Will the internet survive energy contraction?

[AvalonXQ]

So you're making all these statements about how the world is doomed, and you haven't already done the work? That's reassuring.

TFian just accepts Greer's word for it.
Which again, isn't exactly reassuring.

 

[TFian]

So you're making all these statements about how the world is doomed, and you haven't already done the work? That's reassuring.

Not quite, it takes a while to post dozens of detailed responses to the various posts that people have made, along with the requested evidence, numbers etc. When having a real life as well, such as a job, family, etc., those take precedent and things that can be time consuming as a past time are put in the back burner.

 

[drkitten]

TFian just accepts Greer's word for it.

This is an important point. TFian, are you reading?

Basically, what you seem to be doing is citing Greer himself. You're not citing anyone else who agrees with him (which is quite understandable, as no one else in the world does), nor are you citing any of the reasons why his opinions are rational (which again is understandable, as there are no such reasons). I'd go further -- not only are there no reasons why his opinions are rational, but there are ample opinions why his opinions are not rational. Just as a quick set of for instances:

* He completely misestimates the amount and availability of uranium.
* He has no concept of the comparative energy uses of available technologies -- for example, he supports radio that uses kilowatts of power, but not fiber optics that use milliwatts.
* He has no idea of the existing substitutes for oil (e.g. in plastics).

In post #84, you wrote

You're making him sound self deluded or a scam artist, which is simply not true.

Do you have any actual evidence that he's not either self-deluded or a scam artist? Because based on the rather egregious errors he's made -- the errors listed alone suffice -- I believe that he is. If that be defamation, so be it. The truth is an absolute defence.

 

[AvalonXQ]

Not quite, it takes a while to post dozens of detailed responses to the various posts that people have made, along with the requested evidence, numbers etc.

How about you post just one? We can pick that one apart while you tackle the next.

 

[excaza]

I wonder if there's a direct correlation between mention of the second law of thermodynamics and kookery.

 

[Hellbound]

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 do.

I work both hardware and software, both for civillian and U.S. government concerns. On the hardware side, I've dealt with networking including LAN, WAN, wired, fiber optic, wireless, satellite, POTS, DSN, and the servers you're discussing. On the software side I've dealth with the same, as well as servers of various flavors.

My guess is that the people who have a greed may know hardware, but not energy. IN other words, if you asked me "is there was no electricity would the Internet work" I'd say no. But that does NOT mean I agree with your position. The issue in question is the unrealistic assumption that all our energy will simply turn off one day, nothing left. Not to mention the effficiency matters that you are completely failing to understand.

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.

No, you don't. This is misconception number one. To keep the Internet running WITH ALL THE CURRENT CONTENT, BANDWIDTH, LEVEL OF USE, AND CAPABILITY IT CURRENTLY HAS you may need that. To maintain just basic connectivity, with the capability to deliver, say, text and still images, and trimming out a lot of frivolous content (such as free hosting services and other crap), you can get by with a LOT less. And, assuming energy costs go up, that means costs for these services go up, so the process of weeding out the unnecessary is an economic one: free hosting will go away, social networking will start to charge fees and quit being "look at me" sites and turn more into tools, people and busiensses will cut out bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming media unless there's good reason, and home internet access will gain bandwidth controls or limitations. All of which means you can turn off a lot of those servers.

And by the way, most server farms do NOT take as much power as a small city, especially these days. The vast majority of companies are moving into virtual servers and hosts, which drastically cuts power consumption.

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. 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, that cheaper way will be more viable.

But you're failing here. You keep comparing apples and oranges. You compare ALL of the MILLIONS of things the Internet allows, with a few small, select, limited examples done without the Internet. The comparison is invalid. It would be very simple and very easy to keep, for example, nothing but email running. Comapring the resources needed for that to your radio and morse code shows the limited capability you're advocating: Morse code takes a long time to code and send, and the reciever has to decode it. You can't send images. The longer the message the longer the transmission. And you're limited by the range of your radio. Not to mention you still have to have power for your radio to send the message, and now you have to have everyone with a radio, radio repeater towers and retransmission lines, etc, etc.

