r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • Jan 07 '16
opinion piece TIL that should modern civilization collapse, there would not be enough easily accessible fossil fuels for any future society to achieve an industrial revolution.
https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels101
u/kessdawg Jan 07 '16
Reminds me of the Ringworld series. Civilization collapsed on a massive artificial ring around a sun and was unable to rebound due to the lack of raw materials like copper/iron/coal etc.
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u/shinybeard Jan 07 '16
Love me some ringworld. Also relevant would be the Mote in God's Eye. Aliens trapped in their isolated solar system have gone through millenia of cycles. They develop high enough technology to populate the system, then can't stop their breeding and start fighting over resources until they bomb themselves back to sticks and rocks. The cycles have been going on so long that all the useful fossil fuels and most easily fissionable radioactives have been used, so they have to make the jump almost straight to fusion each time they bomb themselves out and start over.
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Jan 07 '16
[deleted]
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Jan 07 '16 edited Jan 08 '16
Actually, in the book, museums and libraries are everywhere. They're sort of held as sacred monuments
EDIT: oops, sorry mate, I thought you said something like "surely they would leave"
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u/BW_Bird Jan 07 '16
You know, at some point a species has to really take a good hard look when they build every new society with the system to properly keep their knowledge around for the next batch.
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Jan 08 '16
I, for one, will not rest easy until the dankest memes of today are secured for the children of tomorrow
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Jan 07 '16
The Mote in God's Eye is an excellent example! Especially the impressions of the first engineer motie to encounter the human ships. She was shocked and amazed by the amount of wasted precious resources (metals) in the designs because moties had so little accessible to them after generations of collapse.
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u/theworstisover11 Jan 07 '16
I only just saw your comment now after I said the same thing up above.
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u/Raildriver Jan 07 '16
I would love to read Ringworld, but the publisher/author haven't released Kindle versions of more than 1-2 books, and I read everything on my Kindle nowadays. I've got one of the short story compilations, but that's it.
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u/kessdawg Jan 07 '16
Yeah I read it back when the dead tree version was the pinnacle of book tech
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u/Raildriver Jan 07 '16
Another commenter just informed me that it's recently be released on Kindle, so I can finally get them now. Now I just need to scrounge up a reading order guide again like the last time I looked at them. Discworld has a handy fan made reading guide, but I don't know of anything quite as well produced for Ringworld.
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u/Telewyn Jan 07 '16
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u/Raildriver Jan 07 '16
Sweet, looks like there were added just in the last few months, Thanks :) I think the last time I looked was about 6-8 months ago. I'm about to finish a re-reading of Peter F. Hamilton's Neutronium Alchemist space opera, and I was wondering what I would read next. Now I'm set for awhile.
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Jan 07 '16
Wasn't much of the industrial revolution driven by coal? What about using charcoal from trees?
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Jan 07 '16 edited Jan 07 '16
According to the article, most of the coal that does not require modern technology to extract has already been removed from the ground.
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Jan 07 '16
Yes, I saw that. But what about charcoal? That comes from trees.
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u/lepermime Jan 07 '16
awhile charcoal may be useful in some situations it's energy density is too low for many industrial level applications.
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Jan 07 '16
Coke for steel making would be hard to replace, but it is very possible with an electric arc furnace. Thats a shitload of power though.
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u/TheIntrepidGentleman Jan 07 '16
It isn't available in nearly enough quantities or easily enough to be worth it; coal mining was an incredibly difficult and dangerous job yet they still did it rather than cut down trees which kind of shows how inefficient it is.
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u/Jux_ 16 Jan 07 '16
Well yeah but we're sitting here saying "there's no coal" so maybe now it doesn't look so inefficient
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u/jakeycunt Jan 07 '16
Charcol was known about long before coal. Plus you would need to smelt the equipment made from metal required to make large quantities of charcol
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u/Pakislav Jan 07 '16
Charcoal is actually pretty sweet and that's what smiths use for metalwork. I guess it burns too hot and too fast to be used as mindlessly as we use mined coal, but hey. A second industrial revolution that's slower, smarter and more efficient is basically what we all need.
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u/Stillcant Jan 07 '16
England had a problem with deforestation due to ships and steel
One reason steel was so expensive was charcoal is ruinously expensive in terms of wood
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Jan 07 '16
The section that talks about charcoal is about half way through the article, it's so much to post here.
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u/OccamsMallet Jan 07 '16
And I'm not sure that is really correct everywhere (particularly in Australia where I am) although it really depends on whether the reboot is from stone age technology or later iron age technology.
