Economy musings, or how I think way to much about small details · 8:00pm Aug 3rd, 2016
Having a bit of free time and needing to unwind I wrote down a small idea that may be interesting.
This is me doing semi-serious thinking about a show with colorful ponies.
I was discussing with a friend about the idea of an earth-born industrialized precursor civilization and how it really doesn't match with our observable data. Specifically, we had access to easily reachable raw materials for thousands of years. Starting from there then I thought about Equestria and the old trope that it really is just earth in a far future. Maybe it makes sense. The nature of magic is inconsequential for my following reasoning, I simply take its existence as fait accompli and go roughly with the capabilities shown in the cartoon.
Let's postulate that indeed Equestria is on earth after humanity disappeared. How or why is not really important, maybe we left, maybe we died out, maybe we sublimated. Whatever happened, it happened an amount of time ago that is not long enough to replenish earth-oil deposits, so maybe 10k years.
In the show we have almost no hint that there is an extended industrial base. We see isolated high-tech artifacts, but those can be explained with extremely capable artisans who use magic to do the things we need our infrastructure for. A reason for this can be that raw materials like copper and iron can't be reached and mined at reasonable costs. As a consequence those materials are not widely employed. Those that are used come from slow extraction processes like rock-farms, which are placed above old dumpsters and cities and basically produce low quality ore.
The consequence would be a civilization that uses a lot of renewable resource like timber. Technological development would be slower and less widespread, as the absence of mass production limits the appeal of consumer-tech. On the other hand useful infrastructure, like the railroads, would probably hog the available supply of metals. Military technology would maybe have to do with the same limitations. We see spears, which don't require much metal, and wooden sail ships (Sombra-war timeline) because energy-dense coal is too precious to be used on engines. Electricity, while known, is something used topically because not having much copper limits the creation of grids and under those conditions magic is the rational alternative.
Gold is more commonly available (at least in proportion to the population) because it's easy to recycle and it doesn't oxidise, which means that it doesn't need much energy to be reused. An extremely well developed agriculture that employs comparably few lead to the creation of a large middle-class composed by craft-ponies concentrated in cities and which are the back-bone of the Equestrian economy. Not having large-scale industries means that the financial sector is primitive, as there is no need for large capitals except for infrastructures mainly managed by the state. Capitalism as we know it never became prominent, and as consequence socialism and communism never developed.
The rich supply of food (Earth pony magic and Pegasus weather control means that famine is almost unheard off) means that even feudalism is not widespread. Politically we see cities and towns that are governed by the bourgeoisie (this is intended as the historical definition similar to what happened in the German city states of the 17th century) with large autonomy and little direction from the central equestrian government.
As educating a craft-pony is expensive and agriculture has no need for a large and uneducated workforce population growth is slow. There is no big drive for expansion and wars are as a consequence rare enough to have a small standing army and to resort to drafting in case of some big conflict (again, Sombra-war timeline).
Did I miss something obvious or is this thing self-consistent?
Well, there is Manehattan to consider. A lot of tall buildings, which presumably require metal endoskeletons and fairly sophisticated construction equipment. There's also the conspicuously green statue in the harbor, which implies that a lot of copper went into it. Heck, there's even evidence that Manehattan has a telephone network.
So, yeah, bit of an issue.
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But the requirements for a single city, maybe a lavishly rich city, are far less than those for a nation. We probably need to see if other cities share the same design. But yes, Manehattan is a good counterexample.
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So I looked up some facts about copper, mainly the amount we use. It seems the Statue of Liberty contains 31 tons of copper, while a Boeing 747 contains about 4 tons of it. If copper is precious enough to impede it's use on a large scale industrial level it would still be doable to use it on a costly vanity project. Current copper prices are at 4.8$ per kg. If we calculate with 100 times that price it would place the value of the copper in the Statue of Liberty at 14,880,000$. Pretty expensive but hardly something that could bankrupt a city. Still enough to make it too expensive for large scale applications. Regarding the phone network it's more difficult to find data, mainly because we don't know the extension of the phone network in Manehattan and don't know if maybe it is something akin to the very expensive but limited high speed connection between Chicago and New York used by traders.
We need probably some estimations of the extension of Manehattan to see how viable the starting hypothesis is.
Not saying you are wrong and I am right, but I'm having fun crunching number right now.
I have a fanfiction I'm working on where in the future they mine silicon from an astroid for computers because Equestria is a silicon-poor country.
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Well, that is a bit of an unusual resource to gather in space, considering the abundance of silicon on earth. But then, having a princess that can move stuff into orbit probably reduces greatly the cost of orbital mining respectively to refining processes.
I'm quite intrigued by the idea.
4131351 I guess the idea is that they live on a very silicon poor world for whatever reason, but they find an astroid with plenty of silicon in it. And they need silicon for computers. I need to do a lot more research on it though. It's going to hopefully be my magnum opus, if you want to be a technical advisor or whatever. Most of my story sucked to varying degrees and I want this one to not suck.
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Eh, my knowledge comes mostly from Wikipedia and for having cursed at electronics for a while. But I would be happy to help in whatever guise I can. I was a bit of surprised because, according to Wikipedia, Silicon is the 8th most common element in the universe. On the other hand to use it in electronics you need a very high purity that is difficult to obtain by simply using the most common form found. The idea is good, but you may need to switch to mining some other, less common material used in refining Silicon to electronics grade purity. That is, if you want to keep our physics and not introduce some bizarre but entertaining local variation, maybe something that has to do with the existence of magic.
Oh, and not having a good refinement process has interesting effects on other branches of metallurgy, like steel production.
