The last post I did started out by me writing down various ideas I had, then I realised that I'd written more questions than Ideas and turned it into a post rather than a list. This is a list of ideas, not necessarily entirely coherent ones, I have and will try to turn into post's at some point.
I predict that neo-reactionary political and social ideas will increase over the next century as a form of historical delusion
By reactionary I don't mean things like fascism, military dictatorships, the return of the gender roles from the 20th century or people becoming more religious. I mean ideas that (at least superficially) go against the Enlightenment (secularism, rationality etc) and its twin Romanticism (nationalism, will of the people etc) and at least want to superficially reverse those movements. So returning to monarchy, aristocracy, the divine right of kings, the unity of church and state and other ideas of that vein or adaptations of these.Various modern non-western ideas also count; such as sharia law, Caliphates (Islamic state lead by a combined political and religious head), Confucianism, a caste system (like India's), Venetian democracy, aristocratic republics, the old Chinese state system/Imperial hegemony are also included.
Progress has happened, all three types as described by the Archdruid have occurred. Morale progress; here tracked by murder and war death rates (note I am not in any way defining morality beyond some basics), an actual figure for medieval England is 10% of the population was murdered (30% for nobles) while the highest contemporary country on wikipedia is less than a percent (El Salvador in 1995), we don't kill nearly as many people in wars and fight barely any in comparison to almost any period of history (e.g peace on the barbarian frontiers of Rome was like an ultra violent version of the Israeli-Gaza border, evidence for this includes that only large farmsteads existed in border areas as small farms could not defend themselves) and most governments refrain from large-scale censorship, strict controls on consumption or mass murder (as in 5-10% of the population, the Albigensian Crusade killed close to 1 in 12 Frenchmen and significant numbers of people were killed in the suppression of the numerous revolts), though as recent events in the middle east have shown this is much more true of the west than the rest. Technical and economic progress are fairly obvious, the global economy is far larger than it was a few hundred years ago while there isn't any previous society that even equals our scientific/technical ability without deliberately rigging the contest. There is no point in pretending that progress didn't happen, all that does is make the future more confusing and obscure important trends.
Social progress has occurred, not necessarily in the last few decades but over centuries certainly, and as a consequence our current social systems are a lot better than previous ones; admittedly quite a few didn't exist in previous societies (I've never heard of a historical universal health care). You can argue about the why, how or desirability of these systems, which include large scale social welfare, a fully professional military with advanced logistics (nicer on civilian populations), the separation of civilian, military and religious leadership etc, but that is a historical process which happened. Compound that with other changes, like how firearms affect power relations, radios communication, the metallurgical improvements that happened before and during the Industrial revolution that had numerous consequences like allowing lots of rails for trains and previous societies are more or less unsuited for current conditions and likely future ones. Radio allows a far greater level of centralisation for no extra cost and if some form of quick VIP transport remains (aircraft or limited motor vehicles) then this affect is compounded even more, that's only one example.
A nice measure of an improved political/social systems; violent dynastic struggles and civil wars over rulers no longer exist. Given that Poland at one point had legalized civil war (one of the reasons Poland never did that well), and that these lead to large ultimately purposeless wars, this is a nice improvement. On a larger scale (war and international relations), we no longer routinely wipe out entire cities in nasty ways during war, war is incredibly rare (relatively speaking, world peace has been achieved) and the death tolls are puny in absolute numbers (50,000 a year is nothing), impressive considering the massive increase in population. An example of how things have changed; I read that about 50% of the violence in Iraq is in Baghdad, the majority of previous societies would have solved that by the simple process of annihilating the city and if that didn't work to quell Iraq, destroy some more cities. The war nerd complains that this is an era of squeamishness (note he really overstates his case and the killing of civilians), the difference between the Romans and the First world is that the Romans were ruthless and quite able to kill lots of people but didn't have that much more force than the barbarians while it would be almost trivial for the First world to annihilate the rest because of the massive force difference, but we don't like killing civilians. Israel can simply walk in and purge the Gaza strip (we're talking up to million dead), it would solve the Hamas problem but they don't.
One of the changes in recent history, one of those resilient and old changes, is that we can kill lots of people very easily. To quote this article, "Ethics, not truth, may be the first casualty of war in an age of limits." It is quite possible that in the near future the ability to kill lots of people will again meet people who are perfectly fine with using those abilities. You could have mass immigration from Africa to Europe, but if the Europeans decide to shoot back it's not really going to work. 10 million poor starving people who can't carry a lot of equipment (otherwise there not mobile) isn't going to exactly be a hard target. Of course theirs always mobility blockers (minefields) to aid in starvation or dehydration along with a highly successful Roman strategy that severly weakened warrior hordes but could (because they're slower and require more food) easily stop more civilian groups. All that is required is a return to an older mindset, an older morality and system. But that's mostly irrelavent, the groups that migrated after Romes fall weren't civilians, but hordes of between 10-100,000 warriors who normally adopted the local customs (like Christianity) and integrated themselves into the existing political structure. Mass migration on the scale of millions of civilians that displace the locals has be from Europe to elsewhere, because the Europeans were vastly superior in technological terms.
Also democracies aren't more corrupt than aristocratic systems, it's just that corruption has a different definition now. The thinking goes that since the leaders of a democracy aren't automatically rich, it's fairly easy for the rich to corrupt them; but this ignores how much effort and laws favor the rich in older systems. Often a benefit of being a noble was not paying taxes, that's not a small matter considering that they own most of the wealth and land, and influential positions are often reserved for nobles only, which limits the possibilities for poorer people, and its especially bad as throughout most of history noble titles could be bought. Prussia went to huge lengths to preserve aristocratic land ownership such as spending fortunes, setting up noble only banks, rewriting laws, all for a single class of people, their version of the 1%; that is corruption of the system by the rich. By our standards this is an incredible level of corruption and the difference is that we see those properties as corrupt while in the societies that had them, that was an expected and reasonable situation. The reason we consider corruption common in democracies isn't because that's the situation in relation to other systems, but because we have expanded the definition of corruption.
The cause of the rise in neo-reactionary thought is not going to be an honest assessment that older societies are better than current ones, but the same mental drive as displayed in the fox and the grapes. As decline happens, a likely response is to simply decry everything after the renaissance and beyond as evil and reject everything modern no matter its merit. There are aspects our the current civilisation that need to be ditched, but quite a lot doesn't. Like the systems that make our politicians do more than the bare minimum to stop revolts (and in a non-destructive ways), prevent major wars which don't kill millions of civilians and create a really low murder/crime rate. Added into this will also be groups trying to 'restore' their old privileges or push their own agendas
Older societies where by and large functioning and healthy, but by current standards they all had drastic faults and flaw, especially when you look at the lives of peasants rather than simply the lives of the urban or aristocratic. They had parts that we like, but also parts that we hate and find abhorrent. Rome slaughtered and enslaved millions but provided quality infrastructure and enforced peace, the Celts were socially progressive in various areas (ex. divorce laws) but were also barbarians who would raid and sack other lands. There is no utopia in the past, nor the future.
Especially considering that past societies habits of every now and then creating quite impressive kill-counts, often not of foreigners but their own people, is quite likely to return if we adopt neo-reactionary ideas.
If people decide to revive tradition, the actual tradition is irrelevant in the face of what they think the tradition was.
As it stands, it's unlikely that an actual traditional system is going to be proposed, the legitimacy of tradition and a vague framework is more likely. This is because the idea of a political/social system is separate, but linked, from the actual system; viking mythology is similar, most of our ideas of pagan viking mythology comes from christian monk's writing centuries after the actual mythology disappeared. All the unspoken intricacies, basic ideas, assumptions and so on by and large don't exist anymore and can't be easily be brought back. Here's a minor example of different cultural assumptions; Captain Cook at one point kidnapped some islanders to learn the local sewing techniques, problem was they were male islanders and thus didn't know how to sew since to them it was women's work, while Cook went of his assumptions that sewing was more often masculine (sailors invented quite a lot of sewing).
Older societies are alien to us; they had different values, assumptions, ideas and lived in a very different world. In that light, importing even parts of older societies without drastic modifications doesn't make a lot of sense. Besides, quite a lot of the reactionary thought is going to be Utopian to some degree, which means that the negative sides of older societies are going to be downplayed; like the regular peasant revolts, regular standard revolts, rampant censorship (Elizabeth didn't censor newspapers, because she simply banned them), the power struggles and by our standards massive instability. The sword of Damocles is a good description of a king's position, always in danger of someone who wants power going about it in the traditional manner of kings, kill the incumbent and sit on his throne. And if the society was considerable unlucky, something like the An Lushan rebellion would occur (here's the death toll), through normally events like that aren't quite so bad.
