Centerfield

Lead pipes have often been mentioned for Rome, but it was a helluva lot more than that. Let's not forget the Sahara Desert, which 10,000 years ago was not a desert at all. Climate change isn't something we invented with modern civilization, as the Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal can attest. I've been poor and homeless. It didn't last for long because I was young and healthy and didn't like it at all. But it taught me much about self-reliance, and about helping those in real need. Which is a major reason why I tout community volunteerism alla time, and do a lot of volunteering.

The world changes constantly, but it's tough to have any perspective of that unless you study history.

Posted by: Tully at October 16, 2005 02:24 PM

One of the education channels did a thing on the lead pipes. The water the romans used was hard, so most of the pipes quickly became coated in minerals and safe to use. On the other hand, supposedly the roman emperors developed a taste for “leaded sugar”, yuck!

I'm glad you made it back off the street Tully. It's not a place I'd want to be. I grew up as poor white trash. Times were tough on occasion, but I always had a roof over my head and full belly.

Posted by: Bob J Young at October 16, 2005 02:43 PM

My condition was due as much to sheer teenage stubborness as anything else, Bob. When I left home I was determined to do everything on my own and earn everything I had, with no help from anyone. I could have broken down and wired the folks at any time, but would not. I accomplished what I set out to do, but as I mentioned, I was young and healthy with no chattels. Most poor folks don't have an emergency family fallback, and the advantages of being healthy without any obligations. Inside of a year I had my own place, a decent (not great, but decent) job, and was starting college on my own dime. It probably would have been a lot sooner if I wasn't having such a good time seeing America close-up from the underside.

But I digress. Part of your main point was that without a knowledge of history, it's tough to grasp how much things change over time. I thought immediately of my grandfather, born in the 1880's. In his lifetime he saw the last of the Indian Wars, several states join the Union, the birth of the automobile and the airplane, the spread of electricity and indoor plumbing and air conditioning, Prohibition, Gang killings, the birth of modern medicine, the rise of Communism and Hitler, raised a family during the Depression (he didn't marry until his late 40's), saw two World Wars and the first atomic bombs, and the first men in space. As a young man he knew Civil War veterans and ex-slaves, and as an old man he watched young men from his town be among the first to go to Vietnam.

I know from reading his journals that he was often worried that world was gong to hell in a handbasket. He worshipped Teddy Roosevelt, but thought FDR was leading us into a socialism as destructive as Russia's. And so on. When you think about it, he saw as enormous a world-wide change as history has ever had in one lifetime! Yet by the time he passed away he was an optimist about the way the world was going, despite the ongoing Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had seen so much change that he had come to accept it as normal, even healthy.

Leaded sugar? Shudder. Lead sugar does have a unique sweet taste, I hear. I'll take someone else's word for it. The Romans also used lead wine jars, the acid in the wine just about guaranteeing an unhealthy dose of lead. But I think trying to pin the downfall of Rome on any single cause is a mug's game. Nations can endure, but empires always fall. The Viking colonies in Greenland, on the other hand, fell victim to global cooling.

Posted by: Tully at October 16, 2005 04:49 PM

I recommend 2 books that will give you a bit of perspective on life in the 1930's and in the colonial era. Undaunted Courage (Lewis and Clark expedition) and The Wild Blue (B-24 pilots) by Stephen Ambrose.

Leaded sugar is found in some candies from Mexico.

Posted by: Marcus at October 16, 2005 05:11 PM

Tully: I don't think Americans will have any trouble dealing with change in general. Yankee ingenuity is something we always have prided ourselves on. But we created a whole society (and a huge population) build on oil and abundant agriculture. When the great depression happened we were mostly self sufficient and agrarian, now we are mostly urban and clueless. How many Urbanites know how to plant a garden, let alone preserve the results? Can we adapt? Yes, eventually. I just would prefer an more informed and gentler transition. (No phones, no lights, no motor cars, not a single luxury. Like Robinson Crusoe, it's primitive as can be. Hey Gilligan, drop those coconuts)

Marcus:I've already read one book based on the Lewis and Clark expedition journals (can't recall the exact name). It was however a great read. In it they described coming upon villages where most of the inhabitance had die of European introduced illnesses. The white man's microbes went west before the white man. I saw a guy on the Newshour promoting a new book called “1492”, sounds like a good one. It seem to be addressing America when Columbus arrived and how disease played such a large part in what happened next.

(I'll have to remember not to eat any Mexican candy.)

