Comments on: When Ephemeralization is Hard to Tell from Catabolic Collapse

By: Mike Booth

Mike Booth — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 15:38:24 +0000

Sorry to disabuse you, but we largely replaced satellite comms with undersea fiberoptic cables more than a decade ago. Comsats were the big thing of the 60’s. Early Bird, Telstar…..
Remember the awful pause waiting for a response in a transatlantic phone conversation in the 90’s? The 2 way round-trip delay over a geo-stationary satellite link.
Yes, satellite does have application in specialised areas (such as seagoing vessels – INMARSAT) where fiber is a no-go, or where a geographically remote temporary requirement means that the cost is irrelevant (military).
Check out FLAG (fiber link around the globe) and the many proprietary intercontinental connections. The countries with poor fiber connections generally have extremely limited bandwidth available, and internet access is painffully slow.
There is massive invisible infrastructure supporting every facet of Western civilisation with a phenomenal degree of interconnectedness and inter-reliance. But we are mostly unaware of it; taking all the benefits for granted. Thinking it is all so easy. That is the scary bit, that most of us are totally unaware of the ever-increasing complexity of the life-support system we have created. It may seem easy and simpler than it used to be, but it certainly isn’t!

By: H Luce

H Luce — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 06:44:01 +0000

Molecular replicators are just great, until they break down. Then what happens? Where do the spare parts come from? To make a complicated piece of high tech like this, it requires a vast infrastructure of high tech fabrication – making ultra-pure doped silicon, making ultra-pure dopants, getting the circuits onto the silicon – and on and on, and without this supporting infrastructure – the instant the molecular replicator breaks because a cosmic ray or radiation/EMP from a solar storm causes a chip to go bad, you’re out of business and back to Greer’s model.

It’s true that high tech *can* last for a long time, up until last year I was able to use my HP-25 calculator from undergrad days in 1976, but now the “9” on the keyboard no longer works – so I use my fancy HP calculator from 1986. How about 100 years from now – or even 50 years from now? Will either machine still function? I have a Mac Powerbook G3 from 2001 which can read (useless) 800K floppies or even, with a special drive, 120MB floppies. Try finding any of those at any price. OK, the SCSI bus. Out of luck here, too. Well, it turns out you can use a USB SD card reader/writer, and you can still use ethernet after a fashion, but no wifi. I suppose you could use dialup if you could find it. You won’t be looking at any youtube movies, it’ll be able to handle smaller jpeg pics – lots of limitations. And as time goes on it gets worse, so if USB goes away, then that’s it for upgrading.

And just think of the high tech and all the infrastructure it takes to get those satellites up in orbit – and then keep track of all the space junk up there so the comsats don’t get smashed to bits on their first orbit. And satellites do wear out and have to be replaced. Telstar, launched 51 years ago, is still up, but ceased working after 1 year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar). It went up on a Delta rocket – and I could go on and on.

I don’t think that comsats are going to be what does it for future comms, though. If anything, I’ll bet it’s more in the nature of fiber-optic cables replacing the copper cables laid starting nearly 150 years ago, but we could be back to horse and buggy days, too, with long distance travel going by trains and sailing ships (http://www.sailtransportnetwork.org/node/930)

By: Øyvind Holmstad

Øyvind Holmstad — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 04:47:35 +0000

The word Ephemeralization, coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, is described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization

By: Rod Cloutier

Rod Cloutier — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 01:03:04 +0000

A rebuttal of your argument by John Michael Greer:

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca/2013/10/the-flight-to-ephemeral.html

By: Peter Kalmus

Peter Kalmus — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 02:49:12 +0000

Star Trek molecular replicators? A world without want? What planet are you living on, exactly?

And yeah, it’s not like it takes a whole SPACE PROGRAM to maintain those “few tons” of satellites, or anything.

I’ll take good old organic gardening and a strong community solidly grounded in reality. You can keep your replicators.

By: The flight to the ephemeral | VantageWire

The flight to the ephemeral | VantageWire — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 00:19:16 +0000

[…] week’s detour. A few weeks ago, the P2P Foundation website hosted a piece by Kevin Carson titled When Ephemeralization is Hard to Tell from Catabolic Collapse. Carson’s piece got some attention recently in the peak oil blogosphere, not to mention some […]

By: Øyvind Holmstad

Øyvind Holmstad — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 05:28:29 +0000

Greer comments on this article in his post The Flight to the Ephemeral: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/10/the-flight-to-ephemeral.html

By: smc

smc — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 19:33:53 +0000

Is the satelites vs undersea cables really the best example you could provide? It seems to lose immediately to the counter-argument “…but I bet the satelite launch infra-structure weighed a few thousand tonnes.” Fixed vs mobile telephony in the developing world might be a better way to go.

By: Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 18:18:34 +0000

In reply to Walter Haugen. thanks for the recommendations!

By: Walter Haugen

Walter Haugen — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 16:13:15 +0000

Check out Joseph Tainter’s “The Collapse of Complex Societies” or my book “The Laws of Physics Are On My Side.” Tainter introduces marginal returns as the basis of his argument and it is relevant to your own. If the marginal returns fall below 1:1, it doesn’t matter if you have a high throughput (American empire today) or a relatively low throughput (Rome circa 100 AD). It is still relative to your input/output.

Per my book, what we are doing now is replacing cultural behavior with massive doses of fossil fuel energy. Once we run short of cheap oil energy (either by price or supply) we have to constrict our energy use. If we don’t we get dieoff.

Your solar business is still dependent on cheap oil, whether in the embedded energy of the infrastructure or just getting the workers to the jobsite and factory. My farming is also slightly dependent on fossil fuel energy, as I use 10 gallons of gasoline and my labor to grow 10,000 pounds of food per year. However, in my case I am 25-35 times more efficient than industrial agriculture, measured by input/output analysis.

I am no fan of Greer, as I find him arrogant and wordy. However, he did hit on a winner with catabolic collapse. As for Diamond, he is the only one I have heard who understands the role of the 1st and 2nd derivative in plotting the inflection point where marginal returns change sign. Tainter alludes to this but doesn’t even use the term “inflection point” in his analysis. As for Kunstler, he has looked at the problem in depth and his “World Made by Hand” books look at the sociological effects – and are a good read too.