And socially, most older societies (and current but foreign ones) are alien and have completely different values to us. Here's wikipedia's page on pederasty in ancient Greece, something that seems completely monstrous to us but was fine back then, they were also by our standards gay and had various social customs surrounding it (they cared if they were effeminate or manly), someone won a court case by proving that a co-plaintiff was a boy prostitute and therefore lost his citizenship. One justification for homosexuality was driven by extreme misogyny, if women are inferior to men, then a relationship with a women is inferior than that with a man. The vikings were similar, there's a saga where the hero kidnaps a pretty french couple to live with him on one of his raids, for sex basically (both the male and female), and later goes off and kills a dragon somewhere. The commonality was the association of the being in the penetrative role as masculine and the other as feminine, to be considered gay you had to be penetrated, the other guy was considered heterosexual. Slavery also varied across different cultures, a slave in Rome wasn't the same as a black one in the US and a black slave in Africa was different from one in the US while slavery in Russia slaves were better off than serfs until slavery was banned.
Humans are mentally quite mutable, different societies can have completely different moral behaviours, ideas and such. An example of this is culture-bound syndromes, an interesting one is puppy pregnancy syndrome in which a man believes after being bitten by a dog he is now pregnant and will give birth to puppies and thus die. Also, warrior cultures are similarly alien and tend to have very different idea of manliness to what we have, here's a comic with some examples, the Spartans would also do each others hair before battle so they'd look nice after they died (warrior cultures share quite a few traits, vanity is one of them). Importing a traditional system without also changing people to be like traditional people is more or less pointless, it simply won't work.
The examples above are just snapshots of some differences, but most aspects of previous civilisations are similar in that they are different from ours. In Rome the priests and politicians were the same people (both were also elected), the Indian society that created the caste system is a very different one to today's India, in France there's was a Bishop who inherited a sword and armour with his position, quite a few monks and priests fought in medieval wars (they show up as casualties in battle), in eastern Europe there exists the last remnants of a third gender tradition. When either Jaws or Star wars (can't remember) was being shown in Japan, the producers thought they hated the movie because the audience was quite (in America that's not a good sign) but a local explained that it was a sign of respect and the audience liked the film. In Afghanistan there was an ambush of US troops and the local kids joined in, because they were bored and nothing much happens in Afghanistan villages that's exciting (why else would you have quail fights), here's an article on how westernisation, boredom and other things is affecting Somalia. If compared to other theoretical minds (actual aliens or AIs), humans have virtually no variation (e.g. we all feel joy, anger and pleasure), but we do have a large range of variables while our brains at least partly change according to the outside world.
Physical laws are invariant and inviolable; e.g. the laws of thermodynamics are always operating on everything and are never violated. Human ideas; laws, customs, thoughts, ideologies, practise, social constructs etc are not like that in any sense. One of the reasons current democracy works far better than previous incarnations is that it isn't the same as what the Greeks, Romans, Veniceans or anyone else had, which also means that the historical critiques of democracy (such as those of Thucydides) are discussing a different idea and system (some differences are minor, others significant). Physical laws are invariant and inviolable; e.g. the laws of thermodynamics are always operating on everything and are never violated. Human ideas; laws, customs, thoughts, ideologies, practise, social constructs etc are not like that in any sense. One of the reasons current democracy works far better than previous incarnations is that it isn't the same as what the Greeks, Romans, Veniceans or anyone else had, which also means that the historical critiques of democracy (such as those of Thucydides) are discussing a different idea and system (some differences are minor, others significant). Ethnicity and culture are exactly the same, at one point in time Italians weren't considered white, Italian immigrants weren't considered Australian and the idea of a (single) Italian ethnicity is also made up, my Grandmother wouldn't visit a specific supermarket because it had too much southern Italian goods, she was from the north. And in the Roman days there were lots of different ethnic groups (tribes) in Italy; Latin, Etruscan, Celts in the north, Samnites, Romans and a few others. England is the exact same, pretty much everywhere used to be incredibly diverse.
Food is another good marker. I live near Box hill, a fairly Asian area (mostly Chinese/Hong Kong or Korean) and a new fast food shop opened up that sells Korean specialities. Those specialities include twisted potato (quite nice) and a small container of fried chicken in a cup of coke-cola (the chicken is not covered in coke-cola). There's also a Hong Kong restaurant there which does a great steak with chips, while you can get any dish (Asian or not) with spaghetti. My Mom mentioned that when she was at a Chinese cooking class, the teacher told everyone not to use Chinese noodles because they were crap but instead use Spaghetti because it was better.
I'm using food here as a proxy, I could talk about other things that signify the same. I've meet Asian bogans for example, how common it is to see half Asian half White couples or the fact that I have a friend that if you speak to him over the internet he sounds like a big white bogan, but is actually a short guy who's ethnically Hong kongese. There is no perfect enforcer of human ideas and cultures, they generally aren't enforced at all. Most values have no objective counterpart in the world, ethnicity, democracy, justice, truth and so on do not exist outside human minds, and human minds are highly imperfect, flawed and filled with biases.
It is actual impossible to import ancient cultural forms as they were,
because the people who practised them and all their unspoken ideas/norms
no longer exist.
Nukes are in many ways the best weapon, because you don't actually have to use them.
Physically using a nuke to create an explosion for purposes other than testing means that the relevant country has completely and utterly failed to use them properly (outside of some rare circumstances, such as those at the end of and just after WWII). In fact one way to improve a nuke is to not actually build one but convince everyone that you have, since that gets you an incredibly high return for minimal resource inputs. Of course there's the risk of being found out involved, but if you can't build a nuke, faking it is an (albiet highly risky) option.
Nukes operate entirely as diplomatic tools, threats that massively limit and constrain your opponents options (and your own in a lesser way). America is not going to be invaded by another country as long as it has nukes while India and Pakistan only bluster at each other with at most small black ops against each other (at least outside of Kashmir) because both sides nukes constrains the others. China and Japan (which has breakout capability) are exactly the same and Mad dictators don't change the equations. Mao (a mad dictator if there ever was one) when he didn't have nuclear weapons kept trying to get the Soviets to use them and allow Communism to rise from the ashes, but as soon as China got nukes that behaviour disappeared completely. The reason the cold war didn't have an all out war between the USSR and USA wasn't because of some complicated plot or fear of industrial war, but because a war would have involved nukes completely destroying both societies. Some of the population would have survived, but the government is gone and the instigators on both sides lose as nothing would have remained of either communism or western liberal democracy (which means the elites in charge are likely dead).
Anger can work in a similar fashion, though not nearly as well. The example I remember is a monkey gathering fruit. If it takes an hour to gather one fruit and you are a standard rational utility maximiser, then all I have to do is steal your fruit and hide it for 90 minutes. Since it will take less time to simply gather a new fruit than find it, that's what a rational utility maximiser does. But that equation changes if you are a being which gets angry and instead of doing the standard maximum utility choice decide to hunt me down and start stabbing. Something similar is at work in the ultimatum game, if your a utility maximiser and I know I won't be playing you again, I can simply offer 99-1 because your decision is either $1 or nothing. With a human, that doesn't work so well. On a large scale this makes human behaviour more rational than it can seem at first, but this isn't an entirely individual phenomenon.
To work, the threat has to be believable, simply stating that "I will get angry and hunt you down if you steal my fruit" won't work if I have reason to believe it's just empty bluster. Nuclear tests are proof that a nation has a nuclear bomb, while anger is demonstrated often enough for it to be a credible threat. Evolution has a lot of solutions to basic game theory problems, like tit for tat.
And luckily for us nuclear weapons act near perfectly as deterrents while anger doesn't. It's also a large part of how the military in diplomacy works.
People are common failure points, not the methods and systems
Medical research isn't the most rigorous, here's an article on it (first I found, there are probably better). In Predictably Irrational, the author mentions that one treatment for his full body burn was to special suit, which only made his problem worse as well as several cases of medical treatments being no better than placebo's. Drug research is similar, which honestly is not surprising given the complexity and abundance of biochemical pathways, and the massive amount of money involved doesn't help.
An example of a problem in social psychology, the Milgram experiment's data was horribly misused for, as I understand it, prestige and money.
Somewhere in this blog is a great anecdote that I can't find about a guest lecturer talking about his experiments. My recollection of it; The guest lecturer is a surgeon who just completed a 1000 patient study to test the efficacy of a new treatment, as he's giving his speech a student asks a question and there's the following exchange;
"Did you use a control"
"You mean having half the patients not receiving the treatment"
"Yes"
(Shouting) "So I should have condemned half of them to die?"
"Which half?"
Here a sense of ethics and the desire to do something rather than nothing is getting in the way of properly testing the procedure. Since you have no idea whether the new technique will work, you need a comparision, which is what a control is, though having the standard treatment at the same time is also a good idea.
