This is probably one of the worst posts about minimal technology I've ever seen online.
Making rope is easier than getting the license to be allowed to farm industrial hemp.
Even if machines and electronics stop working, you can still extract their metals out of them without the effort of reducing ore from scratch.
There are entire landfills waiting to be mined.
Then there is the fact that you're completely uninformed about rural life even just 150 years ago. They used very little steel tools and while the steel tools they did use were essential, the vast majority of them can be shared with the rest of the village.
Even just 200 years ago, most people lived off the land.
The idea that urbanisation turned all of humanity into a helpless class of humans is ridiculous.
The only real constraint is sufficient farm land to support a transition away from urban living, but when you think about it, even that is unnecessary, because there is no reason to abandon the idea of professional farming just because the population declined.
The moment you entertain even just a little bit of modern technology being preserved the argument makes no sense. The amount of power that you can capture with solar panels by far exceeds what human power and horse power can do. Solar panels are only considered inferior to fossil fuels due to the fact that you can burn fossil fuels on demand, whereas solar panels only produce during the day when the sun is out.
But that doesn't negate the fact that the amount of work solar panels can drive exceeds the work a human can do in a day. You can build a slightly less efficient industrial society on the basis of such an energy source. Technology and energy are not going to be the problem.
>This is probably one of the worst posts about minimal technology I've ever seen online.
>You can build a slightly less efficient industrial society on the basis of such an energy source. Technology and energy are not going to be the problem.
Which was never any assertion of mine. People are going to be the problem. Workers are going to be the problem. A shrinking population doesn't have a surplus. And while you're busy trying to build the slightly less efficient industrial society without enough people to run it, your population continues to shrink... meaning you have to downgrade again. But you never quite seem to downgrade enough, because right when you think you've struck the balance, you have fewer people necessitating another downgrade.
Remember all the posts here that talk about how the reason people don't have kids is that the economy's bad? They need more pay and more child care subsidies and diapers are too expensive and people would rather spend that money on themselves and blah blah blah? Do you think they're going to feel so prosperous in your "slightly less efficient industrial society"? They aren't going to be cranking out 8 or 10 babies. All the things you're doing to make it so that civilization can hang on a little longer make them miserable in ways that you all have identified as the disincentive to parenthood.
How is this not obvious to you? What sorts of willful denial of reality does it take to arrive at your conclusion? In my city of 350,000 people we have more dog groomers and pet stores than we do pediatrician clinics. They're closing elementary schools (the Facebook posts about these are hilarious, no one seems to get it). And you think that solar panels can fix what's broken (are there any solar panel factories in North America, come to that?).
> This is probably one of the worst posts about minimal technology I've ever seen online.
Harsh, I thought of it more as having an adorable level of cluelessness.
> no reason to abandon the idea of professional farming just because the population declined
Indeed, both for economies of scale and for the fact that existing modern farmlands are like butter to work - the major and minor tree roots of the past are gone, the rocks have been picked or sifted out, deep clays have been ripped up and mixed with sandy surface soils, etc. In this part of the world there are many 4,000 hectare farmlands made up of uniformly graded soils ready to work with less energy input than virgin land requires (whether with new or old methods).
Veering away from looking backwards:
We're also on the cusp of having self docking and charging autonomous agri bots running from battery farms - not quite there yet .. but "watch this space".
Making rope is easier than getting the license to be allowed to farm industrial hemp.
Even if machines and electronics stop working, you can still extract their metals out of them without the effort of reducing ore from scratch. There are entire landfills waiting to be mined.
Then there is the fact that you're completely uninformed about rural life even just 150 years ago. They used very little steel tools and while the steel tools they did use were essential, the vast majority of them can be shared with the rest of the village.
Even just 200 years ago, most people lived off the land.
The idea that urbanisation turned all of humanity into a helpless class of humans is ridiculous.
The only real constraint is sufficient farm land to support a transition away from urban living, but when you think about it, even that is unnecessary, because there is no reason to abandon the idea of professional farming just because the population declined.
The moment you entertain even just a little bit of modern technology being preserved the argument makes no sense. The amount of power that you can capture with solar panels by far exceeds what human power and horse power can do. Solar panels are only considered inferior to fossil fuels due to the fact that you can burn fossil fuels on demand, whereas solar panels only produce during the day when the sun is out.
But that doesn't negate the fact that the amount of work solar panels can drive exceeds the work a human can do in a day. You can build a slightly less efficient industrial society on the basis of such an energy source. Technology and energy are not going to be the problem.