Response to Danial Quinn “Where we Went Wrong”
April 25th, 2009
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The following video was found on the site Panearth, which was posted on a comment by Steven Earl Milroy. While it may seem benign on the surface, I honestly can say it is one of the most chilling videos I have seen in a long time. What is so chilling is that people would support this philosophy. I just hope that any support for this belief is out of ignorance of history and the implications of such lifestyle. Those who would stand behind this, even aware of the historical context really take things to another level of cruelty and anti-humanism.
This video was made by Danian Quinn.
First the big question: Did we really go “wrong”? Modern society certainly gets plenty of criticism for its impacts on the enviornment and the fact that people no longer live “simple” and “natural” lives. There may be something to the claim that people have more complex lives with more to worry about. Of course, there’s a need to qualify the word “simple” in this context. If a “simple” life is one where one need not worry about things like bills to be paid, getting to their apointments on time and picking up the dry cleaning because they only have one daily task, namely backbreaking work in the fields and if their only worry is whether they’ll live much longer then one could call that simple, although I’ll take the complex hustle and bustle of modern life over that any day.
Of course, it is certainly true that there has been some impact on resources and environments due to industrialization. Humans cut down old growth forests, and dug up land for minerals. The other side, of course is that a person living in a modern society can reasonably expect to live into their 70’s. Numerous causes of death and misery have been avoided. In industrial societies people rarely die of bacterial infections, which were once the leading cause of death. Those with physical disabilities can lead productive, fulfilling lives, food is plentiful and the common person can even do things like travel to distant parts of the world, experience culture and scientific discoveries and communicate with their family.
And while net consumption of society may have increased, the per-capita impact has not necessarily risen so greatly, especially in light of greater effeciency in resource utilization. Maintaining the current population, or anything near it would not simply be unsustainable, it would be downright impossible – even at an extremely low standard of living. Deindustrialization can result in one and only circumstance: most people die.
It is not simply an issue of modern people having the means to go experience the Grand Canyon, Stonehenge or the ruins of ancient Rome. The very fact that people in modern societies have time to enjoy a movie, a Broadway show or even read a book is a distinct difference from centuries past when the very notion of entertainment, leisure and activities for enjoyment and personal fulfillment were the domain of the extravagantly wealthy.
The Industrial Revolution saw the largest jump in life expectancy and general health of the common person in human history. It also produced a mass migration toward cities and toward unified national societies. In countries where industrialization took root, it killed the last vestiges of tribalism and community isolation. In modern times, the Industrial Revolution has often been cast in an extremely negative light by those like Quinn, who will be quick to point out that industrialization often involved workers who lived in deplorable conditions as well as industries that polluted and consumed resources. While there may be some truth to these claims, they do not tell the full story of the social impacts of industrialization. To us, the tenements of Manhattan and the sweat shops of London may seem like a meager existence, but to those who lived in more primitive conditions, they were far more desirable than a life of digging potatoes in the countryside of Ireland or Poland. The masses of immigrants fled subsistence life to carve out a better existence in an industrial society, but few if any fled factories to find a better life toiling in the fields.
In part this was made possible by improvements in agricultural production which enabled a society to be formed in which most or all citizens are not occupied in subsistence agriculture. When food is so scarce that each person is occupied simply in the act of producing their own food, there is little opportunity for improvement. However, when a farmer can grow enough to feed ten families and not only one, that means that nine others can be employed at something else. The nine others may choose occupations which benefit the system in other ways: a blacksmith to produce plows for the farmer, a merchant to sell the farmer’s crops and the blacksmith’s wares in other areas, a coach builder to produce wagons to transport the goods, a broker to insure the farmer against drought and the merchant against product loss and so on. This is the essence of modern society and it is the only way that any individual can have any measure of choice in how they live their life.
On Tribalism:
Tribalism is the natural first order of human society which forms on its own when groups of otherwise unorganized people are left in an enviornment where they must fight each day to survive. In an anarchical, it offers an advantage for individuals to band together into groups that work to overcome their adversaries, seize land and have some rudimentary allegiance. Of course, such groups are not necessarily fair and democratic. Tribalism commonly involves chieftains who seize power by violence or are given power by their loyalty or relation to those who came before them.
There may be some tribal traits which are inherent to human tendencies, but there is also the natural advantage that it presents. Tribalism can be seen in modern street gangs and the pirates of areas like Somalia. In such circumstances where a cutthroat life is carved out in a land of limited resources and no society, those who do not band together will often be the first to die or be killed. Conversely, tribalism tends to die out when modern societies of plenty arrive. Examples of this can be seen in the Middle East, where tribalism continues to be a strong influence on society in the badlands of Northern Iran and the searing sands of central Saudi Arabia, despite tribalism being generally non-existent in the supermarkets and skyscrapers of Kuwait City or Dubai.
Tribalism is not limited to non-western societies. At one time, Europe itself was filled with marauding bands of Vikings, Celts, Franks, Anglos and others who lived in tribal societies. A return to this came in the middle-ages, where a pseudo-tribal society was formed in the form of small communities of serfs who worked the land under the leadership of noble lords, who passed on leadership to their offspring, just as many tribal chiefs do.
