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Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

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Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#181

Post by ergl »

imtringued wrote: post #27
frankbreetz wrote: post #2

If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive.

There isn't a lot of essential technology beyond energy, agriculture and mining. The biggest driving factor is actually making a society that rewards technological progress. Give that society half a millenia and it will invent computers again. If you wanted to let a society recover from technological collapse then you would merely need a list of possible inventions ordered by the date of their invention. 3D CAD model…

Given that we've depleted most easily accessible mines as well as easy coal and oil sites, I very much doubt that any future civilization will be able to reach our technological level ever again.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#182

Post by conjectures »

eitland wrote: post #177
conjectures wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what fraction of world calories that type of land is? Otherwise this objection is a case of 'an edge case exists, and I would like you to imagine that it is the major determining factor.'

What I am saying is you can kiss goodbye to everything except fruit, potatoes and some easy vegetables on good fields in Norway (except central East Coast and Trøndelag, they have somewhat better conditions). Fruit will be hit or miss in a lot of places and will only be an option in southern parts of the country anyways. Same goes for a number of other places in the world. As I pointed out from the start, the efficie…

I hear what you're saying. The difficulty is that you're another non quant trying to make a general argument and failing.

I'll spell out what a strong argument for the point you're trying to make might look like:

A) An estimate of the total number of calories coming from purely grazed meat on this sort of land.

B) An estimate of the total number of calories of meat consumed.

C) A/B > 3/4.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#183

Post by GVIrish »

squish78 wrote: post #149
GVIrish wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slashing and burning rainforest to farm cattle or raise crops are both bad options given how critical the Amazon is to maintaining climate and biodiversity. Either way, the amount of land and water required to raise each lb of beef is an order of magnitude greater than the amount needed for a pound of chicken, which is in turn an order of magnitude higher than the resources needed for a pound of vegetables. The expan…

I don't think anyone disagrees with you. My point (again) is that this land can't be sustainably farmed for vegetable/cereal crops, so cattle is the only industry that the land could be used for. I would prefer there were some sustainable ranching practices, but I don't know enough about Brazilian agriculture to comment on how that land is managed after it's cleared. I guess the million dollar question is - who has t…

> I guess the million dollar question is - who has the moral authority to tell Brazilians that they don't have the right to utilize their land and natural resources like China, USA, India, and every other industrial nation?

That is going to be a very thorny issue in the years to come, thorny enough to lead to armed conflict. Climate change is a threat to humanity, much less a huge threat to the national security interests of any nation with a military. At some point the situation is going to be serious enough that military conflict will occur over water rights, environmental destruction, climate refugees, etc.

I imagine that before that happens, some country (or countries) will get hit with sanctions for environmental destruction. Of course that will be fraught because who isn't guilty of that?

But at the end of the day, what does it matter when the future of civilization is at stake? Why should the world stand by while Brazil (or any other country) destroys THE essential ecosystem in combating climate change. 100 years from now if the Amazon is gone people will wish other countries had put a stop to the destruction with sanctions or even military force.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#184

Post by dredmorbius »

areyousure wrote: post #170
dredmorbius wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage requires retrieval, as well as well as an encoding and preserving mechanism. Much as users don't want backups, they want restores, authors don't want books, they want readers. There's an interesting parallel between transmissions and recordings I'd noticed some time ago, that doesn't seem to be much commented on in discussions of information theory, though I'm not sure if it's because it's obscure or obvious:…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hiding_theorem#Conservation...

Practical upshot?

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#185

Post by jbob2000 »

ekianjo wrote: post #18
ddxxdd wrote: post #12

This feels reminiscent of the current issue of long-term data storage. Flash drives are volatile and can lose your data any minute. Solid State drives are slightly less volatile, and a hard disk has magnetic fields that will last decades, but nothing will keep our gigabytes of data alive and intact for future archaeologists. If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. On a side not…

> If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. There is no form of storage that cannot be destroyed. Even stone scriptures eventually erode and fade away. The best thing we can do is duplicate everything as much as we can and hope to reduce the loss over time.

What if you genetically modified a species of tardigrade to hold data in their DNA? They would reproduce forever and are extremely hard to kill. That would be a form of storage that couldn’t (practically) be destroyed.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#186

Post by dredmorbius »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #179
dredmorbius wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oil came shooting out of the ground, and even now generally flows. Methane hydrates largely seem to be frozen in tundra and on the seafloor. Even accessing them tends to precipitate release. Liquids are far more fungible than either solids or gasses, and methane hydrates tend to be the latter transforming wantonly to the former with very little in-between. Sort of the worst of all possible worlds. Also a tremendously…

Oil that fuels our civilization comes from 2000ft down, and takes sophisticated drilling rigs to capture. The days of 'shooting out of the ground' is a century gone, and never fueled much. Methane Hydrate can be 'harvested' by drilling, then pumping a little warm water down the hole, then piping the gas into the harbor where the city enjoys endless free natural gas.

Note the use of past tense in my comment. And oil still flows, as a liquid, from wells. Sometimes thicker, sometimes more volatile. But liquid.

The most productive wells and fields tended to be heavy initial producers. Among the most prolific single wells I'm aware of is the First Oil Well of Bahrain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Oil_Well,_Bahrain

Drilled in 1931, initially flowing at 9,600 bbl/day, peaking at 80,000 bbl/day, and (as best I can make out still producing at 35,000 bbl today, 89 years after first oil.

Contrast with stripper and marginal oil wells, producing 10-15 bbl/day, or less.

But even a stripper well produces a liquid, which stays a liquid (modulo condensate and NGLs). You can pump liquid from the ground, and store it in loosely-covered tanks. It will flow through nonpressurised or lightly-pressurised pipelines.

