When you patch the code on a spacecraft, you don't patch all the computers at once; you patch one that you aren't using, you switch to that one, and you keep the computer with the old version as your backup in case the primary computer fails.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactome of a human colony works in a similar way.
So there is not one city, with a single set of infrastructure. There are three, the same way there are three computers on a spacecraft. There are three parts to the city, physically separated; humans and human working fluids don't usually pass between them.
Even before a new can of apes arrives, they're being surveilled. Their temperament and susceptibility for certain diseases have been tested before they boarded their shuttle. Once aboard, the ambient genomic surveillance begins. OGH has posted before about the future of ambient computing, and it kicks in here. Genetic material is captured and sequenced everywhere during the long ferry journey from Earth.
So even then, even knowing the entire proteome of your can of apes, having had them in isolation from the rest of humanity for their entire seven-month journey, you don't just patch every habitat simultaneously with the fresh code from Gaia's festering, wonderful bioreactor. Once a new can arrives, they're introduced to one of the segments, and that segment is isolated from the others for a quarantine period.
This doesn't improve the situation for the colonists in the infected segment, of course, but it does reduce the impact on the colony as a whole system, which is the point. Two thirds of the population are safe, and they can help the infected segment at a distance, whether that is through waldoes in the hospital, or by supplying food and medicines.
]]>Then the turd-flavoured icing on the cake is that the same places are likely to be most affected by the changing climate.
So while the 20th century's powers will have become "old people, in cities, afraid of the sky" there's going to be vast change happening in the new powers, one way or another.
All your electric cars, vegan protein and media empires, these means to an end, your measly $100bn isn't going to keep them yours once they become successful. Capitalism will buy you out, it will turn your radical change into just another product, having eaten you it will regenerate itself again, and although the crisis has passed the next one will be on its way. (and what will it be? some unforeseen effect of your car batteries' lithium on brain or tree health? maybe what happened to bananas happens to OGH's treecrete?)
Which is to say that whatever you do, I think one of the key drivers of these interlinked crises is intellectual property. As long as the knowledge to create the modern wonders that can feed, clothe, house and heal all eleven billion of us is jealously held in companies and universities, as long as the material expression of our common knowledge is curled out at the optimum profit, it will not serve our common good.
So that's what I think I would try to fix, with my approximately 1 Apollo worth of funding.
]]>To support that I'd also fund the journals to peer review and publish this work.
Third, buy into a few small enterprises in those industries, and switch them over to open source intellectual property models, connecting them up to the R&D institutions.
I'd get some spreadsheet nerd to work out the details of your constraints so that I can spend almost everything, getting out of the Guillotine Zone by the time the Domino Recessions really start to raise my chances of death by angry mob.
]]>This is because fossil fuels have high energy density, which lowers transport and processing costs, and the actual energy input required to create them didn't come from human effort.
Renewables and nuclear, however, have notably lower EROEI. While I'm sure they'll improve, to some extent it is based on a natural constraint: they are not energy dense, and gathering them takes orders of magnitude more effort. This is an obvious thing to say about renewables, but it applies to fission too. Fuel rods are the end result of a process which begins with an absolutely stupendous amount of ore, which itself is not particularly energy dense.
So no, I am not saying civilization will collapse, I don't think there will be gigadeath, because we have a century to slowly transition from fossil fuel + fertiliser + pesticide powered monoculture to horticulture (permaculture!) accelerated by info + biotech.
I'm just saying the productive excess won't be as big as it was in the 20th or early 21st centuries, and that'll have an effect on society and so on the built environment.
]]>Even 4C means the equatorial band is essentially uninhabitable, because you can't work outside without dying of heat exhaustion: "By 2100, ∼34.1% (±7.6% s.d.) and ∼47.1% (±8.9% s.d.) of the global land area will be exposed to temperature and humidity conditions that exceed the deadly threshold for more than 20 days per year under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5, respectively; this will expose ∼53.7% (±8.7% s.d.) and ∼73.9% (±6.6% s.d.) of the world’s human population to deadly climates by the end of the century" (http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/mora/Publications/Mora%20059.pdf). The bulk of the population has migrated out of that band.
Most of the population currently lives in places that will be affected by sea level rise, to quite a large extent by that time.
So something really striking about the built environment circa 2119, speaking as a European, is that it's new. It has been built recently, both to escape the rising water and to accommodate the migration of a third to a half of the planet's population.
The parts which survive from before the flood have been radically retrofitted. It has been built and retrofitted to deal with brand new conditions, because although the habitable zone has moved north the specific conditions are different.
Let's take a diversion into demographics. There are 30-50% more people than in 2019, and they live on half the land area. Their demographic profiles in terms of aging and education look roughly like Germany circa 2019. Nobody is prepared to put up with the externalities chemical, biological and radiological currently foisted on the global South in order to deliver the electronic / mechanical / biological widgetverse of the early 21st century, so they don't exist. Yes, there are still a lot of things with computers in, they're better than they are in 2019, but with nowhere to hide the downside, they're nowhere near as cheap or plentiful as in 2019.
