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1816, the Year without a Summer

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Re: 1816, the Year without a Summer

#11

Post by Hextinium »

xenadu02 wrote: post #9
AncoraImparo wrote: post #2

If we faced this crisis again, what would be different?

1. Far fewer people subsistence farm so they're not one bad harvest away from famine 2. Not all areas would have complete crop failure; IIRC in 1816 "America's Breadbasket" (such as it was at that time) had a relatively easier time of it 3. We have a much better system of distributing information now and easy ways to transport seeds/cuttings. We could probably replace some of the lost crops with alternatives that wer…

I completely agree with everything that you said above but doubt that people will continue to be entrenched in their ideas when people start dying from starvation locally and not in a foreign land that they can ignore.

Re: 1816, the Year without a Summer

#12

Post by supertrope »

StClaire wrote: post #8

As an aside, I've always wanted to read a this book on the cultural origins of Frankenstein. The shift in climate, advances in medicine and science, the decline in alchemy, treatment of women, etc. I've read a lot of different works but I've never seen it all in one place. Can anyone recommend a title?

On the science angle for those unfamiliar:

Luigi Galvani investigated the connection between living creatures and electricity. Earlier scientists had observed that static electricity and lightning were the same phenomenon. Galvani made frog legs twitch by applying two dissimilar metals. He came to the conclusion that animals generate electricity conducted by the metals. Alessandro Volta believed the opposite causation: that the setup generated the electricity and the legs reacted. Volta invented the battery after experimenting with various elements as the metals. Galvani's nephew Giovanni Aldini carried on his work and even experimented on the body of a condemned prisoner.

I had always thought the rise of Frankenstein's monster was a hilariously nonsensical application of the literary device of extending scientific explanations of natural phenomenon into magic (e.g. endless potential of atomic everything in the 50s, electric disturbances in ghost movies, reversing the polarity, quantum mechanics, genetic engineering, endless applications for graphene). We all know that lightning kills and injures. But it's not such a random jump between hearing of a corpse flinching, making a fist, and opening an eye (Aldini); and writing a horror story about a crazed scientist reversing death.

Funnily enough it turns out that all living things do generate electricity through pumping out sodium ions and pumping in potassium ions, creating a voltage across their cell membranes. But nowhere near enough to be observable on a macro scale.

Re: 1816, the Year without a Summer

#14

Post by extrapickles »

xenadu02 wrote: post #9
AncoraImparo wrote: post #2

If we faced this crisis again, what would be different?

1. Far fewer people subsistence farm so they're not one bad harvest away from famine 2. Not all areas would have complete crop failure; IIRC in 1816 "America's Breadbasket" (such as it was at that time) had a relatively easier time of it 3. We have a much better system of distributing information now and easy ways to transport seeds/cuttings. We could probably replace some of the lost crops with alternatives that wer…

We also have a staggering amount of food already canned/frozen or grown in greenhouses just to make sure staple foods are available year-round.

Thanks to plastic, greenhouses are cheap and easy to make, so even poorer countries would fare reasonably well. What is harder to predict is how well greenhouses already in colder climates would fare.

Re: 1816, the Year without a Summer

#15

Post by Nomentatus »

wmf wrote: post #5
AncoraImparo wrote: post #2

If we faced this crisis again, what would be different?

The world is much richer overall and food production per capita is probably much higher. The world is much better connected, both in information (winter is coming!) and flow of goods. There would be far less hunger, although in a capitalist world people on the margin would still get squeezed. Also, a few years of cooling might counteract global warming a little, although this would probably end up just giving more fu…

Flow of goods can also spread the pain, no region is spared. Reliable agriculture with better efficiency means overproduction doesn't happen as much, so there's less cushion. Rome was better at shipping cheaply than previous societies, and better integrated, so it suffered much more widespread (although less frequent) famines that could affect nearly the whole empire.
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