The Great Heinlein Juveniles Plus The Other Two Reread 9: Tunnel in the Sky

[James Nicoll]

1955's Tunnel in the Sky takes us to a future Earth jam-packed with
people but rescued from an ongoing Malthusian crisis by the timely
invention of interstellar gates. With access to the hundred thousand
Earth-like worlds1 scattered through the Milky Way, there is enough
room for everyone to spread out while breeding like mice, at least
for a time - I make it about 600 years before all one hundred
thousand worlds are as crammed with people as the Earth is.

There are many interesting ways people can die on worlds like Earth
and to avoid unnecessary recapitulations of Jamestown, Fort San
Juan and Popham, the powers that be, at least in the west, have
mandated survival courses. The final test for the course involves
dropping a class full of kids into a wilderness on some far off
world to see how many come back. It.s like Battle Royale IN SPACE!,
except without the official mandate against team work because the
adults, while sometimes obstructive or casual about risk to teens,
are not out-and-out psychopaths.

At first Rod Walker and his fellow students appear to face only
the usual challenges: finding edible food, avoiding being edible
food and dodging whichever classmate it is who settled on the idea
of hunting their classmates for their useful stuff. Rod enjoys only
mixed success at this: it turns out testing the local food for
edibility by eating it isn't a great idea, the local carnivores
don't quite manage to eat him but they leave scars and the only
reason that Rod survives his encounter with the class sociopath is
that Rod's head is quite astoundingly thick.

There's an unanticipated angle to the test, as the dwindling pool
of kids discover. The test is only supposed to last from two to
ten days before the survivors are retrieved. At the end of the ten
days no gate back to Earth opens and as days turn into weeks it
becomes obvious that if rescue is coming at all, there is no
predicting when it will arrive.

Almost by chance Rod and his chums Jimmy and Jack are the seed for
a community of survivors. As their numbers grow, so does the
complexity of the issues they face, from simple logistics to politics
to defense against the local wildlife. Although this long stay was
never planned for, their training is good enough and the general
good will effective enough that the kids are able to fumble their
way towards a functioning, if primitive, community of sedentary
hunter-gatherers. That process towards a working society is what
this novel is about.

Not to be too harsh on poor Rod but while he's not the dullest
Heinlein protagonist, he may well be the dumbest. In addition to
discovering the hard way that some local plants are purgatives,
narrowly avoiding getting eaten and living through an ambush only
because apparently his head is not a vital hit location, Rod also
fails to notice one of his teammates is a woman despite having
wrestled with her until after he delivers a misogynist diatribe
and after the indefensible nature of the town's location nearly
leads to a total party kill invokes the sunk cost fallacy to justify
not relocating to a superior location.

Sadly, this is marred with the usual Heinleinisms. Not just the
Malthusian models that provide the motivation to race to the stars
but a trained eye can detect subtle differences between how the
American-style pioneers are portrayed:


here each family had its own wagon..long, sweeping, boat-tight
Conestogas drawn by three-pair teams and housed in sturdy glass
canvas square and businesslike Studebakers with steel bodies,
high mudcutter wheels, and pulled by one or two-pair teams.
The draft animals were Morgans and lordly Clydesdales and
jug-headed Missouri mules with strong shoulders and shrewd,
suspicious eyes. Dogs trotted between wheels, wagons were piled
high with household goods and implements and children, poultry
protested the indignities of fate in cages tied on behind, and
a little Shetland pony, riderless but carrying his saddle and
just a bit too tall to run underneath with the dogs, stayed
close to the tailgate of one family's rig.

And how the Asian immigrants are depicted:

The crowd streaming through the pen were Asiatics- Japanese,
Indonesians, Siamese, some East Indians, a few Eurasians, but
predominantly South Chinese. To Rod they all looked much alike-
tiny women with babies on hip or back, or often one on back
and one in arms, endless runny-nosed and shaven-headed children,
fathers with household goods ill enormous back packs or pushed
ahead on barrows. There were a few dispirited ponies dragging
two-wheeled carts much too big for them but most of the torrent
had only that which they could carry.

As well, the justifications for why the American settlers equip
themselves for a 19th century society are not convincing. By choosing
that toolkit, they are limiting their productivity to 19th century
levels, which is going to make ramping up to modern levels of
prosperity that much harder. But Americans are nostalgic for the
19th century.

Part of the justification for sending out low tech colonies is
because interstellar gates are energy-expensive, so contact is only
worth while once the colony has stuff - "food and fissionable
metals" - worth that cost to send back. Leaving aside questions
like "how would you design a system for optimum mass transfer given
short periods of contact", Heinlein then goes on to provide this
colour text:

Ortega's torch ships brought the Solar System within reach.
Based on mass conversion, Einstein's deathless E= MC^2 they
could boost for the entire trip at any acceleration the pilot
could stand.

In his defense, the bit about them having total conversion is more
than a page away from the part about importing fissionables.

Some authors go out of their way to handicap the supporting characters
so the protagonist looks better by comparison but Heinlein didn.t
to that in the juveniles and he certainly didn't do it in this. If
anything, Rod makes everyone around him look better, whether its
Jack proving they are not just in Africa or Bob trying to keep
everyone alive with his rudimentary medical skills. I think my
favourite in this is the ingenious Caroline, who turns out to have
filled a deceptively small duffel bag with Many Useful Things.

Rod is the character who delivered one of Heinlein.s funnier lines,
in the process showing sometimes narrators are unreliable. On
discovering that his sister is marrying his teacher:

Rod did so, remembered to shake hands with the Deacon. It was
all right, he guessed, but- well, how old were they? Sis must
be thirtyish and the Deacon. why the Deacon was old- probably
past forty. It did not seem quite decent.

But he did his best to make them feel that he approved. After
he thought it over he decided that if two people, with their
lives behind them, wanted company in their old age, why, it
was probably a good thing.

I am sad to say I only noticed how funny that is well after after
I stopped being a teenager.

Many people believe that Rod is black. The actual evidence is
somewhat equivocal: Rod says Caroline, who is African, looks a bit
like his sister. Aside from that, there's not a lot of physical
description in this book.

The Heinlein Society's Frequently Asked Questions about Robert A.
Heinlein offers this bit of evidence:

The evidence is slim but definite. First and foremost, outside
of the text, there is a letter in which RAH firmly states that
Rod is black, and that Johnny Rico is Filipino. As to the text
itself, it is implied rather than overt. RAH often played games
with the skin color of his characters, in what I see as a
disarming tactic against racists who may come to identify with
the hero, then realize later on that they have identified with
somebody they supposedly hate. He does this in a number of
different places. Part of this may also have to do with the
publishing mores of the time, which probably would not have
let him get away with making his main character black in a
juvenile novel. The most telling evidence is that everybody in
"Tunnel" expects Rod to end up with Caroline, who is explicitly
described as black. While that expectation may seem somewhat
racist to us today, it would be a firm hint to the mindset of
the fifties, which would have been opposed to interracial
marriages.

Sadly, not only did Heinlein have a proven track record of
misremembering his own work (as shown by his confusion over whether
the text of Starship Trooper supported the assertion that voting
rights could be earned with non-military services) but Tunnel is
pretty clear, at least to my eyes, that that the kids in it have
no problems with mixed race marriages. Caroline is a bit put out
that "M" marries Margery Chung because Caroline had her eye on him.
While in real life names are not a reliable guide to ethnicity, in
fiction they often are. Caroline is African, Chung seems to be of
Chinese descent and it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion
either one of the Caroline + M or Chung + M would be an interracial
marriage. I guess M could be both African and Chinese but that only
moves the interracial marriage in question up a generation and back
to Earth.

Since the majority of Americans didn't come to see mixed race
marriages as acceptable until the mid-1990s, forty years after this
book was written, that minor bit of business was pretty daring on
Heinlein's part.

Rod's ongoing reluctance to have anything to do with women is kind
of interesting. A lot of Heinlein juveniles, that could be put down
to the conventions of the genre but in this the kids are explicitly
pairing off and the later appearance of babies strongly suggests
they are having sex with each other. Not Rod, though. And then
there's this line:

"Just like his father," Jimmy said proudly. "Kisses women only."

Which kind of suggests that not all the men kiss women only. I
think the facts support the idea that Rod just doesn't have sexual
urges at all and being as thick as he is, has a hard time wrapping
his mind around why other people do.

While women get to be as competent as the men . even pushing back
when the men try to "protect them" - I am sad to say that as usual
with Heinlein marriage pretty much back burners all non-baby
ambitions they have. Oh, well. Having all women Amazon units was
pretty progressive for the 1950s and so is eschewing the idea the
women would be too squeamish to get their hands bloody.

One of the recurring themes in Heinlein of this period is the
vanished civilization and this book has two: one native to this
world and a reference to Selenites. Where the locals went is a
mystery and because the community never moves into the abandoned
cliff dwellings, not one that gets any serious effort to solve. I
don.t think it.s an attempt to evoke myths Americans had about the
empty frontier. I wish more had been done with this part of the
book.

Another recurring theme in Heinlein's young adult novels - one that
will be of particular importance in Citizen of the Galaxy - is
being forced to chose between incompatible goals. Rod's decision-making
process never takes much time so he is firmly resolute when it
comes to deciding whether to stay in Cowpertown or accept an offer
of rescue. Rod is just one person in an entire community, which
lands him in another situation that comes up from time to time in
Heinlein, which is how to gracefully handle not getting one's own
way. In fact, Rod gets hit with that one a few times and as much
fun as I have mocking his intelligence, he does show an awareness
of when stubbornness is not his ally.

While the world building is sometimes shaky, and his efforts to
transcend the prejudices of his time often fall short, there are
some nice bits to this. Readers interested in trying it for themselves
may buy it in a variety of formats, although I got bored before I
managed to find a mass market or a trade I was 100% sure is still
in print.

1: Which means only one star in a million has a planet where humans
can walk around, which in turn means the average distance between
any two of them should be something like 500 light years?Hope the
people on the sublight starships that get mentioned early on brought
books for the trip.

--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll (For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)

[Brian M. Scott]

On Sat, 11 Oct 2014 03:32:06 +0000 (UTC), James Nicoll
<jdni...@panix.com> wrote in
<news:m1a8bm$c43$1...@reader1.panix.com> in
rec.arts.sf.written:

[...]

> Not to be too harsh on poor Rod but while he's not the
> dullest Heinlein protagonist, he may well be the dumbest.

[...]

> Rod is the character who delivered one of Heinlein.s
> funnier lines, in the process showing sometimes narrators
> are unreliable. On discovering that his sister is
> marrying his teacher:

> Rod did so, remembered to shake hands with the Deacon. It was
> all right, he guessed, but- well, how old were they? Sis must
> be thirtyish and the Deacon. why the Deacon was old- probably
> past forty. It did not seem quite decent.

> But he did his best to make them feel that he approved. After
> he thought it over he decided that if two people, with their
> lives behind them, wanted company in their old age, why, it
> was probably a good thing.

> I am sad to say I only noticed how funny that is well
> after after I stopped being a teenager.

I thought that it was a hoot when I first read the book
sometime between the ages of seven and twelve. And while I
hadn’t thought much of Rod’s maturity or sense before that
point, it was the last straw.

I always thought that a story about his sister would have
been more interesting.

[...]

Brian
--
It was the neap tide, when the baga venture out of their
holes to root for sandtatties. The waves whispered
rhythmically over the packed sand: haggisss, haggisss,
haggisss.

[David DeLaney]

On 2014-10-11, James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
> it would be a firm hint to the mindset of
> the fifties, which would have been opposed to interracial
> marriages.
>
> Sadly, not only did Heinlein have a proven track record of
> misremembering his own work (as shown by his confusion over whether
> the text of Starship Trooper supported the assertion that voting
> rights could be earned with non-military services) but Tunnel is
> pretty clear, at least to my eyes, that that the kids in it have
> no problems with mixed race marriages. Caroline is a bit put out
> that "M" marries Margery Chung because Caroline had her eye on him.
> While in real life names are not a reliable guide to ethnicity, in
> fiction they often are. Caroline is African, Chung seems to be of
> Chinese descent and it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion
> either one of the Caroline + M or Chung + M would be an interracial
> marriage. I guess M could be both African and Chinese but that only
> moves the interracial marriage in question up a generation and back
> to Earth.
>
> Since the majority of Americans didn't come to see mixed race
> marriages as acceptable until the mid-1990s, forty years after this
> book was written, that minor bit of business was pretty daring on
> Heinlein's part.

Part of the problem is PROBABLY that the SPECIFIC interracial marriages
that were highly objected to were ones involving one (1) White-labelled
person and one (1) person not so labelled. If a black person and an Asian
person wanted to marry, that was no skin off the White community's noses,
in effect. Sure, some people would object on the principle of the thing,
but sadly the underlying principle, from observation, seems not to have been
"RACES MUST NEVER BE MIXED NOOOOO" but rather "Keep those darker or yellower
or redder races out of our lily-white pure virginal^Woverlordish gene pool!".

As far as I understand things, anyway.

So the above may not actually have been a problem for that interpretation?

Dave
--
\/David DeLaney posting thru EarthLink - "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

[David E. Siegel]

On Friday, October 10, 2014 11:32:06 PM UTC-4, James Nicoll wrote:
<snip>

>
> There are many interesting ways people can die on worlds like Earth
> and to avoid unnecessary recapitulations of Jamestown, Fort San
> Juan and Popham, the powers that be, at least in the west, have
> mandated survival courses.

As I recall it, such courses were not mandated, they were simply required for particular occupations on colony worlds. Indeed Rod needed to have his father's signature to get permission to take the course in high-school, most took it in college if they were going to take it.

> The final test for the course involves
> dropping a class full of kids into a wilderness on some far off
> world to see how many come back. It.s like Battle Royale IN SPACE!,

To be fair, while attacking other students was allowed, it seems not to have been encouraged or common.

<snip>

>
> At first Rod Walker and his fellow students appear to face only
> the usual challenges: finding edible food, avoiding being edible
> food and dodging whichever classmate it is who settled on the idea
> of hunting their classmates for their useful stuff.

<snip>

> There's an unanticipated angle to the test, as the dwindling pool
> of kids discover.

Unanticipated by the planners as well as the testees, it seems.

>The test is only supposed to last from two to
> ten days before the survivors are retrieved. At the end of the ten
> days no gate back to Earth opens and as days turn into weeks it
> becomes obvious that if rescue is coming at all, there is no
> predicting when it will arrive.
>
>
>
> Almost by chance Rod and his chums Jimmy and Jack are the seed for
> a community of survivors. As their numbers grow, so does the
> complexity of the issues they face, from simple logistics to politics
> to defense against the local wildlife. Although this long stay was
> never planned for, their training is good enough and the general
> good will effective enough that the kids are able to fumble their
> way towards a functioning, if primitive, community of sedentary
> hunter-gatherers. That process towards a working society is what
> this novel is about.
>

As well as Rod's growing from a naive kid into an effective leader.

>
> Not to be too harsh on poor Rod but while he's not the dullest
> Heinlein protagonist, he may well be the dumbest. In addition to
> discovering the hard way that some local plants are purgatives,
> narrowly avoiding getting eaten and living through an ambush only
> because apparently his head is not a vital hit location, Rod also
> fails to notice one of his teammates is a woman despite having
> wrestled with her until after he delivers a misogynist diatribe
> and after the indefensible nature of the town's location nearly
> leads to a total party kill invokes the sunk cost fallacy to justify
> not relocating to a superior location.
>

Your snytax is a bit unclear; Rod does learn that Jackie (Jack) is female long before the decision not to relocate is made. And the "misogynist diatribe" IIRC is consistent with Rod still being in the "Girls are icky" phase emotionally. He does learn better on that one. Also, it is really Grant who "invokes the sunk cost fallacy" when rejectign Rods proposal to move BEFORE the fledgling colony is seriously attacked -- Rod really invokes the more emotional 'our blood has mad this land sacred" meme.

>
> Sadly, this is marred with the usual Heinleinisms. Not just the
> Malthusian models that provide the motivation to race to the stars

It seems RAH never heard of or undestood the demographic transition, but then many did not.

>
> but a trained eye can detect subtle differences between how the
>
> American-style pioneers are portrayed:
>

<snip quote>

>
> And how the Asian immigrants are depicted:
>

<snip quote>

>
>
>
> As well, the justifications for why the American settlers equip
> themselves for a 19th century society are not convincing. By choosing
> that toolkit, they are limiting their productivity to 19th century
> levels, which is going to make ramping up to modern levels of
> prosperity that much harder. But Americans are nostalgic for the
> 19th century.
>

It is at least partly the argument that any higher tech cannot be self-sustaining at small population levels, and that the limited contact the gates allow is not enough to provide the required support. This argument has flaws, but is not total nonsense. And if yoiu include texts and skills, going from 19th to 20th C tech need not take as long as all that.

>
> Part of the justification for sending out low tech colonies is
> because interstellar gates are energy-expensive, so contact is only
> worth while once the colony has stuff - "food and fissionable
> metals" - worth that cost to send back. Leaving aside questions
> like "how would you design a system for optimum mass transfer given
> short periods of contact", Heinlein then goes on to provide this
> colour text:
>

<snip quote on torch ships>

Yes that is an inconsistency, and removing the torch ships would have zero impact on the plot.

My thought: the first time you open a gate for a colony you send through a rail setting team and defenders and supports. The next time you open it so that rails go through the gate and can haul mas through on fairly high speed steam trains. The engines stay on the colony side and if well-designed can be maintained fairly easily
>
<snip>

>
> I am sad to say I only noticed how funny that is well after after
>
> I stopped being a teenager.
>

I noticed it as a teen, but not nearly as throughly as I now do at the decripit age of 53.

<snip rest of very good review>

Thanks

-DES

[Quadibloc]

On Friday, October 10, 2014 9:32:06 PM UTC-6, James Nicoll wrote:

> And how the Asian immigrants are depicted:

I had perceived that as a criticism of their government rather than a racial stereotype - even if the population problem that would have tasked any government wasn't a political creation.

John Savard

[Quadibloc]

On Saturday, October 11, 2014 11:52:01 AM UTC-6, David E. Siegel wrote:

> It seems RAH never heard of or undestood the demographic transition, but then
> many did not.

It _is_ true that prosperous, technically advanced countries have lower rates of
population growth than countries in the Third World.

However, concluding from this fact that population growth is not really a
problem, as usually happens when the phrase "demographic transition" is trotted
out, is a fallacy, for two big reasons:

1) The demographic transition takes place _after_ increased living standards
are achieved - perhaps a couple of generations later. But if a country's high
population has placed its people in poverty, where are the resources supposed
to come from to put them, and keep them, at an advanced industrialized standard
of living while the transition takes place?