In this case it was ethics, as opposed to some baser motivation like money, that got in the way of proper science. A common case of science being misused for various human reasons is in how people assert intuitive notions, such as that violent video games and rape porn increasing cases of violence and rape. Now the reason for this is fairly obvious, our brains have a built in failure mode called confirmation bias that makes people ignore evidence and stick to their side. And the link can seem really obvious and intuitive, plus it fits with various moral systems, but the data doesn't fit.
At worst, violent video games (and movies) do nothing in respect to violence levels, here's study for violent movies and another for violent video games, there was a better example I saw years ago using FBI data that showed a marked decrease in youth violence as video games in general became common but this will have to do. And similar data exists for rape porn as well. Here it's basically politics and prejudiced views that are causing the problems. Note that you could easily reverse the above statements and the same point is made. As a New Scientist article once pointed out, social psychology answers look obvious in hindsight (the specific question was did rural or urban men adopt to WW2 more easily than the other, answer urban) and any stance can often be justified.
As an aside, the obvious consequence of the above facts is that as peak oil lowers the availability of both porn and video games, if nothing is done to replace them then their societal benefits will disappear. I can think of a few possibilities; but frankly I don't know enough and the effects will be a drop of water in comparison to everything else. It's just one of those little things.
In none of these cases is the abstract idea of the scientific method at fault, but the humans who implement it and their conflicting motivations. Humans are far more commonly failure points than methods and technology. Chernobyl is as good example of that as needed, thought to be fair modern nuclear reactors are as close to foolproof as possible. Fukushima wasn't modern and the Japanese were repeatedly warned to update it, which again points to humans and conflicting motivations (money + political influence) as the failure point. To be clear, while I agree that most anti-nuclear proponents dramatically hype (to ridiculous extremes at times) the dangers of nuclear power, I still agree that nuclear power isn't that good an idea but for economic reasons. I could use other examples, but these are fairly clear, but the point is sometimes ignored in ideologies, people are imperfect and there needs to be mechanisms in place to deal with their mistakes.
In practical terms; this is the main reason I completely expect artificial societies (I think they are great idea) to be misused for ideologies in the near future. Basically instead of using any actual lessons from artificial societies, especially if they forget to add where the model breaks from reality, makes assumptions or simplifies things, will instead pimp their own special societal/political model. Especially since anything that large scale is going to be incredibly untrustworthy until far more basic models are commonplace and lessons drawn, like one in this article about corruption. Chances are the initial lessons are already going to be in use, but otherwise the idea seems sound.
It's also where a lot of social ideologies fail, not taking into account that humans are not perfect beings and will cheat, seize power, be corrupt or engage in other standard forms of moral failure. If a social system doesn't take this into account, it's not going to work and will fall prey to human behaviour. And a system doesn't just become good because it's written that it is, actual effort and mechanisms need to be in place to counteract these trends. If you want to create a non-hierarchical society, actual mechanism's need to be in place to stop hierarchies forming and energy needs to be expended as well, simply saying the society is non-hierarchical isn't anywhere near enough. And what also needs to be remembered is that formal and informal hierarchies can form, and the main difference is informal ones don't have as many checks on them.
The fault of communism is that it requires people to be something they aren't, so from the perspective of communism it's humans who failed. However, since it's a system designed to be implemented in a human society and all plans to use it revolve around human societies, it's the flaw. And common human failings will pop up in any system, here's that concept but talking about cultishness (Every cause wants to be a cult), what matters is what the system does about it and at least mitigates the problems. To quote that article "It is sufficient that the adherents be human", there is no excuse for a social, mechanical, political system to not take at least a cursory look at how people will interact with it. And since its rather unlikely for us to be replaced by other sentients in the near future or begin drastic modifications, we don't have a choice but to accept this.
Monday, 3 February 2014
Monday, 9 December 2013
Key Questions
This is an initial list of key questions I think are important. I'll be creating a separate page for these and will add to it every now and then. with links to relevant blog posts, my own and others
What scale will relocalization progress to and how will it differ for different classes of goods and political systems?
Since our society is global in scale (or close enough), any change to this (short of colonizing space) will create a more local world. This is because relocalization is relative, it doesn't have a set point at which you've relocalized, all it indicates is a change in scale. And there is quite a large range of options between a global economy and one focused around a village. This also applies to political systems, there really isn't a set point at which something is local (it could be 5km or it could be 50km) because it will depend on transport methods, technologies, terrain and a host of other factors. So when someone says that the world is going to relocalize, they could mean a change of scale to anything from national, regional or village level economics unless they specify what scale they're referring to.
So what scale economies are likely to develop?
10-100km sounds reasonable for the majority of food trading and luxury goods could easily remain globally traded. But what about manufactured goods, will they be as local as food or traded over a larger scale? on a national scale or a global scale? And what about different types of manufactured goods?
And what about political systems?
Obviously some nations will break up, likely many in Europe and Africa, but not necessarily all. Iceland, New Zealand, some of the South American nations and maybe even Germany are good candidates for surviving (among others) completely intact. What will distinguish nations that break up from ones that don't? What will the aftermaths look like? How will sub-national politics (state or local) change? Where will democracy survive and what other sorts of political systems will exist?
And how will the scales change over time, space and with different transport systems? And how can the outcome be affected?
How will the differing aspects of various energy sources affect overshoot and be affected by overshoot?
Oil is mainly used in transport (about 70% of oil goes to transport), coal for electricity and natural gas for electricity + heat. Renewables are turning out to be great at producing electricity and are driving electricity prices down in both Australia and Germany. The rises in retail (different from wholesale) price are due to different factors. There are going to be problems with the transition to more distributed energy sources and they'll need to be solved, but storage problems are quite solvable (playing catch up really) and the entire idea of base load power actually comes from the characteristics of fossil fuel plants, not the use of electricity. In short, fossil fuel plants have giant boilers that you don't want to let cool down, so near constant operation is wanted which has further implications (like offering cheaper prices at certain times) which affects the entire electricity system in ways that renewables don't and can eventually be phased out. Transport is a different story however, while the most efficient forms can easily use electricity, extensive infrastructure changes are necessary while the only available drop in energy source (biofuels) are a niche energy source at best. The specific characteristics of the various energy sources available are going to affect their deployment, utility and development.
So how will this play out? What will happen to the electricity grid? Will it disappear, divide into lots of micro grids, become smaller or something else? Where will industrial heat come from? Electric arc furnaces are likely to stay for steel making, but what about for sterilization and other processes? How will renewables affect the electrification of transport? How will it affect transport in general? What about other processes?
And how will it vary over time and in different areas? What can be done to change the outcome?
What is the future of new and underused transportation methods?
Airships (a hybrid of planes and blimps) are being developed by big experienced companies, like Lock-Heed martin, along with a few low energy/solar airplanes. Sailing ships are starting to come back, luckily more like windjammers than wooden hulls (see here), and some interesting ideas are appearing. Here's a few; the Vindskip, Skysails and Solarsails, but there are others. It's not going to take off hugely in the near future (5-20 years), but the possibilities for the mid future are there. And then there's bikes, what modern roads were originally built for and now in an electric form, so what's the likely future then for road transport and will velomobiles be involved? And if transport is largely electrified, how will people get to slightly out of the way locations and transport materials to new sites?
How will overshoot affect the development, deployment and use of these technologies? Which innovations will work and survive? What will the long-term and secondary effects be? How will other changes affect the changes in transport? How will transport affect those changes?
And how will it vary over time and in different areas? What can be done to change the outcome?
What is the future of electronics and functions currently carried out by electronics?
Electronics are incredibly useful and ubiquitous in modern life, for very good reasons, even the third world has plenty of cell phones (Africa especially). Electric sensors are useful for a wide range of applications, electronic calculators are faster than hand calculations for equations beyond basic arithmetic (try doing 4x4 matrix calculations by hand). But a lot of functions can be carried out without electronics or by far simpler ones. Light (semaphores) can be used for rapid and long distance communication, radios themselves are rather simple (relative to laptops), slide rules and log tables can replace some calculations and indicators can be used rather than electronic pH readers. New production methods are appearing, partly an offshoot of the 3d printing boom, and that alone will change electronics.
So how will overshoot affect the spread of electronics? How will society cope with the lose of mass electronics? What will happen to the production, distribution and status of electronics? How will the replacements fare and what difference in performance will they have? What will change in communications and mass media (actually quite old)? What will replace the current forms?
And how will it vary over time and in different areas? What can be done to change the outcome?
How will the change from optimizing labour to optimizing resources and energy affect society?
Desert animals and plants do all they can to preserve water, one desert rat doesn't even need to drink, yet rainforest creatures for the most part don't bother conserving water. Everything is done to lighten aircraft, but wing production produces 90% swarth (excess aluminum shavings) because of this, yet I've never heard of a similar scale of concern for a ships weight. A similar difference exists for mobile and stationary batteries, the majority are designed for mobile use and most stationary ones are adapted mobile batteries, and the development of stationary batteries is something that's only happening now. In short, mature battery technologies are designed for mobile uses rather than stationary, so aren't suitable for stationary storage by that alone even through good stationary batteries are possible (size and weight isn't an issue, price is).
