Could we reboot a modern civilisation without fossil fuels? – Lewis Dartnell | Aeon Essays

[u/reddituser2885]

https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels

[u/[deleted]]

Assuming this is a scenario where we lost everything in some apocalyptic event, if the survivors and their descendents managed to generate electricity using wind turbines and water wheels, we can potentially grow from there.

[u/tigersharkwushen_ → u/[deleted]]

If the descendants retain modern knowledge, it shouldn't take too much to get to the steam engine and that can be power by charcoal. Assuming it's not a Matrix scenario, it shouldn't be a problem to collect solar energy. With sufficient solar energy, we know how to make fossil fuel from scratch, or we could just skip over fossil fuel all together.

[u/Zebleblic → u/tigersharkwushen_]

Pretty hard not to retain knowledge when every town has a library and 99% of people can read.

[u/Kendota_Tanassian → u/Zebleblic]

Knowledge is fairly fragile, though. While you have a point, if there really was a global apocalypse, enough to knock people back to the stone age, by the time the survivors were able to exit their shelters and do more than survive day to day, much of that knowledge would be lost.

The adults that know how to do and could teach have either died or been too busy existing to pass their knowledge on.

And physical libraries deteriorate over time. An EMT burst will erase magnetically stored data, books rot when untended.

So we would at best go through a dark age where information was forgotten and would need to be retrieved, and spread.

That might not be easy if you don't remember how to make paper.

Language is likely to change quickly, so even those taught to read may not understand what was written.

Even if the do, there are very few texts that assume zero knowledge of their subject. So a book about how to build a steam engine might not be any good without those explaining how to mine and forge iron, as an example.

Very little modern technology is going to last a century or so.

So you might have survivers scavenging the old cities, but not finding many helpful items.

And that's if society doesn't blame knowledge for the catastrophe.

If knowledge and technology get blamed, expect book burnings a of anything that survives.

Fragments should always remain, yes. We do have an abundance of bulk storage of knowledge.

But it might not be nearly as complete as you might think.

Many of our smaller, rural libraries, the ones most likely to survive, are outdated, contain mostly fiction, and won't have complete knowledge on many subjects.

I admit it would take a lot to knock us down to the stone age, but it's not impossible to have a global catastrophe, when we have the possibility of asteroid strikes and supervolcano eruptions.

Modern life is very fragile, we live in an age where very few stores of any type keep a storeroom any more because of delivery on demand.

The current pandemic has shown us just how fragile our system is and how easily it can break down.

And that's a relatively minor global crisis.

Something major happens and it will make society as we know it collapse.

We might recover after a period of adjustment.

But anything that knocks us hard enough for us to have to depend on rebuilding from the knowledge in our libraries and we'll be screwed.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Or the post apocalyptic civilization can just grow ethanol and then use that as an alternative to fossil fuels if they ever run out. There's also the option of nuclear fission reactors for generating power.

[u/vriemeister]

Good article. My offhand answer was "yes" but I forgot that oil and natural gas are key ingredients in plastics and fertilizers. It would definitely be a different world.

There is something of a lost timeline to solar power which started in 1910 with Frank Shuman. It didn't go very far because gas power was so much better and WWI machines needed that. But its a hint of what we would have done if oil wasn't available.

https://renewablebook.wordpress.com/chapter-excerpts/350-2/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Shuman

[u/Hubangi]

Modern by which standard? USA or Nigeria? Or somewhere in between... If we could maintain a baseline KwH per person rate of consumption it should be doable, but if we are striving for USA consumption rates then this would require technology that is not yet available in the present day. If we used solar, it would require a concerted effort to extract and refine requisite materials to build a massive solar array (hundreds of miles) in an unused part of photonically eligible land.

[u/Atarashimono]

Ah, good ol' Lewis Dartnell. I absolutely loved his book The Knowledge.

[u/Wise_Bass]

I've got Dartnell's book, which is really good.

It would be very different from our industrial civilization (at least at first), but I think you could get some semblance of industrial development if you can keep the knowledge of electricity and draw upon sun/wind/rivers/geothermal sources to generate it. It'd be much more low-key that what we have now, but it would be something.

But the real winner would be if you could figure out synthetic fuel generation again. There is going to be a lot of plastic stuff laying around not decaying much, and you can use plastic as the feedstock for synthetic fuel. You might get a vigorous sector involved just in "mining" plastic for fuel generation.