I'd like to expand one idea I alluded to in the Death of Tyranny, that the Industrial Age was brought about by making mechanical slaves. In my language of patterns, the difference between a tool and a machine is that a tool helps you do something while a machine does it for you. The distinction isn't always clear cut; in between scythes and lawn-mowing robots, you have the options of reel mowers, push mowers, self-propelled mowers, riding lawn mowers, and lawn tractors (not to mention cows, sheep, rabbits, ducks, etc.) for getting your grass trimmed. While there are important philosophical reasons not to even have machines as slaves (especially Cylons), today I am more concerned with the practical side.
One rumor I have heard from the very early days of industrial automation (circa the 1950s), they had to make a choice between analog and digital robots. Analog robots were cheaper to produce, easier to maintain, worked faster, required less power, were far easier to modify, and did much more precise work. Digital robots only had a single advantage: they didn't require an full-time operator. In other words, analog robots were tools, digital robots were machines. I think we all know which choice they made.
Nor is this question just a matter of history. I love what Marcin Jakubowski is trying to do over at Factor-E Farm. I truly wish him the best of luck in completing his Global Village Construction Set. Honestly I think what he is doing there is the best chance of maintaining a high level of technology as we move off Hubbert's Mesa. I just hope he has the time to complete it. If you look at his Compressed Earth Block Press, you will clearly see it is a machine. Just give it power and dirt and it will spit out blocks for you. Contrast that with the Auram CSEB Press. It is completely human powered. There are no fancy hydraulics or gears or belts to break down. It is basically just a box with a giant lever. The GVCS Press will clearly win on a per person or per machine basis over the Auram one. But there is much less that can go wrong with the Auram.
On the Long Ascent, machines can be useful, but good tools are essential.
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Friday, October 12, 2012
Friday, October 5, 2012
An End to Literacy
You may be surprised to see this topic in this blog. If you are a long time reader, you have rightly come to expect basically uplifting posts about possible positive futures. On the face of it, this topic can seem quite discouraging.
Let me first state, I am talking about an end to literacy, or more exactly, one possible end. This is not like the death of tyranny, where the outcome is like that for cancer that has metastasized; the question is not whether the cancer will live, the question is whether it will kill the patient in its process of dying. Nor am I talking about the complete extinction of literacy; like calligraphy after the invention of the printing press, writing may go from a major industry to a rare hobby.
Nor do I view literacy as a bad thing, or even as a needless luxury. Tripp Tibbetts wrote a good post on the role of books in the preservation of knowledge; the Leibowitz Society is an excellent if infrequent blog on that general topic. What made literacy so special was it allowed the transmission of knowledge from one person to another without being in the same place and time. As energy availability declines, the second part may grow greatly in value. It is quite conceivable certain knowledge will be forgotten only to be learned again from books. Not having to travel to meet in the same place is also an important consideration; after all, everyone reading this blog probably is literate. If this was a podcast, I couldn't be quite as certain.
Therein lies the key. Knowledge no longer needs to be printed to be transmitted. Videos are more complex than books and are more likely to decline with the availability of energy. Once books are made and distributed, using them takes little energy, at least during daylight hours, but the costs of production and distribution are not trivial, and they are subject to mildew. However, while audiobooks require much more storage space than ebooks, they are much smaller than regular books, and earpieces are much smaller, simpler, and more resilient and energy efficient than screens. As long as we retain the technology to crystallize the abundant earth of silicon and print circuits on it, we should be able to continue make audiobooks.
On the Long Ascent, your MP3 player might just be your library, too.
Let me first state, I am talking about an end to literacy, or more exactly, one possible end. This is not like the death of tyranny, where the outcome is like that for cancer that has metastasized; the question is not whether the cancer will live, the question is whether it will kill the patient in its process of dying. Nor am I talking about the complete extinction of literacy; like calligraphy after the invention of the printing press, writing may go from a major industry to a rare hobby.
Nor do I view literacy as a bad thing, or even as a needless luxury. Tripp Tibbetts wrote a good post on the role of books in the preservation of knowledge; the Leibowitz Society is an excellent if infrequent blog on that general topic. What made literacy so special was it allowed the transmission of knowledge from one person to another without being in the same place and time. As energy availability declines, the second part may grow greatly in value. It is quite conceivable certain knowledge will be forgotten only to be learned again from books. Not having to travel to meet in the same place is also an important consideration; after all, everyone reading this blog probably is literate. If this was a podcast, I couldn't be quite as certain.
