Will the internet survive energy contraction?

[Hellbound]

Druids aren't allowed to use axes. "Club, dagger, dart, quarterstaff, scimitar, sickle, shortspear, sling, and spear."

Well, they can technically use them, they just can't be proficient with them.

One suspects the same applies to the sciences...

 

[roger]

So, TFian, what have you personally done in your life to prepare for the timeline you offered? Because you are describing the total breakdown of society in the next few years. At the least, I think I'd have XOM shorted with every penny I had. I'd have sold off any car I have since it would soon be worthless. I'd probably have a self sustaining garden/farm going (I need to know now that I can sustain myself, not wait until trucks can't deliver groceries to the grocery store in 2 years). Probably 30K rounds of ammunition, minimum. I'd have a well dug - a well I can dip a bucket into - if I didn't have year round water on my property. I'd have probably 5000 gal or so tank of water below the frost line. I'd have one of those nifty solar generators drkitten proposed already set up and functioning. I'd have a full collection of 19th century tools, with an emphasis on tree felling and processing. Etc.

So, have you done this stuff, or are you just arguing on the internet?

 

[Weak Kitten]

Well, they can technically use them, they just can't be proficient with them.

One suspects the same applies to the sciences...

And their attack bonuses are really bad. After all, DEX isn't a high stat for Druids.

 

[Dancing David]

Sure.

I think by 2011, we'll see a defined crash of the united states economy.

By 2012, oil will have peaked to the point where there's not enough for the car culture left. By 2013, empty freeways.

By 2018 industrial civilization around the world collapses, violence in the big cities ensures, die off emerges, and a hand full of Monticello style communities are the only ones left thriving.

OMFSM, well if you are going to take a stand.

2013 empty highways? Really?

I think you misunderstand the economics of what 'peak oil' means.

 

[ZirconBlue]

I think you misunderstand the economics of what 'peak oil' means.

I think TFian misunderstands a lot of things.

 

[Hellbound]

And their attack bonuses are really bad. After all, DEX isn't a high stat for Druids.

Nor INT, for that matter.

I did think they required WIS, though...I guess there always has to be someone who barely graduated druid school...

 

[PixyMisa]

It can eventually lead to collapse.

Think about this, to make the Internet work you need to maintain and power thousands of server farms

No.

Are the things everyone in this thread proposing technically feasible? Sure. Does it offer enough in the way of benefits to be worth the considerable cost in resources

Unstated major premise.

when every scrap of energy and material has six serious needs begging for it

Unsupported assertion.

and communication on the scale you're discussing can be done just as well by a cheaper and less resource-intensive approach that does without computers?

Impossibility.

That sentence was made of fail.

Everything you guys mentioned in your example 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.

Try it sometime. I actually had an army-surplus Morse key and a teeny low-power transmitter as a teenager. There's a reason that Morse code is extinct. It's painfully slow compared with any halfway decent communications system, even with considerable practice.

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.

Not a chance. A paper notebook would contain vastly less information and be vastly less useful than even a small wiki. A single cheap memory card or optical disk can hold the text of a hundred thousand books. You have no conception of what you are throwing away.

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, that cheaper way will be more viable.

There isn't another way, so your claim is not relevant.

First, I'm typing this on my junkyard Dell laptop made from the parts of about 6 machines and maybe 3 models, running Linux. I've got quite a few old and obsolete machines running on my home network.

Newer machines are considerably more energy efficient. Time to upgrade.

The idea that electronic devices last forever is a fallacy. Even semiconductors change characteristics over time, and other pasts like capacitors fail more quickly.

Capacitors are easily replaced. Semiconductors wear out slowly by a process called electromigration, but this is well understood and chips are designed carefully to minimise the effects. Short of some physical accident, semiconductors will generally for several decades of continual operation - much longer if they are only in use part of the time.

Anything that spins is suspect. CDs and DVDs degrade.

Very slowly.

