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What if bikes had been invented earlier?
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this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Solarpunk Urbanism
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A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
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Other than the mobile need that same source of energy is needed to turn ore into metal. Refining ore as they did in BC days used a lot of energy - mines were located near forests (ore was more common then the forests and you needed a lot more wood than ore!). Modern refining uses a lot less energy on a per output basis. (It uses a lot more energy now, but produces orders of magnitude more output)
@bluGill @Nyssa @urbanism
This is essentially what I was wondering about – was it possible to evolve metallurgy with a different principal energy source and charcoal or coal used "only" for redox reactions?
Thinking about it, it would be necessary to discover electric power before industrial revolution in a geography with a product of precipitation and elevation drop like e.g. Norway or Costa Rica have (and this would have to be "normal" geography, not exceptional).
You can make things more efficient, but there is a reason many factories melting metal work third shift only, and close the factory for maintenance in December - the power company gives them a big discount for using the cheapest power. Even if you get 10x more efficient (which implies you are an expert in these processes - there are only a handful in the world) , that really isn't enough to jump start manufacturing.
Don't forget too that modern life is only possible because a large population means we can specialize a lot. The number of different experts to really make a difference is larger than you would guess: someone to refine iron, but they need someone to create electric, which needs an [steam] engine, which in turns needs a metal alloy expert (not the same as the first person though there is overlap). We are now in a circle as you can't do any step without some other step. It took a long time to bootstrap the process.
If you went back to anytime after 1680 with modern knowledge you could bootstrap a lot of things faster - but that only is possible because the industrial revolution is already starting and so you can make a large strive in one area and it will help others who are already working in some other - both by creating demand for what they are producing and also by creating better inputs to what they are doing. Without lots of other parts of the industrial revolution happening at the same time there just isn't enough parts in play for you to do anything alone.