Economics of Possibility

[gfish]

I woke up this morning thinking about the viking exploration of Vinland. It's really a very odd thing -- you have viking colonies on Greenland for many hundreds of years. They're desperate for wood (and metal, which at the time required lots of charcoal). They know about the new world, and they come over occasionally to harvest trees and smelt some iron. But they never started a real colony there, despite living in a much more marginal environment and having a real need for the resources. Why not? Greenland probably couldn't afford to fund a real colony, and was crippled by a violent and hidebound culture. No one else cared. No one else even knew about the possibility for a long time.

I've posted before about how isolated we are from the past, particularly before the Industrial Revolution. Thinking about the failure to colonize Vinland made me realize another great barrier to understanding. If something is viable today, it happens. There are no frontiers that are not being constantly, ruthlessly pushed back. This is true for at least 3 reasons.

Communications: If an opportunity opens up on the other side of the world, I can know about it instantly. I can research similar problems from the past and learn from them.

Resources and Infrastructure: We have the resources to guarantee we won't starve, letting us spend time working on speculative ventures. We have many systems for giving these resources to people who have clever ideas, be it government grants for scientific research or venture capital for startups.

Population: There are 6 billion of us doing all of the above, massively in parallel. It only takes one person to see the potential in something for it to happen. If you can't see the solution because of cultural blinders, someone else will.

(Yes, none of these are 100% true, but compared to what I'm talking about they might as well be. 10⁹ is a very large number, so feel free to reduce it by whatever scaling factor you feel is appropriate and the argument will still hold.)

I remain glad I was born when I was. It is daunting, to know what one is up against when trying to do something genuinely new and innovative. But the limitations humanity dealt with for most of history were far, far worse.

Comments

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

I've always been a little sorry I wasn't born later than I was. I don't mind being as old as I am, but it's hard for me to break habits learned in the days before the Internet and safer queerness.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

There also wasn't any serious opposition to the Greenland colonies because the indigenous population was very small. In the Newfoundland area, though, there were scads of people, and just over the hill, scads more. A viable beachhead would've taken all Greenland's population and a good chunk of Iceland's. I think the uncertainty of the Iceland->Greenland voyage also made it hard for the Greenlanders to feel like they could take risks going even further afield. I'm basically concentrating on a specific part of infrastructure: transportation of goods and people, which was a huge problem. I remember reading that there were times when it was cheaper to transport coal from the English mines to Boston than to refineries in Cornwall.

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

I woke up this morning thinking about the viking exploration of Vinland.

Opening sentences like this are the reason I love my life.