At 8:00 PM +0100 1/18/10, Srini RamaKrishnan wrote: >On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 6:35 PM, Eugen Leitl <[email protected]> wrote: >> An all-terrain vehicle, a self-erecting solar canopy, >> solid-state air conditioning and water still, LEO sat constellation uplink. > >I was thinking more along the lines of a Mongolian yurt. Living a >nomadic life with tethers to society is faking it. What happens when a >rock falls from the sky and destroys the hi-tech?
Why would living a nomadic life with tethers to society be faking it? Nomadic peoples all over the world have a long history of trading with settled peoples. They didn't make or find everything themselves; they used their mobility to provide rare goods to people who had things they needed or wanted. The first items that come to mind are hardware (knives, swords, pots, tools, harness fittings), but nomadic people traded for all sorts of luxuries as well as mundane necessities. Rocks will fall from the sky from time to time and wipe out sections of society. If the damage can't be repaired, the level of technology will fall, at least for a time, and settled people as well as nomadic ones will make do with what's available. The more nomadic the person these days, the more likely they are to have a cell phone. -- Heather Madrone ([email protected]) http://www.madrone.com http://www.sunsplinter.blogspot.com I'd love to change the world, but they won't give me access to the source code.
