
The Scariest, Most Boring Armageddon - atroyn
https://medium.com/@atroyn/the-scariest-most-boring-armageddon-249d1a4ab02e#.ewn8apmbi
======
atemerev
An interesting point, but I can't see how it could happen.

The industrial revolution was sparkled not by sudden availability of raw
resources (they were always there, including coal), but by advances in physics
and philosophy (probably the most important person founding the change was
Thomas Aquinas, who defined the separation between secular and religious
pursuits, and declared that scientific understanding of the world is actually
something good in its own right — but it took nearly 500 years for his ideas
to finally take off). The coal, on the other hand, was equally available in
1200 as well as in 1760.

If there will be no more coal (doubtful — at least 600 years of proven
reserves exist), humanity will find the replacement. Energy resources are so
cheap that we have to actually restrain ourselves to limit our footprint on
the planet (otherwise, nobody would care). Oil is dirty cheap and still
actually flows right from the earth in some lucky places. Uranium is so cheap
we are happy with ~1% utilisation rate in "classical" nuclear reactors
(breeder reactors would allow full utilisation, but they cost more — so why
bother if uranium is so darn cheap? With breeders, we have enough uranium for
MILLIONS of years with our current energy consumption rates).

It is knowledge that must be preserved, but utter destruction of human
knowledge is no longer a "boring" apocalypse scenario. It is quite interesting
how this can possibly happen, and what can be done to prevent it.

~~~
jamespitts
Decline does not have to follow the scenario in which knowledge, capability,
or even access to resources are lost. The scenario of a living hell for most
people and a slow, global decline can come about simply by reducing access to
the benefits of technology and resources, and by making use of extreme methods
of control.

For example: what if the priority of a small segment of the population becomes
putting maximum resources into some long-term project which only benefits that
group? 90% of the population could be directed toward working on that massive
project, by delusion, coercion, or other methods. The pyramids of Egypt and
North Korea now are smaller-scale examples of this.

~~~
dragontamer
Just an FYI: I've been hearing more and more recently that the Pyramids of
Egypt were built by free engineers, not slaves. It has been recently theorized
that methodologies they used to hurl great stones across the desert required
far fewer laborers. By pouring water in front of the stones, the desert sand
would become slippery, and thus much much fewer people would be needed for the
task. (Early estimates was that it took ~100k people to build a pyramid.
Modern estimates point at only ~10k, based on newly found food consumption
records)

IE: The Pyramids were more akin to the Great Cathedrals across Europe: 100 or
200 year projects completed by generations of engineers, architects, and
artists. Not necessarily the elites of society... but at least those with free
will. Some motivated by Religion, others motivated by simple glory and the joy
of building great things.

I think people think that Egyptian Slaves built the pyramids... Sometimes
people think they were Jewish Slaves: some time between Joseph and Moses in
Biblical times. But if they were simple slaves, why were the workers of the
Pyramids buried either near, or even within the Pyramids? This was a great
honor that was normally reserved only for Pharaohs!

[http://news.discovery.com/history/ancient-egypt/pyramids-
tom...](http://news.discovery.com/history/ancient-egypt/pyramids-tombs-giza-
egypt.htm)

~~~
jamespitts
Interesting-- if the pyramids took a long time (as cathedrals did) then the
work and resource-use may have not had such a terrible impact on the common
people.

------
maxander
A large part of the problem is centralization- if oil refineries or
manufacturing hubs halfway across the world fail, we're suddenly out of
supplies needed to function. The sort of collapse talked about here is scary
precisely because it could happen everywhere at once. Likewise, because oil
drilling depends on technology sourced from all over the world, you can't have
a "local restart"\- you'd have to reboot the entire planet all in one go.

Historically, the "fall of Rome" wasn't as big a setback in human history as
its made out to be- cultural progress shifted over to Persian countries, who
kept on doing science and other nice stuff until Europe got itself back
together. Meanwhile China ticked along unconcerned about the whole thing. It
wouldn't work the same way in today's world, but that's a solvable problem.

I've read about wood gas as a possible energy source for a non-global economy-
non-ideal stuff in many respects, and requires the survival of a good amount
of know-how, but providing a locally-sourced oil alternative in a pinch.

------
atroyn
I wrote this in response to much of the hoopla around the 'threat' of A.I
super-intelligence, and other unlikely disasters.

The future of humanity as a species is worth thinking about, but we also ought
to be considering the very real possibility of getting stuck in the awful
conditions humans endured in the past, alongside more farfetched (and less
likely) scenarios.

I wish I had some unique idea about how to do that, but I suppose discussion
is just as good.