And as for those tribes in Brazil that this guy seems to like so much: They have an extremely low life expectancy and a lifestyle few outsiders would consider so Utopian. It has been alleged that these tribes practice infanticide, although claims have been made that this is fabricated as well. It would not be that unusual if this were the case, however. In many such societies, infants who are physically disabled may be left to die along with those who are too old to care for themselves or too sick. This may seem horrible and immoral to us, but it is important to keep this in context. These societies live in a manner so close to starvation and death that anyone who can’t pull their own weight simply can’t be taken care of. They don’t care for the disabled or those who can’t provide because they can’t. It is a brutal practice which is a necessity in such a brutal lifestyle.
Life Expectancy in Tribal Societies:
- Pre-Colombian North America: – 25-35
- (Extremely high childhood and adolescent mortality. Extremely high incidence of women dying in child birth)
- Isolated Brazilian Tribes: 42 years
- Afghanistan: 44.2 years
- (This is the average lifespan and it’s a bit deceptive since not all people in Afghanistan continue to live in tribal societies. Tribal lifespan is far lower than those living in more urban centers like Kabul, so the average is skewed by this)
It’s worth noting that despite claims to the contrary, these low life expectancies have nothing to do with exploitation by the West or by any kind of internal political corruption. Many of these tribes live isolated from modern society and as they have for hundreds of years. Their life expectancy was always extremely low, by modern standards. Death due to accidents, infectious disease, child birth and other conditions that would be preventable in much of the rest of the world. It is not as if things have gotten worse for such peoples because they have somehow been denied medical care or sanitation. Their sanitation, medical care and quality of life is just as brutal today as it was one hundred years ago and one thousand years ago.
On Agriculture:
“The easiest life of all is going out and Getting What is there already”
“By far those who have the easiest life, the most leisurely life, are those who hunt and gather”
Anyone who believes this should go out in the woods and see how difficult it is to find enough food for a good meal. The reality, of course, is that this is one of the most ridiculous claims around. Sure, picking up food that is already there is easy if by “already there” he means on the shelf at your local supermarket. The society we live in provides us with so much food that a person could pay for a days worth of caloric intake with the money made working for an hour at minimum wage.
Energy expenditure for foraging for food is difficult to quantify, as for one thing, there are plenty of areas where foraging for food is simply not a feasible method of getting by. Temperate areas may have some food available in certain seasons, although winter has historically been an extremely difficult time, even for the best prepared tribes. Without fruit or vegetables, mild scurvy was not uncommon in the winter months.
Even in areas with the best food sources, hunting and gathering is at best, extremely hit or miss. Hunting for food may prove to provide ample amounts of meat, assuming that the parties involved are lucky enough to have firearms, but without such technology, the methods involved may be as crude and dangerous as trying to heard groups of animals off of cliffs, while trying to avoid being trampled in the process.
Of course this is not a sustainable or even remotely feasible way of feeding any kind of sizable population. The Americas (North and South) currently have a combined population of more than one billion people and produce so much food that the two continents are large net exporters of foodstuffs. At the height of pre-Colombian population, no more than one hundred million natives lived on both continents, their population kept low more through attrition than low birth rates.
This is not to say that Native Americans lacked agriculture. Many native American tribes did extensively use agriculture. Of course, such agricultural activities were nowhere near the advanced levels of today’s farming, but it’s interesting to note that the Native American civilizations which achieved the highest levels of technical and cultural development were invariably those which used agriculture to the greatest degree, even exclusively. Likewise, Asian, European and Middle Eastern cultures developed to their maximum level of sophistication after embracing agriculture and leaving nomadic existence behind.
On Population:
There is something very important to note about tribalism, anti-technology, anti-civilization, anti-agriculture and similar schemes. These plans do indeed keep human population in check and in doing so they may reduce the overall human impact. Ironically, such societies have a much greater impact per population member on the local enviornment, but the net impact is smaller due to the lower population.
To see why this is the case one can use the simple example of sanitation in a society. If a modern country like the United States were to give up sewers and septic systems in favor of simply relieving oneself on the nearest tree, the impact on the enviornment would be enormous. Areas of high population density would become heavily polluted by human waste, causing disease, infestations of insects and other pests, pollution to the local water table and extreme effects on the local eco system. However, hundreds of years ago, when pre-Columbian natives lived in the same areas and lacked sewage treatment or septic tanks, the impact was low because there were so fewer individuals spread out over such a larger area.
Population is kept low in such societies, but it is by the most merciless of means. Death is rampant and life expectancy is extremely low. Birth rates are not lowered, but instead the opposit happens. In such societies, women may be pregnant nearly perpetually during the fertile years of their lives. Death during childbirth is extremely common and infant mortality is very high. Such societal dynamics encourage large families with many young children, as a signifficant proportion may not make it past adolescence. For those who do make it to adulthood, death in one’s 20’s or 30’s is commonplace with infectious disease being the number one killer. In some tribal societies those who make it to their 60’s or 70’s may be left to fend for themselves due to the scarcity of resources for the healthy members of the tribe.
