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I am afraid that civilization will collapse. Third world war will be devastating. It would be difficult to restart civilization after it because we already cons

I am afraid that civilization will collapse. Third world war will be devastating. It would be difficult to restart civilization after it because we already consumed all easily available mineral resources. This will become a problem even if there would be no war. Energy resources had almost finished, and no viable alternatives were found.

FeepingCreature 7y ago
> Energy resources had almost finished Reminder that the sun exists.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Reminder that during the previous solar age, with abundant mineral resources, limits of development were ~500 million souls, wooden ploughs, and largely stone-and-earth construction. Even modest amounts of bronze and iron smelting cleared forests (for charcoal) throughout the Mediterannean and European regions. Much of the reason for forest regrowth throughout Europe has been the shift to other fuels. Nonrenewable fossil fuels. Which have issues both of abundance and atmospheric impacts. Returning to an era of predominantly solar energy, even with our considerably enhanced technical and scientific knowledge, absent the preindustrial ease of access to specific materials (iron, copper, etc.), as well as that great advance: naturally-occurring agricultural fertilisers (saltpetre from India, guano from South America and Pacific islands), would be ... markedly different from the present.
  - kragen 7y ago
    > Reminder that during the previous solar age, with abundant mineral resources, limits of development were ~500 million souls, wooden ploughs, and largely stone-and-earth construction. Plants are a very inefficient way of converting sunlight into work. The difficulty was not a matter of energy scarcity; it was that the humans didn't know what energy was, how to bore a cylinder, or how to vacuum-silver a mirror. There are very significant bootstrapping difficulties, yes, but also very significant bootstrapping resources, if we can preserve them. Knowledge is the most important one. > absent the preindustrial ease of access to specific materials (iron, copper, etc.) Copper and especially iron are immensely more accessible in the humans' landfills than they ever were in ore deposits. Artificial fertilizer synthesis does seem like it might be particularly tricky to carry out at a small scale.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      The all-in efficiency of plant-based photosynthesis -- about 1-3% for most land plants, possibly as high as 10% for algae.[1] The all-in efficiency of solar energy is close to the same magnitude -- panel efficiencies are as high as 37% (single-layer), in practice closer to 15-25%, and with spacing, capacity, and other factors, tend to fall to about 5%. To which manufacturing, installation, and disposal costs (all self-provisioned by plants) are required. The point remains that for primary energy, we don't have a whole lot of options, and plant productivity is much of that. A modern civilisation knocked back won't have nuclear power, reliable electrical transmission, or advanced battery technologies. Mobility of fuels will be limited.[2] "Technology", a distractingly vague term, seems to be based on specific modalities, each with its own specific capabilities and limitations.[3] Precision boring is contingent on sufficent-quality metalurgy, based on available materials, fuels, and smelting/casting controls, as well as measurement and feedback (information/systems management) controls. At that, what you buy in, say, a reciprocating steam engine, is a net fuel-to-work efficiency gain from about 3% (Watt ~1800) to about 25% (best stationary triple-expansion engines). Locomotive steam engines were about 10% efficienty, barely 3x better than Watt's 1800 design.[4] That is: precision and technology still only bring you up to theoretical maximum efficiencies. Process and systems management technology is at best a fractional factor 0 <= t < 1. (Many proposed technologies end up with efficiencies well below 0. We typically don't adopt those.) Fuels are larger multipliers. Increasing applied energy frequently increases potential output as a multiple factor: capital + process + n times more energy results in some tn times more output (where n > 1 and 0 <= t < 1). You can keep applying more energy to a process for ever increasing outputs, at least to a considerable extent -- generally to thermal, friction, vibrational, stress, or other limits. Landfill mining has been suggested. It was a (minor, though not miner) element in Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth* (1976). And has long been practiced, historically and presently, with a range of consequences. The more general problem here is that recycling is at best less than 100% efficient, and the generational loss is r^g (g == generations, with 0 <= r < 1). The most-recycled current materials within the US is lead, largely from car batteries), with rates of 74%. At two generations, the remaining material is 55%. After 10, it's less than 5%.[5] Eventually dust is your best source. Non-ore-forming materials (e.g., rare earths) already exhibit this, the difficulty in their sourcing isn't due to their scarcity per se (they're relatively abundant within Earth's crust), but in their failure to concentrate, and the immense amounts of overburden and tailings created in their use. It's less a matter of mining than of pollution and landscape spoilage exporting, costs China have been willing to absorb in recent decades. The next H-B alternative, not dependent on abundant natural gas,[7] or lack of one, will be hugely monumental. I'd hedge my bets on a bioengineered process, though there are others being pursued, see: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01145 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01145 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fuel-made-sun-air-and-water-could-power-globe-without-carbon https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fu... ________________________________ Notes: 1. Both based on incident sunlight => stored energy, generally as cellulose or lipids. Algael productivity discounts the likely impact of parasites and/or disease on large-scale development (as does land cropping). Lifeforms other than human are also keen on large and convenient plant-energy stores. 