2) In the 1960s, when the industrialized world was prosperous, population was
still growing exponentially, at 2% per year. So that's all the demographic
transition will buy you - and even a slow rate of exponential growth will
result, in an eyeblink on geological or astronomical time scales, in all the
matter in the universe being converted to people. The below-replacement
fertility rates we are _now_ seeing in many countries are the result of human
misery due to malfunctioning economies and high unemployment, not the
demographic transition as such.

So if you want to inhibit population growth, _first_ get people's standards and
expectations up with prosperity, _then_ collapse the economy so it doesn't meet
them.

John Savard

[David E. Siegel]

On Saturday, October 11, 2014 3:20:35 PM UTC-4, Quadibloc wrote:
> On Saturday, October 11, 2014 11:52:01 AM UTC-6, David E. Siegel wrote:
>
>
>

> > It seems RAH never heard of or understood the demographic transition, but then

> > many did not.
>
> It _is_ true that prosperous, technically advanced countries have lower rates of
> population growth than countries in the Third World.
>
> However, concluding from this fact that population growth is not really a
> problem, as usually happens when the phrase "demographic transition" is trotted
> out, is a fallacy, for two big reasons:
>
> 1) The demographic transition takes place _after_ increased living standards
> are achieved - perhaps a couple of generations later. But if a country's high
> population has placed its people in poverty, where are the resources supposed
> to come from to put them, and keep them, at an advanced industrialized standard
> of living while the transition takes place?
>

Yes, our current best understanding of the transition is that it only takes place well after high, or at least significantly increased, standards of living are achieved. If advanced technological levels are combined with persistently low standards of living, we don't yet know what the demographic result will be.

If a people is in poverty but has achieved industrialization, further development MAY be able to produce them out of poverty, possibly along with outside investment. But this is not guaranteed, AFAIK.

>
> 2) In the 1960s, when the industrialized world was prosperous, population was
> still growing exponentially, at 2% per year. So that's all the demographic
> transition will buy you - and even a slow rate of exponential growth will
> result, in an eyeblink on geological or astronomical time scales, in all the
> matter in the universe being converted to people. The below-replacement
> fertility rates we are _now_ seeing in many countries are the result of human
> misery due to malfunctioning economies and high unemployment, not the
> demographic transition as such.
>

I believe that the world as a whole is significantly more prosperous now than it was in the 1960s, and the global average standard of living has improved
since then, even as many individuals and regions have suffered due to war and other armed conflicts, and to various economic troubles. Moreover, I see no
reason to conclude that the transition process had gone as far as it could by the 1960s, and that 2% growth is the lowest that a prosperous society will
achieve. If we manage a further sustained period of prosperity, and particularly of average global prosperity comparable to or better than the US standard of living in the 1960s over, say a period of 60 years or more (with
that prosperity widely shared), then i would expect a significant further fall in population growth.

The demographic transition isn't magic, but it does mean that a Malthusian exponential expansion of population is not nearly as inevitable as was once
widely thought. It does not mean that such issues are automatically self-correcting and need no attention.

>
> So if you want to inhibit population growth, _first_ get people's standards and
> expectations up with prosperity, _then_ collapse the economy so it doesn't meet
> them.
>
> John Savard

That is one way, but it may well not be the best long-term way. With sustained poverty the transition might well reverse. With sustained prosperity it may
continue.


-DES

[David E. Siegel]

We can't really tell, as Rod Walker doesn't think about the government of Asia. The image we are shown does play to the then current stereotypes of endlessly
over-breeding Asians, as do comments in _Farmer in the Sky_ and elsewhere in RAH's works. Moreover, if the fault lies with the government of Asia in TitS,
one might well assume that that government is itself composed of Asians, which leads to the same stereotype, merely a level removed. Or perhaps there is
a world government, which is prejudiced against Asians, so that it under-equips them. We know pretty close to nothing about who runs the world of TitS
and how. If Rod knows, he never shares that knowledge with the reader. We know that there are military forces (including the Amazon corps) but not who they
are maintained against. There is no mention of non-human sapient technological species, nor of conflict between earth and other human-settled planets. Had RAH
used this setting for a longer adult novel, we might have gotten some very interesting information. But he didn't.

-DES

[Quadibloc]

On Saturday, October 11, 2014 8:01:16 PM UTC-6, David E. Siegel wrote:
> We know pretty close to nothing about who runs the world of TitS
> and how. If Rod knows, he never shares that knowledge with the reader.

Well, it is a fact that there are a lot of people in China. So for the story to reflect that doesn't seem to me to be promoting racism.

What we see is that when China gets its turn at using the tunnel, it herds its people through in a rough, brutal, and ruthless manner. So I interpreted that as meaning that China is still misgoverned - under something repressive and undemocratic.

John Savard

[J. Clarke]

In article <0a3eee0e-23d1-45fd...@googlegroups.com>,
jsa...@ecn.ab.ca says...

>
> On Saturday, October 11, 2014 11:52:01 AM UTC-6, David E. Siegel wrote:
>
> > It seems RAH never heard of or undestood the demographic transition, but then
> > many did not.
>
> It _is_ true that prosperous, technically advanced countries have lower rates of
> population growth than countries in the Third World.
>
> However, concluding from this fact that population growth is not really a
> problem, as usually happens when the phrase "demographic transition" is trotted
> out, is a fallacy, for two big reasons:
>
> 1) The demographic transition takes place _after_ increased living standards
> are achieved - perhaps a couple of generations later. But if a country's high
> population has placed its people in poverty, where are the resources supposed
> to come from to put them, and keep them, at an advanced industrialized standard
> of living while the transition takes place?

What leads you to believe that a high population causes poverty?

> 2) In the 1960s, when the industrialized world was prosperous, population was
> still growing exponentially, at 2% per year. So that's all the demographic
> transition will buy you - and even a slow rate of exponential growth will
> result, in an eyeblink on geological or astronomical time scales, in all the
> matter in the universe being converted to people. The below-replacement
> fertility rates we are _now_ seeing in many countries are the result of human
> misery due to malfunctioning economies and high unemployment, not the
> demographic transition as such.

There's a lag laddie. The EU has already hit the ZPG level, the US is
projected to hit it later this century. And it's not "prosperity" per
se that causes it, it seems to be more related to urbanization--a kid is
an asset on a farm but a liability in a city.

> So if you want to inhibit population growth, _first_ get people's standards and
> expectations up with prosperity, _then_ collapse the economy so it doesn't meet
> them.

And that has worked where?

[Larry Headlund]

On Saturday, October 11, 2014 10:01:16 PM UTC-4, David E. Siegel wrote:
We know that there are military forces (including the Amazon corps) but not who they are maintained against. There is no mention of non-human sapient technological species, nor of conflict between earth and other human-settled planets.

There was a throwaway scene (first Emigrants' Gate chapter) where a chlorine breathing sapient is greeted by terrestrial diplomats. Rod's sister has been in combat but we aren't told if she was fighting humans or aliens or both.

[J. Clarke]

In article <3c38ad8d-3e29-4dc0...@googlegroups.com>,
sie...@acm.org says...

This presupposes that the gate can be opened with sufficient precision
to allow the rails to be easily reconnected. With an SG-1 style gate
that is in a fixed location and requires an artifact at each end to
create the gate that might work but it's clear that Heinlein's gates
don't work quite like that.

However what purpose is served by running rails? Are you going to run
rails far enough in to handle a full trainload of colonists? Well what
does that gain you over the colonists just walking through? And what
does having a locomotive on the other side gain? Once you've got a
large enough colony to go find sources for iron and coal then you can
start making steel and be able to maintain an engine, but you're not
going to be doing that until you have reliable agriculture up and
running and adequate shelter and security established, and horses or
mules would be bloody useful in sending out such prospecting
expeditions.

Anne McCaffrey actually addresses this in the Pern novels, the dragons
are a product of advanced biotechnology brought by the colonists, but
all that technology has been lost, leaving the dragons to make more
dragons.

Now, it might be that nanotech replicators of some kind could circumvent
such issues, but when you get right down to it that's what a horse _is_,
the machinery that couple of nanoreplicators use to make more
nanoreplicators.

[J. Clarke]

In article <m1a8bm$c43$1...@reader1.panix.com>, jdni...@panix.com says...

No doubt rich Asians going to premium planets did themselves up just as
well as the Westerners, while the scene would look similar except for
the scale of the operation when the US emptied its prisons onto some
Hellhole.

That said, not many people in the '50s would have believe you if you
told them that by the end of the century Japan would have the second
largest national economy in the world.

> As well, the justifications for why the American settlers equip
> themselves for a 19th century society are not convincing. By choosing
> that toolkit, they are limiting their productivity to 19th century
> levels, which is going to make ramping up to modern levels of
> prosperity that much harder. But Americans are nostalgic for the
> 19th century.
>
> Part of the justification for sending out low tech colonies is
> because interstellar gates are energy-expensive, so contact is only
> worth while once the colony has stuff - "food and fissionable
> metals" - worth that cost to send back. Leaving aside questions
> like "how would you design a system for optimum mass transfer given
> short periods of contact", Heinlein then goes on to provide this
> colour text:
>
> Ortega's torch ships brought the Solar System within reach.
> Based on mass conversion, Einstein's deathless E= MC^2 they
> could boost for the entire trip at any acceleration the pilot
> could stand.
>
> In his defense, the bit about them having total conversion is more
> than a page away from the part about importing fissionables.

Failing to see the consequences of total conversion is of course an
error, but perhaps there's something we don't know about torchships--
maybe there's something about the total conversion process that makes it
useful only as a space engine (remember, we can in principle use atomic
bombs as space engines but they aren't much good otherwise except as
weapons).

But I've never had a problem with low tech colonies, few people with
engineering experience do. If you aren't going to be having regular
resupply you don't take something with you that you can't fix with the
resources at hand unless you know that you are only going to need it for
a short time, and then you design it so that after it fails as many of
the pieces as possible can be diverted to other use. People horribly
overestimate the ease of keeping a technological society going.

Simple fact, horses can make more horses, but tractors can't make more
tractors.

There's a passage in there somewhere that I remember reading and saying
"Aha, Rod is black" but on skimming through an ebook I can't find it and
I don't have time to read the whole thing through again right now.

More explicitly, it is stated that Caroline is Zulu.

[Larry Headlund]

On Friday, October 10, 2014 11:32:06 PM UTC-4, James Nicoll wrote:

> 1955's Tunnel in the Sky takes us to a future Earth jam-packed with people but rescued from an ongoing Malthusian crisis by the timely invention of interstellar gates.

I note that Heinlein's Teeming Earth juveniles feature small families: only child ones in Farmer in the Sky[*] and Starman Jones, two children in Tunnel in the Sky. The exception is the five children in Time for the Stars but in that one the protagonist twins were explicitly unplanned and unexpected.

In the juveniles where population pressure is not a plot issue, we have, as far as I recall, only children in Between Planets, The Star Beast, Citizen of the Galaxy and Have Space Suit - Will Travel, two children in Space Cadet, three in Red Planet, four in Rolling Stones and a surprise five in Podkayne of Mars.

[*] Two single child families merged in Farmer in the Sky.

[Cryptoengineer]

"J. Clarke" <jclark...@cox.net> wrote in
news:MPG.2ea44c204...@news.newsguy.com:

> In article <0a3eee0e-23d1-45fd...@googlegroups.com>,
> jsa...@ecn.ab.ca says...

>

>> So if you want to inhibit population growth, _first_ get people's
>> standards and expectations up with prosperity, _then_ collapse the
>> economy so it doesn't meet them.
>
> And that has worked where?
>

Russia.

pt

[Don Kuenz]

They looked like little schoolchildren being herded
toward the long wooden barracks, all eighty of them
now, stretched out in a long line, tripping over
their pants, their caps spinning crazily around
their heads, gasping for air, chocking and spitting
and coughing in the heat, their oversized boots
thumping against the parade deck again and again,
thumping until they sounded like a train slowly
rolling into the station. He felt he couldn't go
any farther and the drill instructors were still
screaming. They had been screaming all day, all
afternoon, all morning, ever since he got to that
place they were screaming, screaming and shouting,
cursing, screaming again, until it sounded like
one tremendous scream. He had to keep pushing, he
thought. He had come this far, he thought. He
hadn't cried like the fat boy, he hadn't fallen to
his knees like a baby. He had come this far and he
was gonna make it the rest of the way, with all of
them.

But now some were dropping out in back of him. He
could hear the drill instructors shouting at them.
They were falling to their knees in the evening
heat onto the parade deck and he looked back and
watched, still gasping for air, still not believing
he had made it this far. There were boys on their
knees - three, four, five, six - he couldn't count
them all, but they were on their knees with their
sea bags still over their shoulders like Christs,
and they were crawling, he saw them crawling!
trying not to quit, trying to catch up with the
rest. And he was thankful now he was still on his
feet. Oh his legs ached and his chest felt like it
was going to explode and his head was pounding now
and his eyes were burning and he was getting closer
and closer.

Some men were cursing now, swearing and cursing
like the drill instructors, cursing the heat,
cursing the sweat. They began to shout and curse
the shock, the shock of this day.

_Born on the Fourth of July_

ObSF: Walter M. Miller, Jr. had taken a photo of Ron Kovic and displayed
it prominently in his house.

--
Don Kuenz

[David E. Siegel]

On Sunday, October 12, 2014 10:20:04 AM UTC-4, J. Clarke wrote:
> In article <3c38ad8d-3e29-4dc0...@googlegroups.com>,
>
> sie...@acm.org says...
>
> > On Friday, October 10, 2014 11:32:06 PM UTC-4, James Nicoll wrote:

<snip>
>

> > > Sadly, this is marred with the usual Heinleinisms. Not just the
> > > Malthusian models that provide the motivation to race to the stars

> > It seems RAH never heard of or understood the demographic transition, but then many did not.

>
> > > but a trained eye can detect subtle differences between how the
> > > American-style pioneers are portrayed:
>
> > <snip quote>
>
> > > And how the Asian immigrants are depicted:
>
> > <snip quote>
>
> > > As well, the justifications for why the American settlers equip
> > > themselves for a 19th century society are not convincing. By choosing
> > > that toolkit, they are limiting their productivity to 19th century
> > > levels, which is going to make ramping up to modern levels of
> > > prosperity that much harder. But Americans are nostalgic for the
> > > 19th century.
>

> > It is at least partly the argument that any higher tech cannot be self-sustaining at small population levels, and that the limited contact the gates allow is not enough to provide the required support. This argument has flaws, but is not total nonsense. And if you include texts and skills, going from 19th to 20th C tech need not take as long as all that.

>
> > >
>
> > > Part of the justification for sending out low tech colonies is
> > > because interstellar gates are energy-expensive, so contact is only
> > > worth while once the colony has stuff - "food and fissionable
> > > metals" - worth that cost to send back. Leaving aside questions
> > > like "how would you design a system for optimum mass transfer given
> > > short periods of contact", Heinlein then goes on to provide this
> > > colour text:
>
> > <snip quote on torch ships>
>
> > Yes that is an inconsistency, and removing the torch ships would have zero impact on the plot.
>
> > My thought: the first time you open a gate for a colony you send through a rail setting team and defenders and supports. The next time you open it so that rails go through the gate and can haul mas through on fairly high speed steam trains. The engines stay on the colony side and if well-designed can be maintained fairly easily
>
> This presupposes that the gate can be opened with sufficient precision
> to allow the rails to be easily reconnected. With an SG-1 style gate
> that is in a fixed location and requires an artifact at each end to
> create the gate that might work but it's clear that Heinlein's gates
> don't work quite like that.
>

Yes it does. However, IIRC (I haven't re-read TitS in some years) The "pen" confining the Asian immigrants is shown extending across the gate, so such a
level of precision seems not implausible

>
> However what purpose is served by running rails? Are you going to run
> rails far enough in to handle a full trainload of colonists? Well what
> does that gain you over the colonists just walking through? And what
> does having a locomotive on the other side gain? Once you've got a
> large enough colony to go find sources for iron and coal then you can
> start making steel and be able to maintain an engine, but you're not
> going to be doing that until you have reliable agriculture up and
> running and adequate shelter and security established, and horses or
> mules would be bloody useful in sending out such prospecting
> expeditions.
>

The point is that a train on rails can move a much larger mass, whether of colonists or supplies, across the gate in a much shorter time. Particularly if
he train is running thru the gate at fairly high speed. Yes, I am thinking of having pre-built rails go far enough to handle a full trainload, or even
multiple trainloads. Their cargo could include horses or mules, which indeed might well be useful for preliminary exploration. It could also include more
rails so that tracks can be laid directly to any useful mine sites, and mining equipment, or whatever else is deemed worth shipping. And I wold put a large
enough colony to rapidly become self-sustaining thru pretty early in the development of a promising world.

>
> Anne McCaffrey actually addresses this in the Pern novels, the dragons
> are a product of advanced biotechnology brought by the colonists, but
> all that technology has been lost, leaving the dragons to make more
> dragons.
>
> Now, it might be that nanotech replicators of some kind could circumvent
> such issues, but when you get right down to it that's what a horse _is_,
> the machinery that couple of nanoreplicators use to make more
> nanoreplicators.

Well no. A true nanoreplicator can be programmed to turn out a variety of outputs from almost any input. But horses and other living organisms are
self-reproducing, obviously. Bio-engineered critters might well help, for the matter of that the breeding "mules" shown in the "Tale of the Adopted Daughter"
sequence of TEfL greatly aided the settlers there. But TitS didn't mention any bio-engineering, so I struck to what would HAVE to be available based on the
story, and might be useful and maintainable on a colony world. In any case there are few better ways to move a large mass rapidly past a fixed point than
a rail-based system.

Consider the wagon train shown early in TitS (and the similar one at the end). How long would it take to move through the gate under its own power? Half an
hour? more? Depends on how many wagons. But load them on a train first (perhaps disassembling the wagons) and how long need the gate be open now? a
minute or two, perhaps. Apply the same logic to the large numbers of Asians on foot that we are shown, and how much gate time would be saved?

If the gates can't be reopened with sufficient precision to match up rails, use tracked vehicles, again loaded before the gate ever opens. Send them back on a
subsequent gate if they aren't useful to the colony yet.

-DES

[lal_truckee]

Ah! So real prosperity isn't even required - the mere promise of
prosperity suffices.

[Greg Goss]

"J. Clarke" <jclark...@cox.net> wrote:
>jsa...@ecn.ab.ca says...

