SATURDAY, OCT 24, 2015: NOTE TO FILE

Euro-Sino Empire

Wikipedia article accessed 35V403 (June 23, 2353)
via Wayforward Machine

Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS

TOPICS: NEAR FUTURE, FROM THE WIRES, LIKELY STORY, HISTORY, REALITY-BASED

Abstract: The future will become history with the passing of the present. The Wayforward Machine is a useful story device, like warp drive, for telling stories that help compensate for human temporal blindness (and spacial). The "interim Americo" period of history may barely merit mention. Our fixation on current events may be a distraction.

TUCSON (A-P) — The Euro-Sino Empire ('Era of European Predominance... Era of National Sovereignty... a world which had unconsciously become one single interlocking system' —H.G. Wells 1933, aka monetary culture, World Socioeconomic-Political System (WSS), Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) form of civilization, the monetary culture/growth hegemon, Indo-Europeanized global culture) was a replay of the Greco-Roman Empire ('the great Helleno-Latin monetary imperialism in the western world' —H.G. Wells, whose starting date was the 1571 C.E. Battle of Lepanto, a Christian naval victory ending the Era of Asiatic Predominance) that preceded it. Much as the Greco had been, the Euro beginnings were based on an extractive mercantile agro-economic maritime empire. Unlike the Greco, the Euro transitioned to coal and other energy sources which allowed for continued growth. The later Roman agro-military-industrial complex that subsumed the Greco was mirrored by the rise of the global fossil-fueled economic empire that began with the Euro Industrial Revolution whose pulse climaxed within the Sino region in the twenty-first century. The Euro (and interim Americo) complex had transitioned away from coal to use the preferred oil and gas reserves. When they declined, the Euro-Americo region tried to transition back to coal and exploit alleged alternative energy, but because the Sino-Indio part of the corporatized Empire was already coal-based, the Sino region came to dominate the global affairs of Empire in its final years before the coal too failed to empower.

The earlier "Greek Miracle" of the free, curious and critical Ionian and Athenian Greeks was mirrored by the European Enlightenment that laid the foundations for a recovery of science as a way of finding things out which served the Euro-Sino Empire much as the Greek learning had the Roman Empire. Having some grasp of the nature of things aids empire-building. While science is a necessary precondition for sustainable empire, as was the case with the Greco-Roman Empire, the Euro-Sino Empire marginalized science while celebrating their humancentric Anthropocene enthusiasm, especially towards the end of empire when it sought political-military solutions and so failed to transition to sustainability via rapid managed degrowth.

Much as the Greco-Roman Empire had been replaced by a "Holy Roman Empire" which was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire apart from its ideological Christian hegemony, the Euro-Sino Empire collapse allowed the Holy IS Empire to dominate, with extreme prejudice, the lives and minds of most of the remnant population. Having even less science and no Internet except for the inner elites, the Global Caliphate lasted a mere 42 years instead of the nearly thousand years between the fall of the Western Greco-Roman Empire and the European Renaissance that began after the fall of the remnant Eastern Greco-Roman (Byzantine) Empire in 1453 which generated a wave of émigré Greco scholars who brought their precious ancient Greek manuscripts and memes with them to Europe to escape the Islamo hegemony of the Ottoman Caliphate.

History continued to repeat itself. The high-speed Euro-Sino culture didn't last long, but neither did its Dark Age. The remnant techno-scholars (aka Anonymous) had preserved the Internet as the Hamnet and evolved it into the Info-Ether we depend on today. Those who had survived were in no position to generate much new information, were low on empower, were lamentably limited and oppressed, and so the techno-scholars morphed the misnamed "smartphones" into the solar smartbooks we depend on today to access the vast info trove stored in the Info-Ether that was generated by the Euro-Sino Empire as it flowered before its collapse. Thanks to the Byzantine Greco scholars who preserved perhaps ten percent of the Greco learning of the free, curious and critical Ionian Greeks to whom we trace our intellectual ancestry, and thanks to the techno-scholars who preserved the valuable bits of the Open Internet and hacked the Global Caliphate's Intranet to use to dismantle their empire by decapitating it, we recovered science upon which we came to base our fragile grasp of reality and culture (see Way Down to  Prosperous Sustainability).

