Simple vs Complex, Common vs Rare

Terraformer · 2019-05-31 05:35:20

Some technologies are simple and use common materials - the digging stick being a prime example, since it can be made out of a wooden stick (common material) by a single person with basic tools (simple, doesn't need a complex society or lots of complex work done). At the other end, we have modern electronics, which require ultrapure and difficult to extract elements (rare) and billion dollar fabs that require the support of a giant economy to function (complex).

I propose that technologies can be mapped out on a two-axes chart, with one axis (horizontal, left-right) being common-rare (what is it made of - how hard are the materials to acquire?) and the other (vertical, bottom-top) being simple-complex (how difficult is it to make - how big does the economy have to be to support it?). To round out the examples, it's possible to build a jet aircraft out of steels made of fairly common materials (I don't know if Nickel is *required*, but it does make things a lot easier), but it's not going to be possible for a team of blacksmiths working in some post-apocalyptic city state to make one. On the other side, certain rare, hard-to-extract metals are used as chemical catalysts - they're not common, but if you have them using them is fairly simple.

The simpler technology is, and the more it uses common, accessible materials, the easier it will be for a small group to build and maintain. Technologies in the bottom-left could probably be sustained by a small city - whether that be in a post-apocalyptic world, or on another planet. I think this is *roughly* what Open Source Ecology are aiming for. Obviously having a Standard Template Construct available would grant access to every technology, but if that was destroyed we'd be sunk.

louis · 2019-05-31 07:21:55

Very interesting post. This is a good way of looking at things, I think.

Some observations:

1. People sometimes get confused between "easy to make" and "how are things made on Earth". So it's wrong to assume that you need to build an equivalent of a Ford Auto Plant over 10 sq. miles employing several thousand people to produce an automobile on Mars. You might be able to build one, but your manufacture process will just be a lot more inefficient (maybe using a lot of slow 3D printers for instance). A third axis might be therefore, for Mars analysis, what % efficiency can be achieved on Mars at a given state of development compared with on Earth. Efficiency for this purpose probably relates to time: how many of x can you produce in an hour with the most efficient operation on Earth being 100%. So we might be able to produce an automobile on Mars at an early stage but it might only be at 5% efficiency of what Ford can do.

2. In relation to Mars there is the issue of how far you can "cheat" by importing technology - especially 3D printers, CNC lathes, robot arms and the rest.

Terraformer wrote:

Some technologies are simple and use common materials - the digging stick being a prime example, since it can be made out of a wooden stick (common material) by a single person with basic tools (simple, doesn't need a complex society or lots of complex work done). At the other end, we have modern electronics, which require ultrapure and difficult to extract elements (rare) and billion dollar fabs that require the support of a giant economy to function (complex).
I propose that technologies can be mapped out on a two-axes chart, with one axis (horizontal, left-right) being common-rare (what is it made of - how hard are the materials to acquire?) and the other (vertical, bottom-top) being simple-complex (how difficult is it to make - how big does the economy have to be to support it?). To round out the examples, it's possible to build a jet aircraft out of steels made of fairly common materials (I don't know if Nickel is *required*, but it does make things a lot easier), but it's not going to be possible for a team of blacksmiths working in some post-apocalyptic city state to make one. On the other side, certain rare, hard-to-extract metals are used as chemical catalysts - they're not common, but if you have them using them is fairly simple.
The simpler technology is, and the more it uses common, accessible materials, the easier it will be for a small group to build and maintain. Technologies in the bottom-left could probably be sustained by a small city - whether that be in a post-apocalyptic world, or on another planet. I think this is *roughly* what Open Source Ecology are aiming for. Obviously having a Standard Template Construct available would grant access to every technology, but if that was destroyed we'd be sunk.

Terraformer · 2019-05-31 09:11:04

If you're importing computer chips, your total complexity now includes the fabs that make them and the economies that support those fabs. You're not "cheating" - if your access to those fabs is lost, you're sunk.

