Embodied Energy of Modern Human

[7Wannabe5]

After experiencing a great deal of confusion trying to create a systems model for my perma-culture project which involves funds, stocks, and flows of a variety of types of energy, I am finally beginning to comprehend all the problems that can result depending on the context in which you perform a conversion and/or convergence. Primary sources of energy must be differentiated from carrier sources of energy which must be differentiated from end usages of energy before any possible sensible abstractions can be made. For instance, if you are comparing burning bagged dried corn vs. burning coal briquets in furnace for the purpose of heating a residence, a sensible conversion can be made. However, if you are trying to create an equality including $$$ and potatoes and units of solar radiation and barrels of oil and pork futures, it is very easy to lose track of essentials.

That said, I recently started to wonder about the economic viability of using a modern affluent college-graduate human for the purpose of digging potatoes in my garden. In this model, the primary energy source is solar radiation, one carrier of energy would be potatoes, and the second carrier of energy would be the human. The task of the employed human is to dig enough potatoes to feed himself and me (the Queen and/or capitalist.) But, first, I must purchase the services of this human from the society that produced him. I do not know the going price, so I start by making a calculation of the all the energy inputs necessary to produce the human as approximation, and I quickly come to the realization that it will be much less expensive to simply purchase potatoes on the open market, because the current situation is that due to inputs of fossil fuels and machinery, all the food an average American eats in a year is produced by just 20 hours of human agricultural labor, but the human battery applied to direct production represents only 2-3% of the cost of food in the form of a prepared meal picked up from drive-by window at Applebees's. So, if the average American spends $6500/year on food, much of which is not prepared in the home, 3% would be $195, $195/20 would yield average hourly wage of $9.75 for agricultural worker, with obvious conclusion that median wage would likely be much lower.

So, it might be easy to jump to the conclusion that gardening is not a worthwhile activity for a highly energy embodied average member of this forum based on this analysis. However, this analysis did not take into account the fact that the worldwide preferred diet of affluent urban dwellers is much higher in meat and/or fresh produce, unique in composition, and grown with few harmful inputs, such as pesticides. Fresh produce is much lower in caloric composition, higher in water content, must be transported when out of season/climate of production, and much more likely to be wasted before eaten than most other foods. Therefore, the end user who would otherwise prefer to spend $2000/year on fresh organic produce, even if factor of 10 less efficient than modern farmer, could reasonably expect to "pay" herself an effective wage of approximately $20/hour.

The reason why I posted this under this category is I happened upon this highly amusing and inspirational description of expanded experiment in alignment with this question of viability.

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/05/ ... alone.html

[Farm_or]

Interesting perspective. Somethings I had came to the same conclusion. Modern AG is very efficient. Gardening can not compete. Quality comes in question. I have gotten to know that farm practices vary greatly. I have been in one place long enough to know that I would consume that farmer's produce, but that guy? Wouldn't touch his produce with a ten foot pole.

My neighbor's attempts to garner business for their high quality garden grown produce has ended in frustrations. They told me that they can not compete on price and the quality issue isn't valued by enough people in this area. The straw that broke the camel's back was the gnarly wind gusts in March that destroyed their hoop house green house.

The biggest problem with human power is the health impact. Without tort reform, lawyers get rich, insurance raises rates, doctors raise rates, employees raise rates. At highest risk is repetitive motion injury and back related injury. This is where machines and robots are more cost effective. The hardest workers in AG -dairy, are becoming more and more automated. The reality of human resources cost when done correctly and responsibly is very high. Tell the young ones that education will be more important than ever to compete in a ever tightening job market. Especially learn robotics. That is a big reason that I volunteer now for the local robotics program. My dad's top team won the division championship and are going for the state championship next month!

[7Wannabe5]

My neighbor's attempts to garner business for their high quality garden grown produce has ended in frustrations. They told me that they can not compete on price and the quality issue isn't valued by enough people in this area. The straw that broke the camel's back was the gnarly wind gusts in March that destroyed their hoop house green house.

I think it is difficult to compete just on the basis of qualities not easily perceived by consumer. However, one obvious niche for the small grower is novelty. This can actually serve two purposes. Appeal to jaded palate of aspirational class consumer, and possible preservation or creation of unique ecological niche which produces novelty crop. For instance, Wild Michigan Huckleberries are going to sell at a premium compared to other fruits, and the ability to garner some profit from preservation of eco-system which produces this crop could forestall alternate use of the land such as Construction of Resort Condos. Similarly, if somebody can derive a profit from selling Authentic Algonquin Heritage Popping Corn, the seed will stay viable in the catalogue of diverse human artifacts.