>There's a lag laddie. The EU has already hit the ZPG level, the US is
>projected to hit it later this century. And it's not "prosperity" per
>se that causes it, it seems to be more related to urbanization--a kid is
>an asset on a farm but a liability in a city.
>
>> So if you want to inhibit population growth, _first_ get people's standards and
>> expectations up with prosperity, _then_ collapse the economy so it doesn't meet
>> them.
>
>And that has worked where?

Russia?
--
We are geeks. Resistance is voltage over current.

[Greg Goss]

"David E. Siegel" <sie...@acm.org> wrote:

>If the gates can't be reopened with sufficient precision to match up rails, use tracked vehicles, again loaded before the gate ever opens. Send them back on a
> subsequent gate if they aren't useful to the colony yet.

Australia-style "road trains"? I've seen video of twenty or more
trailers hauled by a motor unit.

In this context, rather than trying to retain the technology as the
initial poster suggested, the tractor would be considered disposable.
Hauling stuff around until it broke down or until the initial
trailer-loads of fuel ran out. Since the gate was described as so
expensive, a tractor unit and a train of trailers would be immensely
cheap if it tripled the transit speed.

[JRStern]

On Sat, 11 Oct 2014 03:32:06 +0000 (UTC), jdni...@panix.com (James
Nicoll) wrote:

>1955's Tunnel in the Sky takes us to a future Earth jam-packed with
>people but rescued from an ongoing Malthusian crisis by the timely
>invention of interstellar gates.

!

I'm sure I read this when I was a kid, but had forgotten everything
including the Star Gates. Huh.

I have the vague recollection of reading this.

As to the low tech, for a writer and readers living in 1955 and
Heinlein born in 1907, the low tech was more familiar, the real world
hi tech still not that high and not that common. There was less
distance between 1955 and 1855, even less between 1907 and 1807. They
still have (a few) horse-drawn wagons on the streets of NYC in 1930s
Marx Bros movies, it's already antiquated, rare and humorous but still
real enough and it's not just the romantic carts in Central Park. I
gather it was not rare as recently as the early 1920s.

My reading a 1955 book circa 1966 my vague memories suggest I thought
it was a little bit anomalous and as much a literary presumption as a
real posit, but not like a kid reading it today.

J.

[Cryptoengineer]

JRStern <JRS...@foobar.invalid> wrote in
news:tcbl3ahrhgfduo6de...@4ax.com:

There were still a few horse-drawn carts to be seen in the suburbs of
London in the late 1960s, though by then it pretty rare.

The homesteaders of the 19th and 18th century did have to be partially
self-sufficient, but they weren't entirely cut off. There was trade
going on all along. Nevertheless, in the popular imagination, including
perhaps RAH's, that was the latest tech level they could think of as
self-sustaining.

> My reading a 1955 book circa 1966 my vague memories suggest I thought
> it was a little bit anomalous and as much a literary presumption as a
> real posit, but not like a kid reading it today.
>
> J.

py

[J. Clarke]

In article <161b1551-bfeb-48cc...@googlegroups.com>,
sie...@acm.org says...

The pen ran between two gates, it did not cross either of them. And you
are forgetting the discussion of alighment of the gate with the
planetary surface, which in itself was depicted as being hugely
difficult.

> > However what purpose is served by running rails? Are you going to run
> > rails far enough in to handle a full trainload of colonists? Well what
> > does that gain you over the colonists just walking through? And what
> > does having a locomotive on the other side gain? Once you've got a
> > large enough colony to go find sources for iron and coal then you can
> > start making steel and be able to maintain an engine, but you're not
> > going to be doing that until you have reliable agriculture up and
> > running and adequate shelter and security established, and horses or
> > mules would be bloody useful in sending out such prospecting
> > expeditions.
> >
> The point is that a train on rails can move a much larger mass,whether
> of colonists or supplies, across the gate in a much shorter time.

So how long does it take to grade the roadbed and lay the track?

> Particularly if
> he train is running thru the gate at fairly high speed.

So now you not only want track, you want _good_ track and enough extra
for the train to be able to slow down from high speed on the other end.

Trains are not a good idea for a one-shot time-constrained movement.

> Yes, I am thinking of having pre-built rails go far enough to handle
> a full trainload, or even
> multiple trainloads.

So now you're running the train back and forth across the gate, loading
it at one end and unloading it at the other, to save time in a transit
of a few hundred feet.

Clearly logistics is not your strong suit.

> Their cargo could include horses or mules, which indeed might well be
> useful for preliminary exploration. It could also include more
> rails so that tracks can be laid directly to any useful mine sites,

So how many hundred miles of rail are you going to provide and where are
you going to get the manpower to lay the track? If you do a bit of
reseearch you will find that it is not as simple as laying tracks on the
ground. You have to have a graded roadbed for example, and a large
quantity of rot-resistant crossties, so now you have a large-scale
logging operation going and a pressure-treating plant which needs a
supply of chemicals. And before you say "but the railroads didn't do
that when they started out", you forget that the railroads were built in
an environment in which labor was cheap and plentiful (you could buy it
from Africa or import it dirt cheap from China, both of which options
were used.

> and mining equipment, or whatever else is deemed worth shipping.

You really have no concept of the scale of operations required to run
even a small mine.

> And I wold put a large
> enough colony to rapidly become self-sustaining thru pretty early in the development of a promising world.

Clearly the Australasians took this approach. One wonders how many
starved and how many others ate each other before they got some kind of
stable agriculture going.

You are forgetting that you can't just ship a million people through a
stargate and have them growing enough food to support themselves
overnight. The more you ship, the more land you need to clear. A small
group can get started in a natural clearing and expand from there, a
large group has to clear forest and pull stumps and the like before it
can even get started with such things as irrigation.

> > Anne McCaffrey actually addresses this in the Pern novels, the
dragons
> > are a product of advanced biotechnology brought by the colonists, but
> > all that technology has been lost, leaving the dragons to make more
> > dragons.
> >
> > Now, it might be that nanotech replicators of some kind could circumvent
> > such issues, but when you get right down to it that's what a horse _is_,
> > the machinery that couple of nanoreplicators use to make more
> > nanoreplicators.
>
> Well no. A true nanoreplicator can be programmed to turn out a variety of outputs from almost any input.

Made lots of those have you? I suspect that they aren't going to be
nearly that flexible in the real world.

> But horses and other living organisms are
> self-reproducing, obviously. Bio-engineered critters might well help, for the matter of that the breeding "mules" shown in the "Tale of the Adopted Daughter"
> sequence of TEfL greatly aided the settlers there. But TitS didn't mention any bio-engineering, so I struck to what would HAVE to be available based on the
> story, and might be useful and maintainable on a colony world. In any case there are few better ways to move a large mass rapidly past a fixed point than
> a rail-based system.

This is true if the rails are already in place. But if you have to
build the rails first and are only going to have the system in operation
for a few hours or a few days then it's another story.

> Consider the wagon train shown early in TitS (and the similar one at the end). How long would it take to move through the gate under its own power? Half an
> hour? more? Depends on how many wagons. But load them on a train first (perhaps disassembling the wagons) and how long need the gate be open now? a
> minute or two, perhaps. Apply the same logic to the large numbers of Asians on foot that we are shown, and how much gate time would be saved?

Well let's see, you have to build enough rails on the other side to hold
a train long enough to carry 2 million people. So how long is that
train? The Nazis put 150 Jews in a cattle car. Since we may take it as
a given that they were not concerned in the slightest for anything other
than transportation efficiency we can take that as a reasonable value.
So your train will be approximately 13,000 cars long. The German cattle
cars were about 30 feet long. So to hold this train you're going to
have to lay 75 miles of track on the other side of the gate. That's
just to hold the train, not to stop it. How long is it going to take
you to lay 75 miles of track?

> If the gates can't be reopened with sufficient precision to match up rails, use tracked vehicles, again loaded before the gate ever opens. Send them back on a
> subsequent gate if they aren't useful to the colony yet.

What makes you think that "tracked vehicles" are going to move large
masses of people faster than they can walk?

You're too hung up on gadgets.

[David E. Siegel]

On Sunday, October 12, 2014 2:03:14 PM UTC-4, Cryptoengineer wrote:
> JRStern <JRS...@foobar.invalid> wrote in
>
> news:tcbl3ahrhgfduo6de...@4ax.com:
>
>
>
> > On Sat, 11 Oct 2014 03:32:06 +0000 (UTC), jdni...@panix.com (James
>
> > Nicoll) wrote:
>
> >
>
> >>1955's Tunnel in the Sky takes us to a future Earth jam-packed with
> >>people but rescued from an ongoing Malthusian crisis by the timely
> >>invention of interstellar gates.
>

> > I'm sure I read this when I was a kid, but had forgotten everything
> > including the Star Gates. Huh.
>
> >>Sadly, this is marred with the usual Heinleinisms. Not just the
> >>Malthusian models that provide the motivation to race to the stars
> >>but a trained eye can detect subtle differences between how the
> >>American-style pioneers are portrayed:
>
> >>
>
> >> here each family had its own wagon..long, sweeping, boat-tight
> >> Conestogas drawn by three-pair teams and housed in sturdy glass
> >> canvas square and businesslike Studebakers with steel bodies,
> >> high mudcutter wheels, and pulled by one or two-pair teams.
> >> The draft animals were Morgans and lordly Clydesdales and
> >> jug-headed Missouri mules with strong shoulders and shrewd,
> >> suspicious eyes. Dogs trotted between wheels, wagons were piled
> >> high with household goods and implements and children, poultry
> >> protested the indignities of fate in cages tied on behind, and
> >> a little Shetland pony, riderless but carrying his saddle and
> >> just a bit too tall to run underneath with the dogs, stayed
> >> close to the tailgate of one family's rig.
>
> >>
>
> >>And how the Asian immigrants are depicted:
>

<snip quote showing Asian settlers>

RAH knew perfectly well that wagon train tech is NOT self-sufficient without at least limited development, and really required contact with a full civilization
or the ability to create one. There is a scene in his _Beyond This Horizon_ where Monro-Alpha rhapsodizes on the "simple life" to Smith from 1926, and
Smith responds "He wants to cut down a tree; who sold him the axe?!" There is a more extreme and less realistic example at the start of "Coventry" where the
VP character thinks that his track-driven "turtle" is a primitive device that he could easily replicate if he had to, and the narrator points out his
ignorance.

However, given coal, wood, and iron ore, arable land and an assortment of skills, the required initial seed to build a 19th-C level of tech is not huge,
although i think the one-family minimum shown in the "Tale of the Adopted Daughter" (aka "Happy Valley") is not quite realistic.

-DES

[Titus G]

Detroit.

[David E. Siegel]

I had not forgotten that, my memory was that it was mentioned as something that
required care, but was normally adjusted promptly and with a near-zero error rate.

I may well have gotten the pen wrong, and that reduces evidence for the precision of gate opening.

>
> > > However what purpose is served by running rails? Are you going to run
> > > rails far enough in to handle a full trainload of colonists? Well what
> > > does that gain you over the colonists just walking through? And what
> > > does having a locomotive on the other side gain? Once you've got a
> > > large enough colony to go find sources for iron and coal then you can
> > > start making steel and be able to maintain an engine, but you're not
> > > going to be doing that until you have reliable agriculture up and
> > > running and adequate shelter and security established, and horses or
> > > mules would be bloody useful in sending out such prospecting
> > > expeditions.
>
> > The point is that a train on rails can move a much larger mass,whether
> > of colonists or supplies, across the gate in a much shorter time.
>
> So how long does it take to grade the roadbed and lay the track?
>

That time is not spent with the gate open. The object here is to spend offline prep time so as to maximize the amount of stuff put through the gate while it is open.

>
> > Particularly if
> > he train is running thru the gate at fairly high speed.
>
> So now you not only want track, you want _good_ track and enough extra
> for the train to be able to slow down from high speed on the other end.
>

Yes, I think it would pay off.

>
> Trains are not a good idea for a one-shot time-constrained movement.
>

But if the colony lives there will be many (short) gate crossings into the indefinite future.

However, it might be that motorized tracked vehicles or vehicle trains would be a better bet, even if they would not be as easily maintained on the low-tech side. Either is surely a better use of scarce gate time than is having people or horses proceed on foot.

> > Yes, I am thinking of having pre-built rails go far enough to handle
> > a full trainload, or even
> > multiple trainloads.
>
> So now you're running the train back and forth across the gate, loading
> it at one end and unloading it at the other, to save time in a transit
> of a few hundred feet.
>

No not at all. As many trains as are wanted proceed one after another, at the best speed, and smallest interval, conditions safely allow, onto holding tracks
laid out on the far end, to be unloaded AFTER the gate has closed, and thereafter used or taken down for parts or even for scrap metal, or possibly
run back when the colony has cargo to send back to earth

Motorized vehicles, probably tracked but possibly wheeled, could well be substituted. Again a string of these is waiting for the gate to be open and
stable, and go through at the highest safe speed and shortest interval possible once the gate is stable. This is the best option if gate positioning
is not precise enough to reliably mare track quickly. If the gates can be opened precisely enough for quick and reliable reconnection, then the greater
volume and mas that trains could handle would probably make significant prep work on the low-tech side worth while.

>
> Clearly logistics is not your strong suit.
>

Not when idocies are put into my mouth. I never said anything about trains going back and forth during a single opening and i surely didn't intend to
imply such an idea. That would be nonsense. If this were real some studies with numbers would be needed to compare the advantages of trains vs land-trains
vs other possible options, and I don't claim to have done those. I just claim that a mechanized option pays off compared to having people walk or ride horse-
or mule-drawn wagons through the short-term gate.

>
> > Their cargo could include horses or mules, which indeed might well be
> > useful for preliminary exploration. It could also include more
> > rails so that tracks can be laid directly to any useful mine sites,
>
> So how many hundred miles of rail are you going to provide and where are
> you going to get the manpower to lay the track? If you do a bit of
> reseearch you will find that it is not as simple as laying tracks on the
> ground. You have to have a graded roadbed for example, and a large
> quantity of rot-resistant crossties, so now you have a large-scale
> logging operation going and a pressure-treating plant which needs a
> supply of chemicals. And before you say "but the railroads didn't do
> that when they started out", you forget that the railroads were built in
> an environment in which labor was cheap and plentiful (you could buy it
> from Africa or import it dirt cheap from China, both of which options
> were used.
>

Quite true. And in a high-tech society labor is not cheap, although if we have those large numbers of Asians and other impoverished colonists being sent outworld, perhaps it can be cheaper than in the 21st C.

But compared to the human, materiel, and energy costs we are told and shown being spent on this project, hundreds of miles of rails *are* cheap. Untreated
wood can be used for ties at first, until a treatment plant can be built. They won't last as long, but they will work for a time. Yes grading will have to be
done. I am not a railroad expert, but i have lived near one and commuted on one, and seen construction in process, and i have read histories of the process.

I do admit that trains may not be the best option, motorized vehicles might be better. Much depends on precise parameters not stated in the novel.

>
> > and mining equipment, or whatever else is deemed worth shipping.
>
>
>
> You really have no concept of the scale of operations required to run
> even a small mine.
>

Since it was explicitly stated that a colony generally paid for itself by shipping back mined metals, some sort of mining is going nto need to be started
at some point. Will it pay better to wait until the needed support infrastructure can be built on the low-tech side, probably several decades
later, or to ship it in as soon as a mine site has been discovered and surveyed?

>
> > And I wold put a large
> > enough colony to rapidly become self-sustaining thru pretty early in the development of a promising world.
>
> Clearly the Australasians took this approach. One wonders how many
> starved and how many others ate each other before they got some kind of
> stable agriculture going.
>

If they under-equip and under-supply their colonists enough for famine, let alone starvation or cannibalism to be probable, they are not doing *their*
logistics well. Note that we don't know how new or long-established the world getting the huge steam of immigrants was -- or perhaps they were "political
deportees" that the powers that be would just as soon did die. We simply don't know.

>
> You are forgetting that you can't just ship a million people through a
> stargate and have them growing enough food to support themselves
> overnight. The more you ship, the more land you need to clear. A small
> group can get started in a natural clearing and expand from there, a
> large group has to clear forest and pull stumps and the like before it
> can even get started with such things as irrigation.
>

Granted. And I never said "millon". There will be an optimum size between "so small no useful surplus is produced" and "so large the needed infrastructure
isn't worth while". I suspect, abut can't prove, that the wagon trains shown are on the small side of that optimum, but it would take serious analysis to
determine where the optimum really was, and that can't be done without real figures for things like "what does it cost per second to hold a gate open"
"what are the costs for land clearing machines and teams", "How much clear land is needed for a colony of size X?" and various other parameters not given
in the novel. So i can only guess at the result.

>
> > > Anne McCaffrey actually addresses this in the Pern novels, the
> dragons
> > > are a product of advanced biotechnology brought by the colonists, but
> > > all that technology has been lost, leaving the dragons to make more
> > > dragons.
>
> > > Now, it might be that nanotech replicators of some kind could circumvent
> > > such issues, but when you get right down to it that's what a horse _is_,
> > > the machinery that couple of nanoreplicators use to make more
> > > nanoreplicators.
>
> > Well no. A true nanoreplicator can be programmed to turn out a variety of outputs from almost any input.
>
> Made lots of those have you? I suspect that they aren't going to be
> nearly that flexible in the real world.
>

Perhaps not. No one knows. But if any artificial nano-replicators are/can be built, it is hard to see why they wouldn't be pretty flexible.

>
> > But horses and other living organisms are
> > self-reproducing, obviously. Bio-engineered critters might well help, for the matter of that the breeding "mules" shown in the "Tale of the Adopted Daughter"
> > sequence of TEfL greatly aided the settlers there. But TitS didn't mention any bio-engineering, so I struck to what would HAVE to be available based on the
> > story, and might be useful and maintainable on a colony world. In any case there are few better ways to move a large mass rapidly past a fixed point than
> > a rail-based system.
>
> This is true if the rails are already in place. But if you have to
> build the rails first and are only going to have the system in operation
> for a few hours or a few days then it's another story.
>

True. I am assuming repeated transits, at steadily reducing frequencies over many years. if this this not so, rails look less attractive, depending on just
how high the cost per second of gate operation is. if it is high enough, anything that reduces it may well pay off.

