Will the internet survive energy contraction?

[PixyMisa]

I agree. I'm not making an argument against information transfer, I'm just saying it's possible we'll devolve to an oppressive poor agrarian feudal state.

How is that possible?

 

[Brian-M]

About the radios, in fact, the Grand ArchDruid John Michael Greer thinks radio will be the only thing that survives out of the industrial age, because of how easy it is to create them. Cell phones, computers, modern medical technology though, he believes are going out the window, because all are dependent on petro chemicals.

They don't actually need petroleum based chemicals. They're only used because petroleum is cheap and abundant at present. Petroleum is mostly used to make the plastic parts. Hell, we can just go back to using Bakelite instead. Problem solved.

Also, as resources become more scarce and these things become more expensive, the trend will probably be to make durable energy-efficient devices instead of disposable power-hungry devices. Consequently, it may become commonplace to keep the same slow and expensive low-power computer in service for forty or fifty years, instead of replacing a cheap powerful power-hungry one every three or four years, which would drastically reduce the resources required to continue to meet demand.

We're peaking on Uranium, copper, coal, and many other resources. That's why I'm skeptical of the ability to make new fiber optic cables, if they rely on rare materials.

Most fiber optic cables are made from silica sand. Not exactly a rare material. But the internet could also survive on copper cables, albeit at greatly reduced bandwidth. There's no reason why existing land cables could not be properly maintained.

As for the "peaking", that's not the same thing as running out. it just means prices are going to rise steadily, greatly reducing demand but not precluding continued use altogether. For example, according to some sources gold production peaked around the year 2000. But there's still plenty of gold around for personal and industrial use.

Why would everyone have to have books? Most people didn't read back in the agrarian days. Most people were either illiterate farmers or slaves.

But only an idiot or someone with an unrealistically romanticized view of the agrarian age would ever want to return to it. Any sensible person would want humanity to expend every reasonable effort possible to maintain our technology and knowledge base to the best of our ability.

As such, books and electronic communications would be essential commodities.

I'm not making an argument against information transfer, I'm just saying it's possible we'll devolve to an oppressive poor agrarian feudal state.

Ah. I thought the subject was "will the internet survive the energy contraction", not "will the internet survive the complete and total collapse of modern civilization and technology". My mistake.

Well, I figured satellite communications were a backbone of the Internet. I thought cable Internet provides relied on satellites?

Satellite communications are convenient, but low bandwidth. That's why vast amounts of resources are expended maintaining huge bundles of submarine fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the oceans. (More info.)

 

[Dancing David]

Can you make fiber optic cables with domestic parts? I mean, in areas like Australia, Canada, US, Europe, without having to outsource it's production with rare materials in areas like India and China?

Yes the process is not that hard ( I am not sure about the longevity of germanium supplies), you are assuming the collapse of the infrastructure, well I hate to tell you this TFian, because it is not a good thing ecologically, there is enough methane hydrate/methane clathrate to continue fossil fuel burning for a very long time (like mellenia).

You are putting the cart before the horse, you are assuming all these consequences of an energy collapse without really knowing about the alternatives. You have assumed some sort of energy collapse without really looking at the issue at all.

Now that is most likely because you have been not looking at a wide variety of sources. Methane clathrate could be easily gathered with existing technology (in fact the technology of seventy years ago) and burned as is or used to make hydrogen. Either would continue the not very wise out put of CO₂, which is a separate issue from this catastrophic energy collapse you are envisioning.

 

[PixyMisa]

They don't actually need petroleum based chemicals. They're only used because petroleum is cheap and abundant at present. Petroleum is mostly used to make the plastic parts.

And any organic feedstock can be used for that. Oil, coal, crop waste, algae... Oil is just cheap and convenient.

Also, as resources become more scarce and these things become more expensive, the trend will probably be to make durable energy-efficient devices instead of disposable power-hungry devices. Consequently, it may become commonplace to keep the same slow and expensive low-power computer in service for forty or fifty years, instead of replacing a cheap powerful power-hungry one every three or four years, which would drastically reduce the resources required to continue to meet demand.

We're only a decade away from hitting the limits of scaling for silicon. After that, development will require design innovation rather than just packing in more transistors, so it will be significantly slower, and we'll keep computers around for longer.

So you're going to have to live with that 2020 96-core 5GHz system for a while.

Most fiber optic cables are made from silica sand. Not exactly a rare material. But the internet could also survive on copper cables, albeit at greatly reduced bandwidth. There's no reason why existing land cables could not be properly maintained.

Yup. Probably best to replace copper cables with fiber and reuse the copper.

But only an idiot or someone with an unrealistically romanticized view of the agrarian age would ever want to return to it. Any sensible person would want humanity to expend every reasonable effort possible to maintain our technology and knowledge base to the best of our ability.

