The case for globalism

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Car Hater: May 7, 2007; wolf. bike.
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A White Guy posted:

The planet won't be inhabitable for 5 billion years. I forget where I read this, but as solar radiation increases over the millenias, the planet will get less and less habitable. The projections were that the planet would stop being habitable within the next billion years, on a timescale that's well beyond the lifespan of our civilization but pretty soon, in galactic terms.

The current estimate is 600-800 million years before the sun cooks away enough water to halt plate tectonics and end the recycling portion of the carbon cycle, slowly eroding the ability of plants to photosynthesize. That's plenty of time for a couple more cycles of intelligent life evolving, rampant fossil fuel consumption, overshoot & collapse, and reconstitution into the crust.

# ? Aug 25, 2016 14:16

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# ? Apr 30, 2024 14:07

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Ytlaya posted:

There's also the fact that even if it took a long time to physically build civilization back up, the information would probably still exist, vastly cutting the amount of time necessary to redevelop. People probably wouldn't have to reinvent how to build a nuclear power plant, for example.

radmonger posted:

Lack of fossil fuels, when they eventually run out on Civilisation 10.0 or something, would change things somewhat. It'd be hard to mine uranium with a pick axe. But i don't see why you couldn't build a small hydro plant or windmill manually and then expand from there. Plus 9 catastrophes out of 10 there would be at least one country left with a working power plant.

Solar, wind, probably seawater uranium are not going to run out until the Sun leaves the main sequence.(5 billion years or so).

Ignoring that the original idea was "a drunken walk between the 17th and 21st century", which to me implies erasing the progress of those centuries at the end of each cycle, there are still some issues you have to deal with in a scenario where 21st century civilization survives the initial catastrophe in spots:

Surviving power plants:
- You need specialized knowledge to run and maintain a power plant, as well a supply chain.
- You need motivation to run that power plant.
- You need an educational system that can maintain the knowledge required to keep the plant running.

Recreating nuclear/solar/large scale water power
- Modern manufacturing is the result of a long process of continuing improvements in metallurgy, chemistry, and so on, building on previous knowledge. What happens if parts of large chunks of that knowledge gets taken out?
- Similarly, you need the right machine tools to manufacture other machine tools to manufacture other machine tools to manufacture the specialized equipment/components you need.
- You, once again, need an educational system to maintain the knowledge required to recreate these technologies.

The educational system here is of course reliant on a generally stable, prosperous and populous society, able to produce enough food that people can devote year after year to preserve the knowledge required to maintain what remains and hopefully rebuild. A system that could be very vulnerable to random catastrophes, or people forgetting why something was important because the dude who used to do it just did it without comment for years until he went and got run over by a truck, leading to more and more systems coming offline, diverting attention away from rebuilding into basic questions of survival. Should basic stuff like sanitation come off line, you'd suddenly be faced with recurrent epidemics which encourage people to spread out (or it just thins them out), which would basically be a death blow to any effort to maintain civilization.

The scenario where the world reverts to the 17th century is the same, except no knowledge is maintained except that which exists in books, which will be preserved to varying degrees, or digital media, which could become unreadable very quickly.

radmonger posted:

The 18C led inexorably to the 19th; it seems to really take some kind of motivated reasoning to imagine it could ever continue indefinitely. On the plus side, 5 billion years is enough time for a large enough statistical sample of civilisations that you can be confident every population group will get their fair share of time having a go on the Maxim gun.

It only seems that way because that's what happened historically. If there were no fossil fuels to fuel the industrial revolution, the 19th century is stillborn. That doesn't mean the civilization can't still develop, but it could be at a much slower pace, and go in a very different direction.

# ? Aug 25, 2016 16:15

Kilroy: Oct 1, 2000

I mean, we can't even build a Saturn V rocket anymore.

(We can build better, more efficient, and safer rockets in its place, but goes to show how quickly knowledge like that can be lost.)

# ? Aug 25, 2016 16:31

Ytlaya: Nov 13, 2005

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Ignoring that the original idea was "a drunken walk between the 17th and 21st century", which to me implies erasing the progress of those centuries at the end of each cycle, there are still some issues you have to deal with in a scenario where 21st century civilization survives the initial catastrophe in spots:

Surviving power plants:
- You need specialized knowledge to run and maintain a power plant, as well a supply chain.
- You need motivation to run that power plant.
- You need an educational system that can maintain the knowledge required to keep the plant running.

