The Ratchet Effect - Why Technological Progress and the Expansion of Man's Habitat is Irreversible

[jordan179]

IntroductionA common science-fictional scenario is the post-apocalyptic story, in which some war or disaster has destroyed civilization and the human race must rebuild from a low-tech foundation. And in real history, we see abundant evidence that civilizations are mortal: Toynbee (Read more... )

Comments

[polaris93]

There are two caveats that should be considered here. The first has to do with fire, which was humanity's first and perhaps greatest power-tool. Without fire, you have real problems scaring predators away at night, you can't cook food, can't smelt metal, and can't do the other basic things on which the rise of advanced technology depends. (A marine civilization could come into existence, but its ability to smelt metal would be very dicey, at best, dependent on somehow harnessing undersea volcanoes -- and volcanoes aren't known for being cooperative.) There must be open flame for a technologically sophisticated civilization to arise, or to recover from a fall -- natural fire is used to clear fields so that forbes and herbs that game animals like will grow there, to make sure game is available; and it is used to clear fields for farming, as well. Without fire, intensive farming is impossible -- and it is intensive farming on which the rise of a technologically endowed civilization depends. If a world can be truly terraformed, so that open flame can exist on it in the wild, then a fallen civilization can be resurrected there. But without open flame, you can't recover what you had.

Consider Mars. If we colonize Mars, and then civilization falls there, without help from Earth or some other world that can somehow mount a spacefaring technology, that civilization can't come back -- and the colonies will perish, because in the absence of advanced technology, a world without fire can't rebuild a civilization that can provide for its members. It is possible that a fallen colony on one world which hasn't been terraformed and won't sustain open flame could be cut off long enough from the rest of the universe to perish completely, so even help coming after that wouldn't do any good.

Other than that, you've made some excellent points, and your conclusion is quite correct. Including the statement of the basic assumption, that humanity is not annihilated.

[jordan179]

I don't see why open flames would be impossible or impractical in all but the smallest habs. Large habs would use large life support systems which would include the reclamation of the waste products of fires. The chemical knowledge required for this is mid 19th-century; the chemical knowledge required to run it well no more than mid 20th-century.

I do think that, in a civilizational collapse, small or inadequately-sustained habs would be at risk, and some would die out or be abandoned for exactly the same reasons that many towns and villas were abandoned in the fall of the Roman Empire. Others would survive, however, and act as centers from which would come the eventual rebirth of trade and urban life, just as happened in the Dark Ages.

[polaris93]

The problem with using open fire in habitats is that it uses up oxygen rather rapidly, and at the same time adds some nasty combustion products to the atmosphere in those habitats. Very large habitats would have to be equipped with scrubbers and be growing a great deal of groundcover and trees to take up combustion products and liberate oxygen from them. This could be done -- maybe. But would builders have enough forethought to build them that way? We Earthlings take our oxygenated atmosphere, the plant life that recharges it with oxygen, relatively plenteous running water, and our soil's rich mix of minerals for granted, but that's something we'd better not do on other worlds, especially worlds which, like Mars, are naturally extremely impoverished in life-giving surface resources. On Mars, you'd have to build enormous habitats if you want them to provide the same benefits to inhabitants that life outdoors does here on Earth -- and by "enormous" I mean bigger than Rama (of Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama). It wouldn't take much more effort to terraform Mars, which would take care of the problem nicely. Mars could still hold on to an atmosphere (many scientists now think an enormous impact was responsible for the loss of most of Mars's original atmosphere, not just spaceward molecular migration), whereas habitats would inevitably leak gas molecules, so terraforming the planet would be the best option. It could be done -- but would corporations run by accountants, for whom the future extends just three months from the present, think it would be a good investment to do this? Since individuals couldn't do it, it would be up to government, corporations, and/or large companies of other types to do the job. Which ones do you want to bet would win the bidding?

[jordan179]

The problem with using open fire in habitats is that it uses up oxygen rather rapidly, and at the same time adds some nasty combustion products to the atmosphere in those habitats. Very large habitats would have to be equipped with scrubbers and be growing a great deal of groundcover and trees to take up combustion products and liberate oxygen from them. This could be done -- maybe.

I think it would be done in the larger habs. In a miles-long O'Neill cylinder, for instance, you could have a single small 19th-century style steelworks without much problem, and maybe even a whole miniature 19th-century industrial economy with only minor problems.

However, I don't think it's plausible that a whole civilization of habs would be reduced to that point (though of course a single hab might be so badly mismanaged as to lose all its science). It's more likely that a disaster (cultural or otherwise) would eliminate the highest-tech fabrication capability (the production of antimatter? Of negative-mass objects? Of sapient computers?) and leave the hab reduced to something lower-tech but still "high-tech" from our POV (integrated microcircuitry? Nuclear thermal batteries?).