The only agrarian age I'd be interested in would be a post-singularity one, where industry and technology were so advanced as to be largely invisible.

 

[excaza]

I just want my flying car.

 

[ZirconBlue]

It's... Glass.

[pedant]Well, some of it is. There are plastic optical fibers, as well.

And the jacketing materials are plastic.[/pedant]

I just want my flying car.

And personal jet-pack.


Still, I think if we're talking a post-apocalyptic world, I vote we just go Steampunk.

 

[drkitten]

About the radios, in fact, the Grand ArchDruid John Michael Greer thinks radio will be the only thing that survives out of the industrial age, because of how easy it is to create them. Cell phones, computers, modern medical technology though, he believes are going out the window, because all are dependent on petro chemicals.

Then the Grand ArchYoYo is even more a fool than I had thought.

Radio is a communications technology. Computers are a data processing technology. There's nothing incompatible about both -- in fact, one of the first computer networks was the Aloha network (1968), which ran on [drum roll, please]...

[wait for it...]

packet radio.

We can use the same transistor technology -- or, hell vacuum tube technology -- we use to make the radios and build computers instead. And here's another example where high-tech is lower-cost; the power costs for a transistor-based piece of electronics is approximately a zillionth of those for the equivalent tube-based one, so we see even less use of vacuum tubes in power-sensitive applications. (Why do you think LED TVs have replaced CRTs?)

 

[ThatSoundAgain]

Yes, radio and computers go together fine. I recently bought a DAB radio that receives digitally compressed audio transmitted over FM. That means the signal makes little sense as audio before it's been processed by the tiny computer inside the appliance.

There's still never really anything on, though.

 

[Mark6]

And where did you come up with that assertion? I'd like to see you back it up. That's borderline defaming of a public figure. You're making him sound self deluded or a scam artist, which is simply not true. Why would you do that?

When someone have been writing for over ten years things which display complete disconnect from reality, he IS either deluded or a scam artist. When some of these things display awareness of reality, but careful cherry-picking of data, the chances of the second rise greatly.

I do no need to back it up -- plenty of people on this thread already showed that ArchYoYo is full of it. If you refuse to believe them, too bad.

 

[PixyMisa]

The argument presented amounts to this:

Literacy will vanish from the world, for with no whale oil, how shall we light our lamps to read of an evening?

So pardon us if we smile condescendingly, pat you on the head, and send you off to play with the other children.

And then get on with the work of maintaining the civilisation you seem so eager to abandon.

 

[TFian]

Glass. It's made from sand.

Anyway, we've got Uranium for half a million years at least. Copper is running low, but we're replacing huge amounts of installed copper cable with optical fiber. Which is glass. Made from sand.


And, with the current world population, if we reverted to "the agrarian days" most people would be corpses.

@ Uranium for half a million years. Repeating a false statement makes it true not.

Peak Uranium is here whether you accept it or not.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24414/

… the most worrying problem is the misconception that uranium is plentiful. The world’s nuclear plants today eat through some 65,000 tons of uranium each year. Of this, the mining industry supplies about 40,000 tons. The rest comes from secondary sources such as civilian and military stockpiles, reprocessed fuel and re-enriched uranium. “But without access to the military stocks, the civilian western uranium stocks will be exhausted by 2013, concludes Dittmar.

It’s not clear how the shortfall can be made up since nobody seems to know where the mining industry can look for more.

That means countries that rely on uranium imports such as Japan and many western countries will face uranium shortages, possibly as soon as 2013. Far from being the secure source of energy that many governments are basing their future energy needs on, nuclear power looks decidedly rickety.

But what of new technologies such as fission breeder reactors which generate fuel and nuclear fusion? Dittmar is pessimistic about fission breeders. “Their huge construction costs, their poor safety records and their inefficient performance give little reason to believe that they will ever become commercially significant,” he says.

@ the corpse comment. Well, you've never heard of the idea of "die off', have you?

 

[TFian]

The only agrarian age I'd be interested in would be a post-singularity one, where industry and technology were so advanced as to be largely invisible.

What's this agrarian post singularity age? That sounds like a weird mix of scenarios. Are you one of those individuals who believes in Kurzweil's "singularity" paradise?

 

[roger]

@ Uranium for half a million years. Repeating a false statement makes it true not.

Peak Uranium is here whether you accept it or not.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24414/

Once again you are only looking at technology that makes current economic sense, not what is possible when energy costs get higher.

Here's an article that tackles that issue:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last


We have 30,000 years of uranium based on breeder reactors using currently found reserves. Then, we have the uranium in seawater, which supports Pixy's numbers of around a half million years if used in breeder reactors.

