[cube]

Lets assume it takes 1000 engineers to design 1 computer. Don't worry about the exact numbers. Having said that lets ask ourselves how big does a city have to be to produce 1,000 specialized engineers to design a computer? --> 1,000,000 people

1) Of all the jobs that can possibly exist in a city: policeman, bus driver, etc...only 10% can be engineering.

2) However there are lots of different types of engineering: civil, mechanical, etc.....only 10% can be electrical engineering.

3) Further still there are different types of electrical engineers. Some build ipods while others make printers, etc.....only 10% can be electrical engineering with an emphasis on making computers.

10% of 10% of 10% of 1 million people == 1,000.

My Argument:
Without large cities it would be impossible for society to have "complex technology" simply because the highly specialized human labor isn't going to be there.

I believe one of the big reasons why human technology has advanced so much in the past 200 years is (NOT because people got smarter) but instead of a greater use of "division of labor" made possible by building ever larger cities. In a PO world if we cannot maintain our mega-cities then we will lose our ability to retain complex technology.

Am I onto something or is this just doomer porn?

[mkwin]

It is an interesting point but I think science is a more important factor in technological advancement than urban living.

Large cities have existed for thousands of years - Rome had a population of 1 million people at times - so oil can't really be described as the main driver for urban living either.

[MrBill]

Actually, the division of labor and the ability to live in cities only occured once man turned to agriculture and developed the ability to store an agricultural surplus.

I can see your point about complex tasks requiring a large population though. Otherwise it would be uneconomical. A bank with one customer. A supermarket for one product. A train with one passenger.

There is a pretty interesting book that has probably been out of circulation for years now called
The Ancient Engineers, but it looks like you can still order it. If you're interested in that type of thing it is a fascinating book about all sorts of engineering feats completed centuries ago. It is actually quite humbling what they achieved starting from scratch.

So actually they did complete these projects starting from a much lower base population. Only about 300 million or so worldwide. Compared with 6.7 billion I think we could afford to fall quite a long ways in terms of population before we started to lose the ability to retain knowledge or develop new technology. And the challenge of post peak oil resource depletion will demand even more effort on our parts to transition to any type of sustainable future. Like keeping the cities fed on less arable land and dealing with climate change.

[Ludi]

We know that cities are a feature of civilization and that civilization is not sustainable. It's not clear if cities can be supported by horticulture. A non-civilized, non-hierarchical way of life is almost certainly more sustainable than what we have now, which isn't at all sustainable. I don't know for certain if it is an "either-or" but it may be. If we want to survive as a species, we probably need to find a different way of life that doesn't kill the planet. We know our present way of life is killing the Earth's life systems which sustain us and if we don't change, we will probably go extinct (death of the biosphere). Life itself may be more important than high technology, but like I say, it's not clear if they are mutually exclusive.


For more details about why civilization is not sustainable and why we need to find a different way to live, please read "Ishmael" and "The Story of B" by Daniel Quinn.

[cube]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MrBill', 'A')ctually, the division of labor and the ability to live in cities only occured once man turned to agriculture and developed the ability to store an agricultural surplus.
...

[MrBill]

cube wrote:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'L')et me guess, you must of read some of those "Jared Diamond" books.
That is true. Agriculture makes it possible to take the first step. I think Plato once observed it takes 14 men to produce a sandal. However in order to take advantage of division of labor to the ultimate extreme (like what we do today) we need mega-cities.