🚀 go-pugleaf

There has been much discussion in these newsgroups to the effect that it is
not necessary for us to restructure our economies in major ways or to
impose major costs on ourselves to recycle scarce materials because the
cost of extraction from the environment of even thinly-scattered materials
will never become too great for our economies to bear. The "negative-
logarithm" argument is often used in this context in a way that suggests
it is the only cost of importance, and that since it grows slowly, we
need never be concerned about the collapse of the world industrial economy
due to materials depletion, given the abundance of low-cost energy. It is
time to put this line of argument in its place.

First, a review of basic economics:

The classic breakdown of the factors of production is Land, Labor, and
Capital. In more modern terms we might break it down to

	Space
	Time
	Energy
	Materials
	Information
	Favorable situation
	- Initial conditions
	- Operating conditions
	- Future prospects

The last, "favorable situation", is not usually considered in these terms,
but more about that later.

Now let's look at the costs involved in providing the materials needed by
a technical economy:

1) Marginal physical material extraction. This is the cost of extracting
one more gram of a given material from the material in which it is embedded.
It is the cost which is, in general, governed by the "negative logarithm"
function.

2) Exploration. Surveying, exploratory drilling, storing and sharing the
information obtained thereby.

3) Site acquisition. Buying the land or mineral rights to it.

4) Exposure. Getting to the raw material. Drilling, mining, tilling.

5) Capital equipment. The tools needed to extract the materials. Includes
R&D, production, distribution, storage, operation, maintenance, transport.

6) Labor. Skilled workers needed to operate everything.

7) Administration. Putting everything together, and keeping it going.

8) Finance. The sources of venture capital to get everything started and
to keep it going, who will expect a profit.

9) Marketing and Sales. Getting it to the people who will be able to use it.

10) Security. Control of disasters, theft, vandalism, or diversion. Guards,
police, fire protection, armies. Safety measures.

10) Use. It can cost to use something as well as to buy it.

11) Disposal. The cost of getting rid of it after it has been used. This
could be recycling, or it could be putting it in a stream or landfill.

12) Site restoration. Putting the land back the way it was before doing
the extraction. Or if extracted from the ocean, putting the materials back
into the ocean so that concentrations remain constant.

13) Pollution control. Keeping contaminants out of the environment.

14) Habitat protection. Keeping all of the above from permanently damaging
the natural ecosystem.

Now it should be noted that our Cost #1 above is usually not a large part
of the total of all of the above costs in the kind of economic system we
have known for the past 200 years or so. However, those who argue that we
do not need to be concerned about materials depletion tend to assume that
all of the other costs given above will remain approximately constant
while Cost #1 increases (slowly). Reality is not as simple at that.

In reality, as scarce materials are depleted, costs #2, #3, and #4 tend to
rise rapidly, and costs #12, #13, and #14 rise dramatically. These last
three now tend to be treated as *externalities*, costs which do not need
to be paid by the producers, but which can be imposed on nonparties to 
the economic transaction, such as future generations. Cost #5 may also
rise, although new technology may bring it down as well.

The other costs do not remain constant, either. Even small increases in
the real cost of critical materials can propagate throughout the economy
and affect all other costs in non-linear ways. Sometimes the effect is
severe cost increases. Sometimes, but less often, it results in cost
savings, as shifts in extraction strategies lead to efficiencies in other
areas.

Many of these costs are as large as they are, and as susceptible to rises
in basic materials costs, because of the ways the economy is structured.
It is not just the terrestrial environment outside the economic infra-
structure which is an entropic sink. There are entropic sinks surrounding
many of the steps in the entire economic process. Containing costs largely
consists of re-organizing the economy to eliminate as many of those
entropic sinks as possible.

My proposed starship-cities essentially represent such a re-organization.
By confining the material components of the economy within fairly small,
sealed volumes of space, we are able to greatly reduce most of the above
costs except #1, which then becomes the primary governing cost for the
system as a whole, and which is manageable in that kind of system. If
people continue to live in scattered, open settlements, most of the above
costs will rise until the continued viability of human civilization is
threatened. The effects of such cost rises will be perceived as falling
real wages for the majority of workers; increasing costs of housing, food,
transportation, and other necessities; increased unemployment and social
tension; faltering economic growth and increased business failures;
increased crime and violence; diminished public services; the loss of
civility and public confidence in the future and in public institutions;
the breakdown of private morality; and an increasingly short-term focus
in human affairs.

Sound familiar?

Eventually these trends result in the breakdown of civil order. That can
take many forms. People can turn to demagogues who promise much and do a
lot of damage. Democratic governments are replaced by military dictators.
More and more things go wrong. Soon no one can trust anyone else, not
even their own families. Neither governments nor markets are able to meet
the needs of people as a spiraling disorder crushes civilization under
a blanket of despair. The collapse may not occur dramatically. It may be
prolonged over many generations. Heroic efforts may be made: to invest in
new industries, to begin new public projects, to introduce new techno-
logies, new ideas, new methods of organization. But nothing works, because
the environment favorable to making use of those innovations is missing.

Taking the world economy as a whole as a production process, we started
with favorable initial conditions, and we may still have favorable operating
conditions, but those operating conditions seem likely not to hold, and
the future prospects are very much in doubt.

We don't have to use only our imaginations to see how everything can go
wrong, even with technological advances. History, both ancient and recent,
is replete with stories of how civilizations can break down under various
pressures. Examples are all around us. They are happening, on small scales,
right now. Whether we can avoid letting the world situation as a whole 
become unmanageable depends on whether we can avoid letting all these
now localized collapses come together and feed on each other.

People have looked at this situation and called for various remedies:
education, spiritual reform, changing the proportions of economic activity
between the public and the private sector, world or regional government,
new technologies, ...

Well, we need all of these things. But most of all we need one particular
new technology -- the technology of the large-scale civilization-support
system. Starship-cities are technology, the technology that is missing
from the picture, a technology that encompasses not only infrastructure
but also a new way of organizing human affairs. Organizational methods are
technology, too.

But there is a problem. This critical new technology is not accessible to
laissez-faire commercial market mechanisms. As a project it is too large,
its payoff too long-term, and the benefits too diffuse for recapture, to
be suited for purely private capital. It requires a public-sector invest-
ment.

---

jdr@starflight.corp.sun.com, starflt@uunet.uu.net
Jon Roland
Starflight Corporation, 1755 E Bayshore Rd #9A,
Redwood City, CA 94063-4142, 415/361-8141