Environmental news is increasingly grim :(

[conuly]

Every once in a while, I engage in a little thought experiment with myself.

I am the possessor of some remarkable technology, including time travel. I can bring a crack team of however many people I want to any point in time to influence history so that our current ecological nightmare doesn't happen. (We can also fix anything else we like, because there's no prime directive here.) We can, of course, bring with us seed banks and hard drives full of all our favorite media and whatever, and if we go really far back then some of us will stay in suspended animation to continue fixing the timeline for as long as necessary.

The only question is this: How much of known world history am I willing to sacrifice to make a better world today?

Every time I run this problem, I start with different dates - the 1920s? The 1800s? 1490? 2000 BCE? - before ultimately deciding - fuck it. The only way to ensure a bright future for humanity in my new, butterfly-timeline is to bring everything and everyone necessary for a modern infrastructure back to the early Neolithic era and utterly take over before our distant ancestors can do the same.

I'm not sure what this conclusion says about me.

Comments

[jessie_c]

I think that I'd go back about 2 000 000 years and start encouraging the Bonobos to bang the rocks togehter.

[conuly]

At that point, I'm bringing 10,000+ diverse individuals of reproductive age from a variety of jobs that are all necessary for our modern society, and the supplies to start that society running. Plus their existing children and a whole bunch of embryos or donor sperm or both.

[low_delta]

It won't work.

First of all, whenever a civilization crumbles beliefs reset. So going back to any time before the Renaissance is futile. And many times after that, for that matter.

Second, society rebels against anything it doesn't want to believe. The more people you can convince of a certain necessity, the more people will be fighting it in a few years. You can say, "sure, America is an enormous pristine continent right now, but we must act to keep it that way!" And many people will go along with you. But many more people will act in their own self-interest and say that this new world is ripe for the picking and we'd be stupid to ignore that. And pretty soon that side is entrenched and we end up even worse off.

[jessie_c]

Which is why I'm sticking with the Bobnobo strategy :)

[jessie_c]

...and triply redundant infrastructure. It would really ruin your day when the only EmbryoMatic(tm) in the settlement blows a 5 cent fuse you forgot to bring along.

[melannen]

...I wonder what it says about me that my first thought was "exactly twenty-five months - no, wait, might as well go all the way back to Reagan."

I think there are a few key points in the last two centuries where a nudge could have resulted in our current society being built on something other than fossil fuels, although I think figuring out those point would probably be harder than inventing time travel.

Also, honestly, whatever alternative energy source we ended up with would be just as likely to result in major worldwide damage before we figured it out; you just can't extract and release energy at that scale without knocking something out of balance.

The bonobos probably is the only good long-term plan. (But the bonobos probably don't ever invent "civilization"; the only thing that makes the drop in quality of life that comes with it worthwhile is that it lets you have an army that's bigger than the other guy's. If you don't invent war there's not really any need to invent cities either.)

The thing is, though, you don't *get* modern infrustructure without having the kind of society that will do that kind of damage - it requires large scale trade networks to get expertise and raw materials where they are needed, large scale markets to create demand and economies of scale, and widespread communication and population shifts to get enough knowledge together to start compounding itself, and you don't get all of those things without also massively altering the environment.

[spikethemuffin]

I have slight hope, because I just saw this:

https://www.ted.com/talks/chad_frischmann_100_solutions_to_climate_change/footnotes

(Sorry, yeah, I know, all the cool kids hate TED Talks.)

...and then I realize people just won't, and it hurts my heart.

[kengr]

*First* you'd need to compile the ultimate survival manual that some of us on the Traveller Mailing List (it's an SF RPG) discussed years back.

Basically, it's a book (more likely something electronic) that contains all the info on how to get from "you've got the book and whatever you can find lying around in the natural environment" to the current tech level.

This is a far from trivial exercise.

First you need to take every item that exists and what it takes to make it in terms of tools and raw materials.

Then you figure the same thing for each of those tools and materials.

As you go along, the paths for getting tools and materials will intersect many times. This reduces the info required *somewhat*.

Then you start optimizing things. You don't necessarily need to duplicate all the steps we went thru to get to a given item historically. That allows pruning a lot of branches of the tree.

Eventually, out a an insane amount of work, you'll have something that can take you from "I have the book" to any arbitrary item that's ever been made.

along with alternates paths for things like optimizing for speed or for lowest environmental impact. Plus other things.

Eliminating false starts and non-viable branches, would help eliminate a lot of pollution and environmental destruction.

So will adjusting paths to take into account that a lot of things *can* share tooling and resources that we currently don't.

It'll be easier once we advance 3d-printer tech to the point of the "universal fabrication unit" aka fabber.

