[UIUCstudent01]

The mix of half agraria and half computer network survival and business - is my hope too......

But I think it won't survive 2100. Unless we see some massive nuclear plants... and some other developments in keeping the infrastructure alive...

We have massive hordes of people who don't expect Peak-Oil and aren't able to react to it. And won't be able to train their children (2030 you say?) to keep up their garden.. how will the cities look?

Our complicated society seems very vulnerable when you start taking oil away....

[xerces]

"We have massive hordes of people who don't expect Peak-Oil and aren't able to react to it. And won't be able to train their children (2030 you say?) to keep up their garden.. how will the cities look? "

The thing here is that I don't think peakoil will take the form of some kind of immediate societal collapse(in the span of a few years) or even some kind of a major depression(5-10 year ) scale. Given the fact that we still have abundant coal reserves and alternative energy sources, I would expect peakoil it manifest itself in a gradual and persistent increase in energy costs over the course of a generation (~20-30 years). Over such a long span of time, people and the economy will be able to adapt itself to the high cost of energy.

If oil were to run out tomorrow, all those ppl who live in huge( and poorly constructed houses) would freeze to death this winter. But if central heating costs gradually increases to the point of unaffordability over the course of decades, you'll see the following:

The house-construction industry will adjust by first building homes with more efficient heating systems,
then smaller houses, then smaller and better insulated houses. Then finally small,extremely well insulated houses with natural(passive solar...etc) heating.


Ditto with the distribution/supply chain industry:
If gas prices were to increase gradually over decades (with expected fluctuations), then normal supermarkets will be out-competed by online-supermarkets. Why, because online markets deliever their food to your door and do it a much lower fuel cost due to pre-planned routes with trucks loaded with food for 50 families. As the cost of fuel increases the discrepancy of price between the online-supermarket and the physical supermarket will only widen.

Ditto with the traveling/tourism industry:
If physical transportation costs were to increase to the point of being unafforadable, then ppl will more and more turn to MMORG and virtual worlds on the internet for adventure and entertainment. Eventually, the physical resorts and hotels of distant islands in the pacific will be outcompeted and replaced with server farms. These farms will host Virtual resorts and hotels. And the staff of those islands resorts will become virtual staff. It's just economics at work. People will consistently choose a slightly inferior but much cheaper substitute over an expensive version of the real thing.

And people will adapt as well. As imported red meat gets ever more expensive, people will choose much cheaper but only slightly inferior substitutes (fish, shrimp, soy). And as vegetable costs becomes more expensive people will naturally pick up gardening as a CHEAPER way of getting the same goods.


Now for cities:

I would expect cities to be much denser than they are now. Effectively suburbs will be consumed both-ways by the cities and the farms. Now, I would expect over time for some industry to come back to small cities. This is because the cost of transporting products from other continents(or the otherside of the country) would be cost prohibitive for all but the most complex products(computer chips, hybrid engines, advanced machine tools). Instead, consumer goods like textiles and furniture will have to be made locally and distributed by rail to be profitable. And when there's a profit to be made, there will always be someone to do it.

Thus cities will become centers of the manufacture of physical goods for the farms and a consumer of farm goods(like they were only 40-50 years ago) . But they may also become a significant source of food production, think hydro-ponics and roof-top gardens.

This may all seem utopian, but supply and demand seems to indicate that when store bought food gets expensive, people will supplement their diets with cheaper home-grown foods.

Additionally I'm beginning to believe that 25-30 years from now,the nation's largest cities may begin to look like insect hives. There may be giant structures that houses upwards of 100,000 people each(ten times the volume of the Empire State Building), these structructures could be stacked next to each other like honeycombs in a bee's nest. These structures are unbelievably energy efficient and can be built at relatively low cost while freeing up huge amounts of prime farmland.

[PeakOiler]

I'm a chemist and I work in a lab. It would be impossible for me to analyze samples using GC-MS (gas-chromatography-mass spectroscopy) and HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography) via cyberspace.

[Ludi]

It's rare to see a utopian on the scale of xerces.