It is also not uncommon for tribal societies to periodically be reduced in population due to epidemics of disease or famine, which can be caused by something as simple as a mild drought. Such events occasionally wipe out entire groups, but more often simply reduce the population of those less capable of enduring such stress. In extreme examples, this can lead to a generational gap when such an event wipes out an entire generation of children and infants.
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Agriculture, Bad Science, Culture, Enviornment, History, Politics, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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April 26th, 2009 at 2:54 am
DV82XL said:
Because, according to him, hunter-gather life living in isolated tribes of families is the superior way of living and he says it even offers more leisure, better community, better happiness etc etc.
I think his vision of tribal life is not the nomads of the Afghan mountains or the backwaters of Brazil. I think his prototype for a tribal society is the group of children who live with Peter Pan on the enchanted island with Tinkerbell.
It’s sheer bull****, but he indicates this is a better way to live and it was better in centuries past. He might as well say “We need to go back to the days of tribalism when we didn’t live in these cold impersonal societies, back when we all danced around the lollypop trees and the fairies gave us gumdrops as they flew two and fro over the happy magic meadow. All our tribes would work to collect the magic amulets to make the potion that allowed us all to fly over the rainbows and to the merry land of tapdancing unicorns. That is what tribal life is all about”
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April 26th, 2009 at 2:59 am
This man somewhat reminds me of Emperor Norton the way he can speak endlessly of brainless nonsense that he somehow pretends is scholarly and important. Emperor Norton had more character and originality though. I like Emperor Norton better.
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April 26th, 2009 at 10:50 am
I don’t know why people think that humankind moving to fossil fuels was a bad thing. Obviously they don’t realize how bad it was before when we burned wood and sometimes whales. I don’t think fossil fuels are perfect but they’re not the daemon they are made out to be. Oil is actually a pretty good fuel because distillates like gasoline burn very cleanly and produce as much water as co2 when they burn.
Your point about sanitation is a good one. Sewage treatment is much better than if an equal number of people just went to the restroom where they pleased. Human waste is distinctly worse than that of most animals in bacterial content. Compared to grazers, omnivores produce much worse waste that can be a health problem. The number of us there is, that would be a horrible thing. At worst we could get by with dugout latrines.
How about if we all farmed the land to feed ourselves? Such an absurd notion is a return to serfdom. It would be better than gathering tho. That was the most idiotic statement on the video. Few environments offer ample food for humans to go out and pick for themselves.
Tribalism is a response to anarchic and harsh conditions. When in such a brutal existence people band together into tribes. When things improve, tribalism becomes obsolete. People live as they do today by choice. Our society offers us choice because it can produce enough for everyone. If people really desired to live in a tribal system, they would organize themselves as such. Gangs are a little like tribes but otherwise people don’t choose to live that way.
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April 26th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Chem Geek Gregor said:
It’s not that bad. I think any anthropologist would give you many examples of hunter-gatherer tribes that have lived rather idyllic lives for periods of time in certain areas of the world. If population is somehow controlled, and fish, game and wild foods are plentiful, as they were in many areas in pre-industrial environments. It really wouldn’t be that difficult to do, if it weren’t for certain human propensities for selfish actions, like producing too many children, when that is not sustainable.
There is a much bigger issue that underlies this particular eco-fantasy of Mr. Quinn. That is, the ratcheting effect of knowledge and technology. No matter how desirable it may become, turning back the clock on any technological development is pretty much impossible, Nuclear Weapons being a common example. Somehow we need to deal with new technologies, rather than like Mr. Quinn, hide behind some fantasy, to avoid the much more difficult task of using newer technologies to mitigate the effects of some newer technologies.
Regarding this issue, Global Warming, Nuclear Weapons – you ain’t seen nothing yet. There will be anti-matter, pure fusion weapons, easy to manufacture and terrifying bioweapons, EMP weapons that can shut down an entire city or an entire country, space based weapons, genetically engineered superior humans, and one of the toughest – Intelligent Machines. Unless there is some magic in the human brain, we can expect machines to become smarter than humans – and that will inevitably lead to human consciousness either merging with machine intelligence or the end of human dominance over what was once our civilization. But it may well be that it is virtually impossible for a technological civilization to survive – nor is it possible for it to turn back the clock on it’s technological developments in order to survive. There is a Sci-Fi novel, the name escapes me, about an alien civilization that goes through perpetual cycles of destroying itself – than rebuilding and doing it all over again. That indeed may be the resolution to Fermi’s Paradox: Where are all the Alien Civilizations?
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April 26th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Warren Heath said:
Are you referring to The Mote In God’s Eye, by Niven and Pournelle?
