Now, I've posted a bunch of stuff on some loosely defined topics.
I want to draw the line between fact and fiction.
If we're arguing about fictional universes, there's no point, because we can start by saying, "In my sci-fi fiction, I make the rules, so what I say goes."
If we're arguing about facts, we might get sloppy and use terms like "tech level." I have yet to see a single work on engineering management, technical history, etc. which can actually give a quantitative chart of real-life tech levels comparable to Traveller's charts of fictitious tech levels. I get frustrated when I see what seems to be two different posters using the same terms to apparently refer to widely different concepts. So I would like some better terminology.
Some people have raised excellent points -- e.g. the fact that light maintenance on a power drill might require O-rings and so on.
However, I have yet to see any textbook or college course that can map out the inter-relationships between tools. Lots of people say, "Oh, it's vast, it's incalculable, there's no way to express how fragile the network of technology is." Well, that doesn't convince me. I'd like to see a professor of history or engineering write a book that breaks it on down and shows exactly how dependent specific tools are on having a supporting network of tools. The closest thing I've seen is some of the writing of Bucky Fuller.
Everything I've seen convinces me that humans are capable of making very small bases of tech into very self-sufficient enterprises.
Now I start out reading Bucky Fuller and pretty soon I'm into the Spaceship Earth hooey and before you know it I'm listening to a bunch of hippies who make compost out of human manure.
So without further ado, here's some links to the hippie tree-hugging stuff that influences my speculation on environmental topics.
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/
http://www.cropking.com/aquaponics.shtml?ref=google
http://www.aquaponics.com/
http://www.bfi.org/
http://www.weblife.org/humanure/default.html
http://www.daviscaves.com/index.shtml
Now, any grammar school kid can look at these websites and say, "That's a load of pinko hippie propaganda, I don't believe a word they say."
That's fine, but doubt is cheap. I have no great personal love for hippies, and I would gladly ditch them and their ideas of organic gardening if I could find a nice, big scientific community that thought it was a bunch of pseudo-science.
The problem is, I keep looking for scientists to disprove this environmental stuff, like Bjorn Lomberg, and his numbers don't seem to add up.
So maybe notions like the earthbox (earthbox.com) and the fish tanks for growing trout (cropking.com) are really just snake-oil scams to make money from gullible consumers. But it looks to me that they work.
Now, maybe they work, but they're highly dependent on industrial civilization and they couldn't work for an isolated colony. That's an awfully hard claim to test. If I were writing a peer-reviewed paper pro or con, what kind of journal would be competent to publish it? History of science? Agricultural science? Sociology?
And if we could figure out how to prove or disprove that in a scholarly fashion, maybe we could find an academic discipline that teaches courses on how to track the exact dependence of power drills on O-rings. Would that be engineering? Industrial management? Operations research?
I want to draw the line between fact and fiction.
If we're arguing about fictional universes, there's no point, because we can start by saying, "In my sci-fi fiction, I make the rules, so what I say goes."
If we're arguing about facts, we might get sloppy and use terms like "tech level." I have yet to see a single work on engineering management, technical history, etc. which can actually give a quantitative chart of real-life tech levels comparable to Traveller's charts of fictitious tech levels. I get frustrated when I see what seems to be two different posters using the same terms to apparently refer to widely different concepts. So I would like some better terminology.
Some people have raised excellent points -- e.g. the fact that light maintenance on a power drill might require O-rings and so on.
However, I have yet to see any textbook or college course that can map out the inter-relationships between tools. Lots of people say, "Oh, it's vast, it's incalculable, there's no way to express how fragile the network of technology is." Well, that doesn't convince me. I'd like to see a professor of history or engineering write a book that breaks it on down and shows exactly how dependent specific tools are on having a supporting network of tools. The closest thing I've seen is some of the writing of Bucky Fuller.
Everything I've seen convinces me that humans are capable of making very small bases of tech into very self-sufficient enterprises.
Now I start out reading Bucky Fuller and pretty soon I'm into the Spaceship Earth hooey and before you know it I'm listening to a bunch of hippies who make compost out of human manure.
So without further ado, here's some links to the hippie tree-hugging stuff that influences my speculation on environmental topics.
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/
http://www.cropking.com/aquaponics.shtml?ref=google
http://www.aquaponics.com/
http://www.bfi.org/
http://www.weblife.org/humanure/default.html
http://www.daviscaves.com/index.shtml
Now, any grammar school kid can look at these websites and say, "That's a load of pinko hippie propaganda, I don't believe a word they say."
That's fine, but doubt is cheap. I have no great personal love for hippies, and I would gladly ditch them and their ideas of organic gardening if I could find a nice, big scientific community that thought it was a bunch of pseudo-science.
The problem is, I keep looking for scientists to disprove this environmental stuff, like Bjorn Lomberg, and his numbers don't seem to add up.
So maybe notions like the earthbox (earthbox.com) and the fish tanks for growing trout (cropking.com) are really just snake-oil scams to make money from gullible consumers. But it looks to me that they work.
Now, maybe they work, but they're highly dependent on industrial civilization and they couldn't work for an isolated colony. That's an awfully hard claim to test. If I were writing a peer-reviewed paper pro or con, what kind of journal would be competent to publish it? History of science? Agricultural science? Sociology?
And if we could figure out how to prove or disprove that in a scholarly fashion, maybe we could find an academic discipline that teaches courses on how to track the exact dependence of power drills on O-rings. Would that be engineering? Industrial management? Operations research?