# Food surplus and technology



## Gurkhal (Apr 20, 2015)

Ok, this is major question for which I thought that I should seek an answere here on Mythic Scribes.

In a certain setting I have, a major idea is that there's a "cosmic year" which effectively means that from a top point, during a Great Summer, the food production level will constatly sink across the whole world durin the "Great autumn" and drop to a very low level during a "Great Winter".

The big question is thus, what effects on technology would it have to see the food production levels constantly drop across the world for hundreds, or potentially thousands, of years?


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## CupofJoe (Apr 21, 2015)

I can't remember the details but the Brian Aldiss' _Helliconia Trilogy_ has a similar really long climate [6000+ year] cycle. I remember it being a good read, but not one I've gone back too...
I think that during each cycle within the story each time Helliconia reverted to a near Bronze/Iron Age with only a little technological advancement from the last big freeze.
If the cycle was short... say tens of years then I could see that storage of food [and the technology behind it] might be an option. So things might go on sort of as normal [if normal is eating jerky, salt fish and dried fruit for half you life].
If the cycle was really long... thousands of years, then the change might not even be appreciated or only as myth and legend. Each human life time would probably not see a great change. Populations and civilisations would ebb and flow seemingly naturally.
Oddly it is the middle range... hundreds of years, when I can see the worst problem... long enough to expand a population, develop civilisation and technology but all so long enough to forget how bad things were and to put off looking for a fix for The Next Guy....


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## Terry Greer (Apr 21, 2015)

I agree with CupofJoe - The Helliconia trilogy is well worth a read.

The big problem with technology is that it's dependent on resources that get used up in the first cycle.
Present western technology and society has largely been built on the back of (initially) easy to obtain fossil fuels. As time has gone on these have progressively required more and more advanced technology to scarcer and harder to obtain resources. 
If society crumbled now it would be much harder to have another industrial revolution as any remaining resources would be unavailable to a fledgling technology.
A second technological revolution would therefore require a different approach - and so on.

If these cycles have been going on for a long while then there may no longer be any easy to obtain mass resources available anymore - and any new technology would have to be built from the ground up on resources that would naturally replensh themselves over the cycle or which are inexhaustable. That doesn't leave much. Though recycling strictures built into the culture could potentially help.

Almost certainly it wouldn't be pleasant - even if the decay is slow it would inevitably lead to war and suffering on a huge scale.  This is especially true if (again as CupofJoe says) the events can be easily remembered in recorded history or forecast by a regular cycle.  

The idea of a repeating cycle of civilisations rising and falling like this was also used for the aliens -nicknamed moties- in The Mote in God's eye and it's sequels by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (again well worth a read)

A Song of Ice and Fire has a similar theme - with the idea that 'winter is coming' at the heart of it. Frequent massive climate change like this is one of the ways that i can conceive that relatively low-tech medieval-like worlds can persist over millenia rather than developing high technology. What technology does exist is then one-off constructs made by gifted artisans (such as the antikythera mechanism Antikythera mechanism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).


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## Gurkhal (Apr 21, 2015)

Thanks guys!

I'll look into the Helliconia series and see if its any good. My main reason for this type of cylces is to have a sense of finality, the temporal nature of mankind's achivements and to actually halt technological progress down to a desires level, and motivate a rise of warriors to rule society. 

You raise a good point about obtainable resources thought which I had not thought much about before. It is something that I will need to return to in order to give a proper explaination.


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## Russ (Apr 21, 2015)

It would really depend on how far the technology advanced before the next great winter hit.

If it only reached say, medieval levels, then they would be screwed because margins of survival were very thin indeed.

However if it reached modern levels (and it could in "thousands of years") than it means such things could be predicted and planned for, and technological counter measures employed.

Lots of interesting variable.  I quite like the idea, it sounds like it could make for an intriguing work.


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## psychotick (Apr 21, 2015)

Hi,

This is tricky. The first thing to consider is that for technology / indeed civilisation to arise a surplus of food is needed. There is a reason that the fertile flood plains of the Nile were the birthplace of civilisation. To develop and advance people need free time, and hunter gatherers simply don't have a lot of spare time and energy to start thinking about building complex houses and forging iron etc.

Next, depending on how long the winter lasts, technology can be maintained during it. As long as you have writing and paper it should at least survive. So a winter of a few years at least should not have too much of a detrimental effect on things.

Food preservation is vital, depending again on how long the winter lasts and technology available. Do they have glass or at least good ceramics? With that and vinegar and of course wax, they can pickle. With salt they can preserve meats. Fortified alcohols will also endure. And also winter is a harsh time but there should still be some prey around to hunt. There may also be crops that can be grown in winter. Or at least in fall and spring which limits the duration of the hunger.

But none of these things will endure across centuries. Which leaves you with the question, will there be enough food over winter for education in reading and writing etc to continue. If there is, then technology can be restarted in spring. If there isn't then they end up starting over from scratch.

