18 March 2024

Historical Causation And The Deep Future

Unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, it is safe to assume that the chain of causation for historical events is:

Climate change and new technology ==> New economic realities ==> Changing cultural norms ==> Changing politics, changing religious views, new laws, and new wars.

While individuals aren't irrelevant in history and drive the particulars of how it plays out, the Marxist concept of economic determinism is more right than it is wrong. If particular people at particular times in history had acted differently, an Arian Christianity or the cult of Mithras or Rabbinic Judaism or Zoroastrianism might have become dominant in Europe, instead of the version of Christian Orthodoxy orchestrated by Emperor Constantine, of the world we live in. If certain battles and events had come out differently, England might have been French speaking, and Ireland might predominantly speak a Celtic language. The United States might have been a constitutional monarchy under George Washington's dynasty, and the Confederate States of America might still exist today. But the technological, economic, and cultural character of those alternate histories would have been similar no matter how they got there.

Climate and technology drive change in everything else until they stop changing so much and the chain of causation plays out until it reaches a stable equilibrium, where it will then remain more or less indefinitely, until climate and technology chain gain.

Epochal periods in history, from the Out of Africa migration, to the migration of humans beyond India to Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Australia, to the human replacement of Neanderthals in Europe, to the migration of humans to the Americas, to the Neolithic Revolutions across the globe, to Indo-European expansion and the fall of the Harappans and the fall of the Minoans and the fall of an Egyptian dynasty, to the rise and fall of sedentary farming civilizations in the Amazon basin, to Bronze Age collapse and the fall of empires like the Hittite Empire, to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, to the demise of the Anasazi, to the Black Plague in the Middle Ages, to the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression in the U.S., are all attributable to a great extent to climate events.

Technology fills in the gaps that climate doesn't explain. The domestication of a sufficient package of plants and animals in the Neolithic Revolutions. Stone working and astronomy and calendars for megalithic civilizations. Metallurgy and writing in the Copper and Bronze Ages. Domestication of the horse and the invention of a practical wheel in addition to metallurgy, for Indo-European expansion. Maritime navigation techniques and ship building for the Austronesian expansion, for Phoenician and Punic exploration and trade, for the Viking Expansion, and with European colonial expansion and the Columbian Exchange. Ironworking metallurgy and mathematics for the Iron Age. Road building, plumbing, and aqueduct building for the Roman Empire. Reinvention of art and science and mathematics in the Renaissance. The printing press and practical military use of gunpowder in the Reformation and early modern era. Then windmills and dikes in places like the Netherlands and England. Then coal driven steam engines in the Industrial Revolution. Then electricity, hydroelectric power, trains, steamships, and telecommunications. Then petroleum driven vehicles and antibiotics and vaccines. Then nuclear power and weapons and quantum physics and general relativity. Then computers and space travel and satellites and robots and automation and genetic engineering.

We continue to produce new technologies and have much more to discovery. We've reached a point where our own technologies have brought about rapid climate change.

But our technological development has grown systematic and our scientific understanding grows ever more complete. The remaining frontiers of physics, astronomy, and cosmology probably have few technological applications. Deriving the principles of chemistry from fundamental physics is something that has already been outlined and is close to being possible to do rigorously. We understand chemistry well enough that increasingly it is becoming a matter of artistry and craftsmanship rather than a question of the limits of our scientific understanding of it. Biochemistry is the hardest part of that and we are seeing a torrent of progress there. From biochemistry and parallel study of ecology and meteorology we are coming to master biology and the medical biotechnology that flows from that knowledge.

Maybe we'll have another century or two of significant scientific advancement and technological breakthroughs. Maybe we'll proceed two steps forward and one step back with an apocalypse or two along the way and progress will be delayed for a century or two. But science and technology are ratchets. It doesn't take many seeds for it to revive itself after even a very severe setback.

Call me an optimist, but I see a future where humanity has come to a full scientific understanding of the physical world at all scales, and has developed technologies that more or less fully exploit this scientific understanding, as a more likely one than any other possible future for humanity. 

