The warthog and the sunflower have a common characteristic: they are both dissipative structures powered by thermodynamic potentials. And they share this characteristic with much larger and more complicated structures, such as empires. Warthogs and Sunflowers need metabolic energy (food) to survive: no food -- no warthogs, and no sunflowers either. If we want our civilization to survive, we need "food" in the form of energy potentials that we can dissipate. So far, our food has been in the form of fossil fuels. Will we be able to found a new, and perhaps more nutritious, food in the form of solar energy?
I am not saying I know more than historians about history; I am sure they have a deep grasp of many details and events that pertain to human empires, much better than anything I can manage to know. But the problem with this book is the lack of a common thread in the story of these 32 empires. In every chapter, you read of things that happen: battles fought, laws enacted, rulers coming and going, neighbors invading or being invaded, all sorts of things, and yet, somehow, these apparently unrelated events always gang together to bring down the whole stupendous edifice. It reminds Shakespeare's line, "When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions." Shakespeare was a poet, not a historian, but he grasped a basic point: sorrows do come in battalions, but why?
In "The End of Empires," the discussion on this point is mainly in the first introductory chapter, where the authors endeavor to tell us that empires may fall because of three factors; 1) Internal factors, 2) External factors, and 3) Unforeseen events. Which is tantamount to saying that anything and everything can bring down empires, But, again, why?
If you are reading this blog, "The Sunflower Paradigm," you are interested in energy, and I think you are prepared to accept the idea that what keeps empires together is nothing but energy. No energy -- no empire.
This concept would be basically incomprehensible for someone who doesn't have a minimum training in the mechanisms that keep complex systems "alive." It is energy. It is an intuition that goes back to Ilya Prigogine, who proposed the concept of "dissipative structures." A definition that can be applied to many things, from warthogs to sunflowers, including empires.
A dissipative structure is something that emerges out of energy potentials. It is actually strictly linked to the definition of "potential," which has to be understood as something that can be dissipated, that is turned into entropy. Dissipative structures are self-assembled machines that turn energy potentials into entropy, that is low-temperature heat that disappears in the environment.
Think of a living being. It lives on the energy produced by the energy potential stored in food, metabolic energy. No metabolism, no life. You can say that of a warthog or a sunflower: no food -- no warthog, and not even a sunflower. You can say the same for empires, although their metabolic processes are quite different from those of biological creatures.
The concept of dissipative structures is wide-ranging, and it is an incredibly useful tool for understanding how the universe works. You can use it in physics, chemistry, and, yes, in the science of those complex systems we call human social structures. Empires, for instance. The simple concept that energy (more exactly, energy potentials) creates social structures is a powerful tool for understanding the mechanism of the collapse of empires.
Of the 32 chapters of the book, none mentions energy flows. Maybe you know that in 1984 the German historian Demandt listed 210 (!!) causes of why the Roman Empire fell, including such concepts as “Tiredness of life” and “Escapism." You can't accuse historians of lacking fantasy, but you might perhaps propose that they don't have a good understanding of the mechanisms that create and destroy these large human enterprises.
Only recently, the historian Thomas Homer-Dixon proposed that the Roman collapse was the result of the decline of the energy return on energy investment (EROI) of the Roman society. It was a good idea, although vague as it was proposed. But it was approximately correct. The Roman Empire was a stupendous structure that relied mostly on slaves as its source of energy. Slaves cultivated the land that provided food, then they also mined gold and silver to pay the military apparatus, the legions, and the civilian bureaucracy that kept the empire together. The whole machine required gold and silver to keep working. Soldiers wouldn't fight without being paid, and the same was for civil servants.
We have little or no evidence of a decline in the productivity of Roman agriculture until the last gasps of the empire, during the 5th century AD. But we do have evidence that the mining system of the empire collapsed during the 3rd century. It was because depletion made mining more and more expensive. The Empire would have needed many more slave miners than it could afford to have. So, it became unable to mine gold. No gold, no legions, no legions, no empire. And the whole system went through that kind of transformation that simply meant it had to reduce its rate of entropy dissipation. The end of the empire.
The same story is playing out in our case. Depletion of our fossil resources (our "energy slaves") is making us less and less able to provide the kind of energy that makes our civilization able to create entropy at a rate much faster than any previous civilization in history. And, if we keep going along the road we are following, it doesn't help to talk of being "more efficient" or developing "new economic paradigms." There is no other destination for us than a society working at a much lower dissipation rate. A low metabolism society, agricultural, or even based on hunting and gathering.