Another interesting project I happened upon was an artist who grew and gathered the plant components necessary to make a selection of nature-based art supplies and tints, and then marketed them. The ability to get an agricultural product to a level of preservation or processing where you can hold it in stock until you can sell it at a reasonable price is probably critical level of value you need to add in order to survive. That's why I chose decorative pussy willows as one of my potential cash crops for my project.

Also, obviously, when it comes to gardening simply for household consumption, if this activity is combined with a fairly high level of skill in the culinary arts, you will easily be able to prepare meals for your household and guests that will rival the quality of any expensive restaurant for a fraction of the cost. Might be an amusing exercise to pull up a variety of menus from well-reviewed restaurants and then plan a garden in accordance. However, if you attempt to compete at the Dollar Store level of cuisine simply on price basis, you will fail miserably.

I also totally agree with what you are saying about robotics. That is one of the reasons why I have enrolled myself in a technological course of study this year. I think the future of agriculture will involve the use of smaller more specialized machines, many of which may be directly solar-powered and environmentally activated.

[daylen]

I'm assuming you are just using potatoes as an example considering they are probably one of the least efficient crops to grow economically. Anyway, I don't have a garden, but I do want one in the future for the simple reason that I dislike going to the grocery store. There is an argument to be made that any activity that distracts from the consumerist culture is a welcome addition to the web-of-pleasant-distractions.

I am not so sure that robotics will have a major role in the future of small scale permaculutre systems. Sure, there will be widespread use of specialized equipment in larger and more specialized operations, but such operations will just employ specialized humans for the purpose of maintaining the equipment. So unless you plan of working a full-time job, what is the purpose of learning the details of such robotic systems? The further you stray from disintegrated, isolated agricultural systems the less useful such tools become.

[Lillailler]

Two things:
1) A large proportion of the human's costs have already been expended, and are in the accountant's term 'sunk'. You need only consider the marginal costs.

2) Have you considered, instead of hiring labour, selling an exercise program? You could call it 'Dig-fit'. As trainer you could demand deeper, faster, another row, etc...

[7Wannabe5]

Have you considered, instead of hiring labour, selling an exercise program? You could call it 'Dig-fit'. As trainer you could demand deeper, faster, another row, etc...

Yes. Probably the best example of the current level of economic ridiculousness of my perma-culture project would be the extent to which I have solicited manual labor from middle-aged men who are otherwise capable of engaging in opportunities to earn marginal hourly wages of well over $40/hr. I can only "sell" this "job" on the basis of "better than the gym!" to individuals who are otherwise interested in gardening or nature. A 55 year old engineer hacking away at baked clay for an hour with a roofing spade, and then taking me out for brunch is not a sustainable model. I am not a fake boutique business sort of person.

That said, it is pretty obvious that some of the wasted time,money and energy affluent urban humans put into driving to the gym and working out and/or driving out of the city to experience nature by climbing a mountain for no purpose beyond completion, could better (more loop-closing) be spent on some activity like foraging or gardening. However, as the experiment in the article I linked above reveals, just the amount of human labor necessary to replicate the energy-needs for shelter/appliances at modern affluent standard would be far and beyond the amount of time/effort needed to maintain physical fitness through gym work.

I am not so sure that robotics will have a major role in the future of small scale permaculutre systems. Sure, there will be widespread use of specialized equipment in larger and more specialized operations, but such operations will just employ specialized humans for the purpose of maintaining the equipment. So unless you plan of working a full-time job, what is the purpose of learning the details of such robotic systems? The further you stray from disintegrated, isolated agricultural systems the less useful such tools become.

You need to empty your mind of preconceived notions regarding the process of agriculture or how humans can feed themselves. The first thing to recognize is that tilling the soil is slash-burn process. Humans literally can't feed themselves without using tools/technology. Even if I air-dropped you into the Garden of Eden, you would not survive for long without bare minimum of a stone-on-stone nut-cracker. Any environment even a bit more harsh than that, you better have the know-how to make fire and a blade. Modern agriculture is just stone-cracker/fire/blade rendered macro. General Mills and a $250,000 tractor representing the stone-cracker/fire/blade. The process of tilling the soil exposes the organic matter to oxygen, and thereby creates slow burn fire.

One obvious problem with modern macro-agriculture is that operating mega-factories and large machinery including tractors, and the trucks necessary for transportation, requires a very dense source of energy to create power, such as oil, coal, or nuclear OR the ability to concentrate a less dense primary source of energy, such as solar radiation, into a more dense carrier source such as a battery. A draught horse which can be fueled at the same level of energy density as human, can do the work, provide the power, of over 30 men, with very high acquisition and maintenance cost. A relatively much lower-power solar-powered lawn mowing robot can be purchased for around $5000 with very low maintenance cost. So, the trick is to figure out how to perform the necessary stone-crack/fire/blade cycle of agriculture in a manner and at a scale that huge powerful machines and animals are not needed. Slaves were a previous solution. My proposal is the use of human power-density or lower, intelligent, agile technology applied at the smallest scale necessary to get the job done.

