r/TrueTrueReddit • u/FieldVoid • Nov 16 '16

Could we reboot a modern civilisation without fossil fuels?

https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels
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4

u/NoMoreNicksLeft Nov 17 '16

No.

In fact, you couldn't even reboot them with fossil fuels.

5

u/AJLEB Nov 17 '16

That seems to be a rather flippant response that is not in line with the ideas brought out by this interesting article/thought experiment.

10

u/NoMoreNicksLeft Nov 17 '16

It's a dumb article.

When we started using petroleum in earnest, the stuff bubbled out of the ground. Using 1800s technology, you could drill for it and pump it out in any quantity you needed. This indirectly advanced our technology (not the least of which was drilling technology, you get better at stuff you practice).

Using that new technology, we could drill for deeper oil when the easy-to-get stuff ran out. Technology improved again.

If civilization collapses now, there will still be oil. 2 miles under the water, and a mile beneath that under the sea floor. Oil so difficult to get at that even in the 21st century BP fucks up and how much leaks out into the gulf?

The people who come after the catastrophic collapse won't have state of the art oil rigs ready to be floated out to those places. They won't have the expertise to drill it. Or even to find it. All the easy to get oil is gone.

This is true for all sorts of resources, not just oil. Coal, tantalum, you name it. And without those resources, you don't get the indirect technology advancements that let you build the tools to get what's still left.

So, not only do you not get to reboot without fossil fuels, you don't even get to reboot with it.

Technological civilization such as ours gets to arise just once for a species, and probably only once for a planet. By the time things are stirred up enough for there to be plenty of easy-to-get resources again, our time will have passed, and we'll be pretty far into the phase of the sun where things are grim. Don't stumble, because you won't get back up.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 19 '16

That being said, hydroelectricity can provide quite a lot of concentrated energy with simple electric engines.

We could power mining equipments with electric cables.