What resources can't be renewed?
DataPacRat
Rrangoon. One of the background points that I've already established is
that x thousand years ago, the Rrangoon civilization managed to use up
pretty much everything on the planet that was use-uppable. (This point was
introduced mainly to keep the current Rrangoon culture from having much
(if any) metal available to notice magnetism in and develop theories
thereon - for example, their knowledge of electricity being more about
organic ion flow than metallic electron exchange.)
So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet, and a reasonably "consumer"
civilization, what resources can be made unavailable to successor
civilizations? For example, fossil fuels can be burned up, but
coal-tar-like substances can be created from appropriately treating
ordinary plant matter. Anything that can be mined can be mined out... but
if the the products don't rust into nothingness, they might be dumped into
cities / trash-middens that can be further mined... I think.
What do you think?
Thank you for your time,
--
DataPacRat: amateur alchemist, agnostic Gnostic, and memetic engineer.
The Rrangoon species is available at http://www.phantomcross.org/rrangoon/
James Nicoll
DataPacRat <spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> wrote:
>
> So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet, and a reasonably "consumer"
>civilization, what resources can be made unavailable to successor
>civilizations?
Biodiversity. The classic example is from the Svetz
story, where the ecosystem mostly consists of humans and food
algae, ims. Once it's gone, it takes a long time to recover.
Actually, _the_ classic example is how when you look at parts
of the regions around the Med where Empires once grew grain and other
food, you now find deserts.
Charles R Martin
> In article <9lwS7.29712$eF1.3...@news20.bellglobal.com>,
> DataPacRat <spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> wrote:
> >
> > So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet, and a reasonably "consumer"
> >civilization, what resources can be made unavailable to successor
> >civilizations?
>
> Biodiversity. The classic example is from the Svetz
> story, where the ecosystem mostly consists of humans and food
> algae, ims. Once it's gone, it takes a long time to recover.
I don't think that's really true. It's _hard_ admittedly, but the
space of possible coded proteins is finite, and a very high proportion
of the genes for coding physiology are shared among all organisms. So
a population of humans and food algae probably has 99+ percent of the
total biodiversity.
Now, it might take a w2hole helluva lot of CPU time to compute the
right bit-twiddles to get zebras given people and algae, but I don't
think it's impossible.
>
> Actually, _the_ classic example is how when you look at parts
> of the regions around the Med where Empires once grew grain and other
> food, you now find deserts.
>
I think this is a fairly controversial interpretation.
--
Chrysanthemum growers -- you are the slaves of your chrysanthemums! -- Buso
______________________________________________________________________________
Charles R (Charlie) Martin Broomfield, CO 40N 105W
Brandon J. Van Every
"DataPacRat" <spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> wrote in message
news:9lwS7.29712$eF1.3...@news20.bellglobal.com...
> I work off-and-on on describing an alien species I've created, the
> Rrangoon. One of the background points that I've already established is
> that x thousand years ago, the Rrangoon civilization managed to use up
> pretty much everything on the planet that was use-uppable. (This point was
> introduced mainly to keep the current Rrangoon culture from having much
> (if any) metal available to notice magnetism in and develop theories
> thereon - for example, their knowledge of electricity being more about
> organic ion flow than metallic electron exchange.)
The only way your Rrangoon could have "used up" all the metal is if they
meticulously sifted the surface of their homeworld for every trace element
available, and carted said elements off planet. That would seem to imply
that your planet is absolutely flat, uniform, and devoid of water. Surely
they did mine the oceans to get every last scrap of metal, and also carted
off the water to get to the bottom of the oceans, because if they left the
water in situ then you'd have Waterworld. I dunno if you were planning on
aquatic rather than terrestrial species, probably not. So, there isn't
exactly uniform water everywhere, rather there's no water and the whole
place is flat as a pancake. Well, maybe really really shallow water is ok.
Whatever was easy for your Rrangoon industry. Hmm, could they have drilled
big holes into the planetary magma and then gotten the water to fry into its
constituent atoms? Blast those gases out into space somehow?
And, your planet has some kind of goofy non-metallic core that never errupts
or exerts a Van Allen belt or anything like that. Volcanically extinct?
Why wouldn't these Rrangoon just rip the whole planet apart, if they had
that kind of metal-removing technology?
> So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet,
Volcanically extinct with no metallic core is not reasonably Earthlike. Are
you sure you wouldn't be served by "no metals down to a depth of X?" At
some point, your successor civ is going to figure out that if they only dig
down far enough, they can get metals. Question is, why would they figure
this out without metals, what are they fabricating in the meantime? Do
plants show the way, is it all carbon, diamond fiber trees and such?
--
Cheers, www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA
20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.
Brandon J. Van Every
"Brandon J. Van Every" <vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote in message
news:eOBS7.5635$mF.5...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
>
>
> Volcanically extinct with no metallic core is not reasonably Earthlike.
Are
> you sure you wouldn't be served by "no metals down to a depth of X?" At
> some point, your successor civ is going to figure out that if they only
dig
> down far enough, they can get metals. Question is, why would they figure
> this out without metals, what are they fabricating in the meantime? Do
> plants show the way, is it all carbon, diamond fiber trees and such?
And, what are *we* missing since we don't pay much attention to our ocean
floors??!? Too busy with our steel mills, our silicon wafers....
And what about Naomi??!!
Isaac Kuo
>So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet, and a reasonably "consumer"
>civilization, what resources can be made unavailable to successor
>civilizations?
Virgin territory.
Isaac Kuo
Joseph Hertzlinger
wrote:
> Actually, _the_ classic example is how when you look at parts
>of the regions around the Med where Empires once grew grain and other
>food, you now find deserts.
Topsoil is a renewable resource. You just need people to maintain the
compost heaps. I suspect the turning point in the Mediterranean was
bubonic plague. The ecology was almost completely artificial in some
areas and had to be maintained by humans. After the farmers had been
depopulated...
The example of Israel shows that if people come back for other
reasons, it's possible for former deserts to bloom again.
Earl Colby Pottinger
> I work off-and-on on describing an alien species I've created, the
> Rrangoon. One of the background points that I've already established is
> that x thousand years ago, the Rrangoon civilization managed to use up
> pretty much everything on the planet that was use-uppable. (This point was
> introduced mainly to keep the current Rrangoon culture from having much
> (if any) metal available to notice magnetism in and develop theories
> thereon - for example, their knowledge of electricity being more about
> organic ion flow than metallic electron exchange.)
>
> So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet, and a reasonably "consumer"
> civilization, what resources can be made unavailable to successor
> civilizations? For example, fossil fuels can be burned up, but
> coal-tar-like substances can be created from appropriately treating
> ordinary plant matter. Anything that can be mined can be mined out... but
> if the the products don't rust into nothingness, they might be dumped into
> cities / trash-middens that can be further mined... I think.
>
> What do you think?
> Thank you for your time,
You have just discovered what is wrong with the One-Earthers and NAZI-Greens,
the ones who keep claiming that we will run out of resource X in Y years and
in Y+1 years when there is plenty of resource X around never admit they made
a mistake and instead start screaming that we are about to run out of
resource Z.
Earl Colby Pottinger
--
Hydrogen Peroxide Rockets, BePrint, BePrinter, RAMDISK, Cabin Raising,
Camping, BoatBuilding, Girlfriend. What happened to the time?
http://webhome.idirect.com/~earlcp
Blaine Manyluk
is immortal, it matters less.
=====================================================================
BLAINE MANYLUK - Posting from beautiful south-side Edmonton, AB, CA
www.gordent.com - www.gordent.com/warpwar
=====================================================================
Conrad Hodson
On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, DataPacRat wrote:
> So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet, and a reasonably "consumer"
> civilization, what resources can be made unavailable to successor
> civilizations? For example, fossil fuels can be burned up, but
> coal-tar-like substances can be created from appropriately treating
> ordinary plant matter. Anything that can be mined can be mined out... but
> if the the products don't rust into nothingness, they might be dumped into
> cities / trash-middens that can be further mined... I think.
>
> What do you think?
I think you'll find that renewable energy is relatively "easy", and so is
useful recycling of a number of common metals. It's difficult to imagine
any way of "exhausting" iron, aluminum or magnesium; they're too big a
part of plain old rocks and dirt.
The real kicker in these scenarios is likely to be rare but very useful
trace minerals. Things where ores exist only in a few spots in the world,
and traces in ordinary rocks or sea water are so small as to be
useless. When those ore bodies are exhausted, it may be damned difficult
to recover or recycle the element unless its use has been in some easily
collected item. Tungsten, for instance, is something that can be mined in
only a few places on Earth, and our use tends to scatter it, in
machine-shop dust and millions of scattered broken light bulbs.
It's your culture, and your handwaves, but trace and alloying elements
would be my nominee for the toughest problem faced by a steady-state
economy. The big handwave possibility here, of course, is seawater
extraction of micro-concentrations of dissolved elements.
Conrad Hodson
Karl M. Syring
This may well be an effect of the drop in global temperature and
precipitation in the last 5000 years or so. In the first half of the
holocene, the Sahara desert was a kind of savannah with lots of wildlife
(http://www.co2science.org/subject/other/clim_hist_tenthousand.htm).
Karl M. Syring
Hugh Bothwell
"Earl Colby Pottinger" <ear...@idirect.com> wrote in message
news:dsWS7.8891$xB4.1...@brie.direct.ca...
> You have just discovered what is wrong with the One-Earthers and
NAZI-Greens,
> the ones who keep claiming that we will run out of resource X in Y years
and
> in Y+1 years when there is plenty of resource X around never admit they
made
> a mistake and instead start screaming that we are about to run out of
> resource Z.
I agree, tho' slightly more moderately. Where resources are concerned,
there
are no hard walls - if a resource gets rarer, it becomes more expensive, and
people find ways to use less or make more or substitute something else. If
you want historical data, look at Britain and Germany during the shortage
years
of 1940-1945, when both sides got inventive with stuff like artificial
rubber and
fuel from gasification of coal and margarine/oleo and so on.
Paul F. Dietz
> I agree, tho' slightly more moderately. Where resources are concerned,
> there are no hard walls - if a resource gets rarer, it becomes more expensive,
> and people find ways to use less or make more or substitute something else.
As an example of substitution (driven by environmental concerns
rather than scarcity), consider mercury.
Mercury was used in a wide variety of products -- thermometers,
paints, fungicides, medicines, dental fillings, vacuum pumps, switches,
batteries, and so on, and in industrial processes like production of
chlorine/caustic soda and purification of silver and gold.
Today, demand is in the crapper because of environmental concerns.
The price of mercury has fallen steadily. Basically *all* the
uses have found substitutes, which often turned out to be better and
cheaper.
Ultimately, substitution will drive us to the 30+ elements that
are available in essentially unlimited amounts. Of the rest, demand
will fall until it equals the rate at which they can be coproduced
in other activities (in the way that germanium and gallium are coproduced
in the mining of other metals, for example). Rhodium demand, for
example, could be met entirely from its production in fission reactors.
We may ultimately want to import some elements. The most important,
I think, will end up being helium. It's abundant elsewhere in the solar
system, does not accumulate on Earth over long periods, and doesn't have
a substitute as a very low temperature cryogen (except *perhaps* optical
cooling.)
Paul
Brandon J. Van Every
"Paul F. Dietz" <di...@interaccess.com> wrote in message
news:3C1D1841...@interaccess.com...
>
> We may ultimately want to import some elements. The most important,
> I think, will end up being helium. It's abundant elsewhere in the solar
> system, does not accumulate on Earth over long periods, and doesn't have
> a substitute as a very low temperature cryogen (except *perhaps* optical
> cooling.)
<sucks gas out of big red balloon>
[Mouseketeer voice] "I RESENT THAT LINE OF REASONING! IF ONLY MORE PEOPLE
DIDN'T WASTE ALL THEIR HELIUM ON STUPID PRANKS"
<balloon BZOOOOTS! off into the sunset>
Joseph Hertzlinger
<di...@interaccess.com> wrote:
>We may ultimately want to import some elements. The most important,
>I think, will end up being helium. It's abundant elsewhere in the
>solar system, does not accumulate on Earth over long periods, and
>doesn't have a substitute as a very low temperature cryogen (except
>*perhaps* optical cooling.)
Does that mean the Strategic Helium Reserve is not completely absurd?
Christopher M. Jones
What in tarnation ever made you believe it *was* absurd?!
--
moooooooo
Brandon J. Van Every
"Christopher M. Jones" <christ...@spicedham.qwest.net> wrote in message
news:TOfT7.455$ns3.2...@news.uswest.net...
> "Joseph Hertzlinger" <jher...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> >
> > Does that mean the Strategic Helium Reserve is not completely absurd?
>
> What in tarnation ever made you believe it *was* absurd?!
<fffFSFSSSFFFFFSSfffp> BECAUSE NONE OF YOU PEOPLE TAKE ME SERIOUSLY WHEN I'M
SPEAKING WITH A SQUEAKY HIGH VOICE! I'LL BURY YOU, I'LL BURY YOU I TELL
YOU!!!
Paul F. Dietz
> > Does that mean the Strategic Helium Reserve is not completely absurd?
> What in tarnation ever made you believe it *was* absurd?!
<Libertarian Dogma>
Well, you see, it's being done by The Government, in contravention
of the dictates of the Free Market, therefore it must be Absurd.
Q.E.D.