For instance, macro-agriculture requires the creation of nitrogen fertilizers through an industrial process. What I attempted instead with my perma-culture project was a combination of inputs of prepared compost and green manure. It actually takes a whole lot of green clippings to provide a small amount of green manure to a series of intensive growing beds. So, I amused myself with the thought of volunteering to mow other people's lawns in order to gather even more. However, one of the problems with this idea was that I had already maxed out my gardening-as-exercise to the margin of desirability. So, then I considered the possibility of 10 other vacant lots covered with nitrogen-fixing crop such as soy or clover being mowed/vacuumed and then deposited on my intensive beds by a tireless little work-force of small robots. But, why stop there? Why couldn't I have a crew of small, intelligent, spider-like crawler robots that could tirelessly enter into dumpsters to chew up cardboard and slurp-up food waste to be once again deposited on my intensive beds? Then once you get to that level, it is pretty easy to imagine a very small robot that could burrow underground and gather up enough earthworms or another that could gather enough very tiny grass seeds to provide me with my daily requirement of protein once transformed into palatable form.

So, given some basic human nutrition requirements in terms of volume (H20 inclusive), protein, fat, minerals, etc. , the first question becomes, given nth degree very small scale intelligent complex-systems level management, what is the minimum acreage of solar radiation necessary to provide nutrition for one human being in a given locale? The second question becomes what would be the cost of the tools necessary to provide this level of management? Since as far as I can see, the only other viable option 100 years out would be something like return to human slave system, I think even such a silly idea might merit some consideration. Also, it is a funner puzzle (because not yet solved)than figuring out how to get old men to work for free AND provide me with brunch

[jacob]

@7 - I think I've shared this one with you before: https://www.amazon.com/Energy-Society-T ... 1420046675
There's also this: https://www.amazon.com/Maximum-Power-Id ... 870813625/ ... Building a big tractor requires much less energy than building a small army of micro-robots; unless you recognize them by their original name: insects.

The third option is to let the overshoot play itself out. Then restart with what's left.

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob: Thanks for the links. Added to my stacks. I remembered the topic you suggested, but not the exact titles. I am basing my analysis roughly on some mash-up of the works of Vaclav Smil, Mario Giampietro, James C. Scott, and William Cronon.

Metrics such as amount of energy needed are not very useful outside of context. I think the process, materials, and facilities necessary to build a modern mega-tractor, serving the prior function of hundreds of horses, might vary significantly from those necessary to build, for instance, a modern robot rabbit replacement capable of turning variety of green growing matter into convenient nitrogen-dense pellets. Small army of robots to replace the tractor directly would not be required since unhealthy process of tilling would not occur in my system. The seeds would simply be inserted by very light-weight bird-like robot into fluffy black gold loam of intensive bed.

To build my robot rabbit green manure acquisition unit, might cost the same amount as a smart phone + small paper shredder + small wet-dry-vac, so maybe $1000. A modern tractor might cost $80,000. A modern farmer feeds one human/year with 20 hours labor, so maximum 100 humans/year. So, I think it might be do-able. Of course, I will likely need a team of old engineers and other tech types with nothing better to do than volunteer their services to help me complete my objective, but that problem has already been solved!

P.S. Option 3 sucks.

[jacob]

It seems we're talking about two different things. As I see it, you presume the existence of a functional high-tech mass-scale economy that makes such robots cheap for individual gardeners to use. They are, of course, cheap because macro-farmers convert natgas and soil chemicals into cheap potatoes (corn and soybeans for feedstock, technically) so that the engineers and phds spending 20 years in school to build and run those semiconductor plants don't have to spend several hours per day hacking away with a grub hoe. If so, that's nice ... but it seems more like a self-imposed challenge of sorts along the lines of "let me build this interesting system under self-imposed idiosyncratic conditions (e.g. must run on alkaline batteries)"(*); than a solution that will/could actually feed humanity (or the people living in the area enclosing the necessary factories and technology institutions) if it had to be self-sustaining (bootstrap fashion).

(*) And if so, why worry about energy costs? All that matters once you assume the existence of a high-tech economy with "next day shipping" to "zone 1" is dollar cost.

What Odum does is to convert those kWh and kcals into a universal currency called emergy. He's worked out the conversion factors as well as that is possible. TL;DR --- anything tech has huge emergy costs. The more advanced the tech, the higher the embedded emergy.

PS: I sense a certain amount of double-think on the forum (and elsewhere) when it comes to these things with some people knowing about the [overshot] predicament and yet some of those same people wanting to create more people as if the consequences don't apply in an increasingly personal way to the people they create. Maybe it's just that I can't wrap my mind around it. I have an extremely hard time "congratulating people on their babies" and I don't understand what makes this simple congratulatory effort so easy for others when they know.