I'm also not talking about Mars at all in this thread. Please don't hijack my threads about technological self-sufficiency by talking about how not being technologically self-sufficient is so much easier.

JoshNH4H · 2019-05-31 15:18:08

This is a great distillation of a lot of discussions you see in various domains, on here of course relating to Mars (+the asteroids, the Moon, etc.), settling the Arctic, Self-Replicating Machines, self-sufficient communes/communities, seasteading, etc. (#FlashBackFriday to the Clean Slate Forums)

As far as common vs rare: I think your example of a stick brings up an important point, which is that common vs. rare is not abstract (You couldn't publish a table for it like you could publish the atomic weights of the elements) but depends mostly on local environment and infrastructure. Sticks are common in the forest but rare in the tundra, the ocean, Mars, etc. Iron ore is common, except for where it isn't (carbonaceous chondrites and, to my understanding, the oceanic crust are short on Iron), and good orebodies become less common as we mine them out. Sometimes you've got to dig.

The complexity operator seems close to a measure of the required tolerances to make something out of raw materials. Thinking of a spear with a stone tip, the tolerance is centimeter-scale and a wide variation in rock properties will result in an acceptable final product; raw human sensoria are more than adequate to the task, although there's surely a lot of skill involved and you need the right tools.

For something like an airplane turbine, though, you've got a much different set of requirements. Alloy compositions need to be correct to within 0.05% or so for consistency, which requires an ability to measure mass accurately. Dimensional tolerances are presumably small, although I don't know how small (A few hundred micron? Naturally the answer is "it depends" but probably something around there). Some alloys get annealed, meaning you need to be able to produce and measure temperature, plus time.

Louis mentioned something that I'd like to elaborate on, which is that there's a difference between having the ability to do something and the ability to do that thing efficiently. Let's say, for argument's sake, that you need to produce an aluminium cylinder with a diameter of 0.1000 meters diameter with a tolerance of ±0.0001 m (i.e. acceptable diameters range from 0.9999 m to 0.1001 m). The best tool for the job is a lathe. Let's say the lathe you have on hand has a precision around 0.001 m. You can still make this component, as long as you have the measurement capability to check that it's within spec. It'll be pretty wasteful, though: You'll be throwing out "bad ones" (out of spec but within machining precision) until you get a good one. Huge waste of time and material, but it can be done. Naturally it's much more efficient when your machining precision is as good or better than your specified tolerances, but precision begets precision: It's hard, though not impossible, to design a machine more precise than the parts it's made from.

I think there's a sort of set of underlying ideas here that could be put together into a comprehensive physical economic analysis of any given community, which I can comment on in another post (or another thread if you'd rather keep this one more narrowly on topic)

louis · 2019-05-31 17:22:21

Well I assumed you had Mars in mind since this is a Mars site. Otherwise I don't think it's a very important axis - on Earth you can just let the market or whoever has control of resources decide. All the examples you gave are examples of technologies that exist on Earth, so from that point of view it's not v. illuminating.

So far only a few, very limited technologies exist on Mars and, as far as I know, they have all been exported there...I don't think we've yet exported a Mars ISRU-based technology...but I might be wrong.

I thought your axis illuminated how one decides how to proceed with Mars technology. I don't think it really has much to say about current Earth technologies but might be an interesting way of looking at historic technological development.

Terraformer wrote:

If you're importing computer chips, your total complexity now includes the fabs that make them and the economies that support those fabs. You're not "cheating" - if your access to those fabs is lost, you're sunk.
I'm also not talking about Mars at all in this thread. Please don't hijack my threads about technological self-sufficiency by talking about how not being technologically self-sufficient is so much easier.

louis · 2019-05-31 17:35:44

I think there is a connection with an interesting fact from metallurgy - that in the medieval period sword makers could produce really high-grade steel as good as anything produced until maybe 50 years ago. How exactly they did it is now partly a matter of conjecture. Clearly it was a craft technique which compared to a modern steel works was horribly inefficient and also they could only produce it at a v. small scale.

