Has anyone else been reading Greer's Retrotopia series? It comes from a viewpoint I have expressed myself many times so if anyone else is reading it I think the concepts are well worth discussing.
Forgot the link Doh!
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... burgh.html
In any case the book is about a high technology diplomat banging his head on the idea that Progress is subject to the law of diminishing returns, just like every other human created thing.
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And they call it progress.
Re: And they call it progress.
by Tanada » Fri 01 Jul 2016, 23:01:33
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Alfred Tennyson', 'W')e are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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Re: And they call it progress.
by Timo » Fri 01 Jul 2016, 23:11:09
No. I haven't been reading Greer's series, but i do like the way he writes at Archdruid. . What's the first one? I'll buy it and start. I need a good series to read right now.
- Timo
Re: And they call it progress.
by Tanada » Sat 02 Jul 2016, 09:32:23
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Timo', 'N')o. I haven't been reading Greer's series, but i do like the way he writes at Archdruid. . What's the first one? I'll buy it and start. I need a good series to read right now.
I didn't make myself very clear I guess LOL, comes from posting late at night. Greer his books as he writes them a chapter every couple of weeks. Retrotopia is his latest fiction work and it is still being written, he is about 18 chapters into the book now starting with the link I posted above.
In any case it isn't the book I wanted to discuss here, but rather the concept that Progress is subject to the Law of Diminishing Returns.
It ties in well with the Infrastructure thread I started last year. You start with a fellow carrying things in his hands, then upgrade to a back pack or shoulder yoke, then to a travois, then to a wheeled cart...
Each improvement yielded increased carrying capacity, but also came at an increased cost in energy. Once we got to wheeled vehicles leveling and smoothing road surfaces became a practical necessity. A human or a pack animal can haul a travois over incredibly rough terrain, but put a wheel on it to reduce drag resistance and that suddenly changes the picture.
This is true of all technological "progress" as far as I can tell. A simple trader with pack/travois can go almost anywhere a human can walk without making improvements to the transportation system/road network. Wheeled vehicles are much more likely to be limited to roads, and the faster you want to go the more improvements those roads require. Thus the law of diminishing returns rears up and bites your behind. A simple dirt road only needs to have trees cleared and drainage ditches built and maintained to be useful for 6 months of the year or more. Add a gravel topping and it is good 10-12 months of the year, but you have to get that gravel from somewhere and distribute it properly while still maintaining the drainage ditches and preventing plants from encroaching on the roadway. Add a hard Asphalt or Concrete surface above the gravel and now your hard surface roadway is good for 12 months a year, every year , but again your maintenance costs show a substantial increase to conduct even more repairs. Add in limited access points, overpasses and bridges, and carefully engineered curves to allow really high speed traffic and in addition to more traffic you get much much higher maintenance costs.
The same is true of railroads, the first simple ones used very light iron straps on wooden rails to move wagons fitted with special wheels. Heck the first passenger train in North America used stagecoaches hooked together in a train with flanges added to the wheels to keep them on the rails. A horse or mule team could haul half a dozen rail coaches that way, but when you started adding steam engines you had to build much stronger rails, so with stronger rails you might as well make bigger coaches into large passenger cars. And so on and so forth until now we have high speed rail system that go 150 km/h. But every step of that progress from a horse drawn string of six rail coaches to high speed rail transport took an upgrade in the road, from better rails to better ballast to better rail ties to more level roadbeds with many more over passes type bridges or tunnels.
The same is even true of aircraft, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew first from a sandy stretch of empty beach. From there grass field runways were commonplace right up through World War II. Concrete and Asphalt runways were created because the aircraft kept getting bigger and heavier with higher ground loading until they could not fly from even dry or frozen dirt runways without sinking into the soil. Now we have massive airport complexes where aircraft like an Airbus A-380 has a maximum take off weight of 427,000 kg, something totally beyond the grasp of a dirt runway in even the best weather conditions. And all the construction expertise and energy embedded in those runways, taxi ways, hanger floors and so on and so forth comes at an enormous cost in construction and maintenance.
For all of these methods of transport the law of diminishing returns holds true. You can also say the same thing about say electronics. You started out with telegraphs using wire, then crystal radios with simple tube amplifiers, then solid state diodes and amplifiers and cathode ray tube displays for TV and computer monitors. Now we have squeezed all those diodes and amplifiers and switch gates down onto the smallest wafer chips we can. But those chips are incredibly delicate because they are traced so small, a single bit of human dandruff is enough to ruin one of them, hence the super clean rooms where they are manufactured. Not only that, the tiniest surge of current will also kill them dead.