That is our destiny unless we manage to replace fossil fuels with a comparable, and perhaps much higher, energy potential that we can dissipate. It was the dream of the 1950s, the "atomic age," that never really materialized. Today, solar energy could provide the potential that we need to maintain a high dissipation rate. The society that could develop out of this jump to a new source could be as different from ours as a warthog is different from a sunflower. Still, it will be based on a fast metabolic rate. Will it come? We can't say, but whatever will happen, will happen because it had to happen.
Dear Ugo,
ReplyDeletecertainly, starvation is a reason for death, but not the only one. We may die if we lack some critical materials too. We may lose the fight against a competitor or being predated. Even if we are lucky, our bodies are not built up to last forever: that's how Gaia has designed us. We evolve by learning new tricks and passing them to our offspring, then giving them the tools and the room.
And as you wisely say, there must be a reason. A young body can learn many new tricks, a new pool of genes can offer an individual most adapted to the current environmental conditions. But an old body has too many ingrained habits, too many inertia, to be able to respond properly to new threats.
A large empire as those shown in the book might not fear the competition or being predated by another nation, but their inner structures can become stunted, not being able to adapt in time.
So, in my humble opinion, there's starvation (energy/size), malnutrition (critical minerals/size) and old age (decadency) as the principal factors that explain why a succesful organism may die. A deficiency in any of these factors leads to deficiencies in the others, initializing the spiral towards collapse.
There is an overarching element that generates the things that make an empire move. If you have energy, you can have materials, food, and more. But you are raising a fundamental point, here. We tend to see empires as if they were organisms, going through a single cycle of birth and death. But they are not -- not fully, at least. Organisms are programmed to die: they accumulate entropy, and then they fade out. Empires can go through cycles of high and low activity, depending on the energy flow. After all, 1500 years after the end of the Roman Empire, there were people, in Italy, busy at rebuilding it. They failed, of course, crushed by other, more powerful and well established empires. But they might have succeeded owing to the power of fossil fuels. Historians in a remote future could have said that the Roman Empire had lasted throughout the 20th century!
DeleteAs a cartoonist wrote (Manuel Summers): "The fact that no people has lived more than a hundred years doesn't mean that death is unavoidable".
DeleteThen you say that all that happens, happens for a reason. Death too.
... The bacteria that live in our body must be thinking the same: animals do not die, they go through periods of growth and sudden degrowth, when an animal is eaten by another, but there's almost always a body to live in ...
Let's think of other more short-lived organizations: corporations. They also go through the same cycles: if successful, they grow; if they aren't eaten by competitors they become large, they get so big that they are able to manipulate the rules; then once they are too big, they can't adapt to changes as fast as the small competitors and lose competitivity. Corporations can then choose to shrink or collapse. By shrinking they may able to survive, adapt and grow again, but this time they can't manipulate the market's rules, so the advantage is gone, they are back in the jungle. Every time a big corporation faces a crisis like this, it risks collapsing or being overrun by the competence. The risk accumulates until it becomes a certainty.
The longest lived bussiness are either small ones which don't have a desire for growth (like old family bussiness in very specialized niches) or religious in nature (like the Catholic Church), or both (see Kongo Gumi builders).
After reading Derek Parfit's "Teletransportation Paradox", I cannot agree that rebuilding a living structure is the same as keeping it alive. So once an organization (or a civilization) has collapsed and ceased to exist, any attempt at resurrecting it will either fail or end up building a different thing, since it should have evolved to stay alive in the first place.
Organisms must die, but that's not true for holobionts. They can collapse and then return as good as new, as long as the potential that created them exist. It is a fundamental distinction in the structures that compose the universe. Some are holobionts, others are organisms. Single human beings are organisms, whole human societies are more like holobionts. No need to die for them, although they may.
DeleteWhat Ilya Prigogyne discovered is not only the dissipation of energy, but that the dissipation of energy happens faster when there is structure, when there is coordination in matter such that the variations are no longer random movements that provide the energy distribution, but coordinated movements . This means that the energy is distributed over a larger volume with less resistance. Coordination and therefore structure reduces resistance. At a certain point, therefore, structure is created (coordination of the logical type “if this, then that,…). In a certain energy band structure is difficult to destroy, in a certain energy band (energy potential) a direction for change spontaneously arises. Some structures manage to perpetuate themselves, and here we are: living structures, and empires if you will. We see structure in its material traces.
ReplyDeleteWhy not explicitly link an alternative to fossil energy sources to “more nature” and therefore “more matter”? Why shouldn't a civilization that is no longer based on fossil fuels be the result of new coordination between humans and nature that allows for more "naturally generated" materials?
It is impossible to separate energy and material from each other: material buffers energy in a special way and if there are more materials and more diversity of materials, energy can be dissipated more quickly in an energy band that is essential for life. The amazing thing is that nature has been experimenting for 500 million years (!) with creating matter from solar energy and an enormous diversity of plants has emerged that is able to sustain itself. I can undeniably demonstrate that all materials are structurally equivalent from an energetic point of view (they all have the same order of magnitude of energy storage per weight). So material that arises spontaneously is superior. That spontaneous emergence needs multiplicity both in mass and in diversity. The current energy debate is not overrun by multiplicity but by two elephants in the room, on the one hand "warm, therefore chaotic, gas" and therefore irreversible thermodynamics and on the other hand "rhythmically moving charge" and therefore the imperative unequivocal coordination of electric motors and the resulting fight for cos(phi). Both forms of energy are difficult to buffer and to link to natural spontaneous processes. That focus and blindness to the elephants ensures that we no longer see other forms of energy.
The energy debate is now being conducted “for the sake of the climate” with a new enemy: CO2, even though carbon is an essential building material for plants. The new elephant in the room of the energy debate is that people do not want to talk about the influence of plants on the climate, when it is scientifically proven that forests release much more water per unit of surface area into the atmosphere than evaporation per unit of ocean surface and that water makes the great energy flows on the globe possible. This leads to climate control and fresh water flow through large contiguous forests (these are massively coordinated entities and not just “plants”) which you clearly understand as witnessed by your holobiont blog.
A new civilization should result from new material coordination between man and nature. Coordination presupposes a shared story. Despite the fact that nowadays it has become technically very easy to communicate alternatives, it is becoming more difficult to entice people to use their own creativity in the story. This is of course a paradox, and if you want to see it, it is not difficult to understand. I have already pointed this out in my commentary on the “the boy who cried wolf” (Seneca effect blog May 11, 2023) where I linked it to negative feedback.
Oh, but our rulers only want to talk about electricity, even if it just represents a 20% of our energy needs. We could burn wood in a gasification boiler at an amazing 90% efficiency and really low pollution, but that only gives us heat. We are told to use electric heating instead because, you know, with a heat pump we get >300% efficiency, but the cost to turn any energy into electricity is not advertised, nor it is the cost of building, maintaining and disposing these complex devices.
DeleteI am not against using electricity, I would be glad if in the future I can still use a computer plugged to a solar panel installed in my appartment wall, even if I have to wait for the sunny hours. I am just not buying the trope that we have to electrify everything if we want to be ecological.
You are making several fundamental points. Yes, nature has been doing its job of dissipating the energy potential of solar energy on land for more than 500 million years -- and doing a good job at creating an incredible array of diverse dissipation structures. Now, we are seeing two more "bands" of dissipation, as you say, hot gas and electric motors. Are they elephants destined to die of starvation? Or are they the next step forward in an even more complex set of dissipation structures? I think one can make a good case for the second possibility, but it has all to be seen.
DeleteYes, and this time we will no longer just have to wait and see what happens, but we can also steer if we use our imagination and continue to link that imagination to what we have learned from nature. We will continue to use gas flows (in the temperature interval of life, for example, this is wind) and continue to use liquid flows (in the temperature interval of life, this is water, not ice and not gas, in the potential field of gravitation, so under the influence of the tides, for example). The energy transformation is from potential energy to kinetic energy. Power is proportional to the product of speed and acceleration. The transformation requires a large interacting surface and exponentially larger volumes (slightly smaller in water compared to air). The larger the construction, the more efficient. So we will have to think about the materials we will use for this. The less energy we need to produce those materials, the better. The point that I wanted to make comes up again: we cannot separate energy from material. We will continue to couple the generated kinetic energy with electrical potential differences and then we will also continue to use an additional new aspect: the magnetic aspect of dynamics. The power is proportional to the product of electric current and magnetic flux. We can also generate this (in a photovoltaic cell) without having to make the detour of a mass that has a speed and acceleration. But perhaps then we will begin to see the advantage of being able to use many more frequencies than the current 50 or 60 hertz. Many frequencies can resonate with each other and we will have to learn to look at wave phenomena in a different way. And now comes the real revolution: every wave carries information when understood as a superposition of basic frequencies. Thus, by observing spontaneous resonance in energy dissipation, we observe calculations in the structure of reality. The large patterns of dynamic events on the globe are gigantic dynamic memories and we will begin to wonder why we have already destroyed so much memory by destroying all those electrical potential differences in living matter on the globe. We will look at (electromagnetic) radiation in a different way. We will perform the calculations in our computers differently, no longer based on bits but on patterns that can be reversibly transformed, and this will once again cost us much less energy.
DeleteWhatever cause brought down the western part of the empire, it did not bring down the eastern part, which lasted for another millenium. Were there gold mines in the east? It is true that the eastern empire gradually became smaller and smaller, more or less continuosly, but in any case the fate of the two parts was quite different. How can you explain this, I wonder?
ReplyDeleteA long story..... First of all, the Eastern Empire was a commercial society, not primarily a military one, as the Western Empire was. So, it is known that they obtained gold by trade. They were placed in a great geographic position, at the crossroad of many eurasiatic commercial roads and their territories had good manufacturing capabilities. Really, it was a different kettle of jingles. But there is another explanation that has to do with the gold mines of Thracia (modern Bulgaria). There has to be a reason why the Bulgarian Khanate and the Byzantine Empire kept fighting for nearly a millennium; and it was not a sporadic fight -- it was a struggle for survival with niceties such as gouging out the eyes of all the captured enemy soldiers. I think it was a fight for the control of the Thracian gold mines. From our viewpoint, it is difficult to say which factor was the most important factor. For sure, the Thracian gold mines had been heavily exploited by the Romans and were in decline, but it is reported that the Byzantine empire exploited them for centuries after that the Western Empire had collapsed. That was unlike the Spanish mines, which were simply abandoned during the 3rd-4rth century AD. So, a case could be made that the Western Empire collapsed because it ran out of gold, while the Easter one survived because it had some gold. We don't have quantitative data, but one thing is sure: the Eastern Empire survived as long as it had gold. Long story, as I said....
DeleteI think that the argument exposed is too much simplist, because there another materials for to pay the soldiers, like salt.
ReplyDeleteExcuse me, Anselmo, but the story that the Roman legionnaries were paid in salt is just a legend. A fraction of their pay was formally supposed to be used to buy salt; but it was paid in silver "solidi"
DeleteWarthogs die from lack of food, but also from spears.
ReplyDeleteWhat keeps empire or living creature together is, among many things, energy, but NOT "nothing but energy". If you stab me with a knife, I may die while well-feed.
The last Tsar of the Russian Empire, together with his Empire (it was resurrected by the communists, but only after German Empire lost on the West and was unable to enforce Brest-Litovsk treaty; and after civil war), died not from lack of coal. Or maybe from too feudal social structure of the Empire that was unable to properly use it's great coal reserves.
True, Empires can be overrun by superior military forces. But if they have a sane economic basis, they often recover and return in play. Remaining with the Romans, they defeated the Greeks at Kinoscephalos in 197 BC and annexed Greece. A few centuries later, the Roman Emperors spoke Greek and saw themselves at least in part Greek.
DeleteBy the way: I think that Western understanding of history suffers from considering mostly Europe, a place that for a long time was weak in comparision to the real Center of the Civilized world, Chinese Empire (sometimes kingdoms, when fractured).
DeleteEven during overpulation-caused collapse the might of China was still able to sustain great cities, for ealxample. Look at this population graphic:
https://i.postimg.cc/HxsnzpVD/b75d2d077b3fd29a83652fe84f88a7d3-population-infographics.jpg
Some would say that the decline of family (and the resulting birth dearth) amongst the Romans led to the need for immigrants in their society and then they lost their homogeneity which led to a breakdown in unity of purpose, which then meant they did not solve their energy problems. Aging societies loose their innovation.
ReplyDeleteWhen you look at Nimes and its water supply, such a marvel of construction built so rapidly and then marvel at its lack of maintenance over centuries until it choked with deposits.
The west is dying of old age.