The techno-scholars recovered information and made it available to all. They had developed the Hamnet which was a radio-based Internet. A document request could be sent and often within a day, the document could be retrieved. Each scholar could request as much text-based information each day as they could read in a day. Images could be included, but little video was sent which was little missed. A scholar could request Origin of Species or 1.2 seconds of video. YouTube and Netflix were archived. There was no recreational Internet, so scholars became the prime users of the Info-Ether unlike the Internet which had come to be dominated by post-truth consumer media and primate prattle.

When the techno-scholars made the planet safe for information, instead of misinformation and disinformation, they released autonomous hydrogen balloons carrying solar-powered hubs as non-orbiting satellites above the troposphere. In the stratosphere there are no clouds, so solar power is a predictable 365 days, if not nights, of power. Some solar PV power was used for electrolysis of water vapor to maintain the hydrogen gas. The Info-Ether only worked during daylight hours, but it worked to connect the smartbooks. Material, including limited video, could be queued to download for nighttime consideration. To make good use of limited bandwidth, library servers delivered ebooks, film, music, and video from their vast archive stored locally. Patrons would build a list and visit the village library to plug in their thumb drive that could easily hold a week's worth of information. When smartbooks were connected during the day, they were connected to the Gog, the global AI, and so by proxy they were indeed smart. The low-power Info-Ether had limits compared to the Internet of the 21st century, but none that mattered.

 

Euro-Sino Timeline

5th century CE.
The Euro-Sino Empire begins where the prior agrarian/wood powered military/maritime empire, the Greco-Roman, ends secondary to overshoot—i.e. over exploitation of humans/environment, of biophysical resources. The Mediterranean-wide expansion, from Egypt to northern Europe/British Isles, of agriculture into formerly forested areas, for both cultivated and grazed usage, resulted in a system pulse.

Although the initial extractive agricultural productivity was three times the sustainable level, the loss of soil fertility, increasing population growth, extensive soil erosion, and continued deforestation (to provide for roofing, for cooking/heating, and ship building to allow maritime trade/war) became limiting and failed to fuel continued industrial production of metal, glass, ceramics, cement, lime. Only agricultural production in Egypt was sustainable secondary to annual flooding/fertilizing by the Nile.

6th - 11th century
Slow Stage 4 environmental and social recovery (aka Dark Age). Soils recover from over exploitation forced by demands of distant elites of the prior empire on outlying areas. Natural succession leads to reforestation, creates biomass and increases soil fertility allowing for a second round of agro-industrial development. The Holy Roman Empire subsumed the last of the Roman aristocracy. The Feudal SYSTEM depended on the God's Mandate (the divine right of kings) narrative of the priests to justify the emergent inequality of elite aristocracy providing protection services (from Vikings, Muslims, and neighboring principalities) and serfdom.

12th century
Medieval three-field system allows for a more productive agricultural system supporting larger populations to empower renewed empire-building beginning with the rise of towns in Western Europe leading to the growth of Machiavellian principalities, military might, and commerce. Larger principalities and city-states emerge united by the existing empire of belief.

13th century
Leagues & guilds grow in Western Europe. Chimney technology allows for multi-room elite housing with glass windows on exterior. Home heating, mining, and glass making required extensive, unsustainable wood consumption, a repetition of Roman deforestation/empowerment pulse of over a thousand years prior.

14th century
The rise of political and economic power occurred within the overarching religious/belief empire despite the start of the Little Ice Age, famine, and Black Death. Population declined, but soon recovered.

15th century
Global expansion of trade and mercantile empire-building enriches hereditary aristocracy, but rising mercantile wealth comes to challenge divine rights of the agro-wood powered Feudal SYSTEM.

16th century
England repels Spanish Armada in 1588 but fear of future invasion results in construction of a fleet of large war ships, each consuming 1,000 oak trees. Naval demands for wood and cannon smelted by charcoal trump glass maker demands on forest resources in Europe.