~~~
javajosh
I'm glad you're thinking about the long-term prospects of humanity. Your point
is well-made that a technological regression, at this point, would be
exceedingly difficult for future humans to reverse.

If humans do not spread life beyond earth, then life will not survive long-
term. It does _feel_ like we must succeed in this first great technological
expansion, or we might never succeed, and fall prey to Fermi's Demon.

~~~
atroyn
I sort of left two additional open questions:

\- How long can the current era last? I.e. are we default-alive or default-
dead?

\- Am I not thinking laterally enough about what pre-industrial civilizations
could have done?

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fweespeech
Ultimately, and what the OP ignores, is rebuilding society [and resource
exploitation to do so in general] like can be done with the rubble of the
existing civilization.

It will be a long, slow road to recovery but all you really need to be able to
do is setup one hydroelectric dam and you have enough energy to rebuild
civilization.

We could build those with 1800s technology and, frankly, many of the
innovations of the 1800s today are possible by just recycling the bones of a
large city.

So I don't think this doomsday scenario will be as bad as the OP fears. We
just may get booted down to the 1700-1800s and take 300 years rebuilding.

~~~
Casseres
The problem is, with just one hydroelectric dam, others will want it. Thus
others will fight you for it, and in the process, it will be destroyed or the
people that know how to maintain it will be killed.

~~~
fweespeech
1800s-era Hydroelectric Dams are buildable with basically nothing but very
basic technology and alot of manpower.

No one would kill for them in the general case simply because other people
could build it.

This isn't some SUPERMODERNTECH but a very basic one we've been exploiting for
thousands of years, just the ability to convert it to electricity wasn't
really possible until the 1800s.

------
jmaistre
If books and blueprints for advanced technology were available, I wonder what
is the potential for leapfrogging technologies. So instead of burning coal to
power steam factories, we could skip straight to powering electric generators
via dams and turbines. Water power fortunately is not going anywhere, and
provides a considerable amount of electricity.

The big issue is energy for transportation and for growing crops. I wonder
what the prospects for things like switchgrass based ethanol are. I see
promising news reports, but nothing has come of it yet.

~~~
cstross
Not as easy as you seem to think.

Dams = concrete, concrete = a whole lotta cement and other energy inputs;
concrete production is one of our big unsung CO2 emission sources right now.

Turbines and generators = refined metal, including copper (dynamo windings)
and steel (turbine blades) -- again, lots of energy required.

Okay, we can back it off a level and go for water wheels in rivers -- a Roman
to mediaeval technology -- driving the dynamos; but it's still not going to
work without refined metals (energy intensive) and waterproof insulators,
which means gutta-percha or rubber or refined organic polymers -- all of which
mean long-haul shipping or again, energy-intensive chemical industry.

These obstacles aren't insuperable, as long as we don't get knocked back to
dark ages/monasteries preserving books and knowledge but no actual lights-
on/wheels-turning infrastructure. If we get knocked back _that_ far in a post-
carbon-extraction world, it'd be devilishly hard to build back up again.

~~~
atemerev
No, it is much easier than you'd think. Energy breeds energy. You start with a
smaller energy source, use it to extract resources and make parts for the
bigger energy generator, rinse, repeat.

Wind turbines and small hydroelectric dams are simple. Megaprojects are
harder, but it is easy to start small and extend from here. It is easy to make
electric energy, and with enough electricity, everything is possible.