</Libertarian Dogma>
Paul
Joseph Hertzlinger
I tried using common sense. OTOH, as a science-fiction fan, I have no
common sense and should not try using it.
DataPacRat
>> So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet, and a reasonably "consumer"
>>civilization, what resources can be made unavailable to successor
>>civilizations?
> Biodiversity.
Ah, a very interesting reply; thank you. I'm going to have to think more
about the Rrangoon's ecosystem, now, considering what flora and fauna
might have been eliminated and/or introduced...
(Don't forget, if you'd care to glance over the Ecology section of the
Rrangoon text, feel free to offer your own thoughts.)
> The classic example is from the Svetz story, where the ecosystem mostly
> consists of humans and food algae, ims. Once it's gone, it takes a long
> time to recover.
Which "Svetz" story might that be? I do recall a Niven story, "Bordered
in Black", with such a situation on one planet (although other
circumstances might have applied there).
> Actually, _the_ classic example is how when you look at parts
> of the regions around the Med where Empires once grew grain and other
> food, you now find deserts.
I could be wrong, but as I recall, hadn't those parts originally been
deserts until human social organization progressed to the point that
large-scale irrigation systems could be maintained? How do the pre- and
post-irrigation ecologies compare?
DataPacRat
>>> So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet, and a reasonably "consumer"
>>>civilization, what resources can be made unavailable to successor
>>>civilizations?
>> Biodiversity. The classic example is from the Svetz
>> story, where the ecosystem mostly consists of humans and food
>> algae, ims. Once it's gone, it takes a long time to recover.
> I don't think that's really true. It's _hard_ admittedly, but the
> space of possible coded proteins is finite, and a very high proportion
> of the genes for coding physiology are shared among all organisms. So
> a population of humans and food algae probably has 99+ percent of the
> total biodiversity.
>
> Now, it might take a whole helluva lot of CPU time to compute the
> right bit-twiddles to get zebras given people and algae, but I don't
> think it's impossible.
If by "CPU time", you mean "time taken by Mother Nature's random
mutations, Darwinian selection, and so forth", I'm willing to agree with
you in context. However, I'm hoping to keep the Rrangoon's precursor
civilization within a few dozen thousand years, which doesn't leave much
time for a possibly-reduced ecosystem to diversify. Simple adaptations,
similar to certain moths darkening to match "Industrial" griminess in
England, are one thing; redeveloping, say, hydrogen-filled balloon plants
from any other lifeform is another.
DataPacRat
> Topsoil is a renewable resource. You just need people to maintain the
> compost heaps. I suspect the turning point in the Mediterranean was
> bubonic plague. The ecology was almost completely artificial in some
> areas and had to be maintained by humans. After the farmers had been
> depopulated...
>
> The example of Israel shows that if people come back for other
> reasons, it's possible for former deserts to bloom again.
Very interesting, and something I hadn't known before. Given how often
various areas populated by Rrangoon become suddenly depopulated by
disease, also very applicable; I'll be sure to keep this idea in mind in
the future.
DataPacRat
> "James Nicoll" <jdni...@panix.com> schrieb
>> DataPacRat <spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> wrote:
>> Actually, _the_ classic example is how when you look at parts
>> of the regions around the Med where Empires once grew grain and other
>> food, you now find deserts.
>
> This may well be an effect of the drop in global temperature and
> precipitation in the last 5000 years or so. In the first half of the
> holocene, the Sahara desert was a kind of savannah with lots of wildlife
> (http://www.co2science.org/subject/other/clim_hist_tenthousand.htm).
This is almost exactly the time-scale I'm hoping to think about for the
Rrangoon. However, I'm not sure whether I want them to be in the middle of
a series of ice ages, such as we are now; do you happen to know how common
this pattern is in Earth's history, and under what circumstances (eg, the
regular wobbles of the Earth's orbit and axis)?
DataPacRat
> "DataPacRat" <spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> wrote:
>> I work off-and-on on describing an alien species I've created, the
>> Rrangoon. One of the background points that I've already established is
>> that x thousand years ago, the Rrangoon civilization managed to use up
>> pretty much everything on the planet that was use-uppable. (This point was
>> introduced mainly to keep the current Rrangoon culture from having much
>> (if any) metal available to notice magnetism in and develop theories
>> thereon - for example, their knowledge of electricity being more about
>> organic ion flow than metallic electron exchange.)
> The only way your Rrangoon could have "used up" all the metal is if they
> meticulously sifted the surface of their homeworld for every trace element
> available, and carted said elements off planet.
I didn't mean to imply that the Rrangoon eliminated /all/ metal on their
homeworld - simply that whatever concentrations of easily-recognizable and
-extractable ore were available were mined out. For example, there's at
least one instance in human history when tin mines near the Mediterranean
were played out, which seems to have spurred the Phoenicians to start
trading with tin-miners in far-off England in order to be able to continue
making bronze. What I'm proposing is along the lines that in addition to
tin, the copper mines were played out as well, thus leaving the locals to
manage with basic "stones" (mind you, mines for high-quality flint exist,
but stone tools can be made with anything short of sandstone, and I don't
plan on the Rrangoon demolishing their continents bedrock) and whatever
renewable (most likely organic) resources they can invent.
>> So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet,
>
> Are you sure you wouldn't be served by "no metals down to a depth of X?"
Actually, this is almost exactly what I'm hoping for. :)
> At some point, your successor civ is going to figure out that if they
> only dig down far enough, they can get metals. Question is, why would
> they figure this out without metals
And that's precisely the question. Given a decent ceramics industry
(assuming that clay is as universal as I believe, which it might not be),
they might muddle along that path until they reach their own space age...
at which time they can discover the metallic riches of the home of the
iron-nickel meteors which have probably landed now and then, which is
about the time I intend on being the Rrangoon's present, thus giving me
the most opportunity to examine the changes in their society.
> what are they fabricating in the meantime? Do plants show the way, is it
> all carbon, diamond fiber trees and such?
I've already offered a number of ideas within the text linked to in my
signature, if you'd like to read it. However, I have to admit that you're
the first person to bring up the idea of unusual carbon structures in
their flora and fauna. Hm... perhaps Buckytubes form part of the internal
structure of the Rrangoon's "water balloon" skeleton? I'm going to have to
think about this some more - which is exactly what I was hoping for. :)
DataPacRat
> On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, DataPacRat wrote:
>> So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet, and a reasonably "consumer"
>> civilization, what resources can be made unavailable to successor
>> civilizations? For example, fossil fuels can be burned up, but
>> coal-tar-like substances can be created from appropriately treating
>> ordinary plant matter. Anything that can be mined can be mined out... but
>> if the the products don't rust into nothingness, they might be dumped into
>> cities / trash-middens that can be further mined... I think.
>>
>> What do you think?
> I think you'll find that renewable energy is relatively "easy", and so is
> useful recycling of a number of common metals. It's difficult to imagine
> any way of "exhausting" iron, aluminum or magnesium; they're too big a
> part of plain old rocks and dirt.
Having aluminum, iron, and so forth simply present in plain old rocks and
dirt is one thing; having the idea, and the technologies, to process those
rocks into metals is another variable entirely. For example, in the
Rrangoon background text, I mention the possibility of extracting silicon
from plain old sand by baking it in the presence of carbon (charcoal) and
absence of oxygen. I didn't actually look up what temperature would be
necessary, simply assuming that mirror-based solar ovens would manage. Are
there any substances as common as sand that other metals might be
similarly baked out of? And if so, are the necessary temperatures
comparable?
> The real kicker in these scenarios is likely to be rare but very useful
> trace minerals. Things where ores exist only in a few spots in the world,
> and traces in ordinary rocks or sea water are so small as to be
> useless. When those ore bodies are exhausted, it may be damned difficult
> to recover or recycle the element unless its use has been in some easily
> collected item. Tungsten, for instance, is something that can be mined in
> only a few places on Earth, and our use tends to scatter it, in
> machine-shop dust and millions of scattered broken light bulbs.
>
> It's your culture, and your handwaves, but trace and alloying elements
> would be my nominee for the toughest problem faced by a steady-state
> economy.
Thank you for these ideas - they mesh perfectly with the overall
structure I'm hoping to build. I already knew about this, a little - the
loss of Vanadium-laced ores leading to the disappearance of "Wootz"
Damascus Steel (as opposed to the more common pattern-welding with the
same name) - but hadn't thought about it in connection with the Rrangoon.
> The big handwave possibility here, of course, is seawater extraction of
> micro-concentrations of dissolved elements.
Well, for reasons related to another aspect of the Rrangoon
(specifically, "what if disease-resistant bacteria outpaced antibiotic
technology), the Rrangoon are rather hydrophobic; I think that it's
unlikely they'll perform many experiments that might lead to this
technology before their inter-planetery age gives them access to
asteroidal materials.
DataPacRat
> DataPacRat <spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> wrote:
>> I work off-and-on on describing an alien species I've created, the
>> Rrangoon. One of the background points that I've already established is
>> that x thousand years ago, the Rrangoon civilization managed to use up
>> pretty much everything on the planet that was use-uppable. (This point was
>> introduced mainly to keep the current Rrangoon culture from having much
>> (if any) metal available to notice magnetism in and develop theories
>> thereon - for example, their knowledge of electricity being more about
>> organic ion flow than metallic electron exchange.)
>>
>> So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet, and a reasonably "consumer"
>> civilization, what resources can be made unavailable to successor
>> civilizations? For example, fossil fuels can be burned up, but
>> coal-tar-like substances can be created from appropriately treating
>> ordinary plant matter. Anything that can be mined can be mined out... but
>> if the the products don't rust into nothingness, they might be dumped into
>> cities / trash-middens that can be further mined... I think.
>>
>> What do you think?
> You have just discovered what is wrong with the One-Earthers and NAZI-Greens,
> the ones who keep claiming that we will run out of resource X in Y years and
> in Y+1 years when there is plenty of resource X around never admit they made
> a mistake and instead start screaming that we are about to run out of
> resource Z.
Er, I'm afraid that that's not quite what I've "discovered". For example,
in another post in this thread, I mentioned the fact that the
Vanadium-laced ores which made the forging of "Wootz" Damascus steel
possible eventually played out, thus making it impossible to create that
particular alloy, and the knowledge of /how/ to create it was then lost.
(I believe there was an article in the January, 2001 issue of "Scientific
American" about this.)
Yes, given the right technical knowledge, many limited resources can be
replaced with others in many situations - as another poster in this thread
mentioned, mercury is a prime example in recent human culture. However, if
those other resources also disappear, as well as a large cross-section of
the society's knowledge, then matters are probably more open to question.
For example, one cliche is humanity nuking itself "back to the stone age";
if the copper and iron ores necessary to progress into the Bronze and Iron
ages were the ones that even 20th-century science found difficult to
extract, how would this post-nuke culture progress technologically?
Thank you for your time,
DataPacRat
> "Earl Colby Pottinger" <ear...@idirect.com> wrote:
>> You have just discovered what is wrong with the One-Earthers and
>> NAZI-Greens, the ones who keep claiming that we will run out of
>> resource X in Y years and in Y+1 years when there is plenty of resource
>> X around never admit they made a mistake and instead start screaming
>> that we are about to run out of resource Z.
> I agree, tho' slightly more moderately. Where resources are concerned,
> there are no hard walls - if a resource gets rarer, it becomes more
> expensive, and people find ways to use less or make more or substitute
> something else.
I'm afraid that I don't completely with your premise here. Up to a
certain point, yes, the resource simply becomes rarer - but there are
examples in history of a resource disappearing entirely, thus leading to
the last option you mentioned - "substitute something else". And it's that
option that I'm trying to explore with the Rrangoon's development of
technology throughout their history.
Thank you for your time,
DataPacRat
> Ultimately, substitution will drive us to the 30+ elements that
> are available in essentially unlimited amounts.
Please, do you have a list of those elements, and where they can be found
in quantity? I can think of some offhand, certainly, but I would
appreciate it if you could fill me in on the rest.
My local library once had a book that went through the elements, one by
one, describing each one's properties, discovery, uses, and sources.
However, that book disappeared years ago, along with any knowledge I had
of its authour or title. Does anybody find this description familiar?
Thank you for your time,
Brandon J. Van Every
> How do the pre- and post-irrigation ecologies compare?
Well, I don't know about atmospheric terms, but in human terms, once you
turn hunter-gatherer land into farmland, there's no going back. All of the
hunter-gatherer plant species are displaced by the domesticated agricultural
species. So, as long as humans keep maintaining it, you got lotsa food.
Stop maintaining it, and you've got no food at all, not even what you had in
hunter-gatherer days.
The six "pristine" civilizations - Egypt, Sumeria, India, China,
Mesoamerican, Andean - all originated in regions of hydraulic distress.
Either too much water or too little water. They solved the problems with
hydraulic engineering and onerous hierarchical social systems, wiping out
competing neighbors for the scarce resources. In areas where there were
plenty of resources to hunter-gather, you didn't get these developments.
Basically, people went agrarian because their land sucked.
Source: Science And Techology In World History, ISBN 0-8018-5869-0.
Christopher M. Jones
> On Sun, 16 Dec 2001 21:57:23 -0800, Christopher M. Jones
> <christ...@spicedham.qwest.net> wrote:
>
> >"Joseph Hertzlinger" <jher...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> >> Does that mean the Strategic Helium Reserve is not completely absurd?
> >
> >What in tarnation ever made you believe it *was* absurd?!
