The Amish attitude towards technology is a pretty good model of what an eventual Mars colony will need.
When (or if) people finally travel to Mars to stay, the biggest risk to the colony will be being dependent on imports from Earth. It will always be expensive to send ships from Earth to Mars, so it is folly to assume that resupply missions will continue indefinitely. So a colony which hopes to be viable must be vigilant not to be too dependent on outside goods.
This is the same as the Amish attitude. Every item from outside is regarded as suspicious; it MUST be rejected if it produces a dependency on the outside. Best if it can be made inside the community; perhaps acceptable if it can be repaired and used indefinitely even if it only comes from outside.
So a Mars colony will evaluate imports. Anything that can be made locally on Mars is best; things which can be repaired and reused indefinitely are okay; things which increase the dependency on the outside world will be shunned.
There's no wood on Mars. A great deal of our infrastructure (not just Amish infrastructure) is wood-based, and the first Martians will have to find a substitute for it. The typical substitute for wood is plastic, but that comes from petroleum, and there's none of that on Mars either. I suppose one of the first things we'll have to build on Mars is greenhouses -- not just for food, but for plant-based plastic to build things with.
The typical substitute for wood is plastic, but that comes from petroleum, and there's none of that on Mars either.
This was covered in Zubrin's The Case for Mars. With the input of some hydrogen and some energy, you can source feedstock for plastics from Mars' atmosphere. For example, ethylene:
That's because most industrial vacuum processes happen in the 15 psi context of conditions on Earth. We already know that the Sabatier process will work in Mars like conditions. The chemistry has been around for a century, and demonstration hardware specifically for Mars conditions was built over a decade ago.
This thread seems to suggest that the big barrier is energy. The reason why natural gas and petroleum are used as feedstocks for the manufacture of plastic on earth is precisely because using them reduces the required energy input. The thread is also a good source of a few interesting links.
In terms of having enough output from a material standpoint, the requirement is still mostly energy. It would require a lot of energy to move enough CO2 through the plant.
Since there are nutriments and water (even solidified) on mars, the biggest problem is really energy. If you have energy, you can make greenhouses fir fast growing plants such as bamboo and hemps, that we know how to turn into clothing, building materials, and many other things.
I'm curious. What happens when one starts a fire on mars to forge a metal?
We can't ship metal, it's much to heavy. So we have to consider that beneath the fine powdery surface of mars there lies basalt rock. Is there a type of concrete that can be constructed from basalt material?
Well, you can't start a fire in the atmosphere. So either you have one inside, or (more likely) you'd use induction heating to do the forging.
Concrete requires some rather specific calcium chemistry. But basalt is quite a good building material on its own, especially if you adopt Inca building techniques of mortarless flat-surface construction. Then all you'd need to do is construct interior insulating airtight shells to live in.
There's plenty of iron on the red planet, and from the red dust comes oxygen. Nitrogen will be harder to obtain.
It has been proposed that many early Martian colonial buildings will be vaulted masonry built using locally manufactured bricks. The weight of the building and soil can serve to contain a pressurized atmosphere. Frozen water could be used in certain environments to make such buildings airtight.
Actually on Mars it would (or so it's thought) create a sort of self sealing system. The building's atmosphere will contain humidity, so as air leaks out through the super cold Martian soil that moisture will freeze, sealing the leak.
It's also worth pointing out that the buildings don't have to be perfectly air tight. Small slow leaks are quite acceptable.
This suggests that if you want to create a company that is acquired by Elon Musk you probably want to design/patent systems and methodologies for building things on Mars :-)
You're making the assumption that IP (designs & patents) will be enforceable on Mars. That sounds risky. You can't even get those guarantees on earth among nation states.
This it what I was thinking, it is going to be difficult (and too late) to demonstrate expertise in 2024 when Elon is putting together the first Red Dragon mission and you'll want to be able to say "Hey, check out this self assembling Mars Habitat and Greenhouse thing we've been prototyping."
>Despite what you may have heard, the Amish aren’t against technology. Communities adopt new gadgets such as fax machines and business-use cellphones all the time—as long as the local church approves each one ahead of time, determining that it won’t drastically change their way of life.
This alone is the most interesting point of the article. People not belonging to the community, like myself, have a fixed preconceived notion of what it's like to be Amish. I still don't know much about Amish life and culture, but it's fascinating to see where my assumptions are wrong (and what else I may be wrong about!)