Then, of course, there are things like thorium, which is much more plentiful than uranium. It cannot be used by itself as a fissible material, but it can be used in conjunction with uranium, vastly cutting down uranium requirements.

 

[TFian]

Once again you are only looking at technology that makes current economic sense, not what is possible when energy costs get higher.

Here's an article that tackles that issue:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last


We have 30,000 years of uranium based on breeder reactors using currently found reserves. Then, we have the uranium in seawater, which supports Pixy's numbers of around a half million years if used in breeder reactors.

Breeder reactors are addressed in the article. Even in the quote (briefly)

 

[PixyMisa]

@ Uranium for half a million years. Repeating a false statement makes it true not.

Not reading the explanation of a statement doesn't mean the statement is wrong; it just means you didn't read the explanation.

There is a thousand times more Uranium in the oceans than in established mineral deposits, and it is practical to extract it, though not yet economic; extracting Uranium from seawater would increase electricity prices by 10-20%.

Peak Uranium is here whether you accept it or not.

Nope.

 

[TFian]

Not reading the explanation of a statement doesn't mean the statement is wrong; it just means you didn't read the explanation.

There is a thousand times more Uranium in the oceans than in established mineral deposits, and it is practical to extract it, though not yet economic; extracting Uranium from seawater would increase electricity prices by 10-20%.

Prove it then. Where's this magical abundant amount of uranium in the ocean?

 

[PixyMisa]

What's this agrarian post singularity age?

One where, as I said, technology is sufficiently advanced as to be largely invisible.

That sounds like a weird mix of scenarios.

It's the only survivable agrarian scenario. Whether it sounds weird is largely irrelevant.

Are you one of those individuals who believes in Kurzweil's "singularity" paradise?

I don't think that Kurzweil sees the post-Singularity world as a paradise. Just different.

I have doubts about the Singularity; I feel - but cannot prove - that the law of diminishing returns will be rather more applicable than Kurzweil expects. At best, I think it will continue to be a brake on the positive feedback loop of technological advancement.

But we are well on our way to the Singularity right now. It's not unreasonable to say that we are in the Singularity right now. Advancements in technology and the increase in knowledge are accelerating exponentially. You have to remember that the Singularity is only a remarkable event when seen from the past; once you are in it, it's just the way things are.

 

[PixyMisa]

Prove it then. Where's this magical abundant amount of uranium in the ocean?

In. The. Ocean.

It's not that complicated.

If you take a bucket of seawater and analyse it, you will find Uranium. Not a lot, proportionally, but enough to be practical to extract. And the ocean is rather large.

My figure of half a million years worth (with proven breeder reactor technology) is a low-ball estimate. With new-generation breeder reactors and more efficient extraction, we might well achieve 10 to 20 million years.

Sorry, no doom for you.

 

[Roboramma]

From a quick google on Uranium in sea water:
http://www.wise-uranium.org/upusa.html#SEAWATER

"One possibility for maintaining fission as a major option without reprocessing is low-cost extraction of uranium from seawater. The uranium concentration of sea water is low (approximately 3 ppb) but the quantity of contained uranium is vast - some 4 billion tonnes (about 700 times more than known terrestrial resources recoverable at a price of up to $130 per kg). If half of this resource could ultimately be recovered, it could support for 6,500 years 3,000 GW of nuclear capacity (75 percent capacity factor) based on next-generation reactors (e.g., high-temperature gas-cooled reactors) operated on once-through fuel cycles. Research on a process being developed in Japan suggests that it might be feasible to recover uranium from seawater at a cost of $120 per lb of U3O8.40 Although this is more than 10 times the current uranium price, it would contribute just 0.5¢ per kWh to the cost of electricity for a next-generation reactor operated on a once-through fuel cycle-equivalent to the fuel cost for an oil-fired power plant burning $3-a-barrel oil." [emphasis added]

There's nothing in there that's not feasible. When you consider what a small percentage of the cost of nuclear power is made up by the cost of the fuel, it would have to be very expensive indeed for the price to be prohibitive, particularly in the sorts of scenarios under discussion here (where the price of energy is increasing)

So, TFian, what are you disputing here?

 

[Roboramma]

Breeder reactors are addressed in the article. Even in the quote (briefly)

One person's opinion that they won't become comercially significant does little to "address" the importance of breeder reactors. Moreover, even if he is right about the problems with them (which I doubt), if we are faced with a choice between relatively expensive and not very safe breeder reactors and the collapse of modern industrial society, I think we'll choose the breeder reactors.

But it doesn't even come to that. See my last post: even without breeder reactors there's enough uranium in the oceans to last for 3000 years. And it's not very expensive to get it out: yes, it's slightly more expensive than mining current ores, but if those did run out, as you suggest, the cost of getting at ocean uranium would not be prohibitive.
So where's the problem?