2. There's little discussion of this even in histories which take an energy-centric viewpoint such as Smil or Weissenbacher, but a key liability for fossil fuel energy resources was that they were so unevenly distributed, and transportation capabilities so limited. Better to (locally) gather fuelwood, dung, press olive for oils, or render animal tallow, than to try hauling seacoal, natural tar, or the few rare oil seeps more than a few tens of km. Even the coal-rich US didn't transition from wood until its inland rail-based transportation system was developed. On which coal still represents a large share of revenues and massive constituent of total ton-miles. Oil's development as a fuel waited in part on reliable metalurgy, the capability to construct pipes of more than ~10cm in diameter and a few tens of metres in length. Along with rights-of-way, a sufficient challenge that as of WWII, major infrastructure (the Big Inch and Little Big Inch pipelines, still in use) were constructed not by private industry but by the Federal Government. International oil shipments were contingent on developing double-hulled supermassive oil tankers. Ari Onassis, Greek shipping magnate, was, it turns out, a Greek supertanker shipping magnate. After water, sand, and gravel, oil is the most-transported material in the modern economy. Natural gas likewise is more difficult to transport than oil or coal, requiring hermetically-sealed containment, and high pressures and/or low temperatures. It has a tendency to go boom in ways that coal and oil for the most part don't, which makes neighbours even edgier than for those materials. Transport and nonuniformly-distributed fuels are co-dependent. 3. My thinking leads to identification of nine of these: 1. fuels, 2. materials, 3. process (technical) knowlege, 4. causal (scientific) knowledge, 5. network dyanmics, 6. systems management (physical, social, informational), 7. information (acquisition, parsing, processing, storage/retrieval, transmission), 8. power transmission & transformation, and 9. hygiene (addressing unintended / undesired consequences). Still in development. See (in slightly earlier form): https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww 4. Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization, (2017). Figure 5.5, p.243. 5. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/recycling-statistics-and-information https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/recycling-statistics-and-i... 6. A chief export of Trinidad and Tobago, and the reason for that small Caribbean island nation's hugely outsized per-capita carbon footprint. See: T&T EMissions Trends: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/emis/t_t.html https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/emis/t_t.html T&T CO2 emissions https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/trinidad-and-tobago-co2-emissions/ https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/trinidad-and-tob... Global per-capita emissions https://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/global-emissions-supplemental.jpg https://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-... (from: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-carbon-emissions-in-one-chart/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-carbon-emiss...) T&T exports / economy: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-are-the-major-natural-resources-of-trinidad-and-tobago.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-are-the-major-natur...
kragen 7y ago
> we already consumed all easily available mineral resources. With the exceptions of energy, helium, and the insignificant amounts incorporated into space probes, the humans do not consume mineral resources; they concentrate them, dilute them, and move them around, but they do not consume them. For example, there is just as much neodymium on Earth as there was a million years ago, to a precision of several decimal places. The difference is that now much of it is separated from the other lanthanoids (a difficult and energy-intensive process) and concentrated in junkyards and landfills. > Energy resources had almost finished This is pretty hard to predict, but I think this is more a problem of knowledge and organization than of resources. The first commercial human solar energy plant was built in Egypt in 1912–3 in Maadi by Frank Shuman, the guy who invented that horrible safety glass with wires running through it. It didn't use photovoltaic cells; it used a low-pressure steam engine. (And he sold the results as irrigation water, not electricity as originally planned.) It couldn't compete with increasingly cheap oil, but at the time it would probably have operated at a profit if the Great War hadn't broken out the next year, resulting in the British Army expropriating it as "raw materials"; Shuman was quoted in the New York Times saying, "We have proved the commercial profit of sun power in the tropics and have more particularly proved that after our stores of oil and coal are exhausted the human race can receive unlimited power from the rays of the sun." But certainly the humans managed to trap one another in a crab-bucket of material poverty for thousands of years before, and they could do it again.
imtringued 7y ago
I personally think it won't be this bad. The beginning of the industrial revolution wasn't even three centuries ago. Next time progress will be slower but we will have a treasure trove of old tools that we can scavenge from the junkyards to bootstrap ourselves.
tasogare 7y ago
There is no need for a WWIII for the Western civilization to collapse. In a similar way the Roman empire wasn't defeated in a single war but slowly invaded from everywhere by peoples of very different culture, current European people are slowly but surely being replaced by different peoples with different culture. In few decades if nothing is done, these countries could very likely still exist, have the same flag and same name but will belong to another civilization. Sweden is a good example of that.