>
> I tried using common sense. OTOH, as a science-fiction fan, I have no
> common sense and should not try using it.
For those who *don't* know, Helium is a rare and critically
important material in research and industry. It is used in
everything from welding and cryogenically cooled systems to
deep submergence diving and semiconductor manufacturing. Its
ready availability and low cost are important for economic
success and vitality.
--
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
`Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, `art sure no craven.
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore -
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'
Brandon J. Van Every
> For example, one cliche is humanity nuking itself "back to the stone age";
> if the copper and iron ores necessary to progress into the Bronze and Iron
> ages were the ones that even 20th-century science found difficult to
> extract, how would this post-nuke culture progress technologically?
Nukeing stuff isn't a good excuse. There's plenty of iron left in a nuked
NYC. You have to cart all the crap off the planet.
This poses a problem... essentially your planet is an old mining depot.
Maybe it never originally had any life at all, but was seeded by the miners.
Why did they seed it? Was it a standard operating procedure, and then
supply and demand took them away from the planet, so they forgot about it?
Alternately, it was the original homeworld for an earlier civilization.
They reach for the stars, and they become so galactically advanced, that
they strip even their homeworld of raw materials for whatever civilization
needs they have. So, where did this civilization go? Why aren't they
lurking in this very star system anymore?
The "mining outpost, no inherent life" scenario seems more plausible.
Markus Redeker
> And that's precisely the question. Given a decent ceramics industry
> (assuming that clay is as universal as I believe, which it might not
> be), they might muddle along that path until they reach their own
> space age...
A very interesting idea - but is it possible?
To be more specific: Assume that human civilization had never access
to metals (thus no Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc.), but did use ceramics
instead; assume they made it better and better over the ages - how far
would they get?
Of course they would use other non-metallic materials, like wood, as
well. And "no access to metals" only means "pure" metal like steel
etc.; almost everything contains some amount of metal in its chemical
compostion, and I can't exclude that.
Markus Redeker
> And that's precisely the question. Given a decent ceramics industry
> (assuming that clay is as universal as I believe, which it might not
> be), they might muddle along that path until they reach their own
> space age...
A very interesting idea - but is it possible?
To be more specific: Assume that human civilization had never access
to metals (thus no Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc.), but did use ceramics
instead; assume they made it better and better over the ages - how far
would they get?
Of course they would use other non-metallic materials, like wood, as
well. And "no access to metals" only means "pure" metal like steel
etc.; almost everything contains some amount of metal in its chemical
compostion, and I can't exclude that.
- Markus
Timothy C. Eisele
> For example, one cliche is humanity nuking itself "back to the stone age";
> if the copper and iron ores necessary to progress into the Bronze and Iron
> ages were the ones that even 20th-century science found difficult to
> extract, how would this post-nuke culture progress technologically?
To start with, consider the materials you *won't* ever run out of (at
least, not as long as there is a functioning planet):
Look at a list ranking elements in the earth's crust by abundance.
Everything in the top 10 will always be nearly as available as it is now,
and everything in the top 30 or so will always be at least in principle
recoverable. The top ten include iron, magnesium, and aluminum.
Iron is widespread in reasonable concentrations, and for the low-tech
peoples tends to accumulate in bogs as masses of high-grade hydrated iron
oxides. This "bog iron" is a renewable resource. Magnesium is extractable
from seawater as soon as you can generate electricity. Aluminum is extractable
from clay, which is a natural product of rock weathering and is available
in essentially inexhaustable amounts. As long as all knowledge of how to
extract these metals is not lost, they will be available.
Other metals, like copper, could be depleted as far as high-grade ores,
but they are present in building wire and are usually used in non-dispersive
applications that can be easily recovered by a rebuilding civilization.
--
Tim Eisele
tcei...@mtu.edu
Conrad Hodson
>
> Having aluminum, iron, and so forth simply present in plain old rocks and
> dirt is one thing; having the idea, and the technologies, to process those
> rocks into metals is another variable entirely. For example, in the
> Rrangoon background text, I mention the possibility of extracting silicon
> from plain old sand by baking it in the presence of carbon (charcoal) and
> absence of oxygen. I didn't actually look up what temperature would be
> necessary, simply assuming that mirror-based solar ovens would manage. Are
> there any substances as common as sand that other metals might be
> similarly baked out of? And if so, are the necessary temperatures
> comparable?
Heating iron oxides (common in many soils, and concentrated naturally by
bacteria in cold anaerobic lakes and bogs all over the world; those
bacteria have been at it since shortly after the Late Heavy Bombardment,
and created most of our iron ores in the process. Bog iron is a renewable
resource even within the lifespan of a typical human civilization.)
Anyway, heating iron oxides with carbon (charcoal from any organic matter
baked in the absence of air) will reduce the iron to metal and it only
takes a temperature of a couple thousand degrees F. It can be done with
charcoal from scrap wood and a leather bellows, and in fact was done
exactly that way for the first two thousand years of the Iron Age. High
tech it isn't--the Mande in Mali used to use termite mounds as pre-made
blast furnaces. Slavic blacksmiths reduced their own iron from ore on
their own everyday side-draft forges.
My guess would be that most cultures would be able to reduce and work iron
several centuries before they could make a useful solar furnace. And
again, I have trouble imagining _any_ scenario that could kill off all the
archaebacteria, especially the ones that convert iron oxides. In fact,
most of the disaster scenarios I could conceive of would _increase_
opportunities and niches for anaerobes.
Conrad Hodson
Mark Fergerson
>
> James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
<snip>
> > The classic example is from the Svetz story, where the ecosystem mostly
> > consists of humans and food algae, ims. Once it's gone, it takes a long
> > time to recover.
>
> Which "Svetz" story might that be? I do recall a Niven story, "Bordered
> in Black", with such a situation on one planet (although other
> circumstances might have applied there).
IIRC that was an artificial ecosystem planted by the Slavers.
Try _Flight of the Horse_ or _Rainbow Mars_ (which contains FOTH). The basic
concept is time-travel to mine the past for extinct lifeforms to amuse the
inbred Secretary-General. Svetz doesn't know that long-range time-travel gets
lateral. He goes after a horse and gets a Pegasus, etc. His Gila Monster flies
and breathes fire...
Oh, and it was "Us and the food _yeast_".
Mark L. Fergerson
Conrad Hodson
And therein is the problem with the WI--clay minerals are _based_ on
metallic ions, and as long as the earth is made largely of iron, bacteria
are going to sequester and concentrate it. As long as aluminum and
magnesium compounds are widspread in the soil, they'll end up concentrated
in leached soils (such as bauxites) or sea salt, where magnesium is one of
the commonest metal ions.
In essence, your WI is much like one which asks "What if a civilization
had no access to oxygen?" Well, first of all, the stuff is
ubiquitous; secondly it's vital to life, so they'd be dead without
it; thirdly a world where all the metals had been removed would be a gas
giant at best, dispersed into a nebula at worst.
Iron simply isn't in the same category as copper or lead. Plausible,
workable sources of iron are literally commoner than farmable soil,
commoner than trees, commoner than sand or limestone. The earth itself is
made of the stuff, and wouldn't be anything like the earth without it.
And I just can't see any culture that takes ceramics a long, long way
without learning how to reduce iron. A kiln is just too good an
environment--there's going to be an accidental discovery if they take that
road.
Conrad Hodson
Mark Fergerson
<snip>
> My local library once had a book that went through the elements, one by
> one, describing each one's properties, discovery, uses, and sources.
> However, that book disappeared years ago, along with any knowledge I had
> of its authour or title. Does anybody find this description familiar?
Chemical Rubber Company Handbook of Chemistry and Physics aka the CRC?
Can be found at used bookstores for around US$5. If you find one of any
vintage, buy it.
Mark L. Fergerson
Mark Fergerson
<snip>
> Er, I'm afraid that that's not quite what I've "discovered". For example,
> in another post in this thread, I mentioned the fact that the
> Vanadium-laced ores which made the forging of "Wootz" Damascus steel
> possible eventually played out, thus making it impossible to create that
> particular alloy, and the knowledge of /how/ to create it was then lost.
> (I believe there was an article in the January, 2001 issue of "Scientific
> American" about this.)
Until it was reverse-engineered. But that only works if you have a broad
working knowledge of metallurgy in place.
> Yes, given the right technical knowledge, many limited resources can be
> replaced with others in many situations - as another poster in this thread
> mentioned, mercury is a prime example in recent human culture. However, if
> those other resources also disappear, as well as a large cross-section of
> the society's knowledge, then matters are probably more open to question.
OTOH you might find "alternative" materials first, because the "easy" ones
like Hg aren't available.
> For example, one cliche is humanity nuking itself "back to the stone age";
> if the copper and iron ores necessary to progress into the Bronze and Iron
> ages were the ones that even 20th-century science found difficult to
> extract, how would this post-nuke culture progress technologically?
Making copper from ore is easy; there's speculation it was first discovered by
making firepits out of Cu-bearing ores and noticing the red stuff dripping out
of the hot rocks.
Even if that's all gone, there's the trash heaps of the previous civilization;
bronze and brass are good sources of copper once your alchemists realize there's
more than one metal in them.
Mark L. Fergerson
Mark Fergerson
>
> I work off-and-on on describing an alien species I've created, the
> Rrangoon. One of the background points that I've already established is
> that x thousand years ago, the Rrangoon civilization managed to use up
> pretty much everything on the planet that was use-uppable. (This point was
> introduced mainly to keep the current Rrangoon culture from having much
> (if any) metal available to notice magnetism in and develop theories
> thereon - for example, their knowledge of electricity being more about
> organic ion flow than metallic electron exchange.)
Sounds like an extreme case of the trouble the Moties had in _The Mote in
God's Eye_ (Pournelle and Niven).
> So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet, and a reasonably "consumer"
> civilization, what resources can be made unavailable to successor
> civilizations? For example, fossil fuels can be burned up, but
> coal-tar-like substances can be created from appropriately treating
> ordinary plant matter. Anything that can be mined can be mined out... but
> if the the products don't rust into nothingness, they might be dumped into
> cities / trash-middens that can be further mined... I think.
Certainly, but if your Rrangoon have no concept of the periodic table or of
metallurgy, they might have trouble realizing those interesting artifacts they
find are composed of more than one element. Frinst if you didn't know brass was
an alloy you might think it was an element.
But I can't see them having _no_ metal available without severe geological
overturning (to hide the trash heaps permanently), which they might find
inconvenient for other reasons. ;>)
Even then, that suggests sufficient vulcanism to present "fresh" supplies of
raw minerals from which to (relatively) easily extract metals.
Mark L. Fergerson
Karl M. Syring
> Karl M. Syring <syr...@email.com> wrote:
> > "James Nicoll" <jdni...@panix.com> schrieb
> >> DataPacRat <spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> wrote:
>
> >> Actually, _the_ classic example is how when you look at parts
> >> of the regions around the Med where Empires once grew grain and other
> >> food, you now find deserts.
> >
> > This may well be an effect of the drop in global temperature and
> > precipitation in the last 5000 years or so. In the first half of the
> > holocene, the Sahara desert was a kind of savannah with lots of wildlife
> > (http://www.co2science.org/subject/other/clim_hist_tenthousand.htm).
>
> This is almost exactly the time-scale I'm hoping to think about for the
> Rrangoon. However, I'm not sure whether I want them to be in the middle of
> a series of ice ages, such as we are now; do you happen to know how common
> this pattern is in Earth's history, and under what circumstances (eg, the
> regular wobbles of the Earth's orbit and axis)?
I am not exactly an expert in palaeoclimate. A nice public exposition can be
found on the scotese.com site. As far as I know, we are in a kind of
icehouse climate since 15 Million years or more, while the period of ice
ages only set in around 700000 years ago. This appears to be the first ice
age period since the Precambrium.
An interesting fact for me is that the end of the dinosaurs was not
accompanied by a temperature drop. The period of the hothouse Earth ended
only with the Oligocene, when a number of mammalian species that where just
returning to dinosaur body sizes died out.
Some people believe, the current icehouse crisis with it's 10C drop of mean
temperature is due to reduced volcanic CO2 emissions and we must make up for
this.
Karl M. Syring
Paul F. Dietz
> Please, do you have a list of those elements, and where they can be found
> in quantity? I can think of some offhand, certainly, but I would
> appreciate it if you could fill me in on the rest.
I don't have the list at hand, but see these articles:
Goeller, H. E. & Alvin M. Weinberg 1976: "The Age of Substitutability:
What do we do when the mercury runs out?" Science vol. 191:683-9.
Goeller, H. E. & A. Zucker 1984: "Infinite Resources: The Ultimate Strategy"
Science vol. 223:456-62.
Paul
Paul F. Dietz
> Er, I'm afraid that that's not quite what I've "discovered". For example,
> in another post in this thread, I mentioned the fact that the
> Vanadium-laced ores which made the forging of "Wootz" Damascus steel
> possible eventually played out,
As an aside, let me note that vanadium is one of those elements
that will continue to be available for a long time, although
not necessarily in large amounts. It can be extracted from
seawater by the same polymer adsorber used to extract uranium
(polyamidoxime).
This kind of low-volume side production is just fine for
'vitamin'-like applications, where the element is needed in
small amounts for some crucial task. The elements we consume
in mass quantity tend to be rather common (iron,
aluminum, silicon (in silicates), etc.) The exceptions are
fossil fuels (which we'll have to substitute for) and
possibly phosphorus.