The global food supply chain has been annihilated by drought and disease and the extinction of the majority of pollinating species from pesticides and climate and disease. The lesson we took away was, like the Yanks and their shale gas in the 2000s, that you need to be independent of other people's problems. This applies down to the city level, because "Lincolnshire is everyone else's farmland" is a pattern which just doesn't work any more.
There's a lot of food growing in the city, and because so little automation is possible, there are a lot of people working on growing it. They grow it where the cars used to be, where the ornamental gardens used to be. They keep it in pantries, or things like pantries, because electricity is too expensive to waste on refrigeration.
That's a general theme, in fact. The productive excess enabled by fossil fuels is gone. The ratio for renewable energy sources sucks. That means the labour saving devices aren't there. Humans are cheaper, and there are lots of them around.
The maid and the cook are back.
]]>It's 2098, eighty-odd years since the high-frequency trading algorithms diversified into cultural production and political engagement to help them find an edge. The bots' ceaseless microsecond combat is just a background hum, bar the bubbles and recessions which blight entire minutes of each day. She collects the spoor of these computation fauna, tracking and categorising their endless variety.
]]>If these systems are currently capable of being trained on human reaction to optimise for gross reactions, like the desire to make a large purchase, might they be also used to automate the search for subtler emotional tones in the creation of art? Faces, scenery, lighting, cutting; how long until iMovie has an 'anomie' slider?
]]>You can see a sort of early version of this in the History Channel and 'best of some decade' shows, but should the Cambrian explosion of "content" survive the century even vaguely intact there'll be an absolutely obscene quantity of this stuff. There is probably less variety in early 21st century culture than a hundred years prior, but all of that variation is being recorded, providing valuable raw material for the popular historians of 2117 to substantiate their theories about the rise and fall of the Holy American Empire or how the roots of the Australian Rebellions of 2081 really lie in the counterculture of Jakarta circa 2045. Except the second one's really a 'We love Jakarta in the 2040s' in disguise.
]]>I've found your data point: food and drink as 11% of the (£531 per week) income of the average household, 2014 [ons]. Since the mean isn't a great measure of how it would affect lower and higher income households, I've looked around to see whether the proportion of household expenditure in lower-income households is greater. It is. The bottom quintile spends 15%, rather than 11%, of their £310 weekly income on food [pocketbook]. It's reasonable to extend this, based on the income distribution, to the lowest decile, who have an income of £240 per week or less.
Looking at the spending of the median household (11%, £58ish) vs the spending of the bottom quintile (15%, £46ish), we could say that the lowest decile might economise in the same proportion as the lowest quintile does relative to the median, saving a similar ~5% of the difference between their incomes: £3.50 a week. That leaves them spending £42.50 a week, or 18% of the highest income in that decile.
This is all merely to illustrate that it is not the median household that starves when times are hard.
]]>In a related vein: if launch costs for experimental (propulsion, manufacturing, comms, life support) tech were to fall by two orders of magnitude, would it be proportionally easier to get early stage funding for such projects? Have lower launch costs historically translated into higher rates of development in these industries?
It's worth considering the methalox engine + carbon composite structural tank combination as applied to smaller launch vehicles, too. What's to stop them building a next-generation booster in the 20 tonne to orbit bracket with similar performance characteristics? Have I misunderstood the distribution of costs in the launch business?
]]>https://youtu.be/FjQr3lRACPI?t=25
So I'm going to say, 400 Ma from now, distant cephalopod descendants with big hydrogen bladders doing their jet-propulsion shtick in the sky, hybrid aerostat/aerodyne style.
]]>I think your example of a small generation ship illustrates what you're really concerned with, here, and that's the situation of total isolation. I suggest that that places a lower bound on the size of the population, let's say for the sake of argument North Korea if run along the same lines, or several times that when designed to encourage the finer aspects of human existence.
To loop this around to your earlier post, http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/cytological-utopia-and-the-rap.html, I might even claim that minimal generation ship is not in fact tin can with ten thousand primates, a composting toilet and a nuclear greenhouse, but a fully living Earthling super-organism; it takes however many million primates to constitute a civilisation, and they cannot exist in that way separated from the 10 to the whateverth power other parts, from the viruses and the archaea on up.
]]>Between private ownership and collective responsibility. I'll venture to say that successful space settlements further from Earth would be ones with a strong sense of collective ownership, which is not necessarily disjoint from the set of colonies with a strong executive function exercised on behalf of a remote owner.
Then you have two camps; one, the post capitalist, basic-income colonies, where the citizens know they have enough to breathe and drink, and the old and less able are doing what they can. Second the late-capitalist predator colonies, state funded developments where the private part of the public private partnership is still there, carving out a profit from functionally indentured workers, or has defaulted on the contract, leaving the carcass to one picked over by the vulture funds. BHS in space.
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