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April 26th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Warren Heath said:
Doomsayers have predicted the Fall of Man many times, all prematurely, my suspicion is that Vernor Vinge is right: we are approaching the point of a Singularity. Vinge used the term Singularity for a very good reason. It’s an event horizon in the truest sense. Instead of a cosmological event horizon caused by a black hole’s gravitational pull, it’s a social event horizon caused by our inability to extrapolate the trajectory of human civilization beyond a certain point of technological sophistication.
The Singularity, therefore, describes a futurological problem — a blind-spot in our predictive thinking. So most of what you speak of is extrapolation that will be rendered meaningless, simply because we cannot see what we will become, anymore than a medieval philosopher could see the Internet.
Warren Heath said:
The Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
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April 26th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Note to Warren Heath: You posted the same comment on another post which it was not relevant to and I assume this was simply a copy and past error to the wrong page. This same comment was on the post about morgellons.
I deleted it as it seemed obvious to me that this was probably a simple error. If that’s a problem I can restore that. I don’t want to be accused of silencing anyone
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April 26th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
DV82XL said:
Vinge’s peace war and marooned in realtime are great reads. One thing is that the singularity doesn’t have to happen. There is always the chance that something like this could happen:
http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/2009/04/high-above-bloody-streets-below.html
Dubai is a classic case of something like that beginning, with the rest of us forconstrained by the regulations of the statists who will exempt themselves. Or the gloabal civilisation could just implode like the Western Roman empire did with the economy returning to feudalistic barter in less than a generation.
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April 26th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
J Carlton said:
See to me that’s just extrapolation based on historical precedent, valid to a point, but The Singularity (frankly I dislike the term, but we are stuck with it) by definition is the point where that breaks down. Sure there are going to be people, like the Dubai set, that think that things are going to progress as always in a straight line, and are buying in to that prediction, but that doesn’t mean they are right. As for total collapse, these things were always local, we have a global civilization the shear weight of which will be able to survive events that take down something as small and disconnected as the late Roman Empire.
By every indication, and despite the laments of the Green’s and the simplicity movement we are moving swiftly into a post scarcity economy and this will only accelerate once everyone pull their heads out of their collective asses and we move to embrace nuclear energy.
But the point is that technology is developing so fast that it is really not possible to see clearly into the future. Hell I grew up on SF and PopSci, and I never saw that one day I’d be doing what I am at this moment, even though I bought into the idea that there was going to be a computer terminal in every home. We have to stop trying to predict the future and start to enable it – more bandwidth and more energy should be our objectives – the future will take us where it wants.
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April 26th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Finrod said:
Thanks, that’s the book – an excellent read. Battlestar Galactica also had a somewhat similar idea, although a ludicrous, unrealistic version and their resolution on the final episode would have only ensured human extinction (thus the end of the cycle) or a slightly slowed down development of the next cycle.
DV82XL said:
I totally agree with what you’ve stated. We are approaching a future, with numerous technologies converging to a point of potential salvation or catastrophe or anything in between, and it is fun but futile to predict just what that future will be. Between AI, Biotechnology, Nuclear Fusion, NanoTechnology, Artificial Life, and even some potential “black swans” like “The Final Theory of Physics”, SETI or Quantum Consciousness could overwhelm any grandiose pronouncements made by Environmentalists, Politicians or Religious Leaders.
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April 27th, 2009 at 4:09 am
Phew. Glad I found at least one page linked to this video had some sanity. It scares me that so many people support this crap.
I believe we do not have tribes because we do not need them. When given the opertunity to freely associate people don’t form distinct segrigated groups. There may be some groups and cliques formed, but they’re don’t have hard boundies. I have friends from a few years I don’t talk to much anymore and new friends in different social circles. That is how a large prosperous society functions, we are all connected. I think the idea that people assemble into tribes and bands is something you see in times of despiration and lack of freedom. Tribal life is a survival tactic. It also is very limiting. Tribal life means putting power in unelected lords and being trapped in a community.
This man’s ideals are based on fantasy. He believes the world is full of good food for the taking and people want to live in tribes but somehow are forced not to. He is wrong on both counts.
This is what many of my peers believe, however. I’m very afraid that it could end up destroying all we have.
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April 27th, 2009 at 7:29 am
when I was in school I had a friend majoring in anthropology, he asked me one day how much time I thought the prehistoric people spent “hunting and gathering” – he had been told the answer was about two hours a day. I thought, Wow – can that be right. what are we doing in this rat-race??
well a little (very little) time spent thinking about this reveals the issues noted by most of the commenters above: very few people, living in a nearly perfect tropical setting…
the point is, true or not, this was being taught as true and the implication (especially in the mid 1970s) was obvious – “we have gone wrong.” The implication should have been “so what?” I guess the nitwit in the video never grew up, never realized that those hunter gatherers lived in a different world. Its like someone yearning for the gardern of eden.
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April 27th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
gman said:
It’s not just “like someone yearning”; that’s exactly what it is.
As Michael Crichton observed and pointed out: “environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.” And here we see a perfect example of the remapping of the Garden of Eden Myth, a powerful tale of the Grace before the Fall.
What is the Grace? Primitive man living in “perfect harmony” with nature, without any of the worries and dangers of our lives today.
