• Sign up or login, and you'll have full access to opportunities of forum.

The Coffee Shop

  • Thread starter The Fallen Angel
  • Start date
Go to CruxDreams.com
malins said:
Anyway yeah that's true. Those predictions did exist!

It's interesting though to investigate how they came about. Did people simply make shit up or were there were honest mistakes one can learn from.

The idea of 'oil running out' or peak oil theory basically goes back to a 1950's prediction by a guy called M King Hubbert (not to be confused with L Ron Hubbard).

He derived it from observing the way individual oil fields were exploited, scaling up to how regions or basins got exploited and then up to the national level.

His prediction was basically that U.S production would peak in 1970 and then it would go downhill pretty symmetrically.
Red is the 1956 prediction, green is actual production.

So one can understand that up until around the early 1990s this seemed quite prescient.
View attachment 1439979

He hadn't predicted the absolute amount of the maximum, but the shape of the curve seemed right, it peaked in 1970 and then went downhill along the curve.
Of course implicitly this would also apply to other oil producers.
Maybe Saudi Arabia had more oil and started later but the curve would be similar. That was the theory.

The production curve started peeling off by the mid 1990s but back then a lot of people said, that's a last desperate gamble. Dead cat bounce.
(Note- Alaskan oil developed from the 1970s onwards isn't included here)

But after 2009 production went crazy and no longer had any relation to the curve whatsoever.

So on the shorter term (about 35 years) the simple resource limit theory was right.

In the intermediate term, ca 70 years ... liberal market theorists won - market demand and tech innovation (horizontal drilling, fracking, deep sea...) have made it possible to develop reservoirs that before wouldn't be considered viable - or wouldn't even have been recognized as 'oil'.
Human innovation powered through the assumed resource limit.

In the long term ... these resources are of course also finite and the amount of money and energy that needs to be invested, in order to harvest one unit of energy that can be sold at some price, is increasing.
For instance the production declines in shale oil wells are very rapid compared to conventional 'old school' oil wells which means you continuously need to reinvest. That makes the business also very susceptible to changes in financing situations.

So in the very long run there would be a point where one has simply developed every possible technology to squeeze hydrocarbons from the rock and scoured all the globe for resources and then one would get back on an inescapable decline curve.

However it's very likely that before this time arrives we won't even need those resources.
Because either our civilization has moved on to other energy sources or it has collapsed.

An interesting thought is though that if there is a global civilizational collapse, then there will not ever be a return to another industrial age some several thousand years in the future or so.
Because the easily exploitable resources of coal, gas, and oil are all used up and you can't expect a new civilization to go right to extreeme deep sea drilling etc. The timeframe for coal, oil & gas deposits to form again is on a scale of millions of years...
(Actually even starting a new bronze age won't be easy...)

So to sum it up in the 1970's the notion that oil would become a restricted resource in the foreseeable future wasn't complete nonsense.

As the 1970's proceeded it sure looked like it but of course this was also fired up by panic abut oil crises that were purely political and had nothing to with resource limits (1973 & 1979) and in fact those crises gave an impulse to develop other resources (north sea & alaskan oil)

However the prediction was too static and ignored human adaptation.

Another prediction back from the 70's of course was the Soylent Green world where everything would be hopelessly oercrowded due to rampant oerpopulation and we'd start eating each other. This too has not come to pass with the overwhelming majority of the world's population now living in societies that have below replacement fertility going into the future.

So while doom hangs over us perpetually actually predicting how and when the world ends remains a risky business.

Should it fail to do so, perhaps the future will also laugh about how anyone ever believed AI would kill us all...
Click to expand...

Have you read Mote in God’s eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle? Because it’s basically got a “solution” for restarting civilization After collapse and loss of exploitable resources- Museums of a special kind! Well worth a read if you like old school Science Fiction. Yes it’s not very woke!
 
Loinclothslave said:
Have you read Mote in God’s eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle? Because it’s basically got a “solution” for restarting civilization After collapse and loss of exploitable resources- Museums of a special kind!
Click to expand...
Actually yeah I have though it's a long time ago. Some interesting ideas in there though IMHO severely burdened with tropes (more so than necessary) and cardboard characters.

Of course in the story the cyclically collapsing and re-developing civilization of the Moties has plot armor, it's the premise of the setting so the 'museums' will work in each cycle.

In practice I'd guess this would be a lot more doubtful!

Basically to reboot to some level of civilization one will either need to have it as a living tradition that's being continuously maintained (something one might be able to do for some aspects of a basic civlization model in a kind of religious order/monastic setting) or you need outside help (which in practice may follow from getting conquered) otherwise descents are deep and long lasting...
As far as I remember the exact internal functioning of the 'museums' wasn't explained that precisely ( or maybe I forgot) -- they seemed to me also be a plot device for the men stranded on the alien home planet to quickly catch up on the 'true nature' of the Motie civilization -- so of course one could say they also included some additional feature that would enable civilizational bootstrapping.
Loinclothslave said:
Yes it’s not very woke!
Click to expand...
Hmm well yes I do get bored quickly by "woke" stories that pretend to be SF/fantasy but just transparently lecture the author's position about some current-day ideological obsession.

