Thanks Toby, that’s good to know. As I recall, your discussion (much of which was in footnotes) focussed very strongly on effects that might be extinction-oriented, though, so I would be inclined to put more weight on your estimates of the probability of extinction than your estimates of indirect effects.
E.g. a scenario you didn’t discuss that seems seem plausible to me is approximately “reduced resource availability slows future civilisations’ technical development enough that they have to spend a much greater period in the time of perils, and in practice become much less likely to ever successfully navigate through it”—even if we survive as a semitechnological species for hundreds of millions of years.
I discuss something similar to that a bit on page 41, but mainly focusing on whether depletion could make it harder for civilisation to re-emerge. Ultimately, it still looks to me like it would be easier and faster the second time around.
I’d be interested to reread that, but on my version p41 has the beginning of the ‘civilisational virtues’ section and end of ‘looking to our past’, and I can’t see anything relevant.
I may have forgotten something you said, but as I recall, the claim is largely that there’ll be leftover knowledge and technology which will speed up the process. If so, I think it’s highly optimistic to say it would be faster:
1) The blueprints leftover by the previous civilisation will at best get us as far as they did, but to succeed we’ll necessarily need to develop substantially more advanced technology than they had.
2) In practice they won’t get us that far—a lot of modern technology is highly contingent on the exigencies of currently available resources. E.g. computers would presumably need a very different design in a world without access to cheap plastics.
3) The second time around isn’t the end of the story—we might need to do this multiple times, creating a multiplicative drain on resources (e.g. if development is slowed by the absence of fossil fuels, we’ll spend that much longer using up rock phosphorus), whereas lessons available from previous civilisations will be at best additive and likely not as good as that—we’ll probably lose most of the technology of earlier civilisations when dissecting it to make the current one. So even if the second time would be faster, it would move us one civilisation closer to a state where it’s impossibly slow.
Thanks Toby, that’s good to know. As I recall, your discussion (much of which was in footnotes) focussed very strongly on effects that might be extinction-oriented, though, so I would be inclined to put more weight on your estimates of the probability of extinction than your estimates of indirect effects.
E.g. a scenario you didn’t discuss that seems seem plausible to me is approximately “reduced resource availability slows future civilisations’ technical development enough that they have to spend a much greater period in the time of perils, and in practice become much less likely to ever successfully navigate through it”—even if we survive as a semitechnological species for hundreds of millions of years.
I discuss something similar to that a bit on page 41, but mainly focusing on whether depletion could make it harder for civilisation to re-emerge. Ultimately, it still looks to me like it would be easier and faster the second time around.
I’d be interested to reread that, but on my version p41 has the beginning of the ‘civilisational virtues’ section and end of ‘looking to our past’, and I can’t see anything relevant.
I may have forgotten something you said, but as I recall, the claim is largely that there’ll be leftover knowledge and technology which will speed up the process. If so, I think it’s highly optimistic to say it would be faster:
1) The blueprints leftover by the previous civilisation will at best get us as far as they did, but to succeed we’ll necessarily need to develop substantially more advanced technology than they had.
2) In practice they won’t get us that far—a lot of modern technology is highly contingent on the exigencies of currently available resources. E.g. computers would presumably need a very different design in a world without access to cheap plastics.
3) The second time around isn’t the end of the story—we might need to do this multiple times, creating a multiplicative drain on resources (e.g. if development is slowed by the absence of fossil fuels, we’ll spend that much longer using up rock phosphorus), whereas lessons available from previous civilisations will be at best additive and likely not as good as that—we’ll probably lose most of the technology of earlier civilisations when dissecting it to make the current one. So even if the second time would be faster, it would move us one civilisation closer to a state where it’s impossibly slow.