With the room for technological innovation muted and our home planet's climate susceptible to our precise and intentional manipulation, we will soon after, probably before the year 2500 CE,  settle into a stable equilibrium that will last for thousands of years, not unlike our many tens of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, the thousands of years of the early Neolithic era, or the millennium long periods of the Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age-Classic era, and the Middle Ages, respectively.

The world of 4500 CE will look more like the world of 2500 CE than the world of 2024 looks like the world of 1824.

That Time When Golf Was A Crime

James IV King of Scotland Born March 17, 1473 banned what sport activity in Scotland?

In 1491, James IV reaffirmed a ban on golf that had started in 1457 when James II banned golf and football to preserve the skills of archery. The ban was lifted in 1502 with the signing of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace between England and Scotland. James soon became a golfer himself and made the first recorded purchase of golf equipment, a set of golf clubs from a bow-maker in Perth [not the one in Australia which didn't exist yet].

15 March 2024

Some 21st Century Infrastructure Concepts

If you are building a new town from the ground up, not burdened by sunk costs, a variety of infrastructure choices come into focus:

* In places that get cold in the winter, geothermal heat pumps and good insulation make the most sense relative to the alternatives. Conditioned on that choice, requiring electric stoves and ovens, and electric water heaters make sense, so that no natural gas infrastructure needs to be put in place. In places that don't get that cold and are arid, evaporative coolers and a different heating solution (such as a non-geothermal heat pump or electric heater) may make sense. Wood and natural gas stoves and fire places would probably be absent, or a rare and expensive luxury by permit.

* The town doesn't need landline telephone, cable, or Internet service. Provide free town-wide wireless high speed Internet access and a 5G cell phone network with good service everywhere instead.

* Power lines should be buried, so that they don't go down during storms. To make the electrical power system even more robust, houses and businesses should have standard battery backups.

* Roundabouts should be preferred to four way stops and traffic lights in the vast majority of case. They reduce accidents, reduce accident severity, and don't require power to function.

* In arid areas, water hungry grass should be disfavored or banned in favor of Xeriscaping. And, golf courses should be omitted, or at least rationed and designed to be radically water thrifty. In addition to greatly reducing the dominant source of demand for municipal water, it would also greatly reduce the need for potentially health harming fertilizers and herbicides.

* All vehicles and landscaping equipment should be electric. Houses and businesses should have car chargers as standard equipment. This way the town doesn't need a gas station for cars and trucks, although it might need one or two specialty gas stations for boats, aircraft, and equipment not available in electrical versions. This also means that the town doesn't need businesses that repair and maintain internal combustion engines. And, it dramatically reduces the number of hazard prone fossil fuel carrying trucks and trains and ships in the vicinity of the town.

* Electricity would be generated with solar power, wind, hydroelectric, tidal, geothermal, and/or nuclear power, but would be fossil fuel and combustion fuel (e.g. wood, incinerated trash, biodiesel, corn ethanol) free. 

* Homes and businesses would routinely have solar panels on them with net metering. Parking lots would routinely have car port style covers with solar panels on them with net metering, which would also greatly reduce the need to clear snow in parking lots.

* Street lights would be LED and have light pollution reducing designs.

* Appliances and light fixtures would be energy efficient.

* Land use would be reasonable dense and mixed use to facilitate shorter travel distances, with transportation routes sensitive to walkability and bicycle friendliness.

* Very cost housing, like dorms and single occupancy hotels without baths in individual units, accessory dwelling units, very small apartments, multi-family shared uses of single family homes, boarding houses, and tiny house/RV/van/tent camps with bath houses would be legal to minimize the income needed to avoid homelessness.

* There would an electric powered high speed rail connection to the nearest major city and major airport.

* All rail lines would be designed to eliminate all rail crossings from roads, reducing accidents and allowing for higher speed rail traffic. They would also be fenced to keep out people and animals, with animal and/or pedestrian bridges/tunnels installed at regular intervals.