~~~
maxander
Oil drilling is one of the most technologically advanced industries that
exist, if not the most, and the existence of such technology is predicated
(currently) upon the existence of globally-available cheap energy. Non-oil-
based development would likely hit a ceiling where there just isn't enough
energy to progress long before you could recreate such an elaborate system.

~~~
atemerev
We only burn oil for energy because it is dirt cheap (yes, thanks to the
economy of scale). Electricity can be produced by many other ways if oil
becomes too expensive for that.

------
onetimePete
So, the idea is to create a society that survives even this scenario.
Distributed Library's,that survive Alexandria. Rugged Tech, that can be made
even with just sun power and leftovers. Social networks, that allow for
continued cooperation even during times of enforced isolation by disease and
war. Social networks that enforce social behavior, by the world bearing
witness. Tech that evades the control of the temporary mighty, warlords and
priest castes, that try to "stabilize" society by freezing it between the holy
cycles of overpopulation and civil war. Lots of work. Doable Work.

~~~
seanp2k2
Lots of work with really no funding. Who are the custodians of humanity? "All
of us" would be great but pretty far off current reality.

------
reasonattlm
Almost certainly not the case that coal and oil are prerequisites, though
things might have been harder without them, progress wouldn't necessarily have
halted. Different approaches would have been taken. Growing fuel crops, for
example, rather than building more mines. The important point here is that
improvement in wealth and life expectancy in England started well before the
industrial revolution. That revolution was enabled by this growth in wealth
and longevity, and thus greater investment in technology, not vice versa.

[https://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html](https://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html)

"We claim that the exogenous decline of adult mortality at the end of the
seventeenth century can be one of the causes driving both the decline of
interest rate and the increase in agricultural production per acre in
preindustrial England. Following the intuition of the life-cycle hypothesis,
we show that the increase in adult life expectancy must have implied less
farmer impatience and it could have caused more investment in nitrogen stock
and land fertility, and higher production per acre. We analyse this dynamic
interaction using an overlapping generation model and show that the evolution
of agricultural production and capital rates of return predicted by the model
coincide fairly well with their empirical pattern."

~~~
atroyn
Thanks for this reference. I'm quite interested in what kinds of alternate
'bootstrap' energy sources would have been available.

------
dwaltrip
I don't understand this. There is no way we would lose all knowledge in the
described situations. So why couldn't existing knowledge be used to re-boot
society? Sure it might take 100-200 years, but it would happen

~~~
JoeAltmaier
It took a very long time the first time. Having knowledge, and having the
resources to make use of it, are far far apart.

To drill for oil, you need drill bits. They require exotic steel. That
requires high-temperature furnaces. Which requires 100 other things -
ceramics, high-density fuels (not oil!), presses and breaks and grinders etc
that in turn require other exotic machines to make and ingredients to find or
make.

The chain of dominoes can be hundreds long. And there you are, standing in the
rubble with a rock and some sticks. And you're hungry. And so is everybody
else, and they want your food.

I can imagine another thousand years to get anywhere near where we are now.
And it'd look completely different - combining photolithography for circuits
with steam engines and slavery. All the inventions of history combined in ways
that the new reality required.

~~~
atemerev
It would be hard enough indeed if there wasn't a cheap way to produce at least
some electricity to bootstrap the process.

And electricity is easy to bootstrap, thanks to hydro and wind turbines.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sure, if you have wire, and magnets, and cement, and electronic controls, and
pipe (for hydro). And the tools and processes to make those things.

If we imagine there's some infrastructure remaining, then there'd be a small
window of opportunity to rebuild using that, before it decayed. A couple of
years maybe.

~~~
VLM
And civil engineers qualified for hydro dam design, and diesel powered
bulldozers and cranes, and their operators, and the mechanics and and and...

The bigger picture is not just binary today or 50000 BC, but somewhat more
likely getting stuck in weird local minima / local maxima. A lot of
peculiarity of USA vs euro lifestyle boils down to just the luck of the draw
that we're at one local minima of public transit where they happened to fall
into a local maxima, or a zillion other variables.

John Michael Greer's blog has a lot of commentary about realistic lifestyle on
the downslope. One common theme is something like the secular Amish.

