Perhaps the most common response to the peak-oil problem is: "The oil isn’t going to disappear overnight. We have a century to prepare." Unfortunately, the fact that the decline in oil is a curve, not a vertical line, makes it difficult to comprehend. What matters is that the serious damage will be done long before we get to those tiny remaining drops a century or so from now.
The same statement, "We have a century to prepare," also raises the question: Who is the "we" here? All human beings? A small group of dedicated survivalists? If the answer is the former, then the statement may be false: humanity, as a whole, is not good at making decisions. The human race, taken in its entirety, is not inclined to behave in such a sophisticated manner; human beings sometimes prefer ignorance, superstition, cruelty, and intolerance.
THE BASIC PROBLEM: HUBBERT’S CURVE
Studying American oil fields in the 1950s, M. King Hubbert found that as the years went by, oil production decreased, mainly because new discoveries became fewer and smaller. The changes in production could be plotted on a graph, forming the left side of that familiar shape known as a bell curve. Looking at the graph, Hubbert could see that the peak of American oil production would be about 1970; after that, there would be a permanent decline. When he announced this, most people laughed at him. But he was right: after 1970, U.S. oil never recovered.
Hubbert also reasoned that the same sort of pattern must be true of oil production in the whole world, not just in the U.S. Plotting the available data, he calculated that global production would peak around the year 2000. Again he was right, and for the same reason: the big discoveries are all in the past; newer discoveries are fewer and smaller. In 1960, about 7 billion barrels were being produced yearly, and in 2000 production had increased to about 30 billion; now, however, global oil production is rapidly declining — and the oil must be shared among far more people. By 2030, production will be down to about 11 billion barrels.
In the entire world, there are perhaps a trillion barrels of oil left to extract — which may sound like a lot, but isn’t. When newspapers announce the discovery of a deposit of a billion barrels, readers are no doubt amazed, but they are not told that such a find is only two weeks’ supply. And the only event that could ease the demand for oil would be a global depression; reduced oil consumption would then be part of the overall collapse of the world’s economy.
As the years go by, new oil wells have to be drilled deeper than the old, because newly discovered deposits are deeper. Those new deposits are therefore less accessible. But oil is used as a fuel for the oil drills themselves. When it takes an entire barrel of oil to get one barrel of oil out of the ground, as is increasingly the case, it is a waste of time to continue drilling such a well.
Coal and natural gas are also disappearing, although coal will be available for a while after oil is gone — unless it becomes a popular substitute for petroleum. Coal, however, is highly polluting and cannot be used as a fuel for most forms of transportation; the last industrial society may be a bizarre, crowded, dirty, impoverished world. Natural gas is not easily transported, and it is not suitable for most equipment.
Modern agriculture is highly dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizers (the Haber-Bosch process combines natural gas with atmospheric nitrogen to produce nitrogen fertilizer) , pesticides, and the operation of machines for harvesting, processing, and transporting. The Green Revolution was the invention of a way to turn petroleum and natural gas into food. Without fossil fuels, modern methods of food production will disappear.
As Michael T. Klare has shown in Resource Wars, much of modern warfare is about oil, in spite of all the pious and hypocritical rhetoric about "the forces of good" and "the forces of evil." The real "forces" are those trying to control the oil wells and the fragile pipelines that carry that oil. A map of recent American military ventures is a map of petroleum deposits. When the oil wars began is largely a matter of definition, though perhaps 1973 would be a usable date, when the Yom Kippur War — or, more truthfully, the decline of U.S. domestic oil — led to the OPEC oil embargo.
A "survivalist" is not necessarily an "environmentalist." Although it is a popular belief that the survival of humanity is tied with survival of the biosphere in general, that may not be entirely true. On the contrary, the future survival of humanity and the survival of many other species may be mutually incompatible, and a choice between the two might have to be made. Coal provides an illustration of this problem. It may turn out that the most efficient way to soften the blow to humanity in the post-oil era is to go back to the use of coal. The catch, of course, is that the worldwide use of coal, among a population of several billions, will produce pollution of unimaginable proportions.
Incidentally, the first clearly marked sign of "the end" may be the failure of electricity. Most North American electricity is produced by fossil fuels, and in the U.S. that generally means coal. Coal is terribly inefficient; only a third of its energy is transferred as it is converted to electricity. At the same time, the North American grid is a hopelessly elaborate machine — the largest machine in history — and it is perpetually operating at maximum load, chronically in need of better maintenance and expensive upgrading.
