Will the internet survive energy contraction?

[ThatSoundAgain]

Wrong. You're using the (il)logic of abundance. Sure, we build them now, because we have abundant resources. When we don't, we'll go back to less energy intensive ways of doing the same thing, Morse code, carrier pigeons, pony express.

Why are you not addressing the fact that an energy-optimal computer network is vastly cheaper than an energy optimal pony express?

you're making the assumption that "the internet" is at its core what they're doing at Youtube and Amazon. If you set the baseline there, in an energy abundance no less, and use those numbers, then sure you have half a case. But it's a mistaken premise.

 

[Number Six]

I think this thread is ripe for someone to make a specific prediction with a time frame attached to it. That way the subjective Is Not / Is Too nature of the debate can be collapsed into somebody saying "Toldja."

 

[excaza]

Why are you not addressing the fact that an energy-optimal computer network is vastly cheaper than an energy optimal pony express?

Or that the first computers used hundreds of kilowatts of power (ENIAC used 150kW), when the modern desktop can get away with using about 300 watts.

 

[TFian]

Which is only a problem if you assume technology won't just shift away from petroleum. Which is a ridiculously braindead assumption.

Grand ArchDruid John Michael Greer has written extensively why technology can't shift away from petroleum. You should read up on it.

 

[TFian]

Why are you not addressing the fact that an energy-optimal computer network is vastly cheaper than an energy optimal pony express?

you're making the assumption that "the internet" is at its core what they're doing at Youtube and Amazon. If you set the baseline there, in an energy abundance no less, and use those numbers, then sure you have half a case. But it's a mistaken premise.

It isn't though. Pony Express can be powered purely by muscle power, can you say the same about email?

Explain your baseline comment.

 

[excaza]

Grand ArchDruid John Michael Greer has written extensively why technology can't shift away from petroleum. You should read up on it.

I think I'll listen to people who know what they're talking about.

 

[TFian]

I think I'll listen to people who know what they're talking about.

Then you should listen to him

The second issue, though, is the one I want to stress here. It’s seen a lot less discussion, but it’s even more important than the issue of net energy, and it unfolds from the most ironclad of all the laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics. The point that needs to be understood is that how much energy you happen to have on hand, even after subtracting the energy cost, doesn’t actually matter a bit when it comes to doing work. The amount of work you get out of a given energy source depends, not on the amount of energy, but on the difference in energy concentration between the energy source and the environment.

Please read that again: The amount of work you get out of a given energy source depends, not on the amount of energy it contains, but on the difference in energy concentration between the energy source and the environment.

Got that? Now let’s take a closer look at it.

Left to itself, energy always moves from more concentrated states to less concentrated states; this is why the coffee in your morning cuppa gets cold if you leave it on the table too long. The heat that was in the coffee still exists, because energy is neither created nor destroyed; it’s simply become useless to you, because most of it’s dispersed into the environment, raising the air temperature in your dining room by a fraction of a degree. There’s still heat in the coffee as well, since it stops losing heat when it reaches room temperature and doesn’t continue down to absolute zero, but room temperature coffee is not going to do the work of warming your insides on a cold winter morning.

This is why we can't run our civilization on things like solar. since sunshine is dilute, not concentrated, it doesn't have very much usable energy in, and therefore cannot power civilization (eg via PVs or concentrated solar power).

 

[ThatSoundAgain]

Oh he's (and I) are not really worried about the internet, he's just trying ti dispell the myths of a continuation of the "networked" culture, which will be disappearing soon. There's likely to be a massive Malthusian style die off, whether that's good or bad is debatable though.

If you think that's at all debatable, then you are a proponent of human misery.

John Greer doesn't believe we'll have refrigerators (at least like the ones we have now) or electric lighting, and thinks our best hope is a middle age agrarian civilization.

You said we'd have to turn off communications to have refrigerators. Was that your own idea then?

A primitive agrarian civilization is last on the list of sane alternatives for anyone who isn't a proponent of human misery.

Pre industrial technology isn't more resource intensive or environmentally destructive though.

Scaled to support 6 billion people it is. But oh, I forget, you want most of those to die off anyway.

 

[GreyArea]

@ Age, I'm 23. No, I don't have much sense on how life was different thirty years ago.