Paul
Geoffrey A. Landis
>
> "DataPacRat" <spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> wrote:
> > How do the pre- and post-irrigation ecologies compare?
>
> Well, I don't know about atmospheric terms, but in human terms, once you
> turn hunter-gatherer land into farmland, there's no going back. All of the
> hunter-gatherer plant species are displaced by the domesticated agricultural
> species.
Don't know if I believe that-- where I live, most of the forests are on
land that was logged, farmed, and then the farms were abandoned at the
beginning of the last century when better farmland in Iowa was opened
up. It's fine territory for hunter gatherers; in fact, some hunters
would be useful to keep the deer population down (and the gathering
isn't bad, either; black berries, for example, run rampant.)
--
Geoffrey A. Landis
http://www.sff.net/people/geoffrey.landis
Just published: IMPACT PARAMETER (and other quantum realities)
http://www.goldengryphon.com/ip-frame.html
Timothy C. Eisele
> "Brandon J. Van Every" wrote:
> >
> > Well, I don't know about atmospheric terms, but in human terms, once you
> > turn hunter-gatherer land into farmland, there's no going back. All of the
> > hunter-gatherer plant species are displaced by the domesticated agricultural
> > species.
> Don't know if I believe that-- where I live, most of the forests are on
> land that was logged, farmed, and then the farms were abandoned at the
> beginning of the last century when better farmland in Iowa was opened
> up. It's fine territory for hunter gatherers; in fact, some hunters
> would be useful to keep the deer population down (and the gathering
> isn't bad, either; black berries, for example, run rampant.)
Same here. In a span of about 50 years, the local environment (upper
peninsula of Michigan) has reverted so far that a lot of people
currently mistake it for "virgin wilderness" (even though pictures from
the 1940s show the whole area reduced to near treelessness by mining,
logging, and farming activities). There is plenty of wildlife, fruits
and berries, seeds, fish, the whole works, all in a mostly continuous
expanse of forest, and the main industry is wood products. It would
be hard living as a hunter-gatherer here because of the climate, but
the food availability would be fine.
--
Tim Eisele
tcei...@mtu.edu
Geoffrey A. Landis
>
> On 18 Dec 2001, Markus Redeker wrote:
>
> > To be more specific: Assume that human civilization had never access
> > to metals (thus no Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc.), but did use ceramics
> > instead; assume they made it better and better over the ages - how far
> > would they get?
> >
> > Of course they would use other non-metallic materials, like wood, as
> > well. And "no access to metals" only means "pure" metal like steel
> > etc.; almost everything contains some amount of metal in its chemical
> > compostion, and I can't exclude that.
> >
> And therein is the problem with the WI--clay minerals are _based_ on
> metallic ions, and as long as the earth is made largely of iron, bacteria
> are going to sequester and concentrate it.
Something bacteria did back in the years of the banded-iron formations,
3.5 billion to 2 billion years ago. This is not a fast process, and I
am not at all sure it goes on today in amounts significant enough to
make any difference to ore concentrations over periods of less than aeons.
> As long as aluminum and
> magnesium compounds are widspread in the soil, they'll end up concentrated
> in leached soils (such as bauxites) or sea salt, where magnesium is one of
> the commonest metal ions.
Refining metallic aluminum and magnesium is a high tech electrical
process. Yes, once the civilization becomes sophisticated enough, they
will be able to do this, but the question of how civilization would get
to that point is still interesting.
> In essence, your WI is much like one which asks "What if a civilization
> had no access to oxygen?" Well, first of all, the stuff is ubiquitous;
The question as phrased was: "'no access to metals' means "pure" metal
like steel etc."
You are asserting that "pure metal like steel" is ubiquitous?
> secondly it's vital to life, so they'd be dead without it;
Pure metal like steel is not vital to life/
> thirdly a world where all the metals had been removed would be a gas
> giant at best, dispersed into a nebula at worst.
A world without pure metal like steel in the crust would not be a gas giant.
> Iron simply isn't in the same category as copper or lead. Plausible,
> workable sources of iron are literally commoner than farmable soil,
> commoner than trees, commoner than sand or limestone.
I will argue with that assertion. You are essentially denying the
meaning of the word "ore".
> The earth itself is
> made of the stuff, and wouldn't be anything like the earth without it.
The composition of the Earth is irrelevant,since most of the Earth is
the mantle and core, which is not accessable. The crust of the earth is
made of a lot of stuff from which iron cannot be economically extracted
(mostly silicates); iron is about 4% of the crust by weight.
> And I just can't see any culture that takes ceramics a long, long way
> without learning how to reduce iron. A kiln is just too good an
> environment--there's going to be an accidental discovery if they take that
> road.
Maybe. Maybe not.
James Nicoll
Mark Fergerson <mferg...@home.com> wrote:
>DataPacRat wrote:
>>
>> James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>
><snip>
>
>> > The classic example is from the Svetz story, where the ecosystem mostly
>> > consists of humans and food algae, ims. Once it's gone, it takes a long
>> > time to recover.
>>
>> Which "Svetz" story might that be?
I should have said "Svetz stories" and I think most of them are
in _Flight of the Unicorn_.
>> I do recall a Niven story, "Bordered
>> in Black", with such a situation on one planet (although other
>> circumstances might have applied there).
>
> IIRC that was an artificial ecosystem planted by the Slavers.
No, more of a trial run of ideas which Niven later re-used
in his Known Space stories. BiB has humans already on the Sirian
planet by the time we develop hyperdrive and it has, ims, a 21st
century hyperdrive developed by humans. In KS, the intelligent
beings on Jinx prior to 2098 are Bandersnatch and contact is
via slowboat. The humans don't get hyperdrive until they buy it
from the Outsiders during the Man-Kzin wars.
> Try _Flight of the Horse_ or _Rainbow Mars_ (which contains FOTH). The basic
>concept is time-travel to mine the past for extinct lifeforms to amuse the
>inbred Secretary-General. Svetz doesn't know that long-range time-travel gets
>lateral. He goes after a horse and gets a Pegasus, etc. His Gila Monster flies
>and breathes fire...
>
> Oh, and it was "Us and the food _yeast_".
What he said.
--
"Don't worry. It's just a bunch of crazies who believe in only one
god. They're just this far away from atheism."
DataPacRat
> DataPacRat wrote:
>> My local library once had a book that went through the elements, one by
>> one, describing each one's properties, discovery, uses, and sources.
>> However, that book disappeared years ago, along with any knowledge I had
>> of its authour or title. Does anybody find this description familiar?
> Chemical Rubber Company Handbook of Chemistry and Physics aka the CRC?
Aka the Rubber Bible - and I'm afraid that no, I'm thinking of an
entirely different book (although for all I know, published by the same
people). At most about 200 pages; the higher elements also have alpha/beta
decay-series charts; mentions unnilquadium and unnilhexium but nothing
higher; geared to about high-school level readers or so.
Timothy C. Eisele
> Mark Fergerson <mferg...@home.com> wrote:
> > DataPacRat wrote:
> >> My local library once had a book that went through the elements, one by
> >> one, describing each one's properties, discovery, uses, and sources.
> >> However, that book disappeared years ago, along with any knowledge I had
> >> of its authour or title. Does anybody find this description familiar?
> > Chemical Rubber Company Handbook of Chemistry and Physics aka the CRC?
> Aka the Rubber Bible - and I'm afraid that no, I'm thinking of an
> entirely different book (although for all I know, published by the same
> people). At most about 200 pages; the higher elements also have alpha/beta
> decay-series charts; mentions unnilquadium and unnilhexium but nothing
> higher; geared to about high-school level readers or so.
This probably isn't _The_Elements_, by John Emsley, published by
Oxford University Press in 1989 (it has a bright yellow cover), but
I highly recommend it as a replacement. It's one of my favorite references,
not least because it has a fully consistent format for all of the elements,
so if a certain bit of data is given for one, it is given for all.
--
Tim Eisele
tcei...@mtu.edu
Erik Max Francis
> No, more of a trial run of ideas which Niven later re-used
> in his Known Space stories. BiB has humans already on the Sirian
> planet by the time we develop hyperdrive and it has, ims, a 21st
> century hyperdrive developed by humans. In KS, the intelligent
> beings on Jinx prior to 2098 are Bandersnatch and contact is
> via slowboat. The humans don't get hyperdrive until they buy it
> from the Outsiders during the Man-Kzin wars.
Indeed. Niven has explicitly disclaimed that "Border in black" is a
proto-Known Space story. Note that it also contains some factual
errors. The story states that both components of Sirius are blue-white
giants (neither are; A is a white main sequence star), and the
expedition actually goes to Sirius B, which is a white dwarf.
He does at least point out that life would be unlikely around either
(whether or not they were type A V/DA or B III).
--
Erik Max Francis / m...@alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
__ San Jose, CA, US / 37 20 N 121 53 W / ICQ16063900 / &tSftDotIotE
/ \ Laws are silent in time of war.
\__/ Cicero
Esperanto reference / http://www.alcyone.com/max/lang/esperanto/
An Esperanto reference for English speakers.
James Nicoll
>
>>> So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet, and a reasonably "consumer"
>>>civilization, what resources can be made unavailable to successor
>>>civilizations?
>
>
> Ah, a very interesting reply; thank you. I'm going to have to think more
>about the Rrangoon's ecosystem, now, considering what flora and fauna
>might have been eliminated and/or introduced...
> (Don't forget, if you'd care to glance over the Ecology section of the
>Rrangoon text, feel free to offer your own thoughts.)
I'm not saying that biodiversity has to always go down (As someone
pointed out, there's genetic engineering) but it seems like the one of
the few resources which could decline and not recover in the manner
the Club of Rome expected material resources to fall (And it's not
like there are off-world biological resources for us to tap (1)).
You might see the same biomass/area but the number of species
still plummet. Look at farmland vs wild grasslands as an example.
I'd suggest E. O. Wilson as inspirational reading material,
in particular _Biodiveristy_.
1: UNless there are and that's what drives commercial exploitation of
space in the 2100 and 2200s.
James Nicoll
Erik Max Francis <m...@alcyone.com> wrote:
>James Nicoll wrote:
>
>> No, more of a trial run of ideas which Niven later re-used
>> in his Known Space stories. BiB has humans already on the Sirian
>> planet by the time we develop hyperdrive and it has, ims, a 21st
>> century hyperdrive developed by humans. In KS, the intelligent
>> beings on Jinx prior to 2098 are Bandersnatch and contact is
>> via slowboat. The humans don't get hyperdrive until they buy it
>> from the Outsiders during the Man-Kzin wars.
>
>Indeed. Niven has explicitly disclaimed that "Border in black" is a
>proto-Known Space story. Note that it also contains some factual
>errors. The story states that both components of Sirius are blue-white
>giants (neither are; A is a white main sequence star), and the
>expedition actually goes to Sirius B, which is a white dwarf.
>
>He does at least point out that life would be unlikely around either
>(whether or not they were type A V/DA or B III).
No kidding. First off, B's orbit around A varies from 31.5 AU
to about 8.1 and a habitable planet around A would orbit about 5 AU
out, which means unless you had a Neptune/Pluto thing going B could
get as 1.7x as close to the planet as A does. That can't be good for
long term orbital stability.
(And Niven's not the only offender: Bova has humans on a planet
of A in _As On A Darkling Plane_ and they survived the artificial conversion
of B to a white dwarf. When was B's orbit well known?).
OTOH, if you assume that somehow a habitable planet forms after
B goes WD or ends up in that orbital position after an exciting history
during the time B lost all that mass (1), it'd be 1/20th of AU away from
B. That would be stable. I think the light from B is much more blue than
Sol's, so the world would need a kickass Ozone layer (at least) to be
human-habitable (And I think we can assume if it has humans livign there,
we terraformed it).
A native local ecosystem would likely be very simple at best.
Also every half century Sirius A would vary from adding 2% to the total
light the habitable planet gets gets to adding 35%. The local year
would be about 4 days but I think we can take it as given that the
planet is tide locked to B and the major climate variation would come
from the 50 year A-B orbit (Or every 4560 year-days on B habitable).
Might actually be an interesting world to write about. A
naive calulation suggests that if at apoastron B habitable is 280 K,
at periastron it might get as hot as 300 k. Unlike our summer/winter,
Sirius B habitable would experience an all-world variation. Wonder what
that does to weather? More energy to drive storms but less variation
worldwide and less coriolus effect as well.
Thoughts? Anyone want to try their hand at charting the
season change wrt time? My math is no longer up to it, if it ever was.
James Nicoll
1: The core of a close-in Neptune-like gas giant, for example or post
WD plantary formation ala the pulsar planets.
Paul Bramscher
> DataPacRat <spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> :
>
> <snippage>
> >
> > So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet, and a reasonably "consumer"
> > civilization, what resources can be made unavailable to successor
> > civilizations? For example, fossil fuels can be burned up, but
> > coal-tar-like substances can be created from appropriately treating
> > ordinary plant matter. Anything that can be mined can be mined out... but
> > if the the products don't rust into nothingness, they might be dumped into
> > cities / trash-middens that can be further mined... I think.
Depends. Things that are non-renewable must at least meet one particular
criteria: we cannot recreate or manufacture them ourselves.
For example:
(1) The entire DNA strand for any plant or animal species. Once the species
is extinct, it's a non-renewable resource/thing. We've barely scratched the
surface in terms of describing sections of DNA, let alone creating it.
