It's hard to make predictions, especially if they're about the future; however, I think you're absolutely correct that our future trajectory is a lot more of less than the utopian future narrative painted by the technocornucopians who seem to be stuck in the denial/bargaining stages of awareness as it concerns our human ecological overshoot predicament.
That we are for the most part doing the exact opposite of what we need to be doing through our rabid pursuit of growth, especially of complex technologies, suggests that the legacy we will leave for future generations (if there are any) will be a significantly degraded planet with a tremendously lowered carrying capacity.
Very intelligent us naked, story-telling apes are; just not overly wise.
The feudal system was in existence in Britain for hundreds of years before shipbuilding. Surely the mindset came first? What brought about a feudal mindset?
Diarmuid: The feudal mindset was created by lack of safety. When raiding bands threaten, you seek the protection of a local warlord, give up your personal freedom and autonomy and pledge to work and fight for him.
If I understand what Diarmuid seems to be hinting at, I agree that people like to have an alpha male around. If the resources are scarce and horses are always available to level the playing field, you get the Amazons.
"Who were the Amazons? In Greek myth, Amazons were fierce warrior women of exotic Eastern lands, as courageous and skilled in battle as the mightiest Greek heroes. Amazons were major characters not only in the legendary Trojan War but also in the chronicles of the greatest Greek city-state, Athens. Every great champion of myth—Heracles, Theseus, Achilles—proved his valor by overcoming powerful warrior queens and their armies of women. Those glorious struggles against foreign man-killers were recounted in oral tales and written epics and illustrated in countless artworks throughout the Greco-Roman world."
Mayor, Adrienne. "The Amazons" (pp. 10-11). Princeton University Press
Dr. Mayor goes on to show that there existed a civilization that was led (at least occasionally) by women that ranged from the Pacific to the Ireland for 5000 years. Did those people say "no" to technology? "No", To hierarchy? I think not. The women in charge, were in fact in charge. They didn't form feudal kingdoms and do a bunch of farming because the resources simply were unavailable and the entire group had to keep moving to find fresh grass, not because of some purposeful rejection of technology.
B I think has made the mistake of romanticizing the "noble savage" who somehow rejects the "evil" technologies and lifestyle that has led us to where we are even though the "savage" knows that the technologies in question would make his life easier. It is pretty clear that for the Amazons, what kept their lifestyle simple and egalitarian for millennia was the fact that the steppe is a very hard place to live and it is impossible to farm there without modern equipment.
The obvious rejoinder to the claim that low-tech societies have an intrinsic, perhaps irresistible bias towards equality is warlordism.
Likewise I am skeptical about the claim that some indigenous societies experimented with agriculture, city-states etc and then voluntarily de-evolved, so to speak. In the absence of writing and thus of annals and archives this is impossible to ascertain since the archaeological evidence on its own can show that a regression occurred but not that it was deliberate.
There is in fact an example of Western civilization walking away from a promising opportunity: nuclear technology. Nuclear armaments have been stocked but not used for 80 years. And nuclear fission plants, although safer than most other forms of energy production, are hemmed in by so many restrictions and precautions that they are economically infeasible. Their only
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo.
The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident
However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.
Spent fuel can be re-used and rendered safe as background in 300 years not "be isolated and controlled for thousands of years".
Conventional uranium fission reactors burn up less than 5% of the energy in their uranium fuel. The so called 'waste' is dangerous for c300,000 years. But it can be recycled to yield the remaining 95% energy in 'actinide' burning 'fast breeder' advanced reactors such as PRISM 90 91 which could simultaneously reduce the UK's nuclear waste' stockpile storage to a few hundred years, and recycle nuclear weapons, whilst suppling all the UK electricity demand for hundreds of years.
PRISM was offered to the UK government in the early 2000s by GE Hitachi with no upfront research & development or reactor power station(s) infrastructure build out costs, all profits only from wholesale electricity supply to the grid. Had regulatory and fiscal go ahead by been given 20 years ago, the UK would already have PRISM technology up and running and be leading a worldwide commercial roll-out within a decade or two.
Globally two fast breeder reactors are currently online producing commercial power to be built: the Russian BN-600 reactor on the Caspian Sea for electric power and desalination (560 MW on the Middle Urals power grid since 1980) and the BN-800 reactor (which reached its full power production in August, 2016).