Recreating nuclear/solar/large scale water power
- Modern manufacturing is the result of a long process of continuing improvements in metallurgy, chemistry, and so on, building on previous knowledge. What happens if parts of large chunks of that knowledge gets taken out?
- Similarly, you need the right machine tools to manufacture other machine tools to manufacture other machine tools to manufacture the specialized equipment/components you need.
- You, once again, need an educational system to maintain the knowledge required to recreate these technologies.

The educational system here is of course reliant on a generally stable, prosperous and populous society, able to produce enough food that people can devote year after year to preserve the knowledge required to maintain what remains and hopefully rebuild. A system that could be very vulnerable to random catastrophes, or people forgetting why something was important because the dude who used to do it just did it without comment for years until he went and got run over by a truck, leading to more and more systems coming offline, diverting attention away from rebuilding into basic questions of survival. Should basic stuff like sanitation come off line, you'd suddenly be faced with recurrent epidemics which encourage people to spread out (or it just thins them out), which would basically be a death blow to any effort to maintain civilization.

The scenario where the world reverts to the 17th century is the same, except no knowledge is maintained except that which exists in books, which will be preserved to varying degrees, or digital media, which could become unreadable very quickly.

It only seems that way because that's what happened historically. If there were no fossil fuels to fuel the industrial revolution, the 19th century is stillborn. That doesn't mean the civilization can't still develop, but it could be at a much slower pace, and go in a very different direction.

I'm not saying it would be instantaneous; just that it would definitely be way faster than it originally took. Something like electricity, for example, can be leveraged pretty easily, and instantly giving people basic knowledge of how it works would greatly accelerate the development of a society starting in a 17th century-ish situation. You'd basically be saying a lot of the time that would otherwise be spent doing research and could reallocate a bunch of manpower towards figuring out how the "future" technology works (which I think would happen easier than you're assuming; if you get a bunch of people together and give them access to a bunch of documentation for a power plant, they'd figure it out sooner or later). The fact that most modern technology requires knowledge of a bunch of other technology would slow things down, but it would still be drastically faster than if people were trying to do it from scratch.

Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Aug 25, 2016

# ? Aug 25, 2016 17:14

radmonger: Jun 6, 2011

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Surviving power plants:
- You need specialized knowledge to run and maintain a power plant, as well a supply chain.
- You need motivation to run that power plant.
- You need an educational system that can maintain the knowledge required to keep the plant running.

That's a list of reasons why you might end up in the 17C as opposed to '21C but some people are dead'. If you lose the ability to economically organise anything larger than a village, then any specialist occupation that doesn't pay off at that scale is non-viable.

Which means you can have a blacksmith, a priest, and maybe a schoolteacher and doctor. Nothing more.

But that's enough to maintain literacy , which means anything that has ever been invented you know about. Which is why it's 17C(ish), not before . Although 'contemporary isolated 3rd world village' might actually be a better mental model.

To go below that, you have to destroy everything at village scale, leaving only isolated individuals.

And even if you somehow did do that, that would only delay the process of civilisation reforming by a few hundred or thousand years.

# ? Aug 25, 2016 17:16

Ytlaya: Nov 13, 2005

Actually, now that I think of it, such a scenario might be worse than the 17th century in many ways. In the 17th century we still had very large, advanced societies. If you gave people in the actual 17th century access to all modern knowledge, it would vastly jumpstart things (because you had pretty sophisticated industries/supply chains to supply raw materials and at least some sort of scientific community). But in the case of some sort of apocalypse, you might end up with a bunch of disconnected villages and far less manpower, which would make implementing the fruits of future knowledge far more difficult.

So I don't really think it can be compared to any point in time, because you wouldn't have any civilization to speak of (which is like going back literally thousands of years) but the people who exist are likely to be far more educated/literate.