(2) Certain geologic structures that either require millions of years, too
much material, a cosmic event (such as an impact with a particular kind of
non-earth material), etc. We don't have the time or materials on our planet to
duplicate them.
(3) Many things in the cultural historical realm: unique manuscripts, one of a
kind art or architecture, etc.
(4) Certain things very large or very small. Due to engineering difficulties,
for example, they cannot be created artificially.
(5) Anything unique. It's non-renewable by definition.
> You have just discovered what is wrong with the One-Earthers and NAZI-Greens,
> the ones who keep claiming that we will run out of resource X in Y years and
> in Y+1 years when there is plenty of resource X around never admit they made
> a mistake and instead start screaming that we are about to run out of
> resource Z.
This really isn't worth replying to, but a couple issues worth pointing out:
(A) Nazis, nor the right-wing, have never been interested in conservation of
the natural environment. They're more interested in oppressing it. You might
want re-examine your oxymoronic statement in light of this provable historical
reality.
(B) I cannot recall ANY ecologist/Green who suggested that a particular
resource would be gone at a specific point in time, yet it persisted past that
point. I can, however, produce any number of meteorologists, biologists,
ecologists, paleontologists, or other life scientists who'll equate human-caused
extinction or global change of the past 2 centuries with previous
mass-extinctions on record.
As someone who's enjoyed the outdoors and biodiversity for the past 30 years, I
suggest that if you believe in spontaneous generation, i.e. that using things
doesn't consume them and they magically re-appear (despite my examples 1-5 above)
I suggest you move to a place where there is less diversity. It might be more
suited to your outlook on conservation: perhaps Death Valley, a polar icecap, or
deep space. Extreme conditions, themselves, have "used up" (e.g. extinction
resulting from an ice age) resources, if not prevented them from developing in
the first place. This isn't a Nazi-Green theory but, rather, the reality of
natural history and agents that work within it.
Lack of respect for conservation speaks of many things, most noteably lack of
respect for oneself. Could be than a hostile alien will look at yourself, come
by and gobble you up, and say, "What the hell? He was a renewable resource,
there are plenty where he came from."
James Nicoll
>Also every half century Sirius A would vary from adding 2% to the total
>light the habitable planet gets gets to adding 35%. The local year
>would be about 4 days but I think we can take it as given that the
>planet is tide locked to B and the major climate variation would come
>from the 50 year A-B orbit (Or every 4560 year-days on B habitable).
>
> Might actually be an interesting world to write about. A
>naive calulation suggests that if at apoastron B habitable is 280 K,
>at periastron it might get as hot as 300 k. Unlike our summer/winter,
>Sirius B habitable would experience an all-world variation. Wonder what
>that does to weather? More energy to drive storms but less variation
>worldwide and less coriolus effect as well.
And through the miracle of inspiration which is driven by
having already hit 'send' I realise this is a tide locked world.
Only one side is illuminated by B and the other has to make do
with heat transfer from the hot side. According to Treitel's
webpage, you still might only get a difference of 15 degrees
between Dayside and Nightside.
So at apastron, the planet (Which for the purposes of saving
keystrokes I will call Azure, for the startling blueness it presented
the first time it was resolved optically), Dayside is 280 K (7 C)
and Nightside is 265 K (-8 C). At perastron, Azure's Dayside is 300K
(27 C) and Nightside is 285 K (12 C). The good thing is we don't
have to worry about Azure's volatiles getting sequested on the
Nightside. No permanent icecaps on this world for sure.
OTOH, A will be eclipsed by B once a year-day (B is .23 degrees
from Azure and A is I think .13 degrees, so it is a total eclipse).
Hmmm. If my BOTEC is right, the eclipse is only about 4 minutes every
100 hours. Probably doesn't matter unless I screwed up the math.
Erik Max Francis
> No kidding. First off, B's orbit around A varies from 31.5 AU
> to about 8.1 and a habitable planet around A would orbit about 5 AU
> out, which means unless you had a Neptune/Pluto thing going B could
> get as 1.7x as close to the planet as A does. That can't be good for
> long term orbital stability.
You don't even need to go that far. Sirius A is a A1 V star, which has
way too short a lifetime for complex life to develop. Furthermore,
Sirius B is a white dwarf, which means that fairly recently it was a
giant star which shed its outer layers while the core underwent
collapse. We now know (though it wasn't known at the time Niven wrote
that story) that Sirius has a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas, which
you'd expect for a young star.
The situation would in fact be _far_ for habitability if Niven's
mistaken designation as a B III pair were correct; in that case the
stars have already moved off the main sequence, resulting in luminosity
increases on the order of 100 times; you only get blue giants from even
more massive stars, so not only would the progenitor stars have been eve
more short-lived than a mere A1 V star, but now that they're off the
main sequence the evolutionary rate is stepped up even more
dramatically.
James Nicoll
>
>> No kidding. First off, B's orbit around A varies from 31.5 AU
>> to about 8.1 and a habitable planet around A would orbit about 5 AU
>> out, which means unless you had a Neptune/Pluto thing going B could
>> get as 1.7x as close to the planet as A does. That can't be good for
>> long term orbital stability.
>
>You don't even need to go that far. Sirius A is a A1 V star, which has
>way too short a lifetime for complex life to develop.
Although I think Niven has Jinx and the planet in _Bordered
in Black_ be terraformed, the former by Slavers and the latter by
who knows.
Unfortunately the Slavers seem to have tformed Jinx before it
could have existed and as you say, big stars evolve fast: Jinx would
have a sriosu challenge staying habitable for a billion years, even
granting the system an age of 10^9 years. The BiB folks may have tformed
the planet in the last few thousand years so at least stellar evolution
will have played only a small role.
> Furthermore,
>Sirius B is a white dwarf, which means that fairly recently it was a
>giant star which shed its outer layers while the core underwent
>collapse. We now know (though it wasn't known at the time Niven wrote
>that story) that Sirius has a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas, which
>you'd expect for a young star.
>
>The situation would in fact be _far_ for habitability if Niven's
? Is there a word missing?
>mistaken designation as a B III pair were correct; in that case the
>stars have already moved off the main sequence, resulting in luminosity
>increases on the order of 100 times; you only get blue giants from even
>more massive stars, so not only would the progenitor stars have been eve
>more short-lived than a mere A1 V star, but now that they're off the
>main sequence the evolutionary rate is stepped up even more
>dramatically.
I notice that a certain amount of SF had habitable planets
around fairly inappropriate stars, even when the authors were people
who generally checked their homework (_Close to Critical_ or the
original _The Enemy Stars). This seems to have gotten less common
in the 1960s.
James Nicoll
>
>> No kidding. First off, B's orbit around A varies from 31.5 AU
>> to about 8.1 and a habitable planet around A would orbit about 5 AU
>> out, which means unless you had a Neptune/Pluto thing going B could
>> get as 1.7x as close to the planet as A does. That can't be good for
>> long term orbital stability.
>
>You don't even need to go that far. Sirius A is a A1 V star, which has
>way too short a lifetime for complex life to develop. Furthermore,
>Sirius B is a white dwarf, which means that fairly recently it was a
>giant star which shed its outer layers while the core underwent
>collapse. We now know (though it wasn't known at the time Niven wrote
>that story) that Sirius has a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas, which
>you'd expect for a young star.
This means that Azure is least implausible, I think, if it is
a sterile but potentially lifebearing rocky core of gas giant which
got mostly evaporated while B was doing the whole exciting "Let's
cast off most of my mass(1) and then become a white dwarf" thing. Azure
certainly must have had an interesting history in its less than a billion
year lifespan.
Note that at no point do I claim Azure is likely. This is just
play.
One thing: the hydrogen-deuterium ratios will be _much_ lower
on Azure than on Earth because Azure started with, say, 20 earthmasses,
mostly hydrogen and now it has been whittled to 1 Earthmass with a
similar hydrosphere (1/5000th of the mass of the planet) as Earth.
Is there a way to calculate the H/D ratio from that?
D2O won't cross semipermiable barriers the same way H20 will.
Not sure if that's a major killer or not. Depends on how much D2O is
kicking around.
James Nicoll
1: Because it is more evolved than A but less massive at the moment.
Brandon J. Van Every
"Conrad Hodson" <con...@efn.org> wrote in message
news:Pine.GSU.4.21.011218...@garcia.efn.org...
>
> In essence, your WI is much like one which asks "What if a civilization
> had no access to oxygen?" Well, first of all, the stuff is
> ubiquitous; secondly it's vital to life, so they'd be dead without
> it; thirdly a world where all the metals had been removed would be a gas
> giant at best, dispersed into a nebula at worst.
Well, one could take the really drastic approach that I suggested initially.
Precursor civilization used this planet as a mining outpost, used the oceans
as a giant leech pool, levelled the mountains, paved the earth, made
everything absolutely flat and completely devoid of trace metals down to a
depth of X miles. Carted all the oceans away because they contained useful
poisons and were in the way of further excavation. The thing is, now you're
talking about Planet Bowling Ball. What distinguishes such a planet from an
asteroid, is life even possible? Could one genetically engineer "holder"
vegetation that doesn't need metals, so that the precursor civ has the
option to start mining again if need be and doesn't have to worry about the
atmosphere changing?
--
Cheers, www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA
20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.
Paul F. Dietz
> Refining metallic aluminum and magnesium is a high tech electrical
> process.
There is a carbothermic process for producing elemental magnesium.
Paul
Erik Max Francis
> >The situation would in fact be _far_ for habitability if Niven's
>
> ? Is there a word missing?
Yes:
The situation would in fact be _far_ worse for habitability ...
Joseph Hertzlinger
<christ...@spicedham.qwest.net> wrote:
>For those who *don't* know, Helium is a rare and critically important
>material in research and industry. It is used in everything from
>welding and cryogenically cooled systems to deep submergence diving
>and semiconductor manufacturing. Its ready availability and low cost
>are important for economic success and vitality.
We might have a "killer app" for extraterrestrial mining. First, we
use up all of Earth's helium. We can try using balloons more. We can
use balloons for evacuating people from war zones. It might someday be
necessary to take away an entire nation in a giant balloon. As
Mr. Peabody put it "One nation, in a dirigible..."
Joseph Hertzlinger
<spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> wrote:
>Joseph Hertzlinger <jher...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>> Topsoil is a renewable resource. You just need people to maintain the
>> compost heaps. I suspect the turning point in the Mediterranean was
>> bubonic plague. The ecology was almost completely artificial in some
>> areas and had to be maintained by humans. After the farmers had been
>> depopulated...
>>
>> The example of Israel shows that if people come back for other
>> reasons, it's possible for former deserts to bloom again.
>
> Very interesting, and something I hadn't known before. Given how often
>various areas populated by Rrangoon become suddenly depopulated by
>disease, also very applicable; I'll be sure to keep this idea in mind in
>the future.
Actually, that was just a speculation on my part. OTOH, it makes at
least as much sense as the official environmentalist view.
Frank Henriquez
Erik Max Francis <m...@alcyone.com> wrote:
>You don't even need to go that far. Sirius A is a A1 V star, which has
>way too short a lifetime for complex life to develop. Furthermore,
>Sirius B is a white dwarf, which means that fairly recently it was a
>giant star which shed its outer layers while the core underwent
>collapse.
It's even more complicated than that - Sirius A is not a typical A star;
It's outer atmosphere was probably completely replaced by material from
the B component when B went through it's Red Giant phase (Sirius B was
at one point the more massive of the two stars. That's why it became a
WD before the A component).
>We now know (though it wasn't known at the time Niven wrote
>that story) that Sirius has a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas, which
>you'd expect for a young star.
The only reference I've seen is of a very low mass dust shell 1/500 the
mass of the Moon. It may be a distant shell of gas and dust left over
from the B component's Red Giant/Planetary Nebula phase.
The Sirius system is probably a very good example of where NOT to bother
looking for life.
Frank
--
Frank Henriquez Programmer/Analyst Jules Stein Eye Institute, UCLA
fr...@ucla.edu http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~frank/index.htm
Conrad Hodson
>
> Certainly, but if your Rrangoon have no concept of the periodic table or of
> metallurgy, they might have trouble realizing those interesting artifacts they
> find are composed of more than one element. Frinst if you didn't know brass was
> an alloy you might think it was an element.
That more or less happened in our own history. The Greeks knew about and
made brass (which they called something like oreichalcon, mountain
copper) without realizing it was an alloy. Apparently they used a mixture
of calamine with some kind of copper ore and smelted them together,
producing the alloy without ever seeing or knowing about the existence of
zinc as a metal.
IIRC there were quite a few examples of such "alloys in ignorance"--rule
of thumb metallurgy where people just knew that the iron was better when
you threw some of _those_ rocks into the furnace along with _these_. Or
where nature had already done the mixing for them--I heard once that the
reputation of Toledo steels came from the presence of chromium and
vanadium oxides in the local iron ore. Reduce by the same old medieval
methods--but the carburized part of your bloom isn't just crude blister
steel, it's crude chrome-vanadium blister steel, a considerable upgrade.
Conrad Hodson
Conrad Hodson
>
> This kind of low-volume side production is just fine for
> 'vitamin'-like applications, where the element is needed in
> small amounts for some crucial task. The elements we consume
> in mass quantity tend to be rather common (iron,
> aluminum, silicon (in silicates), etc.) The exceptions are
> fossil fuels (which we'll have to substitute for) and
> possibly phosphorus.