[Kriegsspiel]

PS: I sense a certain amount of double-think on the forum (and elsewhere) when it comes to these things with some people knowing about the [overshot] predicament and yet some of those same people wanting to create more people as if the consequences don't apply in an increasingly personal way to the people they create. Maybe it's just that I can't wrap my mind around it. I have an extremely hard time "congratulating people on their babies" and I don't understand what makes this simple congratulatory effort so easy for others when they know.

Ethically, you should only be reproducing if you think you have the genetics and skills to mold your offspring into an unstoppable juggernaut who will thrive in the hellish daymare awaiting us. Otherwise I agree... dick move.

[7Wannabe5]

(*) And if so, why worry about energy costs? All that matters once you assume the existence of a high-tech economy with "next day shipping" to "zone 1" is dollar cost.

Right. I just get my robot parts shipped to me from the High Tech White City On the Hill one time. Then (in theory) my food will never have to be shipped to me again. Since humans usually eat around 3 lbs.food/day, that's over 1000 lbs./year. The small academy attached to my project will require two hours of garden work from human students each morning followed by 4 hours of rigorous study. Then when they have mastered The Knowledge, they will do a pilgrimage to the White City, which is located next to a river providing hydro-power. Something. Something. Something. All paths are idiosyncratic. There is no requirement of anything more dense than a potato to power a human brain.



Most urban females only want to have a couple kids max. Give 1960s technology a chance to catch up to 1860s technology. The taper off might come quicker than you think.

[daylen]

You need to empty your mind of preconceived notions regarding the process of agriculture or how humans can feed themselves. The first thing to recognize is that tilling the soil is slash-burn process. Humans literally can't feed themselves without using tools/technology. Even if I air-dropped you into the Garden of Eden, you would not survive for long without bare minimum of a stone-on-stone nut-cracker. Any environment even a bit more harsh than that, you better have the know-how to make fire and a blade. Modern agriculture is just stone-cracker/fire/blade rendered macro. General Mills and a $250,000 tractor representing the stone-cracker/fire/blade. The process of tilling the soil exposes the organic matter to oxygen, and thereby creates slow burn fire.

Whoa, hold on a second! I never said we didn't need tools! I was just saying that machines at the level of autonomy that your talking about will probably not gain widespread adoption at the household scale. Though, I do see your point that it could be fun to design a system that incorporates such machines.

[Lucky C]

Have you considered, instead of hiring labour, selling an exercise program? You could call it 'Dig-fit'. As trainer you could demand deeper, faster, another row, etc...

Yes. Probably the best example of the current level of economic ridiculousness of my perma-culture project would be the extent to which I have solicited manual labor from middle-aged men who are otherwise capable of engaging in opportunities to earn marginal hourly wages of well over $40/hr. I can only "sell" this "job" on the basis of "better than the gym!" to individuals who are otherwise interested in gardening or nature. A 55 year old engineer hacking away at baked clay for an hour with a roofing spade, and then taking me out for brunch is not a sustainable model. I am not a fake boutique business sort of person.

For your business model research purposes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkNxvUrWQ_Q

[7Wannabe5]

Though, I do see your point that it could be fun to design a system that incorporates such machines.

Right. I have been reading a lot of new non-fiction in which it seems like there is some sort of debate about whether it would be better to go back to being foragers or 19th century agrarians, questioning whether the city and the surrounding agrarian landscape are inherently mutually dependent or essentially in conflict, etc. etc. Meanwhile, I teach all sorts of little kids who love nature and technology. They think it is fun to plant pumpkins, and they think it is fun to program robots. So, I wonder whether we really have to go through the fall and the scavenger phase before we get to something like the eco-technic future?


@Lucky C: lol- Unfortunately, Mark Twain, quite possibly an ENTP, already made the public too aware of this business model.


@jacob:

Re: "Something. Something. Something."

In the standard FIRE model, there is a fulcrum that individuals adjust differently in order to balance self-sufficiency/resilience and efficiency/robustness. Your ERE model is better than the standard because it is more generalized and systems oriented. In the book you suggest that buying an iron pan with money would likely be a reasonable choice over trying to manufacture one from scratch. Large scale industry is very efficient at doing what it does, so there is almost no end to efficiencies that can be purchased if one starts with the premise of the marginal hourly wage of an aspirational class worker.