THE MYTH OF ALTERNATIVE ENERGY
Alternative sources of energy will never be very useful, for several reasons, but mainly because of a problem of "net energy": the amount of energy output is not sufficiently greater than the amount of energy input. Alternative sources simply don’t have enough "bang" to replace 30 billion annual barrels of oil.
A further problem with alternative sources of energy is that conventional oil is required to extract, process, and transport almost any other form of energy; a coal mine is not operated by coal-powered equipment. It takes "oil energy" to make "alternative energy."
The use of unconventional oil (shale deposits, tar sands, heavy oil) poses several problems besides that of net energy. Even if we optimistically assume that about 700 billion barrels of unconventional oil could be produced, that amount would equal only about 15 years of global oil demand. Also, the pollution problems are considerable, and it is not certain how much environmental damage the human race is willing to endure. With unconventional oil we are, quite literally, scraping the bottom of the barrel.
More-exotic forms of alternative energy are plagued with even greater problems. Fuel cells cannot be made practical, because such devices require hydrogen derived from fossil fuels (coal or natural gas), if we exclude designs that will never escape the realm of science fiction; if fuel cells ever became popular, the fossil fuels they require would then be consumed even faster than they are now. Biomass energy (perhaps from wood, animal dung, peat, corn, or switchgrass) would require impossibly large amounts of land and would still result in insufficient quantities of net energy, perhaps even negative quantities. Hydroelectric dams are reaching their practical limits. Wind and geothermal power are only effective in certain areas and for certain purposes. Nuclear power will soon be suffering from a lack of fuel and is already creating serious environmental dangers.
The current favorite for alternative energy is solar power, but proponents must close their eyes to all questions of scale. According to Gerhard Knies, the world’s deserts have an area of 36 million km2, and the solar energy they receive is equivalent to 300 ZJ (1 ZJ = 1021 joules), which at an 11% electrical-conversion rate would result in 33 ZJ. The EIA’s "World Consumption of Primary Energy" tells us that total energy consumption in 2005 was approximately 0.5 ZJ.
To meet the world’s present energy needs by using solar power, therefore, we would need an array (or an equivalent number of smaller ones) with a size of 0.5/33 x 36 million km2, which is 360,000 km2 (140,400 square miles) — a machine the size of Germany. The production and maintenance of this array would require vast quantities of hydrocarbons, metals, and other materials — a self-defeating process.
Petroleum, unfortunately, is the perfect fuel, and nothing else even comes close. There will never be a solar-powered airplane. The problem with flying pigs (as in "when pigs can fly") is not that we have to wait for scientists to perfect the technology; the problem is that the pig idea is not a good one in the first place. To maintain an industrial civilization, it’s either oil or nothing.
Another unrealistically optimistic thought is that we are shifting from an oil-based culture to an information-based one: computers, we are told, will soon replace trucks. To say that high technology reduces mankind’s need for petroleum, however, is an act of faith that is not born out by the figures on world consumption of oil.
The quest for alternative sources of energy is not merely illusory; it is actually harmful. By daydreaming of a noiseless and odorless utopia of windmills and solar panels, we are reducing the effectiveness of whatever serious information is now being published. When news articles claim that there are simple painless solutions to the oil crisis, the reader’s response is not awareness but drowsiness. We are rapidly heading toward what has been described as the greatest disaster in history, but we are indulging in escapist fantasies. All talk of alternative energy is just a way of evading the real issue: that the Industrial Age is over.
INFRASTRUCTURE
Most schemes for a post-oil technology are based on the misconception that there will be an infrastructure, similar to that of the present day, which could support such future gadgetry. Modern equipment, however, is dependent on specific methods of manufacture, transportation, maintenance, and repair. In less abstract terms, this means machinery, motorized vehicles, and service depots or shops, all of which are generally run by fossil fuels. In addition, one unconsciously assumes the presence of electricity, which energizes the various communications devices, such as telephones and computers; electricity on such a large scale is only possible with fossil fuels.
