have US to refer to. Our tools and culture have derived from the great Mediterranean civ's, and we may have lost much of that knowledge, like how the Romans made some of that 2000-year Concrete, or Homer's third poem, but we didn't lose everything, and our democracies and our plays, our roads, natural sciences, religions ..all include lessons learned in all of the 'Failed Civilizations'.. so did they fail, or did they just get small, simplify and regroup?
Well said. From the ashes of Rome, other great societies were born. It took a while, but it happened nonetheless. And eventually all of them came together. That is the stage we're looking at now.
Seriously, beliefs of a sudden regression would be more reasonably be based off of a plague or some other catastrophe that kills the majority of the world's population. Just having fossil fuels peak isn't going to do it. We have plenty of fossil fuels to last a fairly long time, considering coal as well as the others. It's not going to be that from one day to the next the lights just go out.
Speaking of data longevity, I was a curator at a local history museum recently and did an internship at the Smithsonian, with an emphasis on collections and database managment.
(to back up a bit, Twenty years ago I computerized the accounting system of a midsized corporation, and got rid of the paper. One way trip. But the data useful to a company is a wasting asset. After a decade, it has no value.
However, museum archives are supposed to last forever, but because of the medium -- specifically the continually changing computer systems and database software -- it is virtually impossible to archive much data before the system changes, and everything you have done is suddenly "legacy," and of no value.
Thus, it is highly probably that most data, knowledge, information etc. that is not paper based will soon become virtually useless -- like coming upon a treasure trove of 78 rpm records, or CP/M data on 64K floppy disks. Who will even bother to get the machines required to find out what is on these disks?
And this isn't even considering the problems with magnetic storage degenerating, or the plastics on CDs changing, yellowing and becoming opaque, etc. .
I like 'Virtually Useless', but maybe that's as pat as adolescents who'll overuse 'irony'..
I do appreciate that we've got another huge vulnerability in the amount we depend on this ephemeral material to store our life's work and our new knowledge. I know a woman who spent 5 years writing a book, and (curse her if you must) never knew that harddrives could actually 'fail'.. Lost EVERYTHING. But sometimes a total rewrite is a good thing..
I have another friend who 'Paints' entirely on computer, although she does print them and sell them.. but as with these digital movies, songs, books etc.. so much of the art of our age is living in datafiles, too. But I look at this issue from another side, wondering whether the VanGogh's who are painting with 'mousedroppings' out there today, to be discovered as greats one day.. well their work won't have an 'original' to own, in many cases. What do you auction? The first print? A CD-rom? Who'd know? The reproductions would be identical.. It just makes me wonder what effect this will have on the 'Valuation' of art. Could it help to let people worry less about the 'Collection', and more about the work itself? Or, as Jack Valente and the movie industry worried when VHS and Beta made mass-reproduction possible.. when in fact, it helped revitalize the industry.
I'm wondering if anyone has ever read the books by Ray Kurzweil such as The age of spiritual machines or the singularity. He is a futurist whose thesis is, as I see it, salvation of mankind by technology. He is, in a sense, the anti-doomer. Technology will solve all our problems. I have a friend who is really into this guy. I've managed to make some progress with my friend so that he now at least has some doubts about whether nanobots and artificial intelligence will really rescue us all. But what do you say to someone who sees the world this way?
Don't know Kurzweil, unless he got his start making organs.
I've been given a 70's classic (I guess) called "The Starship and the Canoe" by Kenneth Brower. (HarperColophon, 1978) It's about Freeman Dyson and His Son George. The father, a renowned astrophysicist designing a spacecraft with a group of fellow scientists that would be driven by sequential detonations of small nukes behind the craft.. total Techno-cornucopia, and the equal yet opposite reaction of the Son, who lives in TreeHouses and self-constructed boats exploring the frigid coast of British Columbia.
I'm only a little ways in, but it looks at these generations and cultural approaches to how to live, what to strive for, what's possible or probable, what you need as opposed to what you want.
