[RySenkari]

(Yeah, I stole that topic title from The Animatrix.)

Most people here talk about Peak Oil causing the end of civilization, the collapse of society, and an end of technological progress. It would cause a return to the Dark Ages, and perhaps the Stone Age, at least in the worse scenarios.

So my question to all of you is this. If there is a so-called "hard crash", and we get knocked back to the Dark Ages, and assuming we don't completely die out... when will humanity return to this level of technology and begin advancing beyond? When will there be a "Second Renaissance", when the post-societal Dark Ages end and technology begins to advance again?

I believe that even if we do return to the Dark Ages or Stone Age-like society, mankind will eventually discover some new form of cheap energy (that we'll probably run out of again) that they can use to begin reconstructing advanced society. Given decades, centuries, or even millenia, we will recover and return to a technological society.

When will this happen? 2050? 2100? 2200? 2500? 3000? 5000? Your guess is as good as mine.

[rerere]

In all the talk about soft crashes hard crashes et la I've not seen banter on these 2 concepts:

1) If you have any 80+ year old relatives ask them to think back to their childhood and identify the 15-20 items the household would consider 'essential' or 'cherished' items. Think of how you needed those items to survive.

Now, ask that same question of today's 20-somethings. Then take their 20 cherished items and apply the 'survival' filter of your choice.


2) In the bad old Greek Days, one worked hard enough to make a living, and the rest of the time was spent in contemplation. Even the old masonic tradition said '8 hours labor, 8 hours sleep, and the rest to do the work of or contemplate Diety.'

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('RySenkari', '(')Yeah, I stole that topic title from The Animatrix.)

So my question to all of you is this. If there is a so-called "hard crash", and we get knocked back to the Dark Ages, and assuming we don't completely die out... when will humanity return to this level of technology and begin advancing beyond? When will there be a "Second Renaissance", when the post-societal Dark Ages end and technology begins to advance again?

[lostech]

that isn't strictly true is it? I mean, something like a telegraph line is 'technology' but surely this can drastically reduce the need to use energy or change the environment, by reducing the need for physical transport of information? there must be many other examples. Theoretically I think technology gives humans the ability to make less of an impact on the environment, although as to whether or not humans can avoid the temptation of using technology simply for short term luxury- I don't know
For this reason I think a technological renaissance is likely, alhtough it will probably have to be much slower and more careful, as it won't have access to the resources ours did.

[jesus_of_suburbia_old]

Lostech,
MonteQuest isn't speaking of a world void of any technology. He is simply referring of one which doesn't create the same amount of entropy it does today. I doubt a telegraph would create much disorder.

[lostech]

Ah, right. "absorb and sustain". We're on the same page here. I think my point is that 'more advanced' doesn't always mean more entropy/ energy use.

[jesus_of_suburbia_old]

Correct.

We are currently seeing energy used rather frivilously for convenience. Take a broom and a vacuum cleaner. The broom can do the job of a vacuum cleaner while expending much less energy. The vacuum not only uses energy for operation, but also in its construction. Now, the broom might take a longer time to get job done, but it lasts longer and is much easier to replace than a vacuum.

[Sencha]

I have to agree with what most of the other posters have been saying. We will never have anything close to what we have now in terms of technology, and I happen to think it is for the better.

The highest we will probably get is the, strangely enough, Renaissance period. I would guess that would be when we stabilize ourselves, and the bloody, endless conflict of the dark ages would have settled itself down.

Maybe if we're really lucky, we can live somewhat reminiscent of the 1800's, before oil was discovered, but that might be asking for too much.

But hey, if we stay around the medieval ages of things, it would be sort of fun. We'd get to live in Middle Earth, instead of read about it! Who knows, depending on what happens we might be living in a world like that depicted in Ralph Bakshi's Wizards

For those who don't know, its a medieval/fantasy world that exists a million years after an apocalyptic holocaust. The radiation evolves humans into being well, humans, elves, dwarves, orks, etc. It's pretty cool.

[bentstrider]

I could picture keeping the population size relative to how much energy is available occurring.
Basically, you're going to have a type of population control based on how much alternative energy gets churned out.
It goes like this: Governing body decides that if wants to avoid another "crash", it will have to keep the population to a certain number.
A good number I hear many conspiracy theorists work with is 500,000,000 total humans on earth.
They'll probably let it go under the number.
But once it gets above, a "death draft" would occur.
Whoevers name gets called up, they get taken out painless and easy.
Quite Barbaric in it's own sense, but technological survival is survival.
And they could also make it an incentive to live self-sufficiently.
Instead of the Selective Service System, it will be the Selective "Offing" Administration.