At some point you hit diminishing returns and it's just not worth it anymore

Or not.

then you switch to simpler methods such as what the Grand ArchDruid John Michael Greer describes.

What he describes involves the deaths of upwards of six billion people. Thanks, but I'll pass.

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".

That's not true either. It's pretty easy to design a simple CPU, and easy to manufacture one. People do it as a hobby.

On top of that, over ten billion CPUs and MCUs are sold every year, and the number is growing rapidly even as the price is falling. The things are everywhere. I have dozens of them sitting in a box waiting to be built into projects that are never likely to happen. My brother, who designs custom microcontroller systems for a living, has hundreds of them.

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

Read a book.

What do you feel about nuclear energy?

It works.

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 (which is a form of permaculture/appropriate technology/organic farming) as dubbed by Grand ArchDruid John Michael Greer, or brutal feudalistic agrarian societies.

That peaceful transition is a fairy tale. A shift to an agrarian society - without post-Singularity technology hiding in the background - would mean the death of something like 90% of the human population of the planet.

And that is something most of us here would consider a bad thing, so we (many of us are scientists and engineers) are applying our skills to solving these problems, rather than fantasizing about them.

Your comments are very nearly the perfect example of the logic of abundance, the kind of thinking Grand ArchDruid John Michael Greer criticizes.

Tough bickies for you and the "ArchDruid". We live in a world of abundance. There's solar energy everywhere. There's uranium to last us a million years. Oil is running out, true, but due to the hard work of engineers and scientists focused on solving problems, that problem is being solved.

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.

I don't thing you've grasped yet that it won't.

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.

We're not short of energy unless you make it that way.

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.

That hasn't been true since... You know, I don't think that's ever been true. Outside of sub-Saharan Africa, anyway.

The Egyptians, a low-tech agrarian culture with none of our modern scientific knowledge built the pyramids pretty much to soak up the output of an idle labour force. The Romans conquered Europe and Northern Africa, and were building cities and roads and aqueducts left, right, and center.

Those things the Internet does that can't be replaced by simpler methods -- for example, the ability to look up a diagram for a foxhole radio in seconds, as I just did -- are precisely those things that require the huge server farms and other unsustainable technologies.

No. Not remotely. You have no grasp at all of the immense power and sophistication of modern technology.

You know what I do for my day job? I run a small cluster of servers - about half a rack - that downloads and indexes about two hundred and fifty million messages a day. About 250GB of structured text. The equivalent of a thousand copies of the full Encyclopedia Britannica. And we're just one tiny company, with about ten employees, located in one distant corner of the planet.

You can take the whole of Wikipedia and store it in any cheap mobile phone or MP3 player.

 

[PixyMisa]

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. 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.

Our best hope is 6+ billion deaths, simply because you don't want to admit that there's Uranium dissolved in seawater and sunlight to spare?

Thanks, but no.

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

Actually, it is more resource intensive and environmentally destructive. Take a look, for example, at the cedar forests covering so much of the Middle East... Oh, wait, there's only barren scrub there? Well, at the great wheatfields of North Africa... Oh, wait, that's a desert now. Well, the thriving civilisation of Easter Isl... Oh, never mind.

 

[PixyMisa]

Then you should listen to him

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).

Wrong, wrong, completely and hoplessly wrong. Yes, you do work by transferring heat from a hot body to a cold body. With solar power, you have access to a heat reservoir of approximately 6000 Kelvin. The only reason you would not be able to power civilization on that is if the local temperature were also 6000 Kelvin, or higher.

In which case, you have other problems.

 

[PixyMisa]

How could it be done all off of solar power?

Easily.

Could you make such solar panels without any oil?

Um, also easily. They're not made from oil.

Ah yes, the disparity of wages. The beauty of "globalization".

You seem confused. Globalization leads to greater wage parity.

Also it's only "cheaper" because of abundant liquid fossil fuels. Which is running out.

Crude oil is fast running out. Fortunately, (a) there are alternate sources that will last for decades, such as tar sands and shale oil; (b) there are alternatives available for most uses, including bulk transport; and (c) synthetic oils from fast-growing sources such as algae look entirely viable.