And India has another breeder reactor planed to be connect to the grid in 2022, phase 2 of its 3 phase long term plan first implemented in the 1950s aiming by 2050 to be energy independent burning its huge Thorium reserves.
Conventional uranium reserves are predicted to last circa 70 or so years. This is enough time to develop to commercial scale filtering uranium (and other rare metals) from seawater. In 2018 US researchers created five grams of yellowcake — a powdered form of uranium used to produce fuel for nuclear power production — using acrylic fibres to extract it from seawater.
Having said all the above, electricity simply CAN NOT replace high energy density hydrocarbons to sustain the so called 'modern world' - on the other hand fast breeder nuclear could slow down inevitable de-growth back to when humans were hunter gatherers.
While this is a very interesting take, it is not obvious to me that the collapse of the civilization we currently recognize is inevitable. First, sociopaths will exist regardless of the situation, it is a characteristic of human nature, and many of them will be charismatic enough to gain substantial followings. the idea that an egalitarian society will evolve, while perhaps true in small pockets, seems contra to the human condition. sure, the Amish have maintained that view for a long time, but they are the exception that proves the rule, I would argue.
second, the adherence to the view that anthropomorphic climate change is the reality, rather than that climate, which has changed for the 4 billion years of the earth's existence, both warming and cooling cyclically over that time, is simply changing on its own imbues far more power to the human impact on the planet than may well be the case.
absent a cataclysmic event (meteor striking the earth or something of that nature), my money would be on an incremental change in civilizations going forward with the many incredibly beneficial technologies that have been created to date continuing to support mankind.
If devolution is the reality, it will take thousands of years to come about. it is just not a relevant discussion for today's problems.
Yes, modernity had to happen. All humans lived in indigenous communities at one time but eventually civilisations and modernity arose. If fossil fuels had not been available, then modernity as we know it couldn't have arisen but there would still be civilisations and complexity. Until they failed.
As a practicing anarcho-primitivist and former urbanite (and currently back-to-the-land subsistence farmer), this was my favorite essay so far. Spot on. The future will be primitive, and that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing at all (all things considered, that is). From now on, I'll recommend this piece to people claiming that "all technology is neutral". Thanks a lot for this great summary.
I was always sceptical thinking some culture or civilisation just said "No" to technologies and the social hierarchies they implie.
Of course, there were so many different situations during human history that it might have happened sometime. Some individuals or small groups heading for the wilderness and managing to survive and develop their own culture. At least for a while.
Still, I remember Graeber telling the story of these Siberian mammoth hunters gathering during migration season, grudgingly accepting hierarchical society for the time being but happily returning to freedom and rabbit hunting as soon as winter was over. And seeing there the proof that humans don't like hierarchies and inequalities.
But the story might be a little bit different...
As soon as humans meet mammoths, people started to eat their meat. Be there from dying ones or even dead ones at the beginning. Killing some of them was possible. But it proved a much more dangerous business than catching rabbits, thus requiring orders, tactics and social hierarchy to be effective. Still, done the proper way, it provided a vast quantity of energy that allowed brisk human population increase.
Then soon enough, there were just not enough rabbits to provide food for such a large population to survive winter. Then, even if everybody enjoyed running freely after rabbits during summer time, there were no choice and no way to say "no" to mammoth hutting technologies and social organisation.
But was there a time when it has been possible ?...
And incidentally or not, mammoth died until the last one. It's quite possible human overkilled them. Who knows what would have happened to the buffalos if the Amerindians had been left to themself. Especially after they (re)domesticated the horse.
So why Polynesians didn't build large ships. Because they didn't want to ? Or because they just couldn't ?
Thank you B 🙏
It's hard to make predictions, especially if they're about the future; however, I think you're absolutely correct that our future trajectory is a lot more of less than the utopian future narrative painted by the technocornucopians who seem to be stuck in the denial/bargaining stages of awareness as it concerns our human ecological overshoot predicament.
That we are for the most part doing the exact opposite of what we need to be doing through our rabid pursuit of growth, especially of complex technologies, suggests that the legacy we will leave for future generations (if there are any) will be a significantly degraded planet with a tremendously lowered carrying capacity.