I like some of the ideas. Not the mega-urban structures, though. Bad idea, very stressful on people.

I'm concerned about the cyber/farmer having enough time to do all his chores and his paying job too, if he works regular job hours and farms the old-fashioned way with a plough (why is he doing this? he likes mules?). Maybe he should look into some more cutting edge farming techniques such as permaculture, biointensive, or Fukuoka method. Unless he just likes mules. Nothing wrong with that, I think mules are cool.

[xerces]

Depends on how much he farms. I can easily forsee a situation where a the vast majority of rural families have <5 acres of land. Remember that farming and aquaculture on the family level is only a small scale supplement to their main source of delivered bulk foods.

[xerces]

"It's rare to see a utopian on the scale of xerces. "

Wow, how am I an utopian? I simply don't forsee societal collapse and a massive population die-off, does that make me an utopian?

[Ludi]

This is a "utopian" vision:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('xerces', ' ')Additionally I'm beginning to believe that 25-30 years from now,the nation's largest cities may begin to look like insect hives. There may be giant structures that houses upwards of 100,000 people each(ten times the volume of the Empire State Building), these structructures could be stacked next to each other like honeycombs in a bee's nest. These structures are unbelievably energy efficient and can be built at relatively low cost while freeing up huge amounts of prime farmland.

[Wildwell]

The teleportation thing is not something that can be done anytime soon. Do you find your email, phone and internet reliable? No, I thought not. Moroever, to transfer one human being on today's best data network would take several billion years, oh and you'll be a copy at the other end.

[oiless]

There seems to be a fair number of people here that work with information technology.
I don't, I work with my hands and my mind. I build things, I design objects for specific purposes, then I make them reality, I make things that people can reach out and touch.
I am a master of the more brute forms of technology in other words, point me at any machine that does not have circuit boards in it and I will make it work. If it's broken I fix it. If it needs to be modified to work better or differently I can design the modification and build it. If you need a machine to do some specific thing, chances are I can build it. (Within reason, don't ask me for an oil refinery, but if you ask me for a pump I can do that. It may be cheaper to buy one in the present day, but the point is I have the skills.)

So, and I may get flamed for this, what is information technology all about? What does it do? What is the product of cyberspace?
Now I realize that information is disseminated at great speed, but so is disinformation, so you end up (IMO) with a medium that has about the same information value as television. Try searching for any piece of information on the net and you find that it has been cut & pasted all over hell, plagerised, summerised, and bastardized. Unless one can, by dint of great effort, track it back to the original source, then compare that source with ones own observations and experience, and determine veracity, the "information" is useless.
So, cyberspace is not a reliable source of information. That leaves it's other functions, which I would say are primarly:
1-Looking at pictures of naked people.
2-Scamming people out of their money.
3-Selling people things they don't need. (see the second entry)
4-Playing with that electronic stuff we call money these days.
5- Amusing ourselves with things like this forum.

Now, I'm sure that there are important things that are done electronically that I'm not privy to, like communications between researchers in various subjects, but it appears to me that most stuff people do electronically is already a waste of energy; so why would there be more of that going on in a decentralized agrarian society, instead of less? Why would someone email me about a hand powered machine to wind hemp fibres into rope when he could walk across the village and we could talk over the possibilities face to face and come to a consensus about what he needs, what I can do, and what it's worth.
Someone needs a horse drawn mower fixed, are they going to email someone, or talk to the local smith?
Someone needs new cups cast for their pelton wheel, are they going to boot up their computer, or are they coming to me?

Is there some fundamental concept here that I'm missing?

[Pops]

I believe you are right to a point oiless - but of course like all solutions this idea doesn't solve everything. I suppose it comes down to where one believes the high point will be. I don’t work in software making software, or on computers making computers. I work on computers with software that replaced one hundred years of skilled trades in a decade.

But you may be right if there is nothing new to be built, if technology stagnates and begins to roll back down the slope and all we do is recreate and repair what is leftover.

My first job was in a print shop. It was based on offset photolithography – taking pictures of photoset type and pictures and then making the plates via a lphoto process as well.