[Coolman]

Never agian will life be like this, we have wasted far to much resources, oil, natural gas, coal, copper, silver, gold, platinum etc. that we can not get them with out our heavy duty machines.

[jpatti]

Life being like this is not equivalent to a Renaissance.

In today's worked, human beings are resources and consumers, rather than people. Industrial society sucks. Getting it back would be a bad thing.

When I think about the stuff I'll want and that won't be available without transportation, the necessities include salt, baking soda and cream of tartar.

But the luxuries are things like cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, cocoa and sugar. This stuff became available to people before oil, but they were really expensive. Traders carried this stuff around the world. And in thinking about it the other day, I realized that the global economy actually began with Marco Polo, not with oil.

The other thing is... it will be important to have books. Not just books on stuff like medicine and farming and gardening. But basic books on stuff like mathematics and science and such. I have a pile of college books, but I don't have *basic* books for teaching children.

This will end up important. Although my husband had a vasectomy before we met and we will therefore never have children, my daughter will be perfectly fertile once contraceptives are no longer available.

The ability to educate children is going to be important. I need to order the whole set of Saxon math books...

[tmazanec1]

It will be either the first or the last, with a slight dice loading for the first. If we don't recover in a few decades, it will be many millennia, with the optimistic timeline leading by a nose so far (or maybe a nostril).

[gg3]

Monte, I do think RySenkari understands the central point, and is not talking about "repeat of the same" but about "something different emerging."

Personally, I would say probably by 2100 we'll have stabilized. Not back to where we are, but stable. I suppose most of us will have a bird's eye view of it from some vantage point in the hereafter...

More later, I gotta scoot for now...

[fastbike]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')ever agian will life be like this, we have wasted far to much resources, oil, natural gas, coal, copper, silver, gold, platinum etc. that we can not get them with out our heavy duty machines.

[RySenkari]

By Second Renaissance and technology, I wasn't talking about industrial society per se, as it relates to oil.

I was thinking more along the lines of when we'll either discover some other form of efficient energy (remember, when oil was discovered, it was labeled a "miracle" as well... those of us living now can't possibly imagine what our post-peak descendants will stumble upon as a source of power), or discover a way to advance technology with the resources available to us (hard-crash advocates seem to be thinking in terms of "well, if we can't use alternative energy efficiently by the time the crap hits the fan, we'll never use it"... given hundreds or thousands (or TENS OF THOUSANDS, for all you super-pessimists out there) of years, I'm sure we'll think of something, even if we're living in the Stone Age).

Hopefully by then we'll be able to control this new energy source and/or prepare a new one for when we run out. If we can do that, then we truly will have had a Second Renaissance, in every sense of the word.

I still should've probably included a "Never" option in the poll, though I was assuming that Past 5000 AD would've covered all my bases, including 1,000,000 AD or 10,000,000 AD, assuming humans are still around then.

[Chicagoan]

I believe that some people will have access to modern technology, even after the crash. An elite few will be able to afford to transition to renewable energy, but most people will not. I was trained as a historian, and most societies were organized that way.

If some exotic form of energy was discovered post-crash, the elites would be the ones who would have access to it. Can you imagine a Dick Chaney with zero-point weapons? It is getting to a point where I think it would be better if society goes all the way back to the stone age. It was much more egalitarian back then. But the likes of Dick Bush, and Colon will not give upeasily.

[lotrfan55345]

And when we see some of this technology - it will be labelled as some ghost/alien/wacko type thing.

I wish I was the son of a rich/important person.

[Marco]

Lets not get too romantic about post PO society. Hobbs reminds us that life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short. I'm not an 'expert' in anything really- except maybe history- Honours and all that.

What I am confident in saying is that life in pre-industrial society- lets say Europe- was pretty tough for most people. How a society is organized depends on its means of production. That is, what resources it has to draw on. Most hand tillage agriculture was at subsistence levels- sometimes a little more or a little less (see famine). The ruling class controlled most of the better tillage land and kept the means to enforce its control firmly in its own hands. Sounds like a few countries I could name today.

How quickly we devolve back to this level depends on several things. Firstly it depends on the rate of decline. As PO bites further into industrial capacity, governements will likely not hasten the devolution to local production and communal control or resources-which in my view is the best idea. They will instead try to keep centralized control. This could mean martial law and 'nationalization' of resources, including labor. Governments are going to get really, really nasty.

At first this will be seen in shifting resources into industrial agriculture and its transport systems. The idea of many people labouring in the fields for state controlled farms is not impossible. In the end (10-20 years or less? I'm guessing) no matter what is done centralized control will fall apart.

