Back from very refreshing holidays,
which I badly needed this year, as I may have taken a few more commitments of
late than what wisdom would dictate (probably my very occasional readers have
noticed, as from a blogging perspective it has been a year of truly abysmal
productivity). And things are only going to get more hectic for the following
couple of months. But there are a number of things I’ve been thinking about
that I wanted to share with my devoted readership, and this is a moment as good
as any other to get at it.
First and foremost in my mind has
been how the likely collapse of our civilization may play out. There are a
couple of lines of thought that I had been harboring for some time now, and for
which I have found a lot of additional supporting evidence in these past
months:
·
Technological
advance has really and completely petered out. I visited in July a factory in the
Basque Country that builds superconducting magnets. I still can remember the
buzz about superconductance almost forty years ago. Back then, it seemed that
developing materials that would superconduct at ambient temperature (or at
least, at a temperature that allowed them to be cooled w liquid nitrogen, which
is comparatively unexpensive) was just a matter of time, and a short one at
that (think years, not decades). Just hasn’t happened. This particular factory
supplies the sextupoles for one of humanity’s greatest achievements, the Large
Hadron Collider, in CERN near Geneva. Amazing little pieces of equipment of
almost magical qualities… exactly like the ones that my mother tested in her
old laboratory when I was but a sparkle of possibility in God’s eyes. It tells
you something that the most advanced equipment, for the most advanced
scientific installation on planet Earth, relies on a technology that
essentially has experienced no improvement at all in the last half century. Add
it to the long list of fields (energy production, space exploration, air
transportation, land transit, building materials, etc.) that have experienced almost no evolution
since the 70s of last century.
·
About
the other great technological undertaking at planetary level, seeing the latest
news from ITER, I’ve lost faith that it will ever be completed. They still have
not started the truly difficult part (actually building the cryostat), and the
societal know-how to achieve it at the budgeted cost and time has simply evaporated.
There is not in the whole Europe enough people with the required skill to design
in detail, weld, erect and connect the myriad parts, with the demanded quality
and precision (and I doubt they can find
enough, even in Asia, where thanks to China and Korea still building
conventional NPPs there are more
engineers and tradesmen with the requisite skills). It is just a matter of how
many more years (or decades) it will take them to realize that there is not
enough collective willpower to see it through, and quietly dump the whole thing
(and with it, the dream of endless, cheap, clean energy that fusion embodied)
·
Climate
change is already baked in, taking place, and there is absolutely no way to
stop it as, taken globally, people just don’t want it to stop (or, more
precisely, to make the sacrifices that would be needed). First piece of data, I
travelled to Saudi Arabia, and talked to some people in the energy sector. They
smile benevolently when asked if they are not nervous by the prospect of the
advanced economies “weaning off oil” and substantially reducing their
dependence on their main export, which provides them with 99% of their revenue.
They have heard that tune since… you guessed it, since the first oil crisis
(coincidentally, at the beginning of the 70s of last century, when
technological progress almost stopped) and said advanced economies have “only”
increased the total amount of oil they use fourfold. Plus China, and India, and
Latin America, and even parts of Africa are building sizeable middle classes
which want to celebrate their arrival to wealth and prosperity with what has
been sold to them as the ultimate symbol of affluence: a car! (and, 99% of the
time, the first one they can afford, which renders them the mobility and
convenience of a self-propelling vehicle, is still one with an internal
combustion engine). Second piece of data, we have lived through one of the
hottest summers on record (I experienced it firsthand in the typically balmy
North of Spain, sweltering under temperatures of 40º C, and by having the
ancestral home of my parents almost burned down by one of the fiercest
wildfires on record in the Canary Islands, an inevitable byproduct of high
temperatures and very low humidity).