Economies, technologies and organisms optimize/minimize the use resources that are scarce and expensive, not those that are cheap and abundant. For the last 300 years or so, the Industrial economy has mainly optimized labour not energy and raw materials. And this has quite a few implications for EROEI, societal complexity, what's achievable and quite a lot more.
Industrial civilization doesn't optimize around any single factor, but by price and net present value (NPV). The advantage of this is that everything is automatically weighted and value comparisons are quite easy, rather than only looking at labour or energy for improvements. Rising energy and material prices automatically change how the Industrial economy acts, the information is easy to access and in a very simple form. Material costs have been on a steady downward trend since 1800 while energy prices are fairly similar, so automatically the industrial economy is going to be relatively wasteful of those resources, they aren't valued that highly. Now to provide an example of how this process could change EROEI, first to the data; according to Wikipedia wind's EROEI is 18, in 1995 the average energy intensity of steel production was 27.9Gj/t, the lowest average was 12Gj/t (for the USA), you can reasonably get to 8Gj/t and if every technical trick (not looking at economic viability) is used it can be theoretically lowered to 2Gj/t. If those advances are taken to be the average energy reduction possible for wind turbine production then the EROEI changes from 18 to; 41.85, 62.77 and 252.1 respectively. It's unlikely to actually be those numbers (especially the last one), but chances are that renewable s EROEI will change for the better.
So what are all the implications of changing from optimizing the use of labour to the use of energy and materials? How will it interact with overshoot and the recovery period? How far can/will it go? What can be done to make the transition easier while keeping as many benefits from labour optimization as possible?
How will this process and its benefits vary over time, space, demographics and with different energy and material resources? What can be done to change the outcome?
What will happen to long term (deep time) trends?
Over the last 10,000 years since agriculture started and civilization started, humanity has been adapting to it's new environment (like every other time our environments have changed). One adaption is lactose tolerance in 35% of the population (evolved separately in Africa and Europe) while most people can drink alcohol (which is a toxin after all). Recent and rapid evolution is happening in humanity, causing us to be biologically different than our ancestors while making civilization not so alien to our bodies.
First, by its nature evolution cannot be stopped and it happens continuously, by this I don't mean that the alleles of a population are constantly changing, if the alleles are remaining constant it's because natural selection is causing them to be constant. All evolution is is adaption to the environment by a rather imperfect (there are big flaws in evolution as a design method, like all design methods) but elegant design methodology. And in humans this is just as trues as any other organism, we evolve and adapt to our environments, in this case civilization and the changes brought by human actions. Also, we have never been perfectly adapted to any environment or behavior set (there is no one paleo diet, but instead many) and by its nature evolution cannot make an organism perfectly adapted to an environment (it is filled with compromises, e.g longer legs are faster but lose more heat as well as legacy issues), it is by evolutions nature impossible. Here's some of evolutions flaws; evolution leaves legacy issues, e.g we hiccup because we retain some features from our fish ancestors and cannot get rid of those features without interrupting other functions, evolution cannot easily move organism to different "mountains" in the fitness landscape and outside of bacterial plasmids evolution can't take features from one branch in the evolutionary tree to another.
Secondly, evolution isn't actually a slow process that unfolds over geological time but a rapid process that can unfold over short periods of time (in some cases less than a year). It's one of the big study areas for biology now, but importantly I don't mean changing from one species to another but microevolution which differs from macroevolution only on the relevant timescale. Here's an example of rapid evolution, the threespine stickleback lost and then regained their bony amour in a few decades, a potential rapid evolution is adapting to obesity by have more brown fat (exists not as an energy store but to expend energy for warmth) to burn off excess calories. And if anything, human evolution is actually accelerating; here's john hawk talking about his research on that topic and here is a review of it after he's published his research. And I'm not even talking about epigenetics which is changes to genetic activity without changes to DNA the study of which is fairly recent and is explaining a huge range of biological problems, like the development of organisms.
In short, while humans are not a separate species to our hunter gatherer ancestors, we are not biologically the same. We have evolved, and we will continue to evolve until the human species goes extinct in whatever way it does (including evolving into a different species). This evolution isn't big changes that completely alter the nature of being human, but they are important for day to day life. In 10,000 years humans will be biologically different. Also different areas and cultures already show differences in evolutionary pressure in certain traits (blood pressure, weight, height, age of first birth etc).
So an obvious question appears; how will humanity continue to evolve in the future? How will the variations change over time and space? How will cultural and technological changes affect human evolution? Will some future society ever start playing around with human genetic engineering on a large scale and what would the outcomes be? How will human evolution affect technology and culture?
Another deep time question set has to do with scientific and technological progress. To start this of I'm going to quote Thomas Kuhn writer of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and his position on it. "That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.", quote here in the last section. The thing is, science has specific criteria by which you can judge theories and laws and you can definitively say that one scientific theory is superior to another. As he explains science (basically applied empiricism) is a problem solving method, also a predictive method and it should be judged by that criteria. Science isn't about finding the "truth" in some abstract way or finding out whats "really there" and inbuilt into the scientific method is the impossibility of it doing so, a scientific law is only one good experiment away from being disproved and the criteria of a theory is problem solving and concrete (i.e not vague) predictions. Occam's razor is the codification of this.
Also to be clear, a scientific law in no way operates like a law in human society, they just get called that for historical reasons. Scientific laws are generalizations of observed phenomena in mathematical form, they are precise and consistent with the majority of data. So the first law of thermodynamics is the generalization that energy has never been observed to either disappear or be created while the second simply states that in an isolated system (the universe is really the only one) entropy has never been observed to decrease. Scientific laws are what happens, theories are are guesses at why stuff happens and are testable while predicting specific (they can't be vague) future observations.
An interesting consequence of how science functions is that when one theory supersedes another, not a lot actually changes. A new theory or law has to predicate almost everything the old theory did, a scientific revolution doesn't actually change that much about our understanding of the material world. And those revolutions are generally slower than most people think, evolution had a long history before Charles Darwin was born, it takes a while for evidence to build up, theories to appear and actually problems have to be around. So we can reasonably predict that ideas that have routinely popped up but have never sticked and lack evidence or failed to gain acceptance, such as vitalism or various physic phenomena (which has been through everthing, including attempted military development) won't be accepted as part of science in the near or even somewhat distant future since they require a large reworking of our understanding of the natural world and quite extraordinary evidence/observations, which as the evidence doesn't exist aren't problems for science.
An example of this would be the theories of Rupert Sheldrake, his ideas are fairly vitalistic and like Hans Driesch went from inventing a vitalistic theory and then moved to parapsychology, both also ignore Methodological naturalism which is one of the important ground rules in science (a highly successful one). An interesting look at his latest book can be found here, parts; one, two, three and four. In a few significant ways, Rupert Sheldrake is a recurrence of ideas and stances that have appeared before and could easily reappear in periodic manner and for similar reasons, such as the disenchantment of the world (here's an interesting look at that). If that's the case, then its for cultural reasons and the clashes between what people would normally think (vitalism seems right and is what children automatically think is right) and what comes out of the scientific method, which is often unintuitive. There have been, and will continue to be, attempts to make science support or disprove various spiritual/religious stances and this is a good example of scientific misuse and cultural clash. The thing is, you can practice and belief in pretty much any religion while still practicing science, there is far less of a clash than most people assume. Methodical naturalism is a working assumption, not an actual philosophical stance (that's philosophical naturalism) while most religions don't actually need science to agree with their statements on the physical world (they aren't actually literal statements). It's rather unlikely that future religions won't be compatible with science.
So what will happen to science? Also what will happen to the related, but distinct, sphere of technology and manipulating the physical worlds? After-all, in a way technological progress has happened in that sphere over the long term, steam engines wouldn't have been invented otherwise (the Romans couldn't have possibly invented them, they lacked too many ancillary technologies). What will the next big changes and revolutions (remembering that they aren't complete changes) be? How will it fit into future societies? How will the scientific method change over time?
What structures won't change as society's values change?
Simply by necessity and time, values are going to change and the societies of the future will be very different from ours in that respect simply because the world and our nature force them to be. However, societies change values as a natural process anyway, here's a discussion on that, and even societies that seem to keep to tradition often change (traditions don't actually have to be that traditional, only seem to be). And this will greatly affect how various human structures are arranged, like the prioritization system we call economics.
But instead of asking what will change, it's also important to see what won't change. After all, quite a lot we do is in response to the non-human world or is our way (most organism do this) of manipulating the environment. So there is going to be a wide range of behaviors that aren't affected by a specific societies values, well outside of the basic ones like survival and basic material needs. And the structures that do change, still have criteria to fulfill and nonhuman forces that affect them. So I don't expect this collapse/decline period to be different from previous ones in that we suddenly ditch agriculture and cities, especially since they are quite advantageous.