In the area I grew up, inflated rubber tires and bicycles were not allowed, but wooden tires on scooters were fine. Reason being, inflated tires made it too easy to travel far from home, which was generally discouraged.
So many people I grew up with seemed to think that Amish were being hypocritical by paying for taxi drivers to drive them around. That's an over-simplistic view. To an Amish community, taxi fees are a tariff intended to encourage finding a job close to home - or if at all possible - in your backyard. The ideal Amish are taught to strive for and desire is to have a farm and provide for your family with your hands.
Here is a great documentary about an Amish couple that gave the rare opportunity to be filmed and interviewed. It's not about the Amish that I grew up with, however their flavor of Amishness is philosophically equivalent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtNXvE_rLoE
Thanks for the link. Great documentary. I just watched that with my kids. We were absolutely mesmerized by the earnestness and openness of the family profiled.
I don't have the citation handy, but one fun fact is that this has basically shaken out by "natural selection" if you will - there used to be Amish communities that were fine with modern travel and personal ownership of cars... but all such Amish communities basically disintegrated into the larger culture. The ones that are left are the ones that picked technology policies that allowed them to absorb benefits from modern technology without fundamentally disrupting their culture.
There's some really interesting inconsistencies in that table. E.g. some think tractors for fieldwork aren't OK but lawnmowers are, for others somehow chainsaws are bad but washing machines are fine etc.
Looking these over there doesn't seem to be any clear pattern to me. The grandparent mentioned them not wanting things that will "drastically change their way of life", surely having a washing machine is a bigger change to your life than having a chainsaw, even if you're a farmer.
>surely having a washing machine is a bigger change to your life than having a chainsaw
The relative effect of these devices varies by location. This assessment might be true in Southern CA, but if you're heating your domicile using wood in Northern Ontario that chainsaw is looking pretty good!
a washing machine, with little parts that can be replaced with wood or metal, seems like the kind of thing that can be kept in good working order for a long time.
I'd be leery of a chainsaw with handmade parts.
I also kind of wonder about lubricants and fuel in a chainsaw, how hard is it to safely duplicate those oils?
In the movie The Devil's Playground there is a discussion about how the Amish adopt technology. If I remember correctly, the criteria was based on whether the technology was disruptive to the community (i.e. how it affects the relations between people rather than an individual's day-to-day life). It's been more than ten years since I've seen the movie and I'm going on memory, but that made a big impression on me.
You should see some videos of Amish woodworking shops. They have every tool that a modern woodworking shop would have: table saw, bandsaw, drill press, rotary sanders, etc.
Except they are all air powered. They have all been rigged to run off pressurized air lines. The air is produced by a gas generator.
Air tools are far more field serviceable than electrical ones. Furthermore, if your gas engine dies you can fairly quickly rig up something with a horse and a treadmill to spin the compressor.
Up to a point central compressed air solutions do have H&S issues I recall one of my thermo fluid lecturers saying well if the main pressure vessel failed it would have demolished the building.
They make many pressure rated air hoses in those communities? Didn't think so. As previous poster noted, it is all effectively arbitrary window dressing.
If it where the case they should be using belt drive driven by wind/horse power - until fairly recently mech eng techs in the uk where taught how to design belt drive systems
From my experience with the Amish it is all about justifications that don't make any sense. But if it works for them I'm not going to judge them too harshly.
Every community seems to be different. Different sets of rules.
In the town where I grew up there are Mennonites, and now more Amish people. Apparently - the reason they don't use electricity from the grid, is because it's possibly made on 'Sunday' - ergo - they can't use it.
They all have generators to make electricity for their barns, equipment etc..
There are lots of different sects with different rules. Also, there are lots of them that have generators creating electricity but they unplug it if the church elders come for a visit.
A lot of people think the Amish are against technology. In fact, they carefully consider the technology's effect on themselves and their community. Will it really help, or is it just a new thing which will cause unintended consequences? For instance, some Amish groups accepted cars, and their community disappeared - when anyone can drive anywhere the community collapsed. Now there are no Amish who allow cars. The same thing would happen with the internet.
Tech people like ourselves automatically assume that technology is some advance, or improvement. Our peers tell us this, our incomes depend on us believing this.
