[SeaGypsy]

'We', won't 'bring it about'. It's on Ibon's 'Worshipping the overshoot predator' thread. And no this is not the space fantasy thread, though you tried to make it one.

[Tanada]

Actually this thread is about the question, is technological advancement at a rapid pace an improvement or a detriment to us?

My POV is we need a certain technological level for sustainability, but that so called "Rapid Progress" is extraordinarily wasteful and driven by the consume consume consume ethic created in the very cheap energy era now ending.

I have pointed out some of the horribly wasteful ways we act because of the cheap energy con-con-consume ethic. Yes newer technology is individually more efficient, but forced mandated changeovers from whatever is current to whatever is next are NOT. I don't care if you are talking about a relatively cheap item like a cell phone or a lifetime expense technology like an energy efficient home. I have started multiple threads on here over the last 8.5 years on the costs vs the benefits of different upgrades to existing plant and equipment. Before I was foreclosed upon I owned a house built in 1913 that was masonry construction with virtually no insulation. I looked into replacement windows, insulating paint, you name it. In the end the only major upgrade done was to replace the 1953 gas furnace with a 2005 gas furnace changing from 55% efficient to 97% efficient. The projected energy savings payback was 5 years because at that time the natural gas was costing me $11 Mcf. The next winter it was $4 Mcf because fracking hit the market like a tidal wave and my payback time was stretched out to 25 years. Replacement windows even at the very high natural gas rates had a 20 year replacement cost energy return on them, and insulating the walls to actually make them reflect energy was very expensive, basically it would have required building a new wall inside the masonry shell room by room to put up insulation and drywall. For that cost it would have been cheaper to just knock the house down and rebuild, which was also outside the realm of possibility.

My direct ancestors grew up during the Great Depression, nothing was thrown away until you had gotten all the use out of it possible. Until the West gets back to thinking that way the Business as Usual Eternal Growth paradigm will keep pushing us further and further from sustainability.

[Pops]

Do you remember that show called "Connections"? It was a guy named Burke I think and he talked about the way that seeming breakthroughs were actually the result of a long series of incremental changes. I think of Jethro Tull inventing the mechanical planter in 1700, mass produced steel in the 1800 and oil in the 1900 as the the real milestones that allowed us the ability to grow way more than we needed to survive and so gave our idle hands over to the devil. lol

I'm not sure how you'd gauge the right amount of invention. My day job is creative, I don't cure cancer but I do create something that wasn't before, it's fun and sometimes profitable, if not soul satisfying. I think that's how humans are wired, creativity is our niche, it's our "Eagle Eye" our "Gazelle Leap" our "Bear Claw."

It isn't all about simply owning the next iPhone. I think a lot of it is the creative drive to invent and integrate an accelerometer into a cell phone and the fun of discovering whatever app someone else created to use it. Expand that out to biology or any of the sciences or arts... Is a Pollock art? Is there water on Mars? Is there a God particle? What's the nature of consciousness? I think these are all forms of cave painting. To me, the opportunity to have all this stuff to discover and play with is fantastic, especially when compared to a life of monotonous drudgery.

My Amish neighbors the next farm over are feeding chickens and milking cows right now, are they better off, more fulfilled, happier than me sitting here tapping into the either? Maybe, I don't know. The point I think is they are the anomaly, the norm is not to shun the newer and easier but to strive for it.

At some point I'd think newer and easier might stop or slow down; not sure. To me thinking about what happens when it does, or worse, what happens if we backslide to older and harder, is as natural as being aware of traffic and how deep the roadside ditch is when I'm driving, it's just prudent to have an escape route if everything goes sideways.

[SeaGypsy]

Totally Pops. To me it seems quite bizarre for someone with quite good capability at survival to be absorbed in an idea which at best might save a tiny number of his/her fellow species to some weirdo off world crapola existence, with no likelihood of having any genetic input. My interest in survival begins with my family, then my fiends and their families, then my hometowns, then my country, then ecology and my culturally similar affiliates, I care almost as little if a few people I have no connection to get to be orphaned out in space as I do if religious extremists get hunted down by aliens. But there I go off topic again.

My view is that skills are the most valuable thing I possess. Real life practical abilities. I barely rate my computer skills above rudimentary, though this is one of my main tools, it's a tool for entertainment and long distance communications. The main practical use is secondary- for job search and education. However I have many friends a few years older than me who see me as a wizard for my ability to find 'stuff' on the internet. So a skill I rate as mundane, to someone else is akin to magic. I guess it's like that with a lot of 'looking over the fence'. I don't give a hoot what the neighbors have 'got'- but I have always been interested in the skills they used to get it. Some of the most narrow focused and specialized people have the most stuff to show for it, in a real world survival scenario would be quickly right to the back of the pecking order and their 'stuff' would be mostly utterly useless. Others with virtually no stuff, but a heck of a lot of practical skills- are likely to become leaders in a 'sideways' or 'backwards' scenario.