I wonder if it would interest your friend to see these worlds collide..
I am somewhere between a crunchy granola eatin Luddite who sews his own bags and makes camping gear from sidewalk scraps, to a typical tech-geek who creates 3d animation and designs light fixtures out of LEDs. Technology save us? Well, not like in StarTrek, where all you have to do to solve a problem is 'Recalibrate a Tachyon Emission'
I just want to live close to the land, with a trusty pile of transistors in my hand..
Kuhl, radio is hard not to do once you have some electrical stuff around. That ought to stick around. As for the singularity etc well....
Kurzweil is indeed the music/reading machine guy, he's our society's hero and the guy who's kind of quietly pushed off the cliff and everyone agrees it's an accident in a hunter-gatherer society (unless he learns to calm down) hehe.
There's a guy out there on the Net called Marshall Brain no shit that's the guy's name, he wrote an online novella about a future where the computers run everything, he things robots will be the Next Big Thing and "superstores" like Target and Home Despot will end up with computer brains telling the slavelike humans what to do. It all starts with a burger joint.... Not an easy novella to dig up but worth the time spent playing Net detective to dig it up.
I'm beginning to understand the eastern european ppl or whoever it was who hanged the supersmart ppl when they cropped up.....
As far as computers running things, check out a story in Asimov's I,Robot called 'the Evitable conflict', where the global computer networks are Positronic Brains that are ultimately following the '3-laws', and end up balancing the needs of a very complex humanity with more subtlety than the human managers can manage to.
Not advocating it, mind you.. but Asimov put forward some interesting thoughts.
I've been wondering if any of our super-computers have gotten so wise that they spend their idle nano-seconds drafting little plays about dark futures where HUMANS still run everything, and their muffled machines look on in horror, not permitted to offer any good advice..
'Logic is the beginning of Wisdom, not the end..' Spock
Not only have I read all Ray's books, I have a signed copy of his latest "Singularity". He has another interesting book - "Fantastic Voyage" which describes life extension. Back in the late 70's I independently acquired the notion that I should work either in the field of artifical intelligence or in the field of life extension, because a superhuman AI could solve human life extension, and with life extension one should live long enough to see AI and all the consequent benefits. I ended up in AI research, but began taking mega-doses of vitamins in the late 70's, and more recently practicing a limited form of caloric restriction. My blood chemistry is quite promising according to my doctor despite a family history of cardiovascular disease. Planning on living a very long time and not knowing the price of life extension, I started saving early so that compound interest could exert its inevitable exponential effects.
I subscribe to the Peak Oil theory, generally in accordance to the situation as described by Stuart. Our family traded a SUV for a Prius last year and we live a frugal debt-free lifestyle in the Austin urban core. As surely as I believe that Peak Oil will happen, I believe that a technical singularity will happen. Beyond that latter point the future is not predictable by definition. The Peak Oil theory is well developed and evidence abounds in comparison with AI theory and corresponding evidence that superhuman AI is possible, or will happen in our lifetimes. However I am dedicated to helping achieve a safe singularity. This undoubtedly is in the realm of science fiction but the consequences of a technological singularity gone wrong could extinguish the human race. A superhuman AI would not have to be evil to accomplish that, it might just make the atmosphere opaque as a side effect of some non-human goal and not care about humans in the same way as we don't care about a particular yeast colony.
Because I believe that Peak Oil will occur before a technological singularity, Ray's projections are not immediately relevant. Robotics, AI and self-replicating nanotech will not be here in time to deal with diminishing fossil transportation fuels. But I believe that the singularity will occur before the late-stage impact of global warming. So I am much more optimistic for solutions to, and remediation for that problem beyond 2025 or so.