Not to mentuion that the Internet becomes MUCH more efficient when you consider that your transmission lines can be multi-use. Those lines are already there...taking them out would be resource-intensive, and letting them sit there without use is a waste. Why try to manufacture and pass out hundreds of radios, and build the infrastructure for your Morse code, when computers are already pretty common and the transmission lines and infrastructure are already there? And then you have to condsder everything else the Internet can do. File transfers (unless you assume all computers will simply go away, there's a need for this...compare internet transmission to burnign a disk/USB/floppy and hand-carrying), imaging, real-time communications, email, knowledge base, etc, etc.

It's much more likely that the inefficient, limited "real-life" operations would go away, and the Internet take over those functions. How much does it cost, for example, to heat and cool a library, pay for water and electricity, maintain thousands of books, pay salries and benefits, etc, when that building may server only 50,000 to 100,000 customers? Replace that with a handful of servers, and you can offer hundreds of thousands of books, anywhere in the world, instantly, and there isn't the issue of a book you need being checked out.

You're completley missing out on efficiencies of scale.

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.

This is also wrong. It's the result of a worldwide chain because it's cheaper. And most of what happens worldwide is resource gathering and programming/chip design. The manufacturing tends to be at a single location where the actual CPU is produced. If we're so far gone that we can't get resources from one location to another, then we're all going to die anyway. And we can live without new CPU and IC designs.

FOr whatever reason, you seem to be thinkign the Internet has to be everything it currently is, with all the same capabilities, and ever-increasing capabilities, or it isn't useful at all. Then you compare it to minimal necessary usage in other technologies. It's not only an unfair comparison, it's cherry-picking your data.

Quite frankly, your opinion, and that of the ArchDude Whatever, are based on ignorance of the actual realities involved and inaccurate comparisons, not to mention the basic faulty assumptions that all our energy is simply going to shut off some day.

 

[TFian]

How about you post just one? We can pick that one apart while you tackle the next.

Sure ok, I'll write something up later this afternoon. I also have another thread in the making. Enjoy picking that apart as well.

 

[Dancing David]

Well that is kind of what the JREF is about, picking things apart.

 

[Weak Kitten]

Wow Hellbound, that was very well said. Thank you. TFian, I think Hellbound is the person you really need to reply to. He/she seems to have a very good grasp of how the internet works today.

 

[Hellbound]

Wow Hellbound, that was very well said. Thank you. TFian, I think Hellbound is the person you really need to reply to. He/she seems to have a very good grasp of how the internet works today.

Thanks. Unfortunately, I am afflicted by typo-itis, and it's too late to edit. Hopefully most people can recognize and interpret my mis-keyings, though

I'm not expert, but I have a broad base in computing technologies, both hardware and software. I have an AAS in Computer Systems Technology, a BS in Information Technology, and have worked in the field since 1997. I'm Microsoft and Cisco certified, certified Fuji technician, IASO certified (military Information Assurance), Tech Level II certified (also military), and I've trained on various wireless and satellite systems both in military and civillian venues. On the military side I work as an Information Systems Security Analyst.

Another aspect that seems completely overlooked by TFian and her Arch Druid is business use and security. My current job on the civillian side deals with HIPPA protected information, so has to be secure. Much of the business and government use falls into these categories. Compare reousrce use for this type fo thing: Internet lets me set up a secure connection to our business partners and clients, PGP encrypt the data, and send it with little fear of any security loss. I can get auditing, non-repudiation, and all sorts of other data security and tracking inforamtion with a click of a mouse. Without internet, the data has to be packaged securely, and (for the same level of security) sealed with some sort of security seal to detect tampering. Then, a person or persons have to be hired to carry the data where it needs to go, make sure someone signs for it, and even then it's less secure. Consdiering that we transfer hundreds of files per day (averaging about 5GB of data per day), this would rapidly overshadow the cost of the itnernet both in terms of resources and energy, as well as being slower, less secure, and less auditable.

When you look at only personal use, for things like simple letters and such, yeah, the Internet would appear to be a waste. When you actually understand the hundreds of thousands of uses, and the enormous amount of energy and timed saved, that comaprison is revealed to be baseless.

 

[ThatSoundAgain]

It's actually interesting that Morse code was brought up. That is human-operated and can be compared to digital.

The fastest recorded speed for a morse operator according to Wikipedia is 35 WPM. A guesstimate of average word length in English is somewhere around 5 characters.