Cheers, Greg.


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## DeathtoTrite (Apr 21, 2015)

How bad is the winter? Is it more subtle, like earth's periods of heat and cold, or is it just constant snow and cold. Cause decades of freezing temperatures will annihilate society.


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## X Equestris (Apr 21, 2015)

Decades or centuries of winter would probably cause a societal collapse.  Though this would be an interesting plot tool if you could make it work.  It might help you explain medieval stasis, for example.


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## Gurkhal (Apr 22, 2015)

I thanks you all for the great interest shown. 

In effect I think that the Great Winter will last for thounsands of years, but it won' be a non-stop winter. More like that the small year, that is the normal year, get a larger and larger winter, which at its deepth gets MAYBE a couple of decades to a century of non-stop winter, but otherwise its more like that winter is the dominant season and that all the others are trimmed down significantly in length. 

In regards to society and its collapse its kind of a thing that I'm looking for to be honest. As I see it, the cycles will be of great importance and so a cycle of rise and fall for human civilization is definietly something that I'm gunning for, and that humanity will come out during the Great Spring to basically start everything afresh. But if needed I could definietly expand on the Great Winter to make it even more severe.

As for technological statis, its true that its an idea although I hoped not to steal so directly from Asoiaf. Rather I see it as that magic is tied to the season so its something like this cycle

*Great Spring*: Mankind comes out and magic starts to wake up which leads to a certain degree of technological progress
*Great Summer*: Magic is at its highest, and why should I invest in technology when I can cast spells or make a sacrifice to some spirit, for even greater benefit right away?
Gr*eat Autumn*: Magic starts to dwindle and in response technological progress begins to pick up
*Great Winter*: Magic is pretty much gone, save for a few nasties that comes out, and human society collapses


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## ThinkerX (Apr 22, 2015)

What you seem to be describing is more of an 'ice age' than a 'winter.'  Climate oddity worth looking into from the last ice age:

First off, the various climate zones (temperate, subtropical, and so on) were not so much obliterated as they were narrowed or compressed.  They just covered far fewer degrees of latitude than before.  At the height of the last ice age, the northern end of the temperate zone proper was probably somewhere around present day Texas.  

Second, the ice caps didn't cover everything else.  There were voids, places almost locked within the ice that had normal seasons, though definitely on the dry side - ice caps require moisture to grow.

So, what you'd have would be the cold valley's with relatively normal seasons in the icecap area - think grasslands, herd animals, long rivers, and forests of stunted trees; and then outside that a fiercely contested 'normal area.'


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## Gurkhal (Apr 23, 2015)

Well, I suppose the term "winter" could be misplaced but perhaps Ice Ages are a more correct word for it. I'll look into the Ice Age stuff as theta might be the thing that I'm looking for.


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## K.S. Crooks (Apr 26, 2015)

Food density may be a priority. Packing more nutrients into smaller units that do not spoil easily. Similar to the way astronaut food is made. Taste could be looked at as being irrelevant because of the lack of real food, but this may make having the processed food taste good to lower the depression.


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## Jabrosky (May 1, 2015)

Gurkhal said:


> Ok, this is major question for which I thought that I should seek an answere here on Mythic Scribes.
> 
> In a certain setting I have, a major idea is that there's a "cosmic year" which effectively means that from a top point, during a Great Summer, the food production level will constatly sink across the whole world durin the "Great autumn" and drop to a very low level during a "Great Winter".
> 
> The big question is thus, what effects on technology would it have to see the food production levels constantly drop across the world for hundreds, or potentially thousands, of years?



Apologies for the hijack, but your premise has inspired an idea of my own.

Climate change has been implicated as a driving force of human history even after the last ice age. For example, Egypto-Nubian civilization as we known it came about when the Sahara turned into a grassy savanna around 7500 BC (therefore inviting migration into the region) and then reverted back to desert around 3000 BC (forcing those colonists to crowd along the Nile, triggering urbanization, social stratification, and all that other developmental jazz). There's also the hypothesis that the Classic Maya civilization's collapse had something to do with a cooling, drying trend in the Yucatan region which caused the rainforests to retract further south and brought drought onto the people.

I wonder what would happen if a world with several civilizations established went through the start another glacial period (assuming they didn't have fossil fuels as a buffer). Those transitions could be very rapid, sometimes finishing within one year, so imagine how they would destabilize social orders throughout the world. Of course humans as a species could withstand the change just as we have previous ones, but civilizations have historically been much more delicate than the humanity that set them up.

At the very least, it would give your characters plenty of ruins to explore for magic treasure.


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## Terry Greer (May 2, 2015)

Imagine a planet with no real axial tilt (so no real annual cycle of seasons as we know them). If such a planet had a great climate cycle change over centuries these could indeed be still called spring/summer/autumn/winter  - not ages as these are cyclic periods and therefore need a cyclic and well understood name for them in their culture.


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