It's always a bit of a gamble to sit down at the computer
and start writing one of these weekly posts.
I don’t know how it works for other writers, but for me, the writing
process is inherently unpredictable; I may think I know what I’m going to
write, but once the fingertips get within range of the keyboard, all bets are
off. A news story off the net, a stray
passage from some old book, a series of those things we like to call
coincidences because we haven’t yet noticed that a belief in coincidence is the
most popular superstition of the age of science—take your pick, it can be any
of those things or others, but all of a sudden what should have been a quiet
evening of sipping tea and anatomizing the decline and fall of industrial civilization
becomes a leap into the dark.
This time, it was a question raised by a reader of last
week’s post. That post, as my readers
will recall, ended with some suggestions about how readers in the world’s
industrial nations might consider changing their own lives, to cut back on the
burden their lifestyles put on the living Earth. The reader in question
applauded those suggestions, but asked what suggestions I might have if I were
addressing an audience of scientists and engineers—that is, people who might be
able to come up with new technologies to help cushion our species’ face-first
collision with the brick wall of planetary limits. What would I want them to
explore?
I confess the question took me entirely by surprise, and I
stammered something about how it was an interesting point, but I didn’t expect
ever to have the chance to address an audience of scientists and engineers
along those lines. Of course the
inevitable result followed promptly, as an assortment of scientists and
engineers popped up to say that they were regular readers of mine, and they
would be interested in hearing my suggestions for what they could do.
It’s a far more complex question than it might seem at first
glance. To begin with, there are at
least two limits that nearly all attempts to imagine technologies for the
future systematically duck. The first of those limits come out of the laws of
thermodynamics, which dictate that the amount of work you can get out of any
energy source is a function of the difference between the concentration of
energy in that energy source and the background concentration in the
environment. Fossil fuels are extraordinarily concentrated energy sources—a
single gallon of gasoline, remember, contains as much energy as one ton of
fully charged lead-acid auto batteries—and nearly all of today’s technologies
depend on that huge difference in energy concentration between the chemical
energy of petroleum and other fossil fuels, on the one hand, and the ambient
heat of the lower atmosphere on the other.
The second limit comes out of White’s Law, which is arguably
as important in human ecology as the laws of thermodynamics are in
physics. White’s Law states that the
level of economic development possible in any society is determined by the
amount of energy per capita at its disposal.
The immense infrastructure that makes today’s industrial world
lifestyles possible depends on constant flows of concentrated energy, not
merely to power it but to provide it with raw materials, spare parts, skilled and
unskilled labor, and all its other necessities, and these requirements each
have further requirements of their own, cascading outwards in a net of
dependencies that ultimately includes much of the planet. Nearly all of today’s
technologies depend on our current industrial infrastructure or a close
facsimile thereof, not only to keep them fueled and running, but to give what
they do some value.
These two limits interact in ways that are fatal to most
projects for future technologies. Any
future society in the real world is going to have to get by on a lot less
energy, and a lot less of the products of energy, than people in today’s
industrial societies are used to having at their beck. This means that any advanced technology will
have to compete with other technologies for a share of the limited energy
that’s available, and it will also have to compete with other, less
technologically complex ways of accomplishing whatever it is that it does. Furthermore, the relevance of any advanced
technology to a future society will depend on how complex an infrastructure
that society would need to build the technology, fuel it, maintain it, and give
its work economic value. Whether or not
computers will be viable in a future society, in other words, is not a question
of whether it’s technically possible to build them; it depends, first, on
whether all the things needed to build, power, maintain, and
get useful work out of them can be provided; second, whether other, simpler
technologies can provide the same services at a lower cost in energy,
resources, and labor; and third, whether the sharply limited resources
available to a future society would be better spent on some other project
altogether.
All these issues will be familiar to regular readers of this
blog. It’s also probably worth saying
that while I try to stay abreast of major developments in half a dozen
sciences, there’s no way any human being can keep up with everything that’s
being done by the world’s scientists and engineers, and so any guesses I may
offer here may already have been rendered unnecessary or proven impossible by
somebody sitting at a lab bench in Cleveland, Cape Town, or Kowloon. I’m still going to take the risk of making
some suggestions, but in a bit I’ll also have a challenge to offer to the
scientists, engineers, and basement inventors among my readers.
First, though, my wish list.
In honor of the holiday season just past, we can call it a solstice
list—those of my readers who celebrate Christmas instead can call it a Christmas
list if they wish. Still, I’d like to
ask that the list not be sent to Santa Claus.
No, this list is for Krampus.
Krampus? He’s a
Yuletide figure across much of central Europe.
Horned, clawed, covered with shaggy black hair, and equipped with a long
red tongue, he carries a birch switch, has a basket on his back, and visits
houses on long winter nights. Good little children wake to find gold coins in
their shoes; bad little children get thwacked with the birch switch; and
really, really bad little children—the sort of spoiled,
shrieking little horrors who take consumer society’s cult of self-centered
greed to its logical extreme—get popped into the basket on Krampus’s back and
taken away by him, and nobody ever sees them again. I suspect that lingering belief in Krampus
may be one reason why children in central Europe are by and large better
behaved than their American equivalents.