Today I composite entire finished pages – photos, type, graphic elements and all on my monitor, it is then transmitted to a facility and it is printed directly on the plate just as your laser printer prints to paper. Granted the production of a million copies of the finished piece is preformed at a print shop just as the casting is done at your foundry. But everything before that can be preformed anywhere there is a connection. This is a very important point, before that, the process required at least a half dozen skilled trades which are virtually nonexistent now as ALL those trades – 10’s of thousands of people, have disappeared in the last 20 years. The pressman and a few in pre-press where there were 6-8-10-12 trades before and still they couldn’t have achieve 5% of the effects I can with the touch of a key and in a small fraction of the time to boot.

As you point out there is an incredible waste of bandwidth – just as there is an incredible waste of everything else. But unless we are to roll slowly back down the slope, losing a little knowledge every inch of the way, this type of communication of ideas and knowledge is by far more powerful, timely and flexible than anything before.


After all, Pelton must have scribbled some idea down on paper before the patternmaker ever picked up a rasp, eh? That is the point here.

[xerces]

"The teleportation thing is not something that can be done anytime soon. Do you find your email, phone and internet reliable? No, I thought not. Moroever, to transfer one human being on today's best data network would take several billion years, oh and you'll be a copy at the other end."

I think you're misunderstanding me here. When I say "virtual teleport" I mean to bring the audio/visual tactile information of a distant place to you, and a representation(avatar ) of you to that other place.

Think about how massively multiplayer games work. A human player is represented by an avatar inhabiting a virtual world that's physically located on a server that's thousands of miles away. Now the server delivers visual audio sensory inputs of that virtual world to the person, while the person's computer sends it's representation of the person(the avatar) to the server(s) hosting the virtual world.

I'm not talking about real teleportation(quantum entanglement) as that would take roughly 3 orders of magnitude more energy than what we have currently available to make this technology economical.

[xerces]

"it appears to me that most stuff people do electronically is already a waste of energy; so why would there be more of that going on in a decentralized agrarian society, instead of less?"

Your comments bring up some extremely useful points. Lets break down the main components of the internet economy:

Communications:

Its 2 orders of magnitude cheaper (energy-wise) to communicate via the web versus snail mail or fax. Just about all communications within companies whose holdings are spread over a large geographical area needs internet based communications (email, IM, web-conferencing, voip). Thus people of any society would rather have a cheap way of getting the same service rather than an expensive way. If you were in a supermarket to buy a bag of flour, and if one bag costs a dollar and an identical bag costs 5 cents, which one would you buy?


Services:
"why would someone email me about a hand powered machine to wind hemp fibres into rope when he could walk across the village and we could talk over the possibilities face to face and come to a consensus about what he needs"

What if that someone was 5 miles away? What if he was 10 miles away. Do you want him to walk 3 hours just to ask you a question? The answer is no, the alternative to email would be to have 10 ppl, each as skilled with rope making as yourself distributed evenly over ten mile radius. But once again, why should the economy choose an expensive and energy inefficient solution(maintaining 10 skilled people each of which serves the ppl within 1 mile of him), when there already exists the infrastructure for all those ppl to just ask you their questions via email. Thus why should people choose to pay an expensive price for the maintainence of your service(if there were 10 of you serving a population of 500 people), when they could simply pay 1 of you to do the same job(with the internet)?


Product distribution:

"Someone needs a horse drawn mower fixed, are they going to email someone, or talk to the local smith?"

Lets have a hypothetical example: You have a small city with a modern manufacturing plant(with efficient machinery and 5 employees) that makes and repairs horse drawn mowers, around this city there's 50 small villages and towns.

For your solution to be workable, you would need to have a blacksmith in every village/town to service the ppl of that town/village. So that's 50 blacksmithes with their families, all of who are consuming energy.

Now with my solution, you email the modern manufacturing plant the question, they find out the problem and mails you a replacement part. The part is delivered a few days later by either a truck or some kind of animal drawn vehicle on a pre-planned delivery route(for maximum efficiency).

