Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels? (2016)
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Lucifer's Hammer had some fairly realistic assessments of life in the following 5-10 years after the event, centred around restarting production. One big point was about some books very similar in concept to "The Knowledge" being used to preserve necessary information, and another was about recapturing some existing nuclear facilities to try to sustain life at all, given the big energy requirements for agriculture and basic personal heat after the event (because of e.g. huge amounts of atmospheric dust)
Reading this article also made me realize, with surprise, that I've never thought about this aspect of Fermi's paradox! One of the many variables that led to our civilization's rise may be the simple fact that we had hundreds of millions of years of abundant life before us that failed to industrialize. Imagine if human-like life had evolved a billion years ago, when the reservoirs of petrochemicals were a billion years less developed?
If it turns out that both life and sentient life are actually surprisingly common, it might be the case that most civilizations are borne unto planets not yet ready to support their technological advancement, and all they can do is burn out the wick before they reach a powderkeg moment. The great filter could work the other way -- we could be the rare success merely by dint of having shown up 'late'.
Fun article!
Currently U235 is only 0.7% of natural uranium, but one can make a nuclear reactor with natural water as a regulator with ratios of about 3%. So for most of Earth's history an intelligent race could probably develop nuclear power at the wood burning level of energy production. If nuclear and coal were developed in tandem, I can't imagine coal winning out. It is so much less safe and dirty.
There is even geologic formations where natural nuclear reactors existed in the past[1].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
When people say "nuclear reactors are safe," they mean advanced modern designs with computers everywhere and precise engineering, not a Bronze-age clay kiln filled to the brim with enriched material.
There are many a history book of war captives (slaves) being sent into gold/silver mines for a quick death.
There would be a nonzero chance of Bronze Age civilization wiping itself out through environmental catastrophe.
TIL. Fascinating, thanks.
TV Tropes calls this a "Morton's Fork" and describes it for this book as: What spurs the decision to change the past even though it'll erase our timeline and existence is the fact that Earth is doomed to an even worse apocalyptic scenario than the one they've already experienced. The human population will be reduced to under 10 million, and humanity will be plunged back into the Stone Ages with little hope of ever rising to civilization ever again, as they have exhausted all easily available energy sources and climate change means they will soon be facing a new ice age.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/PastwatchT...
Perhaps then we (they?) would have had time to contemplate the consequences of burning through that massive biochemical battery with wild abandon!
> The great filter could work the other way -- we could be the rare success merely by dint of having shown up 'late'.
Personally I like the idea of a middle ground between this and the more common inversion: that there's an optimal planetary resource balance wherein a species can develop enough technology to keep the wick from burning out, but energy densities are not sufficient to ignite the same kind of powder keg we have.
Filter-traversing civilizations would be even rarer, then.
But yeah, super fun to think about.
On the other hand if an intelligent species spawns on a much larger planet they can progress much longer before depleting their resources.
If anyone wants to learn more about the history of this specific/niche topic, there's actually an interesting book (with a foreword by Isaac Asimov), Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants by John Drury Clark:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677285.Ignition_
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Drury_Clark
* PDF copy: http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
Rocketry doesn’t exist just because some idealists wanted to go to space. It exists because governments wanted to invent new ways to bomb their enemies. A V-2 allows you to bomb England from continental Europe (and wasn’t even a cost-effective solution for that); nobody was going to build a Saturn V-sized rocket for that use case, and even if they wanted to, it’s not clear that they could get it to work without lots of testing with smaller prototypes.[1] Compounding this issue is that, on this hypothetically larger planet, whatever enemies you’d want to bomb in the first place could also be much farther away! Whereas on Earth it’s not hard to reach any other point on the planet; a little over a decade from the V-2 we had ICBM’s.
[1] By way of analogy, Lofstrom loops are theoretically much more efficient than rockets, but to find out for sure we’d have to build a full scale example, and that would be extremely expensive even if we didn’t run into any unforeseen cost overruns or delays—which we inevitably would because this would be the first time we built anything like this. It would be like ITER except at least ITER has a practical application if it works.
You go from one planet to the next assessing their suitability. When you decide to settle the game ends.
You can't travel indefinitely because ships systems degrade and people die.