Krampus, in other words, is all about consequences. That in itself arguably makes him a better
Yuletide figure than Santa Claus, whose ancient custom of putting a lump of
coal in the stockings of offensive children is hardly even a memory these
days. Still, that’s only part of the
reason I propose to send my wish list to Krampus.
The fact of the matter is that I’ve been bedeviled by
Krampus over the holiday season just past.
Part of that’s due to the publication of a new fantasy novel, Krampus
the Yule Lord, in which the horned Yuletide spirit escapes from half a millennium of
imprisonment to do battle with Santa Claus for dominion over the holiday
season: something, that is, like a cross between A Christmas Carol and Prometheus Unbound. It’s got a portrait of Krampus on the front
cover, and for months, when I visited libraries or walked past bookstores or
waited in train stations next to one of those wretched little newsstands with a
few books tucked in among the junk food and the magazines, there he’d be,
leering out from the shelves. Meanwhile Krampus-themed holiday cards arrived
from friends, as did emails from other friends asking me if I’d ever heard
about...well, you get the picture.
Mind you, in my line of work, you learn early on how to
recognize when an archetype is trying to get your attention. Why exactly this particular archetype is
clearing its throat and casting significant looks in the direction of a mild
and middle-aged archdruid is something that I’ll doubtless figure out in due
time. Meanwhile, though, it seems sensible enough to offer Krampus my wish list
for next Yuletide, or whichever Yuletide is convenient; perhaps he can cash in
some of those gold coins for a few research grants to get the process rolling.
So here are the things I’d like to see under the solstice
tree one of these days, if a few scientists and engineers are willing to be
Krampus’s little helpers and put them there.
At the top of the list—well, let’s start by talking a bit
about the most important legacy our civilization is going to leave to the
future. No, it’s not any of the things
for which we like to preen ourselves; it’s the vast quantities of nuclear waste
we’re heaping up for tomorrow to deal with.
I don’t know words sufficiently forceful in any language to describe the
sheer brutal selfishness of the attitude that insists that our supposed need to
prop up our extravagant lifestyles a little longer justifies generating wastes
that remain lethal for a quarter of a million years, while doing absolutely
nothing to keep them away from the biosphere for more than the smallest
fraction of that interval.
Still, that’s business as usual in most of the world’s
industrial nations these days. Sooner or
later—probably after we get the statistically inevitable nuclear waste accident
that turns a couple of hundred square miles or so of some industrial country
into a dead zone nobody will be able to enter for the next millennium—finding
some less self-destructively stupid way of dealing with the backlog of nuclear
waste is going to be a major issue. When that time arrives, I’d like a
technology that can do the trick: if at
all possible, some way of making spent fuel rods and other high-level waste
physically stable, chemically inert, and biologically inaccessible. Oh, and it
needs to be tested thoroughly; this is not a situation in which it’s helpful to
rely on the alleged properties of vaporware.
So that’s one thing I’d like to see appear under the
solstice tree. Another, along similar
lines, is a more thoroughly developed system of bioremediation for getting
persistent poisons out of soil and water.
High-level nuclear waste isn’t the only kind of poison industrial
civilization likes to produce, and most of the others aren’t even sequestered
temporarily in storage pools. All over
the world, a great deal of soil and water has been contaminated with toxic
metals and other pollutants, and these are things that our descendants are
going to have to deal with for a very long time to come.
Bioremediation is one of the few effective low-tech methods
for dealing with that. It so happens
that some plants, and some other organisms, selectively take up toxic
substances from the soil and concentrate them in their tissues. Experiments have been done showing that it’s
possible, using repeated plantings of the right plants, to extract enough
toxins from contaminated soils to make them safe again. A great deal of further
work needs to be done in order to evolve a sufficiently extensive toolkit of
bioremediation methods that can be applied, without high-tech infrastructure,
to clean up the mess our civilization is going to leave behind it. It should have plants and other organisms
suited to the widest possible range of ecosystems and climatic conditions, and
it should also include relatively simple tests—the sort of things that can be
done in a makeshift lab using readily available reagents—for sorting out what
toxic substances are in a given body of soil or water, and need to be
extracted.
Right next to that kit, I’d like to see something a little
more literary—a good clear manual of ecology for laypeople, written in
relatively simple language, focusing on the principles that our descendants are
going to need to know as they contend with the heap of problems we’re leaving
them. William Catton has usefully described ecology as “the study of the
processes that matter;” our civilization has tried to pretend that those
processes don’t matter, and the consequences of that pretense are among the
most important factors tipping said civilization into the rubbish heap of
history just now. It would be
particularly nice if the manual were to walk its readers through the scientific
method, teaching them how to formulate hypotheses and test them, so that the
most valuable part of the grand intellectual adventure of science doesn’t get lost
irretrievably during the dark age ahead of us.