Now you see that, with your solution there is a lot of energy wasted(energy of all those ppl walking over to the smith, energy of maintaining 50 smiths instead of 5 workers). But more importantly, if you scale your solution across all industries and across the entire nation, then you'll see that this will consume a huge amount of energy. Energy that can be used to maintain and expand an information-age civilization will instead be spent maintaining tens of millions of local semi-skilled workers.

And if your solution is implemented, human civilization will once again become agrarian in nature(why maintain a modern factory when we can have 1000 blacksmiths all hammering away in their villages?).

[EnergySpin]

Rapid prototyping machines (i.e. 3D laser devices) could be used to transmit bluprints and the part will be made on-site.
This is technology that is with us today. IT do have the potential to make things more energy efficient if used in an enabling framework. Otherwise ...
The internet did not eliminate paper trails or office waste.
It is interesting xerces this kind of scenario; in reality many things that can be done in the physical can be done in the digital space. Look at scientific journals; one hardly goes to the library nowdays. And even with a trickle of liquid fuel, the infrastructure could be maintained if fuel was prioritized to maintaing the infrastructure.

[xerces]

Let E be the amount of energy needed to maintain our current civilization:

1. Agro-Info scenario
The energy cost of maintaining a purely information-age society (my vision)

(E x 10^-2) + C

where C is the cost of maintain the web and bulk goods transport infrastructures


2. Eco-friendly scenario
The energy cost of maintaining a society that's in harmony with nature(much lower population and uses only renewable energy sources)

(Ex10^-2) * C

Where C is the fraction of humanity that will remain after population control.


3. Trekkie Scenario

The energy cost of maintaining a purely expansionist way of life ( with personal hovercrafts, space elevators, colonies on other planets, (QT) teleportation of complex products...etc)

(E x 10^3)


4. Doomer/survivalist Scenario

We run out of fossil fuels and then we strip the earth of other fuels(biomass, uranium...etc) and then results in a massive population die off.

(E x 10^-3) * C

Where C is the fraction of the population that will survie the die-off.

[Licho]

Honesty, I think, that if we manage to survive in such "cyber-agrarian" society for a while, we will, over time, once again reach and then exceed per capita energy levels common today. There are no real hard "physical" limits, and over time we can reach it with renewables, advanced fission and fusion.
Keeping communication networks, and as much research and high-tech industry as we can will be vital for our survival.

[EnergySpin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Licho', 'H')onesty, I think, that if we manage to survive in such "cyber-agrarian" society for a while, we will, over time, once again reach and then exceed per capita energy levels common today. There are no real hard "physical" limits, and over time we can reach it with renewables, advanced fission and fusion.
Keeping communication networks, and as much research and high-tech industry as we can will be vital for our survival.

[xerces]

"how much liquid fuel is realistically spend to expand the internet or enable DSL comms?"

Well in terms of maintenance, it may not need oil at all. We could just as easily use muscle power to lay down land based fiber optic cables and microwave towers.

Now in terms of expansion, for example underwater fiber-optic cables to connect to other continents, that will definitely require liquid fuel, but then again, you don't need much more than a few scores of such underwater lines to link up the entire world.

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('xerces', '"')how much liquid fuel is realistically spend to expand the internet or enable DSL comms?"

Well in terms of maintenance, it may not need oil at all. We could just as easily use muscle power to lay down land based fiber optic cables and microwave towers.

Now in terms of expansion, for example underwater fiber-optic cables to connect to other continents, that will definitely require liquid fuel, but then again, you don't need much more than a few scores of such underwater lines to link up the entire world.

[xerces]

"Glass and metals all take alot of energy for production. Optical fibers are made in clean-room environments which are energy intensive."

Which is all true. But all of this takes 1-2% of the energy of transporting hundreds of millions of multi-ton objects scores of miles every day to accomplish the same tasks. Like we're doing now.

[Ludi]

xerces, how quickly do you see this near-complete reordering of society occuring?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('xerces', 'T')hus why should people choose to pay an expensive price for the maintainence of your service(if there were 10 of you serving a population of 500 people), when they could simply pay 1 of you to do the same job(with the internet)?