Very intelligent us naked, story-telling apes are; just not overly wise.
The feudal system was in existence in Britain for hundreds of years before shipbuilding. Surely the mindset came first? What brought about a feudal mindset?
Diarmuid: The feudal mindset was created by lack of safety. When raiding bands threaten, you seek the protection of a local warlord, give up your personal freedom and autonomy and pledge to work and fight for him.
If I understand what Diarmuid seems to be hinting at, I agree that people like to have an alpha male around. If the resources are scarce and horses are always available to level the playing field, you get the Amazons.
"Who were the Amazons? In Greek myth, Amazons were fierce warrior women of exotic Eastern lands, as courageous and skilled in battle as the mightiest Greek heroes. Amazons were major characters not only in the legendary Trojan War but also in the chronicles of the greatest Greek city-state, Athens. Every great champion of myth—Heracles, Theseus, Achilles—proved his valor by overcoming powerful warrior queens and their armies of women. Those glorious struggles against foreign man-killers were recounted in oral tales and written epics and illustrated in countless artworks throughout the Greco-Roman world."
Mayor, Adrienne. "The Amazons" (pp. 10-11). Princeton University Press
Dr. Mayor goes on to show that there existed a civilization that was led (at least occasionally) by women that ranged from the Pacific to the Ireland for 5000 years. Did those people say "no" to technology? "No", To hierarchy? I think not. The women in charge, were in fact in charge. They didn't form feudal kingdoms and do a bunch of farming because the resources simply were unavailable and the entire group had to keep moving to find fresh grass, not because of some purposeful rejection of technology.
B I think has made the mistake of romanticizing the "noble savage" who somehow rejects the "evil" technologies and lifestyle that has led us to where we are even though the "savage" knows that the technologies in question would make his life easier. It is pretty clear that for the Amazons, what kept their lifestyle simple and egalitarian for millennia was the fact that the steppe is a very hard place to live and it is impossible to farm there without modern equipment.
Otherwise, yeah, good points.
The obvious rejoinder to the claim that low-tech societies have an intrinsic, perhaps irresistible bias towards equality is warlordism.
Likewise I am skeptical about the claim that some indigenous societies experimented with agriculture, city-states etc and then voluntarily de-evolved, so to speak. In the absence of writing and thus of annals and archives this is impossible to ascertain since the archaeological evidence on its own can show that a regression occurred but not that it was deliberate.
There is in fact an example of Western civilization walking away from a promising opportunity: nuclear technology. Nuclear armaments have been stocked but not used for 80 years. And nuclear fission plants, although safer than most other forms of energy production, are hemmed in by so many restrictions and precautions that they are economically infeasible. Their only
practical application has been in nuclear submarines. People are scared of everything nuclear and since the 1960’s embraced oil exploitation instead.
Nobody survives when civilization collapses.
There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
http://science.time.com/2011/03/15/a-new-threat-in-japan-radioactive-spent-fuel/
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo.
https://energyskeptic.com/2017/the-devils-scenario-near-miss-at-fukushima-is-a-warning-for-u-s/
The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16628547/
However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.
Spent fuel can be re-used and rendered safe as background in 300 years not "be isolated and controlled for thousands of years".
Conventional uranium fission reactors burn up less than 5% of the energy in their uranium fuel. The so called 'waste' is dangerous for c300,000 years. But it can be recycled to yield the remaining 95% energy in 'actinide' burning 'fast breeder' advanced reactors such as PRISM 90 91 which could simultaneously reduce the UK's nuclear waste' stockpile storage to a few hundred years, and recycle nuclear weapons, whilst suppling all the UK electricity demand for hundreds of years.
PRISM was offered to the UK government in the early 2000s by GE Hitachi with no upfront research & development or reactor power station(s) infrastructure build out costs, all profits only from wholesale electricity supply to the grid. Had regulatory and fiscal go ahead by been given 20 years ago, the UK would already have PRISM technology up and running and be leading a worldwide commercial roll-out within a decade or two.