To believe that a non-petroleum infrastructure is possible, one would have to imagine, for example, solar-powered machines creating equipment for the production and storage of electricity by means of solar energy. This equipment would then be loaded on to solar-powered trucks, driven to various locations, and installed with other solar-powered devices, and so on, ad absurdum and ad infinitum. Such a scenario might provide material for a work of science fiction, but not for genuine science. The sun simply does not work that way.
It is not only oil that will soon be gone. Iron ore of the sort that can be processed with primitive equipment is becoming scarce, and only the less-tractable forms will be available when the oil-powered machinery is no longer available — a chicken-and-egg problem. Copper, aluminum, and other metals are also rapidly vanishing. Metals were useful to mankind only because they could once be found in concentrated pockets in the earth’s crust; now they are irretrievably scattered among the world’s garbage dumps.
The infrastructure will no longer be in place: oil, electricity, and asphalt roads. Partly for that reason, the social structure will also no longer be in place: intricate division of labor, large-scale government, and high-level education. Without the infrastructure and the social structure, it will be impossible to produce the familiar goods of industrial society.
Without fossil fuels, the most that is possible is a pre-industrial infrastructure, although one must still ignore the fact that the pre-industrial world did not fall from the sky as a prefabricated structure but took uncountable generations of human ingenuity to develop. The next problem is that a pre-industrial blacksmith was adept at making horseshoes, but not at making or repairing solar-energy systems.
Fossil fuels, metals, and electricity are all intricately connected. Each is inaccessible — on the modern scale — without the other two. Any two will vanish without the third. If we imagine a world without fossil fuels, we must imagine a world without metals or electricity. What we imagine, at that point, is a society far more primitive than the one to which we are accustomed.
THE POST-OIL ECONOMY
The most basic principle is that one has to start thinking in terms of a smaller radius of activity. The globalized economy has to be replaced by the localized economy.
In the post-oil world, most food will be produced at a local level. It is even likely that each family will have to produce its own food. The catch in growing food, however, is that 87% of the world’s surface is permanently unsuitable for growing food. In many cases, the climate is too severe: too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry. In other cases, the land is too barren to support anything but a sparse growth of wild plants, which in any case are simply growing and then dying and replacing their own material. The other 13% of the world’s land has been used for agriculture for centuries, but the result is that the nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium (N, P, K) and other elements, as well as the humus, have long been depleted, and food production has been maintained only by massive inputs of synthetic fertilizer. In addition, that farmland is crowded and expensive.
Nevertheless, a small human population might survive on agriculture, at least if it reverted to some primitive methods. Some Asian cultures brought wild plant material from the mountains and used it as fertilizer, thereby making use of the N-P-K (etc.) of the wilderness. Many other cultures used wood ashes. The nutrient "source" of the wilderness fed the nutrient "sink" of the farmland. (This is one of the basic principles behind all "organic gardening," although few practitioners would admit it or even know it.)
Other Asian cultures recycled all materials as much as possible, especially human and animal feces. Of course, one cannot create a perpetual-motion machine: every time those materials are recycled, a certain amount of N-P-K is lost to leaching and evaporation.
A third technique, found in Asia as well as in other parts of the world, is to grow legumes or other plants that absorb nitrogen from the air. Unfortunately there are no similar tricks for phosphorus or potassium; plants with very deep roots can draw some of these elements from far underground, but not enough to turn barren land into farmland.
All over the world, many primitive cultures simply grew crops in one area for a few years and then abandoned that plot, cut and burned another patch of forest or jungle, and started a new garden. Such a practice is hard on the environment, but for a sparsely inhabited region the technique is feasible.
If one is living mainly on cultivated plants, at least a quarter of a hectare per person would be needed. For example, one could live — barely — on about 400 kg of dried non-sweet corn (maize) per year, but the yield per hectare of corn, under primitive conditions, is not likely to be over 1,500 kg.
The most useful crops would be those that are high in carbohydrates and protein. Crops that are susceptible to diseases, pests, bad soil, or bad weather should be avoided. In North America up to about the 50th parallel, the most important crops would be open-pollinated corn, beans, and squash — the same crops on which the native people were living for thousands of years. In other parts of the world, other grains might be more suitable: rye, barley, wheat, oats, sorghum, millet, rice, buckwheat.
