Failure to drink one's own kool-aid.

[elfs]

There are fewer things more depressing than watching someone gleefully rub his hands together and cry out, "I can't wait for a lot of people to die!."

But the Lefty Transhumanist blog Cybordemocracy does exactly that. There's no getting around it: calling for the end of modern agrobusiness, predicting that the post-petroleum economy will also be a post-reliable-electricity economy, and hoping for the return of a "localized economy" also means that human lives will return to being nasty, brutal, short, and scarce.

Don't lefties even read Marx anymore?

Comments

[azalynn.livejournal.com]

That is a bit bizarre...isn't transhumanism supposed to be about, you know, trying to move things forward rather than backward?

[mouser.livejournal.com]

From their top page: "Cyborg Democracy is a nexus for techno-progressives, transmitting a sexy, high-tech vision of a radically democratic future."

*blink*

Uh... No they're not...

Really hard to take this person serious. (http://cyborgdemocracy.net/Justice.html)

[gromm.livejournal.com]

No, that's the uber-left but much more importantly the uber-green. The philosophy behind that is that the environment is in trouble because of us. And we're destroying the environment because there are too many of us. Ergo, in order to save the world, we have to kill off about 90% of the people on the planet. Especially if we all want to continue to lead the ultra-wasteful lifestyle of the average North American.

Of course, the lifestyle of the average North American is made possible by a populous society. A few think tanks have figured that if the population were reduced to 10% of its current numbers, then we'd be living the lifestyle of the average European in about oh, 1200 AD.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Of course, the lifestyle of the average North American is made possible by a populous society. A few think tanks have figured that if the population were reduced to 10% of its current numbers, then we'd be living the lifestyle of the average European in about oh, 1200 AD.

Huh. That's a new one to me.

Now, I always suspected that the lavish lifestyle of North America in the late 20th/early 21st century was build upon the labor of the vast, impoverished majority of humans in the rest of the world. Whenever someone claimed that, "Things are so much better now than they were 100 years ago," I'd immediately think: Yes, for us in the US. There may be more people living at a high standard of living, but there are also orders of magnitude more living in abject poverty and squalor.

But, you're saying that without current population levels, it would be impossible to manufacture pipes for indoor plumbing (if only for drainage)? Or to draw metal to create wires? Or to wrap those wires into coils? Or to build water-wheels near rivers? Or to do much of anything beyond subsistence farming (which is what the average 13th century European was)?

[(Anonymous)]

Or to do much of anything beyond subsistence farming (which is what the average 13th century European was)?

Roughly, yes.

Have you ever considered the amount of infrastructure, labour, and logistics that go into the simplest of modern conveniences? Go to the store and buy a ham and cheese sandwich. Someone slaughtered that pig. Someone baked that bread. Someone made that cheese. Probably someone else milked the cow that made that cheese. Someone else entirely grew the grain that made the flour that went into that bread. And someone certainly had to take it from all those diverse people and cart it into town. Finally, someone put it all together into a ham and cheese sandwich and sold it to you.

Sure, with modern machinery, 20 such people can make enough of all that to make 500 sandwiches a day, but build your way up through the logistics so that we can all have clothes, food, water, and a roof over your head. That alone would take a village of probably a thousand people. Then you can *start* thinking of doing wild things like mining the copper to build the wire to build the generators, and smelt the steel to build the generators, and the water wheels to build the generating stations.

Europe regressed technologically after the fall of the Roman empire for a good reason. It has a lot to do with how there wasn't a city the size of Rome anywhere in the world for another 1600 years.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Roughly, yes.

Have you ever considered the amount of infrastructure, labour, and logistics that go into the simplest of modern conveniences?

Yes, I have.

Europe regressed technologically after the fall of the Roman empire for a good reason. It has a lot to do with how there wasn't a city the size of Rome anywhere in the world for another 1600 years.

No, it has more to do with the fact that the people who conquered Rome (the Western Empire, mind you) were illiterate and disinterested in Roman technology. The victors ran things the way they wanted, never mind what the conquered Romans thought. Besides which, the Eastern Empire was still standing, so the engineers and architects probably just fled Rome to Constantinople.