One of the worst fates for me in this game is settling humanity of the world devoid of natural resources.
This causes them to regress to neolithic level of technology and never to progress beyond that.
You can lose a lot of people. They will recover. You can lose science and culture. They will rebuild it eventually. But if you land them on a planet without resources... there's no hope for their future.
EDIT: corrected spelling of word 'lose'
I played three games, my highscore: 10,040
"Loose" rhymes with "juice", "lose" rhymes with "news", if that helps.
'Lose' rhymes with 'two's [complement]'; 'news' rhymes with 'pews'. (The latter pair has a /j/ or 'yuh sound' before the vowel.)
(Heh, really is a can of worms isn't it: 'choose' rhymes with 'lose'; not with 'loose'. Poor ESL learners, no envy from me! Hindi/devanagari, which I'm learning as a second language, is so easy by comparison.)
This must be a regional thing. I've never heard someone pronounce "news" as "nyooze". "Pews" is pronounced that way, however.
I'm en-US, obviously :)
The other form you often see this in is long 'u's being 'oo' rather than (as I would say) roughly 'ew'. (Duplicate, repudiate, muse, etc.)
... and "lose" to bring this full circle.
The difference is in the sound of the final s. "loose" ends with "s" from "set", whereas "lose" ends with the z from "zoo".
And while the vocal sound is the same according to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lose and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loose, I feel that there is (or can be) some difference there. Just like in "jews" vs "juice".
Why does lose pronounce the way it does when nose doesn't pronounce as noose, pose doesn't pronounce as poose, lol.. It's even funny if you ask me.
Let the grammar police whip me down with downvotes but I still stand up by my opinion, English is a frigging weird language full of quirks. I speak 4 languages and 2 of them are Latin based and almost never run into the same kind of issues as English. French does not pronounce the way it is written but at least is consistent about it.
And nobody bothered to respond to the original comment other than making pedantic remarks. You've got too much free time on your hands.
Wouldn't this be a case for the orthography police?
> Wouldn't this be a case for the orthography police?
At least we already have the semantics police on the scene
"Looser" on the other hand we don't see very often. The meaning is "more loose".
With all the ingenuity you can't make reasonable amount of chemical elements that don't occur in your environment.
They also can't use fire to command more than just energy their bodies produce.
Hence no dolphin technical civilisation. Land apes have beaten them to it.
Are there other natural materials that could be used instead of metal to achieve this level of precision? I'm pretty skeptical on this.
Are there energy sources, other than coal, that could be used to develop early metallurgy to the point where someone could re-invent Maudslay's lathe? I suspect that there are and given enough time someone would find one. It might take longer to reach this point but I believe we could get there.
The key foundations of human intelligence and ingenuity will always remains regardless of whether or not fossil fuels exist for us to exploit. Non-renewable resources only served to speed up our industrialization.
No, it doesn't. Only knowledge that people consider to have value will be retained over time. Many things are lost to history, for example.. nobody knows how to make cobblestone. (Or so I'm told)
Somehow the cobblestones managed to look both randomly placed and have some "lines" that gave it a very orderly look. The cobblestones were placed in some substrate that allowed moss to grow between them.
At some point about 10 years ago, the city decided to tear up a giant trench in the middle of the street to replace some sewage. When they were done, they covered the trench with concrete and then re-placed the stones they had removed onto the concrete.
It looks nothing like it used to. Just messy. I think that if someone who didn't grow up there were to see it, they would think it was a perfectly charming street, but really it lost so, so much.
I asked around and apparently nobody knows how to lay cobblestones anymore. There was a certain art to how they were placed and the substrate selected: dirt, then sand (what kind? how coarse?) then stones, then something else. This ensured that they would never wash away even in the torrential rains we get here every year.
Placing cobblestones seems like an easy thing to do. Just rocks on dirt, right? But how do you ensure they never move, they never wash away, they don't get covered in dirt or greenery.
The craziest thing is that the street had remained basically pristine for what was probably 100+ years, but the new stones on concrete are already falling out.
This is regional. I went to a talk on cobblestone streets in New York. There are entire books dedicated to the craft, and new scholarship on it ongoing. (It pertains closely to the question of prefabricated infrastructure.)
