Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2005 9:26 pm Post subject: Waiting for the lights to go out
Regarding the Peak Oil Problem, from the article:
Quote:
Even if we did throw money at the problem, it's not certain we could fix it. One of the strangest portents of the end of progress is the recent discovery that humans are losing their ability to come up with new ideas.
Jonathan Huebner is an amiable, very polite and very correct physicist who works at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He took the job in 1985, when he was 26. An older scientist told him how lucky he was. In the course of his career, he could expect to see huge scientific and technological advances. But by 1990, Huebner had begun to suspect the old man was wrong. "The number of advances wasn't increasing exponentially, I hadn't seen as many as I had expected — not in any particular area, just generally."
Puzzled, he undertook some research of his own. He began to study the rate of significant innovations as catalogued in a standard work entitled The History of Science and Technology. After some elaborate mathematics, he came to a conclusion that raised serious questions about our continued ability to sustain progress. What he found was that the rate of innovation peaked in 1873 and has been declining ever since. In fact, our current rate of innovation — which Huebner puts at seven important technological developments per billion people per year — is about the same as it was in 1600. By 2024 it will have slumped to the same level as it was in the Dark Ages, the period between the end of the Roman empire and the start of the Middle Ages.
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 2:13 am Post subject: Re: Waiting for the lights to go out
Excellent article that you found there Jack. Again and again it all seems to fall back on the question when "our" train - as far as one identifies with it- is about to derail:
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 7:33 am Post subject: Re: Waiting for the lights to go out
Doly wrote:
Jack wrote:
seven important technological developments per billion people per year
How do you determine if a technological development is important? He may just be more impressed by the inventions of the 19th century.
From the article:
Quote:
Huebner offers two possible explanations: economics and the size of the human brain. Either it's just not worth pursuing certain innovations since they won't pay off — one reason why space exploration has all but ground to a halt — or we already know most of what we can know, and so discovering new things is becoming increasingly difficult. We have, for example, known for over 20 years how cancer works and what needs to be done to prevent or cure it. But in most cases, we still have no idea how to do it, and there is no likelihood that we will in the foreseeable future.
Huebner's insight has caused some outrage. The influential scientist Ray Kurzweil has criticised his sample of innovations as "arbitrary"; K Eric Drexler, prophet of nanotechnology, has argued that we should be measuring capabilities, not innovations. Thus we may travel faster or access more information at greater speeds without significant innovations as such.
Huebner has so far successfully responded to all these criticisms. Moreover, he is supported by the work of Ben Jones, a management professor at Northwestern University in Illinois. Jones has found that we are currently in a quandary comparable to that of the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass: we have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. Basically, two centuries of economic growth in the industrialised world has been driven by scientific and technological innovation. We don't get richer unaided or simply by working harder: we get richer because smart people invent steam engines, antibiotics and the internet. What Jones has discovered is that we have to work harder and harder to sustain growth through innovation. More and more money has to be poured into research and development and we have to deploy more people in these areas just to keep up. "The result is," says Jones, "that the average individual innovator is having a smaller and smaller impact."
Joined: Apr 02, 2005 Posts: 1001 Location: Down Under
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 7:58 am Post subject: Re: Waiting for the lights to go out
Doly wrote:
Jack wrote:
seven important technological developments per billion people per year
How do you determine if a technological development is important? He may just be more impressed by the inventions of the 19th century.
Exactly. The importance of most technological developments aren’t even realised until many years afterwards. And often developments considered to be massive don’t end up achieving much, and developments that almost go unnoticed end up revolutionising society.
Take communications technology for example. Most developments in communications were underestimated when they were first invented. In 1816 Britain’s Admiralty brushed aside an early inventor of the electric telegraph stating “Telegraphs of any kind are wholly unnecessary”, which obviously turned out to be a huge error of judgement, and ever since people have been misjudging the technological future and it’s consequences. This continues with today’s considerable and yet underestimated advances in communications technology, as people generally fail to notice the dramatic social changes taking place all around them as the era of mass media comes to an end, fragmenting and giving way to new active media and an evolving new economy.