Where farming isn’t practical, foraging (hunting and gathering) may be the answer. It is generally impossible to live just on wild plants, so hunting, trapping, and fishing would be important skills. One is more likely to succeed — i.e. get at least something to eat — with small animals, but larger animals such as moose provide more food per hour of hunting. The hides provide clothing, the bones provide tools. A rifle or shotgun would be handy until there was no more ammunition; our descendants will be learning to use and make bows and arrows. Deadfalls and snares could be used for many species.
Foraging was possible in ancient times only because there was low population density; that same low density might recur after the collapse of the modern western economy, as the result of famine, plague, and war. Latter-day foragers could also take advantage of the process of urbanization that has been characteristic of so many countries since the Industrial Revolution; as people moved from the countryside to the city, the result for those rural areas was sometimes not just a relative decline in population, but an absolute one.
The same process is still underway. Even in highly developed countries, although the cities may be crowded there are large rural areas (often marginal uplands, admittedly) that are steadily losing population. Such depopulation presents opportunities for those with a pioneering spirit.
Transportation will be limited. Asphalt is made from oil; as the price of oil rises, so will the price of asphalt, and paved roads will therefore go unrepaired. As social chaos intensifies, the maintenance of paved roads will be further reduced. When those roads are not repaired, it will take little time for them to become cracked and unusable, and they will often be blocked by smashed and abandoned cars. In any case, the main roads will generally be going in the wrong directions: from one city to another, exactly where people will not want to go — they will want to go over the hills, to greener pastures.
There would only be three practical methods of travel: on foot, in a non-motorized boat, or on horseback. One’s speed by any of these three methods will be about the same: 40 km per day, if one is in good shape. Even where paved roads are usable, bicycles would be hard to repair without the industrial infrastructure to provide the spare parts and the servicing.
A second major principle is that those who live in the country will be better prepared than those who live in the city. A city is a place that consumes a great deal and produces little, at least in terms of essentials. A city without incoming food or water collapses rapidly, whereas a small community closely tied to the natural environment can more easily adjust to technological and economic troubles.
Even out in the country, however, the present housing patterns often resemble the gasoline-induced sprawl of the suburbs. More useful would be something resembling a traditional village, with the houses at the focus and the fields radiating from that point.
"Something resembling" is, of course, different from the real thing. Urban refugees, flashing credit cards and possessing no usable skills, might not be welcome in long-settled communities.
A knowledge of basic medicine would be useful. Most books on wilderness medicine assume that the reader will be traveling with a suitcase full of drugs, which will not be the case; drugs expire. Training in so-called "first aid" would be more sensible; in fact, the "first-aid" treatment for such common problems as cuts, burns, and broken bones does not differ greatly from the later treatment by a trained physician. Those who are serious about survival would also want to start developing their muscles; the transition from a sedentary to a more active life could take years. With the exception of some empirically valid forms of herbal medicine, what will not be needed is the various forms of nonsense known as "alternative medicine," although it is a curious reflection on the "decline of the West" that superstition has once again come to replace science.
MONEY AND LABOR
Almost everything in our modern economy is either made from oil or requires oil for its functioning or its transportation. As the price of oil begins to skyrocket, therefore, so will the price of everything else. The same happened on a smaller scale during the temporary oil crisis of the 1970s and ’80s.
The hardest hit will be those with debts: car payments, house mortgages, credit cards, student loans. But everyone will find that a dollar just doesn’t "stretch." High prices will be combined with low wages. Even now, the news media are always claiming that the unemployment rate is low, but they fail to mention that so many "employed" people are working at low-paying jobs. It is not easy to get together the required food, clothing, and shelter when one is being paid minimum wage.
At first, money will be an immensely important issue. It will take a handful of bills to buy anything. And largely because of the high prices, unemployment will rise dramatically. For the first few years of the collapse, there will be a financial Reign of Terror.
The "economic" problem of peak oil is occurring when North Americans have already been battered by other economic problems. One serious issue is globalization: for many years, big companies have been getting their work done by sending it out to whatever countries have the poorest people and the most repressive governments. The result is that people in "developed" countries lose their jobs. Although the official unemployment levels are low, the figures are misleading; large numbers of the "employed" are not working at well-paying, permanent, full-time jobs. Closely related to the problem of globalization is that of automation, which increases production but decreases payrolls.
As a result of all these vagaries within the capitalist system, government services are perpetually being cut. The common expression is that "money is tight these days," although very few people ask why that is the case. Taxes continue to rise, but the individual receives little in return.
