[BRIEF NOTE] The Problem with Being Small
Mar. 3rd, 2006 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldFor most of the past month, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pompe, arguably Livejournal's best amateur planetologist, has been examining the different sorts of other Earth-like worlds that are likely to exist: thin-aired desert worlds, pelagic worlds, Arctic worlds. Unsurprisingly, pompe discovers that these worlds aren't going to be nearly as hospitable as Earth, that you can have living Earth-sized worlds with comparable gravity and a relatively breathable nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere and find yourself unable to support high-tech populations numbering in the billions. Populations in the low millions seem more likely.
This discussion hosted byjames_nicoll goes into greater detail about the viability of these worlds. Myself, I find myself thinking of the Canadian Maritimes. The two million inhabitants of these three provinces enjoy a First World standard of living, but that only because the Maritimes are deeply embedded in an economic structure that facilitates trade, capital, and migration flows. As a rule, small economies can prosper only if they are integrated on favourable terms into a broader division of labour. In an interstellar civilization, unless faster-than-light travel is both inexpensive and quick and beanstalks are easy to throw up it's going to be impossible to establish comparable flows. pompe argued at his blog that the denizens of these worlds might constitute a disposable proletariat of colonists and explorers and soldiers, but this rests on the assumption that it's going to be worth the core worlds' while to recruit littleworlders.
Could the Maritimes survive if the outside world was cut off? I suspect so, but there'd have to be a painful rediversion of scarce labour and capital away from industry towards agriculture, and certain resoruce scarcities that just couldn't be filled. Prince Edward Island was prosperous in the mid-19th century, with a well-balanced agricultural and fishing economy. When you go around old Charlottetown, you'll noticed that all of the buildings from that period and even later are built in wood, not brick or stone. The Island just doesn't have any rocky building material. Imagine what problems an isolated colonial population could face if, as recently speculated, the world was prone to ice ages because the carbon cycle was unstable.
Earth's rather nice, it turns out. But then, we knew that already.
pompe, arguably Livejournal's best amateur planetologist, has been examining the different sorts of other Earth-like worlds that are likely to exist: thin-aired desert worlds, pelagic worlds, Arctic worlds. Unsurprisingly, pompe discovers that these worlds aren't going to be nearly as hospitable as Earth, that you can have living Earth-sized worlds with comparable gravity and a relatively breathable nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere and find yourself unable to support high-tech populations numbering in the billions. Populations in the low millions seem more likely.This discussion hosted by
james_nicoll goes into greater detail about the viability of these worlds. Myself, I find myself thinking of the Canadian Maritimes. The two million inhabitants of these three provinces enjoy a First World standard of living, but that only because the Maritimes are deeply embedded in an economic structure that facilitates trade, capital, and migration flows. As a rule, small economies can prosper only if they are integrated on favourable terms into a broader division of labour. In an interstellar civilization, unless faster-than-light travel is both inexpensive and quick and beanstalks are easy to throw up it's going to be impossible to establish comparable flows. pompe argued at his blog that the denizens of these worlds might constitute a disposable proletariat of colonists and explorers and soldiers, but this rests on the assumption that it's going to be worth the core worlds' while to recruit littleworlders.Could the Maritimes survive if the outside world was cut off? I suspect so, but there'd have to be a painful rediversion of scarce labour and capital away from industry towards agriculture, and certain resoruce scarcities that just couldn't be filled. Prince Edward Island was prosperous in the mid-19th century, with a well-balanced agricultural and fishing economy. When you go around old Charlottetown, you'll noticed that all of the buildings from that period and even later are built in wood, not brick or stone. The Island just doesn't have any rocky building material. Imagine what problems an isolated colonial population could face if, as recently speculated, the world was prone to ice ages because the carbon cycle was unstable.
Earth's rather nice, it turns out. But then, we knew that already.