Therein lies the key. Knowledge no longer needs to be printed to be transmitted. Videos are more complex than books and are more likely to decline with the availability of energy. Once books are made and distributed, using them takes little energy, at least during daylight hours, but the costs of production and distribution are not trivial, and they are subject to mildew. However, while audiobooks require much more storage space than ebooks, they are much smaller than regular books, and earpieces are much smaller, simpler, and more resilient and energy efficient than screens. As long as we retain the technology to crystallize the abundant earth of silicon and print circuits on it, we should be able to continue make audiobooks.
On the Long Ascent, your MP3 player might just be your library, too.
Friday, August 31, 2012
On Earth As It Is On Mars
"A day on Mars is a little longer than a day on Earth: 24 hours and 40 minutes. A year on Mars is less than two Earth years: 686 Earth days, or 668 Martian days. Mars is 6,787 kilometers in diameter, compared to Earth's 12,756 kilometers. Its gravitational acceleration is 3.71 meters per second squared, or just over one-third of Earth's. The atmospheric pressure at the surface of Mars averages 5.6 millibars, about one-half of one percent of Earth's. The atmosphere is largely composed of carbon dioxide. Temperatures at the "datum" or reference surface level (there is no "sea level", as there are presently no seas) vary from -130 to +27 Celsius. An unprotected human on the surface of Mars would very likely freeze within minutes, but first would die of exposure to the near-vacuum. If this unfortunate human survived freezing and low pressure, and found a supply of oxygen to breathe, she would still be endangered by high levels of radiation from the sun and elsewhere.
After Earth, Mars is the most hospitable planet in the Solar System." --Greg Bear, Moving Mars
Some people see exploring outer space as a colossal waste. Any numbers associated with outer space truly are mind-boggling. Light, which could circle the Earth more than 7 times in one second, takes over two seconds to go to the Moon and back and over 8 minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth. Mars is 50% further away than the Earth, so you would have to wait from 8 to 40 minutes to get a reply. Sending a package to Mars today would take at least 6 months and cost well over $10,000 a pound. Even if you devised some technomagical teleportation system that just had to overcome the Earth's gravitational pull, at today's prices for electricity it would cost over $7 to send a gallon of water to the Moon.
Most people will agree that satellites have improved life here on Earth. Many people use Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) to navigate. Satellite TV is a popular option. And virtually everyone who gets a weather forecast benefits from weather satellites.
Beyond satellites, though, the short-term benefits are dubious at best. Even Gerard K O'Neill, one of the biggest early proponents of solar power satellites, projected that it would take at least 20 years before the program produced as much energy as it consumed. Other projects have even worse economic projections.
Not all benefits can be measured economically, though. There are the spin-off technologies such as photovoltaics, of course. Some people fantasize about finding another Earth-like planet and finding a faster-than-light way to get there. Even if that were remotely possible, it still wouldn't solve any of our problems. But look at the threats facing us, and then compare them with what life on Mars would be like. Nuclear meltdown? EMP weapons? Massive solar flares? Mars doesn't have a magnetic field, you would need that kind of shielding everyday. Desertification? Mars is a desert. Sea level rise? Deforestation? Loss of wildlife? Loss of arable land? Loss of industry? Running out of oil? Mars doesn't have any of those to begin with.
Every conceivable problem we face, short of a rogue black hole, would be much worse on Mars. Logically, this means, if we can solve those problems so we can live on Mars, we can solve those problems so we can live on Earth.
Sometimes doing things just because they are hard makes the Long Ascent easier.
After Earth, Mars is the most hospitable planet in the Solar System." --Greg Bear, Moving Mars
Some people see exploring outer space as a colossal waste. Any numbers associated with outer space truly are mind-boggling. Light, which could circle the Earth more than 7 times in one second, takes over two seconds to go to the Moon and back and over 8 minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth. Mars is 50% further away than the Earth, so you would have to wait from 8 to 40 minutes to get a reply. Sending a package to Mars today would take at least 6 months and cost well over $10,000 a pound. Even if you devised some technomagical teleportation system that just had to overcome the Earth's gravitational pull, at today's prices for electricity it would cost over $7 to send a gallon of water to the Moon.
Most people will agree that satellites have improved life here on Earth. Many people use Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) to navigate. Satellite TV is a popular option. And virtually everyone who gets a weather forecast benefits from weather satellites.