· Just how longer can entire ecosystems
survive a repetition of such thermal stress (slightly augmented each passing
year) is anybody’s guess. And people are content blaming it all on politicians
that don’t take the whole thing seriously (which they don’t), but at the same time they still keep
buying themselves ever larger and less efficient vehicles (I keep on seeing
more and more SUVs all over Europe), demanding ever more air conditioning in
the Summer, and buying bigger and bigger homes, even if it means living further
from their works (and the schools of their children) and forcing them to longer
commutes, in which, apart from making themselves unhappier, consume tons more
of hydrocarbons. Why shouldn’t they? They have been falsely promised (between
so many other things) that the whole energy production network can be revamped,
that old, polluting, ways of producing energy (coal and nuclear) can be
scrapped and replaced by cleaner ones (wind and solar) without anybody paying
any price. So they just go along, waiting the inevitable (clean energy for
everybody everywhere) to materialize without them making any sacrifice. Only
this time the inevitable happens to be also impossible (in the current state of
actual technology, as opposed to the one dreamed by most journalists, pundits
that should know better and of course politicians)…
In summary, our civilization is
agonizing, incapable of providing technical solutions to its most pressing
problems, and condemned to adapt to the deteriorating conditions of a warming
planet. At this point I think +2ºC in 2050 is unavoidable (as it should be
clear by now that none of the signatories of the Paris treaty, except maybe the
smallest ones, who contribute the less to greenhouse gasses emissions, are
going to meet their lofty commitments, and thinking otherwise is just
delusional), and +3ºC, even +4ºC are not entirely off the table. The train for
avoiding such outcome simply left the station long ago, and it is better to
recognize it than to stick to the pied piper’s dream of everybody suddenly
realizing how serious the threat is, and coordinately engaging in the biggest
reengineering the world has ever seen of how we produce energy, heat our homes,
produce our food and transport merchandises (and ourselves) around.
A number of books have been
published painting in (sometimes excruciating) detail how such warming planet
may look like, normally in apocalyptic tones: billions displaced as their
cities and villages are submerged by the rising sea levels, millions starving
due to the inability to grow enough foodstuffs amidst catastrophic droughts, most
of Earth’s wildlife (both animals and plants) perishing due to inability to
adapt to the changes in their habitats… From the human perspective, it all
would sound quite scary except for one reason: we have heard (most of) it all
before, and it never came to pass. The displacements, famines, wars, societal
upheaval, civilizational collapse and (probable) final extinction of the human
species was already forecasted as an unavoidable fate by the “Club of Rome” in…
the 70s of the last century! (a most fateful decade, as you may have realized),
when there were about 3 billion of us on the planet. And today we are 7 billion
(and counting), mostly enjoying a much higher standard of living than we were
back then, without any of the authors, as far as I know, ever recognizing there
was anything wrong in their predictions (Paul Ehrlich, another famous doomsayer
of the era, only admits that he may have been wrong in “a few decades”, as according
to him all his gloomy predictions of collapse will surely come to pass more or
less as he foretold, sooner rather than later). Like in the tale of the boy who
cried wolf, we have been admonished to change our wasteful ways or else,
without nothing bad happening (rather the opposite, with untold numbers getting
out of poverty and joining the global middle classes, mostly thanks to the fast
rise of China, that more than compensates the inability of the Western world to
improve a iota the lot of 80-90% of its population in the last half century) and
the result is that society is jaded and unresponsive to the latest warnings. “This
time is different (as now the wolf is really coming!)” becomes less convincing in
each iteration.
So we are essentially cooked, right?
Well, maybe not so much. Although in some sense we are in a much worse position
than in the 70s (back then we could still innovate and push technology forward,
which we now seem unable to do), in another we have one (sad, tragic) ace up
our sleeve we didn’t have back then: our dominant reason has become so toxic,
the kind of lives it pushes even its supposed winners to live is so sad (The pitiful and miserable (but rich!) meritocrats) that, as I’ve said a number of
times, it pushes most of the people under its sway to reproduce less, or not to
reproduce at all. And having less kids (a lot less than any previous generation
in recorded history) happens to be a surefire way to reduce our environmental
impact. So, in a kind of perverse fashion, the generation currently in their
prime reproductive age is atoning for the sins of unbridled consumerism and
utter inability to coordinate and translate into social action their vague desire
to reduce their hydrocarbon footprint by leaving many less people behind to
continue with the despoiling of the planet. Those additional tons of CO2 their
bigger SUVs and bigger homes are pumping in the atmosphere are somehow
compensated by them just having one baby (or no baby at all) instead of the 3-5
that their parents had.