Our biggest present consumption of phosphorus is using it agriculturally
in a rather wasteful way. If we closed our ag cycles we could cover our
remaining phosphorus needs from biological sources, probably without even
counting mineral phosphate beds of biological origin. The stuff is
concentrated quite nicely in seashells and animal bones, both of which
humans have produced in abundance as byproducts of feeding for a long
time. It's a matter of heating bone meal with charcoal and sand in a
retort; it's recommended to cool and condense the phosphorus vapor under
water, since the stuff bursts into flame on contact with air. Carbon
monoxide is a byproduct and phosphorus vapor is toxic in a nasty way; good
lab technique or disposable workers are called for.
Conrad Hodson
Conrad Hodson
>
> Something bacteria did back in the years of the banded-iron formations,
> 3.5 billion to 2 billion years ago. This is not a fast process, and I
> am not at all sure it goes on today in amounts significant enough to
> make any difference to ore concentrations over periods of less than aeons.
Actually, anaerobic bacteria (possibly descendants of the ones who
precipitated the Precambrian deposits) are alive and well in every healthy
peat bog. They live by a reaction which takes iron ions leached from the
surrounding rocks and soils and precipitating hydrated iron oxides into
nodules traditionally known as "bog iron". Bog iron was the mainstay of
the Iron Age for a couple of millenia; the first blast furnace in America
was fired with it.
I don't know this firsthand, but I was surprised while researching the
early history of metalworking to encounter more than one claim that bogs
could be _remined_ for bog iron nodules every century or three. I'll try
to hunt up some cites--AFAIK no one on Earth has mined bog iron for the
last century, so a reasonable test might be to check out one of the bogs
near Saugus, Massachusetts or near any settled place in northern
Europe. Those bogs were dug out quite thorougly in the old days, so if
they've grown a new crop of nodules we'd have our test.
>
> > As long as aluminum and
> > magnesium compounds are widspread in the soil, they'll end up concentrated
> > in leached soils (such as bauxites) or sea salt, where magnesium is one of
> > the commonest metal ions.
>
> Refining metallic aluminum and magnesium is a high tech electrical
> process. Yes, once the civilization becomes sophisticated enough, they
> will be able to do this, but the question of how civilization would get
> to that point is still interesting.
Well, both aluminum and magnesium _were_ reduced as metals before
molten-salt electrolysis was available, IIRC. It's just more
expensive. A lot of these survivalist scenarios--recovery after disaster
or megawar or thorough resource depletion--would really be strongly
influencd by finds of artifacts and information that simply weren't
available the first time around. In other words, the situation differs
not just because all the high-grade ores and fuels are gone, but because
there's a lot more information to be found as well. So I suspect that
many different technical roads get taken during redevelopment as opposed
to original development. Archaeology in such a world might be as
practical and economically vital field of study as materials science is to
us today.> > Iron simply isn't in the same category as copper or lead. Plausible,
> > workable sources of iron are literally commoner than farmable soil,
> > commoner than trees, commoner than sand or limestone.
>
> I will argue with that assertion. You are essentially denying the
> meaning of the word "ore".
>
Ore in the usable sense _would_ exist. Bog iron, magnesium compounds from
any saltworks that pays attention to the fact that the crystals look
different at different points in the evaporation process--and there's a
fair sized chunk of aluminum from an old Chinese tomb--Tang dynasty or
earlier. Expensive, but doable at the alchemist level of technology--and
"expensive" would have a different meaning in a world where metals were
known but rare.
> > The earth itself is
> > made of the stuff, and wouldn't be anything like the earth without it.
>
> The composition of the Earth is irrelevant,since most of the Earth is
> the mantle and core, which is not accessable. The crust of the earth is
> made of a lot of stuff from which iron cannot be economically extracted
> (mostly silicates); iron is about 4% of the crust by weight.
>
Except that plain old weathering concentrates that iron as oxides, which
are much more useful. Some of the iron we use today derives from laterite
soils, as does almost all our aluminum, and this process is going on all
over the tropics at the same time the bog-beasties are making iron ore in
the colder countries. Nobody refines iron out of basalt, for sure; but
quite a few laterite deposits weathered out of basalt flows indeed serve
as economically viable ores today, and many more would become
"economically viable" about ten minutes after the last higher-grade
deposit was exhausted. (FWIW, I just checked Encyclopedia
Britannica; its first paragraph on "laterite" mentions 77 percent ferric
oxide, 8.6 percent aluminum oxide, and only 2.8 percent silica.)
> > And I just can't see any culture that takes ceramics a long, long way
> > without learning how to reduce iron. A kiln is just too good an
> > environment--there's going to be an accidental discovery if they take that
> > road.
>
>
> Maybe. Maybe not.
>
Check with potters about how they make glazes work. They know all about
controlled and reproducible oxidizing and reducing environments at high
temperatures, even if they don't know the chemistry behind what they're
doing.
Conrad Hodson
Timothy C. Eisele
> I don't know this firsthand, but I was surprised while researching the
> early history of metalworking to encounter more than one claim that bogs
> could be _remined_ for bog iron nodules every century or three. I'll try
> to hunt up some cites--AFAIK no one on Earth has mined bog iron for the
> last century, so a reasonable test might be to check out one of the bogs
> near Saugus, Massachusetts or near any settled place in northern
> Europe. Those bogs were dug out quite thorougly in the old days, so if
> they've grown a new crop of nodules we'd have our test.
This sounds perfectly reasonable, considering that the bog about 500 feet
from our house is merrily depositing bog iron right now. I've been watching
it accumulate during the three years that we've owned the house, the
deposition rate is quite brisk. I should try mining and smelting it
next summer, just for the heck of it. For that matter, there is a
largeish lump of "synthetic bog iron" accumulating in our *water heater*
(our water has a lot of dissolved iron in it), so if nothing else, we
could smelt *that*. I estimate the water heater accumulates about 10
pounds per year, which is nothing to sneeze at considering we don't
heat all that much water.
--
Tim Eisele
tcei...@mtu.edu
Conrad Hodson
> Conrad Hodson <con...@efn.org> wrote:
>
> > I don't know this firsthand, but I was surprised while researching the
> > early history of metalworking to encounter more than one claim that bogs
> > could be _remined_ for bog iron nodules every century or three. I'll try
> > to hunt up some cites--AFAIK no one on Earth has mined bog iron for the
> > last century, so a reasonable test might be to check out one of the bogs
> > near Saugus, Massachusetts or near any settled place in northern
> > Europe. Those bogs were dug out quite thorougly in the old days, so if
> > they've grown a new crop of nodules we'd have our test.
>
> This sounds perfectly reasonable, considering that the bog about 500 feet
> from our house is merrily depositing bog iron right now. I've been watching
> it accumulate during the three years that we've owned the house, the
> deposition rate is quite brisk. I should try mining and smelting it
> next summer, just for the heck of it.
Thank you! I was hoping that someone reading this actually lived near
enough to a bog to check conveniently; the ones nearest me are about 50
miles away and under deep snow right now.
Incidentally, what's the local bedrock?
For that matter, there is a
> largeish lump of "synthetic bog iron" accumulating in our *water heater*
> (our water has a lot of dissolved iron in it), so if nothing else, we
> could smelt *that*. I estimate the water heater accumulates about 10
> pounds per year, which is nothing to sneeze at considering we don't
> heat all that much water.
Sounds like you have a remarkable amount of iron in your local water! I
hope you have a RO or water softener--that much dissolved iron can
actually be toxic, as I recall.
But thanks for contributing some direct observations on the question. I'd
heard it from enough secondary sources to believe it as a working
hypothesis, but it's nice to have a primary source show up in response to
the subject.
Conrad Hodson
DataPacRat
> Iron is widespread in reasonable concentrations, and for the low-tech
> peoples tends to accumulate in bogs as masses of high-grade hydrated iron
> oxides. This "bog iron" is a renewable resource.
There's some discussion on this in another part of this thread. Are the
organisms that concentrate bog iron common in all bogs? What benefits do
they get out of doing so? How hard would it be to come up with a reason
why the Rrangoon wouldn't be able to use this?
> Aluminum is extractable from clay, which is a natural product of rock
> weathering and is available in essentially inexhaustable amounts.
Well, at least that sets my mind at ease about keeping /clay/ available
to the Rrangoon... :)
> As long as all knowledge of how to extract these metals is not lost,
> they will be available.
One idea that I've kept in mind, but haven't actually written out, was
the existence of a group of Rrangoon who tried to preserve what knowledge
they could during (and after) the fall of their precursor culture. This
group also lets me get away with having some cultural elements that are
common across nearly all Rrangoon, such as their language (an artificial
trade-tongue, ala Esperanto or Lojban). It's also added a few cultural
elements by its very existence; I've recently come up with the idea of
"note-webs", a sort of combination of family-quilt and family-bible that
each Rrangoon copies from her parent(s) before leaving home and starting
to tie her own ideas into (literally), containing some basic essentials of
Rrangoon culture, philosophy, and whatever else I decide to throw in
there.
The hard part is making sure that the Rrangoon /lost/ some fairly
important ideas over the centuries. I suppose I'm going to have to take
another, closer look at the only Earthly example I know of where that
happened, the "Dark Ages" of pre-Renaissance Europe, and see if anything
from there can be applied to the Rrangoon. (Unless somebody here happens
to know off-hand, or of any other instances - factual or fictional...)
> Other metals, like copper, could be depleted as far as high-grade ores,
> but they are present in building wire and are usually used in
> non-dispersive applications that can be easily recovered by a rebuilding
> civilization.
Hm... it seems that I'm going to have to come up with a way for the
Rrangoon's precursor consumerist civilization /to/ disperse those
resources, at least widely enough for their successor cultures to have
enough difficulty recovering them that they don't discover much about EM.
Do you happen to have any suggestions along this line?
James Nicoll
DataPacRat <spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> wrote:
>
> The hard part is making sure that the Rrangoon /lost/ some fairly
>important ideas over the centuries. I suppose I'm going to have to take
>another, closer look at the only Earthly example I know of where that
>happened, the "Dark Ages" of pre-Renaissance Europe, and see if anything
>from there can be applied to the Rrangoon. (Unless somebody here happens
>to know off-hand, or of any other instances - factual or fictional...)
Tasmania, where the locals lost the art of fishing.
>
>> Other metals, like copper, could be depleted as far as high-grade ores,
>> but they are present in building wire and are usually used in
>> non-dispersive applications that can be easily recovered by a rebuilding
>> civilization.
>
> Hm... it seems that I'm going to have to come up with a way for the
>Rrangoon's precursor consumerist civilization /to/ disperse those
>resources, at least widely enough for their successor cultures to have
>enough difficulty recovering them that they don't discover much about EM.
>Do you happen to have any suggestions along this line?
How about a loud source of EM noise or some phenomenon which
runs up immense voltages in any reasonable length of metal? This may
have other effects, of course.
--
"Don't worry. It's just a bunch of crazies who believe in only one
god. They're just this far away from atheism."
Wayne & Schuster
DataPacRat
> On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, DataPacRat wrote:
>> in the Rrangoon background text, I mention the possibility of
>> extracting silicon from plain old sand by baking it in the presence of
>> carbon (charcoal) and absence of oxygen.
> Anyway, heating iron oxides with carbon (charcoal from any organic matter
> baked in the absence of air) will reduce the iron to metal and it only
> takes a temperature of a couple thousand degrees F. It can be done with
> charcoal from scrap wood and a leather bellows, and in fact was done
> exactly that way for the first two thousand years of the Iron Age. High
> tech it isn't--the Mande in Mali used to use termite mounds as pre-made
> blast furnaces. Slavic blacksmiths reduced their own iron from ore on
> their own everyday side-draft forges.
>
> My guess would be that most cultures would be able to reduce and work iron
> several centuries before they could make a useful solar furnace.
Hm... the only reason I wrote about the Rrangoon acquiring silicon that
way was to give them something to create metal-backed, glass mirrors out
of, as I wanted them to have some relatively complex optics. I suppose,
then, that in order to keep their historical metal-tech to a minimum, I'm
going to have to erase that technology from their collective memories, and
either come up with a way of making mirrors without pure metal (any
suggestions?), or have them lack mirrors entirely and make do with glass
lenses, prisms, and the like.
Either way, thank you for the information. :)
DataPacRat
> DataPacRat wrote:
>> I work off-and-on on describing an alien species I've created, the
>> Rrangoon. One of the background points that I've already established is
>> that x thousand years ago, the Rrangoon civilization managed to use up
>> pretty much everything on the planet that was use-uppable. (This point
>> was introduced mainly to keep the current Rrangoon culture from having
>> much (if any) metal available to notice magnetism in and develop
>> theories thereon - for example, their knowledge of electricity being
>> more about organic ion flow than metallic electron exchange.)
> Sounds like an extreme case of the trouble the Moties had in _The Mote
> in God's Eye_ (Pournelle and Niven).
As a matter of fact, I hadn't read that novel until after I'd started
coming up with the Rrangoon - but when I did, I noticed some of the
similaritites, and took any ideas that seemed to fit will. (Not that I
remember which they are, anymore).
>> So: Given a reasonably Earth-like planet, and a reasonably "consumer"
>> civilization, what resources can be made unavailable to successor
>> civilizations? For example, fossil fuels can be burned up, but
>> coal-tar-like substances can be created from appropriately treating
>> ordinary plant matter. Anything that can be mined can be mined out...
>> but if the the products don't rust into nothingness, they might be
>> dumped into cities / trash-middens that can be further mined... I
>> think.