IIRC, they found that limes (or lemons) would prevent scurvy on long voyages; then the ships got faster AND the switched to a citrus fruit lemons (or limes) that didn't have enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy, but they didn't realize it because the faster voyages didn't allow enough time for scurvy to develop; then on some longer voyages sailors did develop scurvy despite eating the citrus fruit, so the Navy erroneously concluded that citrus fruit didn't cure scurvy after all.
Even modern technology can be lost. Look inside any company with a lackluster documentation culture to see this in action on a small scale.
Even NASA had to spent considerable time re-discovering how the Saturn 5 was put together.
Edit - I think I meant this as a reply to the GP, but I'll leave it here.
Granted, we've recently (mostly) rediscovered how to make those, but it shows knowledge accumulation isn't monotonic.
As for Roman concrete, the Romans were blessed with some really nice volcanic ash, but we can build things out of concrete that the Romans never could thanks to rebar alone.
Can you expand on that? I didn't think cobblestones were made? Don't you just pick suitable stones?
An example that comes to mind is a brick townhouse nearby that was struck by a car and part of a structural brick rounded wall collapsed. It remained that way for many years because the owner simply couldn't find a mason that knew how to rebuild it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sett_(paving)
(which is often called a cobblestone)
Edit: Still being laid in Edinburgh...
I had assumed you meant that the stone had been manufactured into a block, but this is clearly something else.
Some kind of special concrete formulation do you think?
The formula kept as a trade secret, then lost when the company closed or got bought or something I suppose?
Rather unfortunate, alas.
Edited
The Ruhr valley area was denuded already in Roman times due to this.
I believe that if you can achieve precision tools you can use those tools to meet societies ongoing energy needs using renewable energy sources. This means that if you have non-fossil fuel energy sources available to advance metallurgy and toolmaking to the point you can make precision tools then you can reboot civilization without fossil fuels. I also think it is very likely that humans could do this but it might take longer than it did with fossil fuels.
What we'd have to change is the way society consumes energy. Right now, we operate under the paradigm of "I request energy, the grid ramps up and down to fill demand".
Instead, we could to switch over to "I ask the grid if capacity is available and use energy when it is".
That would require the ability for the grid to say "no" and for industries to respond to "nos". Nothing terribly hard about that with current data connections.
Easiest way to set that up is with energy bidding. When production is high and demand is low, price goes down. When production is low and demand is high, price goes up. Some applications could even chose to just ignore it and always take (However, everyone could not do that).
What would be the consequence of such a system? That'd mean things like manufacturing would have to have some ramping capabilities. Homes might have to tolerate temps shifting higher or lower than is comfortable. Goods might need to be transported at a much slower pace (Trans oceanic shipping, in particular, would need to be completely changed). And some industries would probably die all together with current tech (such as the airline and cruise industry).
The next question is what do we consider as using fossil fuels? For example, I wouldn't call burning wood a fossil fuel (even though it releases CO2 into the atmosphere) nor would I consider turning vegetable oil into plastic as using a fossil fuel. Both could be done today to keep the same amount of products, but would significantly change the cost characteristics of such things. Plastics would suddenly become a lot more expensive, for example.
Steel production might go down, but would not be eliminated.
Concrete would be one that you'd have to define what you mean by "fossil fuel" as it would release CO2 but isn't technically a fossil fuel. The process of making concrete can be done without burning oil.
That's available now, if you buy power in large enough amounts. It's not popular.[1]
[1] https://seuc.senate.ca.gov/interruptibleservicecontractissue...
In order for this to really work well, we need national standards for both grid operators and grid users. The reason for all of this being both unpopular and requiring big purchases is because it's pretty much a 1 off deal between the grid operator and the purchaser. It requires that they both both come into the room to make a deal.
Instead, we need something closer to the NEM in Australia. There needs to be a standard bidding mechanism for buying/selling energy on the market.
Our electric meters need to be hooked up to a grid pricing network and our appliances need to be able to talk to that network through our meters.
Once there is a standard communication protocol and pricing network, then you'll start to see neat things happen with smarter power consuming products.
For that to work, however, it needs to be setup nationally. It won't work if every single grid invents their own market or bidding standard. Ideally, this would be an international standard.