Which doesn’t mean we have a lot of
room for complacency. Voluntary demographic collapse (starting w Western
societies, Korea and Japan, soon to be followed by China and the rest of Asia)
is not happening “on time” to compensate for developing economies consuming
ever increasing quantities of fossil fuels (and, let’s face it, advanced
economies “saying” they will dramatically decarbonize, and feeling righteous
and virtuous, but then doing nothing of the sort). Not on time, for sure, to
avert catastrophic climate change. For all practical purposes it is better to
think of climate change as already having happened. Yup, the rise of the sea
level will play out during decades to come, but play out it will. Sorry, polar
bears, you were magnificent beasts, we just utterly messed up with your habitat
until there was none left to speak of. Hope you can make do in zoos and tiny
reserves (with air conditioning in summer). AND, not all the world is
voluntarily reducing their fertility.
Although it is very politically
incorrect to point it out, certain continent is projected to go from about a
billion inhabitants today to roughly three billion in the second half of the
current century. Two billion additional human beings with legitimate
aspirations to a life of dignity and (at least moderate) consumption. With
approximately zero available land for cattle or agricultural production to feed
them unless they use the little remaining rainforest they have, which would
accelerate greatly both the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the
atmosphere and the loss of biodiversity, a real double whammy! Nothing
intractable, however, or nothing that would require any enlightened ruler to go
on and force mass sterilizations on them (or any similar feat of autocratic
social engineering, like the one accomplished by China’s derided one child
policy, that their leaders are now discovering may have been quite unnecessary,
as unbridled capitalism happens to be a much more efficient deterrent to total
fertility than any central planner’s decree). Just give them enough free market
and enough television and in less than a generation they will swiftly
transition from 5-7 children per fertile woman to 1-2 (a feat already achieved in
similar timeframes in such different places as rural Mexico and urban Iran).
So, although climate change will
doubtlessly impoverish us, and exact an atrocious price on nature, accelerating
the extinction of countless valuable species, I don’t think that’s what will do
us in. Remember we annually throw away between 20 and 40% of the food we
produce (estimates vary), so keeping us all fed with 20-40% less land is
eminently feasible (and yes, I know not all land is equally productive… but we
can quickly develop varieties of food crops adapted to different soils and
-within reasonable boundaries- climates, and we have more than enough manure to
enrich even the poorest soil just with our very own shit…). And there is wont
to be less of us to feed in a few decades, even without any catastrophic war.
What really worries me is that at some point, when technology stops
progressing, it regresses. It has happened countless times before (although it
doesn’t leave many traces in recorded history, that’s why the phenomenon is not
widely known), and loss of key technologies may have an impact even more disruptive,
more profound (and more detrimental to human flourishing) than climate change.
A few examples of previous instances should suffice:
·
The
Greeks knew how to build intricate gears, and apply them to predict the
movement of the moon and stars, by 100 BC, as evidenced by the famous Antikhythera
mechanism retrieved from a shipwreck of that era in 1901. Europeans wouldn’t
regain the ability of creating machines with precise gears (clocks) until
around 1500 AD, sixteen centuries later
·
The
Chinese developed the ability to navigate the high seas and deploy enormous
fleets under the Ming (commanded by the eunuch admiral Zeng He), fleets that
would have put to shame and easily smashed the puny European ships the Iberians
could tentatively send Eastwards in those days, in the early XV century. They
would cancel them due to dynastic dissensions and not recover the ability to
project power beyond their coast until our present times
·
The
Europeans had a handwritten script in late roman times (uncial) that, after the
collapse of the Roman empire, evolved towards forms (first Visigoth, and later Merovingian),
apt to be reproduced quickly and smoothly in the newly available surfaces
(parchment) in the 7th and 8th centuries. Under the
directions of a new dynasty (founded by Charlemagne and centered in its capital
of Aachen) it degenerated in a more homogeneous script (Carolingian), somewhat
easier to read but much slower to write, as befits a society where illiteracy
was widespread and only a tiny minority had any use at all for written language.