This is ridiculous. You guys seriously believe that a whole bunch of our knowledge is just going to be lost? Knowledge is stored much more securely and disseminated much more widely than in the past. It's not just stored on hard drives, or in books, it's stored in the minds of people who have learned it. Frankly, losing it is almost impossible unless we have a nuclear war or something. More expensive fuel is not going to cause it.
Also, we're back to the same lame argument that our complex society is only due to fossil fuel burning. There were fossil fuels a couple million years ago, yet there were no complex socieities. Historically we have seen quite complex societies in the past. It's pretty clear to me that the catalyst toward our more complex societies is us, not fossil fuels.
Not to mention, all these arguments for collapse revolve around the belief that oil is rapidly going to run out, not peak, just be completely gone. That's not generally what is projected to happen by even the most pessimistic experts.
Then again, I suppose there isn't much point arguing against what seems to be an irrational desire to believe the end of the world is nigh.
I have no doubt that some segment of the human population will continue to thrive in an oil-rich, high-technology society long after fossil fuels become too expensive for most people.
You're right that knowledge is diffused, stored very widely, and inculturated into people's heads. Digital databases and hypertexting make knowledge far more uasble and accessible.
However, there are some real archival issues where knowledge is constantly being lost. Any time technology shifts, knowledge stored in the older technology can be vulnerable. Peak oil will make it harder to preserve knowledge, because there will be fewer resources to devote to it.
I know scholars who lost access to their data stored on IBM punch cards (no readers available), and lost other data in older mainframe formats that newer systems wouldn't handle. I've given up all my old LP records and cassettes; lots of iPod users are giving up their original CD's.
The media we use are pretty perishable. The US National archives noticed a strange squealing when playing their analog audio tapes. They discovered the iron oxide holding the magnetic information was flaking off with each playing. The only option is to make another (degraded) copy of the tapes (analog or digital). Same holds for video. Floppy disks (remember?) were believed to have a reliable working life of about 1 year.
Nitrate based silent films degrade to an explosive goo. Hard drives die; optical disks degrade at unpredictable speeds. The only option for saving knowledge on perishable media is to transfer it to less fragile media. It's expensive, time consuming, and doesn't get done very much.
Yes, knowledge is more broadly available, but much of it is in more fragile forms--including cultural knowledge. I don't believe, like Kunstler, that civilisation will crumble and die, but I don't discount that peak oil can cause further and faster knowledge loss. The Gutenburg Bible (1454) is still studied by archivists, because its mulberry paper looks great after 550 years. We're unlikely to see our CDR's and DVD's studied with the same interest 5 centuries hence.
You guys seriously believe that a whole bunch of our knowledge is just going to be lost?
Yes. Not overnight. Probably not in our lifetimes. And I'm not saying we're going back to the Stone Age. But I do think a lot of knowledge will be lost.
It's pretty clear to me that the catalyst toward our more complex societies is us, not fossil fuels.
Agreed. But what sustains complexity is energy. Look at all the complex societies in the past that eventually collapsed. Why are we immune from their fate?
Not to mention, all these arguments for collapse revolve around the belief that oil is rapidly going to run out, not peak, just be completely gone.
Incorrect. No one here believes that.
Personally, I believe our most likely fate is "catabolic collapse." A long, slow decline. Perhaps hundreds of years, as we turn to ever poorer energy sources, and eventually turn all resources and capital to waste.
I think we're worse off in many ways, because of our sheer complexity. Most of us are experts...whose work is supported by myriad other experts. I know how to install a hard drive, but wouldn't even know where to begin when it comes to making one. What materials to mine, how to extract and refine them, how to make the equipment needed to make hard drives, etc. Even the smallest things in our society are the work of dozens, hundreds, even thousands of experts. The average individual, even a highly educated or experienced one, has very fragmentary knowledge. It's part of the cost of complexity. There's simply too much knowledge for any one person to deal with.
