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Will the internet survive energy contraction?

TFian said:
The construction of horseshoes way pre dates the industrial age. Because so, it takes less energy, not more.
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No. The "pre-industrial" production of horseshoes was powered by burning huge, huge, huge quantities of wood.
 
TFian said:
And sending the person to deliver the letter, is far less energy consuming than riding your bike for 15 hours a day just to send an email. Right?
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You've ignored the units again. 15 hours on a horse, and you can move one letter about 100 miles. One millisecond on a generator-bike, and you can move one email anywhere on Earth instantly.

That's the comparison. Do you want to spend all day on a horse, or one split second on a generator-bike?

15 hours on a generator bike---that's not one email, that's a full day's uptime for every computer in a small neighborhood, sending as many emails as you like, plus whatever accounting/archiving/research/business/education/etc. those computers are also used for.
 
TFian said:
No doomsday scenario. Me and the Archdruid believe in a slow decline, no apocalyptic scenario or die off. Just a transition back to agrarian subsistence living.
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No die off? Could have fooled me, since you've preached that numerous times in previous posts.

Also, I found this little nugget from Greer

Gail, a world population of 6.8 billion isn't supportable for long anyway. The scenario I'm proposing assumes widespread malnutrition and failing public health as important parts of the crisis picture, and yes, that means that a great many people will die sooner than they otherwise would.
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Source http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6309/603514

Sounds like a die off to me. The only difference between the Grand Arch Venereal disease and the other "die off" whackos is he believes it's going to be with a longer time period, with the same end result. They all preach "die off", then a return to feudalistic peasantry, as he does. I don't see why we should treat him any differently.
 
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TFian said:
Sure, I agree in a hypothetical sense. But I never argued otherwise.
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Yes you did.

TFian said:
Energy usage of server farms http://colonos.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/the-energy-nightmare-of-web-server-farms/
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Every time someone says "a future Internet doesn't need much power" you'd quoted the power of the worst of the modern internet.


ETA: here's another one.

TFian said:
The problem with that logic is simply that if the necessary jobs can be done more economically by some other means in an energy-constrained future, then they will be done that other way. In a world where half the surviving population farms for a living and energy supplies are tightly constrained in concentration as well as quantity, there are many better ways to handle information flow than vast server farms that burn through as much electricity as a small city!
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TFian said:
Mind you, with luck and a lot of hard work it should be possible to preserve at least a few of the technological advances of recent centuries into the far future. You don't need fossil fuels to maintain a good working knowledge of sanitation, or build solar water heaters, or make and run vacuum tube-based radio gear with an intercontinental range, and these and many things like them could substantially reduce the misery that comes to mind when words like "medieval" are mentioned. Still, in terms of energy per capita, and of the percentage of the population making a living directly by agriculture, the medieval model's probably fairly close to our future a century or two out.
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Have you ever run a vacuum tube? In order to work at all, their filament needs to be electrically heated, often to the tune of several watts. That's one tube. A standard tube radio has five tubes and draws 10-20 watts.

Have you ever built a vacuum tube? No, and of course neither have I, but I have friends in closely related industries and I know what their equipment looks like. It's just like semiconductor equipment, just less clean. You've got some melting/molding operations and some high-vacuum coating operations; the semiconductor fabs are cleaner and more precisely built, but the energy-hungry parts (pumps, filaments, bakeout heaters, etc.) are identical.

(A colleague of mine once had to construct a complete materials-cost budget for some new transistor. Each transistor needed X much gold, X much Alq3, X much dry nitrogen blown over it, etc. IIRC the most expensive part of the process was that the substrate had to be washed in acetone, and this used lots of acetone.)
 
More generally, TFian, it sounds like you're reasoning about this backwards.

You have a very clear mental picture about what you think the future looks like. You think it's primitive-agrarian, but with modern medicine and maybe the odd vaguely-steampunk radio. Then you're reasoning backwards to justify this. You take all of the thinks that aren't in your mental picture (computers, nuclear power plants, etc.) and wave your hands to justify losing them. I guess there's no power to run them. OK, I guess there's no power to manufacture them. OK, maybe there's technically power to manufacture and run them, but who would bother when there are horses? OK, even if some people want computers, they don't stay around unless there's a whole infrastructure and commerce surrounding them, so I guess that infrastructure must disappear somehow.

If you want to reason forward: start with modern life and start cranking up the consumer cost of oil, then the consumer cost of electricity. How do people adapt? What different decisions do they make---not "as a society" but as fridge-owning, bill-paying, power-plant-manufacturing-company-stockholding individuals?
 
TFian said:
In a world where half the surviving population farms for a living and energy supplies are tightly constrained in concentration as well as quantity, there are many better ways to handle information flow than vast server farms that burn through as much electricity as a small city! A shortwave radio net, using packet methods as long as computers are available,
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Wait...what? You're not only conflating the "Internet" with the "World Wide Web" again...you're contradicting yourself.

You talk of viability packet radio powered Internet, which I've detailed in previous posts, while saying the "Internet" is going to disappear.

Uhm?
 
ben m said:
More generally, TFian, it sounds like you're reasoning about this backwards.

You have a very clear mental picture about what you think the future looks like. You think it's primitive-agrarian, but with modern medicine and maybe the odd vaguely-steampunk radio. Then you're reasoning backwards to justify this. You take all of the thinks that aren't in your mental picture (computers, nuclear power plants, etc.) and wave your hands to justify losing them. I guess there's no power to run them. OK, I guess there's no power to manufacture them. OK, maybe there's technically power to manufacture and run them, but who would bother when there are horses? OK, even if some people want computers, they don't stay around unless there's a whole infrastructure and commerce surrounding them, so I guess that infrastructure must disappear somehow.