> Certainly, but if your Rrangoon have no concept of the periodic table
> or of metallurgy, they might have trouble realizing those interesting
> artifacts they find are composed of more than one element. Frinst if you
> didn't know brass was an alloy you might think it was an element.
Okay, fair enough; this also gives me a way for those trash-middens'
useful-but-complex metals to be unwittingly dispersed as the items are
mined, used, and thrown into the locals' junk-heaps.
DataPacRat
> On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Geoffrey A. Landis wrote:
> Actually, anaerobic bacteria (possibly descendants of the ones who
> precipitated the Precambrian deposits) are alive and well in every healthy
> peat bog. They live by a reaction which takes iron ions leached from the
> surrounding rocks and soils and precipitating hydrated iron oxides into
> nodules traditionally known as "bog iron". Bog iron was the mainstay of
> the Iron Age for a couple of millenia; the first blast furnace in America
> was fired with it.
>
> I don't know this firsthand, but I was surprised while researching the
> early history of metalworking to encounter more than one claim that bogs
> could be _remined_ for bog iron nodules every century or three.
A question - where in the bogs do these iron nodules appear? The Rrangoon
happen to be fairly hydrophobic, so depending on how toxic this sort of
bacteria finds oxygen, I might be able to get away with bog-iron having a
negligable effect on their technology without having to tweak their
world's microbiology even further than I already have.
> A lot of these survivalist scenarios--recovery after disaster or megawar
> or thorough resource depletion--would really be strongly influencd by
> finds of artifacts and information that simply weren't available the
> first time around. In other words, the situation differs not just
> because all the high-grade ores and fuels are gone, but because there's
> a lot more information to be found as well. So I suspect that many
> different technical roads get taken during redevelopment as opposed to
> original development. Archaeology in such a world might be as practical
> and economically vital field of study as materials science is to us
> today.
One idea that I've posited for the Rrangoon is the existence of a group
that tried, not always successfully, to preserve the knowledge of their
precursor civilization. However, given the ravenous micro-organisms on
their planet, that had to take the form of a more active process than it
would on our own world; for example, we have Medieval manuscripts and
Ancient Egyptian papyri that have survived for centuries, which the
Rrangoon would have to do without until they get some relatively advanced
material science. (Hm... Clay tablets might be another matter, if they
weren't scattered or broken, and possibly ceramics; I'm going to have to
think some more about this potential twist.)
Another event in the Rrangoon's history based on this precise theme is in
their near future, when they discover evidence on their sun's outermost
planet of some sort of intelligent life that existed before their own
precursor/consumerist culture, opening a whole new can of worms... (And,
depending on what universe the Rrangoon are in, giving me an excuse to
give them FTL travel without having to learn everything humanity currently
knows. :) )
> "expensive" would have a different meaning in a world where metals were
> known but rare.
Also, in a world where metals were known, but not known very well...
>>> And I just can't see any culture that takes ceramics a long, long way
>>> without learning how to reduce iron. A kiln is just too good an
>>> environment--there's going to be an accidental discovery if they take
>>> that road.
> Check with potters about how they make glazes work. They know all about
> controlled and reproducible oxidizing and reducing environments at high
> temperatures, even if they don't know the chemistry behind what they're
> doing.
I'm afraid that my only knowledge of real-life pottery comes from passing
references while researching other topics. Could you offer a good
reference about ceramic-tech for a beginner like myself?
Conrad Hodson
> In article <HyvU7.23376$J%2.34...@news20.bellglobal.com>,
> DataPacRat <spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> wrote:
> >
> > The hard part is making sure that the Rrangoon /lost/ some fairly
> >important ideas over the centuries. I suppose I'm going to have to take
> >another, closer look at the only Earthly example I know of where that
> >happened, the "Dark Ages" of pre-Renaissance Europe, and see if anything
> >from there can be applied to the Rrangoon. (Unless somebody here happens
> >to know off-hand, or of any other instances - factual or fictional...)
>
> Tasmania, where the locals lost the art of fishing.
Easter Island, where they lost the whole technology of seafaring and
stranded themselves.
Perhaps we shouldn't talk about the US space program....
> >
> > Hm... it seems that I'm going to have to come up with a way for the
> >Rrangoon's precursor consumerist civilization /to/ disperse those
> >resources, at least widely enough for their successor cultures to have
> >enough difficulty recovering them that they don't discover much about EM.
> >Do you happen to have any suggestions along this line?
>
> How about a loud source of EM noise or some phenomenon which
> runs up immense voltages in any reasonable length of metal? This may
> have other effects, of course.
> -
Or a nonphysical factor such as a religious taboo? I suspect that what
you're trying for is just about physically impossible--i.e. it can't be
done without changing the laws of physics and chemistry themselves, which
most likely kills your whole ecosystem as a minor side effect.
Religious taboos, OTOH, can be quite dysfunctional and utterly
irrational; the only justification the original priests who made them up
ever had to give was "the will of the god(s)" or "it is written". Well,
you're the Creator of this world--write what you want.
There have even been some fun anti-metal taboos used in science
fiction. Robert Sheckley's Lumism, an evangelical faith founded by an old
beatnik after a nuclear war: "All we have to do is get rid of the goddam
metal. After that, everything will swing."
The other survivor cultures are trying to rebuild, and greatly resent the
Lumist fanatic bands who sweep through the islands and throw all the metal
they can find into the sea. (Lum himself met his martyrdom at the hands
of a large and angry Fijian defending his sewing machine.) However, even
the opposing cultural leaders have trouble denying the truth behind Lum's
famous dictum: "Man--you ever try to build an atom bomb out of coral and
coconut shells?"
Conrad Hodson
Conrad Hodson
On Fri, 21 Dec 2001, DataPacRat wrote:
>
> > Check with potters about how they make glazes work. They know all about
> > controlled and reproducible oxidizing and reducing environments at high
> > temperatures, even if they don't know the chemistry behind what they're
> > doing.
>
> I'm afraid that my only knowledge of real-life pottery comes from passing
> references while researching other topics. Could you offer a good
> reference about ceramic-tech for a beginner like myself?
Sorry, not my craft--I've just been impressed by potters and their grasp
of the science and technique behind their craft, particularly by the
importance of controlling oxidizing or reducing environments within the
kilns.
For more info, or sources, ask some working potters, or even better,
someone who teaches ceramics at a university. I'm sure there must be
books on the order of "The Chemistry of Clay" or "Technology of the Kiln",
I just haven't seen them.
Conrad Hodson
Geoff McCaughan
> The hard part is making sure that the Rrangoon /lost/ some fairly
> important ideas over the centuries. I suppose I'm going to have to take
> another, closer look at the only Earthly example I know of where that
> happened, the "Dark Ages" of pre-Renaissance Europe, and see if anything
> from there can be applied to the Rrangoon. (Unless somebody here happens
> to know off-hand, or of any other instances - factual or fictional...)
Two examples you could look up are:
The Antikythera Machine [an intricate mechanism built ~80BC]
The Baghdad Batteries [electric cells from ~230AD]
Imagine where we would be had electricity not been lost for ~1500
years...
Ian Burrell
Conrad Hodson <con...@efn.org> wrote:
>
>Or a nonphysical factor such as a religious taboo? I suspect that what
>you're trying for is just about physically impossible--i.e. it can't be
>done without changing the laws of physics and chemistry themselves, which
>most likely kills your whole ecosystem as a minor side effect.
>
>Religious taboos, OTOH, can be quite dysfunctional and utterly
>irrational; the only justification the original priests who made them up
>ever had to give was "the will of the god(s)" or "it is written". Well,
>you're the Creator of this world--write what you want.
>
The problem is that this taboo needs to extend to all the cultures
everywhere. Metal weaponry is a major advantage in battle. What
happens is that the barbarians acquire metal working and sweep down
from the hills. This seems to have happened in places when iron
working cultures met the settled bronze age cultures.
Even within a culture, I can't see such a taboo lasting unless there
is constant reinforcement from a practical reason. Otherwise, some
farmer figures out that a metal axe works much better and questions
why the taboo even exists.
>There have even been some fun anti-metal taboos used in science
>fiction. Robert Sheckley's Lumism, an evangelical faith founded by an old
>beatnik after a nuclear war: "All we have to do is get rid of the goddam
>metal. After that, everything will swing."
>
>The other survivor cultures are trying to rebuild, and greatly resent the
>Lumist fanatic bands who sweep through the islands and throw all the metal
>they can find into the sea. (Lum himself met his martyrdom at the hands
>of a large and angry Fijian defending his sewing machine.) However, even
>the opposing cultural leaders have trouble denying the truth behind Lum's
>famous dictum: "Man--you ever try to build an atom bomb out of coral and
>coconut shells?"
>
How do the fanatics win? How did they get the overwhelming numbers
needed? Metal swords against wood spears are a big advantage. Metal
guns are a huge advantage.
- Ian
--
Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap.
DataPacRat
> DataPacRat <spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> wrote:
>>> Other metals, like copper, could be depleted as far as high-grade
>>> ores, but they are present in building wire and are usually used in
>>> non-dispersive applications that can be easily recovered by a
>>> rebuilding civilization.
>> Hm... it seems that I'm going to have to come up with a way for the
>> Rrangoon's precursor consumerist civilization /to/ disperse those
>> resources, at least widely enough for their successor cultures to have
>> enough difficulty recovering them that they don't discover much about
>> EM. Do you happen to have any suggestions along this line?
> How about a loud source of EM noise or some phenomenon which
> runs up immense voltages in any reasonable length of metal? This may
> have other effects, of course.
That's an interesting suggestion, but I think that it's probably more
likely that those 'other effects' would include Rrangoon trying to
experiment with the shocks, which is the opposite of what I'm striving
for. (On the other hand, if /all/ the experimenters die, a rough
rule-of-thumb about what happens to those who play with metal might crop
up... <grin>)
Hm... another possibility might be to contaminate the precursor's
metallic artifacts with enough radioactivity to sicken those who dig them
up, and with the right balance between half-life and strength, a similar
rule-of-thumb might crop up fairly early... Happen to know any way to
induce radioactivity across a large cross-section of a planet without
quite completely wiping out the local sentient species? <evil grin> Or is
that particular idea too cliched?
DataPacRat
>> DataPacRat <spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> wrote:
>>> Hm... it seems that I'm going to have to come up with a way for the
>>> Rrangoon's precursor consumerist civilization /to/ disperse those
>>> resources, at least widely enough for their successor cultures to have
>>> enough difficulty recovering them that they don't discover much about
>>> EM. Do you happen to have any suggestions along this line?
> I suspect that what you're trying for is just about physically
> impossible--i.e. it can't be done without changing the laws of physics
> and chemistry themselves, which most likely kills your whole ecosystem
> as a minor side effect.
Well, finding out whether or not it's possible is why I posted here in
the first place, after all. And I suspect that it'll turn out to be
possible, just not the way I thought it would. :)
> Religious taboos, OTOH, can be quite dysfunctional and utterly
> irrational; the only justification the original priests who made them up
> ever had to give was "the will of the god(s)" or "it is written".
True, although in the Rrangoon's case, it might be difficult to justify
such a taboo over the whole planet for such a long time. About the only
single connecting thread that I can think of would be their "note-web"
bible-quilts, copied from parent to child supposedly back to their
Eve-figure. Hm... I suppose that a few dropped stitches in the right spot
by somebody early enough might turn one phrase into something more along
the lines of such a taboo, and get distributed widely enough...
It's an idea worth pondering - thank you kindly.
> Well, you're the Creator of this world--write what you want.
<grin> True 'nough - but this Creator is trying to at least keep
self-consistency within sight, if not reach. :)
> Lum's famous dictum: "Man--you ever try to build an atom bomb out of
> coral and coconut shells?"
Actually, that's an interesting challenge... let's see now: a gun-type
bomb, where two sub-critical masses are slapped together, is pretty
simple. Heck, just built a tall chimney, put the two fissiles at either
end, then drop a few tons with the upper one to keep them together long
enough to start a decent chain reaction. The hard part, of course, is
simply acquiring the fissiles. I seem to recall that uranium is just about
the only naturally-occuring possibility, but I could be wrong; but
whatever element is used, the right isotope still has to be refined from
the overall mass, and I'm afraid that I don't even recall what methods are
possible for us now, let alone what might be possible without metal
equipment.
Timothy C. Eisele
> A question - where in the bogs do these iron nodules appear? The Rrangoon
> happen to be fairly hydrophobic, so depending on how toxic this sort of
> bacteria finds oxygen, I might be able to get away with bog-iron having a
> negligable effect on their technology without having to tweak their
> world's microbiology even further than I already have.
In the bog beside our house, it works like this:
There is a spring uphill from the bog, and the water from it contains
iron in the Fe+2 state (this is from leaching of a basalt bedrock formation).
The Fe+2 is probably being mobilized from the rock simply by the
slightly acidic nature of rainfall, although it is possible there
are anaerobic iron-reducing bacteria down there.
The water flows slowly across the bog, and is oxidized (probably by
the action of the bacteria Thiobacillus ferrooxidans, although it may
be some other organism or set of organisms). Iron in the Fe+3 state
forms an insoluble hydroxide, and precipitates out of the slowly-flowing
water. In our bog, it looks to be depositing about a quarter-inch per
year over an area about 3 feet x 20 feet or so. Iron-oxidizing bacteria
are aerobic, so they are certainly not killed by oxygen.