An example of a human structure that probably won't change is some very key parts of the military and similar institutions, like the chain of command and formation marching. Those structure haven't appeared because society has imposed a hierarchical and team based model on armies, but because those systems work in practice better than the other options. The chain of command is the only way that orders could possibly be sent to the right people and for information to flow properly, something which isn't easy to do in combat, and allow it to be processed at the same time. In some situations you can do without them, but that's rare, and there is a variety of hierarchies, so it isn't completely set in stone. While armies don't move around on foot as often as they used do, actually marching, learning to march in formation still has benefits ignoring that armies still have to be able to move by foot. When I did officers training for St John, we had a ex drill sergeant (can't remember his actual title) teaching us and he talked about them, basically it teaches teamwork, they ability to work in a group and to keep track of where everyone is. Valuing equality and democracy hasn't affected these structures that much, other future values won't either.
While I don't know about philosophy and logic (but they're probably similar), science also is largely independent of societies values and generates it's own. To quote this review of Mystery of Mysteries, "Ruse concludes that epistemic values have advanced markedly at the expense of the cultural values.". Put it like this, the theory of evolution is an entirely human construct in that it it only exists in human minds and artifacts. However, that misses that evolution describes what is observed in the world and how things happen, it isn't an arbitrary idea built to support some political system or religious stance (Darwin's grandfather used his evolutionary theories to justify Deism and the Whigs, but not Darwin himself). Put it like this, while aliens may not come up with the exact same scientific theories they will observe the same phenomena (like evolution ) and have the same laws (e.g thermodynamics doesn't change just because they think differently).
Future societies may have completely different values, similar to how much opinions on homosexuality differ in history, in classical civilization it was closer to an expected behavior than anything else (the Sacred band of Thebes was an explicitly homosexual fighting unit). But human structures aren't entirely designed just around human values, but in response to the external environment.
So what parts of civilization are malleable to changes in cultural values? What doesn't change? How sensitive are the things that change to changes in values? Since some structures will have parts that are malleable and parts that aren't, how will that resolve itself?
What scale will relocalization progress to and how will it differ for different classes of goods and political systems?
Since our society is global in scale (or close enough), any change to this (short of colonizing space) will create a more local world. This is because relocalization is relative, it doesn't have a set point at which you've relocalized, all it indicates is a change in scale. And there is quite a large range of options between a global economy and one focused around a village. This also applies to political systems, there really isn't a set point at which something is local (it could be 5km or it could be 50km) because it will depend on transport methods, technologies, terrain and a host of other factors. So when someone says that the world is going to relocalize, they could mean a change of scale to anything from national, regional or village level economics unless they specify what scale they're referring to.
So what scale economies are likely to develop?
10-100km sounds reasonable for the majority of food trading and luxury goods could easily remain globally traded. But what about manufactured goods, will they be as local as food or traded over a larger scale? on a national scale or a global scale? And what about different types of manufactured goods?
And what about political systems?
Obviously some nations will break up, likely many in Europe and Africa, but not necessarily all. Iceland, New Zealand, some of the South American nations and maybe even Germany are good candidates for surviving (among others) completely intact. What will distinguish nations that break up from ones that don't? What will the aftermaths look like? How will sub-national politics (state or local) change? Where will democracy survive and what other sorts of political systems will exist?
And how will the scales change over time, space and with different transport systems? And how can the outcome be affected?
How will the differing aspects of various energy sources affect overshoot and be affected by overshoot?
Oil is mainly used in transport (about 70% of oil goes to transport), coal for electricity and natural gas for electricity + heat. Renewables are turning out to be great at producing electricity and are driving electricity prices down in both Australia and Germany. The rises in retail (different from wholesale) price are due to different factors. There are going to be problems with the transition to more distributed energy sources and they'll need to be solved, but storage problems are quite solvable (playing catch up really) and the entire idea of base load power actually comes from the characteristics of fossil fuel plants, not the use of electricity. In short, fossil fuel plants have giant boilers that you don't want to let cool down, so near constant operation is wanted which has further implications (like offering cheaper prices at certain times) which affects the entire electricity system in ways that renewables don't and can eventually be phased out. Transport is a different story however, while the most efficient forms can easily use electricity, extensive infrastructure changes are necessary while the only available drop in energy source (biofuels) are a niche energy source at best. The specific characteristics of the various energy sources available are going to affect their deployment, utility and development.
So how will this play out? What will happen to the electricity grid? Will it disappear, divide into lots of micro grids, become smaller or something else? Where will industrial heat come from? Electric arc furnaces are likely to stay for steel making, but what about for sterilization and other processes? How will renewables affect the electrification of transport? How will it affect transport in general? What about other processes?
And how will it vary over time and in different areas? What can be done to change the outcome?
What is the future of new and underused transportation methods?
Airships (a hybrid of planes and blimps) are being developed by big experienced companies, like Lock-Heed martin, along with a few low energy/solar airplanes. Sailing ships are starting to come back, luckily more like windjammers than wooden hulls (see here), and some interesting ideas are appearing. Here's a few; the Vindskip, Skysails and Solarsails, but there are others. It's not going to take off hugely in the near future (5-20 years), but the possibilities for the mid future are there. And then there's bikes, what modern roads were originally built for and now in an electric form, so what's the likely future then for road transport and will velomobiles be involved? And if transport is largely electrified, how will people get to slightly out of the way locations and transport materials to new sites?
How will overshoot affect the development, deployment and use of these technologies? Which innovations will work and survive? What will the long-term and secondary effects be? How will other changes affect the changes in transport? How will transport affect those changes?
And how will it vary over time and in different areas? What can be done to change the outcome?
What is the future of electronics and functions currently carried out by electronics?
Electronics are incredibly useful and ubiquitous in modern life, for very good reasons, even the third world has plenty of cell phones (Africa especially). Electric sensors are useful for a wide range of applications, electronic calculators are faster than hand calculations for equations beyond basic arithmetic (try doing 4x4 matrix calculations by hand). But a lot of functions can be carried out without electronics or by far simpler ones. Light (semaphores) can be used for rapid and long distance communication, radios themselves are rather simple (relative to laptops), slide rules and log tables can replace some calculations and indicators can be used rather than electronic pH readers. New production methods are appearing, partly an offshoot of the 3d printing boom, and that alone will change electronics.
So how will overshoot affect the spread of electronics? How will society cope with the lose of mass electronics? What will happen to the production, distribution and status of electronics? How will the replacements fare and what difference in performance will they have? What will change in communications and mass media (actually quite old)? What will replace the current forms?
And how will it vary over time and in different areas? What can be done to change the outcome?
How will the change from optimizing labour to optimizing resources and energy affect society?
Desert animals and plants do all they can to preserve water, one desert rat doesn't even need to drink, yet rainforest creatures for the most part don't bother conserving water. Everything is done to lighten aircraft, but wing production produces 90% swarth (excess aluminum shavings) because of this, yet I've never heard of a similar scale of concern for a ships weight. A similar difference exists for mobile and stationary batteries, the majority are designed for mobile use and most stationary ones are adapted mobile batteries, and the development of stationary batteries is something that's only happening now. In short, mature battery technologies are designed for mobile uses rather than stationary, so aren't suitable for stationary storage by that alone even through good stationary batteries are possible (size and weight isn't an issue, price is).
Economies, technologies and organisms optimize/minimize the use resources that are scarce and expensive, not those that are cheap and abundant. For the last 300 years or so, the Industrial economy has mainly optimized labour not energy and raw materials. And this has quite a few implications for EROEI, societal complexity, what's achievable and quite a lot more.
Industrial civilization doesn't optimize around any single factor, but by price and net present value (NPV). The advantage of this is that everything is automatically weighted and value comparisons are quite easy, rather than only looking at labour or energy for improvements. Rising energy and material prices automatically change how the Industrial economy acts, the information is easy to access and in a very simple form. Material costs have been on a steady downward trend since 1800 while energy prices are fairly similar, so automatically the industrial economy is going to be relatively wasteful of those resources, they aren't valued that highly. Now to provide an example of how this process could change EROEI, first to the data; according to Wikipedia wind's EROEI is 18, in 1995 the average energy intensity of steel production was 27.9Gj/t, the lowest average was 12Gj/t (for the USA), you can reasonably get to 8Gj/t and if every technical trick (not looking at economic viability) is used it can be theoretically lowered to 2Gj/t. If those advances are taken to be the average energy reduction possible for wind turbine production then the EROEI changes from 18 to; 41.85, 62.77 and 252.1 respectively. It's unlikely to actually be those numbers (especially the last one), but chances are that renewable s EROEI will change for the better.
