I’m pretty skeptical of this. I’ve never heard of any contemporary Roman source that implies the Romans knew of the dangers of lead exposure. The idea of lead poisoning leading being a contributor to the collapse of the Roman empire came millennia later.
It’s possible they knew you had to be careful when you used lead as an artificial sweetener in wine (which was a thing), as you could get a lethal dose. But the idea that if something is lethal in large doses it is harmful in small doses would not have been around then (for millennia the opposite was thought true and small doses of things that would be poisonous in large doses was considered a good thing)
Still total side track. Happy to start new thread on subject
They are usually coupled, but in any case, let’s just bring it back to simple terms. Is it your position that CMEs will affect the world equally? Why didn’t the CMEs that we have on record done that?
I think that almost all the participants in this discussion lack an understanding of agriculture, and the fragile basis upon which it rests. Industrial chemicals and fossil fuel are what make the factory farms run, but climate change is now and will continue to disrupt and will probably destroy what we think of as farming. Without chemical factories and fossil fuels, we won’t have Big Ag, and we won’t have transportation networks to carry food but a few miles anyway. But farming itself relies not on our technology but on soil, climate, and weather. We aren’t going to be cleverly scavenging for the means to recreate modernity. Starving people do not have the capacity to do shit like that.
Think about all those pictures of war zones and famines, the desperate people waiting for relief from other countries. Now imagine there are no other countries.
I have no doubt the early major impact on people following a technological collapse will be mass starvation, and the violence that results. We can’t feed 8 billion people without technology.
We could store all the important books and scientific papers on microfilm and microfiche. Those can last for centuries. If text is printed on the right kind of paper with the right kind of ink, it can arguably last for centuries. You could probably etch info on metal plates instead of microfilm too. You could have heavily guarded, underground libraries that have the source material, then you could print cheaper copies to spread all over the world.
Also as far as technology, the pareto principle would apply. Maybe ~20% of our knowledge provides 80% of the benefit. The benefits from things like germ theory, antibiotics, vaccines, the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines, etc are going to be more valuable than understanding a niche field of endocrinology for example.
Regarding the WHO list of essential medicines, there are about ~500 medications on that list, but there are over 20,000 prescription meds total. So about 3% of medicines make up the bulk of the medicines needed to keep a health system going.
A lot of knowledge is increasingly becoming available only in electronic formats.
Mass produced modern books are not “printed on the right kind of paper with the right kind of ink”,
and typical libraries are not designed as long term archival storage.
I am not so sanguine about availability of knowledge after a really severe collapse of civilization (probably involving the death of most humans on the planet).
But again, coal isn’t going to run out as fast as petroleum. IF the decline was slow enough to allow for retrenchment, and I acknowledge that that’s an “if”, we could plausibly revive steam locomotives and ships. That’s huge because as long as there’s mechanically powered rail and ship transport, we won’t go back to pre-industrial distribution modes. The “Wild West” was in fact built upon the technological revolution of becoming cost-effective to ship cattle raised on the Great Plains back to stockyards in Chicago and Saint Louis.
I think we need to specify what kind of economic collapse has happened, in order to frame the discussion.
Almost any permanant severe disruption to the global economy is probably going to result in the death of billions of people in the ‘developed’ countries. Probably complete anarchy?
I mean that petroleum is at least partly being used directly for food production (e.g., as a component of fertilizer), meaning we are literally eating dinosaurs. Without fossil fuel use, food production would drop below global population sustainability.
Petroleum refining produces a high-carbon coke as a byproduct; this is used in place of the older coal coke in nitrogen fixing processes. It’s cheap since it would otherwise be a waste product when petroleum fuels are being produced anyway, but nitrate could go back to being produced by the older Haber process.
True, but somewhat off topic, I think. That is about how industrial processes on a large scale work today.
The original question seems to be about how much technology could be sustainable with a much smaller and probably more rural population. Rather ignoring the probable massive die-off that would result in a collapse of modern technology and the global commerce that it requires.
How many people are left, and how much knowledge do we retain?
There seem to be a few possible levels.
Best case, we at least keep most of the knowledge. We can still generate electricity. Anything electronic is probably unavailable: certainly no semiconductors and even vacuum tubes can’t be produced in a home shop. But at least we have lathes etc in machine shops.
Next worse: we still have early 19th century or late 18th century technology: production of iron, steel and other industrial materials is still possible. (Maybe not immediately necessary, since scrap and leftover materials would be available, which might delay this).
Next level down: 14th to 18th century city-state era. Products and materials are produced on a small scale by artisan shops on a small scale and are not generally available except to the wealthy.
Before that, what? The villiage blacksmith is all you have.
Though even in medieval times, it seems that blacksmiths did not usually produce their own iron: there was a specialist trade called a ‘bloom’ maker who extracted the basic iron from raw materials. So even then this required something of a network of trade to maintain it.
I was addressing the one specific issue of petroleum depletion. My point was that lumping all “fossil fuels” together is misleading because there almost certainly will still be coal when petroleum is too rare and expensive to use much anymore. If fuel was the only issue then late-19th century looks doable, at least if the contraction didn’t produce snowballing effects that tear down what otherwise might continue.