[vision-master]

Dust in the wind

[Tanada]

James Burke did four series for the BBC, you can find just about every episode on Youtube these days. The Day The Universe Changed is my favorite as a history person. He also did Connections, Connections 2 and Connections 3 as sequels, each was successively less information dense. I highly recommend The Day The Universe Changed and the first two sequels, but I have to admit I was very disappointed in Connections 3.

IMO the Amish are a bit too far into the resisting change idea, however I respect their commitment to their way of life.

I have no complaint about a creative person adding an accelerometer to cell phones and inventing aps to make use of them, my objection is more to the 50 million people who discard their perfectly working pre-accelerometer models just to get the newest thing.

[KaiserJeep]

Focusing on consumer goods like cellphones/smartphones and complaining about obsolescence is not particularly instructive. Nor is there a lot of resources involved in the replacement of consumer goods. Which is why the terms "Durable Goods" and "Housing" and "New Housing Starts" and so forth exist - the parts of technological society that represent significant amounts of resources are monitored separately.

The parts of the cellular networks that matter because they represent significant capital are the stuff the consumer never sees - the towers, switching/billing computer networks, microwave links, buried optical fibers, and even orbital communications satellites. I regret to inform you that there are FOURTEEN such cellular networks in the USA, using THREE incompatible network technologies, plus another EIGHT cellular networks in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Having three overlapped networks is indeed wastefull of resources, and the symptom of competition is the "new phone of the month" phenomenon which you are complaining about.

The reasons this happened are historical and relate more to the very real abuses that Americans experienced before "Ma Bell" was broken apart into regional land-line service providers called "Baby Bells". But the net result is that FOUR versions of any new mobile tech device need to be built, for example iPAD-5's exist in WiFi-only and THREE versions for WiFi/cellular to connect to AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon cellular networks. The rapid pace of change and the competition are more apparent in the USA than anywhere else, but smaller versions of this same situation are common throughout the world.

Competition is a good thing, Darwin thought well of it. Eventually there will be a single network, after the usual bankruptcies, mergers, and acquisitions. (Think of the scene in THX-1138 where "consumption is being standardized".)

But a recent decision has been made which illustrates WHY technological advances are important for saving resources. Super-storm Sandy devastated the US East Coast in 2012. The decision has been made that this most densely populated part of the US will be rebuilt with a modern infrastructure, and copper telephone circuits - "landlines" - will no longer exist in the area. If you ask for a landline, what you will get is a voice-over-IP solution from a newly modernized digital network.

Eventually as the rest of the country follows, US copper telephone lines will be gone within (at a guess) three decades - and about a million metric tons of copper will be recycled into other uses - something like 1/15th of the amount mined in the entire world during the 20th century. The copper is being replaced by optical fiber - which regretfully is a petrochemical plastic - but the value of the reclaimed metal will be at least $7.15 Trillon US dollars at today's prices. (One million metric tonnes at $7,150/t.)

In actuality, we will also realize about 3X the savings in labor costs as we get back from the salvaged copper. This is good news for most US citizens, and bad news for the CWA (the Communications Workers of America, a large/powerful labor union), which will pretty much work itself out of jobs in those three decades of network renewal. (Plastic fibers are lots more reliable than metallic copper circuits.)

But if you were to net out the benefits, there is the $7.15B plus hundreds of thousands of people available for things like growing food after mechanized agriculture ends, or implementing "green energy" infrastructure. The benefits will pay for a lot of smartphones - which cost probably $50 to manufacture, plus the markup for the corporate infratructure, which is probably another $50.

Tanada, this detailed explanation of why the hunger for new smartphones is ultimately a good thing was more or less because of your complaints about rapid technological obsolescence. But your points about your energy-inefficient home were well made - pretty much the only way to recycle such structures is to strip them to a shell and build an energy-efficient envelope inside. Fail to do so and you will eventually have something like Detroit. Which is why you should base such arguments on durable goods - vehicles, major appliances, and residences. But then, we typically do not replace such durable goods in short cycles like consumer goods.

As for colonies in space, none of you have yet made a convincing argument about why this will not happen. Given that our Solar System has what for millennia to come can only be considered unlimited supplies of raw materials, energy, and living space - you are looking at a stark choice between a still thriving and growing human species, and one that is in decline along with the planet they evolved upon.

[vision-master]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')u]As for colonies in space, none of you have yet made a convincing argument about why this will not happen. Given that our Solar System has what for millennia to come can only be considered unlimited supplies of raw materials, energy, and living space - you are looking at a stark choice between a still thriving and growing human species, and one that is in decline along with the planet they evolved upon.

[Newfie]

I get a little monthly mag from my electric coop.

Latest issue had these stats, may be off a little.