So what are all the implications of changing from optimizing the use of labour to the use of energy and materials? How will it interact with overshoot and the recovery period? How far can/will it go? What can be done to make the transition easier while keeping as many benefits from labour optimization as possible?
How will this process and its benefits vary over time, space, demographics and with different energy and material resources? What can be done to change the outcome?
What will happen to long term (deep time) trends?
Over the last 10,000 years since agriculture started and civilization started, humanity has been adapting to it's new environment (like every other time our environments have changed). One adaption is lactose tolerance in 35% of the population (evolved separately in Africa and Europe) while most people can drink alcohol (which is a toxin after all). Recent and rapid evolution is happening in humanity, causing us to be biologically different than our ancestors while making civilization not so alien to our bodies.
First, by its nature evolution cannot be stopped and it happens continuously, by this I don't mean that the alleles of a population are constantly changing, if the alleles are remaining constant it's because natural selection is causing them to be constant. All evolution is is adaption to the environment by a rather imperfect (there are big flaws in evolution as a design method, like all design methods) but elegant design methodology. And in humans this is just as trues as any other organism, we evolve and adapt to our environments, in this case civilization and the changes brought by human actions. Also, we have never been perfectly adapted to any environment or behavior set (there is no one paleo diet, but instead many) and by its nature evolution cannot make an organism perfectly adapted to an environment (it is filled with compromises, e.g longer legs are faster but lose more heat as well as legacy issues), it is by evolutions nature impossible. Here's some of evolutions flaws; evolution leaves legacy issues, e.g we hiccup because we retain some features from our fish ancestors and cannot get rid of those features without interrupting other functions, evolution cannot easily move organism to different "mountains" in the fitness landscape and outside of bacterial plasmids evolution can't take features from one branch in the evolutionary tree to another.
Secondly, evolution isn't actually a slow process that unfolds over geological time but a rapid process that can unfold over short periods of time (in some cases less than a year). It's one of the big study areas for biology now, but importantly I don't mean changing from one species to another but microevolution which differs from macroevolution only on the relevant timescale. Here's an example of rapid evolution, the threespine stickleback lost and then regained their bony amour in a few decades, a potential rapid evolution is adapting to obesity by have more brown fat (exists not as an energy store but to expend energy for warmth) to burn off excess calories. And if anything, human evolution is actually accelerating; here's john hawk talking about his research on that topic and here is a review of it after he's published his research. And I'm not even talking about epigenetics which is changes to genetic activity without changes to DNA the study of which is fairly recent and is explaining a huge range of biological problems, like the development of organisms.
In short, while humans are not a separate species to our hunter gatherer ancestors, we are not biologically the same. We have evolved, and we will continue to evolve until the human species goes extinct in whatever way it does (including evolving into a different species). This evolution isn't big changes that completely alter the nature of being human, but they are important for day to day life. In 10,000 years humans will be biologically different. Also different areas and cultures already show differences in evolutionary pressure in certain traits (blood pressure, weight, height, age of first birth etc).
So an obvious question appears; how will humanity continue to evolve in the future? How will the variations change over time and space? How will cultural and technological changes affect human evolution? Will some future society ever start playing around with human genetic engineering on a large scale and what would the outcomes be? How will human evolution affect technology and culture?
Another deep time question set has to do with scientific and technological progress. To start this of I'm going to quote Thomas Kuhn writer of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and his position on it. "That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.", quote here in the last section. The thing is, science has specific criteria by which you can judge theories and laws and you can definitively say that one scientific theory is superior to another. As he explains science (basically applied empiricism) is a problem solving method, also a predictive method and it should be judged by that criteria. Science isn't about finding the "truth" in some abstract way or finding out whats "really there" and inbuilt into the scientific method is the impossibility of it doing so, a scientific law is only one good experiment away from being disproved and the criteria of a theory is problem solving and concrete (i.e not vague) predictions. Occam's razor is the codification of this.
Also to be clear, a scientific law in no way operates like a law in human society, they just get called that for historical reasons. Scientific laws are generalizations of observed phenomena in mathematical form, they are precise and consistent with the majority of data. So the first law of thermodynamics is the generalization that energy has never been observed to either disappear or be created while the second simply states that in an isolated system (the universe is really the only one) entropy has never been observed to decrease. Scientific laws are what happens, theories are are guesses at why stuff happens and are testable while predicting specific (they can't be vague) future observations.
An interesting consequence of how science functions is that when one theory supersedes another, not a lot actually changes. A new theory or law has to predicate almost everything the old theory did, a scientific revolution doesn't actually change that much about our understanding of the material world. And those revolutions are generally slower than most people think, evolution had a long history before Charles Darwin was born, it takes a while for evidence to build up, theories to appear and actually problems have to be around. So we can reasonably predict that ideas that have routinely popped up but have never sticked and lack evidence or failed to gain acceptance, such as vitalism or various physic phenomena (which has been through everthing, including attempted military development) won't be accepted as part of science in the near or even somewhat distant future since they require a large reworking of our understanding of the natural world and quite extraordinary evidence/observations, which as the evidence doesn't exist aren't problems for science.
An example of this would be the theories of Rupert Sheldrake, his ideas are fairly vitalistic and like Hans Driesch went from inventing a vitalistic theory and then moved to parapsychology, both also ignore Methodological naturalism which is one of the important ground rules in science (a highly successful one). An interesting look at his latest book can be found here, parts; one, two, three and four. In a few significant ways, Rupert Sheldrake is a recurrence of ideas and stances that have appeared before and could easily reappear in periodic manner and for similar reasons, such as the disenchantment of the world (here's an interesting look at that). If that's the case, then its for cultural reasons and the clashes between what people would normally think (vitalism seems right and is what children automatically think is right) and what comes out of the scientific method, which is often unintuitive. There have been, and will continue to be, attempts to make science support or disprove various spiritual/religious stances and this is a good example of scientific misuse and cultural clash. The thing is, you can practice and belief in pretty much any religion while still practicing science, there is far less of a clash than most people assume. Methodical naturalism is a working assumption, not an actual philosophical stance (that's philosophical naturalism) while most religions don't actually need science to agree with their statements on the physical world (they aren't actually literal statements). It's rather unlikely that future religions won't be compatible with science.
So what will happen to science? Also what will happen to the related, but distinct, sphere of technology and manipulating the physical worlds? After-all, in a way technological progress has happened in that sphere over the long term, steam engines wouldn't have been invented otherwise (the Romans couldn't have possibly invented them, they lacked too many ancillary technologies). What will the next big changes and revolutions (remembering that they aren't complete changes) be? How will it fit into future societies? How will the scientific method change over time?
What structures won't change as society's values change?
Simply by necessity and time, values are going to change and the societies of the future will be very different from ours in that respect simply because the world and our nature force them to be. However, societies change values as a natural process anyway, here's a discussion on that, and even societies that seem to keep to tradition often change (traditions don't actually have to be that traditional, only seem to be). And this will greatly affect how various human structures are arranged, like the prioritization system we call economics.
But instead of asking what will change, it's also important to see what won't change. After all, quite a lot we do is in response to the non-human world or is our way (most organism do this) of manipulating the environment. So there is going to be a wide range of behaviors that aren't affected by a specific societies values, well outside of the basic ones like survival and basic material needs. And the structures that do change, still have criteria to fulfill and nonhuman forces that affect them. So I don't expect this collapse/decline period to be different from previous ones in that we suddenly ditch agriculture and cities, especially since they are quite advantageous.
An example of a human structure that probably won't change is some very key parts of the military and similar institutions, like the chain of command and formation marching. Those structure haven't appeared because society has imposed a hierarchical and team based model on armies, but because those systems work in practice better than the other options. The chain of command is the only way that orders could possibly be sent to the right people and for information to flow properly, something which isn't easy to do in combat, and allow it to be processed at the same time. In some situations you can do without them, but that's rare, and there is a variety of hierarchies, so it isn't completely set in stone. While armies don't move around on foot as often as they used do, actually marching, learning to march in formation still has benefits ignoring that armies still have to be able to move by foot. When I did officers training for St John, we had a ex drill sergeant (can't remember his actual title) teaching us and he talked about them, basically it teaches teamwork, they ability to work in a group and to keep track of where everyone is. Valuing equality and democracy hasn't affected these structures that much, other future values won't either.
While I don't know about philosophy and logic (but they're probably similar), science also is largely independent of societies values and generates it's own. To quote this review of Mystery of Mysteries, "Ruse concludes that epistemic values have advanced markedly at the expense of the cultural values.". Put it like this, the theory of evolution is an entirely human construct in that it it only exists in human minds and artifacts. However, that misses that evolution describes what is observed in the world and how things happen, it isn't an arbitrary idea built to support some political system or religious stance (Darwin's grandfather used his evolutionary theories to justify Deism and the Whigs, but not Darwin himself). Put it like this, while aliens may not come up with the exact same scientific theories they will observe the same phenomena (like evolution ) and have the same laws (e.g thermodynamics doesn't change just because they think differently).
