Giving up on the Future to save the Past

This week I gave up space travel, not just for me personally but for the entire human race for the foreseeable future. I realized that in the next twenty to forty years no country on Earth will be able to afford to waste their precious resources on manned space flight and that I might die being the last person living who can remember man walking on the moon. I was just a month shy of being 2 years old when my Mother took me and my brothers out to wave at the man on the moon. I remember her saying that this was very important and that I should remember it, I also remember not connecting that act with the actual fact that a man was on the moon.




You see for me space flight was the ultimate destination of Man; all of history was pointing to the time when the human race would leave the planet and colonize the stars. This came from growing up close enough to Marshall Space Flight center that we could hear the rocket engines being tested and watching Skylab missions on television (back in the days of 4 TV channels). I devoured science fiction books and fantasized about leading my on space crew on an interstellar flight to colonize some strange new world. But alas, I have to contend with the limitations of this one and not live in the dreams of exploring other planets.



Ironically the reason why I gave up on manned space flight was that I realized another one of my childhood dreams/fantasies had come true. You see I can also remember complaining to my Mother that I wanted to live in another time that was more exciting than my own, like the Roman Empire at its height. Well I don’t live in the Roman Empire but the American one and not at just the American Empire’s height but also at the peak of the Industrial Age. The problem with being at the peak of something is that once you are there you can only go down. Centuries from now historians probably will define the actual peak of the Industrial Age as the 1960’s and 70’s but when it actually reaches its peak doesn’t matter. All that matter’s is that we are within sight of it, and we will soon (if we aren’t already) travel down the downward slope of a collasping civilization.



I am not talking about a Mad Max type apocalypse, but something much worse a long, slow decline. You see if there was a sudden collapse then 20 to 40 years latter there would still operational modern technology and a few people left who knew how to operate it. Not only that most libraries would still contain readable books and most of our culture would be preserved. The problem with a slow decline is that no one realizes that something should be preserved until it is already lost.



I will give you an example, how many of you own a slide ruler much less knows how to do calculus with it? We are so dependent on our technology now that most of us do not remember how to get by without it. Vacuum tubes can be made with hand tools, and with vacuum tubes you can make radios, and large simple calculators, but does anyone know how to make a vacuum tube much less be able to pass own that knowledge in a meaningful way so that our great-great grandchildren can make them?



Our whole industrial society depends on cheap energy which comes in the form of fossil fuels. Petroleum which contains the most energy of all of the fossil fuels is already half used and the part that remains is harder to extract and refine. Soon both coal and natural gas will be past their peaks also, and with nothing to fuel our economies they will starve and the Industrial Age will die. Not in some big bang and flash of glory but in a slow whimper. You see we have nothing that can replace the energy that we get from fossil fuels, not nuclear, solar, hydro etc… nothing can keep our lifestyle going as it is now. As Richard Heinberg so aptly put it “The Party’s Over”.



I know what you are saying, that there is no way we can lose the accumulated knowledge that we have now, someone will think of something. Well 1800 years ago a Saxon king was buried in Britain with pottery that would have been considered poor quality even for a slave in Roman Briton just 200 years before and now it graced the table of a king. You see the Romanized Britons where so concerned about day to day survival that they did not think about learning or passing down their knowledge of ceramics and the same fate could await us.



But since history is linear and some Irish monks preserved much of what we know of the ancient world we can take precautions to preserve and pass down knowledge. First and foremost we can acquire a library of anything that we think is worth passing on to future generations. This can be do-it yourself books, philosophy, science fiction, the speeches of Winston Churchill…what ever you think is worth preserving. If you can get it on acid free paper so much the better, but get it anyway. Future generations will pass down what they think is useful or entertaining. You can also learn to play a musical instrument and pass on the ability to play tunes that you enjoy.



The knowledge that most needs to be passed to future generations is the same knowledge that our own grand and great grandparents had. How to knit, sew, spin wool, make shoes, butcher animals, tan leather they are skills that were common just 70 years ago but are quite uncommon now. We are lucky in that organic gardening is very advanced now, plus that it is common knowledge that germs cause disease, you get your water upstream from where you go potty and that personal hygiene can prevent illness. These will serve us well as the public health, food distribution and industrial agricultural systems breakdown.



One of the things that will be most helpful is the scientific method as it pertains to ecology. Understanding how to observe and model an ecosystem will be extremely helpful with food production when we do not have fossil fuels to rely on.



I will continue with technologies that need to be preserved and ways in which we can preserve them in the next post.