[Leanan]

One thing that comes through clearly in Jared Diamond's "Collapse" is the cost of complexity. Even things we think of as basic and cheap technology have a cost that may be impossible to pay in a post-peak world.

For example, the Norse settlers of Greenland depended on wood for a variety things: fire to mine and work metal, heat for their homes, cooking, making boats, houses, etc. As the wood began to run out, they made some substitutions. Sod was used for building intead of wood, and bones and animal dung were burned instead of wood. But those substitutions also caused problems. Cutting sod increased erosion, and reduced the amount of pasture for their animals. And the bones and dung were needed to fertilize the pastures and crops.

Wood eventually got so scarce that they could no longer mine or work metal. Scraps of metal that other Norse settlements would have thrown away were carefully saved and reused in Greenland. Knives were sharpened and re-sharpened until almost nothing was left of the blade but the handle. Even importing iron ingots from Norway was little help, because they did not have the wood needed to work the metal.

It also impacted their food supply. I was surprised to learn that even in medieval times, the Norse, at least, understood the importance of sanitation. The buckets they used for milk and cheese were washed twice a day with boiled water; otherwise, bacteria spoiled the milk. But without wood, they could not boil water.

That's the kind of thing Americans rarely think of. Though the search for firewood was a daily concern of our ancestors, and still is a huge problem in parts of the world, energy is so cheap for us we can barely imagine what it will be like post-peak. When basic things like cleaniliness and worked metal will be too expensive for ordinary folk. It's hard to imagine how we will maintain our technology in the post-peak world. When no one can afford a computer, and there's no power to run one and no Internet to connect to anyway, will it be worth remembering how to make integrated circuit chips?

[Coolman]

I think people in this country are unhappy with their way of life. As much as they don't want to admit it. Many people are deppressed. Life is so easy and predictable. Nothing exciting really ever happens. Technology was suppose to make our lives pyscially easier and it did, but it also made them stressful, complex and unsatisfing and now a bunch of people are out of shape and over weight. I think as Peak Oil plays out, regardless of how bad the consiquences will be, I think people are going to panic at first. But after the panic settles down, people will look to the old ways of life and not even think twice about even trying to get their computer chip job back. Humans are animals, just like any animal the closer we live to nature the more happy we are. Like I said before I think most people deep inside hate the modern world.

[DrColossus]

Yes i think it will be worth remembering how to make IC's, just like it will be worth remembering as much of modern science and techology as possible, even if that is only in the form of books or CD's etc.
We will of course not be bothered with making IC's or other techology, there will be plenty left around which will be salvaged and put to work by those of us with the skills.
It is our duty to remember such things so that in the distant future our children will not have to work out so much from first principles.
The global super rich may well maintain large underground repsositories of information, they may maintain factories for producing IC's and such like but they will not care about the rest of us, so it is down to us to save as much knowledge as possible, since knowledge is power, even more so post peak.
Also from a practical point of view, it will be useful to have knowledge of practical things for everyday survival, but then we already know that, thats why we have a personal library thread in the planning forum, its just my personal library wont be limited to books on gardening and such like.

[Leanan]

I think that's likely the only way we'll save knowledge that is no longer useful. If some wealthy or secret society devotes itself to saving it. (Kind like "A Canticle for Liebowitz.")

Me, I kind of doubt we'll succeed in saving much knowledge for the future. We'll be lucky if we can even maintain literacy rates. Books these days are printed on acidic paper, that crumbles in only a few years. CDs don't last as long as they claim; the cheap ones are often useless in a year. And we likely won't be storing this stuff under ideal conditions. That's assuming freezing hordes of people don't decide to burn all the books in the library for warmth.

Even if we do succeed in saving this stuff, I have doubts about how useful it will be. Future generations won't be able to tell fiction from nonfiction, myth from science. (In "A Canticle For Liebowitz," a group of monks find a scrap of an old grocery list, and assume it's important information.)

And just looking at other societies that have collapsed...it's typical for a lot of knowledge and technology to be lost. The Mayans didn't bother with their raised beds or irrigation systems after collapse. The Easter Islanders no longer know how the moai were erected. The Egyptians don't remember how the pyramids were built. The Minoans invented flush toilets and the printing press, but the technologies were lost for 5,000 years after they collapsed.

[bobcousins]

Leanan, thanks for your posts, I think you are about the only person around here that truly "gets it".

There are many people here who think the future will be pretty much the same, only different (with shiny new technology) or smaller, growing food in a neighbourhood community. When you are standing at the pinnacle of 8,000 years of civilisation, it must be inconceivable that your descendants would one day return to hunting wild game with a spear, sleeping under the stars, not knowing what a CD is for, apart from a shiny ornament.