Future societies may have completely different values, similar to how much opinions on homosexuality differ in history, in classical civilization it was closer to an expected behavior than anything else (the Sacred band of Thebes was an explicitly homosexual fighting unit). But human structures aren't entirely designed just around human values, but in response to the external environment.
So what parts of civilization are malleable to changes in cultural values? What doesn't change? How sensitive are the things that change to changes in values? Since some structures will have parts that are malleable and parts that aren't, how will that resolve itself?
Monday, 11 November 2013
Peak oil technical challenge report.
Peak oil Technical
report: Krampus Challenge 2013
Problem – The
re-communalising of cooking
Modern industrial civilization is incredibly
wealthy, not just on the societal level but also at the level of the
individual. This has had significant consequences, some of which have changed society in
drastic ways. One marker/consequence of this incredible wealth is that individual
households have baths and kitchens, someone that is almost unheard of
historically for urban societies (outside of the houses of the elite). Public baths, for example, existed until the
16th century in England before the Puritans got rid of them and are
still used by many cultures today, a Korean friend used public baths here in
Melbourne. Cooking & eating is still partly a communal (as in not done on an individual or family level) activity, think fast food joints, restaurants or cafes. but this is often more as a special thing than a normal activity.
Fast food is itself incredible ancient, it dates
back to ancient Persia (Iran) and it existed largely because most urban people didn’t
have their own kitchens, the average Roman loved fast food (Viegas 2007). To give you an idea of how common fast food was
in urban settings, for every 60 residents of Pompeii there was 1 Thermopolium
(fast food joint) along with Tavernes (cafe) and Popinas (wine bar, often a breakfast of vegetable stew or wine soaked bread was served). Now, there are large differences between modern and ancient fast food, the ancient fast food was less processed while also containing less meat but they otherwise share similar criteria; cheap, quick to prepare en mass and filling. Also Street vendors are a very old tradition, one that is still strong in Asia (think Malaysian hawkers) and it has its own style of food while still sharing the same criteria.
The food served at these places varied;
Paella, curries, nuts, a pot of soup mix, stew and so on were served. Traditionally, only
the rich don’t eat this food in cities (since they could afford kitchens and/or servants) and the
otherwise there would be a kitchen & dining room in the apartment buildings
(Bed and Board), with the owner or staff cooking food. It is only really in modern Industrial civilization that these
options aren’t standard for people living in urban settings.
The economic reasons for this are fairly simple, just as its
more energy efficient to heat up one large bath than lots of small ones, its
more energy efficient to cook large amounts of food at once in one place than
in multiple small kitchens. By doing these things communally, energy is saved,
less equipment is needed, appropriate economics of scale are achieved and
benefits of specialization are achieved that family or individual kitchens just
don’t provide. And, importantly, fuel, a scare and precious resource, is saved
which since it was commonly wood also lessens the impact of cooking on the
environment. We know these systems of cooking are economically viable in low
energy settings and they will be perfectly viable in the future, no matter what
decline may bring. Eating, along with a
few other activities, will become a far more communal affair in the future than it
currently is now. Note, I’m not referring to any specific economic or political
system, communal here refers more to large groups of non-family related people eating in the same place rather
than as small family units, whether its under a Roman style economy or Maoist communal kitchens.
And here is one of the many problems that will exist
in the near future; how to bring this change about in the best way possible. How
do we take advantage of this model of cooking while fuelling it with renewable
energy? After all, most renewable energy sources produce mechanical energy
(wind and hydro for example), while the main historical source of renewable heat (biomass) is likely to be scarce and large scale use of wood in the cities
would lead to devastating deforestation. Where can the energy for this cooking
model come from and how could it best be put to use in a sustainable manner?
Overview of a Solution -
Concentrated solar power
Only a few renewable energy sources produce heat;
geothermal, solar and biomass. Geothermal is impractical outside of a few scattered areas and biomass already
suffers depletion problems in the third world, adding depletion problems to the
first world won’t be very helpful, which leaves solar power. Since this is
using heat in the 100-600oC range, kitchens are generally inside
buildings and these specific kitchens will be running for the majority of their time, the system will
require; solar concentrators, a heat transfer mechanism and thermal storage at a
minimum in addition to the specialized cooking equipment. A few more things can be added, excess heat is available after all,
and some provision for mobile vendors would be useful but the core system is
enough to begin with. Importantly, this system is not like current solar
cookers in that it isn’t a standalone piece of equipment, but an entire
building and includes a system that is only now being incorporated into regular
solar cookers, thermal storage.
Also, while I am talking about this system as a replacement for standard restaurants and eateries, that isn't the only option available. Instead the system used in some college campuses can be copied/modified. Where each floor has a small kitchen units, more for snacks or small meals, and the building has a single big kitchen area, most likely the big kitchen could be the easiest part to adapt. There are a few options in how the system could be arranged, specific districts could be built instead (like shopping districts), and that would in turn affect what technologies are used.
Also, while I am talking about this system as a replacement for standard restaurants and eateries, that isn't the only option available. Instead the system used in some college campuses can be copied/modified. Where each floor has a small kitchen units, more for snacks or small meals, and the building has a single big kitchen area, most likely the big kitchen could be the easiest part to adapt. There are a few options in how the system could be arranged, specific districts could be built instead (like shopping districts), and that would in turn affect what technologies are used.
Solution
Requirements:
The System shall
- Run entirely on non-biomass renewable energy
- Only require backup heat sources in very unfavorable conditions
- Have a backup power supply
- Provide excess heat under normal operating conditions
- If necessary during winter as well
- Be operational in temperate areas
- Pay for itself and provide a living for its operators
- Provide any level of heat required for cooking
- Use less energy than conventional eateries
- Able to use a variety of technologies
- Serve as many or more people as a standard eatery
- Be as technically simple as possible while still fulfilling operational needs
Core Sub-systems:
Solar
concentrators
In order to get the necessary temperatures for
cooking, especially at this scale, sunlight needs to be concentrated. This heat
is not going to directly heat the food (as modern solar cookers do) but instead heats the fluid used in the heat transfer system. There
are a variety of technologies available and it’ll depend on the buildings location
and architecture which one is used. One promising project at RMIT is Micro Urban
Solar integrated Collectors (MUSIC)(RMIT 2013), which aims to develop collector platforms that can
be mounted on roofs and produces heat in the 100-400oC range.
If this technology works out that would be a perfect option but there are other roof mounted technologies that can be used.
Trays of parabolic mirrors are quite common in solar applications, parabolic mirrors are cheap, but Fresnel lens are being used in an MIT salt solar cooker, so Fresen Lenses are also an option. A tracking parabolic dish is also a possibility and so is a solar bowl, instead of a fixed spherical mirror with a tracking receiver, this technology is already used in a solar kitchen (Auroville, India). Scheffler reflectors are also an option and are used in quite a lot of solar cooking technologies and modified evacuated tubes could also provide hot or boiling water.
And the solar concentrator component doesn't necessarily have to be mounted only on the roof, using a nearby open space is an option for some places, particularly rural ones. This system will be easier to implement away from city centers for the basic reason that the buildings can be wider and more land is available for sunlight harvesting. Otherwise the solar concentrators can be mounted on the roof, but sunlight could be deflected from nearby roofs or gardens (similar to how the Japanese put solar panels over fields) to increase the available sunlight. There will be a small range of technologies that work best for this application (I doubt that evacuated tubes will work), but the mixture used will depend on local conditions.
Trays of parabolic mirrors are quite common in solar applications, parabolic mirrors are cheap, but Fresnel lens are being used in an MIT salt solar cooker, so Fresen Lenses are also an option. A tracking parabolic dish is also a possibility and so is a solar bowl, instead of a fixed spherical mirror with a tracking receiver, this technology is already used in a solar kitchen (Auroville, India). Scheffler reflectors are also an option and are used in quite a lot of solar cooking technologies and modified evacuated tubes could also provide hot or boiling water.
And the solar concentrator component doesn't necessarily have to be mounted only on the roof, using a nearby open space is an option for some places, particularly rural ones. This system will be easier to implement away from city centers for the basic reason that the buildings can be wider and more land is available for sunlight harvesting. Otherwise the solar concentrators can be mounted on the roof, but sunlight could be deflected from nearby roofs or gardens (similar to how the Japanese put solar panels over fields) to increase the available sunlight. There will be a small range of technologies that work best for this application (I doubt that evacuated tubes will work), but the mixture used will depend on local conditions.
The main problem is likely to be the availability of sunlight and locations for solar collectors. Roof sharing is an option; the specific eatery could use neighboring roofs for solar collectors and the neighboring building gets free
food or payment. Instead of building this solar restaurant only in one building a group of neighboring buildings could be linked up in a heat distribution network (like a microgrid) and pool their available space for sunlight collection. As it stands, architectural design would have to change to
accommodate this along with construction techniques and urban planning.