The whole notion that society is generally dumber today then ever before and that the rate of new technological developments is diminishing is unfounded and non-factual. It’s a misguided assumption placing outdated values on the modern world. The fact is society and technology is always changing, and it’s impossible to accurately gauge where we are at by comparing us to society and technology of the past.
And you know, regardless of future technological developments, it's completely possible that technological solutions to peak oil have already been developed. In fact we are all using one of them right now.
Jack wrote:
It appears that Huebner has somehow avoided the pitfall you describe.
And yet he still fails to see that the effects of technological innovation cannot be measured until many years after their conception. _________________ "Mother Nature is a psychopathic bitch, and she is out to get you. You have to adapt, change or die." - Tihamer Toth-Fejel, nanotech researcher/engineer.
Joined: Oct 04, 2004 Posts: 2500 Location: Ye Olde Englande
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 8:35 am Post subject: Re: Waiting for the lights to go out
I've actually got the original article. It's from the Sunday Times magazine supplement and is the main feature. On the cover is a scene of Trafalger Square deserted and looking post-apocalyptic.
This is the most mainstream article in the UK that I've seen so far. _________________ "The age of excess is over. The age of entropy has begun"
Joined: Jun 18, 2005 Posts: 3980 Location: In a van down by the river
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 9:38 am Post subject: Re: Waiting for the lights to go out
I think the best argument for why we may be headed for a new dark age was presented when the Author talked about human nature and that technology does not improve it but is just an embodiment of it.
The human race started using antibiotics and the atom bomb at just about the same time. A chat room just like this can be used to share ideas or war plans world wide.
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 11:27 am Post subject: Re: Waiting for the lights to go out
Quote:
So, if Huebner is correct, it is most unlikely that technology will save us.
The point I've been making all these months is all the innovations needed to produce energy for millenia were done circa 1970. Those of us who see a bright future dont need to invoke wizards, dragons, or any other hobgoblins.
That Huebner is wrong on many other counts is only incidental.
Last edited by Dezakin on Mon Oct 24, 2005 11:32 am; edited 1 time in total
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 11:28 am Post subject: Re: Waiting for the lights to go out
Very good point.
People that unquestioningly admire technological and scientific advances almost in a fashion of idolatry are mostly the ones who have no idea of science what-so-ever.
Like the ones who say:"Look some years ago we saw people using small communication devices on Star Trek, and now we use mobile phones!" Then they extrapolate this "sci-fi" to everything else they saw on Star-Trek, from space ships to telekinesis.
They have no idea that the mobile phone is possible because it is not conflicting with basic laws of nature, and that it was possible from the moment on some guy created electromagnetic waves with primitive sparks and then later the transistor was invented.
For them, technology is "magic". And because one kind of "magic" seems possible for them, they think all kinds of magic have to be too.
Joined: Apr 17, 2005 Posts: 2762 Location: Vancouver Island
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 1:28 pm Post subject: Re: Waiting for the lights to go out
I'm firm believer that inventions are rarely set out after and then located. Usually something is discovered and then uses for it are located later. Necessity is not the mother of all invention, random playing is.
Most of the major advances in technology by the US in the 1800's and early 1900's came from rampant patent abuse as englands inventions where outright copied and then improved upon without any legal costs or consequences. From all of this came new ideas and devices.
Today something as stupid as clicking a button to submit an order online can be patented and anyone that infringes charged. If you truely want rampant and rapid inventing dump all patent protection and let it be a free for all. People will make things and try to make money off of selling the first few rather then hoping they can lock in the market for the next 20 years off of their idea. _________________ shame on us, doomed from the start
god have mercy on our dirty little hearts
Joined: Sep 06, 2004 Posts: 5315 Location: Smalltown New Zealand
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 1:41 pm Post subject: Re: Waiting for the lights to go out
Has any one seen the UK series by James Burke "Connections"? He takes inventions then follows the invention rather than concentrating on a field and watching what happens just in that field.