>
> > Consider the wagon train shown early in TitS (and the similar one at the end). How long would it take to move through the gate under its own power? Half an
> > hour? more? Depends on how many wagons. But load them on a train first (perhaps disassembling the wagons) and how long need the gate be open now? a
> > minute or two, perhaps. Apply the same logic to the large numbers of Asians on foot that we are shown, and how much gate time would be saved?
>
>
>
> Well let's see, you have to build enough rails on the other side to hold
> a train long enough to carry 2 million people. So how long is that
> train? The Nazis put 150 Jews in a cattle car. Since we may take it as
> a given that they were not concerned in the slightest for anything other
> than transportation efficiency we can take that as a reasonable value.
> So your train will be approximately 13,000 cars long. The German cattle
> cars were about 30 feet long. So to hold this train you're going to
> have to lay 75 miles of track on the other side of the gate. That's
> just to hold the train, not to stop it. How long is it going to take
> you to lay 75 miles of track?
>

Where do you get the figure of 2 million people? I never mentioned it, and i don't recall the novel doing so.

But if one DID want to send 2 million people through in a single gate crossing, I strongly suspect that a rail-based or other motorized transpost system will
reduce the crucial gate-open time a lot. No I don't have precise figures. Time spent building the raisl on the low-tech side is NOT gate-open time.

> > If the gates can't be reopened with sufficient precision to match up rails, use tracked vehicles, again loaded before the gate ever opens. Send them back on a
>
> > subsequent gate if they aren't useful to the colony yet.
>
>
>
> What makes you think that "tracked vehicles" are going to move large
> masses of people faster than they can walk?
>
> You're too hung up on gadgets.

Burdened people as described can move at what 10 mph? perhaps 20mph for a sprint? Motorized vehicles can do much better than that.

Gadgets can be very handy, and the absence of them in this situation was not well justified.

-DES

[J. Clarke]

In article <ac2b2008-2c33-4b59...@googlegroups.com>,
sie...@acm.org says...

If you can find a source of iron ore you can make iron axe heads with
fairly primitive technology. You can also reforge steel ones. Making
steel tools from scratch by hand though is a tremendous lot of very hard
work.

[Cryptoengineer]

"J. Clarke" <jclark...@cox.net> wrote in

news:MPG.2ea491996...@news.newsguy.com:

They never did. The Australian aborigines remained without agriculture
or cities for 40,000 years, until the rest of the world found them.
Its also notable that they never developed the bow and arrow, and in
some areas such as Tasmania, their tech actually regressed as time
passed.

You guys aren't being imaginative. Want to push goods through fast? Open
the gate at the top of a hill (or even a bit above it), pack the goods
in padded cylinders, and send them through as fast as gravity will let
you. Think of it like an airdrop, not an 18-wheeler.

People and animals require more care, obviously, but most other things
can be packed to deal with some jostling.

Considering how careless the Chinese government in the story appears
to be with provisioning their emigrants, my suspicion is that in the
story it far more concerned with getting extra mouths off the Earth
than it is with whether they survive long afterward.

pt

[Tim McDaniel]

In article <0a3eee0e-23d1-45fd...@googlegroups.com>,

Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>1) The demographic transition takes place _after_ increased living standards
>are achieved - perhaps a couple of generations later.

Cite?

Yes, going to the bottom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
and the top of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_fertility_rate
you can usually switch between tabs and see mostly the same
countries. But
Kiribati $1,562 fertility 2.56
Haiti $1,703 2.79
Nepal 2,245 2.30
Tajikistan 2,536 2.76
Cambodia 3,056 2.66
...

Looking at the map at the top of the latter page, you can see that the
hotspots of fertility are sub-Saharan Africa up to South Africa,
Afghanistan, Iraq, the Phillipines, and Papua New Guinea. There are
plenty of poor and not particular developing countries outside those
bounds: the Central Asian states, for example, Bangladesh, ...

Ah, at least there's a mostly unlabelled graph in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox
The sub-Saharan minus South Africa countries are doubtless hugging the
Y axis ... but notice the large number of dots that are under 5000 and
nevertheless under 3.

Given that some of those cases haven't reached propserity at all, the
notion of a lag (> 0) looks especially dicey to me.

--
Tim McDaniel, tm...@panix.com

[Tim McDaniel]

In article <7IWdnYCfNNEJ-6TJ...@earthlink.com>,
David DeLaney <d...@vic.com> wrote:

>On 2014-10-11, James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>> it would be a firm hint to the mindset of
>> the fifties, which would have been opposed to interracial
>> marriages.
>>

>> the kids in it have
>> no problems with mixed race marriages. Caroline is a bit put out
>> that "M" marries Margery Chung because Caroline had her eye on him.
>> While in real life names are not a reliable guide to ethnicity, in

>> fiction they often are. Caroline is African, Chung seems to be of

>> Chinese descent and it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion
>> either one of the Caroline + M or Chung + M would be an interracial
>> marriage. I guess M could be both African and Chinese but that only
>> moves the interracial marriage in question up a generation and back
>> to Earth.
>>
>> Since the majority of Americans didn't come to see mixed race
>> marriages as acceptable until the mid-1990s, forty years after this
>> book was written, that minor bit of business was pretty daring on
>> Heinlein's part.
>

>Part of the problem is PROBABLY that the SPECIFIC interracial marriages
>that were highly objected to were ones involving one (1) White-labelled
>person and one (1) person not so labelled. If a black person and an Asian
>person wanted to marry, that was no skin off the White community's noses,
>in effect. Sure, some people would object on the principle of the thing,
>but sadly the underlying principle, from observation, seems not to have been
>"RACES MUST NEVER BE MIXED NOOOOO" but rather "Keep those darker or yellower
>or redder races out of our lily-white pure virginal^Woverlordish gene pool!".
>
>As far as I understand things, anyway.

That's my understanding too. Consider the best-named US Supreme Court
case, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia

The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages
involving white persons demonstrates that the racial
classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures
designed to maintain White Supremacy.

That is, Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 (per that act's
Wikipedia page) 'required that a racial description of every person be
recorded at birth and divided society into only two classifications:
white and colored (essentially all other, which included numerous
American Indians). It defined race by the "one-drop rule", defining as
"colored" persons with any African or Native American ancestry.'

I'd like to note that in "Mirror, Mirror" (aired in 1967), Uhura is
vamping Sulu -- I suspect that an Asian was the only main cast member
that a black woman could have vamped without controversy.

--
Tim McDaniel, tm...@panix.com

[Cryptoengineer]

"David E. Siegel" <sie...@acm.org> wrote in
news:9b30c8c9-cff0-41ac...@googlegroups.com:

[snip snip snip]

>
> Burdened people as described can move at what 10 mph? perhaps 20mph
> for a sprint? Motorized vehicles can do much better than that.

For non-athletes, try 2-3 mph, max. You might get them to jog at 5 for
a few yards.

Seriously, I think you're putting far too much thought into this. I
doubt RAH thought further than 'the Chinese government is pushing
excess mouths through the gate as fast as it can get rid of them.'

pt

[J. Clarke]

In article <9b30c8c9-cff0-41ac...@googlegroups.com>,

So you're going to send through 75 miles of railroad track carried by
what? You can't send a train through until you have laid track you
know.

By the time you've done all your prep work to built your railroad to
nowhere you could have just moved the colony through.

> > > Particularly if
> > > he train is running thru the gate at fairly high speed.
> >
> > So now you not only want track, you want _good_ track and enough extra
> > for the train to be able to slow down from high speed on the other end.
> >
> Yes, I think it would pay off.

Run the numbers and show us.

> > Trains are not a good idea for a one-shot time-constrained movement.
> >
> But if the colony lives there will be many (short) gate crossings into the indefinite future.

If it lives long enough to start producing anything in sufficient
quantity that a mule team can't carry it.

> However, it might be that motorized tracked vehicles or vehicle trains
> would be a better bet, even if they would not be as easily maintained
> on the low-tech side. Either is surely a better use of scarce gate
> time than is having people or horses proceed on foot.

How about plain old trucks, and drive them back through the gate when
you're done with them? You're trying to be altogether too fancy.

> > > Yes, I am thinking of having pre-built rails go far enough to handle
> > > a full trainload, or even
> > > multiple trainloads.
> >
> > So now you're running the train back and forth across the gate, loading
> > it at one end and unloading it at the other, to save time in a transit
> > of a few hundred feet.
> >
>
> No not at all. As many trains as are wanted proceed one after another, at the best speed, and smallest interval, conditions safely allow, onto holding tracks
> laid out on the far end, to be unloaded AFTER the gate has closed, and thereafter used or taken down for parts or even for scrap metal, or possibly
> run back when the colony has cargo to send back to earth

So what does this gain over one train? You still have 75 miles of
train and 75 miles of track, however it is laid out. But now you are
introducing a fairly complex switching system as well.

> Motorized vehicles, probably tracked but possibly wheeled, could well be substituted. Again a string of these is waiting for the gate to be open and
> stable, and go through at the highest safe speed and shortest interval possible once the gate is stable. This is the best option if gate positioning
> is not precise enough to reliably mare track quickly. If the gates can be opened precisely enough for quick and reliable reconnection, then the greater
> volume and mas that trains could handle would probably make significant prep work on the low-tech side worth while.
> >
> > Clearly logistics is not your strong suit.
> >
> Not when idocies are put into my mouth. I never said anything about trains going back and forth during a single opening

Then what is gained by "multiple trains" other than greater expense?

> and i surely didn't intend to
> imply such an idea. That would be nonsense. If this were real some studies with numbers would be needed to compare the advantages of trains vs land-trains
> vs other possible options, and I don't claim to have done those. I just claim that a mechanized option pays off compared to having people walk or ride horse-
> or mule-drawn wagons through the short-term gate.

If you're traveling 500 miles motorized transportation has benefits. If
you're traveling 500 feet it takes longer to load and unload the
motorized transportation than it does to just carry it.

> > > Their cargo could include horses or mules, which indeed might well be
> > > useful for preliminary exploration. It could also include more
> > > rails so that tracks can be laid directly to any useful mine sites,
> >
> > So how many hundred miles of rail are you going to provide and where are
> > you going to get the manpower to lay the track? If you do a bit of
> > reseearch you will find that it is not as simple as laying tracks on the
> > ground. You have to have a graded roadbed for example, and a large
> > quantity of rot-resistant crossties, so now you have a large-scale
> > logging operation going and a pressure-treating plant which needs a
> > supply of chemicals. And before you say "but the railroads didn't do
> > that when they started out", you forget that the railroads were built in
> > an environment in which labor was cheap and plentiful (you could buy it
> > from Africa or import it dirt cheap from China, both of which options
> > were used.
> >
> Quite true. And in a high-tech society labor is not cheap, although if we have those large numbers of Asians and other impoverished colonists being sent outworld, perhaps it can be cheaper than in the 21st C.

However feeding them is not cheap and since you are putting all your
effort into building railroads on the other side before you build farms,
you can't feed them off the land.

> But compared to the human, materiel, and energy costs we are told and shown being spent on this project, hundreds of miles of rails *are* cheap.

But how do you transport them?

> Untreated
> wood can be used for ties at first, until a treatment plant can be built.

So now your colonists have to rip up all that track and replace the
ties.

> They won't last as long, but they will work for a time. Yes grading
> will have to be
> done. I am not a railroad expert, but i have lived near one and commuted on one, and seen construction in process, and i have read histories of the process.
>
> I do admit that trains may not be the best option, motorized vehicles might be better. Much depends on precise parameters not stated in the novel.


>
> >
> > > and mining equipment, or whatever else is deemed worth shipping.
> >
> >
> >
> > You really have no concept of the scale of operations required to run
> > even a small mine.
> >
> Since it was explicitly stated that a colony generally paid for itself by shipping back mined metals, some sort of mining is going nto need to be started
> at some point.

Yes, once you have a working colony then you start working on a cash
crop. But having to get mining going in order to fix the tools that you
need in order to have agriculture is going backwards.

> Will it pay better to wait until the needed support infrastructure can
> be built on the low-tech side, probably several decades
> later, or to ship it in as soon as a mine site has been discovered and surveyed?

When you make payment has no relation to its magnitude. The payment is
whatever the contract says whenever the contract says. The contract
will have considered the cost of money in its calculation.

> > > And I wold put a large
> > > enough colony to rapidly become self-sustaining thru pretty early in the development of a promising world.
> >
> > Clearly the Australasians took this approach. One wonders how many
> > starved and how many others ate each other before they got some kind of
> > stable agriculture going.
> >
> If they under-equip and under-supply their colonists enough for famine, let alone starvation or cannibalism to be probable, they are not doing *their*
> logistics well.

If the objective is to get two million people out of Australasia without
regard to what happens to them afterwards then they have done the
logistics just fine. It's a way of executing them without having
unsightly corpses to deal with afterward. And who knows, they might
pull a miracle and manage to thrive.

> Note that we don't know how new or long-established the world getting
> the huge steam of immigrants was -- or perhaps they were "political
> deportees" that the powers that be would just as soon did die. We simply don't know.
> >
> > You are forgetting that you can't just ship a million people through a
> > stargate and have them growing enough food to support themselves
> > overnight. The more you ship, the more land you need to clear. A small
> > group can get started in a natural clearing and expand from there, a
> > large group has to clear forest and pull stumps and the like before it
> > can even get started with such things as irrigation.
> >
> Granted. And I never said "millon".

No, Heinlein did. Two million to be precise.

> There will be an optimum size between "so small no useful surplus is
produced" and "so large the needed infrastructure
> isn't worth while". I suspect, abut can't prove, that the wagon trains shown are on the small side of that optimum, but it would take serious analysis to
> determine where the optimum really was, and that can't be done without real figures for things like "what does it cost per second to hold a gate open"
> "what are the costs for land clearing machines and teams", "How much clear land is needed for a colony of size X?" and various other parameters not given
> in the novel. So i can only guess at the result.
> >
> > > > Anne McCaffrey actually addresses this in the Pern novels, the
> > dragons
> > > > are a product of advanced biotechnology brought by the colonists, but
> > > > all that technology has been lost, leaving the dragons to make more
> > > > dragons.
> >
> > > > Now, it might be that nanotech replicators of some kind could circumvent
> > > > such issues, but when you get right down to it that's what a horse _is_,
> > > > the machinery that couple of nanoreplicators use to make more
> > > > nanoreplicators.
> >
> > > Well no. A true nanoreplicator can be programmed to turn out a variety of outputs from almost any input.
> >
> > Made lots of those have you? I suspect that they aren't going to be
> > nearly that flexible in the real world.
> >
> Perhaps not. No one knows. But if any artificial nano-replicators are/can be built, it is hard to see why they wouldn't be pretty flexible.

Limited space to hold code, limited space to hold tools.

> > > But horses and other living organisms are
> > > self-reproducing, obviously. Bio-engineered critters might well help, for the matter of that the breeding "mules" shown in the "Tale of the Adopted Daughter"
> > > sequence of TEfL greatly aided the settlers there. But TitS didn't mention any bio-engineering, so I struck to what would HAVE to be available based on the
> > > story, and might be useful and maintainable on a colony world. In any case there are few better ways to move a large mass rapidly past a fixed point than
> > > a rail-based system.
> >
> > This is true if the rails are already in place. But if you have to
> > build the rails first and are only going to have the system in operation
> > for a few hours or a few days then it's another story.
> >
> True. I am assuming repeated transits, at steadily reducing frequencies over many years. if this this not so, rails look less attractive, depending on just
> how high the cost per second of gate operation is. if it is high enough, anything that reduces it may well pay off.
>
> >
> > > Consider the wagon train shown early in TitS (and the similar one at the end). How long would it take to move through the gate under its own power? Half an
> > > hour? more? Depends on how many wagons. But load them on a train first (perhaps disassembling the wagons) and how long need the gate be open now? a
> > > minute or two, perhaps. Apply the same logic to the large numbers of Asians on foot that we are shown, and how much gate time would be saved?
> >
> >
> >
> > Well let's see, you have to build enough rails on the other side to hold
> > a train long enough to carry 2 million people. So how long is that
> > train? The Nazis put 150 Jews in a cattle car. Since we may take it as
> > a given that they were not concerned in the slightest for anything other
> > than transportation efficiency we can take that as a reasonable value.
> > So your train will be approximately 13,000 cars long. The German cattle
> > cars were about 30 feet long. So to hold this train you're going to
> > have to lay 75 miles of track on the other side of the gate. That's
> > just to hold the train, not to stop it. How long is it going to take
> > you to lay 75 miles of track?
> >
> Where do you get the figure of 2 million people? I never mentioned it, and i don't recall the novel doing so.

"His Serene Majesty Chairman Fung Chee Mu of the Australasian Republic
has informed the Corporation that his government intends to move in
excess of two million people in forty-eight hours, a truly impressive
figure, more than forty thousand each hour."

> But if one DID want to send 2 million people through in a single gate
> crossing, I strongly suspect that a rail-based or other motorized
> transpost system will reduce the crucial gate-open time a lot. No I
> don't have precise figures. Time spent building the raisl on the low-
> tech side is NOT gate-open time.

So you're going to put everything you need to build 75 miles of railroad
on another planet through the gate (that includes food, a large enough
military force to protect the workers, fuel, large scale power
equipment, a large quantity of rails, a substantial sawmill, etc)? How
long is that gonna take you?

> > > If the gates can't be reopened with sufficient precision to match up rails, use tracked vehicles, again loaded before the gate ever opens. Send them back on a
> >
> > > subsequent gate if they aren't useful to the colony yet.
> >
> >
> >
> > What makes you think that "tracked vehicles" are going to move large
> > masses of people faster than they can walk?
> >
> > You're too hung up on gadgets.
>
> Burdened people as described can move at what 10 mph? perhaps 20mph for a sprint? Motorized vehicles can do much better than that.

Geez, you don't even know the speed of a forced march and you want to
argue logistics. How many people can the largest "tracked vehicle" in
the world hold? And how many of those "tracked vehicles" can go through
the gate simultaneously? So how many does it take to move your two
million people? And will the crews of the "tracked vehicles" having
seen conditions on the other side voluntarily abandon your two million
people in place? Or do you want to gift them a large number of "tracked
vehicles" the loss of which increases the cost of your project?

> Gadgets can be very handy, and the absence of them in this situation was not well justified.

Of course it was. Gadgets require infrastructure that doesn't exist.
Heinlein, who had an engineering degree, understood this. You clearly
have trouble with it.

[J. Clarke]

In article <m1ekgb$mmn$1...@dont-email.me>, tit...@jobbleuniversity.com
says...

In both instances they went somewhere else, they didn't stop having
babies. In the case of Russia growth rate started declining in the '50s
in any case.