Thermal storage
Most cooking isn’t done during the day (Magazine 2012), so heat is going to have to be stored. If enough heat
is stored then a week or so of cloudy days won’t interrupt business. There are
a variety of heat storage technologies; the most likely to be used are those that use oil,
water or molten salt, though phase change materials could be used in the
cooking equipment. Concrete, and some other solid materials like packed rocks,
can also be used store heat, but liquid storage is likely better for this
application. Thermal storage is an area in which research is still continuing,
there’s a concrete thermocline method (John, Hale et al. 2013) that could turn out to be the most efficient option available, but it isn't the only developing heat storage technology out there.
The most efficient storage method is a large cylindrical tank (for liquid storage),
since increasing volume decrease the surface area to volume ratio, the larger
the better and this also applies for solid heat storage for the same reasons. However, for small vendors, and as a potential backup system, some
form of portable heat batteries would be useful. There would be two primary models; a small
one for mobile vendors that is light enough for one person to move and a big
one for stationary purposes. The big one doesn’t necessarily have to only power
the eatery, it could be rented out for other uses; space heating, public baths,
process heat, sterilization etc. This battery would most likely combine liquid heat storage (for lightness) and very strong insulation in order to function adequately.
However, since the bigger the thermal battery is the better it is, having shops that are close together sharing one large storage device makes a lot of sense. Another option is sharing the storage among a group of buildings or even a village/town. The main issue then is how to share the heat when the batteries are low.
However, since the bigger the thermal battery is the better it is, having shops that are close together sharing one large storage device makes a lot of sense. Another option is sharing the storage among a group of buildings or even a village/town. The main issue then is how to share the heat when the batteries are low.
Thermal
transfer system
This is what connects all
the other sub-systems together. None of the other components are actually connected to
each other directly (that is an option however) and without this system a radically different architecture would be
needed. All this system has to do is
move heat where it’s needed and when. Steam pipes are a good and traditional way of doing this and
it’s likely the method that’ll be chosen.
If possible, this component should be
powered by excess heat. Stirling engines could be used; they only produce
mechanical power when enough heat is available, which is when you want the pumping done. This system could also be connected to a larger heat grid, mostly as a
supplier, and this would provide benefits to surrounding heat users while adding
an extra revenue stream for the eatery.
If possible, the pipes should be imbedded in heavily insulated walls and themselves be thick and heavily insulated. And if excess heat is being used to drive the system, consideration should be paid to lowering the required pumping power, there won't be much mechanical power to waste. there are two main ways of doing this (both surprisingly recent practices) are to make the pipes as straight as possible by placing the pipes before you place the equipment or making them as wide as possible to reduce friction. Also this system could be used for space heating of the eatery, small pipes that are normally closed could branch out from the central pipes and when space heating is required, while extra heat is in the pipes, they can simply be opened. It won't be highly responsive, but its an option to consider.
If possible, the pipes should be imbedded in heavily insulated walls and themselves be thick and heavily insulated. And if excess heat is being used to drive the system, consideration should be paid to lowering the required pumping power, there won't be much mechanical power to waste. there are two main ways of doing this (both surprisingly recent practices) are to make the pipes as straight as possible by placing the pipes before you place the equipment or making them as wide as possible to reduce friction. Also this system could be used for space heating of the eatery, small pipes that are normally closed could branch out from the central pipes and when space heating is required, while extra heat is in the pipes, they can simply be opened. It won't be highly responsive, but its an option to consider.
Cooking equipment
Since the
heat is going to be delivered directly as steam, the cooking equipment will
need to be specially designed. Ovens would have a surrounding cavity into which
steam is pumped and a thermo-electric generator could
power a fan when necessary. The rest of the equipment can be modified in
similar ways; high pressure steam could be pumped underneath metal plates to heat them up, similar to how electric stoves work, coffee machines could extract the heat from the steam and the leftover heat from these processes can be used to keep things warm. It likely inadvisable to use the steam from the heat transfer system directly, so steam cookers will need a heat exchanger to swap the heat between the steam for cooking and the steam for heat transfer.
Refrigeration
unit
Refrigeration is quite useful for food storage and
luckily the overall system will produce excess heat. This excess heat can be used in a
vapour absorption cycle (Said, El-Shaarawi et al. 2012), or absorption refrigeration, to refrigerate.
If the climate warrants it, this could also be expanded to provide cooling
for the entire eatery. Absorption heat pumps are also worth looking into, along
with any other similar technologies that use waste heat. Absorption refrigeration is quite an old technology and there are already designs out there that could be dropped into the system with minimal modification.
The main problem with absorption refrigeration is that ammonia is the best refrigerant for these cycles and it's toxic. This means that safety and the placement of the fridge needs to consciously looked at, so when a leak happens it causes the least harm possible and doesn't leak into the main dining area. Otherwise it's worth exploring if the refrigeration system should instead of being linked to the main system, be a physically separate system that has its own solar heat supply. Another is also how to deal with intermittency, is the fridge heavily insulated and cooled extra low so the system can deal with losing power for a few days, should it have a separate thermal battery to smooth out the heat supply or a combination of the two.
The main problem with absorption refrigeration is that ammonia is the best refrigerant for these cycles and it's toxic. This means that safety and the placement of the fridge needs to consciously looked at, so when a leak happens it causes the least harm possible and doesn't leak into the main dining area. Otherwise it's worth exploring if the refrigeration system should instead of being linked to the main system, be a physically separate system that has its own solar heat supply. Another is also how to deal with intermittency, is the fridge heavily insulated and cooled extra low so the system can deal with losing power for a few days, should it have a separate thermal battery to smooth out the heat supply or a combination of the two.
Peripheral/optional
sub-systems:
Small/mobile vendors
Eateries that aren’t stationary or are too small for
this system to be used are still fairly important. Whether it’s a mobile hot
dog stand, a hawker cart or maybe a small store in a train station, the full
system likely isn’t a viable option. That however, doesn’t mean that they can’t benefit from
this system. As mention above, small thermal batteries could be used to power
these stalls or there could be a heat grid and specific outlets where vendors
can charge their batteries.
How this is done depends greatly on the running
times of the stalls and vendors. At my local train station there’s a small
coffee shop that’s only open for the morning and afternoon commute, it wouldn’t
require a large battery and there’s a commercial area right next door, though
this example could use a small solar system. Other places would require either
multiple or larger batteries, though the option of installing a small and
stripped down system is there. As it
stands, these stalls would already benefit because the demand for cooking fuel is
reduced by the core system and this just extends the
solution slightly. Besides, the mobile vendors and small stalls would generally be able to use standard solar cookers while using thermal storage as a backup.
Thermo-electric
conversion
In this situation thermo-electric generators would be better than heat engines for producing electricity, despite the low energy efficiencies (typically around 8%), however as this is converting waste heat the low efficiencies aren't that important. As it stands, adding thermo-electric generators to cooking equipment is already being done and it turns out to be very worthwhile, see the BioLite stove or Powerpot. The best things to power are going to be the LED lights, kitchen fans and possible a radio for music + ambiance. After that comes customers micro-electronics (energy sippers), small batteries and possible energy efficient computers. Small vendors would greatly benefit from this system as it reduces the need for batteries (for lights and stuff) while letting them run certain electronics cheaply or mechanical applications (fans for improved combustion for example).
The thermo-electric generators should be placed where heat flow is already happening or where you want to slow it down, so that you don't have to create a extra heat flow which adds extra costs of its own. Basic thermo-electric generators are technologically simple, but more advanced ones are available if necessary, and that would be the first place to start. One possibility is to use 3D printed thermo-electric generators (Roch 2013) which could be quite cheap and available in quantity, but the main advantage is that they could wrap around the heat transfer pipes rather than being large blocks, which makes placement easier.
Waste Heat
The system is quite likely to generate excess and waste heat. If enough is generated,
not guaranteed, then some use for it should be found. The most immediate use
would be for space heating or cooling (using absorption cycles), after that
comes heating water and possible using steam for cleaning or sterilization. If a district heating distribution system is available then excess heat could be pumped into it, otherwise
nearby buildings could use it for certain processes. It all depends on the form
the waste heat is in (steam for example), how much is available and when is it
available (randomly, periodically etc). And it will be a limited resource, budgeting it carefully will be crucial.
RMIT (2013).
"MUSIC project will establish Australia as a world leader." from http://www.rmit.edu.au/browse/Research/Our%20reputation/Achievements/Funding%20successes/Other%20Grants/2013/MUSIC%20project%20will%20establish%20Australia%20as%20a%20world%20leader/?QRY=engineering
Roch, D.-I. A. (2013) Harvesting unused energy with flatthermoelectrics.
Roch, D.-I. A. (2013) Harvesting unused energy with flatthermoelectrics.
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