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The Ecolomat
The ecolomat is a world-wide system of total automation of production and distribution of basic materials and tools, with totally recycling of resources, and no pollution. Although it is possible to build a small scale semi-independent ecolomat in a village, or in a nation, the only true, full-scale ecolomat is Whole-Earth. Everything produced by the ecolomat would then be available free to every rider of space-ship Earth. This does not mean that you can get free every product or service you can now buy. Some things will be ruled out altogether on ecological or automatable grounds; most good and services will be provided by the consumer and his friends for themselves using the free materials and tools of the ecolomat.
The exact shape of the ecolomat is impossible to predict now, since its design will have to make use of the Whole-Earth ecological systems analysis used by the Club of Rome in THE LIMITS OF GROWTH. It will also depend very strongly on political and historical events, which in turn determine how few mouths to feed by the time we make the transition. For the purposes of this chapter, the rather optimistic assumption is that births will be set equal to deaths as of 1975, and that capital investment is set equal to depreciation as of 1985, and that everything is recycled, made to last as long as we know how, and pollution is controlled, and prime emphasis is made on feeding everyone and on education and health services rather than factory goods. With these assumptions we have what is called the stabilized world model I (figure 46 in THE LIMITS OF GROWTH). This model allows certain quantitative estimates. For instance, it gives everyone in the world a level of 'income' in energy and resources equal to that of present day Europe, which is about half that of the United States. If we are unable to make births equal to deaths by 1975 and investment equal to depreciation by 1985, then the stabilized level of wealth will be correspondingly decreased or may become impossible altogether. If we wait until 2000 to introduce these stabilizing policies, it will be too late. We will get population overshoot and collapse sometime after 2100.
Here it is assumed that we will ultimately be able to achieve something like Model I one way or another (possibly only after some sort of de-populating disaster around the year 2000). One thing the authors of THE LIMITS OF GROWTH emphasize: we will get an end to growth. The only question is whether the limit is imposed on us in a universal collapse, or whether we impose it on ourselves in creating a different kind of system.
The engineering for the ecolomat has not been done, and until it is done, it is impossible to say exactly what things will be possible in the ecolomat and what will not, and what is presented here is speculation based on the somewhat meager available facts. We must begin somewhere, because the existing system will not automatically produce either the engineering or the technology. The first requirement is the ability and motivation to think technologically about Whole-Earth systems. So far, Buckminster Fuller has been the only one to do so.
Speculation: Solar power will be the main energy source in the ecolomat. The desert areas of the Earth will be covered wherever possible with fields of parabolic mirrors (perhaps parabolic only in cross-section; they might look like troughs) heating water to make steam which turns conventional steam turbines which run electrical generators. The Whole Earth would be hooked up to a single electrical grid, with huge power lines on pontoons stretching across the Bering Strain to unite the Eastern and Western hemispheres.
Solar power requires no new or exotic technology. Perhaps that is why it has not received the attention it should. Or perhaps it is the present political difficulty of conceiving of the Earth as one huge power grid, with power running from desert to rain-watered areas and food being transported the other way.
Why not coal? Assuming exponential growth continues, it too will run out soon. In any case, it would be impossible to automate, it is a non-renewable resource, and getting to it requires tearing up the landscape. Oil and natural gas will simply be gone by the time we create the ecolomat.
Why not nuclear power? Most 'experts' put their long range trust in that (very unwisely). Nuclear power always creates pollutants, in the form of radioactive effluent from daily operations and in the form of radioactive waste products from the fuel, which are dumped at sea or underground. The problem with radioactive pollution is that there is no safe level. Any increase over natural background radiation reduces someone's longevity, and is thus unacceptable. And Uranium and Thorium are non-renewable resources and are not particularly abundant. Fission power would only supply our needs for a brief time.
The exotic possibility is fusion power, which uses isotopes of hydrogen as fuel. Once again we are dealing with a non-renewable resource, although this one would last many thousands of years. The biggest problem is pollution. The energy from fusion is released in the form of neutrons and they cannot be contained in the magnetic bottle. The will therefore escape and interact with the substances around the fusion reactor to form radioactive substances. Indeed, the fusion reactor is likely to be a 'dirtier' power source than the present fission reactors. Nuclear power thus turns out to be an exotic technological dream, incompatible with ecolomat principles. The final problem is that even the optimists do not think the enormous technical problems of fusion power will be solved before 2000, and we are now in a race with time. Will we be able to create the ecolomat before our present energy supplies run out? Not if we fritter away our energy and talents on exotic, science-fiction solutions to basic technological problems.