17th century
Jamestown, 1607, was in part an attempt to export glass making to America (a continent for the taking) that had 'plenty' of sand and trees. Dirty coal came to substitute for wood, coke for charcoal, to continue industrial production of glass and metals.

18th century
The Newcomen steam engine of 1712 and the improved Watt steam engine, 1763 to 1775, both coal powered, unleashed the dogs of war and enterprise resulting in the Industrial Revolution, its global expansion and exponential growth. Power shifts from agro/wood powered military/aristocracy to fossil-fueled industrial/military/business-as-usual based empire-building necessitating replacement of the God's Mandate narrative with the Growth's Mandate meme supplied by the new priesthood of the economists.

19th century
America's eastern forests, through which a tag team of squirrels could once have traveled from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River without touching the ground, largely exhausted by 1830s (as were whales), forced a transition to biofuels (alcohol/turpentine briefly), then coal and petroleum use to enable continued growth. And then what?

20th century
Growth greatest in North America, supplier of weapons of mass destruction, spared the destruction of WWI and WWII in the first half of century, resulting in the short-lived Americo interim period. The Green Revolution allows food to be made of oil (via industrial inputs into the agro-ecosystem). Initially, among scientists, only HT clearly saw the need to put system over self.

21st century
Growth shifts to the Sino region, whose economy/extraction of planetary resources doubled every seven to ten years in the early part of the century. In three years China used more cement than America had in its entire history and used half of planetary coal production to grow the economy to, among other things, keep Wal-Mart open 24/7 and make solar panels and wind turbines salvaged and used in 22nd century by techno-scholars to preserve information and information technology.

22nd century
Managed Stage 3 descent within pockets of sustainability (alternative to unmanaged 'zombie apocalypse' collapse as happened among those not writing history). Following the dissolution of the last pretender to Euro-Sino sovereignty, slow Stage 4 environmental and social recovery begins in some regions (those embracing managed descent) assisted by remnant population organized under United Federation of Watersheds policy for continued sustainable degrowth.

23rd century
Federation managed degrowth of population and environmental restorancy continues to further HT's prosperity of enough for all achievable in our century. Federation prime directive: Thou shall not overshoot thy system's sustainable environmental production. That is, don't repeat the pattern of overshoot and descent, learn to live within self-imposed and self-embraced limits. Humans learned to listen to those who listen to Nature.

 

Initial descent was chaotic and 'got people's attention', but the 323 year descent shown above was much less steep than it could have been. Human history could have ended before the 24th century, and could still end as no one can foresee the future in detail. Initially, few embraced Federation policies, but those not wanting to live the nasty, brutish and short life, who were adverse to eating others or being eaten, adapted to Federation planned descent to reduce population without increasing the death rate (via war, pestilence, genocide, starvation, interpersonal violence) by accepting effective birth control for all discontinued for conception limited to one birth to two natural deaths. Death by murder, suicide, self-neglect, starvation, or plague is best not followed by replacement births.

Birth certificates could be transferable but only after a certified 'natural' death (old age, accident, individual illness). If two transferable birth certificates occasioned one birth, the human population will degrow. The less than one child per woman policy allowed for degrowth of population by reducing it by half every 80 years until a sustainable population was reached allowing for a transition to a 2.1 child per woman average or to a one death to one birth policy.

Birth rates have biological limits, but death rate does not. All humans could die in one century or even a decade. A negative population growth of only 0.875% was alternative to a much faster catastrophic die-off possibly ending in human species extinction. Humans living through the managed descent within Federation watersheds got by on 'just enough' without existential threats until all could have enough which was understood to be true prosperity.

A straight two deaths to one birth policy, assuming an average life expectancy of 70 years secondary to best practice medical care, adequate nutrition, protection of citizens from war/murder, would result in only a negative 0.714% degrowth rate that would take 98 years to reduce population by half, a very slow rate of descent that may not be possible to maintain during descent as a natural die-off could well exceed -7%. Only an egalitarian rationing system would allow citizens to live out full lives of enough during descent. To avoid an unnecessarily drawn out descent, those living their life 'right and well' into old age, who avoided self-inflicted death (e.g. via alcohol/drug abuse) by negligence or misadventure, would enable others, usually close kin, including their grandchildren, to reproduce. Not uncommonly, grandparents in due time enabled a granddaughter or grandson's wife to bear a child.

