The shape of social progress - I
If you want to see scenario fulfillment, read anything popular. If it is popular, it is probably based on a bad idea that everyone accepts, and then argues for, precisely because everyone accepts it. The history of science, is the history of one person being right, and everyone else being wrong, which is why in a scientific society, wrongshock is a sacred moment: the moment where you find out that everything you believe is wrong. In engineering culture, that is a culture which is exploiting a previous wave's scientific advancements, clickstrike is a sacred moment, the moment where all the complexities seem to click together and fall into place.
As soon as I read this by Neal Stephenson I knew it was going to be mad popular. But that's because it is so thoroughly wrong, wrong on almost every point of its thesis, wrong on its facts, and wrong on its interpretation of those facts. Most of all, it provides an easy excuse: ineffable forces based on random past events are locking us in. There are three parts to the error. The first is the assertion of the improbability of rocketry, the second is the uncorrelated parts of the scientific progress, and the third is the relationship of both to ineffable forces. The forces involved are effable. It's worth going into the problems with the analysis, and then moving on to the illumination of how things actually fit together.
Let's start with Neal Stephenson's thesis:
To recap, the existence of rockets big enough to hurl significant payloads into orbit was contingent on the following radically improbable series of events:
1. World's most technically advanced nation under absolute control of superweapon-obsessed madman
2. Astonishing advent of atomic bombs at exactly the same time
3. A second great power dominated by secretive, superweapon-obsessed dictator
4. Nuclear/strategic calculus militating in favor of ICBMs as delivery system
5. Geographic situation of adversaries necessitating that ICBMs must have near-orbital capability
6. Manned space exploration as propaganda competition, unmoored from realistic cost/benefit discipline
1 is wrong, the rocket was already developing rapidly, in the USSR as well as the US. The real motivation for Germany's immediate push wasn't madness, it was the Versailles restrictions on artillery, and the very realistic understanding that bombing costs pilots. Neither of these have to do with Hitler's madness. In addition von Braun's prototypes were not developed under Nazi sponsorship, and when he joined the Nazi's to further rocketry, it was 1934, well before total control had occurred in Nazi Germany. The V-2 was already there, on the drawing board, for whoever wanted it. Much of the work had already been done by Goddard and Oberth, and had been incorporated by von Braun. Finally, Hitler was not impressed with the weapon for most of the war, and grasped on it as a way of improving German morale and a total lack of expendable pilots. It was a hail mary weapon, ready two years before it was used, but only deployed late. So much for the "Manhattan Project" mad man theory of the V-2. Unless you mean that the madman was Werner von Braun.
2 is also wrong, as can be shown, the key technologies for atomic advancement are the same that made engineering of rockets practical.
3 would there have been a nuclear arms race absent Stalin? We see nuclear weapons races today between Pakistan and India, neither of which are run by Stalin. Israel developed atomic weapons, and Israel was a democracy during the entire time pursuing them. Why did the US pursue atomic weapons? Because of the leverage they offered: the US was facing not one, but two, enemies who were presumed not to be willing to surrender without a shattering invasion.
4 is also wrong: missiles offered two other legs of survivability, naval and missile launches, in addition to aircraft. Missiles have the advantage of being supersonic, and therefore difficult to stop by military means, or for civilians to get out of the way of. In addition, hardened targets can often only be destroyed by a small number of means. Atomic weapons fill this bill. In fact, over time, atomic weapons have grown smaller, not larger.
5 is wrong: the first and only large scale use of rockets is by Germany on the UK, and the distances there are short. The reality of the ballistic missile, is that even relatively short flights, reach sub-orbital space, and are a breath away from orbit.
6. is harder to say whether it was "wrong," but a quick inventory of the results of spaceflight, including the internet you are using to read this, shows that of the investments of the 1950's and 1960's, it was one of the most productive. The hidden "wrong" is what "ordinary cost benefit" is. Stephanson, trapped in a "next quarter" horizon universe, does not see that entities with longer horizons, and with easier recapture, can make different calculations than, say magazines and book publishers.
Now for the details
Most of you don't think very much about turbines, and yet, turbines are one of the crucial components of your society. They are, also, the crucial technology in a modern liquid propelled rocket. the F-1 was the basic engine of the Saturn project, clustered together in the Saturn V to produce enough lift and throw to project a payload that could land on the moon, and have enough fuel to return safely to earth. At base, it is a one way jet engine. That is, a turbine pump which which combines kerosene with Liquid Oxygen.