Given an even c. 1875 level of chemistry and machining, you don't need open flames for industrial processes. You can do combustion in enclosed chambers, feeding fuel and oxidizers to them, while pumping out the exhaust. Given a non-airbreathing energy source (nuclear or solar) you can then reduce the waste products back into oxidizer and fuel.

Admittedly, if a hab managed to fall back below a late 19th century level of technology, it would be in trouble -- but I don't think that this would happen often, and if there were other habs in communication with that hab, the trouble would not necessarily be impossible to recover from.

I don't know to what extent we will terraform planets. I would point out that some governments and not-for-profit foundations (the latter of which are sometimes set up or funded by for-profit corporations) have shown long-term planning abilities in the past. Futhermore, at a very high tech level, individuals might very well be able to engage in terraforming.

[polaris93]

Somebody really needs to write a science-fiction novel dealing with that problem in detail, working out how survivors of a badly impacted civilization on a colony world would recover from the disaster -- or not recover. Maybe have several different colony worlds in several systems, some of which recover, some not, to see what worked best for the colonists and what failed.

[jordan179]

Joan D. Vinge's The Outcasts of Heaven's Belt showed a very grim situation in which a civlization which had colonized a system with no habitable planets was slowly dying after having lost the capability to build fusion reactors in consequence of an interplanetary war. I thought that the survivors were culturally a bit too combative and fatalistic: there were avenues to their salvation but they were blocked by their own inability to cooperate.

They were saved when an STL starship that had become trapped in their system and hunted by everyone for its resources, which included a very powerful fusion reactor, managed to parlay its technological capabilities into the formation of a system government and shared its energy with all the cultures of that star system.

So I admit that it could happen, here and there. As note my comments regarding a "Greenland" colony situation.

[polaris93]

In his Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon put mankind's final (and most splendid) stand on Neptune, which the 17th men decided to colonize after the Solar System's inner planets became untenable for civilization or even life. So they created a life-form which retained the basics of the human organism, though it was a cruder version of humanity which, they thought, could more easily stand the rigors of life on that remote world. But the new life-form was in fact too delicate for life there. Gradually natural selection transformed the few survivors into creatures so primitive that they retained almost nothing of their human ancestry. Even their hands shrank and became enfolded in the tissues of the club-like organs that their forelimbs evolved into. (Eventually a new hand evolved from that organ.) From that crude beginning the magnificent 18th Men evolved, recovering all the paranormal abilities of their ancestors as well as their creativity and imagination, and recreated civilization and then went on to build it into a splendor their ancestors couldn't conceive of. That may be a much more likely scenario than colonists on other worlds isolated from the rest of the species by some disaster rebuilding a civilization out of the highest products of the old one -- assuming that they have open fire to start with. Without that, they can't go on to refine fire into electricity and nuclear energy, or smelt and work metals.

[jordan179]

You don't really need "open fire." What you need is an intense heat source. It does not have to be airbreathing, or if airbreathing exhaust its wastes directly into the air that you are breathing.

[polaris93]

You also need to be able to harness it. Perhaps we ought to find someone who works all the time with high-energy heat and ask him/her how he/she would go about harnessing, say, volcanic heat for use in smelting metal, etc., assuming he/she was at the Early Neolithic stage of civilization. It's not all that hard to do it if you already have plenty of relatively high-tech tools and infrastructure developed. But while Ook the Caveman might well have stolen fire from a volcano, he did it by dipping a handy piece of windfall into it and carrying fire away on that. Volcanoes aren't portable, whereas smaller branches are. Nobody wants to live up close and personal to a volcano, which you'd have to do to harness its heat if you were at a very primitive stage of technological development. You want to use something to carry that heat back to where you normally live and work -- like a branch. In other words, something to capture open flame, or generate it. That's the only way you could have harnessed volcanic heat back then. As for an underwater civilization -- you could have a heatless one, made out of rocks and coral pieces and so on that were hauled bodily from one place to another by workers. But to harness volcanic heat underwater, especially at an early stage of technological development, you'd have to get way too close to a vent to work its heat, which, half the time, would end up with the enterprising one being boiled alive by a burst of heat from the vent transmitted to his/her/its body via boiling water. Open flame is manageable from the point of view of a creature at a very low stage of technological development, whereas volcanic heat isn't, except as mediated by transformers of that heat in the form of branches or other portable media.