In fact, technology does not improve the human condition in most cases. It erodes it. We would be better making careful decisions like the Amish, but our civilisation is locked onto this myth of 'progress'.
Technology should be for us, not the other way around. Unlike the Amish, we put the cart before the horse.
Cars give freedom to those who don't have it. It's easy to have a rosy pastoral view of the Amish, but the reality is grim for many young women subjugated to that culture. The ability for such people to see that the outside world can be far less harsh than the one they are used to will necessarily (and in my opinion should) lead to the collapse of those communities.
You want those communities to collapse, because you see no other solutions except more tech, more greed, more 'progress'. That's the hamster wheel you've been given. What other life could there be?
I knew briefly a woman who had ran away from everything she knew at 17, to avoid a marriage. The stories of what counted as "normal" was horrific, especially with regards to daughters. Between the corporal punishment, starvation-as-punishment and strict-to-consequence-of-abandonment gender roles, it mapped closely to the popular conception of young women's lives in radical Islam. They also have a greater prevalence of genetic diseases due to inbreeding.
The study linked in that blog post makes no reference to the Amish, whose happiness is entirely conjecture from the blogger.
Making people happy is surprisingly easy; all it takes is a couple of electrodes inserted into the brain. So if that's the only bar that you have, the Amish are way overthinking it.
In theory yes; in practice, it's beyond our technological capabilities at the moment. A better alternative would be drugs. And honestly, it's our "universal culture" that's more susceptible to this failure mode.
I recall reading about such experiments done on rats, and that was at least a couple decades ago. Is it really beyond our technological capabilities? Note, I'm not talking about electrodes to induce dreams or some such; just a simple direct electric stimulation of the pleasure centers. Presumably, the resulting sensation is that you wouldn't know why you're happy - you're just happy.
Direct electric stimulation of brain (implanting electrodes) is simple only if you don't care if the subject has a risk of fatal infection, and if performing literal brain surgery is cheap and routine, as it is for mice/rats (again, because a risk of death or brain damage is acceptable).
Yes, we can do that, but that would be complicated to do it safely on humans - compared to that, a lifetime supply of drugs is cheap and simple.
>In fact, technology does not improve the human condition in most cases. It erodes it.
I agree with what you said but think this is a little strong of a statement. I guess it depends on what you mean by technology. I'd rather live today than in the 1900s because of medical technology alone.
It's like anything. Technology just is. It's what people with free will do with it that can be harmful or helpful.
With that said, I agree we should be more diligent to at least be aware of how technology is affecting us personally, then act accordingly.
You might think you would prefer to live now rather than 1900, but I would suspect that the word "live" had greater meaning then.
Here is Ben Franklin on the appeal of the traditional Native American life:
"When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural [to them] merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them"
Thanks for sharing that passage. From what I understand, our Constitution is based heavily on the governance of Indian tribes of the time. I'm not sure how well that scales, since much if it is now gone.
I was referring more to the Polio and TB and Smallpox. I believe estimates are 50-96% dead from European travels to North America. Crazy stuff.
I don't think so. It's more like - a lot of technologies help you join bigger communities, in particular the Universal Culture[0]. If your community is defined mostly by not being part of universal culture, technology becomes an existential threat to it.
--
[0] - defined as the culture that outcompetes other cultures; often called "Western culture", but it's not really important where it came from. McDonalds, for instance, is part of universal culture, but it wins not because it's from America; it wins because people find it to be actually a pretty good idea.
Corporate consumerism may be a part of that, sure. Not saying it's good or bad, it just is.
As for lack of "real cultural diversity", well, people apparently don't care. I know that I don't. Cultural diversity is just random noise for me - it's cool to look at when you have lots of spare time / income, but when I'm making day-to-day decisions about what to wear, eat, or use for my tasks, I'm going to pick it based on factors like quality, cost-effectiveness and usefulness. Or in other words - it's fun to go to a ${insert culture} restaurant from time to time, but day-to-day, I'm gonna buy the white bread that's the same and universally available almost everywhere.
Whenever a discussion of Amish comes up, I have to link to my favorite hard core Anabaptist sect, the Hutterites. Unlike th Amish, the Hutterites love technology. They choose what technology to use as part of a very strict church system, like the Amish, but are very much into diesel engines and the internet and the like (note the link below). See [1] and [2] below.