When you buy a share of stock in a very large corporate business, you are buying a tiny bit of a complex collection of tools. Four businesses I picked at semi-random off the DJIA would be Apple, Caterpillar, Home Depot, and Coca-Cola. What if instead of making an ERE plan that would include deriving passive income proceeds from investment in the stock of these 4 companies, an individual started 4 tiny businesses serving something resembling the same purposes? How would this be any different than the choice to buy an iron pan and learn how to cook vs. the choice to earn an extra $25 at the margin as a tech worker, and let Stouffer's do my cooking at the rate of $12/hr? The first choice while less efficient is more resilient because you can't learn a skill if you don't have access to the tools. IOW, there is a trade-off for anybody living in the world as it is today between distance from tool set(s) and storage of knowledge/skills in Zone 00 (skin-sac boundary.) And this is not an evenly dispersed potential. For instance, my Iranian-immigrant "ex" told me that one of the best things about the U.S. was our free library system. In Tehran in the 70s, not being able to afford a text-book was enough to inhibit upward-mobility.

Little girls recently immigrated from Bangladesh and Yemen who have access to technology education, rather than just pumpkin-growing education, will likely freely choose to have fewer children. The low-tech agrarian model has unintended consequences related to the dependencies and limitations it uniquely places on females. This is obvious even in well-intended futurist novels written on the topic. Any human society that depends on brute manual labor for power necessary for survival will favor patriarchy. Patriarchy leads to higher birth rates. Empowered females leads to lower birth rates. The best my feeble brain can do is to imagine a solution where more urban functions are integrated into rural areas and more rural functions are integrated into urban areas.

[jacob]

The answer depends on what the goal is---something that's not quite clear to me yet.

You did say self-sufficiency/resilience which are two different kinds of goals. I think micro-robotic gardening is neither. It's clearly not self-sufficient because eventually (within a few years), those robots are going to need spare-parts and oil (I doubt running them on bacon lard will be a good idea) and you will not be able to manufacture those within your zones. If you do get all the tools for machining (lathe/mill), you still need to maintain and supply those from within your domain. Since that is impossible, you will have to trade. You will therefore need money.

Money is the #1 challenge of the self-sufficient farmer. (See e.g. Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living); it's usually for stuff that's too expensive to manufacture yourself, such as a new shovel (they wear down) or horse or human shoeing. But you're buying and replacing servos and microcontrollers... which is expensive stuff relative to a shovel or a shoe. So can you actually make that money by selling the surplus produce to the people selling the tech?

Presuming you have a large pot of money to fund the deficit, the resilience problem is contingent on a functional supply-chain. It's likely that some of the electronic chips in your system come from far away. For example, much of the world's production of flash memory sits in Japan and South Korea (so, like, zone 372 or something) and the JIT chain is so tight that perturbing even one major wafer factory is enough to cause disruptions. You could of course store a life-time supply of parts ... but that's trickier with finicky stuff like electronics. So you want military or space-grade stuff. Storing a lifetime supply of cast-iron pans (you only need one, right?) is pretty easy in comparison. The embedded energy in a pan is valuable and very robust. The embedded energy in a 1990s era EPROM is brittle and no longer valuable.

Finally, there's the larger issue of the overshot. With 7,600,000,000 people (2018) and adding another 80,000,000 net (=birth-death) each year still, the remaining land/soil is still being continuously reduced. A 1.1% growth rate is still more people than a 2% growth rate on 3 billion people. Humans don't eat percentages. Inventing higher-yield crops to keep up will only speed up the land erosion. With consumption increasing both in quantity and quality (the tech components requested have a giant industrial footprint), mining capital is being drawn down increasingly faster. Inventing more efficient extraction methods, again, only going to speed this up---mining now requires massive machines and mountain top removal. Third issue is pollution which feeds back into land yield but also longevity due to diseases like cancer. We've managed to stabilize it in the US for now by exporting our worst production to China. viewtopic.php?p=159626#p159626 ... Depending on what we do now, we'll continually encounter one or two or three of these limits (food crisis, pollution, resource) in various combinations in the next 10-50 years---we got the first taste of a cost constraint in 2008 with $100/oil prices; the economy can't afford that---but OTOH also can not afford(*) throwing money and tech at shale and only getting paid $30, so ... Which one or two or three depends on what we do but it's too late for zero. So, the resilience question here is whether the priority of the new state of the world will still allow sourcing of the required robotics spare-parts at prices that are affordable for a gardener/farmer. I think regardless of whether people decide to voluntarily consume much less to support the population numbers, voluntarily decrease birth rate, or go to war to increase the death rate ... the prices will be too high to afford relative to a backyard production.

(*) Cheap loans to the energy industry divert resources away from other industries such as for example, health care. US life expectancy is currently flat... so some years report declines others don't.

Alternatively, Helen and Scott Nearing did propose something very similar to this with 4 hours of what he called "bread labor" and 4 hours of study. That farm ran for decades. They had volunteers they'd feed for work. Farmland was a lot cheaper back then and the soil was better ... but at this level, you could build the soil back up inside the next 5 years. Understand there's a bit of a time crunch with these things because human leaders and followers have punted for so long already. Would be a lot easier to navigate if it was year 1978 now (with population 4.7B and more land and resources and 50+ years to prepare) and not 2018 (with 7.6B and less of either).