Carolingian would be followed by an even more elaborate and laborious script,
blackface (which is arguably even less legible than Carolingian), that would in
turn make its way to printed texts and would stay in use in some countries
(Germany) almost up to the XXth century (my own copy of the Prussian Academy edition
of Kant’s complete works, the Akademie Textausgabe,
is printed in blackface, so I know what I’m talking about when I mention
its relative illegibility).It would take the continent almost eight hundred
years to get back to a “technology” or a “know-how” for handwriting that would
allow for “easy” learning and be accessible to the masses
Indeed, something similar is happening
under our own very eyes. In our supposedly technologically very advanced times
we have already forgotten the technology for sending human beings to the moon: remember
how the media recently greeted with great fanfare the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon
Heavy rocket? That was the 25 of June of this year (2019), and it was hailed as
a significant milestone, as it was the most powerful rocket ever launched… by
SpaceX. As it is approximately half as powerful as the Apollo X rocket that
took Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michel Collins to our satellite… forty
years ago (see? Another thing we could do in the 70s which we have not improved
much since, if at all). Elon Musk is (as he doesn’t tire to repeat to every
journalist wanting to spend 5’ with him) developing a much bigger rocket, sure
(the famously called BFR) that would indeed improve over the Apollo, and would
have the capability to launch a manned vessel to Mars… and that, I confidently
assert, will never be fully developed or launched, as SpaceX will go bankrupt
much sooner than that.
Want another example? In Europe and
America we have lost the technology to build a Nuclear Power Plant, something
we did routinely… in the 70s of last century (when else?). The ones “being
built” in North America are a sad joke, with no activity whatsoever in the
sites due to bankruptcies of the building companies, or the owners (utilities),
or lack of permission from the regulator, or a combination of all three. The
two (“third generation”) ones where ground has actually been broken in Europe
(Olkiluoto in Finland and Flamanville in France) announce an additional year of
delay every year (and a 20% increase in the projected costs), so they are not
much closer to completion than they were a decade ago. For the rest (Hanhikivi,
Hinkley Point C, Wylfa, Pax, Accuyu…) I doubt, given the political climate and
the experience of the ones being built, they will ever be actually started,
even lest completed. A whole field of technology slowly being lost and
forgotten in front of our eyes.
And in the latter case, not one to
be mourned and grieved by many, as most “ecologists” or “environmentalists”
decided long ago it was an inherently evil technology, whose risks and
drawbacks far outweighed its benefits, and humanity as a whole would be in a
much better place if we had never learned how to split the atom. Maybe, maybe
not. Unfortunately, designing and building nuclear power plants was a necessary
school for keeping alive and improving a number of associated technologies
(metallurgy, piping construction and erection, welding, precision mounting of
complex equipment, high pressure pumps and valves manufacturing) that are now
wilting, and jeopardizing our ability to build similarly advanced, or complex,
pieces of equipment (like the vacuum vessel of ITER, mentioned above, that I fear
will never be completed because of the sheer impossibility of finding enough
welders, or building welding robots advanced enough, to ensure the required
airtightness).
Note that in both cases I’ve
mentioned (rockets to propel heavy loads into space and nuclear power plants)
we have not necessarily lost the theoretical
knowledge required to build them. There is no new physics to be rediscovered in
order to achieve them, no technical problem to be solved to make ‘em work that
hasn’t been already solved. What we have lost is the “institutional” framework
that made them possible in a past time. From the money to invest in them
(which, in the grand scheme of things, simply means we deem other things to be
of higher priority, be them Taylor Swift LPs or Olympic Games, as money is just
a signal of how much society as a whole values each good and service it
produces) to the rules that bound them (safety measure, technical codes to
calculate the thickness of the piping or the safety coefficients of the beams,
etc.) and the people that find it worthy to design, build and operate them: we
just not possess any more the organizational acumen to see those kind of
projects through.