------
Animats
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

It doesn't take some disastrous event for this to happen. It just takes time.
The USGS has resource estimates for all major minerals.[1] For each one,
there's an estimate of world resources. Check out iron ore.[2] "World
resources are estimated to exceed 230 billion tons of iron contained within
greater than 800 billion tons of crude ore." That sounds huge, until you see
that current mining is 3.2 billion tons a year. There's less than a century of
iron left.

It's like that for most minerals. There are not millennia of supply left. In
most cases, it's a century or two.

The original article says "From about 1760 onwards we've improved our
situation dramatically." I've been saying something similar for a while, but I
usually date the start of the industrial revolution from 1825, when the first
steam-powered railroad started carrying goods and passengers commercially.
This was the moment when the industrial revolution got out of beta. It was
also when humans started making serious dents in mined natural resources.
Before steam power, mining was a small-time activity. Nobody could dig much,
and nobody could move much. Today, as mentioned above, 3.2 billion tons a year
of iron alone are mined. That's all in less than 200 years.

It's not going to go on for another 200 years. The highest grade minerals in
easily accessible areas were mined out decades ago. Most mining today is
already working low-grade ore. Going for even lower grade ore is possible, but
that just postpones the end.

Minerals are more of a problem than energy. There are many energy sources,
some of which are renewable. Minerals can be recycled, but you lose some at
each go-round. Asteroid mining might help some day, but not unless we find
some far cheaper way of operating in space.

Heavy industrial civilization has a finite lifespan.

[1] [http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals](http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals) [2]
[http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_ore/mc...](http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_ore/mcs-2015-feore.pdf)

------
tlogan
I can't see how it could happen - and the reason is even more depressing:
world war 3. That will cause "the reset" and after few hundred years the
civilization will start growing again. Some of the current knowledge will be
lost but it will be reinvented again but better.

------
ChuckMcM
And then again, we could develop a benevolent AI which is able to design a
practical fusion reactor solution which gives the human race essentially
unlimited power resources to apply toward cleaning up the planet.

Why is that so much harder to consider than the bad scenarios? I suppose
evolutionarily the optimistic people probably didn't reproduce as often as the
pessimistic people did but still.

~~~
atroyn
The problem there is, such a benevolent AI us not a robust technology. If we
are thrown back into the pre-industrial era, there's a good chance that the AI
would stop functioning.

Make no mistake, I'm optimistic about technology in general, I just want to
observe that this is a unique moment in history an we should treat it as
anything but inevitable that we'll make it.

~~~
ChuckMcM
As I read the author's point it was that some set of events would materialize
that pull us back into the stone age (the air tight box) which denies the
possibility that something we're already doing has already counteracted that.
There are no fewer than 6 reasonably well funded fusion research programs
which have some possibility of producing massive amounts of easily consumed
energy while eliminating large parts of the negative spiral (say carbon
emissions), not to mention that with sufficiently inexpensive energy you can
pull carbon out of the air and turn it into what every hydro carbon you want.

The world has seen doomsday predictions forever, and while there is always the
possibility we'll kill ourselves off, one has to recognize that there is also
the possibility that we won't. Good and bad things seem to happen in about
equal measure when you look at it on a larger time scale.

Doomsday thinking is counter productive to getting stuff done anyway as it
tends to sap people energy (why invest time in what you're doing if you're all
going to die anyway? sorts of reasoning).

------
beefman
Mad Max was originally about peak oil collapse. Nuclear holocaust was
retconned in circa Thunderdome.

The author apparently doesn't know that fissioning the thorium and uranium in
an average rock yields 1,000 times the energy needed to melt it.[1] The ground
you walk on is literally beaming with energy, and it's incredibly easy to have
out.

[1] 2000 GJ and 2 GJ per cubic meter, respectively.

~~~
adrianN
Good luck extracting all the Thorium and Uranium from an average rock and
refining it sufficiently to fuel a nuclear reactor.