[jordan179]

I don't see, though, how a hab could fall back to a pre-industrial tech level. Energy, basic chemistry and mechanics is all that's needed to recycle exhausts from chemically-produced heat sources; and the habs would originally of course have nuclear (fission or fusion) and solar power.

[polaris93]

The most efficient way to recycle those exhaust products is in the form of living organisms, which are past masters at working against the normal flow of entropy as they convert matter and energy in lower-order forms into higher-order (i.e., from less orderly to more orderly) forms. Plant tissues -- bark, cambium, etc. -- are optimal for this. Which means using them for fuel. You generate heat in some way so that you can make the fuel catch fire, and then you work the fire. You could do this in a habitat. As for falling back to a pre-industrial technological level, a disaster that killed off all but a few children, including some teenagers who had been taught to read and had access to books or electronic media that went into some detail on the evolution of technology, could do that. They'd have to experiment with everything on hand to work out the best way to develop and use technology. Starting a fire using plant tissue as fuel would be a good starting point, though they'd have to go rather quickly to a less wasteful source of heat if they wanted to have a good chance to survive long enough to have children of their own -- otherwise they'd use up too much oxygen too quickly through combustion, and they probably couldn't do that. If open flame could be sustained outside (terraforming), then they'd have far more leeway for experimenting with fire and eventually working out more efficient and effective types of heat-generation. Anyway, if the numbers of people alive in that colony were knocked down below a certain level, especially if most or all adults were eliminated in the process, and if the survivors weren't all that tech-savvy to start with (lack of education and/or experience), then they'd lose most or all of their technological heritage right there. If they had open flame to work with, they might be able to hang on long enough to recover their parents' tech, using fire to heat themselves when it was cold and to cook their food and so on. Without that, though, their prospects of survival would be very, very dicey.

[polaris93]

Almost forgot: One epidemic disease that could knock down most of a colony that way is poliomyelitis, a.k.a. polio, which results from a viral pathogen which is endemic among humans. The thing is, before sanitation became a real issue in Western civilization, which watershed occurred around WW 2, babies picked it up from skin contact with fecal material or that sort of thing, had a very mild case of it and quickly recovered, and were forever after immune to it. But once sanitation became important to parents, fewer and fewer babies were exposed to it, and they only caught it after they were older -- at which point it could easily cripple them for life or kill them. Sure, the Salk vaccine stopped the apparent polio epidemic of the 1940s and 1950s -- which was really an epidemic of older children, teenagers, and adults exposed to the virus well after the time when it would have been harmless to them -- but before the 1940s there was no need for it. Today, children are routinely vaccinated against polio. But if the vaccinations stopped, as long as the sort of sanitation procedures we now regard as routine and mandated continued, once more we'd have just that sort of polio "epidemic" among older children, youths, and adults. A colony in space that had forgotten all about polio but still got vaccinated against it could get a bad batch of vaccines and, over the next few years, undergo a deadly epidemic of the virus that killed off most of those with the knowledge to keep the tech going and cripple the rest. Then what?

This looks like I'm nagging, but I'm not (am I senile yet?)

[polaris93]

More thoughts: The most basic chemical reactions for generating heat are those of combustion (not counting body-heat, which isn't going to be high enough to cook food or much of anything else technologically advanced). Nuclear power sources (either kind) develop maintenance problems, and if you don't know how to take care of those -- or, in the case of fission, don't have the resources to replace damaged or overused cores -- those are no longer usable. Solar power is out if you live much farther from a star than Earth is from Sol -- think, e.g., Mars. Volcanoes are useful only on relatively large rocky worlds with hot cores and mantles, like Earth; cryovolcanoes of the sort you'd find on Enceladus wouldn't do for us, and as for harnessing Io's volcanoes, you wouldn't be living on Io itself, anyway. Harnessing gravity, as in the way Jupiter's gravity flexes Io so much that it produces volcanism on Io, is way too advanced a tech for a damnaged people isolated from civilization. So you could get a situation where colonists ended up isolated from the larger civilization, and without the special knowledge and skills to restart their own, in which case, open flame would be a blessing -- but only possible inside a very large habitat, and only for a while (before too much oxygen was used up), or on a terrformed world, or on an Earthlike world at the right distance from its star. I am ashamed to say I haven't yet read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, nor his other excellent books -- one of these days I've got to do that! Anyway, from what I've managed to learn from others' posts about him and his books, he points out that a society isolated from its parent civilization and other civilizations is shit out of luck as far as keeping or recovering its own tech goes. The Easter Islanders are a case in point. An isolated offworld colony would be in real trouble, especially if it didn't have open flame to restart its tech with, as much for lack of resources its world or habitat didn't already have that were necessary for the tech it originally had (e.g., uranium) as for lack of new information from outside sources.