Your idea has another hole in it: The cities of the fledgling United States of America were quite small compared to the other cities of the world (cities which, according to your statement above, did not yet match the size of ancient Rome). Yet, Thomas Jefferson, as President, had indoor plumbing and a flush-toilet installed in the White House. No steam engine back then.

So, I doubt a post-cheap-oil world would look like 13th century Europe. It would more likely revert back to 18th century North America (after the massive population crash, of course).

Wow

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Actually that's a profound question. It has a trivial answer ("of course they don't") but the consequences of that conclusion are fairly far-reaching.

For example--

If The Communist Manifesto is no longer the de-facto manifesto of the political left, what is?

Have these people truly adopted the goal of destroying the human race?

Is it time to formalize the schism between leftist-anarchists and communists within the left? That is, should we stop calling them all leftists?

Sure, there are obvious flippant answers for all these questions, but they aren't very useful. It'd be more productive to put some serious thought to the real long-term effects of a major restructuring of the left.

. png

Attributions matter

[lexm.livejournal.com]

This was actually a piece by James Howard Kunstler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Howard_Kunstler), and the poster on CybDem has indicated in the comments that not only does he not endorse Kunstler's POV, but he also expects it to be "radically different" from that of the blog's readers.

Kunstler has a well-deserved reputation for overstated "Chicken Little" prognostication. Check out his 1999 statement on Y2K (http://kunstler.com/mags_y2k.html) for a rather amusing example...

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Let's put aside the whole question of agribusiness (organisms can't be manufactured; they aren't microwave ovens or clock radios). One of my great fears is that our sloppy misuse of energy and of other natural resources is, well, entropizing our resources. For example, that we'll have mixed most of our rare-earth elements into cheap consumer electronics that recycling them will require a good deal of energy, but that our remaining energy sources will not be sufficent (either in quantity or strength or both).

Right now, everything depends on oil. Even the alternative energy sources. "Bio"diesel and ethanol? Well, modern agriculture is just the conversion of petroleum into foodstuffs. Solar? Photovoltaics require substantial energy to manufacture, including heat, and oil is the easiest source. Besides, mining & refining the silicon & rare-earth elements requires equipment, and the equiment requires fuel. Nuclear? Again, mining the uranium requires equipment, and the mining equipment all runs on oil. Hydrogen? You have to chemically split up water to do that, and the energy to do that ... will likely come from oil.

There is a very, very short window of time in which we can use the available petroleum reserves to invent, develop, and manufacture a completely non-petroleumn energy infrastructure. And instead, we're just pissing away the available petroleum on toys.

I greatly fear that our shortsightedness today is dooming future humans to a stone-age lifestyle, one from which our species will never again be able to rise out of.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

But you forgot coal, of which we have about 200 years worth of reserves. At the very least, they can run external combustion engines and power electrical plants.

I would rather we pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps to renewable sources of energy before it came to that though.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

There is a very, very short window of time in which we can use the available petroleum reserves to invent, develop, and manufacture a completely non-petroleumn energy infrastructure. And instead, we're just pissing away the available petroleum on toys.

We already have two major non-petroleum energy sources: coal and nuclear. As to your comment that "mining the uranium requires equipment, and the mining equipment all runs on oil," there is no inherent reason why this has to be so: the mining equipment could be electrically-powered and the electricity could come from an atomic reactor. Ditto for coal, with the additional point that coal-fired steam engines can be made arbitrarily small and hence can be used to directly power vehicles of all kinds, as we did before the internal displaced the external combustion engine.

I greatly fear that our shortsightedness today is dooming future humans to a stone-age lifestyle, one from which our species will never again be able to rise out of.

This is very improbable, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, if we reverted to the highest technology previously attained before the widespread use of any fossil fuels, that would put us at around AD 1700 or so, in terms of the engineering. That would suck, but I would hardly describe Late Baroque / Early Enlightenment Europe, or the Tokugawa Shogunate, or Qing Dynasty China, as being "stone-age" civilizations.

Secondly, since the scientific knowledge wouldn't all go away, we could do considerably better than that -- we could raise crops of vegetable-oil bearing plants to retain internal combustion technology. Mind you, this means that we'd have a crappy civilization, with a small high-tech elite lording it over starving peasant masses, rather like John Brunner's evil overlords in Quicksand.