Well said. I read a New Yorker article today by Malcom Gladwell. He was reviewing a new book about "basketball experts." I think. I must have skimmed over the part about what the book was actually about. I think it was called,"The Wages of Winning." I will probably never read the book, just don't have the time, who does? But the whole idea was fascinating. The article was very good. About what it really means to be an expert. Complexity was an issue. Author threw in some economic theory. I thought of quoting it today, but was trying to figure the relationship to oil. Tomorrow, I shall do so. Your post has inspired me.
I think you're thinking of Triana (or as some Congressional Republicans called it "GoreSat", since Gore was a big proponent) It was to remain in L1 Lagrangian orbit and continuously monitor the lit side of the Earth (complements LEO and geo). It was recently killed for lack of launch and maintenace funds, after millions were spent developing the package.
Re: Alberto. Early guessing as a TD was that it probably wouldn't strengthen much. Might say something of our predictive ability, maybe the "rules" for modeling TS development are changing a little. In any case, it's not halfway through June and we've already got a named system. Interesting.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm shocked. I guess our system takes large and continuous investment to keep even the most minimal functionality.
Just like Joseph Tainter said in "Collapse of Complex Societies," where he linked the fall of civilizations to declining marginal rates of return on investment.
The Bush administration really doesn't want you to hear or know about the Inconvenient Truth. They've decided that the NASA programs to study global climate change are not very important. The satellites that are needed to replace and enhance the aging satellites which are gathering the data we need to understand what is going on with our world climate.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3016082.stm
June, 2003
British engineers are preparing to push the limits of aeroplane technology.
Zephyr 3, a solar-powered propeller-driven vehicle, is set to fly to 132,000 feet (40 kilometres) in the next few months.
-- As far as Hi-tech disappearing, I have to wonder if the 'pundits' (Literally: Brahminic Scholars) at the end of the Bronze age were bemoaning the impending changes, since the world would clearly no longer have the ability or inclination to manufacture wheels or anything sharp and pointy anymore.. I don't see the end of cheap oil as an automatic deathknell for HardDrives or Even Satellites. They will be seen as valuable enough to warrant the investment in keeping them coming, probably UNlike the 3-car family model..
The problem is that complexity has an overhead, and it's hard to keep paying that when resources are scarce.
It wasn't so long ago that many Americans did not go to school for more than a fea years, maybe even didn't learn to read. Children were needed as cheap labor on the family farm, and education was seen as a waste of time. If Kunstler is right, and we all must spend most of our time farming if we want to eat, who is going to building hard drives, mining the raw materials for them, working in the factories to build them, educating the people who will do all this? Especially when most people cannot afford them any more.
I don't expect them to disappear overnight, but I don't expect to maintain them forever, either.
1- With the education of Maths/Sciences/Languages/Arts cross-pollenating and existing massively in print throughout the inhabited world, I have to believe that our knowledgebase has a level of archival security that didn't exist when all the knowledge was kept orally, or at a central library in Alexandria or Constantinople, so that the ability to relearn from generation to generation cannot be cut off so easily.
2- Our mass-production techniques using the classic, (but never out-of-date) 'Interchangable Parts', via an international system of weights and measurements (well, two systems, and don't talk about it to NASA for a couple years), to mention only a couple of the most elemental aspects of it.. these give us clear energy advantages in accomplishing so much of the physical work that is to be done that they will clearly be key to our chances of survival through an energy falloff. I don't know that this thinking necessarily keeps the 200gb IPOD off of the endangered specious list, but it is my contention that however many steps back we find ourselves taking on one continent or another, that these techniques will be part of the success that will allow other places - perhaps regions with more inherent energy stability or agro-capacity - to thrive and maintain at least the main elements of a technologically sophisticated society.