They also live communally in farming colonies of about 80 people (half Dunbar's number) in very remote parts of Western Canada and the Northwestern US. Historically, the Hutterites have pissed off the local non-Hutterite farmers because the colonies are successful and can buy up local land from the non-communal/ religious/ pacifist local farmers; they were run out of South Dakota for their success combined with their pacifism in the early 20th Century.
They are pacifist, just like all Anabaptists (Mennonite, Amish, etc). Unlike English variants of Anabaptism (Quakers, etc), Hutterites and other German derived sects drink quite a bit of alcohol, I think. I think they have a great a-capella singing ritual tradition. I bet their food is great, too. I heard they like hockey.
The ~1900 Hutterites are also famous among population theorist/ demographers because their historical data provided the baseline of the highest possible, yet realistic, human fertility society. They married early (probably with quasi-arranged marriages), had lots of babies (much cheaper to raise in a communal setting), were healthy with relatively low mortality, and kept great records (German heritage...).
They are very much a going concern today, continuing to found new colonies even a few years ago, one in Oregon 14 years ago [3] below. I have always wanted to visit a colony, but I live in the urban Puget Sound and the closest colony is about 3.5 hour drive away. I have read that they are quite welcoming, as long as you are quite respectful in return (a fair trade, to my mind).
I knew rural BC was an outpost for Mormon offshoots that still polygamy, but this is actually much cooler. It's weird I've never run into any, I spend a lot of time in eastern washington.
>There was actually an alternator system attempted in the last five years,” he says. “It worked about 60 percent, but it never took off.
Generator hubs for bicycles are mature technology at this point. Including capacitors in the taillights so they stay on when the bike is stopped. Buggies could easily adopt them, but I guess it's not worth the bother if batteries mostly work.
I've got a dual dynamo/drum-brake hub, the Sturmey Archer X-FDD. It works quite well-- but only at normal biking speeds. Below 10mph it's flickery and annoying.
If a horse isn't in a hurry, it usually travels at a walk, which is something like 5mph. So bicycle dynamos won't work well for a buggy.
Generators or alternators driven off the wheels are not free - the horse is now powering your lights as well as your wagon. The relatively high efficiency of LED lights helps a lot, but your horse still with thank you for using batteries.
The article discusses the higher efficiency of steel tires compared to rubber tires and the emphasis on light weight. Tens of Watts of generator load on the horse is probably more than the difference in steel vs. rubber tires.
If a guy that rides 1200km on a bike in 50 hours prefers a generator vs batteries based on drag vs weight I'd say that the generator + lights is pretty much solved technology.
My state has cut rumble strips down the middle of many roads. The Amish are up early and travelling around on Sundays in buggies on the shoulders. It use to be easy to give them room; no traffic that early so you swing out across the line and keep away from the horse. Now if you do that you hit the rumble strip and the horse will panic; rear up and try to see what terrible thing is coming up from behind.
When I worked for a Wal-Mart in Indiana in the 90s, the Amish would come into the electronics department and buy country music cassettes and battery-powered players. And also, I kid you not, Gameboys.
How do Amish people generally make money? I know there are markets that sell Amish goods to non-Amish, but there must be more to their income than that.
I live in Lancaster PA and most Amish can't afford the farm land here anymore (its become housing and malls) and have moved west. Lots of Amish now work in the trades (construction/electrical/roofing/etc.) Someone picks them up and takes them to their job sites. Their general low standard of living (no car payments or electronics budgets) allow for that to be a very solid income for most.
By "moved west" I presume you just mean farther west into the state, rather than the west coast? I'm from near Mercer, PA and I haven't noticed any decline in the number of buggies on the roads near there.
A lot have moved west of the mountains but they have also pushed into Ohio, Indiana and Iowa. There are still plenty around but the model of buying a farm for each new couple to run and start their own family isn't tenable with the real estate prices around here and the declining number of farms period.
It is quite a shame as Lancaster County is some of the world's best farmland/top soil and we've paved it all. :(
The article quotes ~$8,000 for a new buggy, plus a horse which although they produce themselves has to be fed and cared for. That to me sounds in the ballpark of the cost of owning a decent used car.
"A lot of people will get 20 or 30 years out of a buggy before they do any major rebuilding of it." They tend to get a lot more use out of them and even then, they are rebuilt and given to their kids for far less than another new buggy.