To 'humanely' degrow the population non-catastrophically (to avoid the 'zombie apocalypse' scenario and traumatizing the survivors to such an extent that they fail to rebuild as per Calhoun rat/mice experiments of mid 20th century) required 300 years minimum. In areas not adopting Federation policy, degrowth occurred in 30 years or even three years, but those few living through the degrowth, as happened many times regionally in the past 10,000 years of human empire-building (e.g. Indus Valley Civilization), did not record the details of precipitous descent and slow recovery. This is why the Dark Ages are dark. Typically only scant archaeological evidence, such as cut marks on human bones, provide ignorable clues.

That the Federation took 300 years to degrow the population was widely regarded as a mistake by the 24th century. The consensus among system scientists was that within the pockets of sustainability the Federation established, the long term carrying capacity of each watershed should have been determined which would then determine the number of births needed to maintain that population. More refugees could have been taken in if Federation population policy had not been the 2:1 birthpon solution. The better solution would have been a policy of universal infertility secondary to the universal use of birth control with abortion backup. For five years during the initial transition, no births would be mutually agreed to. Those not agreeing could vote with their feet to join the teeming hordes. Those who understood Federation policy would have been high-functioning types with some grasp of biophysical constraints. Taking in more of such refugees would have had long-term benefits. They could pass on their memes if not their genes.

If the birth rate needed to support a sustainable population in a watershed was 10/month, then 10 birthpons could be distributed by lottery each month. Even if initially only one woman in a hundred could expect to be a 'winner' and reproduce, within 30 years all women could, on average, have two. Had the Federation had more foresight, it would have realized that by making the transition in 30 years instead of 300, much environmental degradation and human suffering could have been avoided. The evidence pointed to was those watersheds who did not go with the 2 to 1 birthpon policy, but tried the universal infertility followed by a sustainably birth rate without assuming that all generations have an equal 'right' to reproduce. They transitioned 230 years ago and the trauma is now a distant memory.

Those seeking to join the Federation who were motivated to serve self interests (amygdala-interests) self-selected out. Those able to 'actually think more than a decade ahead' tended to self-select in. That there could be worse things than not having children was thinkable for some. Being a part of a system that could actually work long-term, that worked to serve the interests of the seventh generation and beyond—a planetary system that includes the social control SYSTEM, was an option. The Federation developed a social control SYSTEM to mold 'individual behaviour into a plan of actions or avoidances that are oriented toward the maintenance of a viable equilibrium between Man’s demands and Nature’s resources'. That some came to write history and others to read it in the 24th century is the outcome.

 

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Zoom Graphic Interactive Visualization

[A techno-scholar project to go here]

"X-axis" = time from 23,880 BCE to present projected to 2400 CE displayed as a 3d sphere with coast, river, watershed boundaries. Alternative version goes back 75,000 years to include the rising of the modern expansionist form of human event.

"Y-axis" = emergy(seJ)/person (for both "average elites" and "average commoners") in watershed region/time displayed as elevation topo over time. Go to region/watershed of interest (viewed similar to Google Earth), use time slider (t-axis), see rise/fall/oscillation of human footprint with sidebar 2-D graphs and narrative sidebar.

Early view would show hunter-gatherer populations spreading and pulsing to megafauna extinctions, acting like an invasive species, climaxing with early industrial complex/empire-building at end of Epipaleolithic. Beginning about 10,000 years ago, viewers could watch the rise of Neolithic agroecosystem empires pulsing to changing conditions, conquest, and unsustainable practices. All known empire pulsing would be shown per region with selectable multiple projections to 2400 CE, from Business-as-usual scenarios to Federation scenarios.

Maximum view height 720 pixels (10 inches at 72 dpi). Maximum time width for 2-D, at 1 pixel = 1 year, 26,280 pixels (365 inches, 30 feet, 9.27 m, at 72 dpi).

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