Why not solar power? It produces no pollution, not even thermal pollution if handled properly. And it is the only permanent energy source, lasting as long as the earth itself, at least 4 billion years. It is a perfectly adequate energy supply. If the land area of the coal burning Four Corners project were devoted to solar power, it would produce the same amount of energy without polluting the skies.
Food, fiber, oil, and building materials will be supplied in the ecolomat by vast automated farms in rain-watered lands. Insects and diseases will be kept in check biologically, by maintaining a balancing ecology of natural enemies. Chemical insecticides will be used only for emergencies. Some electrical power will be used to fix nitrogen for fertilizers, and the other fertilizers (mainly phosphate and potash) will be provided by recycling all incinerator ash (including cremated human bodies) and all sewage plant sludge and returning it to the fields.
Most present foods will be available with the possible exception of beef, milk and pork. Much of the world's population cannot digest dairy products, and it would be difficult to automate the behavior of beef cattle, dairy cattle, or swine, though villages could certainly grow their own. Another problem with top of the food chain products is that they are inefficient. There is plenty of arable land to provide the world with soybeans but not if the soybeans are first run through another link in the food chain. Yet, soybeans are just as good a food as meat. Of course, there will be fowl, and hunters can provide game, since most villages will be located in rough country unsuited for agriculture but suited for climax forest or prairie ecologies of wild animals. Hunters will have to use bow and arrow.
There will be no lack of animal protein, since fish and seafood are both automatable and ecologically efficient. Poultry and fowl of all kinds may not be as efficient, since they require high protein food...but they are at least automatable and do not take up arable land.
There will be little or no preparation of food by the ecolomat system. Grains will be delivered whole, sugar will be unrefined, and rice will be unpolished. It is healthier that way and keeps better. The villagers can process it at home.
Energy in the form of hydrogen and oxygen gas will come in pipelines, ultimately from the desert regions. Fuel cells can convert it to electricity, or it can be burned for heat. Whether the ecolomat can provide enough energy for central heat and air-conditioning may depend on the size of the stable population.
It is apparent from these examples that the ecolomat as Thales conceives of it is not designed to make human muscle-power superfluous. The aim is merely to provide all essential basic materials and tools so the individual and the village can create a civilized life for themselves. It is unwise, unnecessary, and probably impossible to provide everyone with every luxury.
The only mining will be of such practically inexhaustible sources as the atmosphere, the seas and the sands of the desert. In one way or another, everything will be recycled. Metals will be carefully hoarded and will no longer be used for applications where metal parts can be lost or dissipated. Mining as we know it not only uses up non-renewable resources, but is probably non-automatable.
The basic transportation network will be concrete highways (many of them already in existence), with computer controlled electrified grooves running down the middle of each lane. Running on these highways will be streamlined high floatation cars, trucks, buses and trains. The cars will also have limited storage battery capacity for maneuvering off the main electrified roads. Operation of the trucks will be a totally automated operation from factor to warehouse and back, taking finished products in one direction and partially processed garbage and sewage and junk in the other. The cars would be semi-automatic. Vehicles would be automatically kept at the same speed with a fixed distance separation, with intersecting streams of traffic interleaved past (or through) one another at crossroads. Once off the electrified roads, the cars would be controlled manually. There would be separate bikeways everywhere, and probably much local traffic would be by bicycle. On major interstates or autobahnen, the traffic would move at high speeds, perhaps 300 miles per hour. Horsepower would, of course, be provided by electric motors, using current picked up from the electrified grove in the roadway with a pickup arm.
Private, personal transportation is the real preference of people everywhere. That is why rapid transit is accepted by the public only where traffic conditions are truly impossible. Highways are preferable to rails, since a really well-designed concrete highway is permanent, and needs no upkeep, providing the flotation (square inch of tread surface per pound) is high enough. To insure that, the ecolomat vehicles could be built with sensors which prevented them from being started if they are overloaded.
Another reason why electrified cars would be preferable to mass transit buses or trains is that people prefer private property. The electric cars could be designed so that the user could build his own fiber glass shell, and modify the interior to suit himself. Mere efficiency in moving people is not the only consideration, or even the main consideration.