No, not a spot market in electricity. California tried that two decades ago, with an auction every 15 minutes. It was such a disaster that PG&E, which had lobbied for it, went bankrupt. Speculators caused blackouts. The current system has a market, but it's a day-ahead system where generators bid to provide power tomorrow, and there's a small spot market for fine-tuning.
An overview.[1]
Additionally, we don't have electric vehicles/machinery that can adequately replace many of the essential tools that we have today. Try mining on a fully electric system. I don't think you're going to get very far right now. Maybe some of these processing systems could be electrified but not the whole thing (hey, maybe we'd go small modular reactors and that'd power these machines? But I doubt it).
The reason I bring up such things like concrete and steel, besides the logistics of constructing them (again, getting heat is a problem), is because when we talk about fossil fuels it is really a proxy conversation for climate and emissions. It is a danger that we are only focusing on this and not other things.
>> One of the biggest challenges in climate is that the population has been so hyper focused with energy and transportation
I do think Gates[0] wrote a decent article on the subject matter and how we need to start widening our net if we're really going to solve the problem.
[0] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-clima...
Until people have electric cars though, for most there is no point. Most of what I do with electric I will do at any price when I want to. My oven needs to work when I'm hungry. My furnace needs to keep the pipes from freezing (there is some load balance opportunities here). I turn lights on when it is dark.
(On the other other hand, salt water is metal killer...)
I think this is the key. The modern world is an electrified world. But the other things you point out are in some cases advantages are also disadvantages. But I think the biggest thing is metal and electricity.
They are stuck behind bronze age. I just don't see any technology without having these things as prerequisites. Even electricity is generally impossible when you live in a big conductor.
They are similar to apes in intelligence perhaps. That's not human level.
I think if these animals could write and read somehow they would be just as smart (if not smarter) than some humans :)
No, there are no animals at all, anywhere even close to the smartness of humans. It's not a small difference, it's a HUGE gap.
When we talk about how smart apes, or dolphins are, we are talking relative to other animals. Relative to humans, it's almost nothing.
It answers the question "could we boot a modern civilization without fossil fuels"? A re-boot of modern civilization would be able to mine the garbage pits of current humanity.
You need a large population of farmers growing food to have excess for non farmers. We get around that with fossil fuels today. You also need surplus because the weather is not uniform, so you need enough for your society to supply itself for a few bad years, including the "freeloaders" doing something else.
scroll to article 1 yourself https://acoup.blog/2020/11/06/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
Coppice and pollard creates 'water shoots' - long, straight, copious branches. For crafting material, the taper of the material creates problems, so coppice gives you better results.
Similarly, charcoal made from coppiced wood will have a fairly uniform diameter, and few side branches to create snags. Post-industrial, that should allow you to make more charcoal per batch, but I don't know if that matters as much for brick retorts.
For steel making, I don't know how important air gaps are versus calorie content of the furnace. Uniformity would certainly get you more calories into it but might also suffocate the fire.
(I had no idea the British pronounced "pews" and "poos" identically, btw. Presidente for Life Xi must be horrified.)
Without (only a century of) oil, even without coal, the discovery of EM fields still would have led to (slower) development of hydro and wind electricity gear. Wherever you've got abundant electric, the rest follows. With technology to tap into it, the sun pours FAR more power onto the surface than needed to get 'modern'.
One of the agruments economists make for not switching away from fossil fuels is that we'd be consigning worlds poor to endless poverty. Invariable followed by the accusation that you don't care about poor people. But if you look at the supply of oil and gas it's obvious there never was would be enough to lift the worlds poor out of poverty. If you want a hard example of that during it's modernization push China burned through most of it's coal reserves. Not sustainable.
There is though enough solar and wind.
It would be a pretty bleak society without many of these never mind all of the various medicinal stuff such as antiseptics, antihistamines, vitamin capsules, cortisone, glycerin, asparin
If a planet has deep seas that are cold at the bottom, then they'll have methane hydrates. They're pretty much continuously renewed. I see a much more optimistic future for most galactic races.
All the easily extracted oil is long gone on earth. There used to be deposits bubbling up from the ground, oil extraction now depends on several centuries of accumulated knowledge, industry, infrastructure, and resource maps to get to tar sands, deep water deposits, fracking, etc.