Sure, it may take another few 1000 years to get to that point. It won't directly be lack of energy or resources that does for us. It will be the inability to sustain a complex society. That is probably too abstract a concept for most people to grasp. [What a load of BS, I can already hear you saying!]

Theoretically, if we all cooperated by carefully managing our population, environment and social institutions we could prolong this civilisation, at least until the next Ice Age (less than 10,000 years). But judging by all the people I have met, the chances of that are remote.

Brian Aldiss painted a great picture of a civilisation that emerges, discovers its past, and its future, then prepares for its fate in his Helliconia trilogy. When I first read it, I didn't realise how apt it was. The good news for Helliconia is they managed to bounce back at least once - will we be so lucky?

[Grimnir]

I think that's likely the only way we'll save knowledge that is no longer useful. If some wealthy or secret society devotes itself to saving it. (Kind like "A Canticle for Liebowitz.")

Ever read Asimov's Foundation series? Where are you, Dr. Sheldon?

[DrColossus]

Leanan, thanks for your posts, I think you are about the only person around here that truly "gets it".

Get what? surely we all "get it" or we wouldnt be posting on this site?
I personally am a bit tired of his/her doom and gloom, no-point-to-life attitude, its bad enough that peak oil is probably imminent and we're heading for a crash, without having to defend my optimistic-realist view of life.

Me, I kind of doubt we'll succeed in saving much knowledge for the future.

Have you got a crystal ball that lets you see the future or something, how do you know what its going to be like?
No, so perhaps you could stop patronizing those of us who want to try and make preparations by saving as much knowledge as we can, i bet you both put something in a time capsule type thing when you were at school, well storing information now would be similar to that.
Why not just go and post in the planning forum that you think that everyone who is preparing is wasting their time, see what response you get.

That is probably too abstract a concept for most people to grasp. [What a load of BS, I can already hear you saying!]

That is such a patronizing, holier-than-thou attitude.
I like abstract concepts, i need to for what i'm studying, and i can perfectly well imagine a future like the one you describe, its one of a number of possible futures doesnt mean it is the future.

I personally dont think everything that we have learned will be forgotten, sure we might not be making computers, IC's and cheap tracksuits and trainers in third world sweatshops but there will always be a place for technology, it may be old(er) (compared to now) technology but we will always need something to make work easier or to do more with less.

I think it is a mistake to compare most of our present civilisation with anything that has gone before for the simple reason that what is happening now just doesnt have any precedent, the Mayans or the Easter Islanders etc didnt have bicycles, steam engines, electricity, thermionic valves or transistors etc etc.
We probably wont just flip from this to hunting wild animals (if theres any left) and sleeping under the stars.

[Aaron]

Get what? surely we all "get it" or we wouldn't be posting on this site?
I personally am a bit tired of his/her doom and gloom, no-point-to-life attitude, its bad enough that peak oil is probably imminent and we're heading for a crash, without having to defend my optimistic-realist view of life.

Well sure,

Don't bother to defend your optimistic-realist view of life. Just trash one of our respected posters.

It's all good...

--------------------------

If your just looking for a (word) fight... take the PeakSpeak challenge and meet me for a public debate (Voice/IP).

I'm your Huckleberry.

[DrColossus]

Don't bother to defend your optimistic-realist view of life. Just trash one of our respected posters.

No offence was meant.
I was defending my view of life here and here, i just got fed up, sorry.

I am not looking for any kind of fight, i was just responding to the implication that my view of the future was somehow inferior or i didnt "get it".

[101]

One thing that comes through clearly in Jared Diamond's "Collapse".....

...and they didn´t eat the fish(greenland norse). Unbelievable.

[BorneoRagnarok]

2000 years from now. Some historians will shaked their heads and said
"..and they didn´t eat the bugs (Mega shopping malls people). Unbelievable stupid."

On personal basic, I eat wild ferns. Many of my friends will said
"What happen to ya ?"
"No $$ ?? Why eat grass"

The best answer is "No $ so eat grass. May need to borrow $ from you next time." The best thing is they don't made phone calls to you anymore. Good, post peak don't come for my portion of "grass".

I try to shape my life according to "Stone Age" way of life as I am bone-head greenie. No one agrees with me except another radical greenie. Which is fine for me ...

I must tell everyone that jungle is dangerous so they just stayed in city.
Let them enjoy themselves in city post peak with their gameboy , TV and library. The only knowledge that must be acquired is how to grow food and water. The rest can be sent to /dev/null

[Aaron]

No offence was meant.
I was defending my view of life here and here , i just got fed up, sorry.