Methane hydrates are solids which sublime to gas. You can't pump solids. You can't store gas in unenclosed containers. Piping requires pressurisation, cooling, or both. This is done, yes, but gas remains generally more problematic than oil. Whilst not an intractable problem, it's a more technical, constrained, limiting, and expensive prospect.

Something tells me that "a little warm water" becomes a more complex prospect at deep-sea depths, pressures, and temperatures.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#187

Post by kakwa_ »

ekianjo wrote: post #18
ddxxdd wrote: post #12

This feels reminiscent of the current issue of long-term data storage. Flash drives are volatile and can lose your data any minute. Solid State drives are slightly less volatile, and a hard disk has magnetic fields that will last decades, but nothing will keep our gigabytes of data alive and intact for future archaeologists. If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. On a side not…

> If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. There is no form of storage that cannot be destroyed. Even stone scriptures eventually erode and fade away. The best thing we can do is duplicate everything as much as we can and hope to reduce the loss over time.

Being able to make copies easily and store them in different location are probably the best protection for any document. And now days copies are virtually free and moving them is extremely easy.

I'm wondering if someone as done studies on the last technical revolution of this kind, aka the printing press. To which extent the printing press helped prevent the definitive loss of documents? There are probably a tons of factors to take into account, like history, age, kind of documents, etc, but it could be quite interesting.

Lastly, as a though experiment, I'm wondering how an archeologist would react in front of a disk drive in a thousand years. Let say the disk drive is in a good condition, but the archeologist has to discover everything:

1) First he has to understand that the disk contains binary data spread in a certain way, if he has equivalent technology or better than today, this should work. (if he realizes that he should be extremely cautious when opening the disk drive, at least for spinning rust).

2) Then he could have to understand the logical layout of data on the medium (aka the FS), this step is kind of optional has you can recover fragment easily, but it would help a lot. And if data was stored in a DB, it's a second layer equivalent to the FS.

3) Then you have to understand the file format, if it's directly a simple TXT file, it should be doable, and it's probable someone can deduce the encoding used, ASCII is easy, UTF-8 is a bit more complex but doable. But, and it's a big but, if the data is compressed in anyway, and a lot of formats are these days, I skeptical that the archeologist (and his technical assistance) would be able to deduce it's a compressed format and not some random garbage, and then re-discover the algorithm used. And if it's a more complex document, like images (even if BMP should be doable), sound and video, it starts to get really tricky.

4) And then, you need to decipher the language and/or alphabet used.

Basically it feels a lot like Champollion needing to decipher 4 layers of hieroglyphs before getting the content. Deciphering one can already be hard enough.

That being said, as source code is often recorded as simple ASCII files which should be decipherable, he could get lucky and get the code parsing the layers, or at least get a specification of it.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#188

Post by perl4ever »

Diederich wrote: post #60
andreitp1 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly would they be "wasted"? Seems to me that they would just end up back in nature and deeding other organisms as part of the food chain.

> How exactly would they be "wasted"? Increased entropy mostly in the form of heat.

Compared to not eating it, or compared to the animal never having existed? I can't follow how, either way.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#189

Post by chrisco255 »

beat wrote: post #139
philg_jr wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When farming, the questions are even more complex. The livestock generates manure that fertilizes the fields, so much of that "lost" energy is recovered. Which is why grassfed > cornfed in pretty much every situation except for the extra fat/flavor you might get from cornfed beef. Having cows that consume grass is a win-win. The grass absorbs sunlight instead of reflecting it back into the atmosphere like a feedlot…

Trends in agriculture are driven heavily by cost. This is where the vegan fundamentalists go wrong, arguing that meat is "more expensive". But in the days before modern agriculture, people raised animals and had meat - it was economically beneficial to do so, even for people living at the edge of famine. Cornfed beef is a result of economics, too - it's cheaper to buy corn than use pasture, and/or it produces meat th…

Cows are fed very, very little corn. Corn is not cheaper than grass! Grass is free and widely available in the great American plains. More than 90% of a cow's diet over its lifetime is grass and hay. Less than 10% is grain or non-human edible leftovers from corn stalks, such as corn silage:

https://www.progressiveforage.com/forage-types/silage/what-i... https://beef.unl.edu/cattleproduction/forageconsumed-day

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#190

Post by eitland »

conjectures wrote: post #182
eitland wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I am saying is you can kiss goodbye to everything except fruit, potatoes and some easy vegetables on good fields in Norway (except central East Coast and Trøndelag, they have somewhat better conditions). Fruit will be hit or miss in a lot of places and will only be an option in southern parts of the country anyways. Same goes for a number of other places in the world. As I pointed out from the start, the efficie…

I hear what you're saying. The difficulty is that you're another non quant trying to make a general argument and failing. I'll spell out what a strong argument for the point you're trying to make might look like: A) An estimate of the total number of calories coming from purely grazed meat on this sort of land. B) An estimate of the total number of calories of meat consumed. C) A/B > 3/4.

I think I did better than your quant way :-)

Without having to resort to any kind of estimates[0] I have demonstrated for anyone interested that a purely vegan alternative will render lots of land unproductive, so - even given an optimal use of the rest of the land - you will still leave unused resources on the table.

I can go deeper into this subject, but I think this will suffice for now.

And: I'm all for reducing consumption and waste, and actually enjoy the reduce-reuse-part of the reduce-reuse-recycle-idea so this shouldn't be seen as a defense for overconsumption, bad farming practices or anything but rather an attempt to bring some realism into this thread.

[0]:really my only given is that not all land is usable for effective production of anything except grass.

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