I'm thinking most money-FIRE-only (simple FIRE) will try to ride by simply being along for it like everybody else in a purely reactive mode. But seeing as you're being proactive, I don't think the micro-robotics strategy is the way to go. Electrically, I'd restrict myself to nothing fancier than simple electro-mechanic contacts; light bulbs; ... and start collecting scrap metal for reworking. See e.g. what Mark Boyle is doing: http://www.moneylessmanifesto.org/why-free ... maybe I'd play with robots as a fun project, but I wouldn't stake my future ability to eat on it.

[vexed87]

Electrically, I'd restrict myself to nothing fancier than simple electro-mechanic contacts; light bulbs; ... and start collecting scrap metal for reworking. See e.g. what Mark Boyle is doing: http://www.moneylessmanifesto.org/why-free ... maybe I'd play with robots as a fun project, but I wouldn't stake my future ability to eat on it.

Are we talking pre-industrial age blacksmithing, or something more advanced? I ask because:

If you do get all the tools for machining (lathe/mill), you still need to maintain and supply those from within your domain.

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

I agree with almost everything you wrote. What I didn't make clear is that what I was not-very-clearly promoting was supposed to apply to a specific time range and scale.

EPOCHS

1) pre-agricultural
2) post-agricultural/pre-Renaissance
3) post-Renaissance/pre-fossil fuel era
4) fossil fuel era
5) now until post-fossil fuel era: aka - In The Meantime (ITM)
6) post-fossil fuel era

The reason why I am mixing apples and oranges in my epoch descriptions is that "high tech" was born right at the intersection of 3 and 4 with the coal-powered steam engine punch card programmed Jacquard loom. So, unless miracle-bridge-to-the-future is constructed, the "high-tech era" will exist from the cusp of 3/4 until some point of complete decline after (6.) Some would also place the onset of the Anthropocene at approximately this junction. Others would place it at the dawn of (2.)

Unfortunately, there are very few historical role models for the modern Renaissance woman to copy. Ada Lovelace would be one of the few. Although, whether or not she should be recognized as the world's first computer programmer is somewhat debatable, it is obvious that she was multi-talented and a leader in many realms including the practice of polyamory. Her lively mind interacting with the likely more prosaic turn of that of her "very good friend" Charles Babbage did result in the notes constituting suggested algorithm attached to description of his Analytical Engine. It is likely that the means by which she derived the foodstuffs necessary for her to do this early work in the high-tech field, was most likely dependent upon the brute labor of members of the Scottish peasantry with profits transferred to much smaller contingent of elite class, subsequent to forced removal from ancestral subsistence homesteads.

Okay, so in 1837, in a climax of nerdy polyamorous practice, the first giant CPU is birthed. You suggest, and I agree, that it is likely that there will be a birth of the tiniest most powerful CPU some day ITM, followed by some day in Era 6 when the last extant CPU will be employed for the purposes of scraping the mud off of a pair of field clogs fashioned out of scavenged tire treads. But, ITM...?

CUT SCENE POST- Last year ITM

1) I am at off-grid camper wilderness permaculture project site 2 with my engineer BF (primary polyamour.) He is operating a chain-saw powered by gasoline. I am operating a smart phone, consisting of many components including a tiny CPU, powered by portable solar panel unit. My stuff is more high-tech than his stuff, but until the day my fragile equipment dies, I can continue doing my work without necessarily leaving the site. He either needs to go fetch some more gasoline or switch over to equipment he can operate with his own muscle power. So, within these time/context constraints, my continued work function is less dependent on external energy fund than his continued work function.

2) I am at off-grid urban permaculture project site 1 with my financial analyst/broker partner (former secondary polyamour.) He is operating a very heavy piece of gas powered rental equipment in the attempt to complete the construction of a swale/berm. I am wearing a wide-brimmed hat, sunblock, a long sleeved shirt and sunglasses, and not helping very much, because I am a weak old white woman who suffers from rosacea. So, he chooses to note some historical precedents for such a scenario, in which muscular individuals with darker skin tone, such as he, were caused to suffer harsh role assignment. I noted that it was not my fault that the rental equipment he chose was not designed to be operated by a person with 2/3 the strength of the average human male. I also noted for the record that every time a piece of industrial equipment was designed to be safely operated by somebody with the strength of an average female, the wage received for the job of operating that equipment was consequently reduced in proportion.We were both joking about both of these matters, because neither of us are (yet) actually required to engage in hard manual labor under the hot sun in order to feed ourselves, and it would be irrational to behave as if that were true.