Where does progress stop being worth the cost of the increased complexity? In an energy constrained world how far does that "worth" move down from where it is today?
Our current political system is the only reason for common air travel and high speed train transport, both require huge subsidies of taxpayer funding to stay functional. Take away the taxpayer funding for airports and make the A-380 operators pay the full cost of building and maintaining facilities to handle these monster size aircraft and they will all be scrapped in very rapid time. The general public who flies could not afford to buy the tickets if the A-380 operators paid for all the costs associated with the aircraft. How small would aircraft have to get before the airlines could afford the maintenance of the airport facilities? I suspect something like the ATR-72 which only weighs 23,000 kg carrying 70 passengers would be able to fly from very much cheaper airports than the A-380 that weighs 427,000 kg carrying 538 passenger with a theoretical capacity of 853. The ATR-72 MTOW is just under 330 kg/passenger. The A-380 as currently configured with 538 passengers is 794 kg/passenger. Even at the theoretical max seating using two decks it runs at 500 kg/passenger, substantially more than the ATR-72. In North America/USA heavy duty Semi-trucks are allowed to weigh up to 36,000 kg fully loaded, so designing airports to handle 23,000 kg aircraft is easily within our capability. In fact all the existing airports that were upgraded over the last several decades to handle very heavy jumbo jets could operate these much lighter aircraft for a very long time with only minor maintenance costs. In fact the B-17 and B-24 bomber aircraft of World War II fully loaded both weighed considerably more than the ATR-72 does, and not surprisingly the technology to build airports for those aircraft is a lot less expensive to construct and maintain than what is needed for very large jumbo jets.
So where is the economic cost/benefit limit point for air travel? Do we go from super jumbo two deck A-380 all the way back to dirt/grass runways and piper airplanes with 5 passengers? Or do we manage something like the ATR-72 flying 70 passengers in modern comfort?
For railroads does the USA force itself up to European bullet train standards even though the economic costs are enormous? Or do we fall all the way back to horse/mule drawn light weight passenger coaches operating on the existing rail network? At such low weights the maintenance needed to keep the existing railroads useful amounts to keeping the drainage ditches clear and the plant growth from encroaching on the tracks. Or do we settle somewhere in the middle with smaller locomotives hauling shorter trains that weigh less and so do less damage to the existing network?
For the expressways, do we reconnect all the severed side streets back into the network between overpass entrance and exit points to make the network convenient for short distance travel? Or do we make every expressway a toll road where all the users have to pay directly for the maintenance of the network?
Do we continue to use printed chip circuit boards that are delicate and very high tech, that are manufactured in a very few places and shipped around the world? Or do we fall back to much more robust 1970's era circuit boards where your AM/FM/SW radio weighs 2 kg instead of 200 grams? Is a cell phone that easily fits in your pocket and gives you 24/7 access to the WWW worth the price tag, or will a 1980's era brick phone do what you need at 10 percent the cost and effort to manufacture?
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Alfred Tennyson', 'W')e are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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Re: And they call it progress.
by ennui2 » Sat 02 Jul 2016, 10:00:10
I know Greer is an "appropriate technology" guy, which amounts to promoting using simpler mechanisms, sort of like the Woodwright Shop guy vs. Norm Abrams in hand-tools vs. power-tools. But his whole treatise rests on these questions below:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')Where does progress stop being worth the cost of the increased complexity? In an energy constrained world how far does that "worth" move down from where it is today?
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')Where does progress stop being worth the cost of the increased complexity? In an energy constrained world how far does that "worth" move down from where it is today?
They are still questions because we aren't yet (IMHO) living in an energy-constrained world. As such, arguments over efficiency and infrastructure don't really factor in (other than how waste can contribute to AGW).
Norm Abrams can work a lot faster using nail-guns and power-drills than Roy Underhill and time is money. There's no free-ride. If people had to commute in donkey carts over the same distance they currently commute by car, people would work what, 2 hours days? The time-component of the equation is typically absent from doomer proponents of low-tech living. Let's just say you can't live like Little House on the Prairie at the same time as enjoying modernity as we know it. It would fall apart. That's a downside to anyone who values aspects of modernity, like the internet, modern medicine, a wide choice in foods no matter where you are, etc... That is most all of us, even doomers, when you pin them against the wall.
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