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

[kitten_goddess]

Thank you. Your posts about the future, science, and technology are a source of inspiration to me.

What do you say to ecodoomsayers who whinge, "Unless we cease using modern technology, the human race will be annihilated?" (Not that any of them have ever said that outright, but we can all read between the lines.)

[galadrion]

Verily, I tell you that you say unto them: "Show me the numbers. Unless you can prove it, what you have is a fantasy, not science. And you'd better believe that we'll be reviewing your data and methodologies, bub!"

The cardiac incidents would prove entertaining, I'm sure.

[polaris93]

Natural selection on survivors doesn't hurt -- it removes stress from remaining infrastructure, and makes good care of survivors much more likely. The problem is that if too much mission-critical infrastucture is lost, it will be a long, long time, if ever, before a technologically advanced civilization can arise again. Which could happen in the case of a global nuclear war. It would only take the detonation of about 200 5-megaton nuclear devices to wipe out all complex life in the Northern Hemisphere; and since fallout goes everywhere, and so do the oceans, the whole world would suffer from the fallout that ends up in the oceans, because that could knock marine productivity, including the blue-green algae blooms on which the world depends for regeneration of most of its atmospheric oxygen, into the toilet. One nuclear device, the one deployed during the Castle-Bravo test on March 1, 1954, dumped huge amounts of highly radioactive and otherwise toxic crud on the Northern Hemisphere, causing widespread illness, much of it fatal.

[jordan179]

Life in the wake of a major nuclear war would suck: one of the ways it would suck would be that the survivors would suffer from radiation-induced cancers and their children from radiation-induced birth defects. The lower the technology of the survivors, the more it would suck, even in terms of the cancers (which would be less curable) and birth defects (which would be less preventable

Overdependence on Semiconductors?

[jordan179]

It is quite true that, right now, our highest technology is critically dependent upon a fairly small number of semiconductor plants. What you may not realize is that this has always been the case, substituting some other string for "semiconductor plants." The highest technology is always dependent on some cutting-edge sort of factory, which (because it is "cutting-edge") is economically uncommon.

A century from now, there will be plants able to make semiconducting microcircuitry equivalent to the best we have today in every city and large town; a century after that, in the garage of every interested hobbyist. And at that point there will be some other "cutting-edge" technology, which will be similarly concentrated in a dozen or so of the highest-tech factories. A century ago, the equivalent technology would have been vacuum tubes; a century before that, high-quality steel.

Losing the semiconductor plants would be bad for us, but not as bad as you imagine. To begin with, your statement that

You take out all semiconductor plants

High Precision Technology

[jordan179]

The largest danger is a reliance on complexity to the extent of its production limits where you have zero room for error.

There is never such a reliance; it just looks that way from the POV of an earlier tech level. When the first steam engines were built in the 18th century, it required taking parts machining to previously-undreamt-of heights -- parts had to fit together to the tolerance of a penny's edge! This precision, which so impressed the men of the late 18th century with the awesome perfection of modern technology, would have seemed laughably lax to engineers of the late 19th century, who were accustomed to machining parts to tolerances of a millimeter or less, and did so in their high-performance steam engines. And such precision would seem dangerous to people desigining a modern steam engine -- a nuclear fission reactor

The Common Factor in Failed Societies

[jordan179]

The Soviet Union's ultimate population decline after its collapse will probably be on the order of 25% over 40 years, and their system was so inefficient that most families individually grew some measure of their own food and were responsible for maintenance of their household technology, and had far more resources than it needed for internal sustainability. It was a far larger disaster for Cuba and North Korea, where in the former it was a return to years of subsistence living, while 10% of the DPRK's population starved to death in the span of two years before it caved and started accepting fertilizer aid. Note the common factor in the Soviet Union, Cuba and North Korea. All those countries are (or were) Communist dictatorships, in which adherence to an unrealistic ideology and the retention of power in the hands of a small elite were more institutionally-important than economic growth, or even maintenance. This strongly suggests that allowing extensive governmental interference in the economy is dangerous: the more so the more

[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

[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

[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

[ford_prefect42]

Something of a problem with this theory. We have already used up the easy materials. During the industrial revolution, oil bubbled from the ground and coal seams could be mined by a man with a pickax. Now it takes all the technology that mankind possesses to get the next barrel/ton. The supply chains on all major resources are intensely complex and interdependent, even a minor global disruption of industrial operation could very easily cause a domino-type destruction, food riots in major cities are not conducive to retention of semi-conductor fab plants

[polaris93]

Yes, resource scarcity of the sort you describe here would severely limit not only the ability of civilization to recover after such a war, but the ability of human beings to survive at all (see my comments above for the reasons why, many of which you describe here yourself). And then there's another problem: if too many human beings die, given that the remainder will include many who pass on less-than-desirable genes, ones damaged by radiation, as time goes by, more and more of the descendants of that remainder will be genetically crippled, dying in the womb, stillborn, or dying before they can reproduce (and produce even more lethally crippled children). Ecological effects resulting from catastrophes like that ramify down the generations, and what survives rapidly evolves into numerous types of brand-new species, many unlike any that have gone before, as witness the Triassic Period of Earthly life. Ecosystems are simply ways of distributing energy -- ultimately sunlight -- that powers life, and horrendous environmental

[ford_prefect42]

TBH, I wasn't even narrowing to a nuclear war scenario. It could happen by asteroid strike, supervolcano, any of a hundred astronomical phenomenon could easily wipe out our technology. Even something relatively minor like an orbital nuke wiping out the satellite network or a major anti-oil production terrorist campaign could set about a chain of events that leads to much the same place, worldwide collapse of basic industrial infrastructure.

[polaris93]

One major potential global catastrophe (sorry about that string of modifiers) that could do that is a gigantic solar flare and coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun. That happened on September 1, 1859 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_flare, under "observations") capable of knocking out virtually all unhardened electronics on or in orbit around the Earth (which means the Grid, not to mention orbital satellites, computers, you name it). For more on that, see Chapter 2 of Phil Plait's Death From the Skies! These Are the Ways the World Will End . . . (http://www.amazon.com/Death-Skies-These-Ways-World/dp/0670019976). And, of course, there's always

And there's plenty more covered in Plait's book (). Anything that knocks out the Grid here could indirectly thereby trigger a nuclear war over a helpless USA between, say, China and the Middle East. Not pleasant

[ford_prefect42]

As for the habitat portion... Much depends on the population and number of surviving habitats

[jordan179]

A hab with a population of a few hundred people, basic machine-shop capabilities, chemlab, hydroponics garden, and a few other semi-complex systems may survive for a time, they will, however, be unable to replace their most complex items (solar panels, nuclear fuel, or for that matter, oxygen. They may last for a while, years even, but their death is sealed if they cannot be resupplied.

Mostly yes, assuming that they cannot build a bigger mining and manufacturing base from their existing capabilties. In paticular, volatiles (including oxygen) are easily obtained anywhere beyond the Inner Solar System (and in some places in the Inner System as well; nuclear fuel may also be mined and refined at the right locations.

If the survivors also have some interplanetary-capable ships, they can if necessary travel to the right locations to find the resources. If there are other habs out there, then trade and specialization of production also becomes possible, and highly useful.

Needless to say, they have a huge incentive to try to build