This process was demonstrated, in a different form, as the modern welding torch, in 1901: mixing a combustible with oxygen.
To make this much pure oxygen, the process requires a continuous supply of electricty. This is supplied by powerplants which use, a turbine.
Thus the modern liquid rocket is not a random outgrowth out of place with its moment, it is part of the application of the turbine to air transport, which included, by the end of World War II, the jet engine. Instead of a power mad dictator, the application of the turbine to flight was a natural outgrowth of the application of the turbine to sea transportation, which had happened in the last war, and to slower than air transportation.
So why the rockets? Realize that all bombing is, militarily, a dicey proposition, particularly general attrition bombing, or "strategic" bombing. John Kenneth Galbraith's survey of the bombing from World War II indicated that it was more trouble to take production out, than it cost the Germans. The same is true of the German air campaign against Britain. The purpose of air attack on civilian areas, is terror. Firebombing, not strategic bombing, is the war weapon that leads to victory. It was the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo which damaged the will to fight.
Hilter's pursuit of "Vengence Weapons" was a way of producing usable intermediate products. The same technology which drove the V-1 "buzzbomb" is the jet engine, which is still in service today, including our use of cruise missiles. The V-2 was an intermediate product, eventually to carry the atomic weapon that Hitler's Germany craved so much. However Hitler did not develop one in time, for reasons which are still a matter of debate. The United States did, and it did so based on the same technology.
The production of an atomic weapon rests on large scale grinding and refinement of Uranium. For a strictly Uranium weapon, the method is to use centrifuges, which is to say, the same technology as a turbine. Turbines creating power to spin grinders which feed centrifuges. Water power, in massive quantities, was needed for the fleet of fuges. And so it goes.
The turbine would then drive the military helicopter, and eventually, even the tank. If you can wait for it to spin up, the turbine delivers torque, power, and versatility. The internal combustion engine's main advantage, is that it delivers power in bursts, hence, where we need burst power, we have internal combustion, where we have the need for powerful efficient peaks, we have turbines.
To see how this played out, not based on "path dependence" but on technological and social synergies, consider the personal transport. Early on in its history there were several competing technologies for driving personal transport. Electrical cars, diesel cars powered by agricultural products, and internal combustion cars powered by extracted products, both gasoline and deisel, were in the mix. There had been relatively practical automobiles for almost a century by this point, however, the problem was the problem of roads: dirt roads and the people that moved on them by foot and horse, could not easily co-exist with automobiles, particularly steam powered ones. In 1903 the fastest car in the world was a steam powered one, and one could not drive from coast to coast in the US on the roads.
The railroad then, was a closed cycle, both technologically and socially. Coal produced iron, iron produced both rails and boilers, and on rails segregated the machine from the society. It also led to one of the gigantic ages of centralization of power, which was in accordance with the need to extract rocks from around the world that had the right properties. Empires were based on steam ships, which found the coal and the metals to put into the process, and allowed the centralization of labor needed to dig things out of the ground, since digging things out of the ground by hand, since antiquity, is one of the worst jobs a person could be inflicted with.
The petroleum car is also a closed technological and social loop: the liberation of the individual allowed the market utilization of production, with the combustion on demand engine producing steel, the assembly line, refinement, and asphalt. Technologically closed loops have an advantage over other competing loops, simply because they use "everything but the squeal" and relatively small changes produce relatively large continuous wins. Which then exploit themselves
The rock centric technology hit a wall. That wall was first observed from rocks that did not behave as rocks should. That observation led to the nuclear model of the atom, and from there, to the understanding that there was more energy in the center of the atom. Key techology? The cathode ray tube, which bent electrons. The same pool that separates out hydrogen from oxygen, to make the oxydizers in liquid fueld rockets.
Rockets took another piece of technology from turbines: the de Laval Nozel, created in 1888 to improve the steam turbine, Goddard and others applied this to the rocket in the 1920's, improving efficiency from under 5% to over 60%. A 10-20 fold increase in performance. Again: a modern rocket is a one way turbine that burns kerosene and LOX. The turbine, the rocket, and the atom, are intimately interlinked.
The connection then, between rockets and atoms, is not distant, but quite close: both are children of the production of continuous electricity, made possible by the turbine, both feed the results into turbines. The turbine puts in, the turbine pulls out, with the only important difference being the substance used as the leverage of energy: more energy comes out than in, and in roughly the same proportions. The Life Cycle Analysis of atomic electrical power, and petroleum motive power, is almost equal.
