Right. And that is the most terrifying piece of it all. Most of the people I know either don't think about it or think the magic of science and innovation will rescue us. But if we fall below a certain level of expertise, we will be gkbers. You can't make solar panels with charcoal fires.
I keep thinking of us as mice munching on grain from an overturned truck. Life is great (and the population explodes) until the grain is gone. Then woe to the mice.
Of course, people point to other great challenges we have overcome as a species. But is this time really different?
"mice munching on grain from an overturned truck.... But is this time really different?"
Your metaphor misleads you. It is inaccurate to characterize humanity as passively consuming a single pre-existing resource that it is utterly incapable of recreating. We are generating knowledge as well, and knowledge really is power, and from that we generate yet more resources of other types.
The question of whether we can outrun our own consumption is an interesting question that is not a guaranteed "yes", but the built-in hopelessness of your metaphor isn't part of the answer. It is inaccurate to the point of being anti-knowledge. The universe is awash in negentropy, and the true, physics-based boundaries of our growth are still inconceivably larger than we are right now.
I appreciate your comment. Sometimes I feel I am too pessimistic, but either way you're correct that it's not a precise metaphor. I do feel like the majority of humans (including myself, most of the time) are more like the mice than not--from what I see it's a minority that are pushing the bounds of knowledge. Of course, a small percent of 7B people is a large absolute number.
Whenever I get too pessimistic, I think of the gobs and gobs of money to be made solving this issue (while still maintaining or improving our current standard of living). That said, I think many market optimists (not that I'm calling you one) don't really get EROEI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inves...
Finally, if someone invents a 10x battery at an affordable price, the whole game changes.
The knowledge is increasingly being stored on relatively ephemeral media -- Spinning, naonstructured platters of rust don't last very long, and take a lot of power to drive.
If things really go to hell, I'm willing to bet that huge amounts of knowledge -- possibly even the vast majority of human knowledge -- will end up getting lost gradually, either as it becomes too expensive to keep the servers that store it running, or as the drives fail and it becomes an inefficient use of resources to replace them.
I've done some pretty serious 'rebooting' and I guarantee you that building any of those designs 'from scratch' is not going to work without decades of lead time to create the pre-requisites. I doubt there are shortcuts to go from nothing to diy truck that do not lead past many long years of grunt-work to get the basics in place that will allow you to make the next step.
It would be a lot more impressive if that list worked its way up from having nothing but hand-tools that use no energy to basic generating capacity, smaller power tools, larger power tools, actual machinery.
If you don't have a plan like that in place this will lead absolutely nowhere, try making a hydraulic piston without a really good lathe, a supply of oil, a good seal, a pump and so on. The list of pre-requisites for something as simple as a hydraulic piston is very long.
Metal fabrication is just like software building layer upon layer of capabilities.
Absolutely agree, for many of those machines it would prove far more valuable to compile a history of early, working designs that are more easily produced with simple methods and tools and update them judiciously making use of current art but maintaining simplicity. Then create a roadmap of development leading from one catalogue of tools (and techniques) to the next.
The whole project should not be undertaken as "what would I design if I wanted to restart civilization tomorrow" but as "what would I design if I were to be transported to 1500 with nothing but this catalogue".
And then there's the matter of infrastructure, quite a few of those machines assume a readily available supply of fuel, electricity or hard to get substances such as oil for lubrication and other raw materials such as bar stock, rolled sheet and so on.
If anything the 'reboot' would simply re-use or salvage that what was left over from the aftermath of whatever did us in in the first place, it's a lot easier to fix an old jeep than to make a new one and it will still outperform a horse when doing tractor duty.
Engineers are actually pretty good at making new blueprints.
In fact, they already did it once. Coal-fired steam engines powered civilization once, and could easily do it again. Probably better, using modern techniques such as fluidized beds, pelletizing, etc.
There's this perception that oil will some day "run out" suddenly, like the last sip at the bottom of a milkshake.
It doesn't work that way. If it happens, oil will gradually become more expensive, until the point where it becomes more economic to use coal (or fission, or fusion, or whatever). At that point, the amount of oil remaining becomes moot.
In the US we've got "high" energy prices but nowhere near as high as in Europe, so we can probably tolerate another doubling or two of prices before it gets really, really unbearable.
Until that happens there won't be any substantial pressure to get a LFTR program going, which will definitely solve the problem.
It sometimes really gets to me that we're all suffering a lot because a few politicians won't be adults and do their job and fix the energy situation. But there are a lot more campaign contributions from existing big business than theoretical new big businesses.
Energy costs in the US are differently distributed, more into the future perhaps, more incidentally on the community perhaps, but the market means that the costs are the same (give or take 10% for transport)
The world has always been about to end, and there have always been people ready to make money scaring people over it. This time is no different. In fact, we are better equipped to deal with our current problems than any generation of humanity has ever been.
I keep thinking of us as mice munching on grain from an overturned truck. Life is great (and the population explodes) until the grain is gone. Then woe to the mice.
Of course, people point to other great challenges we have overcome as a species. But is this time really different?