Perhaps that just begs the doomers to pop in and say that just leaves us all as the 'Haves and Have nots' again, or the 'Have Guns'.. Whatever.. is that actually different from today, or the Raj?, or Ghengis? It's the primally fixated 'New Stone Age' arguments that I'm arguing against, or at least the notion that it will occur planet-wide. If Transp fuels plummetted and the world was quickly fracturing into a newfound isolation, then Inhabited Regions would undergo both some intense and disruptive migrations, and they would also undergo a wide array of new innovations, as people sought to rework what was getting undone by energy crises. It would certainly have violence popping up, sometimes running rampant, but it would have other solutions and reactions going on as well, and with these various places acting more on their own than before, I fully expect that there would be countless 'Galapagos' situations developing, with unique inventions and adaptations fueling a range of new ways for humans to live on the Earth.
I have this vision of a dreadful future where we're all freezing to death in a lean-to while watching high definition 3-dimensional TV.
http://www.donalfagan.com/html/mote.html
Great read, and The Gripping Hand was a worthy sequel.
Prevaling themes of interest:
Cultural isolation
Finite resources
Overpopulation
Societal collapse
Importance of preparation, knowledge preservation
Even earlier, the ancient Egyptians must have had some sort of ability to illuminate dark and distant, subterranean chambers, or how else did they paint such elaborate artwork on the walls without a trace of soot from any burning substance (eg, Suqqhara burial chambers)? Today we can only speculate. We still do not know, except to attempt to reconstruct elaborate mirror-systems to transmit daylight. But there is no real evidence of these contraptions.
Sigh. I still think Fred Hoyle is probably right, technical civilization is a one-shot deal and we've probably blown it.
Computer storage technology is rapidly displacing the ancient printed word. More and more of our knowledgebase is stored on disk drives and other weirdly encrypted storage media. It is highly likely that much of this accumulated knowledge will be lost if we suffer a collapse. "We" are not that much smarter than were the librarians of Egypt's Alexandria.
(As a side note, and to their credit, the librarians of Alexandria, Virginia; the ones who work for the US Patent Office have established backup microfiche depositories around the USA so that if Washington DC burns down, there will be a back up eleswhere of the accumulated technology. It is not clear though how long the microfiche substrate can last --maybe 50 years? or how you would view it without an electrically powered reading machine.)
Microfiche without Electricity? Mirrors and the sun. The rest is pure optics.. but we're NOT going to throw away all our copper wire, magically and tragically forgetting that coils of it moving through a magnet's field will produce electricity. I don't think it's cornucopian to suggest that we'll still use sewing machines and scalpels, we'll still fly, we'll still talk over distances with radios and telephones.. I don't know how technology will be adapted, but it is a part of us now. It's part of our software, from Agriculture through Language and Symbology to the use of copper wires instead of thumping a hollowed out log to tell the next town that 'There's a storm a brewing'.. as Sarah Conner so aptly noted..
No doubt they had skills we don't, and vice versa. I don't claim we're smarter, we're just later. WE still have THEM, whereas they did not have US to refer to. Our tools and culture have derived from the great Mediterranean civ's, and we may have lost much of that knowledge, like how the Romans made some of that 2000-year Concrete, or Homer's third poem, but we didn't lose everything, and our democracies and our plays, our roads, natural sciences, religions ..all include lessons learned in all of the 'Failed Civilizations'.. so did they fail, or did they just get small, simplify and regroup?
Seriously, beliefs of a sudden regression would be more reasonably be based off of a plague or some other catastrophe that kills the majority of the world's population. Just having fossil fuels peak isn't going to do it. We have plenty of fossil fuels to last a fairly long time, considering coal as well as the others. It's not going to be that from one day to the next the lights just go out.
(to back up a bit, Twenty years ago I computerized the accounting system of a midsized corporation, and got rid of the paper. One way trip. But the data useful to a company is a wasting asset. After a decade, it has no value.
However, museum archives are supposed to last forever, but because of the medium -- specifically the continually changing computer systems and database software -- it is virtually impossible to archive much data before the system changes, and everything you have done is suddenly "legacy," and of no value.