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/prism-project-a-proposal-for-the-uks-problem-plutonium/
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/PRISM-selected-for-US-test-reactor-programme
https://djprisss.github.io/Limits-to-Renewable-Energy/
Globally two fast breeder reactors are currently online producing commercial power to be built: the Russian BN-600 reactor on the Caspian Sea for electric power and desalination (560 MW on the Middle Urals power grid since 1980) and the BN-800 reactor (which reached its full power production in August, 2016).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Fast_breeder_reactor
And India has another breeder reactor planed to be connect to the grid in 2022, phase 2 of its 3 phase long term plan first implemented in the 1950s aiming by 2050 to be energy independent burning its huge Thorium reserves.
https://www.gktoday.in/current-affairs/prototype-fast-breeder-reactor-to-be-commissioned-in-2022/
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/fast-neutron-reactors.aspx
Conventional uranium reserves are predicted to last circa 70 or so years. This is enough time to develop to commercial scale filtering uranium (and other rare metals) from seawater. In 2018 US researchers created five grams of yellowcake — a powdered form of uranium used to produce fuel for nuclear power production — using acrylic fibres to extract it from seawater.
https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514
Having said all the above, electricity simply CAN NOT replace high energy density hydrocarbons to sustain the so called 'modern world' - on the other hand fast breeder nuclear could slow down inevitable de-growth back to when humans were hunter gatherers.
While this is a very interesting take, it is not obvious to me that the collapse of the civilization we currently recognize is inevitable. First, sociopaths will exist regardless of the situation, it is a characteristic of human nature, and many of them will be charismatic enough to gain substantial followings. the idea that an egalitarian society will evolve, while perhaps true in small pockets, seems contra to the human condition. sure, the Amish have maintained that view for a long time, but they are the exception that proves the rule, I would argue.
second, the adherence to the view that anthropomorphic climate change is the reality, rather than that climate, which has changed for the 4 billion years of the earth's existence, both warming and cooling cyclically over that time, is simply changing on its own imbues far more power to the human impact on the planet than may well be the case.
absent a cataclysmic event (meteor striking the earth or something of that nature), my money would be on an incremental change in civilizations going forward with the many incredibly beneficial technologies that have been created to date continuing to support mankind.
If devolution is the reality, it will take thousands of years to come about. it is just not a relevant discussion for today's problems.
Yes, modernity had to happen. All humans lived in indigenous communities at one time but eventually civilisations and modernity arose. If fossil fuels had not been available, then modernity as we know it couldn't have arisen but there would still be civilisations and complexity. Until they failed.
As a practicing anarcho-primitivist and former urbanite (and currently back-to-the-land subsistence farmer), this was my favorite essay so far. Spot on. The future will be primitive, and that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing at all (all things considered, that is). From now on, I'll recommend this piece to people claiming that "all technology is neutral". Thanks a lot for this great summary.
Beautiful in a profoundly sad way.
I was always sceptical thinking some culture or civilisation just said "No" to technologies and the social hierarchies they implie.
Of course, there were so many different situations during human history that it might have happened sometime. Some individuals or small groups heading for the wilderness and managing to survive and develop their own culture. At least for a while.
Still, I remember Graeber telling the story of these Siberian mammoth hunters gathering during migration season, grudgingly accepting hierarchical society for the time being but happily returning to freedom and rabbit hunting as soon as winter was over. And seeing there the proof that humans don't like hierarchies and inequalities.
But the story might be a little bit different...
As soon as humans meet mammoths, people started to eat their meat. Be there from dying ones or even dead ones at the beginning. Killing some of them was possible. But it proved a much more dangerous business than catching rabbits, thus requiring orders, tactics and social hierarchy to be effective. Still, done the proper way, it provided a vast quantity of energy that allowed brisk human population increase.
Then soon enough, there were just not enough rabbits to provide food for such a large population to survive winter. Then, even if everybody enjoyed running freely after rabbits during summer time, there were no choice and no way to say "no" to mammoth hutting technologies and social organisation.
But was there a time when it has been possible ?...
And incidentally or not, mammoth died until the last one. It's quite possible human overkilled them. Who knows what would have happened to the buffalos if the Amerindians had been left to themself. Especially after they (re)domesticated the horse.
So why Polynesians didn't build large ships. Because they didn't want to ? Or because they just couldn't ?
It would be so bizarre for me to walk around in the year 4000, amongst the weird ruins still standing, weird metal artifacts strewn everywhere.
For those born then, it will seem entirely normal.