Be it as it may, I also do not think
that humanity is doomed because we are losing (or have already lost) our
collective ability to build nuclear power plants, or to build rockets that may
take us some day beyond Earth’s atmosphere. We could make do without those
things, as we indeed have done for most of our history (the ultimate
environmentalist argument). I do think we will lead more impoverished lives,
with less energy (and dirtiest, as the nuclear power plants not being built, or
being shut down, are not being replaced by shiny, clean, renewable wind and
solar plants, but by more fossil-fuel-powered ones: Why we are not reducing carbon emissions, Evolution of energy production by source but also number 8 on 10 things to do to reduce carbon emissions (sorry, not gonna happen)), less wealth, less enriching
experiences, and less opportunities for human flourishing overall. And the
accompanying consequences of those unsavory prospects are more unequal
societies (as when there is less to distribute, and less growth, elites tend to
compete between themselves more fiercely for the spoils, leaving less for the
non-elite majority, as we see already happening in the starkest terms in the
Anglo-Saxon countries), with less social mobility, less inter and intra-group
harmony, less unity of purpose (in Toynbee’s term, declining societies where
elites have lost the creative power to solve new challenges produce a
disenfranchised, disenchanted proletariat that is ripe for a new universalistic
faith as an alternative to the old, exhausted, civilizational values) and more
strife, more anomy, more conflict and more despair.
Which takes me to the happy title of
this post (at last!). It seems reasonable that the most complex, most
challenging technological constructions are the first ones to stop working in
decaying societies (in societies with no unity of purpose, which have by
definition lost the ability to coordinate the efforts of many of its members to
do things that require great sacrifice and great dedication). So it has been
with nuclear energy and manned space exploration (I wonder how longer can unmanned space exploration keep going on
once it becomes clear that after a certain point, nobody else is going up
there, “boldly beyond” where anybody else has been… what would then be the point
to keep on sending probes to what is mostly empty vacuum?), which both demanded
a lot of difficult things to “go right”, to be set within very precise
parameters, in order to be completed successfully. We can (and should!) wonder,
then, what may be the next piece of technological wonder that we are in risk of
losing. And I can think of three candidates: the internet, the power grid and
the ability to cure infectious diseases. The third one, due to the increase in
antibiotic-resistant bacteria, is the one I’m less familiar with, so I won’t
deal with it here (and it’s scary enough without needing to delve further in
it).
Regarding the second, I see it as
the unavoidable consequence of our (somewhat pig-headed and irreflexive) drive
towards an entirely distributed network, lacking what we call today “baseload
plants”, based on non-programmable energy sources when storage technologies are
not ready (and probably, given my current techno-pessimism, will never be) to ensure
the right synchronization with the network of the heaviest consumers (think in
blast furnaces not being able to work, except in island mode, providing for
their own energy needs, as they would bring down they entire outside network
every time they attempted to connect… not fun? You may not care much about
blast furnace, but what if connecting the third EV of the block had the same
effect?) Which doesn’t mean we would devolve in a Mad Max style of life, where
switches and electric plugs stop working forever and the only energy source
left is the little oil we can still put our hands on (ensuring a mad scramble
to take possession of the last remaining spigots). Just a time of frequent and
unpredictable blackouts, some of them lasting for days. Again, not enough to
end human life, but to make civilizational continuity almost impossible.
Between other things, because such discontinuous, unpredictable power supply would
bring in its wake the demise of the IT based economy we are living under.