At one point, the money problem will be everything. A few decades later, the money problem will be nothing. Money is only a symbol, and it is only valuable as long as people are willing to accept that fiction: without government, without a stock market, and without a currency market, such a symbol cannot endure. Money itself will be useless and will finally be ignored. Tangible possessions and practical skills will become the real wealth. Having the right friends will also help.
The answer, in part, is to give up the use of money well ahead of time, instead of letting the money economy claim more victims. Barter would allow people to provide for their daily needs on a local basis, without the dubious assistance of governments or corporations. Such a way of doing business, unfortunately, is illegal if the participants are not paying sales tax on their transactions. Politicians disparage the age-old practice of barter as "the underground economy" or "the gray economy," but of course their own income is dependent on taxes. In any case, the transition would not be simple: there are so many rules, from building codes to insurance regulations to sales- and income-tax laws, that make it difficult to provide oneself with food, clothing and shelter without spending money. Nevertheless, as the economy breaks down, so will the legal structure; where there is no law, there are no criminals.
LEADERSHIP AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE
The biggest news story of modern times rarely appears in the conventional news media, or it appears only in distorted forms. Ironically, the modern world is plagued by a lack of serious information. Today’s news item is usually forgotten by tomorrow. The television viewer has the vague impression that something happened somewhere, but one could change channels all day without finding anything below the surface. But television is only the start of the enigma. What is most apparent is the larger problem that there is no leadership, no sense of organization, for dealing with peak-oil issues.
One might consider as an analogy the Great Depression. During those ten years, everyone lived on his own little island, lost, alone, and afraid. It was a "shame" to be poor, so one could not even discuss it with one’s neighbors. The press and the politicians largely denied that the Depression existed, so there was little help from them. In general, it was just each nuclear family on its own — for those who were lucky enough to have a family. Barry Broadfoot, in Ten Lost Years (p. 353), records the memories of one Depression survivor:
Every newspaper across Canada and in the United States always played up the
silver lining. . . . There were no such things as starvation, hunger marches,
store front windows being kicked in. Yes, they were reported, but always these
were called incidents and incited by "highly-paid professional agitators."
A related problem is the lack of ideological unity. While one person has a sort of Armageddon-like vision, stocking up ammunition for the Last Battle, someone else is busy on the Internet asking for ideas on how to make a still for the dozen corn plants he intends to grow. There is a complete lack of agreement on first principles.
Part of the reason for these problems is that many modern societies, including that of the United States, are "individualist" rather than "collectivist." There is a sort of Daniel-Boone frontier mentality that pervades much of modern life. In many ways, this has been beneficial: freedom from tradition, freedom from onerous family duties, and freedom from manorial obligations have perhaps provided much of the motivation for those who came to what was seen as the "New World." That spirit of self-sufficiency made it possible for pioneers to thrive in the isolation of the wilderness.
Yet we must not forget the truism that there is strength and safety in numbers. Individualism might be more beneficial in good times than in bad; Americans seem to adjust poorly to crises. The defects of individualism can seen right within what is mistakenly called the democratic process: political leaders can tell the most blatant lies about economic trends, about warfare, or about transgressions of civil liberties, and the response is a numbed, silent obedience which is puzzling only until one realizes that the individual has little means of behaving otherwise. He is generally lacking in family or friends with whom he can share information or compare ideas, and he is therefore entirely dependent on the news media for mental sustenance. The television set in the living room is the altar on which he sacrifices his common sense.
Faced with such challenges, one would at first be lucky to produce a "post-oil community" much larger than one’s own nuclear family, before sheer destitution forces people to take a more serious attitude to survival. Fair-sized groups, however, would eventually develop. The society of the future has never been described, but at least some numbers are available. Chester G. Starr’s statement (A History of the Ancient World, pp. 18-19) is probably as good as any: "Whereas Paleolithic packs numbered perhaps 20 or 30, Neolithic farmers either lived in family homesteads, in villages of 150 persons (as at Jarmo), or in even larger towns (as at Jericho)."
