If you want a hard sci fi vision of what kind of civilisation could rise in the next tens of thousands of years on a planet stripped of mineral and energy resources, you might enjoy "Our Vitreous Womb". It imagines a future society built purely off biological technology. Happy to send a review copy your way. Just email me at shane.simonsen@icloud.com
With around 10 calories of fossil fuel in every calorie of food and a 5-6% depletion rate after peak oil production, it won't take the depletion of minerals to start the 4 horsemen on their gallop. You are starting to view the interaction of key components and feedback mechanisms in a way that cornucopians fail to do. In essence you are embracing the thinking of Donella Meadows and LtG. since your simpler model only portrays a portion of the LtG, it may be easy for folks to "get it". Congratulations on some fine thinking and writing.
I cant help it. Reading this, and the previous post makes me think about space aliens.
Imagine any space alien that you want whether they evolved in a swamp, or a desert, or some other habitat, they would find themselves in the same predicament in which we find ourselves. Generalize your graphics above to model any planet anywhere in the universe and what conclusions inevitably follow?
1. The laws of Thermodynamics work everywhere in the universe, so any civilization whether there are (or have been, or will be) 5, or 5 billion such civilizations, must adhere to those laws.
2. No matter what the alien looks (or looked) like, or what the starting resource configuration was, their civilization almost certainly will follow the same trajectory as ours. At best, they were able to visit, and perhaps even colonize planets in their solar system.
3. There are no space aliens visiting earth. The laws of thermodynamics preclude it. General relativity precludes it.
4. Why is it that "the news" says that there are space aliens visiting earth right now?
Proving or disproving the visitations of alien life is a distraction, nothing more or less. We are easy to distract and we have a very pressing reality we should be focused on. We have compromised this planets ability to sustain life, the biggest extinction in the Earths history is taking place right before your eyes. Keep your eyes on the ball, man!
I think it's called Fermi paradox. To get off your planet you basically have to destroy your biosphere. That's not to say that some don't manage it in time..seems unlikely but who knows?
I find this idea with the graphic very interesting. To take it a little further, you could draw the time arrow as a Z-axis and view the whole thing three-dimensionally or like complex math (similar to the sine/cosine wave producing a circle in the complex plane). Your graph then would result in a kind of sawtooth curve in the "real part" for the resource entropy and an inverted sawtooth for the energy entropy: The entropy of the energy is abruptly reduced by a civilized species and takes a very long time to return to a natural flow equilibrium (homeostasis). The entropy of available raw materials could, for example, decrease again over long periods of time as a result of geological processes and new deposits could form. After thousands of years, new civilizations could possibly emerge again, starting new cycles with the then available raw materials, triggering the flank of the sawtooth to fall/rise. What a beautiful universe - everything can be seen as frequency and waves.
Another question in this context: How long will it take for the debris of our modern technological world to decay? Perhaps the materials we used will become new deposits (with low density) in the future? Like the ones we are mining today. And maybe we are not the first high-tech civilization and our cycle is already a repetition of a former one? What if history has been different than we picture this today? That would explain things like the pyramids, for example, which most probably could not have been built so precisely with the means available at the time.
Do we really know that we are the first "intelligent" civilization or are we just so arrogant to state this?
Great piece, as always, but very depressing. There's literally no point to intelligent life if it cannot escape the confines of its planet. It is doomed to perish along with every other non- or semi-intelligent species, whether by a large asteroid crash, supervolcano eruption, an unfortunate supernova in our close galactic neighborhood, or, inevitably, by our life-giving star turning into a red giant in some 4 billion years. Unless I'm mistaken the average lifespan of mammalian species is about 100.000 years. If that statistic is accurate, then we're just about due to check-out.
Even more depressingly, any future civilization will never have the same abundance we enjoyed: most of the precious metals we need came from asteroids and it would probably take even longer to rebuild these deposits than to produce new deposits of fossil fuels. This was a once-on-a-planet opportunity and we probably wasted it.
Humans lived on this planet for 100s of thousands of years in harmony with a high energy entropy environment. So, the statement “Was there any other way” is answered: Yes, our ancestors lived it, lived it for quite a long time.
Isn’t that the premise of the book Ismael? Once we developed agriculture, we sealed our eventual fate. Agriculture allowed for an increase in population, so we increased agriculture, which increased our population, so we increased agriculture, (rinse and repeat)…..more and more until we swarmed across the planet like the borg forcing everyone we came into contact with to adopt our way of life. The result of course was to turn the earth into pollution and garbage as fast as possible.
Would it have been possible to remain as a hunter/gatherer people? I do not know. But our greed and quest for more have led us to the brink of extinction and we are racing ever faster, we see the cliff, but “we can't stop, won't stop”.