FeepingCreature 7y ago

> Energy resources had almost finished Reminder that the sun exists.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Reminder that during the previous solar age, with abundant mineral resources, limits of development were ~500 million souls, wooden ploughs, and largely stone-and-earth construction. Even modest amounts of bronze and iron smelting cleared forests (for charcoal) throughout the Mediterannean and European regions. Much of the reason for forest regrowth throughout Europe has been the shift to other fuels. Nonrenewable fossil fuels. Which have issues both of abundance and atmospheric impacts. Returning to an era of predominantly solar energy, even with our considerably enhanced technical and scientific knowledge, absent the preindustrial ease of access to specific materials (iron, copper, etc.), as well as that great advance: naturally-occurring agricultural fertilisers (saltpetre from India, guano from South America and Pacific islands), would be ... markedly different from the present.
- kragen 7y ago
  > Reminder that during the previous solar age, with abundant mineral resources, limits of development were ~500 million souls, wooden ploughs, and largely stone-and-earth construction. Plants are a very inefficient way of converting sunlight into work. The difficulty was not a matter of energy scarcity; it was that the humans didn't know what energy was, how to bore a cylinder, or how to vacuum-silver a mirror. There are very significant bootstrapping difficulties, yes, but also very significant bootstrapping resources, if we can preserve them. Knowledge is the most important one. > absent the preindustrial ease of access to specific materials (iron, copper, etc.) Copper and especially iron are immensely more accessible in the humans' landfills than they ever were in ore deposits. Artificial fertilizer synthesis does seem like it might be particularly tricky to carry out at a small scale.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    The all-in efficiency of plant-based photosynthesis -- about 1-3% for most land plants, possibly as high as 10% for algae.[1] The all-in efficiency of solar energy is close to the same magnitude -- panel efficiencies are as high as 37% (single-layer), in practice closer to 15-25%, and with spacing, capacity, and other factors, tend to fall to about 5%. To which manufacturing, installation, and disposal costs (all self-provisioned by plants) are required. The point remains that for primary energy, we don't have a whole lot of options, and plant productivity is much of that. A modern civilisation knocked back won't have nuclear power, reliable electrical transmission, or advanced battery technologies. Mobility of fuels will be limited.[2] "Technology", a distractingly vague term, seems to be based on specific modalities, each with its own specific capabilities and limitations.[3] Precision boring is contingent on sufficent-quality metalurgy, based on available materials, fuels, and smelting/casting controls, as well as measurement and feedback (information/systems management) controls. At that, what you buy in, say, a reciprocating steam engine, is a net fuel-to-work efficiency gain from about 3% (Watt ~1800) to about 25% (best stationary triple-expansion engines). Locomotive steam engines were about 10% efficienty, barely 3x better than Watt's 1800 design.[4] That is: precision and technology still only bring you up to theoretical maximum efficiencies. Process and systems management technology is at best a fractional factor 0 <= t < 1. (Many proposed technologies end up with efficiencies well below 0. We typically don't adopt those.) Fuels are larger multipliers. Increasing applied energy frequently increases potential output as a multiple factor: capital + process + n times more energy results in some tn times more output (where n > 1 and 0 <= t < 1). You can keep applying more energy to a process for ever increasing outputs, at least to a considerable extent -- generally to thermal, friction, vibrational, stress, or other limits. Landfill mining has been suggested. It was a (minor, though not miner) element in Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth* (1976). And has long been practiced, historically and presently, with a range of consequences. The more general problem here is that recycling is at best less than 100% efficient, and the generational loss is r^g (g == generations, with 0 <= r < 1). The most-recycled current materials within the US is lead, largely from car batteries), with rates of 74%. At two generations, the remaining material is 55%. After 10, it's less than 5%.[5] Eventually dust is your best source. Non-ore-forming materials (e.g., rare earths) already exhibit this, the difficulty in their sourcing isn't due to their scarcity per se (they're relatively abundant within Earth's crust), but in their failure to concentrate, and the immense amounts of overburden and tailings created in their use. It's less a matter of mining than of pollution and landscape spoilage exporting, costs China have been willing to absorb in recent decades. The next H-B alternative, not dependent on abundant natural gas,[7] or lack of one, will be hugely monumental. I'd hedge my bets on a bioengineered process, though there are others being pursued, see: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01145 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01145 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fuel-made-sun-air-and-water-could-power-globe-without-carbon https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fu... ________________________________ Notes: 1. Both based on incident sunlight => stored energy, generally as cellulose or lipids. Algael productivity discounts the likely impact of parasites and/or disease on large-scale development (as does land cropping). Lifeforms other than human are also keen on large and convenient plant-energy stores. 2. There's little discussion of this even in histories which take an energy-centric viewpoint such as Smil or Weissenbacher, but a key liability for fossil fuel energy resources was that they were so unevenly distributed, and transportation capabilities so limited. Better to (locally) gather fuelwood, dung, press olive for oils, or render animal tallow, than to try hauling seacoal, natural tar, or the few rare oil seeps more than a few tens of km. Even the coal-rich US didn't transition from wood until its inland rail-based transportation system was developed. On which coal still represents a large share of revenues and massive constituent of total ton-miles. Oil's development as a fuel waited in part on reliable metalurgy, the capability to construct pipes of more than ~10cm in diameter and a few tens of metres in length. Along with rights-of-way, a sufficient challenge that as of WWII, major infrastructure (the Big Inch and Little Big Inch pipelines, still in use) were constructed not by private industry but by the Federal Government. International oil shipments were contingent on developing double-hulled supermassive oil tankers. Ari Onassis, Greek shipping magnate, was, it turns out, a Greek supertanker shipping magnate. After water, sand, and gravel, oil is the most-transported material in the modern economy. Natural gas likewise is more difficult to transport than oil or coal, requiring hermetically-sealed containment, and high pressures and/or low temperatures. It has a tendency to go boom in ways that coal and oil for the most part don't, which makes neighbours even edgier than for those materials. Transport and nonuniformly-distributed fuels are co-dependent. 3. My thinking leads to identification of nine of these: 1. fuels, 2. materials, 3. process (technical) knowlege, 4. causal (scientific) knowledge, 5. network dyanmics, 6. systems management (physical, social, informational), 7. information (acquisition, parsing, processing, storage/retrieval, transmission), 8. power transmission & transformation, and 9. hygiene (addressing unintended / undesired consequences). Still in development. See (in slightly earlier form): https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww 4. Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization, (2017). Figure 5.5, p.243. 5. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/recycling-statistics-and-information https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/recycling-statistics-and-i... 6. A chief export of Trinidad and Tobago, and the reason for that small Caribbean island nation's hugely outsized per-capita carbon footprint. See: T&T EMissions Trends: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/emis/t_t.html https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/emis/t_t.html T&T CO2 emissions https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/trinidad-and-tobago-co2-emissions/ https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/trinidad-and-tob... Global per-capita emissions https://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/global-emissions-supplemental.jpg https://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-... (from: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-carbon-emissions-in-one-chart/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-carbon-emiss...) T&T exports / economy: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-are-the-major-natural-resources-of-trinidad-and-tobago.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-are-the-major-natur...