The paths followed becomes a real tangle of zig-zagging across applications as different uses are found for the invention, improvements and follow-ons, often something the original inventor would never have dreamed of.
(this is not saying technology will save us, often an application an inventor "had not dreamed of" was "trivial" or "nothing at all") _________________ "Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers." - Henry Louis Mencken
Joined: Feb 16, 2005 Posts: 251 Location: Siberia of Canada
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 11:39 pm Post subject: Re: Waiting for the lights to go out
There are some hard facts supporting the hypothesis that the rate of inventions is declining. I can come up with two. The first one is the shrinking salaries of research workers and growing unemployment among them. The second fact is more specific to the pharmaceutical industry:
Joined: Oct 14, 2004 Posts: 1203 Location: Left the cult
Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 4:48 pm Post subject: Re: Waiting for the lights to go out
Haven't we had this before? Anyway, this is all explained in Tainter's book Collapse of Complex Civilisations. I couldn't be bothered to go over it again, but it's been covered already.
The rate of technological innovation is declining, and it is significant. More importantly, the "bang per buck" is declining, which means we would have to put more money in to get the same rate of innovation. In fact, this may be one reason why the rate of innovation is declining.
Don't get me wrong, I love technology. But it really is running out. The Red Queen effect is there, you only have to look at antibiotics. The early innovations were mainly about macro scale thigs which gave a great bang for buck : steam engines moving bulk cargo. Do you know what held back the Roman Empire? Mass transit. Land transport was expensive. It cost more to transport grain over land from Southern Italy than it did to get it by boat from Egypt. The Romans would have loved to have steam trains.
Now, the clever stuff is scanning electronic microscopes which can position one atom. Wow! But it costs millions, and moving one atom at a time is not just slow, if you consider a gram of hydrogen contains 6x10^23 atoms.
So unfortunately, we are rapidly reaching the limits of our big earth moving technology. Moving single atoms will never be worth it. If we could truly genetically engineer stuff, things might be different, but we have barely even begun to understand how living things work, let alone build one. Directed evolution is a possibility.
It is true that discoveries have been made as much by chance, than by directed efforts. Unfortunately, this and the other myths of wondrous technological progress are exposed as false.
I see the usual suspects tip up to bang their drum of technological progress. If you love something, it can be hard to let it go, but sorry guys, not all science fiction comes true. The future will be less Star Trek, and more Soylent Green. Who knows, we may get another breakthrough, but its going to take a lot more than "one click shopping". _________________ It's all downhill from here
Joined: Apr 02, 2005 Posts: 1001 Location: Down Under
Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 6:26 pm Post subject: Re: Waiting for the lights to go out
Okay, so lets just accept that technological progress is becoming more difficult (which I’m still not convinced it is), how does this guarantee the collapse of civilisation as we know it? Even if no massive Earth shattering tech breakthrough happens, what’s stopping previous tech-breakthroughs from being implemented in new ways to help solve our problems?
Here’s a thing that frustrates me about those opposed to us techno-optimists: they assume that we are waiting for some Star Trek like technology to come along and make everything fine. This is a load of crap! The fact is, the technology to save us from peak oil largely already exists, and has for many decades.
The requirements to implement a tech-fix to PO isn’t radical new developments in technology, it’s radical new changes in the way people think, in the way society functions.
That said, I’m still not convinced that there is some lack of technological breakthroughs. In recent months for example we’ve had massive breakthroughs in nanotechnology and also in cancer research.
And how can we rate the importance of technology breakthroughs? For all we know, 20 years from now people might hail nanotech as the most important technological development in human history. _________________ "Mother Nature is a psychopathic bitch, and she is out to get you. You have to adapt, change or die." - Tihamer Toth-Fejel, nanotech researcher/engineer.
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