Accepted.

And understood...

Although I gotta say that I agree that most people don't really "get it".

I'm not familiar with your individual position on peak effects, but it is all too common to see unrealistic expectations for how things will go after peak.

The magnitude of the issues we discuss here are simply alien to most people.

The scale involved in complex societies deceives the mind accustomed to dealing with much smaller quantities.

[Leanan]

It won't directly be lack of energy or resources that does for us. It will be the inability to sustain a complex society.

Yes, that is it exactly. The specific technology involved doesn't really matter. It's the complexity itself which is so hard to sustain.

Have you got a crystal ball that lets you see the future or something, how do you know what its going to be like?

No, but I can see the past. And I know that in the past, the people were just like us. No better - and no worse. And no one in the past succeeded in building a high-tech society without use the benefit of fossil fuels.

No, so perhaps you could stop patronizing those of us who want to try and make preparations by saving as much knowledge as we can,

What, exactly, did I say that was patronizing?

i bet you both put something in a time capsule type thing when you were at school, well storing information now would be similar to that.

No, I didn't, actually. And if I had, it would be with the understanding that whoever found it probably wouldn't understand it.

Why not just go and post in the planning forum that you think that everyone who is preparing is wasting their time, see what response you get.

Why would I say that? I don't believe they are wasting their time.

You seem to think that a lower-tech lifestyle isn't worth living. Because I disagree, this makes me a pessimist???

I think it is a mistake to compare most of our present civilisation with anything that has gone before for the simple reason that what is happening now just doesnt have any precedent, the Mayans or the Easter Islanders etc didnt have bicycles, steam engines, electricity, thermionic valves or transistors etc etc.
We probably wont just flip from this to hunting wild animals (if theres any left) and sleeping under the stars.

As Bob said, no one is saying that we'll flip to a hunter-gatherer existence overnight. The question is whether we'll be able to maintain our technology over the long term - generations. Collapse generally takes several decades, and that is the likeliest scenario for us as well (barring nuclear war or runaway global warming, anyway).

Long before we started using oil, our societies started evolving from less, to more complex societies.

That's true...but it's been true for a long, long time. And most such civilizations eventually collapse, when they can no longer maintain their complexity. The reason we (meaning European/western societies) did not collapse was twofold:

1) We weren't allowed to. Because Europe was a seething patchwork of roughly equal competing states, we continued on the path to complexity long after most civilizations would have collapsed. It meant most people lived in grinding poverty, with famine and disease constant problems, but the alternative - being conquered by hostile neighbors - meant that people stuck with it.

2) We took advantage of fossil fuels. Not just oil, but coal, then natural gas, kerosene, etc.

#1 without #2 really isn't a very optimistic scenario at all. I doubt anyone wants to go back to the life of a medieval peasant.

I do think that it's theoretically possible, at least, that humans could create a sustainable, relatively high-tech society. But it would require strict environmental laws, and downright draconian population reduction/control. I fear the chances of that happening are remote.

[Doly]

And most such civilizations eventually collapse, when they can no longer maintain their complexity.

I suppose that most civilizations eventually collapse. But when I look at history, I see that there is a tendency for the general level of complexity of any given civilization to rise. Also, I see that when a civilization collapses, it doesn't generally go back to a Paleolithic lifestyle. And the civilization that rises from the ashes of the previous one tends to be more complex than the previous one.

I find it hard to believe that complexity is a problem in view of that.

[FatherOfTwo]

Although I gotta say that I agree that most people don't really "get it".
I'm not familiar with your individual position on peak effects, but it is all too common to see unrealistic expectations for how things will go after peak.
The magnitude of the issues we discuss here are simply alien to most people.
The scale involved in complex societies deceives the mind accustomed to dealing with much smaller quantities.

All very true. But it must also be stated that we are very heavy on the doom crowd (which admittedly I'm leaning more towards each day myself) and we only have a smattering of experts here.

This forum fortunately has lots of geologists who know their sh&t, people like rockdoc123 come to mind, and they help tremendously in getting a clear picture of the geology side of things. We also have lots of people like Devil who are clearly energy savvy, but aren't hardcore in a particular industry. (I must admit I don’t know what Devil does, my guess is it is climate change oriented?) We also have lots of ecologists and other people who are very interested in peak oil as it relates to the environment (for obvious reasons as it directly ties to some of the problems they’ve been talking about for ages.) As such I would say that this forum has almost unequivocally hammered out that:
a) we're in overshoot
b) we're damn close to peak.

