On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 13:23:12 +0100, you wrote:
Hello,
let me comment on this aspect:
I came to realize a few years ago that I am a modern day Noah. I have built an Ark to carry technology. But I have no children and most of the under 30 population considers books as door stops.
This is the fault of today's university administration. I could tell
stories, both from personal experience as student and from my exwifes
consulting agency. In short, it makes good sense why I stopped my
studies after achieving a BSc.
Your average course textbook is roughly 150 USD or so. Making an
Ebook out of them, the students are "only" charged 70 to 100 USD. Some
order the dead tree copies, some don't. "look! we're saving them
money!"
Harvey
Tam
With best regards
Tam Hanna
---
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On 23. 11. 2018 3:48, Reginald Beardsley via Groups.Io wrote:
This will not be long, but I'll make a brief comment on my reasoning.
If you look back to the bronze age, that was only possible because there were high tenor (high metal content) ores close to the surface which could be readily mined. And there were abundant trees with which to make charcoal to smelt the ores. Neither of those still exist. The natural resources left whether minerals or fossil fuels are difficult to reach and in the case of metals, *very* low tenor. It takes tens of thousands of people to get a single drop of oil in 9000 ft of water at 30,000 ft BSL. I worked a little bit on St Malo, a Unocal discovery before Chevron bought them. I was riding home on the bus and chatting with a Brit who was subsea systems manager for Jack, a nearby Chevron discovery. All he was responsible for was the equipment that sits on the sea floor and ties in to the production system. He had a $2 billion dollar budget. This was in 2006 or 2007 Jack, St Malo and another field produced first oil in2014. They were discovered in 2003 and 2004. The FSPO
(floating storage, production and offloading) system cost $7.5 billion dollars.
How many welders, machinists, fitters and other skilled tradesmen do you think it takes to spend that much money? This was 10 years of intense hard work by a vast number of people. My wild guess is that there were probably about 50-60,000 people involved at some point. Maybe only a few hours like me. All I did was do some synthetic seismograms for the well tie.
If the trucks stop delivering food for a week, there will never be food on the shelves again. Almost everyone has less than a week's supply of food. So it they can get it, they'll stock up as much as possible. In the context of a "just in time" inventory management environment there is *no* capacity for increasing the supply if demand increases. And if demand increases because of a shortage of truck drivers because most of them are sick or dead from influenza, or there has been a Carrington even, a high altitude nuke detonated above the US, a Crater Lake or Yellowstone level caldera collapse or any of a *very* long list of events I can recite., there will be even less capacity to supply food. My doctor, whom I've known since we were 10, tells me people can survive without food for about 60 days.
The net result i will be a period of 30-60 days of incredible violence during which 90% or more of the population will perish. The survivors will be scared and isolated. So social organization will be very difficult.
The Hollywood "Mad Max" version of this is ludicrous. Look at thew costumes. Clothing laced together with leather strips through metal eyelets? Where in the hell are they going to get eyelets? There are no refineries at well sites. There is very little oil left that is not 1000's of ft down. What is left is in places like remote parts of Mynamar.
There was a great article in the Oil and Gas Journal about 15-20 years ago about oil production in the interior. The wells are drilled by setting up a tripod with a pulley. A length of pipe with a beveled edge is attached to a rope. The length of pipe is raised and dropped until it fills with dirt. It is then hauled to the surface, the dirt removed and they start over. Periodically they drop plastic bags off water down the hole as they have found it increases the penetration rate. Once they reach the target, the oil is brought up using a bailer such as the well bucket a childhood friend used to draw water in the 60's.
From there it is transported by young women in 5 gallon jugs to the refinery which consists of a still made from 55 gallon drums.
The wells go dry pretty quickly, so they move over a few feet and rill another one. They even do this "offshore" in a lake using bamboo platforms.
They are very resourceful people, but they are not going to be making semiconductors or machine tools anytime soon unless someone provides a lot of assistance. But those are the only people who have *any* readily recoverable resources. They will survive a collapse of civilization far better than the rest of us. But they will also have no access to the knowledge that makes modern technology possible.
"Oh, but we can use scrap." Oh, yeah? And how many years before all the cars, trucks and other pieces of iron an steel are just brown spots on the ground? Far too low a tenor to be recoverable. A few metals such as gold don't oxidize, but most do. And all the metals important to technology do. Iron is extremely abundant and cast iron is just amazing. It's almost an argument for creationism it's so amenable to primitive methods. But if you don't have high tenor ore, you cannot dig up and smelt an ounce of it. Too much digging and too much tree cutting required.
I got interested in DIY technology around age 20. So at 65, I have spent 45 years trying to prepare for such things. But after reading all those books on the history of technology it sank in that there were two problems: social organization at a large scale (how may people did it take to build the pyramids) and resources which were accessible to technology such as used in Mynamar. Which is only slightly more refined than Drake used in 1859.
I have the tools to do *almost* everything and a library to tell you how. But I'm 65 and have glaucoma. So I'm in a race between dying and going blind. Both my parents lived into their 90's. I hope I do not. I can play guitar and harmonica rather well. Good enough that I can walk on stage and rip a tune with a band I've never played with. But I don't relish the idea of being "Blind Boy Rufus" (I was born with red hair and was given the nickname by my dad. I dropped when I graduated college with my BA in English lit).
I came to realize a few years ago that I am a modern day Noah. I have built an Ark to carry technology. But I have no children and most of the under 30 population considers books as door stops.
So, Toby, that's a short version of why I abandoned the project. It's a very gloomy future. And after 65 years of learning everything (except biological sciences) that I could I can offer no solution. The Silicon Valley elite imagine that when the collapse comes they and their family will get in their personal jet and fly away. Which is possible if they can fly the plane themselves. But the pilot is more likely to shoot the owner and family and take his family than take theirs and leave his own behind.
This is a wretched platform for writing. Doubtless there are many things in my writing which would make me cringe. I took a degree in literature because I wanted a good liberal arts education. The sole criticism I should make of it today is I should have taken math at least up to ordinary differential equations. I did do that later and a *lot* more.
Kids in high school don't learn algebra, geometry and trigonometry because their teachers don't know anything about applying it. But every good skilled tradesman uses them *every* day. And then are insulted because they didn't go to college. It's hard to be motivated to learn something which is difficult if you don't have a clue why you are doing it and neither does the teacher.
I'm going to end it here. Thank you Toby for asking. I hope that at least a few of you found it worthwhile reading.
Reg