My point is that we still had lives and an advanced (if woefully inefficient) society, even though we used less energy then. Same with 1950 or 1910. I don't think the future of energy and technology will simply replicate any particular year in the past, and I'm pretty sure that Mr. Greer has said the same thing. (It's been a while since I read the Archdruid Report.)

As an experiment, track how much oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy you are using these days. Find out how much you would have used in 1980 and see what it would be like to live on that energy budget. Remember, this was the time of the second oil shock. Ask your parents or their peers about how they had to adjust to those circumstances.

Maybe you won't be amazed by the things you can still do using less of these several forms of energy.

Then figure out how much energy you want to consume (1980 or 2010 or whenever), and how you would power that way of life without using any oil.

The charts on this DOE page ( http://www.eia.doe.gov/aer/txt/ptb0103.html ) and this Wikipedia page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States ) will help you figure all that out. (I'm assuming you live in the U.S.) Population data is available from the US Census. http://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/hiscendata.html But also keep in mind that there are regional and state differences. For example, more coal is used for electrical generation in Texas than in New England, which uses more natural gas.

That Wikipedia article is a good place to start reading about what sectors of the economy rely on which forms of energy. You will see that electronics make up a small proportion of consumption, and very little electrical production comes from oil. This is why I think that society will adjust to oil shortages in sectors that use a lot of petroleum well before we turn off the Internet.

But with renewable energy you have problems with intermittent and EROEI. How will they ever scale up?

Regarding intermittence, as I mentioned you can send electricity around the world to fill in the demand. Long-distance DC lines are being experimented with. George Monbiot wrote about this in Heat, as well as innovative storage methods. There was also a Scientific American cover story about renewable energy options pretty recently. (I'm sorry I can't remember which issue.)

As for EROEI, maybe for now we make wind turbines in factories electrified by burning coal. Thirty years from now we'll make wind turbines in factories electrified by wind turbines and tidal generators and all the other wedges of the electrical pie.

What do you feel about nuclear energy?

I dislike it. But I expect that I will lose that fight. Demand for non-fossil-fueled electrical production, new kinds of small reactors, and national politics will bring it back. Hopefully, we'll figure out how to deal with the waste later.


Regarding the timeframe:

Well, I figure it would go along the lines of when oil becomes too expensive, industrial civilization begins to contract, resource wars become common, a mass starvation die off occurs, and we either see a peaceful transition to Green Wizardy ... or brutal feudalistic agrarian societies.

A good start. That's a timeline, a sequence of events. But you should also consider the timing, the speed associated with that sequence, the frame of years. How quickly do you think your sequence would unfold? You can even put dates on it as part of a thought experiment. And we can examine the details if you'd like.

What is your timeline?

I don't think the other side of Hubbert's Peak is a cliff, but rather a step-like slope. Even if oil use declined twice as fast as it it rose, and assuming we peak right this minute, we won't get to zero until the Eighties. I think that we'll be mostly off of oil before that.

Higher prices and price instability will force us to change, and the trials of new systems in the Teens will show us the winning and losing generating methods for different environments. With that stick and those proven carrots, I think you'll start seeing everyone jump on the renewable bandwagon in the Twenties. Most of the infrastructure will turn over in the period 2020 through 2050.

 

[TFian]

If you think that's at all debatable, then you are a proponent of human misery.



You said we'd have to turn off communications to have refrigerators. Was that your own idea then?

A primitive agrarian civilization is last on the list of sane alternatives for anyone who isn't a proponent of human misery.



Scaled to support 6 billion people it is. But oh, I forget, you want most of those to die off anyway.

Here's what Greer said on the matter

I don't think you've grasped yet that the future ahead of us is one in which there will be urgent, bare-survival needs clamoring for every watt of electricity, every scrap of salvage, and every hour of labor time. For a village to devote the electrical output of a waterwheel to a repeater could mean that the electricity won't be there to power a couple of refrigerators, so that children don't die of diarrhea from spoiled food, the way they used to do, every summer, in the pre-refrigeration US. The hours of labor needed to keep your computer system running is time that could be spent growing and harvesting more food, so the risk of going hungry before the next harvest will be a little less. That's the way life works when you don't have a fantastic abundance of cheap energy flooding through a society -- and it's a reality that most people these days seem unable to grasp.

@ the die off. Well, we've overshoot our carrying capacity of this planet, so a die off is probably inevitable. If we're to go back to an agrarian civilization, we'll have to adapt towards, and that means shedding a large portion of our population.