Which takes me to my first candidate
for demise: the internet itself. Which I think will disappear even before the
current continuous, reliable power grid (although it doesn’t need to: the
operators of big data centers, like AWS, could build their own power plants,
fully dedicated to feeding the needed Megawatts to their servers, with whatever
dirty fuel they can put their hands on). And I think it is the next big chunk
of technology (or the next big humanity achievement, if you prefer) to go for the
following reasons:
·
Governments
don’t want it: the idea of the citizenry having access to every type of
information anytime, anywhere, with no filters is just too dangerous. In China
they seem to have already achieved what five years ago in the West we thought
impossible: full censorship over what almost a billion citizens see and
discuss, in an almost frictionless way. It is just a matter of time since
Europe, American (and the rest of Asian societies) replicate such feat, in a
more decentralized manner, and subcontracting most of the censorship to private
enterprises that will both make a mess out of it and use it to increase their
leverage over the state remaining authority. Facebook and Twitter are well along
the way of policing what is deemed acceptable discourse, and given the social
pressure against “hate speech” (anything deemed deviant of the social
consensus, which sounds very good until you take a more dispassionate view of
what such consensus has achieved) that tendency will only accelerate
·
People
don’t want it: I know, I know, this seems truly shocking, when you just have to
go out in the street of any city (within a developed economy or otherwise) and
everybody out there seems to be glued to their phone screens, fully immersed in
a virtual world of social networks, web browsing, instant messaging, casual
gaming and mail reading (that’s “the internet” in a nutshell). To which I
usually answer: “follow the money”. The true measure of how much people value
each good or service (even more so in this most materialistic of eras) is how
much they are willing to pay for them. How much are those enthralled masses
paying for their so absorbing net surfing? Zilch, a few tens of dollars a month
for their mobile phone subscription. Much, much less than what costs to lay the
wires, erect the towers, manufacture and configure the routers and put in place
the satellites that move all the unimaginably vast amounts of zeros and ones
that have to circulate to provide them with their experience. So far, almost
all the big telcos that actually build the required infrastructure lose money
with it, and investors keep on lending it to them in the expectation that somday,
somehow, they will be able to monetize it (something that they thought a decade
ago they could do by selling subscriptions to digital TV, a space that is
becoming more crowded and more uncertain almost by the hour). Mobile telephony
is an interesting case in point, as it has become one of the preferred modes of
accessing the web. Companies have deployed now four “generations” of mobile
networks, and in the end they have lost tons of money in every one of them (as
they had to upgrade to the next before having fully recovered their initial
investment), never being able to make the users pay in full. Now they are
running to be the first to deploy the fifth one, and the specialized press is
chock full of the usual (mostly baloney-ish) stories about what a gold mine it
is going to be, and how it is going to fundamentally change the way people work
and live. All while lining in gold the pockets of the telco companies, of
course. Well, the manufacturers of the underlying equipment (one of which,
Huawei, is going through a rough patch because of its kerfuffle with the Trump
administration, which would merit a post of its own) are wont to make a
killing, but the poor saps buying and using them will not, doesn’t matter how
many new “killer apps”, and “new revenue streams” they are promised by astute
consultants hungry to make a dime. In the end, investors will keep footing the
bill of telephone users as long as there is no other, better, shinier
opportunity for their hard-earned dollars, but woe the moment such opportunity
arises (or, in a serious downturn, money dries up)…
Again, I don’t think any of it will
happen suddenly, one day the governments of the world “closing the internet
down”, or all the telcos going bust at the same time. I see a gradual
degradation of service, with more and more sites being barred, or impossible to
access, more and more discontinuities of service and less and less reliability.
In that situation (similar to what you experience daily on rural villages in
the north of Spain like where I’ve been for a week this summer), you just give
up and learn to live again off the net, without feeling you are losing much, to
be honest (I thought maybe I was from another generation, but my elder son
seemed to also adapt just fine). I have to admit that it was a superbly
engineered network (well, it was designed so the US high command could keep
communications with their field stations was kept open in case of nuclear war,
no matter how many nodes had been disabled, wasn’t it?) and that makes it extra
resilient, but in the end the people will find it just too cumbersome, too full
of holes and interruptions, and absurd rules about what can be discussed and
why, and will resort to alternative ways of passing their time or find alternative
modes of investing their attention, one that doesn’t require gazillions of
wires and optic fiber and antennas and mega constellations and routers and
multiplexors to be laid all over the Earth (hundreds of kilometers above in
some cases) that nobody is really willing to pay for.
And when that happens… those will be interesting times indeed!
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