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To: patton
Ever notice how our infrastructure is getting smaller? Some countries don’t even bother with phone wires anymore - they go straight to cell towers.

Since you started it (nearly two years ago), a smaller, less robust infrastructure makes it easier to destroy, and harder to rebuild.

Look at Larry Niven's "Ring World". That world had a power failure caused by a bug eating the organic control wiring, and they were unable to recover.

45 posted on 05/02/2009 12:06:34 PM PDT by jimtorr
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To: jimtorr

Read it one day in high school, between math classes.


48 posted on 05/02/2009 5:17:31 PM PDT by patton (Oligarchy is an absorbing state in the Markov process we find ourselves in. Sigh.)
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To: jimtorr; SunkenCiv
a smaller, less robust infrastructure

It's what one would expect with a shrinking world population.

Just 2 generations ago, there were still enough people around to support such infrastructure easily.

Every year, more and more of our ancestors die, leaving fewer and fewer people. Simple powers of 2 regression:

Everyone has 2 parents; and 4 grandparents, etc. At that rate, it doesn't take long to see that it wasn't all that long ago that we had 100,000,000,000+ population.

Given the shear numbers, it's no wonder they were able to hand stack piles of rock that we can't even begin to duplicate with machinery.

53 posted on 05/02/2009 6:46:44 PM PDT by ApplegateRanch (The mob got President Barabbas; America got shafted)
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