How would people get from continent to continent? No petroleum means no internal combustion engines, which means no jet planes. There are several possibilities. A tunnel or bridge could connect continents at all the narrow straits, such as the Bering Strait, the straits of Gibralter, at the Hellespont and elsewhere. Crossing the North Atlantic is a formidable proposition, yet it could be done with electric vehicles (which produce no pollutants and require no oxygen). The electric road could be run up Quebec province, under the Hudson strait to Baffin Island, under the Davis Strait to Greenland, around the southern tip of Greenland on the surface, then under the Denmark strait to Iceland, under the ocean again to the Faeroes, from there to the northern tip of Scotland, down through Great Britain, and under the English channel to the continent. Along this route, the ocean is never deeper than 3000 feet and much of the way is no deeper than 600 feet. Electric cars and trucks could pass through a number of air locks to a maximum depth of 600 feet. Such a roadway would be a sealed tube, anchored to the ocean bottom or actually resting on the ocean bottom much of the way. Oxygen could be piped in and carbon dioxide and air impurities could be scrubbed out, and the only opening to the tube could be scrubbed out, and the only openings to the tube would be on land. Similar sunken tubes would cross the Bering Straits, and would connect Japan, the Philippines and Australia to the Asian mainland.
A secondary source of horsepower in the ecolomat will be the steam engine, possibly the special kind of turbine invented by Lear, running on hydrogen gas.
Research needs to be done on this, but it might be efficient to dissociate water with sunlight concentrated by parabolic mirror, and separately pipe the pure hydrogen and pure oxygen everywhere the way natural gas is piped now. A special kind of water heater, which did not require keeping a tank of water hot, could be designed with a hydrogen and oxygen jet. Small space heaters of this type could be used to cook food and for other special applications.
Another source of energy for steam engines could be wood alcohol made from straw or fermented sawdust. Possibly this would be the preferred fuel for the auxiliary engines on sailboats, the only kind of boat provided by the ecolomat.
The only kind of aircraft provided by the ecolomat would be a small, hydrogen filled and hydrogen powered dirigible. The airplane as we know it is doomed to extinction without petroleum.
Services as such could not be provided by the ecolomat, only sophisticated tools which the user can work to provide himself with services. One of the most sophisticated tools available would be the telenet with its program controlled gadgets that one could hook up to the general purpose interface, such as surveillance/security systems of baby-sitters---and maybe many undreamed of things.
There would also be medical and dental tools. Medicine may change a lot by the time the ecolomat is established, and certain healing arts may have become part of religion. There will still be ample need for blood tests, urine analysis, physical diagnosis, setting of bones, sewing up cuts, injections of antibiotics and other vaccines and drugs, EEGs and EKGs and surgery. Who is going to do this doctoring in the ecolomat? There will be no money, no way you can hire anyone. Answer: The citizens will doctor themselves, using sophisticated tools.
There are already automated blood testing machines, which perform about 20 chemical tests on blood samples in a few minutes. This technology can be expanded dramatically. The techniques of electrophoresis can be combined with mass spectroscopy and electromagnetic spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to yield a complete description of the identity and quantity of all chemical substances in a single drop of blood. Sounds impossible? To some extent it is already being done in the chemistry of very small samples. It only needs to be automated, a difficult but not impossible task. A droplet of blood from the end of a finger would first be ultra-centrifuged to separate it into gross components. The proteins in the blood can be separated and identified by electrophoresis in a gel. Salts can be identified by mass spectroscopy. After separating blood components by either or both of these techniques, ultra-violet or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy can be used on each separated component to further divine them and identify them. All this would be computer controlled and analyzed, and the analysis compared to the previous analysis of the same person, with differences compared to a master file of possible causes to yield a diagnosis and prescription.
Diagnosis is one thing. Operations look more difficult. Self dental work would use a super miniaturized tool, which uses high pressure jets both to inject Novocain and to drill cavities, and fiber optics leading to a miniature TV camera just outside the mouth. Hand operated controls move the tool, while a viewing screen shows what the tool is pointed at, side by side with previous pictures of the mouth with the same tool settings. This permits quick detection of any change. A third screen will display the same normal picture, computer modified to appear as it would with various dental conditions. Once a match with present conditions is found, the computer displays step by step instructions for treatment.
A similar machine, with different tools, could be used for surgery. The tool could have miniature cutters with sensors, designed to cut one layer at a time, detect bleeders and cauterize them, and hold open the cut with retractors. It would also have tools for stapling or stitching nerves, blood vessels, muscle, or skin together. The tool would be designed so that the operator only needs to guide it to the correct location and direction and push the button for the correct operation. A computer controlled display would use computer modified pictures of the patient's body to demonstrate each step in sequence. Anesthesia would be injected locally by high pressure jets in the tool, and perhaps mild tranquilizers and mild euphoriants might be used generally, but no general anesthesia.