 

[Number Six]

This is why we can't run our civilization on things like solar. since sunshine is dilute, not concentrated, it doesn't have very much usable energy in, and therefore cannot power civilization (eg via PVs or concentrated solar power).

The amount of usable energy in sunshine depends on what instruments you're using to use the energy. And over time that amount will go up as technology increases. It's not like it has be be incredibly efficient in the grand scheme of things considering the tremendous amount of sunshine that is constantly pouring onto the earth.

That aside though, the fact that a small amount of matter equals a large amount of energy is going to enter into this equation even more someday than it does now.

 

[NewtonTrino]

Wow, this greer guy really is a total kook isn't he?

There isn't going to be any energy contraction. We have many many sources of energy that we haven't even bothered to tap yet because it's not cost effective at the moment. As technology improves and fossil fuels become more expensive to extract we will slowly shift to these other sources. For example space based solar, fission, fusion etc. There's really no reason we have to worry about running out of energy.

Also for those who are extra short sighted remember that almost our entire fossil fuel infrastructure is only 150 years old and most of it is much newer than that. Over the next century we could easily transition to a different infrastructure.

 

[ThatSoundAgain]

It isn't though. Pony Express can be powered purely by muscle power, can you say the same about email?

Yes. The hand-cranked OLPC does email just as well as my destop computer here. It does it over WiFi, a radio technology, and can mesh network in that it doesn't need any infrastructure beyond the machines. Network data will bunny-hop through the devices in range. You'd probably want to add some backbone anyway, optics or radio, but that's the idea.

The kind of work it takes to keep a couple of ponies fed, and build and maintain a road to put the Express on dwarfs the email any day.

Explain your baseline comment.

Sure. If you look at the internet infrastructure today, and set that as your baseline of what network infrastructure costs, you're going to get a wrong number. The servers alone that online video necessitates could be switched off right now, and all you'd miss is online video.

What I'm saying is that it's a fallacy to compare the internet today to any other potential method. Before you'd even consider those other methods, you'd optimize the net.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

I wanted to ask you all, how many of you have experience, and authority when it comes to hardware matters?

I have some hardware training and experience, although I have much more knowledge and experience with software than with hardware.

Sure can back up the theory the Internet is unsustainable, and I will address the points that people make, while for whatever reason insulting the great Grand ArchDruid John Michael Greer as I said in an earlier post later. I want to know though for the moment how many people here actually have experience in hardware and energy intensive structures.

Several of the people who have disagreed with you in this thread are more reliable and more accomplished than "the great Grand ArchDruid John Michael Greer". Why are you so ready to believe everything the Grand ArchDruid has written?

Sure, but I'll just be repeating myself. Think about this, to make the Internet work you need to maintain and power thousands of server farms, each of which use as much electricity as a midsized city, not to mention all the other costly and energy-intensive infrastructure that keeps the net running. Everything you guys mentioned in your examples could be done just as effectively without having to devote resources to building and maintaining computers. Your email to a distant friend? The message could be sent just as easily by radio using Morse Code.

Your argument falls apart as soon as we quantify it. Consider sending Morse (International) code by radio (continuous-wave telegraphy). For reliable (as opposed to occasional) communications over a distance of hundreds or thousands of miles, you will need a transmitter that consumes hundreds of watts; in fact, you will probably need a kilowatt or more. That transmitter will have to be turned on while we transmit the telegraphy. I was once able to send and to receive 25 words per minute, which was faster than most amateur radio operators. That works out to about 150 bytes per minute, or 20 bits/second.

Sending a 20 megabyte file would take about 3 months. Powering a kilowatt transmitter for 3 months costs over 2000 kilowatt-hours. Compare that to sending the same 20 megabyte file over the Internet, which I did earlier this morning: It took about a minute using a computer that consumes at most 25 watts. The Internet infrastructure that played a role in that transmission consumed a few watts also, but not many of those watt-seconds were spent getting that 20 megabyte file to its destination.

It appears, therefore, that you are advocating a technology (continuous wave telegraphy) whose energy costs are approximately one hundred thousand times greater than what it cost when I transferred the file this morning.

Grand ArchDruid John Michael Greer has written extensively why technology can't shift away from petroleum. You should read up on it.