kragen 7y ago

> we already consumed all easily available mineral resources. With the exceptions of energy, helium, and the insignificant amounts incorporated into space probes, the humans do not consume mineral resources; they concentrate them, dilute them, and move them around, but they do not consume them. For example, there is just as much neodymium on Earth as there was a million years ago, to a precision of several decimal places. The difference is that now much of it is separated from the other lanthanoids (a difficult and energy-intensive process) and concentrated in junkyards and landfills. > Energy resources had almost finished This is pretty hard to predict, but I think this is more a problem of knowledge and organization than of resources. The first commercial human solar energy plant was built in Egypt in 1912–3 in Maadi by Frank Shuman, the guy who invented that horrible safety glass with wires running through it. It didn't use photovoltaic cells; it used a low-pressure steam engine. (And he sold the results as irrigation water, not electricity as originally planned.) It couldn't compete with increasingly cheap oil, but at the time it would probably have operated at a profit if the Great War hadn't broken out the next year, resulting in the British Army expropriating it as "raw materials"; Shuman was quoted in the New York Times saying, "We have proved the commercial profit of sun power in the tropics and have more particularly proved that after our stores of oil and coal are exhausted the human race can receive unlimited power from the rays of the sun." But certainly the humans managed to trap one another in a crab-bucket of material poverty for thousands of years before, and they could do it again.

imtringued 7y ago

I personally think it won't be this bad. The beginning of the industrial revolution wasn't even three centuries ago. Next time progress will be slower but we will have a treasure trove of old tools that we can scavenge from the junkyards to bootstrap ourselves.

tasogare 7y ago

There is no need for a WWIII for the Western civilization to collapse. In a similar way the Roman empire wasn't defeated in a single war but slowly invaded from everywhere by peoples of very different culture, current European people are slowly but surely being replaced by different peoples with different culture. In few decades if nothing is done, these countries could very likely still exist, have the same flag and same name but will belong to another civilization. Sweden is a good example of that.