[lal_truckee]

On 10/12/14 1:03 PM, Cryptoengineer wrote:
> "J. Clarke" <jclark...@cox.net> wrote in
> news:MPG.2ea491996...@news.newsguy.com:
>
>> In article <161b1551-bfeb-48cc...@googlegroups.com>,
>> sie...@acm.org says...

clip

>>> If the gates can't be reopened with sufficient precision to match up
>>> rails, use tracked vehicles, again loaded before the gate ever opens.
>>> Send them back on a
>>> subsequent gate if they aren't useful to the colony yet.
>>
>> What makes you think that "tracked vehicles" are going to move large
>> masses of people faster than they can walk?
>>
>> You're too hung up on gadgets.
>
> You guys aren't being imaginative.

Definitely not imaginative.
Move the entry/exit gates, passing over pre-stacked goods and people.
The cargo displaces to the receiving side neatly stack; the people don't
even have to pause their bon voyage party cocktails.

[lal_truckee]

On 10/12/14 1:18 PM, Tim McDaniel wrote:
> I'd like to note that in "Mirror, Mirror" (aired in 1967), Uhura is
> vamping Sulu -- I suspect that an Asian was the only main cast member
> that a black woman could have vamped without controversy.

IIRC Uhura and Kirk kiss.

[Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)]

Under direct telekinetic control by the Platonians, yes. Even THEN it
was a major issue.

--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Website: http://www.grandcentralarena.com Blog:
http://seawasp.livejournal.com

[JRStern]

Axes, yes. Hand-made nails, sure.

Steam locomotives etc, rather more challenging. Even the tracks,
simply because of the mass. Even mass-produced cheap nails require
sophistication, not sure when those where first made.

J.

[David E. Siegel]

Nice idea if it works. Of course then you are in a different world with different world-building than that of TitS.

-DES

[Cryptoengineer]

"J. Clarke" <jclark...@cox.net> wrote in

news:MPG.2ea4ade18...@news.newsguy.com:

> In article <m1ekgb$mmn$1...@dont-email.me>, tit...@jobbleuniversity.com
> says...
>>
>> Cryptoengineer wrote:
>> > "J. Clarke" <jclark...@cox.net> wrote in
>> > news:MPG.2ea44c204...@news.newsguy.com:
>> >

>> >> In article <0a3eee0e-23d1-45fd-8694-afb3a11207d1

@googlegroups.com>,
>> >> jsa...@ecn.ab.ca says...
>>
>> >>> So if you want to inhibit population growth, _first_ get people's
>> >>> standards and expectations up with prosperity, _then_ collapse
the
>> >>> economy so it doesn't meet them.
>>
>> >> And that has worked where?
>>
>> > Russia.
>>
>> Detroit.
>
> In both instances they went somewhere else, they didn't stop having
> babies. In the case of Russia growth rate started declining in the
'50s
> in any case.
>

You really should look these things up before you post. For Russia
you are flat out wrong.

Yes, the birth rate declined from the 50s into the 60s, just as the
US rate did - they had Boomers too. But it was rising during the
70s and early 80s. Then the economy tanked, and the SU collapsed.

Between 1986 and 2000, the birth rate in Russia fell almost by half.
The death rate increased by 60%. The population decreased from 148 to
143 million.

This is not emigration. This is people not having babies, and dying
at a high rate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Cross

pt

[Brian M. Scott]

On Sun, 12 Oct 2014 13:59:32 -0700, JRStern
<JRS...@foobar.invalid> wrote in
<news:4nql3a5svbonrbqls...@4ax.com> in
rec.arts.sf.written:

From Wikipedia:

Until around 1800, nails were made by hand, and were
provided by an artisan known as a nailer or nailor. There
were workmen called slitters who cut up iron bars to a
suitable size for nailers to work on. From the late 16th
century, manual slitters disappeared with the rise of the
slitting mill, which cut bars of iron into rods with an
even cross-section, saving much manual effort.

[...]

The slitting mill, introduced to England in 1590, had
simplified the production of nail rods, but the real
first efforts to mechanise the nail-making process itself
occurred between 1790 and 1820, initially in the United
States and England, when various machines were invented
to automate and speed up the process of making nails from
bars of wrought iron.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nail_%28fastener%29#History>

Brian
--
It was the neap tide, when the baga venture out of their
holes to root for sandtatties. The waves whispered
rhythmically over the packed sand: haggisss, haggisss,
haggisss.

[Cryptoengineer]

Cryptoengineer <pete...@gmail.com> wrote in
news:XnsA3C4A35EF2...@216.166.97.131:

> "J. Clarke" <jclark...@cox.net> wrote in
> news:MPG.2ea491996...@news.newsguy.com:
>
>> In article <161b1551-bfeb-48cc...@googlegroups.com>,
>> sie...@acm.org says...
>>>
>>> On Sunday, October 12, 2014 10:20:04 AM UTC-4, J. Clarke wrote:

>>> > In article <3c38ad8d-3e29-4dc0-a946-
909b9a...@googlegroups.com>,

As for getting 2 million thru in 48 hours, we can run some numbers on
that. It's 11 people/second. US 'quick march' is around 3.5 mph, or
5.13 feet per second, using fit men with backpacks.

How tight can you pack people before the speed falls due to crowding?
When they're trying to carry everything they can that they own and think
they'll need? When the crowd includes the unfit, the elderly, the young?

To maintain 11 people per second, that gate must be pretty wide.

Or more likely, RAH didn't analyse it closely.

pt

[ppint. at pplay]

- hi; in article, <tcbl3ahrhgfduo6de...@4ax.com>,
"JRStern" commentated:

> (JamesNicoll) wrote:
>>1955's Tunnel in the Sky takes us to a future Earth jam-packed with
>>people but rescued from an ongoing Malthusian crisis by the timely
>>invention of interstellar gates.

>[]

>
>I have the vague recollection of reading this. As to the low tech, for
>a writer and readers living in 1955 and Heinlein born in 1907, the low
>tech was more familiar, the real world hi tech still not that high and
>not that common. There was less distance between 1955 and 1855, even
>less between 1907 and 1807. They still have (a few) horse-drawn wagons
>on the streets of NYC in 1930s Marx Bros movies, it's already antiquated,
>rare and humorous but still real enough and it's not just the romantic
>carts in Central Park. I gather it was not rare as recently as the early
>1920s.

- there were still horse-drawn delivery carts in normal use,
everyday use, in my childhood in north london; coal merchants,
both united dairies' and london co-operative dairies' door-
step milk deliverymen (& women), potato & carrot wholesalers
(who also did private deliveries) - but i don't recall seeing
any other specifically dedicated veg (or fruit) deliveries -
apart from the sun-tanned men on ancient-looking bicycles with
strings of orangey-brown-skinned onions dangling from them, the
bicycles' handle-bars and anything else possible; and, not ex-
actly delivery-men, the rag-and-bone man and the dust-bin men,
who doubled up on collecting the piles of mostly fallen leaves,
plus a little litter, swept together by the street-sweepers in
autumn (and blown apart again by equinoctial gales) (or kicked
to bits by gleeful small kids), far too voluminous for the street-
sweepers' hand-carts.

- lots of these were gone forever by the mid-sixties; some re-
placed by lorries, the milk-carts by electric milk-floats, some
seemingly just vanished - which apparently includes equinoctial
gales: nowadays we just have post-equinoctial gales when the jet-
stream shifts to its winter alignment.

- love, ppint.
[drop the "v", and change the "f" to a "g", to email or cc.]
--
"Earth occupies about one-half a degree in two dimensions."
- the real dick eney rec.arts.sf.fandom, 10/5/2005 (5/10/2005 for merkins)

[Robert Carnegie]

On Saturday, 11 October 2014 18:52:01 UTC+1, David E. Siegel wrote:
> My thought: the first time you open a gate for a colony you
> send through a rail setting team and defenders and supports.
> The next time you open it so that rails go through the gate
> and can haul mas through on fairly high speed steam trains.
> The engines stay on the colony side and if well-designed
> can be maintained fairly easily

Okay, but evidently Heinlein wanted a wagon train to the stars.
Crossed with "The Children's Crusade"[*], or _Lord of the Flies_
obviously.

You could techno-babble a reason why you can't run a train
through the stargate. Maybe there's a speed limit, otherwise
you decohere the Heisenberg preboxity norgulator (all die...)
Maybe the payload has to be organic matter (because Cthulhu).

In Alan Dean Foster's novel _The I Inside_ there's an
equivalent "GATE" device, but what you do is stand
/here/, four abreast I think, and they pull the lever
and all of you are flooped instantily to the receiver
on the homestead planet. Then four more people
step up. Unsurprisingly, the principles upon which
the government claims to offer places on the two
colony planets, Wonderful and Easystreet, are false.
(But it is a stargate to inhabitable extrasolar planets,
and not a machine to make alien-chow of unlucky victims.)

[*] Wikipedia: "largely apocryphal" (or at least wildly inaccurate?)

[JRStern]

On Sun, 12 Oct 2014 23:45:25 +0100 (BST), v$af$pp...@i-m-t.demon.co.uk
("ppint. at pplay") wrote:

> - there were still horse-drawn delivery carts in normal use,
> everyday use, in my childhood in north london; coal merchants,
> both united dairies' and london co-operative dairies' door-
> step milk deliverymen (& women), potato & carrot wholesalers
> (who also did private deliveries) - but i don't recall seeing
> any other specifically dedicated veg (or fruit) deliveries -
> apart from the sun-tanned men on ancient-looking bicycles with
> strings of orangey-brown-skinned onions dangling from them, the
> bicycles' handle-bars and anything else possible; and, not ex-
> actly delivery-men, the rag-and-bone man and the dust-bin men,
> who doubled up on collecting the piles of mostly fallen leaves,
> plus a little litter, swept together by the street-sweepers in
> autumn (and blown apart again by equinoctial gales) (or kicked
> to bits by gleeful small kids), far too voluminous for the street-
> sweepers' hand-carts.
>
> - lots of these were gone forever by the mid-sixties; some re-
> placed by lorries, the milk-carts by electric milk-floats, some
> seemingly just vanished - which apparently includes equinoctial
> gales: nowadays we just have post-equinoctial gales when the jet-
> stream shifts to its winter alignment.
>
> - love, ppint.
> [drop the "v", and change the "f" to a "g", to email or cc.]

The lost art in the US is probably fresh milk and related products
delivered to the door through about the 1960s, but at least in urban
areas it was done by truck probably back to the 1930s or earlier.

Funny thing is that delivery of consumables direct to the door is just
coming back now, and as soon as the robots are ready it may again
become common and standard. Delivery by flying drones is probably
never going to happen, well, unless your house sits on three hundred
foot stilts like the Jetsons.

J.

[James Nicoll]

In article <1ce2c079-0f75-4450...@googlegroups.com>,
Larry Headlund <l...@world.std.com> wrote:
>On Saturday, October 11, 2014 10:01:16 PM UTC-4, David E. Siegel wrote:
>We know that there are military forces (including the Amazon corps) but
>not who they are maintained against. There is no mention of non-human
>sapient technological species, nor of conflict between earth and other
>human-settled planets.
>
>There was a throwaway scene (first Emigrants' Gate chapter) where a
>chlorine breathing sapient is greeted by terrestrial diplomats. Rod's
>sister has been in combat but we aren't told if she was fighting humans
>or aliens or both.

Not those aliens, anyway. I recall "your land is no good to us and
vice versa so let us live in peace forever" getting tossed out by
a diplomat.
--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll (For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)

[Garrett Wollman]

In article <9bhm3a9kn82c82gtn...@4ax.com>,

JRStern <JRS...@foobar.invalid> wrote:

>The lost art in the US is probably fresh milk and related products
>delivered to the door through about the 1960s, but at least in urban
>areas it was done by truck probably back to the 1930s or earlier.

Never lost in the Boston area, at least -- there are at least two,
maybe three companies doing it (not counting the more recent,
supermarket-affiliated grocery delivery services).

-GAWollman

--
Garrett A. Wollman | What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft
wol...@bimajority.org| repeated, than the story of a large research program
Opinions not shared by| that impaled itself upon a false central assumption
my employers. | accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993

[Larry Headlund]

On Monday, October 13, 2014 12:44:19 AM UTC-4, James Nicoll wrote:
> In article <1ce2c079-0f75-4450...@googlegroups.com>,
> Larry Headlund <l...@world.std.com> wrote:
> >On Saturday, October 11, 2014 10:01:16 PM UTC-4, David E. Siegel wrote:
> >We know that there are military forces (including the Amazon corps) but not who they are maintained against. There is no mention of non-human sapient technological species, nor of conflict between earth and other human-settled planets.
>There was a throwaway scene (first Emigrants' Gate chapter) where a chlorine breathing sapient is greeted by terrestrial diplomats. Rod's sister has been in combat but we aren't told if she was fighting humans or aliens or both.
> Not those aliens, anyway. I recall "your land is no good to us and vice versa so let us live in peace forever" getting tossed out by a diplomat.

We are told that the only acceptable imports from the frontier planets are food and fissionables. If earth is trying to set up a classic 'colonies provide food and raw materials and consume manufactured goods' this situation has historically not been universally popular with the colonists themselves. So maybe Rod's sister and her Amazons are kept busy putting down colonial revolts. This is hard to reconcile with his sister's expressed desire to become a colonist herself.

If the idea is to maximize food and fissionable imports then the apparent policy of 19th century tech level immigration doesn't seem optimal. Refining fissionables requires honking big quantities of electricity, mid-20th USA levels but just looking at food reveals a contradiction. The USA in mid 19th had 70% of the population down on the farm. So the 70 million emigrants each year could, in a couple of years, produce food for 100 million, themselves and a 30 million amount for export. A mid 20th level when 12% of the US population was in agriculture means that same 70 million would produce food for 560 million or so, a half billion export surplus. By the early 21th we have 2% growing things and a grub for 3 and a half billion on the dock. It seems that a higher tech agriculture is the way to go.

But wait you say, these colonies aren't self sufficient! They are dependent on contact with Earth! This is not a bug, it's a feature. Ask yourself, when is the last time you worried that Iowa is self-sufficient only in niblets? Lost sleep because the Imperial Valley doesn't have any tractor factories? Not being self-sufficient means the farmers will be less hard-nosed when it comes to dickering over price. As long as they have food to sell they will have regular contact with industrial earth, mod the occasional nova. Ricardo would be all for it.

But what if food imports aren't the point? What if, like in Farmer in the Sky the Powers That Be are convinced that collapse is inevitable and they want human civilization spread far and wide before then? (This is in contradiction to what the book asserts: the Gates had eliminated the basic cause of war). You don't want all your eggs in one basket but one hundred thousand baskets seems too much of a good thing. Those 70 million emigrants per year might be better spent creating 7 mid 20th century Australias per year rather than a mean of 700 immigrants per world.

For that matter, wouldn't potential colonial administrators and lawyers be better off skipping Outward Bound: Extreme Edition and taking some Ag courses and joining the 4H club? Wouldn't make near as interesting a novel.

[Richard R. Hershberger]

On Sunday, October 12, 2014 2:03:14 PM UTC-4, Cryptoengineer wrote:
> JRStern <JRS...@foobar.invalid> wrote in
>
> news:tcbl3ahrhgfduo6de...@4ax.com:
>
>
>
> > On Sat, 11 Oct 2014 03:32:06 +0000 (UTC), jdni...@panix.com (James
>

> > Nicoll) wrote:
>
> >>1955's Tunnel in the Sky takes us to a future Earth jam-packed with
> >>people but rescued from an ongoing Malthusian crisis by the timely
> >>invention of interstellar gates.
>

> > I'm sure I read this when I was a kid, but had forgotten everything
> > including the Star Gates. Huh.
>

> >>Sadly, this is marred with the usual Heinleinisms. Not just the
> >>Malthusian models that provide the motivation to race to the stars

> >>but a trained eye can detect subtle differences between how the
> >>American-style pioneers are portrayed:
>

> >> here each family had its own wagon..long, sweeping, boat-tight
> >> Conestogas drawn by three-pair teams and housed in sturdy glass
> >> canvas square and businesslike Studebakers with steel bodies,
> >> high mudcutter wheels, and pulled by one or two-pair teams.
> >> The draft animals were Morgans and lordly Clydesdales and
> >> jug-headed Missouri mules with strong shoulders and shrewd,
> >> suspicious eyes. Dogs trotted between wheels, wagons were piled
> >> high with household goods and implements and children, poultry
> >> protested the indignities of fate in cages tied on behind, and
> >> a little Shetland pony, riderless but carrying his saddle and
> >> just a bit too tall to run underneath with the dogs, stayed

> >> close to the tailgate of one family's rig.

>
> >>And how the Asian immigrants are depicted:
>

> >> The crowd streaming through the pen were Asiatics- Japanese,
> >> Indonesians, Siamese, some East Indians, a few Eurasians, but
> >> predominantly South Chinese. To Rod they all looked much alike-
> >> tiny women with babies on hip or back, or often one on back
> >> and one in arms, endless runny-nosed and shaven-headed children,
> >> fathers with household goods ill enormous back packs or pushed
> >> ahead on barrows. There were a few dispirited ponies dragging
> >> two-wheeled carts much too big for them but most of the torrent
> >> had only that which they could carry.

>
> >>As well, the justifications for why the American settlers equip
>
> >>themselves for a 19th century society are not convincing. By choosing
> >>that toolkit, they are limiting their productivity to 19th century
> >>levels, which is going to make ramping up to modern levels of
> >>prosperity that much harder. But Americans are nostalgic for the
> >>19th century.
>

> >>Part of the justification for sending out low tech colonies is
> >>because interstellar gates are energy-expensive, so contact is only
> >>worth while once the colony has stuff - "food and fissionable
> >>metals" - worth that cost to send back.
>

> > I have the vague recollection of reading this.
>
> > As to the low tech, for a writer and readers living in 1955 and
> > Heinlein born in 1907, the low tech was more familiar, the real world
> > hi tech still not that high and not that common. There was less
> > distance between 1955 and 1855, even less between 1907 and 1807. They
> > still have (a few) horse-drawn wagons on the streets of NYC in 1930s
> > Marx Bros movies, it's already antiquated, rare and humorous but still
> > real enough and it's not just the romantic carts in Central Park. I
> > gather it was not rare as recently as the early 1920s.
>

> There were still a few horse-drawn carts to be seen in the suburbs of
> London in the late 1960s, though by then it pretty rare.
>
> The homesteaders of the 19th and 18th century did have to be partially
> self-sufficient, but they weren't entirely cut off. There was trade
> going on all along. Nevertheless, in the popular imagination, including
> perhaps RAH's, that was the latest tech level they could think of as
> self-sustaining.