Posted by: Bob J Young at October 16, 2005 06:27 PM

Gotta wonder about his data. Most software innovation is not patented. And are the various software and networking innovations tracked accurately and reasonably by a physicist? It all boils down to what HE thinks is important. I'm not buying.

Are the packet, end-to-end protocol design, and network flow control all in there? All are truly world-changing. How about push/peer-to-peer? Or the nnovations involved in managing larger and larger networks that are out of consumer sight.

I think what we're seeing is that it's easier to see, on a cross-discipline basis, what in retrospect what was a major innovation.

Because we're seeing two major perpetual increases in innovation: a rise in the numbers

Posted by: Jon Kay at October 16, 2005 08:02 PM

in the fractions of people engaged in in+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

++++++++

(oops)

...in the percentages of people doing reseach, and of the efficiency of each researcher, as we get advances like reading, open scientific literature, google, etc..

Posted by: Jon Kay at October 16, 2005 08:25 PM

I actually ordered Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed off Amazon.com last night. He uses the Viking colonies on Greenland, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the ancient Maya, and the Polynesians of Easter Island to explore why it is that some civilizations flourish, but then ultimately fail. An office mate read his Guns, Germs, and Steel and swears by it.

The parallel, of course, is to what Bob is saying about how we're successful and we're on top, and we're likely to remain so for centuries (my opinion), but ultimately the day will come when our descendants will be replaced by someone else (something else?) and odds are that it will be at least partially because of our innate characteristics: either a cataclysm of our own making or (more likely, in my estimation) our failure to adapt to a massive revolution in global affairs because it will not conform to our previously established norms.

Posted by: Bobby at October 16, 2005 11:17 PM

I just finished it last week. There's alot of good stuff in there. The only problem I have with it is that he seems to feel the need to throw in a scare t the end. It looks to me like capitalism has things well in hand.

One environmental claim I'm tired of reading is the that the high percentages of fish eaten are a major threat, when fish are pretty easy to farm. Oh, no, doom and gloom, no more fresh wild fish! Our life is ruined!

Posted by: Jon Kay at October 16, 2005 11:47 PM

Actually Bob I was referring to the life of the colonialists in teh Lewis and Clark book, including the horrendous state of education available to the young in those days.

Jon, the problem with industrial sized fish farming is that it requires a lot of energy input.
There are also problems with diseases and the fact taht farmed fish tend to have less genetic variability than wild fish and are thus prone to be vulenrable to more diseases which of course then have to be treated with more inputs(drugs, feed, etc.) Classic examples happen all teh time in agriculture. My dad, when he planted his grapes 20 odd years took a look and noticed that everyone around him was using the same kind of root stock. Being a trained zoologist he decided to use a different root stock. The up shot is that when phyloxera hit the area he didn't have to pull up more than an acre of vines while his neighbors ahd to take more drastic measures.

Diversity is almost always the key to survival of anything, be it bacterium, political system or economy. A diverse energy policy, relying on a multitude of inputs rather than heavily subsidizing coal, nuclear and petroleum would have nade us less vulnerable to price spikes had we followed some of Carter's energy plans through the 80's and 90's as well as increase development of wind and solar and increase CCafe standards. No one caqn tell me that a care capable of over 30 mpg is impractacle. I have a 1990 Ford Escort that gets about 28 city and over 34 on the freeway. It has 150K miles on it. The let the free market rein attitude of the GOP congress towards domestic automobiles since the early 90's has left us in one heck of a pickle today.

BTW, guess who's got a solar cell installation at SBC Park? Sharp. They've sent me a nice brochure about converting to a solar installation. 2 of my neighbors have already done so. So where's the American companies??????

Posted by: Marcus at October 17, 2005 02:00 AM

As I read these comments I am struck by two thoughts.

First, you've provided a bunch really good reading suggestions (thanks!).

And a second thought that hasn't completely congealed yet. It's something in the area of, human's ability to predict the future, or how much chaotic, complex and nonlinear systems figure into the destructions of civilizations. Also add in a dash of how specialization makes it difficult to communicate critical concepts to those outside your specialty.

Biological systems in particular are hard to control. Just try to keep your garden weed and pest free. Eventually the flora, fauna and fungi will adapt to the humans puny effort to control them.

Posted by: Bob J Young at October 17, 2005 09:11 AM

This is actually a rather interesting discussion. There are some very good points made in mentioning that many generations throughout history often thought that they were living in the "last days."

