[TML] The Long Night Was: Lower-tech colonies

[Richard Aiken]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 3:38 PM, Leon Wu <Leon.Wu at newswire.ca> wrote:
> But if it's a world that is only barely able to support itself and had
> relied heavily on outside help then it could have taken it a long time
> to recover on it's own. Imagine the effects the long night would have
> had on a world without metals?

True.  But a thousand years?  If it's that close to the edge
viability, it's much more likely to have died out completely than to
have survived at all.  If it did survive, a thousand years is plenty
of time to have learned to get around the shortage of metals, assuming
it can get access to modern technical information.  There are a lot of
things one can do with ceramics and plastics, for instance.  And -
while the lighter metals are harder to re-fine and work with, it isn't
impossible, given sufficient electricity.

Generating enough electricity would be difficult without the heavier
metals, of course.  But - again - this is a thousand years we're
talking about.  A thousand years during which some enterprising
Ethically Challenged Merchant would have had to *not* been able to
figure out a way to sell generating equipment to such a planet.

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident." Robert A. Heinlein