While Heinlein clearly knew this, I think he underestimated it. In the Heinleinverse this means that you plan really carefully what you are going to pack into the wagon. In the real world of American homesteading, the forward edge of settling was constrained by the supply line back to civilization. From the time of the first English settlements to the closing of the frontier was about three hundred years. Fully half of this was getting from the coast to the Appalachians. Where the first half was a crawl, the second half was a sprint. There are lots of reasons for this, but one was that for the first half that supply line back to civilization meant ships to Britain. In the second it meant lines of communication to the east side of the Appalachians.

This is symbolized nicely by the Conestoga wagon: the prairie schooner, manufactured in southeastern Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania has almost no old growth forest because it was used as fuel for the early iron industry, much of which went toward western settlement. Those forests of western Pennsylvania we see today are almost entirely regrowth. And, of course, there were endless skilled specialists and specialized equipment supporting all this.

The upshot is that I am skeptical of the idea of building a 19th century by sending out families in Conestoga wagons, even with careful planning. While we have the American mythos of rugged individuals conquering the wilderness, there was a lot more infrastructure supporting these rugged individuals than meets the eye.

[J. Clarke]

In article <51eb7c9f-aaeb-4406...@googlegroups.com>,
l...@world.std.com says...

>
> On Monday, October 13, 2014 12:44:19 AM UTC-4, James Nicoll wrote:
> > In article <1ce2c079-0f75-4450...@googlegroups.com>,
> > Larry Headlund <l...@world.std.com> wrote:
> > >On Saturday, October 11, 2014 10:01:16 PM UTC-4, David E. Siegel wrote:
> > >We know that there are military forces (including the Amazon corps) but not who they are maintained against. There is no mention of non-human sapient technological species, nor of conflict between earth and other human-settled planets.
> >There was a throwaway scene (first Emigrants' Gate chapter) where a chlorine breathing sapient is greeted by terrestrial diplomats. Rod's sister has been in combat but we aren't told if she was fighting humans or aliens or both.
> > Not those aliens, anyway. I recall "your land is no good to us and vice versa so let us live in peace forever" getting tossed out by a diplomat.
>
> We are told that the only acceptable imports from the frontier planets are food and fissionables. If earth is trying to set up a classic 'colonies provide food and raw materials and consume manufactured goods' this situation has historically not been universally popular with the colonists themselves. So maybe Rod's sister and her Amazons are kept busy putting down colonial revolts. This is hard to reconcile with his sister's expressed desire to become a colonist
herself.
>

> If the idea is to maximize food and fissionable imports then the
apparent policy of 19th century tech level immigration doesn't seem
optimal. Refining fissionables requires honking big quantities of
electricity, mid-20th USA levels

Check again. While electrolysis is one option there are chemical
methods as well. Uranium was available in commercial quantities in the
late 1800s (it has uses other than nuclear reactors--among other things
it makes pretty glass). You only need the isotope separation facilities
if you want weapons-grade--reactors can be built that work fine with
natural uranium.

> but just looking at food reveals a contradiction. The USA in mid 19th
had 70% of the population down on the farm. So the 70 million emigrants
each year could, in a couple of years, produce food for 100 million,
themselves and a 30 million amount for export.

And this is a problem because?

> A mid 20th level when 12% of the US population was in agriculture
means that same 70 million would produce food for 560 million or so, a
half billion export surplus. By the early 21th we have 2% growing things
and a grub for 3 and a half billion on the dock. It seems that a higher
tech agriculture is the way to go.

While this is certainly an option, it does not remove surplus population
from Earth.

> But wait you say, these colonies aren't self sufficient! They are dependent on contact with Earth! This is not a bug, it's a feature. Ask yourself, when is the last time you worried that Iowa is self-sufficient only in niblets? Lost sleep because the Imperial Valley doesn't have any tractor factories? Not being self-sufficient means the farmers will be less hard-nosed when it comes to dickering over price. As long as they have food to sell they will have regular contact
> with industrial earth, mod the occasional nova. Ricardo would be all
> for it.

Depends on the colony and its purpose--you're assuming that all colonies
are created equal. We had two examples at the beginning of the book, a
"bounty planet" where nobody wanted to go unless forced, and a premium
planet where a rich, well equipped expedition paid a premium for the
right to colonize.

> But what if food imports aren't the point? What if, like in Farmer in
the Sky the Powers That Be are convinced that collapse is inevitable and
they want human civilization spread far and wide before then? (This is
in contradiction to what the book asserts: the Gates had eliminated the
basic cause of war). You don't want all your eggs in one basket but one
hundred thousand baskets seems too much of a good thing. Those 70
million emigrants per year might be better spent creating 7 mid 20th
century Australias per year rather than a mean of 700 immigrants per
world.

Who says that they're colonizing every mapped planet?

> For that matter, wouldn't potential colonial administrators and
> lawyers be better off skipping Outward Bound: Extreme Edition and
> taking some Ag courses and joining the 4H club? Wouldn't make near as
> interesting a novel.

And wouldn't equip them to survive in an alien environment. Earth today
is a tame world. The early stages of a colony on an alien world are not
going to be like that. There are going to be a lot of things that can
kill you there that you don't know about.

[Greg Goss]

"J. Clarke" <jclark...@cox.net> wrote:

>Uranium was available in commercial quantities in the
>late 1800s (it has uses other than nuclear reactors--among other things
>it makes pretty glass). You only need the isotope separation facilities
>if you want weapons-grade--reactors can be built that work fine with
>natural uranium.

If you're not doing isotope separation on the uranium, then you need
isotope separation on the water instead (Candu).
--
We are geeks. Resistance is voltage over current.

[JRStern]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2014 05:08:29 +0000 (UTC), wol...@bimajority.org
(Garrett Wollman) wrote:

>In article <9bhm3a9kn82c82gtn...@4ax.com>,
>JRStern <JRS...@foobar.invalid> wrote:
>
>>The lost art in the US is probably fresh milk and related products
>>delivered to the door through about the 1960s, but at least in urban
>>areas it was done by truck probably back to the 1930s or earlier.
>
>Never lost in the Boston area, at least -- there are at least two,
>maybe three companies doing it (not counting the more recent,
>supermarket-affiliated grocery delivery services).

In Los Angeles "milkman" service was still common in the early 1960s,
I think gone by about 1970 except for limited areas, an attempt was
made to restore in the 1980s (or was it 1990s?) by the guy who became
mayor of Los Angeles Richard Riordan, but I think it failed within a
year or so. I probably have this garbled but it's roughly true.

And today you can get full (??) grocery orders delivered to your door
by several markets, independent courier services, and I think Amazon
in at least test areas. I'm guessing it's here to stay.

Better would be delivery by pneumatic tube or matter transporter, if
we can't synthesize the stuff on demand.

J.


>
>-GAWollman

[Larry Headlund]

On Monday, October 13, 2014 11:37:33 AM UTC-4, J. Clarke wrote:
> In article <51eb7c9f-aaeb-4406...@googlegroups.com>,
> l...@world.std.com says...

> > If the idea is to maximize food and fissionable imports then the apparent policy of 19th century tech level immigration doesn't seem optimal. Refining fissionables requires honking big quantities of electricity, mid-20th USA levels
>
> Check again. While electrolysis is one option there are chemical methods as well. Uranium was available in commercial quantities in the late 1800s (it has uses other than nuclear reactors--among other things it makes pretty glass). You only need the isotope separation facilities if you want weapons-grade--reactors can be built that work fine with natural uranium.

Wrong. Civilian reactors (circa 1955) need enriched uranium, just not as enriched as weapons grade. See (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium) plus all the recent news about Iran refining uranium for civilian use. You cannot isolate the U235 (.7% by weight of uranium metal) by chemical means. And it is only the U235 which counts as fissle. The CANDU reactors which use natural uranium were not developed until the late 1950s-early 1960s.

>
>
> > but just looking at food reveals a contradiction. The USA in mid 19th had 70% of the population down on the farm. So the 70 million emigrants each year could, in a couple of years, produce food for 100 million, themselves and a 30 million amount for export.
> And this is a problem because?

Because of the qualifying proposition 'If the idea is to maximize food and fissionable imports'. Reading comprehension isn't your strong suit.

>
> > A mid 20th level when 12% of the US population was in agriculture means that same 70 million would produce food for 560 million or so, a half billion export surplus. By the early 21th we have 2% growing things and a grub for 3 and a half billion on the dock. It seems that a higher tech agriculture is the way to go.
>
> While this is certainly an option, it does not remove surplus population from Earth.
>
>
>
> > But wait you say, these colonies aren't self sufficient! They are dependent on contact with Earth! This is not a bug, it's a feature. Ask yourself, when is the last time you worried that Iowa is self-sufficient only in niblets? Lost sleep because the Imperial Valley doesn't have any tractor factories? Not being self-sufficient means the farmers will be less hard-nosed when it comes to dickering over price. As long as they have food to sell they will have regular contact with industrial earth, mod the occasional nova. Ricardo would be all for it.

>
> Depends on the colony and its purpose--you're assuming that all colonies are created equal. We had two examples at the beginning of the book, a "bounty planet" where nobody wanted to go unless forced, and a premium planet where a rich, well equipped expedition paid a premium for the right to colonize.

No, I am not saying that all colonies are created equal. Informed readers would see from the reference to Ricardo that I am saying that some colonies are better for some things then others and the more advantageous sites should be developed before the lesser ones.

> > But what if food imports aren't the point? What if, like in Farmer in the Sky the Powers That Be are convinced that collapse is inevitable and they want human civilization spread far and wide before then? (This is in contradiction to what the book asserts: the Gates had eliminated the basic cause of war). You don't want all your eggs in one basket but one hundred thousand baskets seems too much of a good thing. Those 70 million emigrants per year might be better spent creating 7 mid 20th century Australias per year rather than a mean of 700 immigrants per world.
>
> Who says that they're colonizing every mapped planet?

Not me. You know, you can look up the meaning of words you don't understand, like mean.

However, in the one wagon train of emigrants we are shown, 63 wagons or 300 to 500 persons, we are explicitly told that _this_ group of emigrants will be commercially isolated until _they_ could produce surpluses valuable enogh to trade, indicating settlement sizes were small and justifying the horses instead of tractors, etc.

>
>
>
> > For that matter, wouldn't potential colonial administrators and lawyers be better off skipping Outward Bound: Extreme Edition and taking some Ag courses and joining the 4H club? Wouldn't make near as interesting a novel.
>
> And wouldn't equip them to survive in an alien environment. Earth today is a tame world. The early stages of a colony on an alien world are not going to be like that. There are going to be a lot of things that can kill you there that you don't know about.

The really early stages of pioneering on an alien world aren't going to need many lawyers and administrators. Even in a frontier, these are town/city positions. For example, Springfield had a population of 2600 when Lincoln started his law practice there.

[Tim McDaniel]

In article <m1ep9n$6ll$2...@dont-email.me>,

See "without controversy", supra (and that was a year later).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's_Stepchildren#Production_and_reception
describes the background. The controversy was behind the scenes in
NBC and production.

There were, however, few contemporary records of any complaints
commenting on the scene.[12] Nichelle Nichols observes that
"Plato's Stepchildren" which first aired in November 1968
"received a huge response. We received one of the largest batches
of fan mail ever, all of it very positive, with many addressed to
me from girls wondering how it felt to kiss Captain Kirk, and many
to him from guys wondering the same thing about me. However,
almost no one found the kiss offensive" except from a single
mildly negative letter from one white Southerner who wrote: "I am
totally opposed to the mixing of the races. However, any time a
red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame
in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain't gonna fight it."[12]

--
Tim McDaniel, tm...@panix.com

[Quadibloc]

On Sunday, October 12, 2014 7:28:55 AM UTC-6, J. Clarke wrote:

> What leads you to believe that a high population causes poverty?

Huh?

It's true that Japan is wealthy and has a high population. But that is because
it can engage in international trade, and it can harvest fish from the oceans
for use as food.

In general, being able to make a considerable amount of money by exporting
value added by local labor to one's products is not something one can depend
on. Other countries will much prefer to do this kind of thing for themselves -
if some foreign country has a temporary advantage in technology, they will
strive mightily to overcome it.

Only things like mineral resources and arable land can't be brought into being
by human effort - technological parity with other parts of the world just takes
work.

John Savard

[J. Clarke]

In article <0edb3aca-76d7-43b8...@googlegroups.com>,
jsa...@ecn.ab.ca says...

>
> On Sunday, October 12, 2014 7:28:55 AM UTC-6, J. Clarke wrote:
>
> > What leads you to believe that a high population causes poverty?
>
> Huh?
>
> It's true that Japan is wealthy and has a high population.

The US, the EU, and China all have larger populations and higher GDPs.

> But that is because
> it can engage in international trade, and it can harvest fish from the oceans
> for use as food.

So? How do you explain the US and the EU?

> In general, being able to make a considerable amount of money by exporting
> value added by local labor to one's products is not something one can depend
> on.

Why not?

> Other countries will much prefer to do this kind of thing for
> themselves -

That would be news to the US and Japan both of which farm out a good
deal of manufacturing to China.

> if some foreign country has a temporary advantage in technology, they will
> strive mightily to overcome it.

Why would a country strive mightily to overcome its own advantage?

> Only things like mineral resources and arable land can't be brought into being
> by human effort - technological parity with other parts of the world just takes
> work.

And a billion people can't do more work than a million? I don't see an
argument here.

[J. Clarke]

In article <b698ce04-5c20-4834...@googlegroups.com>,
l...@world.std.com says...
I started to respond to this but the googleized formatting made it more effort than it is worth.

[Steve Coltrin]

begin fnord

Greg Goss <go...@gossg.org> writes:

> "J. Clarke" <jclark...@cox.net> wrote:
>
>>Uranium was available in commercial quantities in the
>>late 1800s (it has uses other than nuclear reactors--among other things
>>it makes pretty glass). You only need the isotope separation facilities
>>if you want weapons-grade--reactors can be built that work fine with
>>natural uranium.
>
> If you're not doing isotope separation on the uranium, then you need
> isotope separation on the water instead (Candu).

Or you pick a planet whose uranium has a higher 235/238 ratio; Charles
Stross did this in _Singularity Sky_.

--
Steve Coltrin spco...@omcl.org Google Groups killfiled here
"A group known as the League of Human Dignity helped arrange for Deuel
to be driven to a local livestock scale, where he could be weighed."
- Associated Press

[Paul Colquhoun]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2014 08:14:20 -0700 (PDT), Larry Headlund <l...@world.std.com> wrote:


| For that matter, wouldn't potential colonial administrators and
| lawyers be better off skipping Outward Bound: Extreme Edition
| and taking some Ag courses and joining the 4H club? Wouldn't
| make near as interesting a novel.

I always assumed that the survival course was for 1st wave colonial
leaders or explorer types, and an actual colony would have farmers,
blacksmiths, etc. along with the leader/hunter/survivalist types.


--
Reverend Paul Colquhoun, ULC. http://andor.dropbear.id.au/
Asking for technical help in newsgroups? Read this first:
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#intro

[Cryptoengineer]

Larry Headlund <l...@world.std.com> wrote in
news:b698ce04-5c20-4834...@googlegroups.com:

>>
>> And wouldn't equip them to survive in an alien environment. Earth
>> today
> is a tame world. The early stages of a colony on an alien world are
> not going to be like that. There are going to be a lot of things that
> can kill you there that you don't know about.
>
> The really early stages of pioneering on an alien world aren't going
> to need many lawyers and administrators. Even in a frontier, these are
> town/city positions. For example, Springfield had a population of 2600
> when Lincoln started his law practice there.

I'd like to point out that Illinois has had government officials
empowered to hear and decide legal cases continuously since 1699,
when the French established the Commandery of Illinois, and
Commandant appointed judges to each settlement.

People don't abandon legal systems just because they're out
in the woods.

pt

[J. Clarke]

In article <m2wq835...@kelutral.omcl.org>, spco...@omcl.org says...

>
> begin fnord
> Greg Goss <go...@gossg.org> writes:
>
> > "J. Clarke" <jclark...@cox.net> wrote:
> >
> >>Uranium was available in commercial quantities in the
> >>late 1800s (it has uses other than nuclear reactors--among other things
> >>it makes pretty glass). You only need the isotope separation facilities
> >>if you want weapons-grade--reactors can be built that work fine with
> >>natural uranium.
> >
> > If you're not doing isotope separation on the uranium, then you need
> > isotope separation on the water instead (Candu).
>
> Or you pick a planet whose uranium has a higher 235/238 ratio; Charles
> Stross did this in _Singularity Sky_.

Note that CANDU is not the only natural-uranium reactor design to go
inot service. Chernobyl was a natural-uranium reactor, so were the
British Magnox reactors. Neither of those required isotope separation
of any kind.

[David DeLaney]

On 2014-10-13, J. Clarke <jclark...@cox.net> wrote:
> Check again. While electrolysis is one option there are chemical
> methods as well. Uranium was available in commercial quantities in the
> late 1800s (it has uses other than nuclear reactors--among other things
> it makes pretty glass).

Yep. Orange. Fiestaware.

> You only need the isotope separation facilities
> if you want weapons-grade--reactors can be built that work fine with
> natural uranium.

Well, at this point we still can. A few billion more years down the line and
that dwindles away...

Dave
--
\/David DeLaney posting thru EarthLink - "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

[Cryptoengineer]

David DeLaney <davidd...@earthlink.net> wrote in
news:r-ydnZKasKZUcaHJ...@earthlink.com:

> On 2014-10-13, J. Clarke <jclark...@cox.net> wrote:
>> Check again. While electrolysis is one option there are chemical
>> methods as well. Uranium was available in commercial quantities in
>> the late 1800s (it has uses other than nuclear reactors--among other
>> things it makes pretty glass).
>
> Yep. Orange. Fiestaware.

That's much later. Try looking up 'Uranium glass'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_glass

I collect the stuff, very casually. I don't eat
off of it.

pt

[Mike Dworetsky]

JRStern wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Oct 2014 15:45:11 -0400, "J. Clarke"
> <jclark...@cox.net> wrote:
>
>> In article <ac2b2008-2c33-4b59...@googlegroups.com>,

>> sie...@acm.org says...