~~~
beefman
Without understanding anything about it, it's natural to assume it must be
difficult. Otherwise, why wouldn't more people be doing it? As noted in the
article, coal mostly sat in the ground for thousands of years before 1750,
when all of a sudden mining it was the obvious thing to do. Why?

------
eximius
Really, the _best_ thing for the survival of the species would be population
control (down to something like 2 billion) and eugenics of some sort.

Unfortunately, both are highly immoral.

~~~
scotty79
Why would that be best? As opposed to for example finally figuring out fusion
power and using that power to dig and sustain deep underground farms and
dwellings?

There's whole lot of space underground that's currently inhabited by at most
bacteria.

~~~
eximius
Yes, let's just shove a few billion poor people underground (because that's
what would happen).

edit: but seriously, power isn't even close to our only issue. our population
just isnt sustainable

~~~
scotty79
Why is that? With abundant clean power you can have everything under the
surface: space, daylight, clean water, air, food, wood. I'm guessing more
could be recycled if energy is not a concern. Surface could be the place kept
nice where you go for vacation, all other activity could move underground.

------
executive
except accessing shale is now trivial

~~~
atroyn
Accessing shale is trivial for _our_ civilization, not necessarily for those
of even 200 years ago.

\- You have to know the shale gas is there \- You have to be able to extract,
capture and refine it \- You have to be able to distribute it

~~~
tapostrophemo
The oil industry is filled with examples of people not "knowing" exactly what
they were doing. Choosing to drill in a given location often included the
possibility that there was actually no oil/gas to be had...that the well would
end up being a "dry hole."

------
lossolo
Please stop underestimating A.I. power of destruction. A.I. is not danger
itself, it's people using A.I. are. Like nuclear power, we use it for clear
energy and we use it for destruction. Real AGI is 1000x more deadly than
nuclear power in wrong hands..

~~~
atroyn
I'm not sure I understand how exactly a human-equivalent AGI would be more
dangerous than an actual human.

~~~
jamii
There are a lot of assumptions you have to make to get to the point where it
doesn't have the capability to be dangerous:

* No improvement beyond human level (correlation between IQ and job-performance is variously estimated at around 0.5 and IQ largely comes down to executive function and working memory - so we have to assume an AI design that doesn't allow adding more working memory for some reason)

* No extra individual capabilities (eg human-level but with mental access to Google Scholar)

* No extra group capabilities (eg human-level but with telepathy between AIs - look at the difference the internet is making to human productivity eg Linux)

* No horizontal scaling over time (eg one human-level AI now, one million once Moores law kicks in - that's a lot of scientists/strategists/politicians/advertisers)

So in the situation where we make an AI that is somehow structurally limited
to human-level intelligence and doesn't benefit from extra interfaces and we
somehow can't afford to ever make many of them, then, sure, I can't think of a
way that it could be dangerous.

In a few minutes of cursory thought I came up with four assumptions that were
necessary for assuming that they won't be more capable than humans. What are
the odds that all of those hold?

[EDIT isn't dangerous -> doesn't have the capability to be dangerous]

~~~
cstross
Those four assumptions have nothing to do with _danger_ and everything to do
with _capability_.

I think a more interesting question is "how do we make an intelligence,
artificial _or_ human, that isn't potentially dangerous?"

Humans have a bunch of low-level primate aggression that seems to be wired in;
we can modulate it (we're largely self-domesticating) but we can't totally get
rid of it and more importantly, we can't look at a baby's genome (and
nurturing environment) and say "yup, this one's going to grow up to be
Hitler", or "this 'un's going to be a pacifist, altruist, and general
benefactor".

On the other hand we can probably add a bunch of monitoring code to any AI we
develop rather than grow: if nothing else, consider the possibility of
simulation runs looking for an empathy deficiency.

~~~
jamii
Also, to a first approximation capability == danger. Just look at what even
well-meaning humans have managed to do - imagine an AI that could eg design
memes more persuasive than Marxism.

We can't even get humans to agree on ethical values, let alone explain them to
an AI, so even a perfectly altruistic AI could still be a disaster if it has
the wrong value system, or if we don't perfectly understand the consequences
of our own values systems when fully enacted.