END CUT

Most people on this forum are running a FI ITM project which uses a high-salary job in some sort of high-tech or mega-industrial field to create a fund of productive financial assets comprised of shares of stocks of high-tech and/or mega-industrial companies. Such a fund is pretty much ecologically completely external to an individual's system. It is only economically internal to an individual within the complex context of a global system which is high-tech dependent. So, I think it would be rational to place the future date in ERA (6) on which passive income will no longer be available from financial market as the same date new CPU will no longer be readily purchasable on the open market. Therefore, standard FIRE at any hypothetical SWR can only be regarded as resilient within the time frame of ITM. I recognize that this will also be the case for any high-tech aspects of my permaculture project, but I would suggest that the fact that the high-tech components AND the foodstuffs components of my plan will both actually be within walking (maybe biking?) distance of my literal self on that date, will render my plan more self-sufficient and more resilient at the cusp of ITM and (6.) IOW, what I am suggesting (perhaps with low clarity) is that IMO there is too much waste inherent in a plan that immediately adopts practices that will likely prove necessary in ERA 6 while still ITM, but there is also too much risk inherent in a plan that does not ratchet down to some midway point pro-actively.'

NOTE: I learned part of this lesson the hard way already, when I erred on the side of efficiency due to following bad advice (Damn your eyes, Mr. T. Ferret or Fairazz!) and shipping my rare book inventory away from my direct control into the hands of the likes of Mr. J. Bozo or Beelzebub. Some people might think a share of stock is a real thing you can drive up to a loading dock and haul away in your pick-up, but that is not true. It is even more like a theoretical particle than a particular rare book lost in a complex distribution system. It is certainly nothing like a potato in your pantry.

[jacob]

Here's where I'd suggest the strong possibility that inside the ITM era, high-tech components within walking distance will disappear before food and banks within walking distance.

I don't see much electronics (beyond light bulbs and switches that I mentioned above) with the capacity of being part of an Alpha Strategy. It simply doesn't store well. Unlike the chain saw, it's not designed for user maintenance. You can locally manufacture all chain saw parts in a machine shop with access to scrap steel out of a junk yard or a collapsed building---or you can store the steel. It's going to be harder to source integrated circuits and there's absolutely no way to make them locally. The bottleneck for metal is mainly in the mining. It's no longer possible to mine minerals with a pick axe and some dynamite in the way it was done a hundred years ago. The concentrations are too small at the depths and amounts one can dig out that way. While aluminum is abundant, the electricity to run the smelters is not or will likely not be.

[black_son_of_gray]

I think it would be rational to place the future date in ERA (6) on which passive income will no longer be available from financial market as the same date new CPU will no longer be readily purchasable on the open market.

Before the fossil fuel era, weren't (real?) historic rates of return on the order of 2-3%? Wouldn't the post-fossil fuel era return to similar rates, meaning 33-50x expenses might still generate enough passive income? It might not be through an online broker... but there were kings and queens in the past, and presumably there will be an equivalent in the future.

It could take a long time for the high tech industries to fully eat all of their seed corn. Especially when some parts of the West are considering Internet access a right... municipalities/countries etc. might throw progressively larger subsidies at the problem.

Where do you put "peak fossil fuel"/"degrowth"/"debts-growing-faster-than-economy-becomes-untenable" in your Epochs? Somewhere in 5 right? Do you think the weirdness that might happen at those inflection points might indicate Epoch boundaries in their own right?

[7Wannabe5]

Here's where I'd suggest the strong possibility that inside the ITM era, high-tech components within walking distance will disappear before food and banks within walking distance.

Gotcha. What will be the signs that it is the right day to cash out Vanguard Global Wellington and deposit proceeds in Midwest Regional Credit Union account?

I don't see much electronics (beyond light bulbs and switches that I mentioned above) with the capacity of being part of an Alpha Strategy. It simply doesn't store well. Unlike the chain saw, it's not designed for user maintenance. You can locally manufacture all chain saw parts in a machine shop with access to scrap steel out of a junk yard or a collapsed building---or you can store the steel. It's going to be harder to source integrated circuits and there's absolutely no way to make them locally.

Okay, I will use high tech tools to help design my system and create my database, but my late ITM/ERA (6) system will be limited to mechanisms with environmental sensors, rather than anything with an integrated circuit, and on the same day you deposit all your funds in your local credit union, I will print out my accumulated database on to archival quality paper stock. Just give me a head's up.

Here is the sort of challenge I envision. Seed is cheap relative to land, but both land and seed are VERY CHEAP relative to human labor. An example of a permaculture algorithm would be the maintenance of the productive layered under-story of a fruit orchard. Nature abhors a vacuum, so one orchardist I admire follows the rule that as every "weed" (unwanted plant) is chop-dropped (cut short but debris left in place as green manure) a seed, bulb, or seedling of a desired species is planted in the same place. This sort of procedure requires not just labor, but also intelligence, and it scales over both time and space. The most desired outcome would also maximize diversity of species of productive elements in the under-story. So, imagine a little robot that could whiz around an orchard chopping down small circles of grass/weeds and planting perennial onion bulbs in the center of each small circle, and then repeating variations of the same process with different species in a complex mosaic pattern related to size of plants at maturity and life-cycle factors.