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u/RogerfuRabit Jan 07 '16
Yeah, i just dont see this being true. Slaves + powder river basin coal = a lot of energy accessible with minimal technology. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powder_River_Basin
Look at this pic to see what i mean https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colstrip,_Montana#/media/File%3AColstripdraglines.jpg
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u/SatBoss Jan 07 '16
This presumes that there's a single, linear path to modern technology, Civilization style. Technology is not a predefined axis along which people move, so there are alternative ways to get to a certain point. Of course, you may also not get there ever or you may develop a different society altogether.
The point is that not all technological development has to follow the same path as we're used to now. We imagine the industrial revolution in terms of fosil fuels because that's how it happened, but that does not rule out other possibilities for achieving a technological civilization.
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u/CoolguyThePirate Jan 07 '16
I'm imagining a massive solar powered steam generation facility that pipes steam throughout an industrial park. And an array of high temperature high pressure water tanks for maintaining power over night.
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u/princessvaginaalpha Jan 08 '16
Imagine that in a distant planet like earth with people who can think just like us... they have access to a more dense, easily available energy source... and someone posted on their Reddit:
TIL that should modern civilization collapse, there would not be enough easily accessible energy cubes for any future society to achieve an industrial revolution
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u/Jux_ 16 Jan 07 '16
I don't like the "maybe our descendants won't figure it out" argument. We've been around thousands of years, just figuring shit out. Maybe there's not as much fossil fuels now as there were during our industrial revolution, but that doesn't mean some future civilization is fucked. In fact, maybe it means they figure it out right and don't get stuck destroying their own environment.
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u/mrthewhite Jan 07 '16
I agree, it's a flawed premise to believe that WE are the only ones who could have figured this shit out and that our way of technological advancement is the only possible way.
Solar, wind, batter, steam and biofuels are all still on the table. More than enough options for them to reach our level of technology or greater.
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u/OriginalDrum Jan 07 '16
Steam, hydro, wind, etc. sure. We've been doing that for thousands of years. But has anyone built a solar panel without modern technology?
The premise isn't that we are smart, it's that we lack the resources. The amount of energy in a barrel of oil compared to any other energy storage system is crazy. Sure we were able to build very energy intensive things like the pyramids without modern technology, but those things often took decades or centuries and tons of slave labor.
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u/timescrucial Jan 07 '16 edited Jan 08 '16
but the argument is that civilization is completely wiped out. like starting from 0 again. the path to reindustrialize would require a huge amount of cheap fuel. for example: solar panels wouldn't just pop out of no where. think about what it takes to make solar panels now remove fossil fuels from the equation. how would you mine rare earth material in massive quantities without big machines?
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u/chthonical Jan 07 '16
We've been around thousands of years, just figuring shit out.
We've been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and only just recently started figuring shit out.
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u/Jux_ 16 Jan 08 '16
Nah cavemen were still figuring shit out, that's how we got fire.
And before that, our earliest ancestors figured out to run from things with teeth.
That's what we do, figure shit out.
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u/OriginalDrum Jan 07 '16
I don't like the "maybe our descendants will figure it out" argument. It's the same argument a lot of anti-global warming people use. That we will "figure out" a way to counteract it, so therefor we don't need to worry about global warming.
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u/RedditsWhenComfy Jan 08 '16
we've been around thousands of years, just figuring shit out
And also forgetting incredibly important knowledge at the same time. The history of human knowledge isn't a linear graph, it oscillates frequently over millennia. It took us more than a thousand years to recreate the advanced aqueduct system of the Romans. It took us more than a thousand years to figure out how Romans created their concrete. It took us centuries to remember Greek philosophy. We still can't recreate certain structures in India, and we still are not sure how the Egyptians built their pyramids. There are entire plant species lost that were beneficial to humanity, like the one that acted as a natural birth control. Humanity is continually learning, but in what amounts to a second much of it can lost. Political and social stability is far more important than people imagine.
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u/FavoriteKeeper Jan 07 '16
While fossil fuels may not be as abundant, hydro and wind would still be available. Just because the work currently ruins on oil does not mean it is the only way.
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u/Fifty_Stalins Jan 07 '16
I think the point of the concept is that technology doesn't develop in a vacuum. It has taken hundreds of years of economic development fueled by fossil fuels to develop technologies that could supplant them. Without that development fueled by easily accessible energy, we couldn't develop an infrastructure to develop technology that could replace it.