I hate to say it but we could see the return of a sort of neo-fuedalism. that is desperate people giving up any freedom to become serfs for large-well armed combines of landowners. Work and you will not starve. Work and you will be protected from the gangs of bandits and vigilantes. This has happened before when the Western Roman empire collapsed. It could happen again.

When a final collapse comes it will mean that most people will fall from subsistance level to starvation. There probably will be a massive die-off as some people argue. Even if every barrel of declining reserves were used for agriculture alone-it would only stave off the inevitable. The cities would have long since ceased to have any meaningful economic purpose. Many people will already be toiling in opressive conditions on farms. Most of these farms and combines will be abandoned at the last- or be overrun by desperate people. Some will survive, and its my bet that these ones( if placed defensively and near river transport) could well form the nucleus of new communities.

I would hope that when governments finally see the writing on the wall- and the collapse is not too fast- will shift production to local areas. If they do this then smaller communities have a head start and at least a fighting (and they will have to defend themselves) chance. Remember, even as things get reaaly grim in the cities- most people will hang on and hope for the best. After all, what else can most people do. Apart from the people who have already set themselves up somewhere- or belong to the ruling class- most people will be caught like tuna in a net when martial law and property confiscations start.

My bet is it will take at least one generation for the collapse (ours), and another at least for the transition to stable conditions. This could take at least 50 years. A guess is that by 2100 our so many fewer descendents will be living in agrarian communities of some sort.

[gg3]

Interesting analysis, Marco.

Though, in order to get to the point of mass land confiscations, all of the current law and legal history regarding private property would have to be overturned. If this is done via the exercise of extraordinary powers by central authority, it will spark an enormous rebellion. If this is done through the disintegration of central authority, we go to the next scenario below.

The remainder of your scenario, i.e. after central government and centrally-controlled forced labor disintegrates, is basically a return to feudalism. It appears that the controlling variable in this case is protection from starvation and lawlessness.

Both of those goals: adequate food and protection, can be met through other means than feudalism. I'm not denying the potential for feudal arrangements to arise in certain areas; merely suggesting other possibilities. For example, independent property owners could re-constitute something like county-level government (perhaps on a smaller scale than the county; more like a town with its surrounding agriculture).

This would include a local nexus of trade such as a farmers' market, to allow each property owner to specialize in crops s/he/they see as having market value as well as use value. There might be social mechanisms in place to discourage profiteering and gouging. In some cases there might be a quasi-socialistic requirement to provide a certain percentage of one's production for distribution through a regulated market (somehow I doubt that's going to be popular in the USA anyway).

This arrangement would also include, critically, the means of common defense. Most likely this would consist of a local militia -in the oldschool sense, not as used by extremists in the USA presently- with mandatory participation by all able-bodied adults (probably the age of majority drops to 16 years at this point). The defensive arrangements would include perimeter patrols and communications means for calling troops in to potential trouble spots. If I have anything to say about it where I live, they'll also include intelligence collection and analysis on a proactive basis, through both human and signals intelligence. In any case, a well-organized defense will tend mostly toward deterrence, in the sense that roving bands of outlaws will tend to stay away from such places, preferring softer targets.

It's possible that these "counties" could grow through voluntary arrangements with landowners on their perimeters. However, the limits of trade will be determined by the limits of transport (i.e. no more than 1 day's travel from the geographic center to the periphery), and the limits of governance and defense will be determined by the limits of communication, for example the boundaries of the local telephone exchange and its network of defensible distribution cable. Landowners outside of a given unit of governance would be encouraged to form their own nexes of governance, and then form alliances with those areas that gave them support in doing so.

Individuals who are not landowners would face a variable future. In a scenario such as above, some of the landowners might try to institute a form of serfdom. However, to the extent that competitive forces remain in play, freer labor arrangements would have an advantage: after all, people do produce more & better when they have their freedom than when they don't. So to this extent we would see something like a labor market, in which some workers were more long-term and others tended to move as suited their advantages. Those who stayed in one place for an extended time might be offered equity arrangements similar to employee buy-in plans.

There remains a considerable risk that a given county might decide to embark on a localized form of empire-building by annexing neighboring counties on a less-than-free basis, where their workforce would be subjugated more or less as serfs. The best way to meet this is via strong bonds of trade, which are a stabilizing force (trading partners have an incentive to not go to war against one another) and also a primary channel of human intelligence (news travels at the market); and strong defensive capabilities generally.

Does any of this seem likely to you?