Where do you put "peak fossil fuel"/"degrowth"/"debts-growing-faster-than-economy-becomes-untenable" in your Epochs? Somewhere in 5 right? Do you think the weirdness that might happen at those inflection points might indicate Epoch boundaries in their own right?

Yeah, highly likely. I must admit I don't quite have a grasp on the interrelated trends of population growth, economic growth, economic development, debt and urbanization combined with resource depletion. For instance, the United States is the only high GDP nation likely to be in the top 10 in terms of head count population increase through 2050. The birth rate in the US is below replacement, so this will be due to immigration. Every other nation where population head count will increase dramatically has a per capita GDP of something like $2000. India will be #1, but the birth rate varies greatly between Indian states, and in high correlation with relative poverty/lack of development.

In the ecology course I am auditing, the instructor relates an anecdote about a time he visited a subsistence rural village in China, and spoke with an old woman (probably my age-ha ha) who was fertilizing her crops with her own night-soil. He was inquiring about her lifestyle through an interpreter, and the old woman asked "Have you ever been to Paris?" and the instructor made the faux-pas of quickly replying "Of course, I have been to Paris." and the old woman said "Well, I want my daughter to go to Paris." Thus the urbanization towards upward-mobility of the Chinese work force. The interesting thing is that it seems like it might be the case that forcing women to have fewer children pushes the next generation towards aspirational class consumer earning/spending levels, while placing a woman in an aspiration class situation (like the girls recently immigrated to the US from Bangladesh and Yemen whom I teach) naturally lowers her birth rate. The math is pretty easy. If a woman wants to move to the city, get a job at a factory, save up enough money for college, go to grad school, live in Paris for a year or two, buy a Mercedes, and then have a kid or 2 while in her 20s, she is going to have to get cracking!!! Reproductive rates of women fall significantly and quickly after age 30, so there is this sort of trade-off between encouraging women to have fewer children and encouraging them to live more modest rural sustainable lifestyles. You can see that this is even true among educated residents of developed realms if you have ever read a hippie-Mom natural breast-feeding lifestyle magazine.

So, when Jacob wonders why aspirational class citizens of developed regions still continue to congratulate their peers on the birth of a child, I think this is because he believes that there will be some miracle of human social functioning which will result in the 6th child born to an Ethiopian not-quite-subsistence farmer this year having the same likely fate in the ITM as IlliniDave's, jennypenny's or my 3rd of likely not more than 4 grandchildren. Obviously, there is a not insignificant possibility that Global Climate Change or Nuke detonated in protest of inequity could fry us all, but otherwise results will likely vary significantly. And the plight of the 6th child of the Ethiopian dirt farmer starving to death is not as immediately felt as the fate of one own's child being denied the pleasures of Paris or the fulfillment of parenting, or if forced to take responsibility for this child's potential plight, most aspirational class humans would likely strongly suggest something like mass sterilization of population. However, I would note for the record that the choice of a male member of the aspirational class to spend $X on a vasectomy will likely have no effect on an Ethiopian dirt farmer's decision to have a 6th child. I don't get why humans can't understand that sperm is cheap as corn. Any woman who wants some can get some, and many end up getting some that they didn't even want.

Before the fossil fuel era, weren't (real?) historic rates of return on the order of 2-3%? Wouldn't the post-fossil fuel era return to similar rates, meaning 33-50x expenses might still generate enough passive income? It might not be through an online broker... but there were kings and queens in the past, and presumably there will be an equivalent in the future.

Yeah, human beings are pretty venture-some, so I would assume there will be some ventures in the future, if there is a future. However, since only human beings have money, in order for there to be a return of 3%, there would have to be either a 3% increase in humans consuming/demanding at same level or a 3% increase in the consumption/demand of the average human, or some combination of these two and/or temporary debt situation. So, ultimately continuation of the Capitalist Epoch may require immigration to other planets.

It could take a long time for the high tech industries to fully eat all of their seed corn. Especially when some parts of the West are considering Internet access a right... municipalities/countries etc. might throw progressively larger subsidies at the problem.

Yeah, this is kind of what I am thinking too. Every low income 8 year old eating a free lunch at school has his own smart phone. Until the situation hits the level of Bread OR Circuses, the powers-that-be will likely not consider themselves well-served by limiting access. Perhaps it would be impossible to produce high-tech locally, but I would think it would be in the realm of possibility that the industry could be nationalized, especially given the fairly likely possibility of neo-colonialism.