Comment by Daz1
1 day ago
>Plenty of places have had catastrophic droughts, famines, and plagues. Nearly half of Europe died a few times from plagues. Most natives in America were absolutely wiped out from disease and other issues. Tens of millions died of famine in China last century. Tsunamis washed away and killed hundreds of thousands in Indonesia and Japan this current century.
Conveniently you selected pre-technology examples. How curious.
Meanwhile the impending global famine(s) - (plural) of the 20th century never came to be because captitalism kept pumping out agriscience improvements to improve crop yields to 10 times what they were in 1900.
???
Technology has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. What are you defining as "technology"? Software as a service chatbots? Because those aren't saving anyone.
And 227000 people died 20 years ago in a tsunami in Indonesia. They had cell phones and the internet. Is that pre-technology? 50 million died in famines in China in the 1950s. They had TV, radio, and computers. Is that pre-technology?
Technology is just tools that humans make to solve a problem.[1] It's not magic. And in the case of the Japanese tsunami, the most basic technology that humans have had for tens of thousands of years saved countless lives: just building a wall, and making it tall enough to block rising water. [2] But wrapping an entire country in walls is kind of unfeasible. And you can't protect the entire world. We never know what kind of disaster will strike next, and technology to protect us only develops after we suffer the consequences at least once.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology#Prehistoric
[2] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/photo-essay-the-seawalls-of-toh...
> Daz1: Conveniently you selected pre-technology examples. How curious.
> forgotoldacc: Technology has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. What are you defining as "technology"?
I think he meant "industrial".
> Technology has been around for hundreds of thousands of years
Vernacular methods of doing things have been around - without science or rapid innovation. Key point in time was invention of printing press combined with lutheran zeal to read and the western alphabet that allowed unprecedented platform for knowledge transfer. After that it's been pure acceleration.
Before literacy was a major thing (which it has not been historically) knowledge transfer and preservation was based on human to human contact. You could not literally just crank the machine to print out out going edges in a knowledge graph.
I'm not meaning just a few literate people. I mean an entire society capable of reading and eager to create and learn new information.
> Technology is just tools that humans make to solve a problem.
According to a dictionary it's "the branch of knowledge dealing with engineering or applied sciences" / "the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry" and I would argue it's this sort of technology that enables novel, rapid adaptation.
Applied sciences need science before application. Now - knowledge seeking that sure looks likes science even though it was not called that has been around few millenia - Thales of Miletus, Ibn al-Haytham etc etc.
What is novel in our time is application of science to every goddamn problem on an industrial scale. And the understanding that things can improve. This requires a literate society (imo but arguable maybe), eager to adapt, and pragmatic recognition of what works and what does not.
There are areas that are lacking in literacy and capital. While people in those areas sure enough are able as anybody else to individually use technology developed and manufactured elsewhere, the societies in which they live simply lack the means to apply industrial level technological innovations.
With industrial level technology adaptation it's a whole different ballgame.
Many places in US would be uninhabitable without technology and are thus testaments to the idea that MODERN technology allows survival in unprecedented places. For example Colorado. The place was so arid and unhospitable no one could or would want to live there. But then there came railroads, industrial engineering to implement water reservoirs etc etc and visit Denver today and it's very hard for an outsider to realize they are visiting a modern goddamn miracle.
I'm fairly sure if people can live in Colorado they can live anywhere given sufficient capital is applied (capital being the enabler of applied science and technology).
A lot of ancient societies rapidly adapted to problems. In my previously mentioned tsunami example, ancient societies would build their towns above a certain point to be safe from them. Some cultures used to (and some poorer people still do) build houses on stilts near flood areas to stay safe from rising water.
But in modern, literate society, people think "nah it'll be fine bro" and build houses right up on and flat against the coastline. Then entire towns get washed away.
The biggest mistake modern people make is assuming ancient societies were stupid. They didn't have people sitting in offices thinking up solutions to problems. But the reality is those societies learned just as quickly as anyone else did, and a lot of them probably had a much stronger fear of nature and didn't sit around thinking "nah bro we'll totally survive. we have technology". They knew a tiny mistake meant death. Death to modern first worlders seems like a very out of reach thing. We operate on the assumption we'll live long lives and die in a retirement home.
And Colorado isn't by any means inhospitable. There were plenty of tribes in Colorado before literate enlightened megagenius westerners came along to save the day. It has some of the oldest known towns on the North American continent.[1] Westerners may have at first struggled to survive there with their modern technology, but natives lived just fine in Colorado for thousands of years.
Tibet is a far more inhospitable place. So is Saudi Arabia. But those also have thousands of years of history all without a printing press. Arabian culture even managed to spread across the world out from the inhospitable desert and even dominate part of Europe before the printing press existed. Spain and Indonesia became Islamic before enlightened Europeans went out to save the world and make it "habitable".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_Verde_National_Park
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Technology can't save you from famines when there isn't enough sunlight to grow crops for a season or two. One good supervolcano and civilization might collapse or at least take such a hit as to be utterly transformed. Billions dead, etc.
Literally grow lights and nuclear reactors? (Or plain old gas turbine generators)
Technology is the only thing that can save anyone from that type of situation. Prayer sure wouldn’t help!
You think it's possible to put any decent percentage of our GLOBAL food production in greenhouses (remember with less light global temperatures go down) within ~6 months?
Billions would perish. If the luckier rich countries did not get nuked or invaded by armies or waves of endless starving refugees then they would be able to save a good amount of their population. At best world development goes back ~50-100 years. At worst, modern civilization basically ends from the combination of conflict and famine.
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You don't have the _slightest_ idea of how much energy and materials you would need to provide sufficient grow lights to feed humanity right?
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The Green Revolution has so far just postponed famines. We are farming in an unsustainable way. We're running out of fertile topsoil and are depleting fossil aquifers in many regions of the world. Inorganic fertilizers might become scarce in the foreseeable future too.
You selected pre-climate change examples. How curious.
One thing worth noting about these agriscience improvements you're touting would be they require a combination of non-renewable inputs and unsustainable amounts of water. There is also the minor issue of unrecoverable topsoil depletion and the steady decline of nutrients in agricultural products tracked over decades. Kicking the can down the road isn't the same as solving the problem.