Overall, the iron deposit is in a wet, but pretty well-aerated, area.
In this particular case, the deposit is more of a sheet or lens of iron
hydroxide, not nodules, but I expect that depends a lot on the nature
of the water flows.
--
Tim Eisele
tcei...@mtu.edu
Timothy C. Eisele
> On 20 Dec 2001, Timothy C. Eisele wrote:
> > This sounds perfectly reasonable, considering that the bog about 500 feet
> > from our house is merrily depositing bog iron right now. I've been watching
> > it accumulate during the three years that we've owned the house, the
> > deposition rate is quite brisk. I should try mining and smelting it
> > next summer, just for the heck of it.
> Thank you! I was hoping that someone reading this actually lived near
> enough to a bog to check conveniently; the ones nearest me are about 50
> miles away and under deep snow right now.
> Incidentally, what's the local bedrock?
Mostly basalt. We're in Michigan, right next to Lake Superior, and
are on the edge of the Canadian Shield. Our bog apparently exists
because the bedrock is close to the surface there, and forces the
water up through a series of small springs in the hillside.
> For that matter, there is a
> > largeish lump of "synthetic bog iron" accumulating in our *water heater*
> > (our water has a lot of dissolved iron in it), so if nothing else, we
> > could smelt *that*. I estimate the water heater accumulates about 10
> > pounds per year, which is nothing to sneeze at considering we don't
> > heat all that much water.
> Sounds like you have a remarkable amount of iron in your local water! I
> hope you have a RO or water softener--that much dissolved iron can
> actually be toxic, as I recall.
Well, the water turns light brown about 5 minutes after coming out of the
tap, so yes, there is quite a bit of iron. It doesn't taste all that
great (there's a definite hydrogen sulfide odor to it), so we mostly drink
cheap bottled water. Yes, a water-treatment system is in our future, it
is the next scheduled home-improvement task . . .
--
Tim Eisele
tcei...@mtu.edu
Karl M. Syring
> Timothy C. Eisele <tcei...@mtu.edu> wrote:
>
> > Iron is widespread in reasonable concentrations, and for the low-tech
> > peoples tends to accumulate in bogs as masses of high-grade hydrated
iron
> > oxides. This "bog iron" is a renewable resource.
>
> There's some discussion on this in another part of this thread. Are the
> organisms that concentrate bog iron common in all bogs? What benefits do
> they get out of doing so? How hard would it be to come up with a reason
> why the Rrangoon wouldn't be able to use this?
That problem would be easy to solve: Just postulate that, for some reason,
there are lots of nitrate around in the surface water. This would strongly
inhibit the reduction of the relatively insoluble FeIII+ to FeII+,
preventing the transport of the soluble FeII+. Thus there would be no
accumulation of iron oxides by reoxidation of the FeII+.
BTW: hasn't been the flooding of soils with nitrate been used in SF
somewhere?
Karl M. Syring
Paul F. Dietz
> That problem would be easy to solve: Just postulate that, for some reason,
> there are lots of nitrate around in the surface water. This would strongly
> inhibit the reduction of the relatively insoluble FeIII+ to FeII+,
> preventing the transport of the soluble FeII+.
The problem is that if the planet is anything like Earth, it is almost
entirely reduced. Fe(+3) occurs only very near the surface. Most
of the rocks will already contain Fe(+2). Basalt, for example,
has this ion in the easily weathered neosilicate olivine. The nitrate
will run out long before all the Fe(+2) is oxidized.
Paul
Karl M. Syring
But nitrate must only be present at upper 10 m or so to be effective, and it
works here on earth. Most bogs here in Europe have an impervious layer of
clay beneath a layer of sand that prevents a geochemical equilibrium with
the whole of the earth crust quite effectively.
The net effect of the iron/nitrate interaction is in most cases the
reduction of nitrate to gaseous nitrogen, cleaning up the water. Thus you
would need lots of nitrate to inhibit the Fe(+2) formation. I think, the
ObSF here is Hal Clement's The Nitrogen Fix.
Karl M. Syring
Karl M. Syring
Conrad Hodson
> metallic artifacts with enough radioactivity to sicken those who dig them
> up, and with the right balance between half-life and strength, a similar
> rule-of-thumb might crop up fairly early... Happen to know any way to
> induce radioactivity across a large cross-section of a planet without
> quite completely wiping out the local sentient species? <evil grin> Or is
> that particular idea too cliched?
Not too cliched, but again it means rewriting too many natural laws. Most
ordinary crustal minerals include a considerable proportion of their mass
as _metals_. If they're not radioactive, they're safely available for
use. If they _are_ radioactive, you've just sterilized the planet. Or
rewritten the laws of physics, or geochemistry.
Conrad Hodson
Conrad Hodson
>
> > coral and coconut shells?"
>
> Actually, that's an interesting challenge... let's see now: a gun-type
> bomb, where two sub-critical masses are slapped together, is pretty
> simple. Heck, just built a tall chimney, put the two fissiles at either
> end, then drop a few tons with the upper one to keep them together long
> enough to start a decent chain reaction. The hard part, of course, is
> simply acquiring the fissiles. I seem to recall that uranium is just about
> the only naturally-occuring possibility, but I could be wrong; but
> whatever element is used, the right isotope still has to be refined from
> the overall mass, and I'm afraid that I don't even recall what methods are
> possible for us now, let alone what might be possible without metal
> equipment.
With coral and coconut shells and sea water, the possibility seems quite
remote. Also, even if you somehow handwave the fissiles, your bomb-tower
has a major tactical problem as a weapon: building it in an enemy city
without someone noticing hostiles conducting a major construction
project. Alternatively, building it in one of your own cities, you risk
both nuclear devastation and many centuries of ethnic jokes.
Conrad Hodson
DataPacRat
> On Fri, 21 Dec 2001, DataPacRat wrote:
>>> Lum's famous dictum: "Man--you ever try to build an atom bomb out of
>>> coral and coconut shells?"
>> Actually, that's an interesting challenge... let's see now: a gun-type
>> bomb, where two sub-critical masses are slapped together, is pretty
>> simple. Heck, just built a tall chimney, put the two fissiles at either
>> end, then drop a few tons with the upper one to keep them together long
>> enough to start a decent chain reaction. The hard part, of course, is
>> simply acquiring the fissiles. I seem to recall that uranium is just
>> about the only naturally-occuring possibility, but I could be wrong;
>> but whatever element is used, the right isotope still has to be refined
>> from the overall mass, and I'm afraid that I don't even recall what
>> methods are possible for us now, let alone what might be possible
>> without metal equipment.
> With coral and coconut shells and sea water, the possibility seems quite
> remote.
Remote is one thing, impossible quite another... let me see now... most
isotope-seperation methods rely on the isotopes' different masses, somehow
or other putting them into a liquid-like state where the heavier atoms
seperate from the lighter ones. I don't have a periodic table handy, so I
don't know how high a temperature would be necessary to melt uranium. (For
that matter, I don't have a geochemistry text handy to tell me what
minerals uranium can be extracted from.) But it just might be possible to
rig together, Gilligan's Island style, a simple blast furnace (with, say,
people blowing into bamboo tubes to give the flames more oxygen) with a
pedal-powered centrifuge, and skim from either the top or the bottom
depending on whether you want the lighter or heavier isotopes...
> Also, even if you somehow handwave the fissiles, your bomb-tower
> has a major tactical problem as a weapon: building it in an enemy city
> without someone noticing hostiles conducting a major construction
> project.
A full-fledged "tower" isn't necessarily necessary. There are only a
couple of real requirements: one, keeping the two fissile masses apart
until you want to set off the device, which requires little, if any, more
than either sticking a crowbar (or big stick) between them or keeping them
a few feet apart; two, getting them together when you want to set off the
reaction, and keeping them together for as long as possible while the
pressure from the chain-reaction builds. Without metal, or even gunpowder,
it should be possible to create enough compressive force with some heavy
rocks.
With these two items in mind, our tower can be reduced to a big container
holding all of the rocks together and on top of the two fissile masses; a
tube, maybe a story or two tall, would work, and would have the advantage
of being able to keep the fissiles in place beforehand. In other words,
all you really need to really "light my fire" is a fireplace...
> Alternatively, building it in one of your own cities, you risk both
> nuclear devastation and many centuries of ethnic jokes.
Aw heck, t'weren't nothin' much atall - the hard part was figurin' out
how to set the thing off without bein' too close when it went off. We
solved /that/ one by stickin' a log 'tween the two pieces of new-clear
stuff, settin' it on fire, an gettin' as far away as we could 'fore it
turned inta ashes...
David Alex Lamb
>stranded themselves.
A good example, but basically resource-exhaustion. First they lost the raw
materials -- killed off all the trees to make rollers for setting up the
famous head statues.
>Perhaps we shouldn't talk about the US space program....
Actually it might help a lot. Basically no fundamental "technology" was lost
-- "just" the plans for making Saturn V rockets. So for the Rrangoon, it
might be sufficient to postulate an extreme growth of use of "trade secret"
for specific technologies, followed by a relatively brief period of anarchy
wherin such secrets were lost. I've heard that a few medieval technologies
were lost when the last master died who knew them.
--
"Yo' ideas need to be thinked befo' they are say'd" - Ian Lamb, age 3.5
http://www.cs.queensu.ca/~dalamb/
Christopher M. Jones
> Not too cliched, but again it means rewriting too many natural laws. Most
> ordinary crustal minerals include a considerable proportion of their mass
> as _metals_. If they're not radioactive, they're safely available for
> use. If they _are_ radioactive, you've just sterilized the planet. Or
> rewritten the laws of physics, or geochemistry.
This is especially true for Iron, which exists in the Earth's
crust at about 6% by weight. There are simply too many natural
mechanisms for enriching Iron concentrations and too many easy
ways to extract and work Iron from ores. Other metals like
Aluminum and Silcon exist in even higher concentrations (8%
and 27% respectively). Even something truly rare like gold, 2
ppb, exists in sufficient quantity to make it enormously
difficult to remove all of it from the planet. Plus, any
removal from the surface would only be temporary, as volcanoes
spew out fresh material on a steady basis.
--
Not enough memory to displ~
Christopher M. Jones
> Remote is one thing, impossible quite another... let me see now... most
> isotope-seperation methods rely on the isotopes' different masses, somehow
> or other putting them into a liquid-like state where the heavier atoms
> seperate from the lighter ones. I don't have a periodic table handy, so I
> don't know how high a temperature would be necessary to melt uranium. (For
> that matter, I don't have a geochemistry text handy to tell me what
> minerals uranium can be extracted from.) But it just might be possible to
> rig together, Gilligan's Island style, a simple blast furnace (with, say,
> people blowing into bamboo tubes to give the flames more oxygen) with a
> pedal-powered centrifuge, and skim from either the top or the bottom
> depending on whether you want the lighter or heavier isotopes...
Uranium is never melted in order to separate it. It can be disolved
as a salt (UBr4) or a gas (UF6, a gas at 57 deg. C) and separated via
diffusion, or ionized as an element and separated via magnetic
deflection (similar to mass spectrosocopy).
--
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
Ian Burrell
DataPacRat <spam.datap...@warren.kill.com> wrote:
>
> Remote is one thing, impossible quite another... let me see now... most
>isotope-seperation methods rely on the isotopes' different masses, somehow
>or other putting them into a liquid-like state where the heavier atoms
>seperate from the lighter ones. I don't have a periodic table handy, so I
>don't know how high a temperature would be necessary to melt uranium. (For
>that matter, I don't have a geochemistry text handy to tell me what
>minerals uranium can be extracted from.) But it just might be possible to
>rig together, Gilligan's Island style, a simple blast furnace (with, say,
>people blowing into bamboo tubes to give the flames more oxygen) with a
>pedal-powered centrifuge, and skim from either the top or the bottom
>depending on whether you want the lighter or heavier isotopes...
>
None of the isotope separation processes use liquid uranium. Its
density and temperature would be too high. They use uranium
hexaflouride, an extremely corrosive gas. Nickel plated pipes were
used. The mass difference between U235 and U238 is very slight and
requires many stages to separate. A simple blast furance wouldn't even
get close.
>
> A full-fledged "tower" isn't necessarily necessary. There are only a
>couple of real requirements: one, keeping the two fissile masses apart
>until you want to set off the device, which requires little, if any, more
>than either sticking a crowbar (or big stick) between them or keeping them
>a few feet apart; two, getting them together when you want to set off the
>reaction, and keeping them together for as long as possible while the
>pressure from the chain-reaction builds. Without metal, or even gunpowder,
>it should be possible to create enough compressive force with some heavy
>rocks.
The tower won't work at all. It takes more than heavy rocks to achieve
a nuclear explosion. A nuclear bomb isn't a pressure cooker; the
fissile pit isn't compressed and confined until the chain reaction
builds. The secret is assembling the uranium or plutonium into a
supercritical mass and initiating a chain reaction. The problem is
that if there is stray neutron generated when the assembly is slightly
critical there will be enough of a chain reaction to blow everything
apart but not enough to make an efficient bomb. The spontaneous
generation rate limits the insertion speed. With U235, a gun-type
assembly can be used where two subcritical masses are fired together
at high speed (1000 m/s). With plutonium, only implosion is
possible. Explosives compress the core until the density makes it
supercritical. A tamper is required to increase efficiency; its
inertia, not its strength, slowsthe cores expansion.
- Ian
--
It's kind of fun to do the impossible
-- Walt Disney