Anyway, send me a PM if you like to discuss this stuff, it's something I find quite entertaining.
4131842 copper mining?
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Hmmm, copper is something else that is quite abundant. In my hypothesis it is rare only because there was a heavily industrialized precursor civilization. Helium could be something else that is needed (aside for balloons, but as we know half the equestrian economy is balloon based). It is also a resource that we may need to get from somewhere in a not too distant future. Aside from that, radioactive isotopes and platinum could be attractive.
Obviously you can go for some geological or astronomical anomaly and have Equestria being relatively deprived of iron, copper and other commonly used materials, but then, if you want to toy with the consequences (which is not a requirement for a good story) you'll have to figure out some clever alternative to build a space program. Magic can probably patch a lot of the problems that arise out of having a scarcity of steel.
4131928 Honestly, one of the inspirations for this story was GaPJaxie's Intern, where long in the future, Twilight is a middle manager at a semiconductor company that makes electronic watches, I really liked the banality of it.
The other inspiration was those badfics where the protagonist is the "Long lost 7th element". So I thought, well, what about the 8th element? or the 9th or 10th? Or the long lost 576th element? What if Celestia gets a bit touched in the head and just starts hoofing out elements all willy nilly?
If for whatever reason, Equestria was a silicon-poor place, do you think it's realistic that they would really need it continue technologically advancing several hundred (200 to 700) years in the future?
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Thing is, Silicon is, at least for our technology, pretty important for anything from making concrete to glass passing through electronics, metallurgy, ceramics and, in traces, for our biology. Not having much of it is pretty much a showstopper for our technological paradigma.
My Equestria is the successor to a global industrial civilization that fell (to a cataclysm caused by an ill-advised attempt to build something very like the Krell Machine) around four millennia ago. And I've thougt a lot about the concept of precursor and successor civilizations.
The mistake you're making regarding metals is thinking that they are "used up" by mining. They are not. They are instead formed into buildings, ships etc. The successor civilization can get immense quantities of metals by mining not only the garbage dumps but also the ruins of the precursors. Some of these metals would have been oxidized, but in large masses of metal (such as fallen skyscrapers) there would be unoxidized metals in the midst of masses of rust. What's more, oxidized metals are "ores" -- and successful successors will learn to exploit them; there's a technological staircase leading up from searching for unoxidized metals to extracting metals from the cores of lumps of oxidized metals to chemically or electrically extracting the metals from the precursor-deposited ores, with economic rewards each step of the way.
You may be right about oil. We've currently left a lot of coal in the ground, though, not to mention uranium, so there's still a not-too-difficult path up for our successors.
The lack of oil has, however, been one of the obstacles for my Celestia in her long-term plan to raise the Ponies back to and beyond the heights of the Age of Wonders. Oil is really useful.
It's obvious that Equestria is an Industral Age civilization with a lot of metals for one big reason. The skyscrapers. Those don't work without serious amounts of steel.
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My argument is more that resources are difficult to reach and not that they are consumed. This adds a factor k to the cost of raw materials, which then moves the tipping point for ROI of large scale industrialisation.
I will expand upon this when I'm home from work, this evening.
Oh, and thank you for the follow
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Anyway, my point is that processed material distributed over a very wide surface with low density is probably more expensive to extract. I theorized in the post that Rock Farms are a way to extract the materials by pulling them up in ore-rich rocks. It would be low maintenance way to get the good stuff, but also with a very low throughput, which still means higher costs.
So, assuming that the raw materials are more expensive and that agriculture is already quite efficient (as we see from the show where maybe 10% to 20% of the ponies are involved in it) the point where massive industrialization becomes enticing will be further away. It makes also complicated to build the required infrastructure. I may throw in also a different mentality on the pony side, magic that can already do a lot, a well-developed craft-pony scene and the fact that almost nopony will have a cutie mark in working on an assembly line and the industrial revolution, while it may happen, will develop very differently.
We know that Equestrians have the concept, in the alternate Time-line they begin mass production in the war against Sombra, but it is possible that the will have technology and knowledge and still not start a massive economic overhaul until some external force pushes them into it.
Manehattan is also, probably, kind of an exception, as we never saw Skyscrapers anywhere else. it is possible that Manehattan is obscenely rich and demonstrates it in this way. They have a phone network, they have Skyscrapers, they have an extensive road network, but this is something local, not extended on the national level.
Now, just to be clear, this is me explaining my specific reasoning here and using a ton of assumptions for the sake of discussion. I may not be right, but it is fun discussing it.
4329389 And Thorium. Oh, God we could power the world with Thorium if we worked out the bugs. There's a gazilion tons of the stuff around. And not 'work out the bugs' like they have with fusion over the last fifty years with it being 'Real Soon Now' but actually sit down and build some Liquid Floride Thorium Reactors to see how economically comparable they would be against plain vanilla uranium reactors.
4329657 Yeah, just be careful *what* minerals the rock farm is pulling to the surface. Stack a few too many of the Plutonium rocks together and...
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Hmmm, abandoned rock farm continues to extract ore uncontrolled and reaches a critical mass at a certain point.
There is the seed of an adventure there involving the Pies
4330487 or something for Paranoia.
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A crack-team of rock experts is assembled and sent in.
Maud Pie, Spot, the changeling that sculpted the black throne and the former King an currently recalcitrant contrarian Sombra, pulled out of a dungeon (or the office of the psychologist who is trying to help him become a pony who ca be left out among others) just for the occasion.
Along the way thy discover a failed plan by Flim and Flam to crash the lead market, which brought them to operate without the usual safety procedures a rock farm situated over an ancient nuclear reactor.