>>> <snip quote showing Asian settlers>
>>>>

>>> RAH knew perfectly well that wagon train tech is NOT
>>> self-sufficient without at least limited development, and really
>>> required contact with a full civilization or the ability to create
>>> one. There is a scene in his _Beyond This Horizon_ where
>>> Monro-Alpha rhapsodizes on the "simple life" to Smith from 1926,
>>> and Smith responds "He wants to cut down a tree; who sold him the
>>> axe?!" There is a more extreme and less realistic example at the
>>> start of "Coventry" where the VP character thinks that his
>>> track-driven "turtle" is a primitive device that he could easily
>>> replicate if he had to, and the narrator points out his ignorance.
>>>
>>> However, given coal, wood, and iron ore, arable land and an
>>> assortment of skills, the required initial seed to build a 19th-C
>>> level of tech is not huge, although i think the one-family minimum
>>> shown in the "Tale of the Adopted Daughter" (aka "Happy Valley")
>>> is not quite realistic.
>>
>> If you can find a source of iron ore you can make iron axe heads with
>> fairly primitive technology. You can also reforge steel ones.
>> Making steel tools from scratch by hand though is a tremendous lot
>> of very hard work.
>
> Axes, yes. Hand-made nails, sure.
>
> Steam locomotives etc, rather more challenging. Even the tracks,
> simply because of the mass. Even mass-produced cheap nails require
> sophistication, not sure when those where first made.
>

> J.

Aren't we forgetting that steam powered trains were working in England in
the 1820s-30s, which most would regard as the horse and buggy age? If the
settlers found the raw materials and had a few books on how to do it, I
think they could have their own heavy industry and trains within 20 years of
arriving. And I would bet that the planet had first been explored
sufficiently to know where the coal, oil and iron ore were located, before
dumping colonists (with skills) there.

--
Mike Dworetsky

(Remove pants sp*mbl*ck to reply)

[Mike Dworetsky]

We have had a milkman delivering to our door since moving to our suburban
London house in 1985. He just dropped off two bottles this morning. OK, so
it is an electric cart.

I can remember that shortly after moving into my office in central London in
1974, the "rag and bone" man came down the street in a horse-drawn cart with
the traditional cry, "Any old iron?"

[Richard R. Hershberger]

For that matter, you look at any of the New World colonies and there was some sort of judicial authority in all of them. Or at least all the official colonies. There also were many bootleg colonies. They are less well documented. I suspect that many of them had some sort of de facto judicial authority, but I couldn't prove it.

Libertopian fantasies tend to be set in low population density cultures: the lower the better. This avoids the awkward necessity of rules for people to live together, or even any embarrassing questions about who paves the damn roads.

Richard R. Hershberger

[Cryptoengineer]

"Richard R. Hershberger" <rrh...@acme.com> wrote in
news:77e7a0c3-db6e-4ea3...@googlegroups.com:

Yes. Officially sanctioned colonies, pretty much by definition, are
an attempt by the originating state to extend its reach and authority
to new areas. It would be simply unthinkable just let people be
ungoverned.

pt

[Robert Carnegie]

On Monday, 13 October 2014 23:04:06 UTC+1, J. Clarke wrote:
> In article <0edb3aca-76d7-43b8...@googlegroups.com>,
> jsa...@ecn.ab.ca says...
> > On Sunday, October 12, 2014 7:28:55 AM UTC-6, J. Clarke wrote:
> > > What leads you to believe that a high population causes poverty?
> >
> > Huh?
> >
> > It's true that Japan is wealthy and has a high population.

> > [But - ]

>
> The US, the EU, and China all have larger populations
> and higher GDPs.

Any given territory has a certain amount of stuff.

If, over time, the territory comes to have more
people, then, each person has less stuff.

Natural-wealth-wise, it's been my impression that
Japan has less stuff than other places. Farm land.
And <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Japan>
says "Mining in Japan is minimal because Japan
possesses very few mining resources. This article
is outdated, please update" - outdated how?
Did a vibranium asteroid land there recently that
I didn't hear about? (I suppose you wouldn't...)

[Greg Goss]

Steve Coltrin <spco...@omcl.org> wrote:

>begin fnord
>Greg Goss <go...@gossg.org> writes:
>
>> "J. Clarke" <jclark...@cox.net> wrote:
>>
>>>Uranium was available in commercial quantities in the
>>>late 1800s (it has uses other than nuclear reactors--among other things
>>>it makes pretty glass). You only need the isotope separation facilities
>>>if you want weapons-grade--reactors can be built that work fine with
>>>natural uranium.
>>
>> If you're not doing isotope separation on the uranium, then you need
>> isotope separation on the water instead (Candu).
>
>Or you pick a planet whose uranium has a higher 235/238 ratio; Charles
>Stross did this in _Singularity Sky_.

Or the all-natural reactor in South Africa.

[Greg Goss]

"Mike Dworetsky" <plati...@pants.btinternet.com> wrote:

>JRStern wrote:

>> Steam locomotives etc, rather more challenging. Even the tracks,
>> simply because of the mass. Even mass-produced cheap nails require
>> sophistication, not sure when those where first made.

On this week's Amazing Race, they had to build authentic Viking
torches. One of the steps involved bending a steel nail to hold the
burlap in place on the end. After reading enough 1632 documentary
bits, I wondered just how authentic a bendable nail would have been to
the Vikings. Cast iron? Would they have had ANY nails?

>
>Aren't we forgetting that steam powered trains were working in England in
>the 1820s-30s, which most would regard as the horse and buggy age? If the
>settlers found the raw materials and had a few books on how to do it, I
>think they could have their own heavy industry and trains within 20 years of
>arriving. And I would bet that the planet had first been explored
>sufficiently to know where the coal, oil and iron ore were located, before
>dumping colonists (with skills) there.

I thought that the colonists were expected to DO the exploring. Of
course dragging magnetometers and gravimeters behind an airplane is a
lot easier than slogging a mule through the forests.

[Mark Bestley]

Mike Dworetsky <plati...@pants.btinternet.com> wrote:

> JRStern wrote:
> > On Sun, 12 Oct 2014 23:45:25 +0100 (BST), v$af$pp...@i-m-t.demon.co.uk
> > ("ppint. at pplay") wrote:
> >
> >> - there were still horse-drawn delivery carts in normal use,
> >> everyday use, in my childhood in north london; coal merchants,
> >> both united dairies' and london co-operative dairies' door-
> >> step milk deliverymen (& women), potato & carrot wholesalers

> > The lost art in the US is probably fresh milk and related products
> > delivered to the door through about the 1960s, but at least in urban
> > areas it was done by truck probably back to the 1930s or earlier.
> >
> > Funny thing is that delivery of consumables direct to the door is just
> > coming back now, and as soon as the robots are ready it may again
> > become common and standard. Delivery by flying drones is probably
> > never going to happen, well, unless your house sits on three hundred
> > foot stilts like the Jetsons.
> >
> > J.
>
> We have had a milkman delivering to our door since moving to our suburban
> London house in 1985. He just dropped off two bottles this morning. OK, so
> it is an electric cart.
>

Electric cart deliveries are still going

> I can remember that shortly after moving into my office in central London in
> 1974, the "rag and bone" man came down the street in a horse-drawn cart with
> the traditional cry, "Any old iron?"

I seen one of those going by my house a couple of times this century.

And there are still a few dray horses
<http://www.harveys.org.uk/the-brewery/spot-the-dray>


--
Mark

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

On 2014-10-14 10:45:53 -0400, Robert Carnegie said:

> On Monday, 13 October 2014 23:04:06 UTC+1, J. Clarke wrote:
>> In article <0edb3aca-76d7-43b8...@googlegroups.com>,
>> jsa...@ecn.ab.ca says...
>>> On Sunday, October 12, 2014 7:28:55 AM UTC-6, J. Clarke wrote:
>>>> What leads you to believe that a high population causes poverty?
>>>
>>> Huh?
>>>
>>> It's true that Japan is wealthy and has a high population.
>>> [But - ]
>>
>> The US, the EU, and China all have larger populations
>> and higher GDPs.
>
> Any given territory has a certain amount of stuff.
>
> If, over time, the territory comes to have more
> people, then, each person has less stuff.

The amount of stuff is not fixed and immutable.



--
I'm no longer serializing an Ethshar novel!

[James Nicoll]

In article <e6056558-65f1-40c4...@googlegroups.com>,

Robert Carnegie <rja.ca...@excite.com> wrote:

>If, over time, the territory comes to have more
>people, then, each person has less stuff.

Therefore Canada, which has more people now than it did in 1961
when I was born, must have a lower stuff per person measure.
I wonder how are per capita income has plummetted since I was born?
--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll (For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)

[Brian M. Scott]

On Tue, 14 Oct 2014 09:24:50 -0600, Greg Goss
<go...@gossg.org> wrote in
<news:ca4ti1...@mid.individual.net> in
rec.arts.sf.written:

[...]

> On this week's Amazing Race, they had to build authentic
> Viking torches. One of the steps involved bending a
> steel nail to hold the burlap in place on the end. After
> reading enough 1632 documentary bits, I wondered just how
> authentic a bendable nail would have been to the Vikings.
> Cast iron? Would they have had ANY nails?

Certainly. And rivets: their ships were of clinker
construction.

[...]

Brian
--
It was the neap tide, when the baga venture out of their
holes to root for sandtatties. The waves whispered
rhythmically over the packed sand: haggisss, haggisss,
haggisss.

[David E. Siegel]

On Tuesday, October 14, 2014 10:45:53 AM UTC-4, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> On Monday, 13 October 2014 23:04:06 UTC+1, J. Clarke wrote:
>
> > In article <0edb3aca-76d7-43b8...@googlegroups.com>,
> > jsa...@ecn.ab.ca says...
> > > On Sunday, October 12, 2014 7:28:55 AM UTC-6, J. Clarke wrote:
> > > > What leads you to believe that a high population causes poverty?

> > > Huh?

> > > It's true that Japan is wealthy and has a high population.
>
> > > [But - ]
>
> > The US, the EU, and China all have larger populations
> > and higher GDPs.
>
> Any given territory has a certain amount of stuff.
> If, over time, the territory comes to have more
> people, then, each person has less stuff.
>

Incorrect, or at least so badly oversimplified as to be wrong. Physical wealth is not a fixed constant. Iron ore in the ground adds little to anyone's
standard of living; once mined and used to manufacture useful artifacts, it may add much. More complex artifacts may add far more to "wealth" than the
same materiel content in a different form. A quantity of silicon, say, can form a small pane of glass, or a number of computer chips. Many of the
same atoms, not the same utility and so not the same wealth or contribution to standard of living. Many material resources are renewable: wood frex. And
material goods may be imported in exchange for non material services.

It is true that the amount of land available in a given region is mostly fixed (but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuiderzee and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation) but particular tech may make parcels of land available for uses not feasible otherwise.

For a given tech level, there is probably a population level above which additional population leads to reduced standards of living. A population
far in excess of this level might well lead to impoverishment of many inhabitants. However, most real-world cases of widespread poverty have not
been caused by excess population levels, AFAIK.

>
> Natural-wealth-wise, it's been my impression that
> Japan has less stuff than other places. Farm land.
> And <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Japan>
> says "Mining in Japan is minimal because Japan
> possesses very few mining resources. This article
> is outdated, please update" - outdated how?

Perhaps estimates have been revised? New sources discovered? New tech to make better use of what resources are present? That particular article seems to have very few references cited, so who knows how old the sources it is based on may be.

>
> Did a vibranium asteroid land there recently that
> I didn't hear about? (I suppose you wouldn't...)

Very funny.

In any case, Japan is not an isolated system in the modern world, so if it can trade services for natural resources from elsewhere, a local shortage of land
and minerals need not mean a reduced standard of living.

-DES

[Larry Headlund]

On Monday, October 13, 2014 10:42:27 PM UTC-4, Paul Colquhoun wrote:
> I always assumed that the survival course was for 1st wave colonial leaders or explorer types, and an actual colony would have farmers, blacksmiths, etc. along with the leader/hunter/survivalist types.

The book says the survival course required was for all the Outland professions. Colonial administrator and lawyer are explicitly mentioned. It is silent on if it was required for all (Western) emigrants. I would guess no.

[Tim McDaniel]

In article <XnsA3C66C0E46...@216.166.97.131>,

Cryptoengineer <pete...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Yes. Officially sanctioned colonies, pretty much by definition, are
>an attempt by the originating state to extend its reach and authority
>to new areas. It would be simply unthinkable just let people be
>ungoverned.

Non sequitur. The official sanction can be "Any land you take there,
you do what you want, and we're OK with that" (the Marcher lordships
on the Welsh border of England) or "you are the proprietor and you can
set up rules as long as you do these things and don't do these things"
(I think some English colonies in North America, but I am not familiar
with them). The state may have wanted to extend its reach but may not
be the actual controlling authority there.

--
Tim McDaniel, tm...@panix.com

[Larry Headlund]

On Monday, October 13, 2014 10:58:40 PM UTC-4, Cryptoengineer wrote:

> I'd like to point out that Illinois has had government officials empowered to hear and decide legal cases continuously since 1699, when the French established the Commandery of Illinois, and Commandant appointed judges to each settlement.
> People don't abandon legal systems just because they're out in the woods.

The key word there would be settlement. Starved Rock had over 5000 people by 1980. You don't need that much but you need a certain population concentration. Otherwise you get situations like in some 19th century territories where there was a single court for a large area because it was convenient for the governing authority to do it that way.

[Larry Headlund]

On Tuesday, October 14, 2014 11:00:51 AM UTC-4, Greg Goss wrote:
> Or the all-natural reactor in South Africa.

The natural reactor in Gabon 1.7 billion years ago had a U235 concentration of 3.1%, comparable to the 3%-5% used in commercial light water reactors. If you find one of those deposits, you're good to go. Mining it is not a job I would care to do personally, what with the mine going critical for 30 minutes every 3 hours or so.

[Greg Goss]

I don't know the Gabon one. The Oklo one was water-moderated. If you
could keep it dry, it would cool off.

[J. Clarke]

In article <J62dnVBQDIOAgqDJ...@bt.com>, platinum198
@pants.btinternet.com says...

<facepalm>

First they have to get enough agriculture going to feed themselves.
England in the 1820s had a population of 10 million, pre-existing
agriculture, and a well-established iron industry able to produce
thousands of tons a year.

> And I would bet that the planet had first been explored
> sufficiently to know where the coal, oil and iron ore were located, before
> dumping colonists (with skills) there.

Explored by who and how? With 6 billion people on the planet today and
exploration having been carried out for thousands of years, we still
don't know where all the coal, oil, and iron ore are located. I realize
that a certain subset of SF fans think that all the resources on a
planet can be mapped in a matter of a few weeks by satellites--that will
only work if magic of some kind is developed.

[J. Clarke]

In article <m1k12s$n4r$1...@reader1.panix.com>, tm...@panix.com says...

The Puritans in the Massachussetts Bay Colony pretty much were allowed
to do whatever they wanted until the Crown got sick of hearing
complaints about them.

[David E. Siegel]

On Tuesday, October 14, 2014 7:36:06 PM UTC-4, J. Clarke wrote:
> In article <J62dnVBQDIOAgqDJ...@bt.com>, platinum198
>
> @pants.btinternet.com says...
> > JRStern wrote:
> > > On Sun, 12 Oct 2014 15:45:11 -0400, "J. Clarke"
> > > <jclark...@cox.net> wrote:
> > >> In article <ac2b2008-2c33-4b59...@googlegroups.com>,
> > >> sie...@acm.org says...
> > >>> On Sunday, October 12, 2014 2:03:14 PM UTC-4, Cryptoengineer wrote:
> > >>>> JRStern <JRS...@foobar.invalid> wrote in
> > >>>> news:tcbl3ahrhgfduo6de...@4ax.com:
> > >>>>> On Sat, 11 Oct 2014 03:32:06 +0000 (UTC), jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
>
> > >>>>>> 1955's Tunnel in the Sky takes us to a future Earth jam-packed
> > >>>>>> with people but rescued from an ongoing Malthusian crisis by the
> > >>>>>> timely invention of interstellar gates.
>
> > >>>>> I'm sure I read this when I was a kid, but had forgotten
> > >>>>> everything including the Star Gates. Huh.
>
> > >>>>>> Sadly, this is marred with the usual Heinleinisms. Not just the
> > >>>>>> Malthusian models that provide the motivation to race to the

> > >>>>>> stars but...
<Snip>

> > >>>>>> As well, the justifications for why the American settlers equip
> > >>>>>> themselves for a 19th century society are not convincing. By
> > >>>>>> choosing that toolkit, they are limiting their productivity to
> > >>>>>> 19th century levels, which is going to make ramping up to modern
> > >>>>>> levels of prosperity that much harder. But Americans are
> > >>>>>> nostalgic for the 19th century.
>
> > >>>>>> Part of the justification for sending out low tech colonies is
> > >>>>>> because interstellar gates are energy-expensive, so contact is
> > >>>>>> only worth while once the colony has stuff - "food and
> > >>>>>> fissionable metals" - worth that cost to send back.
> > >>>>
>

> > >>>>> As to the low tech, for a writer and readers living in 1955 and
> > >>>>> Heinlein born in 1907, the low tech was more familiar, the real

> > >>>>> world hi tech still not that high and not that common. [...]
<snip>

> > >>>> The homesteaders of the 19th and 18th century did have to be
> > >>>> partially self-sufficient, but they weren't entirely cut off.
> > >>>> There was trade going on all along. Nevertheless, in the popular
> > >>>> imagination, including perhaps RAH's, that was the latest tech
> > >>>> level they could think of as self-sustaining.
>
> > >>> RAH knew perfectly well that wagon train tech is NOT
> > >>> self-sufficient without at least limited development, and really
> > >>> required contact with a full civilization or the ability to create

> > >>> one. [...]
<snip>

> > >>> However, given coal, wood, and iron ore, arable land and an
> > >>> assortment of skills, the required initial seed to build a 19th-C

> > >>> level of tech is not huge, [...]

>
> > >> If you can find a source of iron ore you can make iron axe heads with
> > >> fairly primitive technology. You can also reforge steel ones.
> > >> Making steel tools from scratch by hand though is a tremendous lot
> > >> of very hard work.

<snip>

> First they have to get enough agriculture going to feed themselves.
> England in the 1820s had a population of 10 million, pre-existing
> agriculture, and a well-established iron industry able to produce
> thousands of tons a year.
>
> > And I would bet that the planet had first been explored
> > sufficiently to know where the coal, oil and iron ore were located, before
> > dumping colonists (with skills) there.
>
> Explored by who and how? With 6 billion people on the planet today and
> exploration having been carried out for thousands of years, we still
> don't know where all the coal, oil, and iron ore are located. I realize
> that a certain subset of SF fans think that all the resources on a
> planet can be mapped in a matter of a few weeks by satellites--that will
> only work if magic of some kind is developed.