If you want to reason forward: start with modern life and start cranking up the consumer cost of oil, then the consumer cost of electricity. How do people adapt? What different decisions do they make---not "as a society" but as fridge-owning, bill-paying, power-plant-manufacturing-company-stockholding individuals?
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^This.

Computers/the Internet are extraordinarily valuable/productive. Despite their costs, no one but a tiny number of fringe luddites wants them to go away. A whole lot of effort and brain power is constantly being applied to the task of making them cheaper and more economical. For example, a company near where I live is developing the technology to manufacture chips on synthetic diamond rather than silicon, because diamond chips can run far hotter than silicon. Once they bring this tech to market, the need to expend all that energy (half their consumption according to your link above) cooling the server farms will go away. That's just one of hundreds, if not thousands, of ways that the Internet will continue to provide far more services at a far lower energy cost than any of the antiquated technology TFian imagines we'll return to.
 
So, how much energy does the "worst" of the server farms really use? I don't buy that whole "small city" estimate from the ArchFurry.
 
Garrison0fMars said:
So, how much energy does the "worst" of the server farms really use? I don't buy that whole "small city" estimate from the ArchFurry.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform

Estimates of the power required for over 450,000 servers range upwards of 20 megawatts, which cost on the order of US$2 million per month in electricity charges. The combined processing power of these servers might reach from 20 to 100 petaflops.
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That's 1% of the power output of the Hoover Dam. It's about 10% of the expected average production (or < 5% of the peak) of the Cape Wind offshore wind farm. In fossil-fuel terms, that's about the electrical power of the cogen gas turbine that powers, heats, and cools the MIT campus; in automotive terms it's about 20,000 horsepower, so about 100 large car engines revving.

A lot of power? Yes, it's a lot of power compared to things with less power, like individual humans and horses and radios. It's not a lot of power compared to currently-existing renewable-energy infrastructure. It's a miniscule amount of power compared to the size of the rest of the energy crisis.

Let me put it another way. I bet that the energy consumed by the morning commutes of Google employees is greater than the energy consumed by the Google servers running 24/7.
 
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ben m said:
A lot of power? Yes, it's a lot of power compared to things with less power, like individual humans and horses and radios. It's not a lot of power compared to currently-existing renewable-energy infrastructure.
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Not only that, but I showed TFian GreenStarNetwork, an ISP that is powering it's "server farms" entirely on local renewable energy. Me thinks the ArchLuddite is seeing what he wants to see, IE an future agrarian society where we go back believing in "Magic" and other such nonsense.
 
ben m said:
More generally, TFian, it sounds like you're reasoning about this backwards.

You have a very clear mental picture about what you think the future looks like. You think it's primitive-agrarian, but with modern medicine and maybe the odd vaguely-steampunk radio. Then you're reasoning backwards to justify this. You take all of the thinks that aren't in your mental picture (computers, nuclear power plants, etc.) and wave your hands to justify losing them. I guess there's no power to run them. OK, I guess there's no power to manufacture them. OK, maybe there's technically power to manufacture and run them, but who would bother when there are horses? OK, even if some people want computers, they don't stay around unless there's a whole infrastructure and commerce surrounding them, so I guess that infrastructure must disappear somehow.

If you want to reason forward: start with modern life and start cranking up the consumer cost of oil, then the consumer cost of electricity. How do people adapt? What different decisions do they make---not "as a society" but as fridge-owning, bill-paying, power-plant-manufacturing-company-stockholding individuals?
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The problem with all that is, the Internet is a key component of a societal framework that is unsustainable, IE industrial civilization. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that’s based on the use of non-renewable resources won’t last. In fact, I would say it takes anybody but a rocket scientist to figure that out. And likewise, it doesn’t take someone who’s very smart to figure out that if every year there are fewer salmon return than the year before, that eventually there won’t be any left. I mean, there were so many passenger pigeons that they would darken the sky for days at a time. There were six times as many passenger pigeons than all the birds in the northern—in North America. Do we know why there aren’t any penguins in the northern hemisphere? The great ox? They were destroyed. And my point is that any way of life that’s based on the hyper-exploitation of renewable resources won’t last.
 
TFian said:
Which require no fossil fuels.
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If you're assuming there's enough wood to run a blacksmith's shop at all, then there is also enough wood to run a generator. Anything that runs on coal can also run on wood.

So I'm sitting in the agrarian future, standing next to the cord of wood that I've chopped and split laboriously under muscle power.

A) An itinerant blacksmith comes up to me and says, "Good sir, if you give me that entire cord of wood, I'll make you a horseshoe, with which you can make the two-day ride to London a few dozen times to resolve your glebe-land lawsuit."

B) A Swiss trader comes up to me and says, "Good sir, I have brought a shipload of laptops and cable modems from Iceland. Your townsfolk have pooled together a pound of silver to install a modem and five terminals at the library. If you'll donate one stick of firewood per year for the generator, and two silver pfennig for a share of the capital, you can email or Skype with London as often as you need to."

You and the Archdruid can spend your lifetime on those horses; I've got better things to do (farming) and will cough up the pfennig for computer time.
 
TFian said:
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that’s based on the use of non-renewable resources won’t last.
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Do you consider wood a renewable resource?
If not, then I guess fire is out.
If so, then what's wrong with running our computers on wood-fired generators?
 
TFian said:
That method may work for a little while
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That method would work a lot longer than "a little while". Do you know just how much electronic waste we have sitting around, or how many processors are churned out, every day? We already have urban shops that fit this model (google "Free Geek", which I've pointed out before, they already have 12 locations and growing). They'd grow far quicker if they became the necessary model to manufacture new computers.
 
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