Obviously, there will be some who buy new more frequently, but that goes directly against their way of life (to not seek the material things of this world) and is not that common.
They're good farmers, self-finance and produce a lot of skilled trade stuff.
The big secret to small time farming is that if you don't have to pay for lots of shit like tractors, etc, you can make money the old fashioned way. Not having car payments, cable tv, etc helps too.
Also, many groups are loaded because they've sold land that's been swallowed up by suburban sprawl.
They also tend to pool and share resources, so an expensive piece of equipment isn't purchased by every farmer in an area, but shared between them. What we'd call a more modern farm has enormous redundancy in equipment ownership in the same local area, which makes it really hard for them to get into a profitable state.
When I was in college, someone hired a team of Amish to build a car stereo shop across the street. It was quite fascinating to watch. They built it using techniques you normally see when building a barn. They sunk a whole series of posts into the ground. They were all different lengths. It made no sense when you looked at it, no apparent rhyme nor reason to it.
They poured a slab around the posts (well, the concrete company did), and then they got out their chainsaws and started cutting the tops off the posts and leveling them to each other. They attached cross members, and out of the chaos emerged the superstructure of the building. It went up fast. When they were done you would never know it wasn't built using traditional methods.
The Amish are a very interesting people, I respect them very much. I wouldn't want to live that way, but you have to have some admiration for people who can hold on to their principles like that in the face of modern conveniences.
I'm somewhat confused. As the article says, buggy components are often manufactured off-site (e.g. fiberclass body), how does this make them self-sufficient?
They don't mind buying things they can't make, as long as they can repair or do without them afterward.
They won't buy things that need constant connection to the outside - like grid electricity.
They will buy a generator as long as they can take it completely apart and put it back together. But if they can't do that they won't.
LED's seem unexpected to me, but I suspect they are OK with them because the lights are not for them they are for the outside world. As far as they are concerned they don't need them (so can do without).
Note: Things (such as buying a generator) vary by community.
Is the vastly lower energy consumption of LEDs perhaps a virtue that makes them preferable to incandescents, even though they are far more complicated to manufacture?
They can't manufacture either of them, so complexity of manufacture doesn't enter into it.
So I assume they like LED's for the same reason you do, less battery.
If they did make incandescents (I suppose if they tried they could), then the comparison would be harder for them, and I would expect some communities to go one way, some the other.
I would imagine they could manufacture incandescents if they so chose. Glassblowing seems like something they'd be OK with. And otherwise it's just a bit of wire and a vacuum.
That wire is pretty special though, it's a coil of coil, with extremely tight tolerance. i.e. if you look at it it looks like a coil, but actually the wire that makes up that first coil is itself an even smaller coil.
You have to wind it such that no part of the wire touches (or it will burn out at that spot).
It's titanium which is not an easy material to make wire out of without special industrial equipment. And not pure titanium either, but has special additives.
You have to make it without any variation in thickness! Even a 1% variation will cause it to rapidly overheat and burn out.
It's also not a vacuum in there, but a mixture of nitrogen and argon, which needs special equipment to gather.
In short they could make a bulb like what Edison made, but without an industrial base not anything like a modern bulb.
And despite all that, those bulbs sell for pennies.......
Hm I guess if they can repair the body. Which is pretty easy.
The other half of their philosophy is avoiding pride. So cool, you're self-sufficient. But not perfectly so, or that would be prideful.
There's an old Amish joke - father is driving the family home from Meeting in the buggy. He turns to Momma and says "I guess we were the plainest ones there!"
I am not the original poster but I understand it to be about bragging (and thus showing pride) about being plain (not showing pride). As in, "well, we sure did show them how much humbler we are than all of them".
When (or if) people finally travel to Mars to stay, the biggest risk to the colony will be being dependent on imports from Earth. It will always be expensive to send ships from Earth to Mars, so it is folly to assume that resupply missions will continue indefinitely. So a colony which hopes to be viable must be vigilant not to be too dependent on outside goods.
This is the same as the Amish attitude. Every item from outside is regarded as suspicious; it MUST be rejected if it produces a dependency on the outside. Best if it can be made inside the community; perhaps acceptable if it can be repaired and used indefinitely even if it only comes from outside.
So a Mars colony will evaluate imports. Anything that can be made locally on Mars is best; things which can be repaired and reused indefinitely are okay; things which increase the dependency on the outside world will be shunned.