The planet must have been scouted at least minimally, to know if it is human-habitable without life support gear (oxygen atmosphere, no widely dispersed
toxins, etc) and whether it is a "bonus" planet. It probably pays whoever is running the gates to scout enough to find arable land reasonably near
some mineral resources. At least it does if the object is to have the colony start returning "minerals and food" to Earth in a relatively short timeframe.
This is not the same as comprehensive exploration to find every mineral deposit on the planet. That would not be feasible without some tech we do
not have today, and which is nowhere hinted at in the novel. But sending a few scouting parties through knowledgeable enough to recognize plausible sites
and with enough test gear to confirm them might well pay prior to sending settlers. Perhaps give the scouts enough tech (1-man helis? land-rovers?
Dirt bikes? hot-air Dirigibles? flying cars? I'm not sure what the best choice would be) to allow them to cover more ground in a limited time scale than
they could on foot. This only has to last long enough for the scouts to do their jobs, plus a safety margin, so the "sustainable" limit need not
apply. You don't need to find every deposit, just *A* deposit or enough deposits to make colony startup faster and more likely to succeed. Unless,
of course, your goal is *really* to make colonies fail as a way to get rid of people. In that case scouting might well be minimal.

-DES

[lal_truckee]

On 10/14/14 4:36 PM, J. Clarke wrote:
> Explored by who and how? With 6 billion people on the planet today and
> exploration having been carried out for thousands of years, we still
> don't know where all the coal, oil, and iron ore are located. I realize
> that a certain subset of SF fans think that all the resources on a
> planet can be mapped in a matter of a few weeks by satellites--that will
> only work if magic of some kind is developed.

I suspect current satellite mapping would work better BEFORE most of the
easy access surface minerals had been mined. Hence, easily forecast tech
improvements coupled with pristine distribution implies a good mineral
map for colonists.

Assuming you can move a satellite, launcher, and ground data reception
station through a gate. Actually really good enough gate control allows
direct orbital insertion and retrieval of satellite & data.

[James Nicoll]

In article <m1ksor$28p$1...@dont-email.me>,

If you need a launcher with gates. They can gate to the moon, can they gate
to LEO or GEO?

[J. Clarke]

In article <263854a7-c173-47f2...@googlegroups.com>,
sie...@acm.org says...

That can be done with sampling--check every few months over the course
of a year and at a range of latitudes.

> It probably pays whoever is running the gates to scout enough to find
> arable land reasonably near > some mineral resources. At least it
> does if the object is to have the colony start returning "minerals
> and food" to Earth in a relatively short timeframe.

What mineral resources? What gets returned in Tunnel is fissionable
minerals, not "minerals" in general.

Now, is there anywhere on Earth that surface deposits of fissionables,
iron, coal, and farmland all exist in close proximity?

> This is not the same as comprehensive exploration to find every mineral deposit on the planet. That would not be feasible without some tech we do
> not have today, and which is nowhere hinted at in the novel. But sending a few scouting parties through knowledgeable enough to recognize plausible sites
> and with enough test gear to confirm them might well pay prior to sending settlers.

If you think that "a few scouting parties" are going to find the
location you posit you are living in a dream world.

> Perhaps give the scouts enough tech (1-man helis? land-rovers?
> Dirt bikes? hot-air Dirigibles? flying cars? I'm not sure what the best choice would be) to allow them to cover more ground in a limited time scale than
> they could on foot.

That's fine if you can identify the mineral deposits you want by riding
past them on a dirt bike.

> This only has to last long enough for the scouts to do their jobs,
> plus a safety margin, so the "sustainable" limit need not
> apply. You don't need to find every deposit, just *A* deposit or enough deposits to make colony startup faster and more likely to succeed. Unless,
> of course, your goal is *really* to make colonies fail as a way to get rid of people. In that case scouting might well be minimal.

You don't need to find "a deposit", you need to find several different
kinds in close proximity in order to meet your criteria. And there is
no guarantee that such a juxtaposition even exists on the planet.
>
> -DES

[J. Clarke]

In article <m1ksor$28p$1...@dont-email.me>, lal_t...@yahoo.com says...

OK, where are the mineral deposits on Mars and the Moon? Both have been
mapped extensively by satellite.

And how do you use a satellite to spot mineral deposits under heavy
forest cover?

[Richard R. Hershberger]

On Tuesday, October 14, 2014 4:29:16 PM UTC-4, Tim McDaniel wrote:
> In article <XnsA3C66C0E46...@216.166.97.131>,

> Cryptoengineer <pete...@gmail.com> wrote:

> >Yes. Officially sanctioned colonies, pretty much by definition, are
> >an attempt by the originating state to extend its reach and authority
> >to new areas. It would be simply unthinkable just let people be
> >ungoverned.
>
>
>
> Non sequitur. The official sanction can be "Any land you take there

> you do what you want, and we're OK with that" (the Marcher lordships
> on the Welsh border of England) or "you are the proprietor and you can
> set up rules as long as you do these things and don't do these things"
> (I think some English colonies in North America, but I am not familiar
> with them). The state may have wanted to extend its reach but may not
> be the actual controlling authority there.

Pennsylvania and Maryland were proprietary colonies right up to the revolution. Several others started out that way, but had their charters revoked for one reason or other.

William Penn, the first proprietor of Pennsylvania, famously was a Quaker and all into religious tolerance and the like. Less famous is that his descendants returned to the respectability of the Church of England, and spent the rest of the colonial period squabbling with all those Quakers who had settled there. Those early Quakers were pretty hard assed. Ben Franklin (nominally Presbyterian) squabbled with them, too. Modern Quakers have mellowed considerably.

As for Maryland, it also was set up as a refuge of religious tolerance, at least for Catholics. That didn't last too long. After the Glorious Revolution the Calvert family became good Protestants. The Calverts also wanted to set up Maryland as a slice of aristocratic heaven, with lordships and respectful tenants. This didn't work well. The prospective tenants couldn't quite understand why they should play that role when there was all that available land with no lord to bow and scrape to.

One vestige of this is the institution of ground rents. In some areas, mostly around Baltimore, you can buy a house without owning the land in fee simple. You have to pay a statutorily set ground rent to the owner of the land. The amount is quite modest, and for many years portfolios of such holdings were regarded as an extremely safe, low-return investment. But inevitably things fall through. A couple of decades back, some outfits started buying up these portfolios and then finding properties to foreclose on, sometimes for ridiculously small amounts. The state put a stop to the worst abuses, but when I bought my house I made damned sure that I owned the property in fee simple.

But I digress.

Richard R. Hershberger

[Cryptoengineer]

"Richard R. Hershberger" <rrh...@acme.com> wrote in

news:35282d50-f444-4a93...@googlegroups.com:

Regardless of how these colonies were set up, it remains a fact that
Britain regarded their declaration of independence as an act of
rebellion.

So I maintain that all these colonies were "an attempt by the

originating state to extend its reach and authority to new areas."

pt

[Larry Headlund]

On Tuesday, October 14, 2014 6:27:03 PM UTC-4, Greg Goss wrote:
> I don't know the Gabon one. The Oklo one was water-moderated. If you could keep it dry, it would cool off.

The Gabon was water-moderated also. Apparently there were similarly U235 rich deposits 2 billion years ago that didn't go critical because they weren't water moderated.

[lal_truckee]

Oklo is in Gabon. Same reference, in context.

[Cryptoengineer]

lal_truckee <lal_t...@yahoo.com> wrote in
news:m1m3t6$s1r$1...@dont-email.me:

One interesting point about the Oklo reactors is that the non-volatile
fission byproducts ie, the 'nuclear waste', was found to have migrated
only a few centimeters since the reactors shut down, in uncontained
sandstone with ground water flowing through it.

This has been taken as good evidence that a properly designed dry rock
nuclear waste repository could retain high level nuclear waste for the
centuries required for it to become no more dangerous than natural
uranium ore bodies.

pt

[Quadibloc]

That is true enough, depending on what kind of stuff you're talking about.

The amount of available minerals underground does increase as we dig ever
deeper, but then the cost of mining and processing goes up.

The productivity of agricultural land has been increased by new technologies,
and no doubt that will happen to some extent in the future.

It's just that there's no absolute guarantee that we will always be able to
increase the amount of that kind of stuff faster than the population grows.
Which means that the basic problem is exactly the same as if the amount of
"stuff" were fixed and immutable, only the time scale before disaster may be
lengthened somewhat. (Or, if you're lucky, lengthened a great deal. But if
something isn't absolutely guaranteed, you have to plan as if you won't have
it.)

John Savard

[Quadibloc]

On Tuesday, October 14, 2014 12:49:13 PM UTC-6, David E. Siegel wrote:

> For a given tech level, there is probably a population level above which additional population leads to reduced standards of living. A population
> far in excess of this level might well lead to impoverishment of many inhabitants. However, most real-world cases of widespread poverty have not
> been caused by excess population levels, AFAIK.

"Probably"? "Might well"? Why use such qualifiers when referring to what are
*absolute rock-hard certainties*? Put a fence around 1,000 subsistence farmers
on an acre of land - and you WILL see them starve to death.

Now, you are right to say that population is seldom the only or direct cause of
poverty. After all, many other factors can be cited. Why isn't Peru able to
export the same kinds of manufactured products as South Korea, for example?

But once one accepts the meaning of "a given level of technology", and if one excludes external trade from consideration (no country can depend on other countries being willing to buy its products unless its military also dominates those countries - a basic, near-axiomatic fact, that tends to be conveniently ignored) then, for example, one can take the Plains Indians as an example.

In pre-Columbian times, they had an adequate amount of land and resources for their population. After they were confined to reservations, after the bison were decimated, they did not. If population versus land were *irrelevant*, being cooped up on reservations would not have caused them a problem.

Thus, the vulnerability of the Yezidis in Iraq comes from their not having enough land. If they had as much land as, say, Russia, then there would be 150 million of them, and they would have nuclear weapons, and so ISIS would not find them an easy target. Similarly, the Armenians didn't have enough land to let them become big enough to defend against Turkey in the early part of the 20th Century, and the Tibetans didn't have enough land to defend themselves against China.

There are approximately 3,000 different languages spoken on Earth. Some people
have noted that we would need four Earths like the present one in order to
sustainably keep the entire world's population at a standard of living like
that of the United States. (I suspect others will say that four is a serious
underestimate.)

However, if we wish the native speakers of each of the world's 3,000 languages
to have access, in their own language, to the same variety of literary and
cinematic products produced within their own culture as English speakers do,
this implies a need to increase the world's population to 1.2 trillion people,
a bit less than 200 times the Earth's present population. Actually, I don't
think we need to go that far; 100 million people per language should be
satisfactory, cutting the requirement to a mere 300 billion.

So if we want everyone to enjoy full equality, we need to find another 3,000
Earths somehow.

John Savard

[Quadibloc]

On Tuesday, October 14, 2014 12:49:13 PM UTC-6, David E. Siegel wrote:

> Iron ore in the ground adds little to anyone's
> standard of living; once mined and used to manufacture useful artifacts, it may add much. More complex artifacts may add far more to "wealth" than the
> same materiel content in a different form. A quantity of silicon, say, can form a small pane of glass, or a number of computer chips. Many of the
> same atoms, not the same utility and so not the same wealth or contribution to standard of living.

This is very true, but it's used to support something which is a fallacy.

Yes, we can look at the economic success of South Korea and Japan. But using
these facts as an argument against concern over population growth misses one
fact: *what would happen if everyone tried to do it that way*?

Expensive computer toys aren't much use to someone who *doesn't have enough to
eat* - _unless_ he can sell them in order to purchase food. *Not everything is
fungible*.

So a world where everybody makes watches of the same quality as the Swiss, or
mobile phones, or other high-quality, high-value goods... *and nobody farms*...
is not sustainable.

Sure, you can have a segment of the economy in which the monetary value of
goods rises without limit - say a world in which people are mad for collectible
card games, so that just about anyone can design one, and have some of the
cards in the first set become as valuable as _Black Lotus_ from _Magic: the
Gathering_. But that economy, however important it may seem from the viewpoint
of banks and stock exchanges, is just the icing on the cake. Food, clothing,
and housing - in their basic form, not in extravagant value-added forms (Louis
Vuitton handbags and so on) - the ability to provide *these* is what matters.

You can make a gourmet meal that costs $1,000 from a certain quantity of resources - but that does not mean that, from those same resources, you can produce $1,000 worth of inexpensive meals to _feed more people_.

You can't plan to feed a _world_ population of several billion on the basis:

Well, I'll just teach them all to make Swiss watches;

The current price of the Swiss watches they make is more than enough to pay for the food they'll need;

So we'll just sell those Swiss watches (to Martians?) and use the money to buy the food they need!

From whom? Where?

So while thinking in terms of money value alone makes sense for _individuals_
and even _small countries_ in a world currently at peace, if you try applying
that kind of thinking to the *whole world*, it doesn't work.

While it is true that the world is not, strictly speaking, a closed system - we
get sunlight for free, and we could perhaps someday exploit Solar System
resources - there is no practical near-term prospect on Earth or in space of
multiplying current agricultural production tenfold. In fact, the level of
agricultural production *we have NOW* is not sustainable - aquifers are
dropping, soils are degrading, fossil fuels to make fertilizers are running out.

John Savard

[Quadibloc]

On Tuesday, October 14, 2014 12:49:13 PM UTC-6, David E. Siegel wrote:

> In any case, Japan is not an isolated system in the modern world, so if it can
> trade services for natural resources from elsewhere, a local shortage of land
> and minerals need not mean a reduced standard of living.

Obviously. However, "local" does not equal "global". The United States is
already facing high unemployment levels because it imports a lot of services
from China, Japan, and South Korea. The existing developed Western world does
not have the natural resources *to* trade to make it possible for, say, India,
let alone India *and* Africa *and* Brazil all to follow the same path to
success.

At least Brazil has some natural resources of its own, although the
consequences of Brazil following the United States' path to development are
viewed as worrisome in some quarters. (The Brazilian rainforest is said to have
positive externalities.)

The question is not what _one_ little country can do in the world as it is.
Perhaps, having free elections and a free press, Botswana could become
technically advanced and start following the "Asian dragons" to success. But
that won't change the fact that, no, everyone can't do it that way, so this is
not valid as a _solution_ to the problem of world poverty (which is solved when
*every* child has enough to eat).

John Savard

[David DeLaney]

On 2014-10-15, J. Clarke <jclark...@cox.net> wrote:
> Now, is there anywhere on Earth that surface deposits of fissionables,
> iron, coal, and farmland all exist in close proximity?

{sfx: BOOOOM}

"NOT ANY MORE."

Dave, and of course he'd know
--
\/David DeLaney posting thru EarthLink - "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

[David DeLaney]

On 2014-10-14, James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
> Robert Carnegie <rja.ca...@excite.com> wrote:
>>If, over time, the territory comes to have more
>>people, then, each person has less stuff.
>
> Therefore Canada, which has more people now than it did in 1961
> when I was born, must have a lower stuff per person measure.
> I wonder how are per capita income has plummetted since I was born?

Remember to divide it up by male/female/? as well!

Dave

[a425couple]

"J. Clarke" <jclark...@cox.net> wrote in message...
> In article <m1a8bm$c43$1...@reader1.panix.com>, jdni...@panix.com says...

>> 1955's Tunnel in the Sky takes us to a future Earth jam-packed with
>> people but rescued from an ongoing Malthusian crisis by the timely

>> invention of interstellar gates. ---
>> There are many interesting ways people can die on worlds like Earth
>> and to avoid unnecessary recapitulations of Jamestown, Fort San
>> Juan and Popham, the powers that be, at least in the west, have
>> mandated survival courses. The final test for the course involves
>> dropping a class full of kids into a wilderness on some far off
>> world to see how many come back. ---

>> Sadly, this is marred with the usual Heinleinisms. Not just the
>> Malthusian models that provide the motivation to race to the stars

>> but a trained eye can detect subtle differences between how the

>> American-style pioneers are portrayed:=---

>> here each family had its own wagon..long, sweeping, boat-tight

>> Conestogas ----

>> As well, the justifications for why the American settlers equip
>> themselves for a 19th century society are not convincing. By choosing
>> that toolkit, they are limiting their productivity to 19th century
>> levels, which is going to make ramping up to modern levels of
>> prosperity that much harder. But Americans are nostalgic for the
>> 19th century.
>> Part of the justification for sending out low tech colonies is
>> because interstellar gates are energy-expensive, so contact is only
>> worth while once the colony has stuff - "food and fissionable

>> metals" - worth that cost to send back. Leaving aside questions
>> like "how would you design a system for optimum mass transfer given
>> short periods of contact", Heinlein then goes on to provide this
>> colour text:
>
> But I've never had a problem with low tech colonies, few people with
> engineering experience do. If you aren't going to be having regular
> resupply you don't take something with you that you can't fix with the
> resources at hand unless you know that you are only going to need it for
> a short time, and then you design it so that after it fails as many of
> the pieces as possible can be diverted to other use. People horribly
> overestimate the ease of keeping a technological society going.
>
> Simple fact, horses can make more horses, but tractors can't make more
> tractors.

I'm a couple of weeks late, so this will probably never be seen,
but I totally agree with your above 2 paragraphs.
Mid 1800s equipment and styles were fairly sustainable
and pretty decent quality of life.

[ncw...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, October 15, 2014 8:57:23 AM UTC+2, J. Clarke wrote:
>
> Now, is there anywhere on Earth that surface deposits of fissionables,
> iron, coal, and farmland all exist in close proximity?
>

Silesia (South-West Poland).

Cheers,
Nigel.

[Cryptoengineer]

ncw...@gmail.com wrote in news:8ef11d80-be95-48d1-9030-6dfbc596cee9
@googlegroups.com:

A recent issue of New Scientist had a long speculation about how things
would have gone if the Earth had no fossil fuels.

Up till about 1700, FF weren't a significant part of the human energy
economy. The best fuel available to then was charcoal, produced from
wood.

In 1709, coke started to be used to smelt iron ore. This produced
cheap iron, and was one of the events which kicked off the Industrial
Revolution. By 1820, replacing the energy produced in Britain by
coal with charcoal would have required more land planted with
coppiced trees than existed in Britain.

The article speculates that in the absence of FF, iron and steel would
have remained much more expensive. Water and wind power would have
predominated for non-mobile uses. The Industrial Revolution would have
come much more slowly, and not in Britain - possibly in Norway or
Switzerland, where hydro power is more available. We'd have eventually
worked out hydroelectricity.

One gating factor is the production of cement, which requires the
'burning' of limestone, an energy-hungry operation. But cement is
needed for the creation of dams, which are required for
hydroelectricity.

We might have electric cars, but powering an airplane would be *quite*
difficult. Ocean going ships would be largely windpowered.

TL,DNR: Without fossil fuels, the Industrial Revolution would have
happened slowly, if at all.

pt