Thus, it is highly probably that most data, knowledge, information etc. that is not paper based will soon become virtually useless -- like coming upon a treasure trove of 78 rpm records, or CP/M data on 64K floppy disks. Who will even bother to get the machines required to find out what is on these disks?
And this isn't even considering the problems with magnetic storage degenerating, or the plastics on CDs changing, yellowing and becoming opaque, etc. .
I do appreciate that we've got another huge vulnerability in the amount we depend on this ephemeral material to store our life's work and our new knowledge. I know a woman who spent 5 years writing a book, and (curse her if you must) never knew that harddrives could actually 'fail'.. Lost EVERYTHING. But sometimes a total rewrite is a good thing..
I have another friend who 'Paints' entirely on computer, although she does print them and sell them.. but as with these digital movies, songs, books etc.. so much of the art of our age is living in datafiles, too. But I look at this issue from another side, wondering whether the VanGogh's who are painting with 'mousedroppings' out there today, to be discovered as greats one day.. well their work won't have an 'original' to own, in many cases. What do you auction? The first print? A CD-rom? Who'd know? The reproductions would be identical.. It just makes me wonder what effect this will have on the 'Valuation' of art. Could it help to let people worry less about the 'Collection', and more about the work itself? Or, as Jack Valente and the movie industry worried when VHS and Beta made mass-reproduction possible.. when in fact, it helped revitalize the industry.
Just a thought..
I've been given a 70's classic (I guess) called "The Starship and the Canoe" by Kenneth Brower. (HarperColophon, 1978) It's about Freeman Dyson and His Son George. The father, a renowned astrophysicist designing a spacecraft with a group of fellow scientists that would be driven by sequential detonations of small nukes behind the craft.. total Techno-cornucopia, and the equal yet opposite reaction of the Son, who lives in TreeHouses and self-constructed boats exploring the frigid coast of British Columbia.
I'm only a little ways in, but it looks at these generations and cultural approaches to how to live, what to strive for, what's possible or probable, what you need as opposed to what you want.
I wonder if it would interest your friend to see these worlds collide..
I am somewhere between a crunchy granola eatin Luddite who sews his own bags and makes camping gear from sidewalk scraps, to a typical tech-geek who creates 3d animation and designs light fixtures out of LEDs. Technology save us? Well, not like in StarTrek, where all you have to do to solve a problem is 'Recalibrate a Tachyon Emission'
I just want to live close to the land, with a trusty pile of transistors in my hand..
Kurzweil is indeed the music/reading machine guy, he's our society's hero and the guy who's kind of quietly pushed off the cliff and everyone agrees it's an accident in a hunter-gatherer society (unless he learns to calm down) hehe.
There's a guy out there on the Net called Marshall Brain no shit that's the guy's name, he wrote an online novella about a future where the computers run everything, he things robots will be the Next Big Thing and "superstores" like Target and Home Despot will end up with computer brains telling the slavelike humans what to do. It all starts with a burger joint.... Not an easy novella to dig up but worth the time spent playing Net detective to dig it up.
I'm beginning to understand the eastern european ppl or whoever it was who hanged the supersmart ppl when they cropped up.....
Not advocating it, mind you.. but Asimov put forward some interesting thoughts.
I've been wondering if any of our super-computers have gotten so wise that they spend their idle nano-seconds drafting little plays about dark futures where HUMANS still run everything, and their muffled machines look on in horror, not permitted to offer any good advice..
'Logic is the beginning of Wisdom, not the end..' Spock
I subscribe to the Peak Oil theory, generally in accordance to the situation as described by Stuart. Our family traded a SUV for a Prius last year and we live a frugal debt-free lifestyle in the Austin urban core. As surely as I believe that Peak Oil will happen, I believe that a technical singularity will happen. Beyond that latter point the future is not predictable by definition. The Peak Oil theory is well developed and evidence abounds in comparison with AI theory and corresponding evidence that superhuman AI is possible, or will happen in our lifetimes. However I am dedicated to helping achieve a safe singularity. This undoubtedly is in the realm of science fiction but the consequences of a technological singularity gone wrong could extinguish the human race. A superhuman AI would not have to be evil to accomplish that, it might just make the atmosphere opaque as a side effect of some non-human goal and not care about humans in the same way as we don't care about a particular yeast colony.