However ...

I do remember cringing at some of the stereotypes in 'Mote' long before wokeness became a word.

It would imho have benefitted from less stereotype load... as far as my memory goes a ridiculously anglo-centric future, with token Russians whose job was to inject some ruthlessness, so when the point came where the protagonists considered the threats to humanity and touched upon the notion of maybe pre-emptively geociding the alien civilization (which obviously was one coldly logical option, not criticizing that) the reader would treat this as a plot option of some credibility. Because they had the kind of Russian who would actually go through with that. Oh yeah and shady uh Levantine merchant character of dubious loyalty.

Now of course a lot of SF stories actually want to to tell a tale from the Age of Sail and in this case I guess the authors wanted to tell the story of a mostly competent and disciplined class of Master & Commander men facing the challenge of the unknown.

Speculating about a far future human culture wasn't really the issue, okay, so they just went with their base model of manliness and competence which was Anglic Empire. but they totally defaulted to WASP's in space... and they really did that thing of "planets will all be settled by people from one specific local subculture as it existed in the mid-20th century Anglosphere and the same local stereotypes will apply" and so you get uh Irish and Scottish space settlers or whatnot... I guess having read too much U.K LeGuin my SF tastes are mildly infected by precursor ideologies to 'woke ' :)
 
Loinclothslave said:
@malins i was precisely thinking of the contrast with LeGuin, a well known contemporary, when mentioning “woke” ha ha!

One problem I have with “woke” is a nebulous definition, if it’s just empathy then use empathy which is a fine word.
Click to expand...
I think it’s a postmodern conceit to give things and causes an obtuse label or slogan. Rather unfortunate IMO.
 
malins said:
Actually yeah I have though it's a long time ago. Some interesting ideas in there though IMHO severely burdened with tropes (more so than necessary) and cardboard characters.

Of course in the story the cyclically collapsing and re-developing civilization of the Moties has plot armor, it's the premise of the setting so the 'museums' will work in each cycle.

In practice I'd guess this would be a lot more doubtful!

Basically to reboot to some level of civilization one will either need to have it as a living tradition that's being continuously maintained (something one might be able to do for some aspects of a basic civlization model in a kind of religious order/monastic setting) or you need outside help (which in practice may follow from getting conquered) otherwise descents are deep and long lasting...
As far as I remember the exact internal functioning of the 'museums' wasn't explained that precisely ( or maybe I forgot) -- they seemed to me also be a plot device for the men stranded on the alien home planet to quickly catch up on the 'true nature' of the Motie civilization -- so of course one could say they also included some additional feature that would enable civilizational bootstrapping.

Hmm well yes I do get bored quickly by "woke" stories that pretend to be SF/fantasy but just transparently lecture the author's position about some current-day ideological obsession.

However ...

I do remember cringing at some of the stereotypes in 'Mote' long before wokeness became a word.

It would imho have benefitted from less stereotype load... as far as my memory goes a ridiculously anglo-centric future, with token Russians whose job was to inject some ruthlessness, so when the point came where the protagonists considered the threats to humanity and touched upon the notion of maybe pre-emptively geociding the alien civilization (which obviously was one coldly logical option, not criticizing that) the reader would treat this as a plot option of some credibility. Because they had the kind of Russian who would actually go through with that. Oh yeah and shady uh Levantine merchant character of dubious loyalty.

Now of course a lot of SF stories actually want to to tell a tale from the Age of Sail and in this case I guess the authors wanted to tell the story of a mostly competent and disciplined class of Master & Commander men facing the challenge of the unknown.

Speculating about a far future human culture wasn't really the issue, okay, so they just went with their base model of manliness and competence which was Anglic Empire. but they totally defaulted to WASP's in space... and they really did that thing of "planets will all be settled by people from one specific local subculture as it existed in the mid-20th century Anglosphere and the same local stereotypes will apply" and so you get uh Irish and Scottish space settlers or whatnot... I guess having read too much U.K LeGuin my SF tastes are mildly infected by precursor ideologies to 'woke ' :)
Click to expand...
Don’t know if chief Engineer Commander Jock (Sandy) Sinclair of New Scotland was a tribute to Scotty but it made my eyes roll when I read it at the tender age of 14.
 
Loinclothslave said:
One problem I have with “woke” is a nebulous definition, if it’s just empathy then use empathy which is a fine word.
Click to expand...
Barbaria1 said:
I think it’s a postmodern conceit to give things and causes an obtuse label or slogan. Rather unfortunate IMO.
Click to expand...
I agree. I don't like "woke" primarily because it gets used a lot simply to insult or denigrate people who have certain opinions - it's been co-opted into the language mainly as a way to shut down discussion, or belittle attitudes and opinions. If you say someone is "woke", it often means now that the person has no relevant views and doesn't have to be listened to. In that way it now serves as weaponized language, much like the term "politically correct". Unfortunate, I think.
 