In any case, the question of the ideal political system is essentially not a political matter but a psychological one. Homo sapiens and his ancestors spent several million years living in small groups, hunting and gathering. The group was small enough so that each person knew every other person. Democracy could work because both the "voters" and the "politicians" were visible. It has only been in a tiny fraction of the life span of humanity that political units have been created that are far too large for people to know one another except as abstractions. Small groups have their problems, but in terms of providing happiness for the average person, the band or village is more efficient than the empire.
SHOCK AND DENIAL
To judge from previous large-scale disasters, it seems likely that as the oil crisis worsens there will be various forms of aberrant behavior: denial, anger, mental paralysis. There may be an increase in crime, there may be strange religious cults or extremist political movements. The reason for such behavior is that fundamentally the peak oil problem is neither about economics nor about politics. Nor is it about alternative energy; there’s no such thing. It’s about geology. It’s about humanity’s attempt to defy geology. But it’s also about psychology: most people cannot grasp what William Catton refers to as "overshoot."
We cannot come to terms with the fact that as a species we have gone beyond the ability of the planet to accommodate us. We have bred ourselves beyond the limits. We have consumed, polluted, and expanded beyond our means, and after several thousand years of superficial technological solutions we are now running short of answers. Biologists explain such expansion in terms of "carrying capacity": lemmings and snowshoe hares — and a great many other species — have the same problem; overpopulation and over-consumption lead to die-off. But humans cannot come to terms with the concept. It goes against the grain of all our religious and philosophical beliefs.
When we were children, nobody told us that any of this would be happening. Nobody told us that the human spirit would have to face limitations. We were taught that there are no necessary boundaries to human achievement. We were taught that optimism, realism, and exuberance are just three names for the same thing. In a philosophical sense, therefore, most humans never become adults: they cannot understand limits.
Yet there is really nothing irredeemable in all this. We live in a "consumer" society, and we are all under the wheels of the juggernaut of capitalism. But if we look beyond civilization, both spatially and temporally, we can find many cultures with an outlook based more on the cycle of the seasons, rather than on an ever-expanding, ever-devouring "progress."
THE CYCLE OF CIVILIZATION
From a Darwinian perspective, civilizations are rather brief interludes in the story of mankind. Humans and humanlike beings have existed for about a million years, but civilizations have existed for only about 5,000 years. Humanity’s "uncivilized" past, therefore, is greater than its "civilized" phase by the enormous ratio of 200:1. Considering the brevity of the latter, it might almost be said that civilization is merely an experiment, the results of which are still uncertain.
All civilizations grow too large to support themselves, and their leaders have little foresight. These civilizations then collapse and are buried in the mud. The same will happen to America, but human shortsightedness prevents us from seeing America as only one among many civilizations. America, in other words, is seen as "civilization" in a generic sense, not as merely one civilization in a quantifiable sense.
Ancient Rome serves to a large extent as a mirror of modern times. The fall of the Roman Empire has been ascribed to various factors, from laziness to lead poisoning. The impoverishment of the soil, and the consequent lack of food, may have played a large part. No doubt it was also a combined military and economic problem: there wasn’t enough money to pay for all the soldiers guarding the frontiers. Pestilence may have been another significant factor. Perhaps a more correct answer would actually be a more general one: the empire was too big, and it was poorly led.
The main difference between America and previous civilizations is that, from now on, the cycle of "civilization" cannot be repeated. Oil is not the only mineral that will be in short supply in the 21st century. Industrial civilization has always been dependent on metals, but hematite, for example, is no longer sufficiently common, and mining companies now look for other sources of iron, which can be processed only with modern machinery.
The machines of one century built the machines of the next. The machines of the past — the hammer, anvil, forge, and bellows of the ancient blacksmith — made it possible for later generations to extract the low-grade ores of the present. Very low-grade iron ores can now be worked, but only because there were once better, more accessible ores. This "mechanical evolution" is, of course, liable to collapse: when Rome fell, so did literacy, education, technology. But after many centuries, the Classical world returned. The western world experienced its Renaissance, its rebirth, after the Dark Ages because the natural world was fundamentally unchanged.
In the future, after the collapse of the present civilization, the necessary fuels and ores will not be available for that gradual rebuilding of technology. The loss of both petroleum and accessible ores means that history will no longer be a cycle of empires, contrary to the descriptions of Spengler and Toynbee.
But village life has a way of transcending disasters. Nestled among silent mountains, there are probably peasant communities that have felt only minor jolts through the deaths of several empires.
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