Finally, I’d like to see a way to turn sunlight into electricity
that doesn’t depend on silicon chip fabrication and doping, or any of the other
high-end infrastructure of the modern industrial system. I’ve pointed out in previous posts that the
way we use electricity nowadays, with sprawling regional grids to convey power
from centrally located power plants to wall sockets that are constantly
supplied with current, is as wasteful as it is unsustainable. That doesn’t mean that the future must do
without electricity; it means that electricity in the future is far more likely
to be generated and distributed on a village-scale or homescale basis, and used
when it’s available, however intermittently that may be. Generating electricity from wind and water
will be easy for our descendants even in the absence of an industrial
system—generators suited to that use can be built easily enough in a garage
workshop, and so can waterwheels and wind turbines quite adequate for the
purpose.
Solar electrical generation is considerably more
challenging. Photovoltaic (PV) cells,
the mainstay of most solar electric systems today, require much the same
manufacturing infrastructure as any other silicon-based semiconductor, and the
likelihood that chip fabrication plants and everything needed to keep them
running will be available in a deindustrial world is probably too small to
worry about. The question remaining is whether there’s a less
infrastructure-intensive way either to make PV cells, or to turn light into
electricity in some other way. My
hunch—and it’s only a hunch, I admit—is that thermoelectric generators using
the Seebeck effect, and simple parabolic or conical mirrors to collect light,
are a good bet; the technology’s simple enough that an ordinarily enterprising
medieval alchemist could have knocked one together while waiting for the
athanor to get up to heat. Still, it will take a good engineer or two to tinker
with the technology, try different options, and work up a prototype that can
show whether my hunch is right; meanwhile, there are no doubt plenty of other
options to explore.
So that’s my first tentative list. If I ever were to be plopped down in front of
an audience of scientists and engineers, though, I’d get through the list as
quickly as possible, and concentrate thereafter on the far more interesting
project of seeing if the scientists and engineers can come up with other
proposals to add to it. The challenge
there, of course, would lie in getting them to grips with the hard limits of a
deindustrializing world, where population, gross domestic product, and resource
availability are all declining steadily.
In such a world, as already noted, the only technologies that can count
on being preserved are those that can be kept running in an environment of
scarcity, provide goods or services valuable enough to justify continued
investment, and do so more economically than any other way of getting the same
goods and services. These are not constraints that today’s scientists and
engineers are used to facing, and getting them to take them seriously may take
a certain amount of patience.
Still, it’s arguably worth doing, and for that reason I’m
going to propose the challenge I mentioned earlier in this post. The peak oil
science fiction contest this blog hosted back in 2011 left me very impressed
with the creativity of this blog’s readership—those of you who weren’t
following this blog yet back then can see for yourself in the pages of the
anthology that resulted from that contest, After
Oil—and I think it’s time to draw on that same resource again.
So...drumroll please...we’re going to have another contest.
Here’s what I’m proposing. I’d like to ask this blog’s
readers to break out their word processing programs again, but this time I’m
looking for nonfiction papers with a scientific or technical slant, written for
an intelligent nonprofessional audience.
Each paper should either describe a
problem that will confront the deindustrializing world in the course of
the Long Descent, or propose a practical solution to some problem of this kind,
or both. Successful entries will start
from the assumption that the unraveling of industrial society sketched out in
this blog and my books The Long Descent and The
Ecotechnic Future is a reality that has to be accepted, and go from
there to deal with specific challenges that will follow from the shape of that
future.
Please don’t simply rehash some issue that’s already been
discussed a godzillion times already. On
the other hand, you can certainly propose a novel solution to a familiar
problem, just as you can come up with an unfamiliar problem that has some
readily available solution; you can take a solution that’s currently in the
conceptual stage, build a prototype, and report on it, and you can also present
a problem that nobody’s thought of yet and say "we need to come up with
some effective response to this." If your solution relies on vaporware—that
is to say, theoretical technologies that haven’t been built or tested yet—say
so, and don’t pretend that you can be sure in advance that it will work as well
as you hope; you might also suggest some ways in which your vaporware can be
tested for efficacy once a prototype gets built. If you build a working
prototype of your proposed technology and describe how it worked, on the other
hand, you get a good dollop of extra credit.
I should stress here that I’m not looking for vague
generalities, wishful thinking, or another round of apocalyptic fantasies. The Long Descent is going to be a very
challenging process all ‘round, but a great many of those challenges will be
concrete problems that can be solved, or at least ameliorated, by applying the
methods of science and engineering, or of plain pragmatic common sense. Creative thought is important here, but so is
a solid grasp of the realities we face, backed up by a clear sense of what’s
already known and has already been done; thus the essays that will come out in
front in this contest will be those that combine original thinking with plenty
of relevant footnotes.
Essays should be between 1500 and 6000 words in length, not
counting footnotes and references; they should be posted somewhere online—if
you don’t have a blog, Blogger will happily set
you up with one—and a link posted on the comments page here. As before, the
best dozen or so essays, as selected by me, will be going into an anthology,
which I’ll edit and introduce; whatever royalties there may be will be split
among the authors. Entries to the
contest should be posted online by November 1, 2013. After all, Krampus will doubtless need a
little time to get the results ready to tuck underneath the solstice tree.
