Explaining Darwin's unexpected 1860s success : rising populations of labourers same time as the rise of their cheaper, more mallible replacement, the hydrocarbon energy slave

Unexpectedly, during the the 1860s, the global modern elite - including Darwin himself - found a little something to applaud inside the vast concept forest that was his theory of 'Natural Evolution'.

Hitler's Dilemma : If we liquidate all the "Primitive" how can we tell that we are the "Advanced" ?

Until the advent of fossil fuel based energy slaves, the rich and powerful needed the poor and powerless to do all the hard unpleasant jobs.

In the1860s, (interestingly parallel with the growing popular elite acclaim for Darwin's and Spencer's theories of the survival of the fittest), elites began seeing that fossil-fuel 'energy slaves' were far cheaper, far more tractable and far more moral than employing human slaves.

Perhaps, said these early utilitarian proponents of the much later Aktion T4, Eastern Hunger Plan and the Holocaust, the poor need no longer be "aways with us".

But if the Nazis and their earlier ilk all around the world had succeeded in liquidating all the weak and the poor, the defective and the asocial, how then would one be able to tell - for certain - that the healthy and the wealthy were truly so ?

For, to give but one example, the idea of 'the wealthy' can be easily shown to be a relative term, not an absolute term.

A working class European family of this the early 21st century is far far wealthier, in terms of access to (energy) slaves, money and sheer comfort, than any of the top nobility families of the 13th century.

They only seem poor, only feel poor, when they compare themselves to the families of today's top 1%.

Similarly, the most advanced human civilizations circa 1940 had so many visible shortfalls from what their members hoped and thought they were capable of, that people at this imagined top could only console themselves by saying "at least we are more civilized than X, Y, or Z" down at the bottom tiers of Life.

X, Y and Z being perhaps Australian aboriginals, slime molds and the anthrax bacteria.

Civilized and advanced are relational concepts and only make sense when matched in opposing symmetry with the uncivilized and primitive.

Destroy the bottom and where then is the top ?

But as it happens, the Nazis and other Social Darwinists never got that far.

Instead Progress's symmetry of an advanced top and a backward bottom simply collapsed when assailed from top and bottom.

In WWII, the top proved to have so many moral failings (mass bombing and gassing of the innocent) at a time when the bottom proved to have so many technical advantages (natural penicillin from the penicillium slime) that the delicate balance of the symmetry of opposites couldn't hold anymore.

So, today, it is a commonplace to say that this planet was made and sustained for the tens of thousands of ancient species of microbe and the relatively recent and single human species is but a short term parasite "just visiting" planet Earth ---- a commonplace unlike to be uttered or believed in 1940 .....

Humans an annual; bacteria a perennial

The single human species can be thought of as an showy but short lived annual with the hundreds of thousands of unspectacular bacteria species as the perennials of major lifeforms.

Today's typical born-in-North-America human reproducing unit consumes enough energy and materials over a typical 25 year generation period to reproduce about a billion trillion trillion of individually slightly different bacteria in the same period of time.

Humans need hundreds of energy slaves to maintain their life style and even then many couples have only one or none kids - kids that take 25 years for themselves to be able to reproduce.

And of course, it takes two adults to make a baby.

Bacteria need very little material and energy to reproduce, sometimes in as little as 25 minutes, not years, and don't need a mate either.

They operate collectively as a vast world wide quasi lending library of genes - every bacterial a potential lender or borrower of 'sometimes useful' unique genes.

This would be far too expensive a library, in metabolical terms, for all bacteria to make all these genes all the time.

But when bacteria somewhere on Earth suddenly need one of these rare genes, they quickly obtain it from other bacteria that hold that particular rare gene, via horizontal gene transfer, HGT.

So while somewhat simple individually, overall the bacteria family is complex enough to handle almost any curve ball the changing environment can throw at it.

But above all, bacteria have evolved downward in size and movement and reproductive choice ( cloning) as to need very little energy and matter to survive, endure and in better times, reproduce.

Put another way, bacteria are not just Life's fastest breeders - they are also its slowest.

Bacteria can survive a hundred and fifty years or more barely alive before they get enough energy and material to reproduce, allowing this form of life to survive on one billion trillion trillionth of what a human couple would need to survive upon.

Human civilization is all very elaborate and showy but without a massive steady flow of energy and material to sustain it will quickly collapse.

A few thousand humans could live on as hunter gatherers in a moderately impoverished world - below that level of subsistence, they do would die out and vanish for all time as a species.

Meanwhile, those barely mobile tortoises of Life/ those non-spectacular perennials of Life (the bacteria) end up finishing the race of Life well ahead of the more showy annuals and speedier hares.

And what we humans need to ask ourselves : is true 'Progress' better defined as a matter of shortlived Annuals or of long living perennials ?

The price of human life to racists : in 1861 Texas vs 1941 Belorussia

In the early 1860s , a Texas racist could buy good cotton land for $6 an acre - a big half section of 320 acres went for $2000 ------ about the same price as ONE top quality (young skilled healthy) slave.

Needless to say, in this age before modernity's machinery, you needed far more than one such field hand to work all those acres.

So the prudent kept their slaves as healthy as they could , for as long as they could.

Because most of the South's wealth was in human being slaves, not in land, buildings or machinery.

But when the Nazi racists invaded Russia in 1941 they saw it not as a land of milk and honey but as a land of machinery : all oil refineries and tractor factories , with no need at all for enslaved Slavs .

The Slavs were all to be starved to death as superfluous to needs, under the infamous Hunger Plan.

Because the Era of Modernity was greatly opposed to human slavery --- as far too expensive and far too inefficient --- at least as compared to enslaving iron and petroleum.

This opposition to human slavery was called 'Progress.'

But in the end , the Nazi racists' best known machines - their 'big iron' panzers - ran out of petroleum and so once again slaves (teams of enslaved farm oxen) were called forth - to haul them into battle ....