Which way is better? We evolved for a hunter/gatherer’s life – to be tribal. Has modern society increased our happiness or contentment? – I do not think so, life may have sucked back then, but at least you weren’t lonely, and you suffered with your tribe. Now we are lonely and depressed in a sea of people, riding a treadmill to nowhere, chasing after more without any real need or knowledge of why we are doing what we are doing.
Will our extinction be a tragedy for this planet? Nope, we flew too close to the sun and killed ourselves. If another species were self-aware, they would be breathing a sigh of relief (the locust needs to go).
But, actually, I'm not so sure that without the Industrial Revolution or the discovery of America, Western Europe would have been automatically headed to scorched earth Mordor economy.
A territory like the actual French one could have seen its population fluctuate between 5 and 20 millions people every 2 or 3 centuries the way it did during the Middle Age in accordance with P. Turchin's secular cycles. And other countries in Europe would follow the same pattern, in a more or less synchronised way during quite a long time if not for ever.
The key being the time the environnement need to recover after a population boom and bust. And it tend to be much shorter in temperate areas where trees grow faster than in harsher Mediterranean or desertic ones.
The slow depletion of ore deposits would also be important (especially for iron toolmaking), so that in the very long term, we could expect to see the population slowly return to Stone Age levels. But by then, the climate could also have changed naturally quite a lot and reverted to glacial conditions anyway.
What is the alternative to seeing that the inevitable is beyond the horizon being marketed by institutions that offer palliatives for a paycheck to afford to exist today. Moving to a slower, less consumptive lifestyle (non MTI) only pushes out the event horizon.
Science with its successes and ability to accelerate is the accepted paradigm that gives hope that there is a solution which allows the universe to absorb the increasing entropy of planet earth, that humans will be able to migrate, or exist in non-corporeal forms
I think that placing the burden on neoclassical economics may be a miss direction from the technical problem. It's couched in economic terms, a false god or religion with a good market.
Hi B love your writing and insights, have you looked at Tim Morgan's work on surplus energy economics https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/ you may find a kindred spirit!!
If you want a hard sci fi vision of what kind of civilisation could rise in the next tens of thousands of years on a planet stripped of mineral and energy resources, you might enjoy "Our Vitreous Womb". It imagines a future society built purely off biological technology. Happy to send a review copy your way. Just email me at shane.simonsen@icloud.com
With around 10 calories of fossil fuel in every calorie of food and a 5-6% depletion rate after peak oil production, it won't take the depletion of minerals to start the 4 horsemen on their gallop. You are starting to view the interaction of key components and feedback mechanisms in a way that cornucopians fail to do. In essence you are embracing the thinking of Donella Meadows and LtG. since your simpler model only portrays a portion of the LtG, it may be easy for folks to "get it". Congratulations on some fine thinking and writing.
It will get a lot simpler for most sooner than your thought experiment suggests.
I cant help it. Reading this, and the previous post makes me think about space aliens.
Imagine any space alien that you want whether they evolved in a swamp, or a desert, or some other habitat, they would find themselves in the same predicament in which we find ourselves. Generalize your graphics above to model any planet anywhere in the universe and what conclusions inevitably follow?
1. The laws of Thermodynamics work everywhere in the universe, so any civilization whether there are (or have been, or will be) 5, or 5 billion such civilizations, must adhere to those laws.
2. No matter what the alien looks (or looked) like, or what the starting resource configuration was, their civilization almost certainly will follow the same trajectory as ours. At best, they were able to visit, and perhaps even colonize planets in their solar system.
3. There are no space aliens visiting earth. The laws of thermodynamics preclude it. General relativity precludes it.
4. Why is it that "the news" says that there are space aliens visiting earth right now?
Proving or disproving the visitations of alien life is a distraction, nothing more or less. We are easy to distract and we have a very pressing reality we should be focused on. We have compromised this planets ability to sustain life, the biggest extinction in the Earths history is taking place right before your eyes. Keep your eyes on the ball, man!
LOL
I think it's called Fermi paradox. To get off your planet you basically have to destroy your biosphere. That's not to say that some don't manage it in time..seems unlikely but who knows?
It's a theme (among others) explored by JM Greer in his excellent novel "Star's Reach" :)
Thanks Tris! I'm always looking for a good novel.
The "grid" is good. Makes it easy to visualize our predicament. Thanks for your article!
I find this idea with the graphic very interesting. To take it a little further, you could draw the time arrow as a Z-axis and view the whole thing three-dimensionally or like complex math (similar to the sine/cosine wave producing a circle in the complex plane). Your graph then would result in a kind of sawtooth curve in the "real part" for the resource entropy and an inverted sawtooth for the energy entropy: The entropy of the energy is abruptly reduced by a civilized species and takes a very long time to return to a natural flow equilibrium (homeostasis). The entropy of available raw materials could, for example, decrease again over long periods of time as a result of geological processes and new deposits could form. After thousands of years, new civilizations could possibly emerge again, starting new cycles with the then available raw materials, triggering the flank of the sawtooth to fall/rise. What a beautiful universe - everything can be seen as frequency and waves.