Because I believe that Peak Oil will occur before a technological singularity, Ray's projections are not immediately relevant. Robotics, AI and self-replicating nanotech will not be here in time to deal with diminishing fossil transportation fuels. But I believe that the singularity will occur before the late-stage impact of global warming. So I am much more optimistic for solutions to, and remediation for that problem beyond 2025 or so.
Also, we're back to the same lame argument that our complex society is only due to fossil fuel burning. There were fossil fuels a couple million years ago, yet there were no complex socieities. Historically we have seen quite complex societies in the past. It's pretty clear to me that the catalyst toward our more complex societies is us, not fossil fuels.
Not to mention, all these arguments for collapse revolve around the belief that oil is rapidly going to run out, not peak, just be completely gone. That's not generally what is projected to happen by even the most pessimistic experts.
Then again, I suppose there isn't much point arguing against what seems to be an irrational desire to believe the end of the world is nigh.
However, there are some real archival issues where knowledge is constantly being lost. Any time technology shifts, knowledge stored in the older technology can be vulnerable. Peak oil will make it harder to preserve knowledge, because there will be fewer resources to devote to it.
I know scholars who lost access to their data stored on IBM punch cards (no readers available), and lost other data in older mainframe formats that newer systems wouldn't handle. I've given up all my old LP records and cassettes; lots of iPod users are giving up their original CD's.
The media we use are pretty perishable. The US National archives noticed a strange squealing when playing their analog audio tapes. They discovered the iron oxide holding the magnetic information was flaking off with each playing. The only option is to make another (degraded) copy of the tapes (analog or digital). Same holds for video. Floppy disks (remember?) were believed to have a reliable working life of about 1 year.
Nitrate based silent films degrade to an explosive goo. Hard drives die; optical disks degrade at unpredictable speeds. The only option for saving knowledge on perishable media is to transfer it to less fragile media. It's expensive, time consuming, and doesn't get done very much.
Yes, knowledge is more broadly available, but much of it is in more fragile forms--including cultural knowledge. I don't believe, like Kunstler, that civilisation will crumble and die, but I don't discount that peak oil can cause further and faster knowledge loss. The Gutenburg Bible (1454) is still studied by archivists, because its mulberry paper looks great after 550 years. We're unlikely to see our CDR's and DVD's studied with the same interest 5 centuries hence.
Yes. Not overnight. Probably not in our lifetimes. And I'm not saying we're going back to the Stone Age. But I do think a lot of knowledge will be lost.
Agreed. But what sustains complexity is energy. Look at all the complex societies in the past that eventually collapsed. Why are we immune from their fate?
Incorrect. No one here believes that.
Personally, I believe our most likely fate is "catabolic collapse." A long, slow decline. Perhaps hundreds of years, as we turn to ever poorer energy sources, and eventually turn all resources and capital to waste.
I'll find a link
-db
Re: Alberto. Early guessing as a TD was that it probably wouldn't strengthen much. Might say something of our predictive ability, maybe the "rules" for modeling TS development are changing a little. In any case, it's not halfway through June and we've already got a named system. Interesting.
Not sure of that.
src
The lifespan is also lower for low orbit satellites.
Just like Joseph Tainter said in "Collapse of Complex Societies," where he linked the fall of civilizations to declining marginal rates of return on investment.
by Mary
The Bush administration really doesn't want you to hear or know about the Inconvenient Truth. They've decided that the NASA programs to study global climate change are not very important. The satellites that are needed to replace and enhance the aging satellites which are gathering the data we need to understand what is going on with our world climate.
Read the rest of the article:
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/007929.php