This is not just about lifestyle. When you're spending all your time hunting animals to eat or digging up hard-to-reach coal/low-energy peat so you don't freeze to death in Winter, you can't do other work like research, and you can't support a population growth that enabled our advances.
Think bootstrapped company vs big money VC backed company. Fossil fuels are like a boatload of VC. It accelerates things but also promotes certain dysfunctions and wastefulness.
Of course maybe our slow renewable civilization would eventually find nuclear fission and take off like ours.
If the iron age, probably cans reboot if the population is kept small enough to avoid any Malthusian traps.
Much more interesting are petrochemicals, many are possible to synthesize without petroleum but it's way less economical.
Examples given in the article were on the scale of post nuclear conflict societal collapse. No ports, no highways, no railways, no dual use infrastructure at all. No more fossil fuel deliveries happening. No deliveries of anything.
Rebuilding in that environment would be challenging in the extreme. I'm not sure that any rebuilding happens in the vast majority of places.
I think you could use biomass to bootstrap these. Biosmass wouldn't be sustainable, but once you have the metallurgy, etc in place you could then build wind turbines.
Then there's the matter of getting enough people down into the mines to get enough out. Historically this was done via slavery, but those ancient civilizations first needed to acquire giant, mean, ugly armies in order to get the slaves. Where do you find a few hundred thousand unarmed people to enslave after a nuclear war?
Actually, first you would have to find a few hundred thousand armed people and convince them to join your army to enslave all the other people. And you would have to have quite a bit of luck. If you didn't, one, or maybe even a group, of the few hundred thousand soldiers you found to be in your army might figure out that they can just kill you and it will be their army.
The ancient way was hard. The entire process would not be as easy as many believe.
You also get eucalypt oil as a by-product from harvesting these trees wikipedia tells me this has a high enough octane rating to serve as a fuel in it's own right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_oil
Now this might be difficult to achieve in a near collapse. I'm not sure the size of plantations you would need I assume would be pretty massive.
But it could be a step in a bootstrap process. Build some hydro/nuclear/wind power plants, then you can start looking into hydrogen reduction for steel production.
Industrial Revolution would be relative to the unique scenario. People will always innovate
Had the industrial revolution not followed this agricultural revolution it seems possible that society would've been stuck in another Malthusian trap and there would not be enough surplus for the industrial revolution to get started.
What if humans had evolved before fossil fuels had had enough time to form?
Without coke (the coal product) how would you bootstrap large steel production? Electric furnaces exist but use a lot of energy.
Without steel and the loss of knowledge on mass producing precision equipment, we lose most of modern medicine's advancements.
But I wonder about scale. Like how much steel do we actually need?
More to the point of the OP I suspect that energy usage per capita isn't intrinsically linked to quality of life or "height" of civilization at least above some baseline level.
> we lose most of modern medicine's advancements.
E.g. stone knives are sharp enough to serve as scalpels? Is that what you mean?
Steel is very easy to sanitize. Most of modern medicine also needs metal shaped precisely. Take out the precision and the sanitization and we're back to medicine that might kill people more often than it helps.
Now this isn't a particularly low tech way of going about it, and producing the hydrogen requires massive amounts of electricity. So probably not an option if you're bootstrapping civilization after a collapse.
But, frankly, we are fucked here on Earth. We're consuming resources at an exponential rate with a population way, way outside what the planet can support sustainably. And we won't fix it before it's too late, because our base human nature wants more, bigger, better at the expense of all else.
I'm with Musk on this, the only way we survive is to get the hell off Earth. But the reasons why are more than just to have a "backup plan" for humanity.
One of humanity's best traits is our adaptability. Put us under stressors and we inevitably adapt to any situation, no matter how dire. Now stick a group of humans in space (or Mars, no difference), task them with creating a self-sustaining technological society, give them a lot of time, and when you come back what you find will be a radically different culture than anything we could relate to on Earth.
That group of humans will have been forced, for generations, to be ruthlessly efficient with their sustainability and use of resources. We are social creatures, and with that comes the social pressure to conform for the survival of the group. Because of these pressures, the base nature of individual greed we witness here on Earth won't have the space to thrive. Given even more time, we may even be lucky enough to see that trait bred out of us. If that were to happen, we may just have a shot at long-term survival as a species.