Grand ArchDruid John Michael Greer has also written extensively about vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, and other magical beings. From the Amazon blurb for one of his books:

A thousand years ago, vampires and shapeshifters, spirits of the ancestors and spirits that were never human at all, intelligent beings with subtle bodies or none, were as much a matter of everyday life then as electricity is now.
But we know better nowadays, of course.
Don't we?
This book is based on the uncomfortable knowledge that we don't know better—that at least some of these entities had, and still have, a reality that goes beyond the limits of human imagination and human psychology.

Why should we pay any more attention to what Greer writes about technology than to what he writes about magical beings?

Then you should listen to him.

 

[drkitten]

I wanted to ask you all, how many of you have experience, and authority when it comes to hardware matters?

Me.

 

[Dancing David]

I wanted to ask you all, how many of you have experience, and authority when it comes to hardware matters? From my experience, everyone optimistic about the energy usage of the internet usually comes from a software background, and NOT a hardware background. When I meet people with a hardware background, they tend to agree more with the Grand ArchDruid John Michael Greer. I'm going to respond to the previous posts later, but I just wanted to ask this.

I am both, I work with hardware all the time.

And anecdotes, appeal to authority,

How much energy to make paper, how much water?

 

[AvalonXQ]

Wait, when has he deleted any comments? I see some comments there criticizing his opinions.

Look carefully at his response to one poster, where he explains that if the post had just been about how the internet was energy efficient he would have just deleted it without letting it post. Since the post also had a second paragraph speculating about another issue, he let it stay.
In other words, if you question his ridiculous assumptions, Greer isn't interested in what you have to say.

 

[Dancing David]

Sure, but I'll just be repeating myself. Think about this, to make the Internet work you need to maintain and power thousands of server farms, each of which use as much electricity as a midsized city, not to mention all the other costly and energy-intensive infrastructure that keeps the net running.

How ill you heat a hous ewith wood?
Or will you go back to coal?

Everything you guys mentioned in your examples could be done just as effectively without having to devote resources to building and maintaining computers.

Really and what is teh energy budhet for a letter?

Blind spot?

Your email to a distant friend? The message could be sent just as easily by radio using Morse Code. A local wiki, for heaven's sake, in a small rural community? Face to face communication, backed up by a notebook or two (of the paper kind), works at least as well and is vastly cheaper. This is the point that I'm trying to make here: it doesn't matter if a technology is really nifty; if there's another way to meet its actual needs that's cheaper in terms of scarce resources,

really? How many gallons of water to make a ream of paper?

that cheaper way will be more viable. Also, there are no simple CPUs - even the simplest is the result of a planet wide industrial chain that could not be duplicated on a small scale. That's true for so much of the things we use every day and think of as "simple". Because we can't have the energy to maintain such a vast power hungry network, and the fact we can't locally create our own computers without intense energy and scarce resources, the Internet is not long for this world.

You are monomaniacal.
Later dude!

 

[drkitten]

Wrong. You're using the (il)logic of abundance. Sure, we build them now, because we have abundant resources. When we don't, we'll go back to less energy intensive ways of doing the same thing, Morse code, carrier pigeons, pony express.

Pony express is "less energy intensive"?

:lol2

An average horse eats about 25 pounds of fodder a day -- at 200 (kilo)calories a pound, that's about 5000 kcal of energy. The pony express could take messages from St. Louis to Sacramento in about ten days carrying a weight of less than 100 pounds of cargo.
That's 50,000 kcal to deliver 100 pounds, or 500,000 calories per pound.

100 pounds is about 20 reams of paper -- call it 10,000 pages or 10MB of data.

Of course, it was actually considerably less efficient than this, because the pony express actually used staged horses for speed -- in fact, it took hundreds of horses to carry the mail although bandwidth volume makes up for this to some extent.

 

[AvalonXQ]

I expect to get a flurry of responses that simply ignore the argument Grand Archdruid John Michael Greer makes about economic viability...

It seems to me that pretty much every response you've gotten has actually been addressing the argument about economic viability.
The irony is that Greer expects his economic viability argument to be taken as a given, and isn't ready to debate it -- because the facts don't line up with his assumptions.
He hopes that others will ignore the basis of his argument and argue from consequences instead, because when the actual topic is engaged, his assumptions are ridiculous and his facts are wrong.