But thirdly, things would never have to get this bad, because we have already figured out how to build nuclear fission reactors, and uranium is a fairly common element on Earth. So, even if we never developed nuclear fusion reactors (despite the fact that we have, in fact, already gotten them almost to the point of commercial practicality) there would be no need to regress to the Quicksand world.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Oh, the scientific knowledge won't go away, but consider this: it takes energy to refine and extract metals once they're (a) oxidized; or (b) combined with other substances.

That's the problem. Once the cheap energy sources are gone, there will be less energy available for refining what ores remain to be mined. So, eventually, what we've mined & refined will be all that our descendants have to work with. Without cheap energy, it will be difficult to recycle those metals. All of the hard metals oxidize over time. So that available supply of metals, "mined by the ancestors," will slowly dwindle over the millenia.

That's what I'm talking about when I say we may be dooming our decendants to a permanent Stone Age ... once entropy catches up with all of our raw materials, and with insufficient energy sources available to recycle/refine the oxidized remains, what then?

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Once the cheap energy sources are gone, there will be less energy available for refining what ores remain to be mined. So, eventually, what we've mined & refined will be all that our descendants have to work with. Without cheap energy, it will be difficult to recycle those metals. All of the hard metals oxidize over time. So that available supply of metals, "mined by the ancestors," will slowly dwindle over the millenia.

The problem with this scenario is that the metals, in oxidizing, would simply become "ores" -- similar, but far more concentrated than the ores which the ancestors originally mined to produce the goods in the ancient waste piles. While it's true that some of the ancient wastes would be in forms less convenient to mine, refine and work than were the original ores, it's also true that some would be in forms more convenient to perform these industrial operations upon. And, since a lower-tech civilization demands far fewer metals than does a higher-tech one, the access curve is fairly forgiving -- by the time the successor civilization reaches a higher enough level of technology to demand the harder-to-get-at metals, it will also have the technology to extract them.

I can't overemphasize the advantages of a successor civilization in being able to mine the ruins, wreckage and waste dumps of its predecessors. A single large ocean liner or skyscraper for instance, contains as much metal as the total annual output of a large medieval kingdom such as 15th-century England or France. And in many cases, the geography of the tells would keep the rusts from eroding and washing away into the sea -- in some cases, there would be large supplies of unrusted metals near the centers of the ruins!

The real problem would be an absence of easy-to-get-at fossil fuels as energy resources, because once burned these turn into carbon dioxide, water and some other byproducts (mostly nasty); they can't be "reclaimed" from the waste piles. The rebirth would be slower until the civilization reached the point of being able to use solar, nuclear and wind electrical generation on a large scale. On the other hand, there is a lot of coal still in the ground, and it is likely that the first wave of successor civilizations would still have some to burn until it got back up to the level of atomic reactors.

By the way, in re-attaining atomic power, nuclear waste dumps would probably be a major strategic resource, as a source of radioactives to make nuclear-thermal piles, even though the wastes are by definition too depleted to be used in outright fission reactors. Though, especially in the early days of the industry, I bet that being a nuclear waste dump miner would not be conducive to a long lifespan!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

I sure hope you're right about the oxidized ores (e.g. iron, copper, aluminum). That would give me some hope.

The real problem are the rare-earths. We're using these to dope semiconductors, create complex rechargeable batteries, and such. And, at least with the semiconductors, we're creating structures at the nanometer scale. Refining that stuff will be nigh-impossible without a cheap-n-easy energy source. So, we could still really screw our descendants if we're not careful.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

The rare earths would be a problem to reclaim. I am guessing that the successor civilization, if it lost knowledge of their existence and nature (beyond perhaps periodic tables copied from old textbooks) would largely try to extract them in miniscule quantities from relic electronics; this would be very difficult. The only good point here is that by the point that a civilization gained a level of technology sufficient to create a meaningful demand for them, it would also be at the point where it could regain nuclear power and some spacefaring capability, which might open up Luna and the Asteroid Belt to mining operations.

Rare earths, incidentally, are one of the resources which could tempt us into expanding our mining operations into space. If the current hafnium IC process proves as useful as advertised, we may be engaging in a lot of exploration over the Earth and beyond to find sources of rare earths -- from what I understand, aren't we getting a lot of them today from a very few mines?