The central techology then, was the ability to build large scale turbines, and the ability to deal with small scale effects. Turbines that had been needed to build large scale hydro-power, which was the key mechanism for electrification of production and daily life. The reason atomic weaponry and rockets go hand in hand, is that they are the low hanging fruit of the turbine. So not a matter of mad dictators, but a matter of the mad scramble of war and a technology that had a considerable head start on the main competing technology - the magnetic rail.
So the closed loop, and the continuous niche indicators work in favor of rockets, atomic weapons, jet fighters, hyrdo-power, and turbines as high end objects, while favoring four stroke petroleum engines on the low end, with electrical motors at the very low end; just as the absence of power to weight sources of power, mass production, and large scale road surfacing – all met by petroleum and the turbine – had hindered this system. When one throws in the production of aluminum as part of flight, the correlation becomes tight when compared with other islands, based on the requirements of that moment.
Thus the turbine-petroleum age was the hill to climb, precisely because, after almost 300 years, all of the pieces were ready. Internal combustion, the idea of the automobile, the turbine, all existed, but they were missing power to weight storage of energy, surfacing of roads, and importantly, social order. Realize that the assembly line was not a production of Ford's mind, but something that had been built before: namely, in the 1500's as the Venetian Arsenal: an assembly line for ships.
So examining the evidence, consider what is missing from the parallel world of an electrical transport economy: a storage mechanism, in the form of a better battery or fuel cell – the fuel cell is 1932, a full two generations after the establishment of internal combustion and the turbine – a power to weight ratio, means of flight – electrical planes are slower and impractical, and the airshift requires helium, which cannot be manufactured and is in short supply – and a higher initial investment cost.
The argument that rockets were only useful for atomic attacks is belied by their long use in warfare - including on First World War bi-planes. The west was relatively behind others, and, in fact, the evidence indicates that the Western rocket was based on Arabic designs in the 18th and 19th century. The rocket was behind the gun mechanism by, again, two generations. But the gun mechanism beat out several competing technologies, including compressed air – a means of energy storage that is being pursued today, but in the 18th century was used to make the most accurate rifles of that time. But the air cylinders were heavy, and could not be recharged in the field, and did not scale to canon size.
But to really answer these questions, one must look at the social context. Why these choices? Was Hilter mad? A leader who took his nation from occupied vanquished to near victor? There's no evidence that he was mad, in the sense of suffering from mental disease, nor that he had made generally bad decisions. Like his antagonist Winston Spencer Churchill, he was a technological believe, a believer in invention. He turned to rockets to get around restrictions on artillery, both legal and technological. Guns that could fire from German to England would not occur for decades after wards, and the Germans had all of the technology available. Also, rockets have an advantage of dealing with another shortage: pilots. A missile does not use pilots, and without escorts, bombing is virtually a human guided missile. Look up how Joe Kennedy died, or how many crews returned from Allied bombing missions before the development of interceptors.
So the obvious question is why a popular and widely read author, get his story so wrong, and why so many people believe it now. The answer, of course, is that America, and the developed world, are locked in a path dependent and locked in culture. The reason people believe a randomocity theory of rockets, is because much of our lives are based on relatively random decisions and lock in. So we project backwards. But Adolf Hilter, WSC, FDR, Stalin, were not creatures of the same moment. They had the reverse problem: namely, no one knew what the best technologies were, or the best social structures, to handle a massively disruptive moment.
In otherwords Stephanson is wrong on virtually every point, on every interpretation, but is right about his audience. Allowing them to see the past as making the same mistakes they make in their cubes every day, is an easy way to enormous instant popularity. It's also a good example of why we are in the mess we are in: people like Stephanson writing for other people like Stephanson about how the weeds are thick and the weeds are somehow aligned against us. No, we are meeting the enemy, and he is us. It isn't Hitler that is keeping the Ares alive, nor Stalin that is making us build vast banking frauds to prop up demand for suburban homes that aren't really wanted, nor Truman and Eisenhower who are stopping us from researching fast nuclear power plants. They are de-yad. It must be us.
And that transition, that moment, is what the next section of this essay will be about.
So Stephanson presents a "clickstrike" lots of random choices made by random people in a random past for a random reason. Which is a great deal like work in Dilbertia. But that's not what happened. Instead, the people who created this structure were looking for "wrongshock" – ways of obliterating people's adherence to the past, and aligning it with a new present. The new present that they were pursuing varied widely, but was guided by a sense of a new social shape, one that would shift Victorian Network to something else – through the Modern Grid, and towards a future which we see as the Post-Modern pyramid.