And then there is the rest of us who have done lots of reading and are intelligent, but essentially since we aren’t in a particular industry (I’m in IT for chrisake) we really only end up repeating what we think is correct. More often than not we don’t know it’s correct because we haven't spent our careers studying the area in question. For instance, how successful will alternate energies scale? What will be the true economic impacts of oil depletion be? We probably have a very good idea but we haven't hammered out these issues like we have the overshoot and oil peak issue.

What this forum really, really needs are some heavy hitters in these and other topic areas - People who are very well respected in their communities and can cut through the crap, mis-information or out-dated ideas. For instance, we really need a nuclear engineer (or 2 or 3!). We all know we’re going to make an effort at expanding nuclear power, but there is lots of fuzzy info out there as to how successful it will be… how much uranium is left? What type of reactors are truly feasible? etc. etc. We also need a heavy hitter economist (gasp!) etc. Of course the catch is that these heavy hitters have to be open-minded enough to explore what lies before us; as we all know it isn’t an easy mental hurdle for some people to get over.

Just my $0.02 (running total probably about $43.96 by now)

[Tanada]

I have been thinking about this topic a great deal the last couple of weeks.

You have some folks, KaiserJeep comes to mind, who believe that because information storage is easy we won't lose any of the accumulated knowledge of humanity even if we have a severe disruption.

On the other hand you have folks like Onlooker who believe we will go back to living in very primitive conditions or perhaps become entirely extinct any day now.

I personally take the third way. Decline of civilization always means simplification of the complexity of the culture in question. However for example while the Rome of 250 AD "collapsed" into the Rome of 650 AD what did that actually mean? Well one example is stone working. The super sophisticated statue carving artistic techniques were lost because the patrons who had formerly paid for the artistic work lost their ability to support the arts. However the basic stone masons who knew how to break rocks along plane to create flat surfaces, assemble rocks and mortar into masonry walls and as far as that goes to make mortar from limestone and sand continued on mostly uninterrupted.

Artistry is great and captures some of the beauty of the natural world into a man made form that other humans can recognize and enjoy. Art is at least a 50,000 ybp old invention based on regoliths carved in places wherever humans went and in the more complex cases including statuary and cave paintings. But when you have to choose between paying the mason to build defenses or paying the artist the mason is going to win, or you are going to die sooner and leave the artist without a patron anyhow.

Another example is literature/storytelling. As far back as culture goes once we developed the ability to tell stories we have, to entertain our fellow tribe members or even just to entertain ourselves. But those stories served a higher purpose, almost always serving as cautionary tales that taught the younger members of your tribe that seeking adventures or doing heroic deeds was not something to do lightly, and often came at great cost. They also served to pass knowledge from generation to generation about what wild foods might be found in famine times and how the tribe had survived different crisis episodes of the past.

So art that transmits crucial information survived even the worst of the Rome collapse period because the people living at any slice of time during the period needed to pass on information to their descendants, but art for the sake of art became a rarity.

A third example is hydraulic cement. The Ancient Romans learned how to mix mortar (lime and sand) with Pozzolana (a type of volcanic ash) and gravel sized pieces of rock to create one of the best cement formula's. The issue was Pozzolana is a natural mineral substance that only forms under the right conditions, and if you want to use it at a distance from the formation it is heavy and dense and requires a lot of effort to move far. As a result while the Roman Empire with its vast trade network and safe roads could afford to haul the pozzolana as far as necessary to get the work done their descendants could not. This lead to people in 650 AD admiring large concrete structures like the Colosseum, but not having a clue how to duplicate the materials used to build it.

So what does this mean for us and our descendants in the post peak world over the next 400 to 600 years as the complexity unwinds?

Well for one thing our levels of complexity are at least an order of magnitude greater than those of the Roman Empire at its peak. IOW if/when we substantially fall we have a lot further to go to get all the way down to basics. We are a hyper specialized culture. In Ancient Rome or Victorian Britain the thing the wealthy aspired to was often to be a 'gentleman farmer' by which they meant the equivalent of a plantation owner. They remained tied to Agriculture in a way most current North Americans and Europeans are not. Because of this skill at farming declined somewhat but never went away completely, and land based crop agriculture is the foundation of human civilizations in Europe, Africa, Asia and the America's long before higher technology evolved. The only major population that did not grasp the value of crop agriculture were the Australian Aboriginal tribes who remained firmly hunter-gatherer cultures until large scale European invasion took place. The Inca in South America are often cited, but they actually descended from the Moche civilization of a thousand years prior that had flourished, then declined and eventually been replaced. The Moche were quite complex as a culture and developed techniques from growing Potato in the high mountains of the Andes that were tested a couple decades ago by an anthropologist and proven to be extremely calorie in calorie out efficient in a pre mechanical muscle power civilization context. Nearly everything about the Moche culture fell apart, but the people remembered how to grow Potato and passed that knowledge down the chain of descent until the Inca used the agricultural base to expand their population/complexity/empire.