It might not be quite as cheap, but the alternatives are known, exist, work. No doom for you. A mild recession, perhaps.

It's like predicting a world-ending plague and finding that a handful of people came down with the sniffles.

Things like fusion, fission and space based solar are fantasies, that have no basis in reality.

Fission works quite well, thanks, and will do so for the next few hundred thousand years.

Uh, a fireplace?

Do you know where the forests of Babylon and Cyprus and Syria went? And England?

What are you going to burn, sand?

 

[drkitten]

Nor INT, for that matter.

I did think they required WIS, though...I guess there always has to be someone who barely graduated druid school...

"What do you call someone who graduates last in his class in medical school?"

"Doctor"

---

"What do you call someone who graduates last in his class in druid school?"
"Grand ArchDruid John Michael Greer"

 

[Hellbound]

"What do you call someone who graduates last in his class in medical school?"

"Doctor"

---

"What do you call someone who graduates last in his class in druid school?"
"Grand ArchDruid John Michael Greer"

Exactly what I was thinking, drkitten

 

[drkitten]

Wrong, wrong, completely and hoplessly wrong. Yes, you do work by transferring heat from a hot body to a cold body. With solar power, you have access to a heat reservoir of approximately 6000 Kelvin. The only reason you would not be able to power civilization on that is if the local temperature were also 6000 Kelvin, or higher.

I take it you've never been to Tempe, Arizona in July.

 

[Mark6]

"What do you call someone who graduates last in his class at West Point?"

"Sir"

Yes, I know it is off-topic.

 

[Dancing David]

Nor INT, for that matter.

I did think they required WIS, though...I guess there always has to be someone who barely graduated druid school...

You know what they call the student who graduated last in his class from Grand ArchDruid school?

Grand ArchDruid

 

[TubbaBlubba]

Yes. Yes it is. Reminds me a bit of Dwarf Fortress.

I know my experience with Dorftress will come into good use after the collapse of modern civilization.


BEWARE THE CARPS!

 

[PixyMisa]

I take it you've never been to Tempe, Arizona in July.

I did say civilization.

 

[excaza]

I have, and am going to continue to give evidence. I'm continuing to work on posts that show that every other energy source that's been suggested to replace petroleum has a very weak EROEI compared to Petroleum, and won't replace it.

EROEI? That's what you're going to use? Even assuming that efficiencies stay the same (which is a ludicrous assumption), every single renewable energy source has a higher EROEI than both petroleum and coal.

 

[drkitten]

EROEI? That's what you're going to use? Even assuming that efficiencies stay the same (which is a ludicrous assumption), every single renewable energy source has a higher EROEI than both petroleum and coal.

I must admit (I missed this the first time) that EROEI seems an odd metric to use if you're talking about total energy availability.

I mean, let's assume that some bright nerd at MIT figures out how to achieve total conversion of mass to energy, but the equipment itself is immensely power-hungry and you only get an ROI of 2 -- that is, you can usefully extract only 50% of the energy implicit in the mass of an object.

The world consumption of energy in 2008 is about 500 exajoules -- 500 x 10^18 joules.

One gram of mass is about 100 terajoules of energy-equivalent, which under our assumption is about 50 terajoules of useful energy.

So by converting a tonne of mass into energy, you could get 50 exajoules of useful energy. By converting ten tonnes of mass into energy -- a swimming pool of water -- you could power the planet for a year. It doesn't matter what the EROEI is; it's how much total energy is available.

 

[Weak Kitten]

Nor INT, for that matter.

I did think they required WIS, though...I guess there always has to be someone who barely graduated druid school...

Had a friend who the dice hated. He ended up having to play a druid with 6 INT. Said druid was last seen chasing after a bear yelling, "Come back bear! Don't you want to be my friend?" It became a running gag and the poor guy was allowed to roll up a new character.

Sadly, you can't roll up a new character in real life.