That tech *may* let us *practically* break things down to the atomic/molecular level and build items up from those atoms/molecules to anything we have a "pattern" for.

That will help a lot with resources. and with pollution. You'd still want to find ores, so you process less random rock for a kilo of whatever. But you'll also be able to "dump" the "waste" as something useful of at least relative inert.

That just leaves you with fixing social/cultural issues. Lots of luck on that. You'll need it.

[saraqael]

How do you define 'everything and everyone necessary for a modern infrastructure'? How many people do you envision taking with you on your team?

[kengr]

Oh, also, I don't think you have to take over. Just drop hints and if necessary "convince" people it's easier to do things the way you want.

Like having *somebody* intercepting slave ships heading from Africa to the Americas would probably reduce the slavery problem by a lot.

And when they can't import more slaves, take steps too free the ones that exist. Simplest thing there would be buying slaves. That'd increase prices and make them scarcer.

At some point (if you have the money to pull it off) Slaves would be too expensive to use for farm work and many other things.

Of course, that has major side effects on production of many things.

So does any fix for any other problems thru history.

[siderea]

Yeah, the real problem that needs solving is People Just Won't. If you're using time travel to solve that one, you have to do something like spread (or coopt) a religion.

There's an argument to be made – I haven't read the whole thing, but I gather it's pretty good – that the industrial revolution could never have happened without Protestantism, which among other important cultural effects morally justified getting rich (and accumulating capital in which to invest in business enterprises). Protestantism, it is widely held, was the product of the invention of the printing press and the notion that people should and could read their holy texts for themselves, rather than rely on priests.

So really, shooting Gutenberg as a child might do it. Trade off: books.

[conuly]

As many as I darn well like. It's a magical device, really.

[conuly]

Buuuuut if we got in at the start of the Industrial Revolution and already invented (or "invented") clean electricity so of course people wouldn't want to foul the air and water....

[conuly]

...I wonder what it says about me that my first thought was "exactly twenty-five months - no, wait, might as well go all the way back to Reagan."

I usually start there, but then - why stop there? Why not Nixon? Why not Hoover?

[conuly]

Ah, there's the brilliance of just fucking all of human history over, going back 100k years (or whatever) and starting from scratch. We already have solar panels and windmills, so at least we're unlikely to forget and start using large scale fossil fuel consumption.

[conuly]

Fuck yeah. It's a magic thought experiment. I can bring along whatever the heck I like, including enough redundancies for each and every possibility.

[conuly]

Honestly, I don't really trust the folks at top much, and like all people at the mid-bottom I kind of think I'd do a better job. Especially int he past.

...actually, inventing labor saving devices a few thousand years earlier (and clean electricity! and vaccines!) might do enough to wipe out most slave labor without having to lift an extra finger.

[low_delta]

OK, yeah, if you give them the technology, that will make it unlikely they trash the earth in their quest for and combustion of petroleum.

So here's part 2 of your thought experiment. What excesses could *that* lead to?

[conuly]

That just leaves you with fixing social/cultural issues. Lots of luck on that. You'll need it.

See, that's where I get hung up. I suppose in my magical machine I can magically invent thought control, but even I can't imagine mindcontrolling everybody at all times, even for their own good. I can control the folks at the top, but what if that makes the folks at the bottom revolt? There's more of them, after all.

Better to metaphorically blow it up and colonize the (very distant) past. At the very least, my brand new civilization will have a few hundred years before they're in the same position we are. Probably a little longer if they start out with clean electricity and a clear view of history.

[conuly]

God, I don't even want to contemplate. One intractable problem at a time.

[conuly]

But it probably still involves clearcutting somehow. Siiiiiiiiiiigh. (Also, I'd better bring a bunch of seeds and farm animals with me. But this is a magical thought experiment, so there's plenty of room on my time ark.)

[siderea]

...that would be irrelevant because they were burning coal for steam power, not electricity.

You'd need to find out why they preferred steam power over electric power in 1850 to change that.

[conuly]

Clearly my crack team is more educated than I am. (And I guess also able to convince the populace that clean electricity is the way to go. They knew about global warming a lot sooner than most people realize.)

[conuly]

Snark aside, I have serious questions about what sort of population you need to support a modern society.

[notasupervillain]

Hm. That seems fair. My problem is that civilization was pretty terrible for everyone involved. Hunter-gatherer societies tended to have high levels of happiness. Since we got civilized, it's been much lower. And personally I wouldn't live in any civilization without equal rights for women, birth control and medication for my mental illness. So neolithic sounds okay. Or else I'll say, screw the world, and what we have now is worth the environmental cost. I wouldn't trade my equality to save the planet.