Modern folks other than hobby gardeners are no longer connected to agriculture. As recently as the 1960's there were still a respectable percentage of Americans engaged in farm work but as we went on the course of massive mechanization this number has fallen like a rock. Where even a small percentage of farmers can be enough to supervise and train other new farmers in a collapse we are now faced with a situation where much less than 1% of the population are engaged in agriculture and many of those are hyper specialized like Michigan Cherry farmers or California Almond farmers. Worse states like New York still have crop farms upstate, but their population is so large and their remaining agriculture so small that there is no reasonable chance they could feed their own population if they had to. In addition while the North Dakota Wheat and Kansas Corn produce abundant crops compared to their population in a fast crash scenario most of these would end up rotting in the field because without the current distribution system they have nowhere to store most of it once the local grain silo's are filled.

Well that will do for an opening set of thoughts, more later.

Happy Christmas Eve Eve everyone!

[GHung]

The costs of complexity will be revealed when inevitable price discovery of complexity imposes itself. There's a lot of price discovery coming down the pike and, as Tanada points out, society-at-large is woefully unprepared, not just in terms of skill-sets, but in terms of mindset. Those who take complexity for granted are unlikely to grasp the difficult simplicity of having to weed and tend a garden every day. There's no app for that.

I've posted the Link to the "Survivor Library" before. I think the name puts a lot of people off, but it's only a collection of thousands of books and publications going back over 200 years, mostly how-to books and pamphlets, largely from much simpler times, and how people did everyday things. Some are quite in-depth, and what I love about many of them is how eloquently folks' prose was, back in the day - on just about every subject, and some of the info there is outdated in terms of science and safety (eg: food preservation), but it goes to things people did to actually live and prosper before everything was hyper-specialized, mechanized, or discarded for more modern, less labor-intensive processes.

http://www.survivorlibrary.com

Any/all of it can be downloaded free, or it can be ordered up-to-date on DVD for about $30 (more on "Mdisks" that last a long time). I ordered them on DVD, copied them to our home cloud RAID drives, and sealed the DVDs in the fire safe in our "bunker". I also download new additions a couple of time a year. In total, it's well over 120 GB, and growing constantly.

My grandkids love to read, so I sometimes print some of the books for their amusement. It shows them that the way we do things these days are not the way our forepeeps did things, and that there is life after complexity, if one is willing.

See some of the hundreds of subjects here: http://www.survivorlibrary.com/?page_id=1014

If nothing else, it's a testament to what a remarkable and busy species we are.

[KaiserJeep]

The source of my belief in the persistence of technology after the great power down is simple. Technology - particularly digital technology - saves enormous amounts of resources. For example, a modern tractor with an engine management computer gets twice the gas mileage of an old carbureted tractor with an engine that produces much less torque and horsepower, and breaks more often. The internet enables "just in time" logistics that result in huge savings in transport and warehousing costs. (If you don't believe that, try running several corporate farms, some food procssing plants, a fleet of trucks, a large distribution warehouse, and multiple supermarkets without computers - you could emply 10X the people and still fail, meanwhile your food would be unaffordably high priced, large amounts of food would spoil, and some would be diverted without payment and without your notice.)

The great power down will necessitate more complexity, not less. Far from being a simpler lifestyle, the post apocalypse world will be mind-blowingly complex. Those that cannot cope with this complexity because of age or infirmity or simple lack of intelligence will quite frankly be the first to perish. It is the modern twist upon survival of the fittest. Unless you put in the time and effort and expense to compete for limited resources using technological aids, you will be less prepared to survive than those that do do so.

[dolanbaker]

According to this link it's a type of long lasting DVD
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/9 ... 1000-years

But what if you had a backup medium that was nigh indestructible, almost immune to inclement conditions, and made of stone? You’d have the Millenniata M-Disc, which is basically a 4.7GB DVD with a data layer made out of stone-like metals and metalloids. The idea is that conventional, home-made optical discs have a very soft recording/data layer that isn’t very resistant to heat, humidity and light, while the M-Disc on the other hand has a much tougher data layer that can withstand the test of time. M-Discs can’t be burnt with your current DVD burner — melting stone requires a laser that’s five times stronger than normal! — but on the flip side, M-Discs are backwards compatible and can be read by normal DVD drives.

Great idea, I've never heard of them, might get one as I have already had some first generation CDs fail to read now.
But there are other things that google has found that are also called mdisk, so I'm not sure if this is what GH is referring to.