Craft technique is probably another variable...Terraformer referenced "how big does the economy have to be" to support a given technology. But with a lot of craft techniques, it only has to be as big as one person who understands the craft.

That relates to another interesting historical fact - the people of Tierra del Fuego (prior to European colonisation) had forgotten how to make fire. In other words there was no single craftsperson who could make fire. They had to keep fires alight or "borrow" fire from some other group if their own fire went out. I suppose a modern analogy for that would be a community that just kept smelting scrap steel but had forgotten how to make steel! Again, there is relevance to Mars there - I think if Mars is from the get-go a near 100% recycling community - let's say 95% as a benchmark compared with about 60% which is the best achieved on Earth - then that would probably be a sensible approach on Mars.

JoshNH4H wrote:

Louis mentioned something that I'd like to elaborate on, which is that there's a difference between having the ability to do something and the ability to do that thing efficiently. Let's say, for argument's sake, that you need to produce an aluminium cylinder with a diameter of 0.1000 meters diameter with a tolerance of ±0.0001 m (i.e. acceptable diameters range from 0.9999 m to 0.1001 m). The best tool for the job is a lathe. Let's say the lathe you have on hand has a precision around 0.001 m. You can still make this component, as long as you have the measurement capability to check that it's within spec. It'll be pretty wasteful, though: You'll be throwing out "bad ones" (out of spec but within machining precision) until you get a good one. Huge waste of time and material, but it can be done. Naturally it's much more efficient when your machining precision is as good or better than your specified tolerances, but precision begets precision: It's hard, though not impossible, to design a machine more precise than the parts it's made from.

SpaceNut · 2019-05-31 18:28:58

I think what was being gotten to is that one item would be used to make the next and so on all the way up to the most advanced of them.

Terraformer · 2019-06-01 02:37:13

louis,

It may be a Mars site, but I posted in in a general forum for a reason. Otherwise I would have put it in Life Support.

You can't "let the market provide" if your goal is to achieve complete self-sufficiency. It's a goal worth aiming at, even as we hope we'll never have to use it. A backup in case of catastrophe here, and useful knowledge for when we go out there.

Josh,

Having the technical ability to do something doesn't mean that it necessarily makes economic sense. A city-state could have the technical ability to build a railway network, but unless there's something worth connecting to, they won't. They could build cars, but without the size to justify mass production, each car would be ridiculously expensive (and in a post-apocalyptic world where fuel is scarce, a waste of resources).

Terraformer · 2019-06-01 11:42:32

I don't think complexity can be reduced down to just tolerances, though that's definitely part of it. It's also the number of steps involved, as well as the reagents you need to use. You could have all the elements to make solar cells in abundance, but going from raw sand to the pure siliicon wafers is still going to be fiendishly difficult. I suppose what I'm getting at, in a sense, is the entropy of manufacture...

SpaceNut · 2019-06-01 13:00:51

The complexity of solar comes back to the average person can not make one from scratch but since we are wanting to do that maybe a topic on building them is what we really want rather than talking about what we could do if we had them....

Continue solar cell talk here

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#1 2019-05-31 05:35:20

Simple vs Complex, Common vs Rare

#2 2019-05-31 07:21:55

Re: Simple vs Complex, Common vs Rare

#3 2019-05-31 09:11:04

Re: Simple vs Complex, Common vs Rare

#4 2019-05-31 15:18:08

Re: Simple vs Complex, Common vs Rare

#5 2019-05-31 17:22:21

Re: Simple vs Complex, Common vs Rare

#6 2019-05-31 17:35:44

Re: Simple vs Complex, Common vs Rare

#7 2019-05-31 18:28:58

Re: Simple vs Complex, Common vs Rare

#8 2019-06-01 02:37:13

Re: Simple vs Complex, Common vs Rare

#9 2019-06-01 11:42:32

Re: Simple vs Complex, Common vs Rare

#10 2019-06-01 13:00:51

Re: Simple vs Complex, Common vs Rare

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