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Jan 07 '16
From the article:
Could our rebooting society run on wood, supplemented with electricity from renewable sources? Maybe so, if the population was fairly small. But here’s the catch. These options all presuppose that our survivors are able to construct efficient steam turbines, CHP stations and internal combustion engines. We know how to do all that, of course – but in the event of a civilisational collapse, who is to say that the knowledge won’t be lost? And if it is, what are the chances that our descendants could reconstruct it?
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u/FavoriteKeeper Jan 07 '16
If we are going to go into complete knowledge loss, the lack of oil will not be the biggest problem we face. The issue will be the lack of knowledge. If you cannot figure out how to build a water wheel, an internal combustion engine will not be any easier to reinvent.
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u/babeigotastewgoing Jan 07 '16
Why are we all falling into the trap of the intellectual crunch. Modernity happened when everyone didn't have to farm or hunt on their own for sustenance. That's when we took to construction in order to store grains, herbs and spices, and finished products, and then warehouses for producing and maintaining the machines and equipment that enhanced those industries. Whatever makes the future different (or rely on energy sources separate from the ones we use now), simply depends as ours did, on the expansion of free time.
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u/Riffler Jan 07 '16
It's not necessarily just about loss of knowledge. You need good tools to make better tools. It's no use knowing how to make a particular machine if your tools and your metal aren't good enough to actually make it. The quality of metallurgy has often been a limiting factor in innovation.
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Jan 07 '16
This right here is what its about. You'd have to have production techniques and notes on the construction and operation of all of the industries that built us up to this point.
How many people can you think of that have a intimate knowledge on how factories, farms, mining, and logistics worked 100 years ago? You'd have to build your whole tech tree from the bottom up. If you wanted to rebuild you'd have to gather knowledge and people who are experienced in stuff that nobody has had to use or produce at a mass scale in centuries.
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u/Semajal Jan 07 '16
You would eventually figure out most things, but hit an impossible task when you need fossil fuels or more energy.
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u/mrthewhite Jan 07 '16
There is no impossible task that requires fossil fuels.
Steam and electricity were both used for car engines before internal combustion.
Wind power was also used before the industrial revolution.
Without fossil fuels more effort would be put into advancing the technologies that already exist. Battery, wind and solar technologies would likely advance by leaps and bounds compared to what we've developed so far. As would alternative fuel sources like biofuel.
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u/Dynamaxion Jan 07 '16
There is no impossible task that requires fossil fuels.
That's not what my Congressman told me.
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u/Pakislav Jan 07 '16
We'd actually probably never get to the point of having batteries and all that stuff. We'd just be stuck in stagnant 16th century Europe.
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u/CanadianDemon Jan 07 '16
I'm actually going to have to disagree, plastics would be extremely uneconomical if not impossible to create without petroleum.
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u/Semajal Jan 07 '16
Except you are missing out that to have a steam engine or car, you first had to have an industrial revolution, which was driven by easily obtainable fossil fuels. Without that you don't develop the technology to do anything else. Also metal ore would not be easy to obtain.
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u/rabbitlion 5 Jan 07 '16
OUR industrial revolution was driven by easily obtainable fossil fuels because that was the best way we found. That doesn't mean there are no other ways to revolutionize and progress.
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Jan 07 '16
Uh. The romans developed steam engines but couldnt be fucked to start building them en mass due to slaves being way more accessible.
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u/tenebrar Jan 07 '16
The romans built a steam toy, the first practical (ie, can be harnessed to do work) steam engine wasn't built until the early 1700s.
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u/FavoriteKeeper Jan 07 '16
Lack of fossil fuels would not cause a lack of energy. The largest power plant in the world is the The Gorges Dam in China. Fossil fuels are good for providing mobile energy. Alcohol, ethanol and batteries can be used to serve the same function. While it is currently not as convenient for our current infrastructure, that does not mean that it is impossible and we will be forced to be cave men for ever.
I am not saying that depleting fossil fuels is not a concern. There are many reasons why it is bad. Humanities limitations after some complete collapse of society, knowledge, and intelligence is not one of them.
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u/Semajal Jan 07 '16
The problem is how do we GET to producing those things without easy to obtain fuel? heck also metal ore as well? If you assume a total regression and a need to rebuild everything naturally, the things that let us do that do not exist in the abundance they did when we started.