In last 10 years....
Fishing down 11%
Hunting down 23%
Outside the home nature participation/observing down 37%

It seems humanity is crawling into its techno cave and pulling the door closed behind em.

[SeaGypsy]

space-otsf-what-if-there-is-no-happy-ending-an-ecologist-s-pov-t68739-40.html

It's here. There's a whole Battlestar Galactica why KJ's dream is just that.

[KaiserJeep]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'I')mpressive line of thought with good data implying interesting consequence. Two mistakes however:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', '&')quot;This is good news for most US citizens, and bad news for the CWA (the Communications Workers of America, a large/powerful labor union), which will pretty much work itself out of jobs in those three decades of network renewal. (Plastic fibers are lots more reliable than metallic copper circuits.)"

[SeaGypsy]

None, probably ever.

[vision-master]

Nomads of the Rainforest

NOVA visits a tribe of Ecuadoran Indians who still maintain traditions that date back to the Stone Age—thirty years after their first contact with Western Civilization.
Original broadcast date: 11/06/84

[vision-master]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')O, I'm not kidding about expanding into space, either. Technological advance has no limits except those imposed by the lack of resources such as labor, materials, space, and money. Once one has access to nearly unlimited materials and energy, first billions and then trillions of humans will live there.

[SeaGypsy]

"Our makers"? You mean the aliens, the 'Gods' or the Laws of Nature? Probably it doesn't matter which, you are correct Vision.

[KaiserJeep]

The technological milestones of space:

First un-tethered hot air balloon - 1783, Paris, France
First powered airplane flight - 1903, Kittyhawk Beach, USA
First manned rocket (ME-163 Komet) - 1944, Peenemünde West, Germany
First satellite in orbit - 1957, Baikonur, USSR
First man in space - 1961, Baikonur, USSR
First lunar mission - 1969, Cape Canaveral, USA
First private space launch (Ariane-1), 1979, Centre spatial guyanais, French Guiana
First reusable spacecraft (Shuttle) - 1981, Cape Canaveral, USA
First space station (Mir) - 1986, Baikonur, USSR
First successful Mars landing - 1997, Cape Canaveral, USA
First private manned space launch (Ansari X-Prize) - 2004, Mohave, USA
First private paid space excursions - 2014?

You see, aside from the first three, I remember them all. I am hoping to see the first industry in space and the first permanent space habitat before I die. Because we have not even slowed down, by my standards. You can invest in space business ventures today if you wish.

Never say never, it's not very smart.

[Subjectivist]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'T')he technological milestones of space:

First un-tethered hot air balloon - 1783, Paris, France
First powered airplane flight - 1903, Kittyhawk Beach, USA
First manned rocket (ME-163 Komet) - 1944, Peenemünde West, Germany
First satellite in orbit - 1957, Baikonur, USSR
First man in space - 1961, Baikonur, USSR
First lunar mission - 1969, Cape Canaveral, USA
First private space launch (Ariane-1), 1979, Centre spatial guyanais, French Guiana
First reusable spacecraft (Shuttle) - 1981, Cape Canaveral, USA
First space station (Mir) - 1986, Baikonur, USSR
First successful Mars landing - 1997, Cape Canaveral, USA
First private manned space launch (Ansari X-Prize) - 2004, Mohave, USA
First private paid space excursions - 2014?

You see, aside from the first three, I remember them all. I am hoping to see the first industry in space and the first permanent space habitat before I die. Because we have not even slowed down, by my standards. You can invest in space business ventures today if you wish.

Never say never, it's not very smart.

[sparky]

.
Technology can be rated today , just look at what people do when they have needs
in no oil driven environment car axles are much sough after ,
they make an excellent base for a wooden cart pulled by animal strength
operating so far below their rated wear , they last for ever
in a similar vein ball bearing can save 300% of the energy needed to move something
LED are fantastic for lighting , they make the constraints of solar power immaterial

drugs ,antibiotics , insecticides are always wanted , everywhere
Synthetic plastics are well worth the effort
from Amazonia to the Pole , women love plastic containers

[ralfy]

Advancement in technology generally works against humanity because both are part of a global capitalist system, where technology employed for increasing production leads to more consumption, and of "connections."

For example, the use of oil and other means to increase and improve manufacturing and food production led to the Green Revolution, which in turn contributed to lower infant mortality rates and prolonged life, which in turn contributed to a population boom.

The same improvements in manufacturing and food production led to a global middle class. That and lower birth rates are ensured only if more join the middle class, which means increased resource consumption.

At the same time, the use of oil and various improvements have also led to significant environmental damage and resource depletion.

Finally, given ecological footprint:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... _footprint

the world is already at overshoot, and that's for living conditions equivalent to that of Turkey. To remain within bio-capacity, living conditions will have to be equivalent to that of Cuba, and that's assuming that population won't increase further and no more environmental damage will take place.