What is the Fall? Industrialization, of course, along with everything that we associate with the hassles of modern life.
The one key difference, which I should point out, is that Judeo-Christian belief makes it clear that there is no going back. The Fall is permanent, and mankind will never recover Eden. The best that can be had — in Christian doctrine, at least — is that the death of Christ and belief in him can somehow place us back into that exalted state spiritually, but we’ll never make it back into the garden physically.
The religion of Environmentalism, however, as interpreted by a significant number of its practitioners (including Quinn), teaches that the idyllic state that existed before the Fall can be recovered, simply by returning to the lifestyle and practices that were used before. This is a dangerous proposition, since this mythical idyllic state never existed to begin with.
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April 27th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
BMS said:
I disagree. In Christianity you’re taught that you must be humble, live to serve god, be extremely apologitic and slightly self-loathing for all you have done wrong and do penance for it. You must free yourself of temptation and not cave to greedy desires. Also, you’re strongly encouraged to make everyone around you do the same.
Failure to do this and you burn. Do it well enough and you are rewarded with a great afterlife. Another persistent belief is that the end is coming and is likely near because we are seeing the signs that come before the Apocalypse. We need to take sides and decide if we want to be saved or suffer on the miserable battlefields of earth in Armageddon.
Environmentalism is the same thing: The end is near. How near? Not sure, but all the signs indicate it is very soon. To the enviornmental lobby, global warming does not mean that things get more difficult or humanity needs to adapt. It is doomsday and it is soon. Peak oil/peak energy/global warming is their doomsday. To them these events are not set-backs they are end alls – the death of humanity. They teach that if you give up your unholy ways and start living a low-energy, low-material, low-standard life then there may still be time for you to be saved when doomsday comes. However, you are running out of time so you must repent now before the end arrives.
By the way: I’m not against environmentalism in the sense of using science and rational thought to control human impacts on the enviornment and to improve resource utilization and the inevitable effects that civilization creates. I’m all for better sewage treatment, better containment or remediation of hazardous waste, preservation of natural areas and species. Also I find coal power appalling and I think we’re becoming way too reliant on natural gas. I also think that some practices of oil recovery and refining are intolerably harmful.
I don’t consider it a philosophical/religious/political thing.
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April 27th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Is there anyone here who thinks we could have had a renewables-dominated global energy economy if technology had developed differently?
For example, if electric motors and generators had been invented earlier than practical heat engines (so that electricity is popularized when renewables are still the Only Game in Town as far as prime-movers go), could wind and water power have acquired a similar commanding position to that occupied by fossil fuels in our world? (I was inspired in that question by the Gurkani Alam alternate history.)
Or do people here believe that few if any of our technological choices are strongly historically contingent?
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April 27th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
George Carty said:
No. Renewables would not dominate the global energy econemy because there just ain’t enough energy there to do it. This really doesn’t have to do with technology. Whether you can improve the energy effeciency of a wind turbine by whatever percent doesn’t change the fact that it’s still dealing with a slow moving, light weight fluid with a minimal pressure differential that just does not carry much energy per a given volume.
Inductive generators came around in the 1830’s but didn’t really mature to being able to be major systems for powering anything until the late 1800’s. There wasn’t much reason given that electricity was a curiosity that had limited uses, the most notable being telegraphy.
In telegraphy, electricity is not valuable for its ability to carry energy and power things. It’s valuable because of its speed as a force applied remotely. Aside from that there were arc lights which were only occasionally used, experiments and a few primative motors. Electricity was used to some degree in chemical processes like electroplating.
What makes electricity valuable is that it’s an excellent means of transporting energy. If you don’t have much energy to begin with then electricity doesn’t do you much good as an energy mover. The thing that makes it nice is its easy to carry by thin, simple to install wires and then you can turn it into heat, mechanical energy or light relatively easily. You can transport energy by cam shafts or hydrolic fluids or steam or belts and pullys but electricity makes it possible to do that for considerable distances and with much greater ease.
The only “renewable” energy source that is even worthwhile for development by electricity is hydro power. Wind was used to power things in the past, but it never really cut it for much besides pumping water and slow milling of low volumes of grain. In those cases it was used because it was all that was avaliable to turn a shaft other than having humans or animals do it. (and animals were commonly used).
If we had motors and generators before steam engines the only thing I can think they might find use for would be to allow for mills and factories to be built further away from rivers. Instead of a mill being right on a river with a dam, it might be a few miles away in an area more easily accessed or closer to a railroad… oh wait… no steam engines… nevermind. Well.. I guess you could have electrified rail, but that would be kinda limited by primary energy.
If anything, discovering these things could be done with electricity would have forced the invention of steam engines by creating a despirate need for mechanical energy to drive the generators.
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April 28th, 2009 at 2:50 am
George Carty said:
Impossible to tell. Butterfly flaps its wings and all, but I don’t think it’s possible that things would really be put towards wind and water being the prime movers. Wind is a no-go in general and water works but only where you have it.