And as a plan, I think that's basically completely stupid. Even our worst case climate change projections give us an Earth that is incredibly more habitable than any extraterrestrial environment. The worst conditions you can find on this entire planet today are more habitable than the best you can find elsewhere in our star system.
Think of what it would take to have a self-sustaining Mars colony, for instance. If we have the ability to do that, then surely it would be a lot easier to do that same thing here on Earth at a fraction of the cost and risk. Why not just do that instead?
Luddites always whine about the resources "wasted" on space exploration, science, and now the beginnings of industry, but they don't appreciate how in so many ways the fruits of our efforts in space end up benefiting all of us here on Earth.
And since those people claim to be concerned with finite resources and a fragile biosphere, why constrain ourselves to the resources of our mother planet (which resource extraction and utilization demonstrably damages) instead of moving our industry to the dead vacuum of space and tapping the near-infinite mass and energy of the rest of the Universe?
2. Spinning habitats create artificial gravity (though astronauts on the ISS do okay in zero g for months or more). No new tech advances necessary.
Humans are nothing if not adaptable and ingenious. Space is just next in a long line of "inhospitable" areas we've colonized.
Most of Magellan's crew died or abandoned the expedition. That doesn't mean it wasn't a worthwhile endeavor for our species.
The problem with this line of thinking is is that when people say "we" they don't really mean it in "the human kind" sense. Because that's either logistically impossible, or if it's not, you get to leave with the same people that want "bigger, better" and they'll ruin it for everyone else.
So educating these people should come first no matter which scenario humanity pursues.
I think they mean it in the 'species' sense: that there's another planet that serves as a redundant node in the network of the human species. If one node fails, another is on hand to keep the network going and rebuild the failing node.
> So educating these people should come first
People who talk about 'educating others' on some important thing often convey a deep sense of hubris. I hope that's not actually true of you, but please just be aware that your comment implies this.
I meant what I said as a reply to parent's assertion about resource consumption and unsustainability, so I don't know, maybe it is hubris.
But I feel like it's safe to assume that the vast majority of people don't really think about how their behaviours in respect to consumption impacts the world as a whole. I'm probably not educated enough in this respect either, but I am pretty sure that following a philosophy where owning less things is better than owning more things is preferable.
Yes, I know that in the big picture of the environmental issues the planet has it is not individual contributions that have the largest impact. However the companies that do, are the ones that hold the same "uneducated" people in decision making positions.
So, that's why I concluded that better environmental education as a whole would mean less need for humans to flee to other planets. If I'm wrong and that's not the case, then it means the Wachowkis were right, humanity really is a virus.
Coming to your other point:
> I think they mean it in the 'species' sense:
If parent meant it like you're suggesting, it's not by saving the whole species as it is now (ie, 7+ billions of people) but as descendants of the lucky few that get to leave Earth. That in my opinion is definitely not the same as saving the species.
Even if Earth is exhausted of all its resources, the two things that Earth will continue to have, is (1) gravity at 9.8 m/s^2, and (2) a magnetic field.
It’s possible the magnetic field can be eliminated, if the planet’s core turns solid, in which case, we all need to go underground. But the planet will continue to get sunlight, and it will continue to have gravity.
These 2 key things, are found nowhere else in this universe. Except for Venus, which has a similar gravity, but it’s so hot, the surface can melt lead.
And we still don’t yet have a high probability of the closest extra-solar planet, that can sustain life with earth-like gravity and a magnetic field.
Even an asteroid that eliminated the dinosaurs was still not able to eliminate life on Earth. Why? Because of this water world, its gravity, and its magnetic field.
So the best solution to having a backup for humanity, is to probably (1) dig a hole deep in the ground, and establish a deep mine colony there. Or (2) build a deep ocean habitat, and establish a deep marine colony there.
That way, if an asteroid hits land, then the deep ocean colony can survive. Or if the asteroid hits the ocean, then the deep mine colony can survive.
Colonies need support initially. But, once they get established and self sustaining it seems to be the natural progression to wonder why they still are subjects of a far away, likely exploitive, ruler.