There are 26 characters in the morse alphabet. That could be encoded in 5 bits with room to spare since 5 bits can count from 0-31. (Morse code is artificially restricted, you could do more characters at the expense of speed).

35 * 5 * 5 = 875 bits per minute for the human.

A positively ancient 56K modem on a phone-quality copper line could transmit 3,360,000 bits in the same minute. I suspect this is possible via radio as well.

So if you have power for one minute on the line, better go with the computer.

 

[Myriad]

I've worked with hardware, going back to the the days of TTL chips and wire wrapped backplanes. I soldered my first home computer together in 1976 out of printed circuit boards, TTL chips, loose resistors and capacitors, and a single "VLSI" chip, an 8080 CPU. When it didn't work at first, I borrowed an old analog oscilloscope and figured out how to fix it.

It still works as of the last time I checked it, a few years ago. The usual maintenance issue is corrosion on the connectors, which have to be disassembled and cleaned with an eraser. No problems with the capacitors yet, but they would be pretty easy to replace using the same soldering iron I put them in with. (The electrolytics, that is; I figure the far more numerous ceramic noise-damping caps will last quite a while.)

That computer (running in the low tens of kiloherz and with four kilobytes of RAM) could easily handle email via a 1200 baud acoustic modem. That's still a lot faster and easier than telegraph or Pony Express.

Did you have a question that requires antique hardware expertise to answer?

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[CapelDodger]

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.

The internet worked twenty years ago without the server farms of Google and Amazon and wherever the porn and spam comes from. There was no free streaming video, admittedly, but that's hardly vital to the internet.

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.

Or guys on horses carrying written material. No resources wasted on building radios then.

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.

Now that really is dreamland. No offence meant, but there it is.

 

[CapelDodger]

No, you don't. This is misconception number one. To keep the Internet running WITH ALL THE CURRENT CONTENT, BANDWIDTH, LEVEL OF USE, AND CAPABILITY IT CURRENTLY HAS you may need that. To maintain just basic connectivity, with the capability to deliver, say, text and still images, and trimming out a lot of frivolous content (such as free hosting services and other crap), you can get by with a LOT less. And, assuming energy costs go up, that means costs for these services go up, so the process of weeding out the unnecessary is an economic one: free hosting will go away, social networking will start to charge fees and quit being "look at me" sites and turn more into tools, people and busiensses will cut out bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming media unless there's good reason, and home internet access will gain bandwidth controls or limitations. All of which means you can turn off a lot of those servers.

Wish I'd said that .

 

[NewtonTrino]

TFian, no disrespect but you really need to bring some actual facts to the table here. Basically electronics are vast multipliers of human effort and therefore are worth the small energy cost in almost any scenario you can paint.

Also why are you so hardcore about following this guy? Is this some sort of cult or something?

 

[TFian]

Sorry about the long delay, had some stuff on my plate, but I'm back now, going to respond to everyone's posts addressing me one by one.

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.)

Maybe he's said that, but he does believe our best chance is a 1800s agrarian civilization powered by Green Wizardy.

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.

That may be true that I would have used less oil in 1980s, but we're heading towards a point where we won't even have about 10% of the energy we need for even a light industrial "advanced" society. Right?

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 Petroleum is needed to make the computers themselves, along with transportation. Have to factor those in as well.

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

If you could find the Sci American about that, please forward it my way.

But, those methods sound very experimental, and I'm not sure how much time we have to get them commercially/industrially viable.

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.

Will we have 30 years? Some like Guy R. McPherson PhD say industrial civilization may collapse by 2018.

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

I'm surprised you don't like nuclear, most people of your ilk seem to.

Regarding the timeframe:


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.

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.

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.

But do we have that time? I think you're being way too optimistic on how much time we have left.

What do you think of TheOilDrum and EnergyBulletin?

 

[AvalonXQ]

I hope the rest of your responses have more facts and numbers than that one did.

 

[TFian]

I hope the rest of your responses have more facts and numbers than that one did.

Sure will Chrono, but I was addressing Grey Area there.

 

[AvalonXQ]

Sure will Chrono, but I was addressing Grey Area there.

There were only five characters for names in the game, so he's actually "Crono". Silly, but there it is.

 

[TFian]

There were only five characters for names in the game, so he's actually "Crono". Silly, but there it is.

Oh, I had actually forgotten that. Been a while since I played it though. Sorry, Crono.