Beyond satellites, though, the short-term benefits are dubious at best. Even Gerard K O'Neill, one of the biggest early proponents of solar power satellites, projected that it would take at least 20 years before the program produced as much energy as it consumed. Other projects have even worse economic projections.
Not all benefits can be measured economically, though. There are the spin-off technologies such as photovoltaics, of course. Some people fantasize about finding another Earth-like planet and finding a faster-than-light way to get there. Even if that were remotely possible, it still wouldn't solve any of our problems. But look at the threats facing us, and then compare them with what life on Mars would be like. Nuclear meltdown? EMP weapons? Massive solar flares? Mars doesn't have a magnetic field, you would need that kind of shielding everyday. Desertification? Mars is a desert. Sea level rise? Deforestation? Loss of wildlife? Loss of arable land? Loss of industry? Running out of oil? Mars doesn't have any of those to begin with.
Every conceivable problem we face, short of a rogue black hole, would be much worse on Mars. Logically, this means, if we can solve those problems so we can live on Mars, we can solve those problems so we can live on Earth.
Sometimes doing things just because they are hard makes the Long Ascent easier.
Friday, March 9, 2012
My YouTube
Today I posted my first video to YouTube, on Winter Blackberry Care. Honestly, the production values are not that great. If you do have blackberries or other brambles, though, you may find watching it worth your while.
My primary interest in mentioning that here is not self-promotion, however. (It does come in a respectable second, though). I more want to comment on an interesting developing phenomemon. While there is a lot of silliness being posted to YouTube, more and more serious offerings are showing up there: how-to's, political commentary, financial advice, to name a few.
What makes this interesting is the ease of putting stuff out there. I spent $40 for the camera, $9 for the SD card, and a few dollars for the batteries. After a few minutes of filming and a little over an hour to upload, my video is out there for everyone to see. That level of access is relatively unprecedented.
There is a dark side to all this, too. I could have given all the same basic information in under a page of text, which would have only taken up a few kilobytes. If I wanted to be fancier, adding a few good pictures could have told all the details you can get from watching the video, at a cost of a couple megabytes at most. As a video, however, I uploaded over 300 megabytes (though I presume YouTube compressed it for download.)
Not only does the video take up more room, it is much harder to store it. As far as I know, there is no legitimate way to download the video from YouTube. Printing it out would also prove very difficult. If the information was presented in a text or PDF file, downloading and printing could both be fairly easy.
Of course this also means if you don't have access to the Internet, you don't have access to this information. While the Internet itself was supposedly designed to withstand a nuclear war, I'm sure there would be nowhere near the ease of connecting as there is today. For my little piece of gardening advice, that hardly matters. But if more and more people start relying on knowledge from the Internet, especially in the form of videos, there is the potential for great loss.
We can use technology on the Long Ascent, but we need to ask ourselves whether it is appropriate and what would happen if it wasn't available.
My primary interest in mentioning that here is not self-promotion, however. (It does come in a respectable second, though). I more want to comment on an interesting developing phenomemon. While there is a lot of silliness being posted to YouTube, more and more serious offerings are showing up there: how-to's, political commentary, financial advice, to name a few.
What makes this interesting is the ease of putting stuff out there. I spent $40 for the camera, $9 for the SD card, and a few dollars for the batteries. After a few minutes of filming and a little over an hour to upload, my video is out there for everyone to see. That level of access is relatively unprecedented.
There is a dark side to all this, too. I could have given all the same basic information in under a page of text, which would have only taken up a few kilobytes. If I wanted to be fancier, adding a few good pictures could have told all the details you can get from watching the video, at a cost of a couple megabytes at most. As a video, however, I uploaded over 300 megabytes (though I presume YouTube compressed it for download.)
Not only does the video take up more room, it is much harder to store it. As far as I know, there is no legitimate way to download the video from YouTube. Printing it out would also prove very difficult. If the information was presented in a text or PDF file, downloading and printing could both be fairly easy.
Of course this also means if you don't have access to the Internet, you don't have access to this information. While the Internet itself was supposedly designed to withstand a nuclear war, I'm sure there would be nowhere near the ease of connecting as there is today. For my little piece of gardening advice, that hardly matters. But if more and more people start relying on knowledge from the Internet, especially in the form of videos, there is the potential for great loss.
We can use technology on the Long Ascent, but we need to ask ourselves whether it is appropriate and what would happen if it wasn't available.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)