# ? Aug 25, 2016 17:22

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Ytlaya posted:

Actually, now that I think of it, such a scenario might be worse than the 17th century in many ways. In the 17th century we still had very large, advanced societies. If you gave people in the actual 17th century access to all modern knowledge, it would vastly jumpstart things (because you had pretty sophisticated industries/supply chains to supply raw materials and at least some sort of scientific community). But in the case of some sort of apocalypse, you might end up with a bunch of disconnected villages and far less manpower, which would make implementing the fruits of future knowledge far more difficult.

So I don't really think it can be compared to any point in time, because you wouldn't have any civilization to speak of (which is like going back literally thousands of years) but the people who exist are likely to be far more educated/literate.

Yeah, the whole "apocalypse" thing is really important. You might have some areas that could cobble together something akin to a 17th century interconnected state, but even those areas would probably be interspersed with the burnt out remains of manufacturing and educational centers, leaving basically designer crops as one of the few immediately usable fruits of industrial civilization. You could have a situation where all the information you need exists, but it exists in chunks across a continent, which you'd need to bring together, and you'd ideally need to do this while you still have people around that have first hand experience with the stuff in the first place. As Kilroy points out, specialized knowledge can disappear surprisingly quickly, and in this case you're racing against the clock while disease and famines rocks society, Hell, just a gap of a single generation in education, and you suddenly have a society which will be very hard pressed to carry on an intellectual tradition.

# ? Aug 25, 2016 17:51

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

radmonger posted:

If you are going to get hypothetical, hyper-tech aliens would doubtless have a wide arrange of means of wiping out all life, and probably physically destroying the Earth.

Once your civilization reaches the point of being able to approach the speed of light you've already got the perfect planet-killing weapon in the form of a relativistic bomb. Just accelerate something to a few percentage points of the speed of light and fly it into a planet and you'd kill every living thing and probably boil off the atmosphere. You don't even need a warhead of any kind because the kinetic energy alone will do all the damage for you, and because it travels so fast chances are the weapon is impossible to detect, and even if you do somehow intercept and blow up the incoming object there's a decent chance the debris will keep moving toward you and wipe you out anyway.

A lot of science fiction is really focused on high tech weapons like the Death Star from Star Wars or the phasers from Star Trek, but the truth is once you can accelerate matter to anything close to the speed of light you've already got the perfect weapon of interstellar warfare.

# ? Aug 25, 2016 19:35

doverhog: May 31, 2013; Defender of democracy and human rights 🇺🇦

In most of science fiction, including Star Wars and Star Trek, spaceships travel with some kind of warp system. They don't actually travel at the speed of light in normal space, because that would be too slow for the speed of plot.

# ? Aug 25, 2016 19:48

Ytlaya: Nov 13, 2005

doverhog posted:

In most of science fiction, including Star Wars and Star Trek, spaceships travel with some kind of warp system. They don't actually travel at the speed of light in normal space, because that would be too slow for the speed of plot.

Related to this, but it's actually funny how slow the ships seem to travel (out of warp) in Star Wars. I think in the old Star Wars flight sim games (X-Wing, TIE Fighter, etc) the ships never went much faster than like 100km/hr. Even a generous estimate wouldn't place the speed of Star Wars fighters at anything remotely near jet planes.

# ? Aug 25, 2016 20:28

Pochoclo: Feb 4, 2008; No...; Clapping Larry

doverhog posted:

In most of science fiction, including Star Wars and Star Trek, spaceships travel with some kind of warp system. They don't actually travel at the speed of light in normal space, because that would be too slow for the speed of plot.

In Star Trek, outside of warp speeds they travel with impulse engines, where "half impulse" (the most usual speeds are "quarter impulse", "half impulse" and "three-quarters impulse") means 0.5c.
Not that it matters, because Star Trek is full of inconsistencies (not that it ever intended to be hard sci-fi of course).

# ? Aug 25, 2016 20:44

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# ? Apr 30, 2024 14:07

WAR CRIME GIGOLO: Oct 3, 2012; The Hague
tryna get me
for these glutes

https://youtu.be/zQTfuI-9jIo

Oxford Discussuon on Von Neuyman probes, Dyson Spheres and exploratory engineering

Keep in mind this was made in 2012. Even in 4 years we're very close to being on-timeline with his projections of engineering

# ? Aug 26, 2016 01:58

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