The Industrial Revolution seems largely the result of a particular positive feedback singularity, that the steam engine, which converts iron, coal and water into mechanical energy that can be used to pump water, was concocted in England, where high quality veins of coal and iron ore happened to be located deep underground beneath the prevailing water table. The steam engine pumping out mines, with steadily increasing power and efficiency, facilitated access to more iron ore and coal, which could be more efficiently transported by steam locomotives riding iron rails and by steamships, to foundries fired by coal to make more iron used to make steam engines, trains, rails and steamships. And off we went to the stars.
Once you get steam engines, you get mechanical engineering as everyone races to figure out how to do even more with less. Feedback control theory comes directly from the steam engine too (James Clerk Maxwell analyzing Watt’s Flyball Governor). The alien planetary autocrat surely wants better steam tech to out-monument the last guy. So steam plus self-interest probably gets you space travel independent of democracy or free markets.
One can’t prove a negative, of course, but on an iron-nickel planet in the habitable zone with carbon-based life using water as a solvent, steam engines do seem inevitable once you get large scale adoption of iron tools. There’s an interesting paper or three to be written about Drake’s f_c for the mechanics and thermodynamics of alternate steam engine triples (metal, fuel, fluid) potentially available on classes of exoplanet by formation and composition.
I disagree heavily with a technological perspective to the Industrial Revolution. For a few reasons:
It ignores how the Industrial Revolution wasn’t just late to and concurrent with the Scientific Revolution—it specifically fueled its existence. Without the surpluses enabled by the Industrial Revolution, you couldn’t support a large enough middle class to draw future waves of engineers and scientists from. Military officers and noblemen are overrepresented in pre-industrial sciences for a reason. The Scientific Revolution would straight up not have happened without a huge middle class. What allowed the creation of the Middle Class?
So, there’s a problem with your feedback loop right there. It has the relationship backwards in my opinion.
The technological prerequisites for an Industrial Revolution have been in place for centuries. Why didn’t it happen? You say it was a feedback loop, how could the feedback loop sustain itself to begin with? Or even get started? What was the nature of this trigger, and how could it be replicated?
The Industrial Revolution seems largely the result of a particular positive feedback singularity, that the steam engine, which converts iron, coal and water into mechanical energy that can be used to pump water, was concocted in England, where high quality veins of coal and iron ore happened to be located deep underground beneath the prevailing water table. The steam engine pumping out mines, with steadily increasing power and efficiency, facilitated access to more iron ore and coal, which could be more efficiently transported by steam locomotives riding iron rails and by steamships, to foundries fired by coal to make more iron used to make steam engines, trains, rails and steamships. And off we went to the stars.
Once you get steam engines, you get mechanical engineering as everyone races to figure out how to do even more with less. Feedback control theory comes directly from the steam engine too (James Clerk Maxwell analyzing Watt’s Flyball Governor). The alien planetary autocrat surely wants better steam tech to out-monument the last guy. So steam plus self-interest probably gets you space travel independent of democracy or free markets.
One can’t prove a negative, of course, but on an iron-nickel planet in the habitable zone with carbon-based life using water as a solvent, steam engines do seem inevitable once you get large scale adoption of iron tools. There’s an interesting paper or three to be written about Drake’s f_c for the mechanics and thermodynamics of alternate steam engine triples (metal, fuel, fluid) potentially available on classes of exoplanet by formation and composition.
I disagree heavily with a technological perspective to the Industrial Revolution. For a few reasons:
It ignores how the Industrial Revolution wasn’t just late to and concurrent with the Scientific Revolution—it specifically fueled its existence. Without the surpluses enabled by the Industrial Revolution, you couldn’t support a large enough middle class to draw future waves of engineers and scientists from. Military officers and noblemen are overrepresented in pre-industrial sciences for a reason. The Scientific Revolution would straight up not have happened without a huge middle class. What allowed the creation of the Middle Class?
So, there’s a problem with your feedback loop right there. It has the relationship backwards in my opinion.
The technological prerequisites for an Industrial Revolution have been in place for centuries. Why didn’t it happen? You say it was a feedback loop, how could the feedback loop sustain itself to begin with? Or even get started? What was the nature of this trigger, and how could it be replicated?