▲ 26 points
back
10 comments
If space is the issue, let's note that one human requires 1-2 hectares of agricultural land, in production every year, to meet basic food and material requirements. Rail, air and ship transport can correct imbalances in food production and demand on a global scale, but only to a limited extent, as it costs energy - fossil, solar, wind, nuclear, etc. - to transport goods from point A to point B on the globe in a timely manner.
If often think, when reading articles like this, that the philosophers, economists and other social scientists all need to take remedial courses in basic thermodynamics, as applicable to physics, chemistry, and biology.
In biological terms, it's also undeniable that widely accessible long-distance air/ship travel has scrambled human population genetics like nothing else in the history of the human species, which is certainly a significant effect as well, with all kinds of implications for the future.
There are only 1.5 billion arable hectares of land. There are people with ridiculously small plots of land which exclusively produce 150kg of rice that they eat.
2 hectares does not meet basic food and material requirements, it goes way beyond that, it includes meat consumption of at least one or two whole pigs.
Scrambled in what way?
> "Whereas in the ancestral past, humans lived in geographically isolated communities where inbreeding was rather common,[65] modern transportation technologies have made it much easier for people to travel great distances and facilitated further genetic mixing, giving rise to additional variations in the human gene pool.[93] It also enables the spread of diseases worldwide, which can have an effect on human evolution.[65]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution#Early_M...
Isn't "the annihilation of space" what Shevek, the anarchist theoretical physicist says to a Terran diplomat in "The Disposessed" when she asks him what he does? Or am I misremembering. His work leads not to an FTL drive (in most of her books) but to the ansible (instant (literally) messaging).
Just wondering...
Abstract:
> This article is a reminder that the concept of ‘annihilation of space’ or ‘spatial compression’, often used as a shorthand for referring to the cultural or economic consequences of industrial mobility, has a long intellectual history. The concept thus comes loaded with a specific outlook on the experience of modernity, which is – I argue – unsuitable for any cultural or social history of space. This article outlines the etymology of the concept and shows: first, that the historical phenomena it pretends to describe are too complex for such a simplistic signpost; and, second, that the term is never a neutral descriptor but always an engagement with a form of historical and cultural mediation on the nature of modernity in relation to space. In both cases this term obfuscates more than it reveals. As a counter-example, I look at the effect of the railways on popular representations of space and conclude that postmodern geography is a relative dead end for historians interested in the social and cultural history of space.
Thanks for the summary. I clicked on this thinking it was going to be about QFT, ether, and all that.
Heh, same. It took me several paragraphs to get oriented as to what the author means by "space". Apparently it's a term of art for historians.
Could you explain what you mean by "term of art"? Reading the syllabus, it appears that the paper has nothing to do with art, though I could be wrong about that.
A term of art is a word or phrase whose use or meaning is specific to a particular field of endeavor.
In this case apparently historians mean something specific when they say "space" and there's a bunch of scholarship on it. I wasn't interested enough to dig too deeply, especially since googling it just brings up a bunch of stuff on the history of outer space exploration.