Jollyrei said:
I agree. I don't like "woke" primarily because it gets used a lot simply to insult or denigrate people who have certain opinions - it's been co-opted into the language mainly as a way to shut down discussion, or belittle attitudes and opinions. If you say someone is "woke", it often means now that the person has no relevant views and doesn't have to be listened to. In that way it now serves as weaponized language, much like the term "politically correct". Unfortunate, I think.
Click to expand...

The reverse also equally true, I stiumble into self identified wokeness in various kink/ vanilla communities, and they can form clubs where political correctness reigns supreme. For those it’s a badge of honour but Ghod forbid if you don’t tow the party line. Heaven forbid if you support a non left candidate because of his competence or think that merit should be a top criteria for an airline pilot instead of race or gender….

The insanity of the digital age seems to be to create echo chambers where everyone within stroking their own egos and condemning anyone not in their special club. It’s a phenomena common to all sides of politics and social debate, anything that stifles open dialogue is a bad thing imho. It’s hard enough to speak one’s mind openly, without adding further hurdles
 
Loinclothslave said:
@malins i was precisely thinking of the contrast with LeGuin, a well known contemporary, when mentioning “woke” ha ha!

One problem I have with “woke” is a nebulous definition, if it’s just empathy then use empathy which is a fine word.
Click to expand...
In political arguments I rarely use the word 'woke' directly or if at all in scare quotes, but actually I don't think it's that hard to outline its origin and describe its evolution, and IMHO it's not to be confused with empathy. And people bothered by 'woke' aren't bothered by empathy. But that's another discussion!

I guess what triggers a lot of people is when already existing works, mythologies & settings are seized upon by people who seem to have no particular liking for the original work, the authors, their background and cultural leanings, or the fanbase, and essentially 'colonize the territory' to make sure that anyone who enters their beloved alternative fictional world will there now encounter the same ideological preoccupations as in the daily opinion columns of our self-declared moral and intellectual superiors.

Far less opposition meets the idea of anyone making up their own new world or setting which explores ideas that might be labeled 'woke'.

I haven't ever come across anyone bothered by the idea of a planet all full of non-gender-binary types such as The Left Hand of Darkness for instance!

Now when it comes to storytelling, and tropes & stereotypes etc. in general, actually I'd say they're pretty essential especially in fully made up / fantasy / far future settings as any story can always only be really about a limited number of things. Otherwise it ceases to be a story.

You can't fully explain every aspect of a world, even in the real world we have to compartmentalize knowledge and rely on simplified models for many aspects of life (the challenge is to recognize when it's necessary to update and refine a simple model because the underlying complexities have suddenly become relevant)

Calling upon a trope means that the readers can compartmentalize parts of the story away, under the assumption they basically 'know how that part works' and the author only has to revisit when the expectation needs to be broken.

An SF story that just goes for the trope 'the space travel era is basically the classic Age of Sail reborn' isn't any weaker for it as such, if its main concern is e.g. what happens when you get somewhere, and for instance have to deal with a challenge without being able to call in instant reinforcements etc.. If the whole point of the story is 'exploring in detail how space travel would work under X,Y,Z assumptions' well then it can't just lean on that trope by default.

In that regard critcisms like 'Uh about LOTR ... haha what is Aragorn's tax policy for when he's king?!?' are stupid and irrelevant, it's not what the story is about.

Now of course one thing about tropes is that while they're a short-cut to a lot of world imagery, they're also quite fluid.
If you describe a setting that has some trope-laden things in it like say, knights and castles and stuff, sure people will envision a lot about the culture to go with it right away. But at one point that might have been "Oh ok so this story is gonna be like Ivanhoe or Prince Valiant" nowadays most people will go "Ok so it's Game of Thrones..."
 
malins said:
t's not to be confused with empathy
Click to expand...
I have issues with the confusion between 'empathy' and 'sympathy'. 'Empathy' is the ability to imagine oneself in someone else's situation, to understand their thoughts, feelings and actions without passing judgement on them, favourable or unfavourable - it's a skill required for any good story-writer, any good historian, a detective, a lawyer, a priest ... But 'sympathy' entails feeling sorry for people, 'feeling their pain', to use a fashionable phrase. In the world of 'woke', 'empathy' is a 'hurrah word' used when what's really meant is 'sympathy', and specifically sympathy with/ for whole groups, categories of people. I like to think I am sympathetic with individuals who've had, maybe still are having a rough time, and will do what I can to help them. But I'm pretty resistant to those who proclaim their supposed victimhood and demand my 'empathy' (meaning 'sympathy'), in my experience, the people most needing sympathy aren't the ones who make a lot of noise about it, more often they're trying to cope without revealing just what they're going through. (French 'sympathique' is different again - agreeable, someone you find easy to get on with)

Woke - I mentioned elsewhere the origin of this word, used by Huddie Leadbetter (Lead Belly) in a famous comment at the end of the recording in the Smithsonian collection of his song 'Scotsboro Boys' - he used it in a very different way, warning Black boys going down to Alabama they'd better 'stay woke' - watch out, be on their guard ...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom