"Roman architecture would have been impossible without the complex socioeconomic platform of [the] empire. The medieval social platform for northern European life was less elaborate and… less complex. Compare these two historical cases with the complexity of social and economic organization that allows oil to be extracted from the ground, refined to gasoline, transported six thousand miles, and used in a highly engineered, fine-tuned machine called a car, [to be] driven on a six-lane freeway. If the social and economic platform fails, how long before the knowledge base dissolves? Two hundred years from now, will anyone know how to build or even repair a 1962 Chrysler slant-six engine? Not to mention a Nordex 1500 kW wind turbine? […] The existing knowledge in basic physics and chemistry is so widespread that it is likely to persist quite a while into the future and provide a foundation for doing more with less than, say, the people of the eighteenth century were able to do with their more limited knowledge."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Chapter 4, p. 130.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Long_Emergency
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
The Long Emergency
95 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by The Long Emergency →
Related Quotes
"Above all, and most immediately, we face the end of the cheap fossil fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that re…"
"What is... not comprehended about this predicament is that the developed world will begin to suffer long before the o…"
"It has been estimated that the world human population stood at about one billion around the early 1800s, which was ro…"
"Malthus… has been the whipping boy of idealists and techno-optimists for two hundred years. His famous essay proposed…"
"Malthus was certainly correct [that demand will outstrip supply], but cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like coal,…"
"We are already experiencing huge cost externalities from population hypergrowth and profligate fossil fuel use in the…"
"The high tide of the... [industrial] age also happened to be a moment in history when human ingenuity gained an upper…"
"At the same time, the world is overdue for an extreme influenza epidemic. The last major outbreak was the 1918 Spanis…"
"The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, [...] but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to …"
"It has been... hard... to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life…"