No doubt the emphasis would be on preventive medicine, and non-surgical methods of treatment, but everyone in the ecolomat would have to familiarize themselves with the dental machine and the surgical machine, both for use on themselves and for use on friends and relatives.
One thing which will have to be decided by government or possibly by war games is location. Ownership of land cannot be decided by economic market facts in the ecolomat, and one reason for establishing world government is to overcome and adjudicate traditional international conflicts over land ownership. Every nation has something to contribute to the world civilization and sometimes something to sacrifice. The massive resettlement of volunteers from urban populations into new villages is one of the tasks of the world government. If you look at the demographic maps of the world, it is apparent the world as a whole is not overcrowded with humans; this is only true of a relatively small percentage of the world's landmass. There are vast areas of habitable land which are virtually uninhabited, including most of Alaska and Canada and Australia, and the inter-mountain areas of the western United States, and Siberia, central Asia, and interior regions of South America. Even in regions of high density, such as the east coast of the United States, concentrations are very uneven. There are vast regions of upstate New York State, or interior Pennsylvania, which are very lightly inhabited.
Speculation: The universal building material of the ecolomat will be fiberglass. Wood, steel, aluminum, and brick or concrete will, of course, also be used for some suitable applications, but buildings, furniture, car-bodies, and numerous other things will probably be fiberglass. The raw materials of glass and ceramics are the chief components of the Earth's crust, so there is no worry about them running short. The plastic which binds the material together and makes it rigid can be made from wood, which is presently over-used and in short supply but is at least a renewable material. And the resins for fiberglass require less timber and faster-growing, lower quality timber (or hemp) than buildings made from lumber.
The reason for the importance of fiberglass is two-fold: it is the craftsman amateur's material par excellence, and most importantly, it can be molded into rounded, double curve shapes, indeed, must be so molded for strength. The epoch of the World-Machine was an era of straight lines. The architects of the Renaissance rejected the pointed arches of Gothic buildings and never favored the cupolas of Middle Eastern and Byzantine architecture, adopting instead what they regarded as the clarity and 'rationality' of Greek horizontals and verticals, which reaches its banal ultimate in the bar and lintel boxes called skyscrapers. We must reject that narrow Renaissance concept of rationality and everything that goes with it.
When the Oglala Sioux had nightmares, they dreamed that white men would take them away from their spiritually harmonious structures and villages and make them live in ugly, gray boxes, where their vital energy (prana) would be dissipated and they would die. Which is what happened. The Amerindian and most 'primitive' peoples live in round buildings, because they believe this completes the circle of vital energy and does not let it escape. That also believed that serpentine shapes accumulated dragon current, but that long straight lines and right angles dissipated it. Thales says that this is correct; that people who live in modern skyscrapers do dissipate their vital energies, which makes them mean, insensitive, uncreative, and closed to spiritual reality. Whether this is true or not, curved structures are far more visually interesting.
Assuming that fiberglass will be available in unlimited quantities in rolls of flexible tape, which hardens when sprayed with a fixative, how could you build a house or temple with it? You could begin with either suspension structures or air-bags or both as a mold. For instance, a temple mold could be made in a mandala shape by means of a central gothic tower or fleche and 4, 6, 8, or 12 portals, each of pointed arch shape with a spire. Attach lightweight steel cables from the top of the portal spires to the corners of the central tower, letting them fall in catenaries, other cables could be anchored to the ground between the portals and secured to the tower, also falling in a shallow catenary. The fiberglass tape is draped over the resulting structure, painted and sprayed with the resin. If no color is used and the optical qualities of the glass and the plastic are properly matched, the result would be a crystalline appearance, as if the entire structure were made of glass. Stained glass windows can be used to fill the resulting portals. Stained glass and ceramics are also excellent materials for the amateur craftsman.
In the world-machine, the materials and techniques were ones which could easily be mass-produced and put together by relatively untrained (and certainly uninspired) workers. But in the coming age, everything large or unique, such as a building, will be handbuilt by the people who use it. And having rejected the Puritan code and rediscovered the mythic language of the unconscious, we will once again let spiritual, symbol and aesthetic considerations outweigh the narrowly practical, machine-like concept of order prevalent in the World-Machine.