I guess I'm one of those who is of the opinion that we'll do whatever we have to do to survive. Sure, there are plenty of Americans who have no clue how to plant a garden, raise their own cows, and can their own vegetables, but we're a pretty smart people--I think we could do it. I actually grew up on a farm in the (extremely) poor rural South, so I'm quite familiar with survival instincts. The problem would be trying to plant a garden in our perfectly planned restrictive communities. Hell, I got fined for flowers that were not on the "approved" list, so I'm fairly confident that corn stalks might raise some eyebrows.

Posted by: AR at October 17, 2005 10:32 AM

I agree with the thought that a knowledge of history helps with understanding change over time and putting things in perspective. In particular, I think it helps to understand how much better life is--at least for those in the west--in general than it was even a few decades ago. After all, we now have ESPN. For the most part, the good old days weren't so good. On the other hand, I think one has to be careful about using history in projecting the future. Many people use history loosely; IMO, history does not repeat itself, things are always a little different. History is often used selectively to support a particular point of view.

I'm skeptical of gloom and doom predictions and tend to think they do more harm than good, in the sense that apocalyptic scenarios are easy to dismiss (especially since they rarely, if ever, come true)and allow people to ignore real problems. According to Malthus, humans should have been overrun with population centuries ago, leading to widespread famine. That didn't happen, but it doesn't mean that overpopulation hasn't been a significant problem in parts of the globe. But by predicting doom that didn't occur, Malthus has basically become a laughing stock.

Certainly, civilizations have come and gone and probably will continue. Five hundred years ago, Spain was on top and the US didn't exist. I suspect that in another five hundred years, the world will have changed substantially. But I am very skeptical about the simple linear assumptions behind most of the gloomiest environmental predictions, ie, that you simply project current trends into the future and assume that that is how things will play out.

Posted by: Marc at October 17, 2005 04:42 PM

I heard some character in a TV drama last weekend say "every generation learns what it needs to in order to surevive, and then the next generation forgets it." that's pretty on point here.

Much of what we remark upon as astonishing in previous generations boils down to the most basic self-interest, that of survival. Most people don't adapt because they like to...but because they need to. Some are more resistant than others. When the chips are down, the herd gets thinned.

Seems to me that the advancement of civilization is always going to be coupled with romanticism for hardier ancestors. And that's not unture or unwarranted. But usually with humans, where there is a will, there's a way. If humans can survive, they will adapt however they need to, unless whatever change occurs leads to an environment in which life is not physically sustainable.

Posted by: bk at October 17, 2005 07:47 PM

Read Ray Kurzwell's "The Singularity is Near". Or just read some of the stuff on his site. Although he takes the optimistic view, the survival of Western Civilization is the least of our worries. Here's a doomsday prediction: we could all be 'grey goo' in 50 years if self-replicating nanotech takes a bad turn. I'm pretty much an optimist and certainly not a chicken little about scientific progress, but there is some strange and scary stuff just around the corner. And there is very little indication we have control over the outcome.

Posted by: Dennis at October 17, 2005 09:31 PM

...there is some strange and scary stuff just around the corner...

And always has been. The urge to doomsaying is driven by fear of the future, or in a broader sense, fear of the unknown. The greater the rate of change, the greater the fear.

Arnold Kling has some relevant thoughts over at Tech Central Station, the first of a three-parter on Kurzweil's new book.

Posted by: Tully at October 18, 2005 11:30 AM

The flipside to all of this is that it is almost imposable to get anyone’s attention above the partisan screamers without the invocation of doom around every corner. Many of the same people who poo poo dire predictions of the global warming crowd are pretty much convinced that "Liberalism" will destroy the very foundation of America. The same can be said for those who feel that a "theocracy" is just over the horizon but don't have any problem with open borders and the tyranny of the "politically correct".

Having been involved with a group of people in a project on energy policy education I can say categorically that no one will pay any attention to you if all you are telling them is that the result of not acting will being about some unspecific harm. Our message was repeatedly drowned out by those who basically championed the status quo by saying that whet we were talking about was the institution of communism. The funny part is that group had always made it a point to explicitly not make any concrete proposals opting instead to simply try and make people understand the problem which, as a whole, is pretty not controversial to anyone who has even a cursory understanding of the issues involved.

On the other hand those groups who shared our understanding of the problems and issues, but who were making wild claims about the dire consequences (the end of civilization as we know it), got all the press, both supportive and critical. In the broader context it simply doesn’t pay to be anything less then shrill.

Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out if dire claims of doom and gloom by some individuals are a true reflection of their message or simply a way to get booked on Hannity and Colmes.

Posted by: Rick DeMent at October 20, 2005 08:42 AM