There is a belief that if we throw enough money at R&D well somehow change everything and I agree with Buzz that is not the case. no matter how you go about things there’s only so much energy a blowin in the wind and that is the hard limit you’ve got your back against.
In the early days of electricity wasn’t it really used heavily for lighting and not so much for other end uses? or maybe I’m wrong there.
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April 28th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
George Carty said:
We did, once. Although global just expresses the fact that it occured everywhere on the globe since man was living in small isolated tribes in constant war against each other.
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April 28th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
George Carty said:
The problem is that you need thin steel plates to make a workable electric motor or the magnetic fields will not saturate. For that you need steel in thin rolled form which requires two thing, A heavy blast, enough to run a Besemer converter and large horse power motors to run the rolls. The Saugus ironworks is a good example of an ironworks before the steam engine and they didn’t have the blast pressure to make steel even if they knew about it. For a really good look at how things connect get James Burke’s “Connections.”
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April 28th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
George Carty said:
Of course we did have a renewables-dominated global energy economy at one point, based on organically produced fuels, wind and animal power with a bit of hydro. Like now there wasn’t enough to do what was needed which is why humanity moved to coal in the first place.
George Carty said:
Hydro was considered the ideal prime mover for electric generation right from the beginning which is why it was exploited at places like Niagara Falls No businessman would chose to pay for fuel if he did not have to. Again: there is just not enough – the same problem.
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April 29th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Russ said:
I was thinking along the lines of “Changing to a distributed renewables-based electrical system now would be ruinously expensive because our civilization has been built around fossil fuel technology, but could such an infrastructure have been built over a timescale of centuries”?
I’m wondering if the author of the Gurkani Alam site has been taken in by the Lovins mystique — according to the section on energy technology, almost every building (other than places of worship) that can carry a wind turbine does, and almost all bridges host hydro generators in their piers. I can’t see how such extensive use of renewables would be cost-competitive with heat engines, either driven by fossil fuels, or by nuclear energy (which is apparently less used than in the real world, mainly in submarines and spacecraft, despite being developed earlier).
I wonder what a more realistic tech progression would be, given the premise of that alternate timeline (Mughal Empire remains strong and independent, and has an electricity-based Industrial Revolution coterminous with the West’s steam-engine-based one). I couldn’t see them developing steam engines independently (tropical climate eliminates the need to heat buildings, and means much less coal would be burned – mainly just for iron manufacture. Therefore less need for pumps in coal mines.) Perhaps they’d just buy steam engines from the Europeans (while selling their electrical tech in exchange)? Or perhaps being a Muslim country (though much more tolerant of non-Muslims than they were in the real world) they’d learn quite early about the Middle East’s petroleum reserves – maybe internal combustion engines would have been invented much earlier. Or maybe some other type of heat engine, which never became important in the real world…
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April 29th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
George Carty said:
A distributed renewables-based electrical system is not something that would have grown spontaneously under any circumstances because the technical difficulties would be so great that even had the idea come to fore, it would still be easer to develop a centralized system. Look, any commercial technology will always go for the low-hanging fruit first. With electric power that would mean hydro in the absence of steam anyway, when that had been exploited to the max, I suspect that heat engines would have been developed to provide prime movers for your scenario, before there was any move towards wind and solar. Because the latter are hard to make economic enough for grid use.
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April 29th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
DV82XL said:
That being the case, perhaps in this alternate history hydro would have ended up being used to an extent far greater than it ever was or is, because with lack of any other mechanism to provide large amounts of energy the only way to get it once the good hydroelectric sites were taken would have been to use the less-optimal ones.
In that case maybe Niagra falls would no longer exist because instead of having some of the water diverter, ALL would have been, maybe even with canals dug to bring in more water and lowering the great lakes in the process.
In this alternate history the desperation for power from water would be so great that dams were built in every location where there was any possibility, even if damage to the local enviornment were huge. Huge areas flooded, maybe a series of dams on the Mississippi that would have turned most of Wisconsin and Minnesota into a huge reservoir.
My fictional alternate history:
Wars over oil would be replaced with wars to seize territory where good hydro reserves existed. Canada, Sweden, Norway, Brazil would be the big energy barons of the world and instead of world wars that saw the takeover of France and Poland, there would be wars over the Scandinavia countries with the European powers wanting to control them so they could have their electricity.
Canada is now part of the US. It was annexed during the times of conquest in the late 1800’s. There was no Mexican American war, because nobody cares about the Southwest – except maybe for the Rio Grande. The US took over Canada after many in Quebec objected to most of their province being flooded as part of the massive Saint Lawrence Hydroelectric Project of 1890. Since then the French Canadians have formed their own country by moving further north. The nation of New Quebec is poor because the only land left lacked rivers, but the ingenious citizens, lead by DV82XL are about to change that with the massive Hudson Bay-Atlantic tidal connector project which will make them a hydroelectric power.
The Cold War sees the US watching Russia building a massive trans-Siberian ultra high voltage connector and there is a very sinister implication to this, because we fear that they are planning on invading North America so they can seize our dams and transmit the power back home through Alaska. Russia claims that they only want to purchase electric power on the fair market from New Quebec once they finish their connector, but still, it is scaring the Americans.
The US, however, despite controlling most of former Canada, is not what is today in power. Much of the Territory in the US now belongs to the CSA (Confederate States of America), who won the Civil War. There was never really any contest, because the South had much greater supplies of the major portable, multipurpose power source: Human muscle in the form of slaves. Slavery is still alive and well in the CSA. In the USA, slavery is not entirely illegal, but it’s more restricted. You need a license to own slaves and you need to pay a duty on them each year and have them submit to random health inspections.
Slavery has also made something of a return to most of the old world. If you even questioned the morality of it, most Europeans and Americans would look at you like you had three eyes. “Slavery? What’s wrong with it? We treat them fairly well. How could we possibly have a civilized society without slaves? Who would dig the canals for the hydro systems?”
In the Middle East, Egypt is the only country with a truly massive massive hydro capacity thanks to the Aswan dam, which was built decades earlier and has collapsed twice each time killing hundreds of thousands. After being rebuilt, the Egyptians can dictate their terms to the North Africans and much of the middle east or they pull the plug.
War in Israel is so constant and bloody that it makes today conflict seem very gentle. The prize is the Jordan River. Likewise the Tigress is constantly fought over, but still these rivers don’t have anywhere near the power of the Nile. Egypt becomes a superpower due to its need for a huge military to guard the river.
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April 29th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Nouveau-Québec is already a region, bounded on the south by the Eastmain River, on the west by James and Hudson bays, on the east by Labrador, and on the north by the Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay. The region was formerly part of the Northwest Territories, but was annexed by Québec in 1912. It is the largest subdivision of the province. There are even now major hydroelectric schemes in progress on the rivers flowing into James Bay, especially the La Grande (the ‘James Bay Project.’
Because if there is one thing there is no lack of in Québec, it is rivers.
In your take, I suspect that it would be the northern part of Canada draining into the Arctic ocean, and Hudson Bay that would be the most valuable.
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April 29th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
DV82XL said:
Pointy taken. In any case, the world has been carved up by various powers constantly fighting over land with good water resources and much of the habitable land has been submerged by dams or cut apart by canals.
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April 29th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
drbuzz0 said:
You’re in the wrong timeline pal – the situation you’ve described sounds so bad you must be thinking “What if fossil fuels didn’t exist” rather than “What if electrical devices were invented 100 years earlier”. I think it’s more likely that they’d start with wind and water power, but quickly outgrow it and switch to heat engines of some kind…
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April 29th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
George Carty said:
It amounts to the same thing George, because the only way electric motors would have predated heat engines, would have been in a world without fossil fuels. Science might be practiced in the pure form, but engineering is a commercial activity, and you just don’t get cases were the more difficult path is taken first.
Wind was available, and was well understood from way back, but because it is intermittent, it was never seriously considered for large-scale electrical generation. It is economics that drives the selection of energy sources and nothing else. I’m don’t think your world would have ever come to pass.
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April 29th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment.
Industrial Society is destroying necessary things [Animals, Trees, Air, Water and Land] for making unnecessary things [consumer goods].
“Growth Rate” – “Economy Rate” – “GDP”
These are figures of “Ecocide”.
These are figures of “crimes against Nature”.
These are figures of “destruction of Ecosystems”.
These are figures of “Insanity, Abnormality and Criminality”.
The link between Mind and Social / Environmental-Issues.
The fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle of Industrial Society is causing exponential rise in psychological problems besides destroying the environment. All issues are interlinked. Our Minds cannot be peaceful when attention-spans are down to nanoseconds, microseconds and milliseconds. Our Minds cannot be peaceful if we destroy Nature [Animals, Trees, Air, Water and Land].
Chief Seattle of the Indian Tribe had warned the destroyers of ecosystems way back in 1854 :
Only after the last tree has been cut down,
Only after the last river has been poisoned,
Only after the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you realize that you cannot eat money.
To read the complete article please follow any of these links.
Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment
Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment
Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment
Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment
sushil_yadav
Delhi, India
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April 30th, 2009 at 3:59 am
DV82XL said:
What dictates that the initial deployment of electrical technology has to be “large-scale” though? From a New Scientist article:
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April 30th, 2009 at 4:28 am
George Carty said:
As was mentioned earlier electric motors presuppose a level of metallurgy that would have required processes that needed the sort of power one could only get from steam at that time. Not only that, the implied supposition that steam power was developed for workshop motive power is just not so. They were developed to pump water from mines, a task that any electric motor that could be built with 18th century materials would not be able to do.
The whole article is deeply flawed in that it seem to assume that a given technology develops in a vacuum, independent of other developments outside its field, and this is just not so. The development of electrical technology was dependent on several advances in material and material availability, some of which was directly related to steam, just as steam depended on work done in the field of artillery. There is a certain path of development that these things took, and one cannot postulate a major change in the arrival of one without assuming huge changes in the route that got it there.