Another question in this context: How long will it take for the debris of our modern technological world to decay? Perhaps the materials we used will become new deposits (with low density) in the future? Like the ones we are mining today. And maybe we are not the first high-tech civilization and our cycle is already a repetition of a former one? What if history has been different than we picture this today? That would explain things like the pyramids, for example, which most probably could not have been built so precisely with the means available at the time.
Do we really know that we are the first "intelligent" civilization or are we just so arrogant to state this?
This is a brilliant concept and so simple to understand with the final graphic. I hope you don't mind that I added some annotations.
https://scontent-lga3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/428629870_7173409226071461_271695835422410070_n.jpg?_nc_cat=101&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=a73e89&_nc_ohc=7AAcV9MLR9cAX9dr_tW&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-2.xx&cb_e2o_trans=t&oh=00_AfB9FMnrnQ-bnjQhROCirNOYph-NTRYlALgtZF321INT3g&oe=65D8B5BB
Great piece, as always, but very depressing. There's literally no point to intelligent life if it cannot escape the confines of its planet. It is doomed to perish along with every other non- or semi-intelligent species, whether by a large asteroid crash, supervolcano eruption, an unfortunate supernova in our close galactic neighborhood, or, inevitably, by our life-giving star turning into a red giant in some 4 billion years. Unless I'm mistaken the average lifespan of mammalian species is about 100.000 years. If that statistic is accurate, then we're just about due to check-out.
Even more depressingly, any future civilization will never have the same abundance we enjoyed: most of the precious metals we need came from asteroids and it would probably take even longer to rebuild these deposits than to produce new deposits of fossil fuels. This was a once-on-a-planet opportunity and we probably wasted it.
Humans lived on this planet for 100s of thousands of years in harmony with a high energy entropy environment. So, the statement “Was there any other way” is answered: Yes, our ancestors lived it, lived it for quite a long time.
Isn’t that the premise of the book Ismael? Once we developed agriculture, we sealed our eventual fate. Agriculture allowed for an increase in population, so we increased agriculture, which increased our population, so we increased agriculture, (rinse and repeat)…..more and more until we swarmed across the planet like the borg forcing everyone we came into contact with to adopt our way of life. The result of course was to turn the earth into pollution and garbage as fast as possible.
Would it have been possible to remain as a hunter/gatherer people? I do not know. But our greed and quest for more have led us to the brink of extinction and we are racing ever faster, we see the cliff, but “we can't stop, won't stop”.
Which way is better? We evolved for a hunter/gatherer’s life – to be tribal. Has modern society increased our happiness or contentment? – I do not think so, life may have sucked back then, but at least you weren’t lonely, and you suffered with your tribe. Now we are lonely and depressed in a sea of people, riding a treadmill to nowhere, chasing after more without any real need or knowledge of why we are doing what we are doing.
Will our extinction be a tragedy for this planet? Nope, we flew too close to the sun and killed ourselves. If another species were self-aware, they would be breathing a sigh of relief (the locust needs to go).
Good one. As always.
But, actually, I'm not so sure that without the Industrial Revolution or the discovery of America, Western Europe would have been automatically headed to scorched earth Mordor economy.
A territory like the actual French one could have seen its population fluctuate between 5 and 20 millions people every 2 or 3 centuries the way it did during the Middle Age in accordance with P. Turchin's secular cycles. And other countries in Europe would follow the same pattern, in a more or less synchronised way during quite a long time if not for ever.
The key being the time the environnement need to recover after a population boom and bust. And it tend to be much shorter in temperate areas where trees grow faster than in harsher Mediterranean or desertic ones.
The slow depletion of ore deposits would also be important (especially for iron toolmaking), so that in the very long term, we could expect to see the population slowly return to Stone Age levels. But by then, the climate could also have changed naturally quite a lot and reverted to glacial conditions anyway.
Thank you B🙏
What is the alternative to seeing that the inevitable is beyond the horizon being marketed by institutions that offer palliatives for a paycheck to afford to exist today. Moving to a slower, less consumptive lifestyle (non MTI) only pushes out the event horizon.
Science with its successes and ability to accelerate is the accepted paradigm that gives hope that there is a solution which allows the universe to absorb the increasing entropy of planet earth, that humans will be able to migrate, or exist in non-corporeal forms
I think that placing the burden on neoclassical economics may be a miss direction from the technical problem. It's couched in economic terms, a false god or religion with a good market.
Space mining is indeed possible, and with the right infrastructure in place indeed very profitable. https://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/asteroids.html#:~:text=At%20present%2C%20asteroid%20mining%20is,resources%20is%20still%20under%20development.