As for your leading question: What dictates that the initial deployment of electrical technology has to be large-scale? The answer is economics – it is simply cheaper to amortize the cost over a large group of users, much cheaper than it would be for each to generate their own power.
Like it or not, money always bats last in these matters.
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April 30th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
It’s a matter of effeciency. Edison was a fan of the idea that there would be a power plant in every neighborhood. This partially due to his relatively low voltage DC system, but it was also something of a design philosophy.
It would likely have been much much worse for the local enviornment if the “distributed” system had been the norm. Wind just plain doesn’t give you the power you need, regardless of how it’s deployed. With the exception of those who happened to be living near a river or stream, everyone else would have the equivalent of a medium sized steam locomotive in their neighborhood chugging day and night to provide power.
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May 2nd, 2009 at 10:27 pm
George Carty said:
I just spent the day at the CT Antique Machinery Association’s Spring power up and I came to some conclusions vis a vis this argument. 1. Early electric motors were neither small nor cheap. They required a lot of labor to construct and the quality of materials available for insulation forces the coils to be larger than current motors. 2. Steam engines could come in any size you want. This makes it fairly easy to size the power for your mill. 3. These engines were available earlier than I thought, high pressure engine being common in the early nineteenth century. 4. The stationary steam engine was efficient enough to remain a viable power source much further into the 20th century than I thought, with examples still operating almost to the current day.
As for small grids becoming common, electrical engineers were aware of the possible ecomonomies of scale obtained by using high voltage ac transmission from the first decade of the 20th century according to source material in the engineering literature that I have seen from that period. The efficiency advantages of larger power plant were also known from the earliest days of electricity. This is especially true because the largest early user of electricity were transit and railroad companies, with industrial and residential users falling far behind as far as usage is concerned. This forces a grid structure because a railroad is spread over miles of line. In fact many of the engineering tools for the grid came about as a result of the New Haven Railroad’s pioneer efforts to electrify. The first grid proposal was written by the New Haven’s chief electrical engineer, William Spencer Murray. There are just too many advantages for distributed electricity not to happen.
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May 3rd, 2009 at 8:54 am
I looked at the Gurkani Alam timeline (I was a bit of a sucker for it – I found appealing the idea of a world where technological progress was faster, and not monopolized by Western cultures) in a bit more detail, and I’m not sure that the metallurgy concerns cited here would a problem, as electric motors and generators were invented about a decade after Watt steam engines. However given that, the emphasis on renewables does seem somewhat strange (why not just use Watt engines to power the generators, giving technogical progress that is faster, but on a course much more similar to OTL).
I culled some of the info from the timeline on technological progress in the 18th and 19th centuries and repeated it here, in case anyone would like to try retconning it. In most cases, I give the OTL date for comparison purposes:
1711 – Newcomen steam engine (same as in OTL)
1715 – Leyden jar (1745 in OTL)
1742 – Linkage between electricity and magnetism discovered (1820 in OTL)
1744 – Primitive electric motor (1821 in OTL)
1755 – Electric telegraph (1809 in OTL)
1764 – Watt steam engine (1765 in OTL)
1769 – Steam-powered vehicle (1771 in OTL)
1775 – Commercially-viable electric motor (1832 in OTL)
1776 – Punch-card operated loom (1801 in OTL)
1776 – Dynamo (1832 in OTL)
1777 – Electrical wind turbines (with battery backup) and water turbines
1778 – Primitive electric car (1828 in OTL)
1781 – Electric arc lamp (early 19th century OTL)
1785 – Steam-driven boat
1790 – Transatlantic telegraph cable (1857 in OTL)
1791 – Steam-driven military armoured car
1793 – Telephone (1876 in OTL)
1799 – Gatling gun (1861 in OTL)
1799 – Electric locomotive (1837 in OTL)
1800 – Electric trolleybus (1882 in OTL)
1801 – Steam locomotive (1804 in OTL)
1802 – Alternator (1832 in OTL)
1812 – Machine gun (1881 in OTL)
1830 – Commercially-viable electric car (1881 in OTL)
1830 – Programmable mechanical computer
1833 – Ocean-going steam ship (1838 in OTL)
1840 – Pure-steam warship (1859 in OTL)
1841 – Internal combustion engine (1860s in OTL)
1850 – Electromechanical computer (late 1880s in OTL)
1852 – Computer-to-computer communication via the telegraph/telephone system
1855 – Commercial internal-combustion-engine car (1885 in OTL)
1856 – Mass-produced steam car
1859 – Steam-driven tracked tank
1873 – Steam turbine (1884 in OTL)
1874 – Radio signal (1895 in OTL)
1877 – Discovery of radioactivity (1896 in OTL)
1878 – Fixed-wing powered aircraft (1903 in OTL)
1880 – Mass-produced internal-combustion-engine car (1908 in OTL)
1895 – Radar (1930s in OTL)
1896 – Beginning of quantum physics (1900 in OTL)
1896 – Sonar (1913 in OTL)
1899 – Commercial radio broadcasting (1920 in OTL)
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May 3rd, 2009 at 11:41 am