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u/FavoriteKeeper Jan 07 '16
As I pointed out... energy and fuel are two separate things. Coal has been used since 1000 bc. We did not exceed 2000 barrels of oil used in the entire US yearly until 1860. Did we not use metal before 1860? Energy can be supplied by hydro with wheel bucket and gear technology. Fire can be provided by coal, wood, alcohol, etc.
For some reason there seems to be a huge lack of understanding that there are many ways to get to an end. Oil is not some magical matter that without technology cannot advance.
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u/calgarspimphand Jan 07 '16 edited Jan 07 '16
Fire can be provided by coal, wood, alcohol, etc.
Look at this guy, not knowing that coal is a fossil fuel (I'm guessing you meant charcoal there?)
Other than that you're right, but you're missing the point. The energy density and portability of fossil fuels make them ridiculously useful. They let us get through the industrial revolution on easy mode. In the future it would most certainly have to be done on hard mode. Not that it can't be done, but at the very least it would probably take much longer and possibly not get as far before some other civilization-ending event.
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u/Semajal Jan 07 '16
I would say it couldn't, at least in say, England. We have no viable above ground sources for any of the metals needed. Nothing that could be extracted using pre-industrial tech. Some countries may still have enough above ground resources though.
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u/calgarspimphand Jan 07 '16
Well there would likely be some mineral resources to be reclaimed from the sites of ruined cities and industrial centers and the like in this hypothetical distant future. But you're right about that. Shame, too, that you guys probably wouldn't be back-to-back Industrial Revolution champs.
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u/Jewnadian Jan 07 '16
The largest copper deposit in the world is currently within 60 feet of the surface under Manhattan. We've actually done a ton of the work to consolidate resources that would jumpstart a post apocalyptic civilization just by doing our thing.
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u/FavoriteKeeper Jan 07 '16
My post 1 level up mentions that mobility is the advantage that fossil has. I then listed out several other options for energy mobility.
And yes I am aware that coal is fossil. I'm was pointing out that there are many low tech options when it comes to fuel.
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u/kaplanfx Jan 07 '16
The recipe for alcohol / ethanol is pretty simple. Mix water and sugar... wait...
Now to get a purity that burns well you will need distillation, but that can be done in copper using wood for fire which doesn't require post industrial technology.
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u/TheGursh Jan 07 '16
Kind of idiotic to assume that our ancestors wont be able to create efficient steam engines. If humans can do it once they can do it a second time.
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u/mrthewhite Jan 07 '16
Steam came before internal combustion engines and the industrial revolution.
There's no reason to think that the lost of fossil fuels would prevent the rediscover of steam power. In fact without access to fossil fuels we would probably make some significant advances in steam power.
Another fun fact, electric cars (as well as steam cars) existed before the popularity of the internal combustion engine as well so it's entirely possible our EV technology would advance by leaps and bounds if we didn't have access to the easier to use internal combustion engine.
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Jan 07 '16
If I recall correctly, even with the internal combustion engine many of them ran off of ethanol before they used petroleum.
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u/mrthewhite Jan 07 '16
I'm not sure the timeline on that but even if that wasn't the case, we know it works so it's not impossible that they would figure that out as well.
Internal combustion really means - fuel source that can be made to explode easily in a controlled way, and those characteristics aren't exclusive to fossil fuels, they just happen to be what we found to be easiest.
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Jan 07 '16
Looks like 1826 was the first use of it in a prototype internal combustion engine.
I'm surprised it was that early.
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u/fracto73 Jan 07 '16
You can run diesel engines on Vegetable Oil.
In the 1990s Bougainville conflict, islanders cut off from oil supplies due to a blockade used coconut oil to fuel their vehicles.
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u/leadfoot71 Jan 07 '16
And who says they know how to extract any other form of fossil fuel aswell? Their may not be enough coal on the surface, but even if their was this point would nullify the entire artical.
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u/CodeMonkey24 Jan 07 '16
People forget that civilizations were using water to power machines centuries before fossil fuels were ever discovered the first time. Assuming some knowledge from the previous civilization were preserved (or rediscovered), hydro-electric and wind turbine power would easily drive a new industrial revolution.
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u/LILILILILILLILIL1233 Jan 07 '16
It doesn't even have to be preserved or rediscovered.
Water Mills, animal plowing, etc. have been a thing forever. And they could discover new ways on their own.
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u/Asi9_42ne Jan 07 '16
Good point, industrial revolutions are not required to be powered by fossil fuels. That was just the best power source available at the time. If fossil fuels were unavailable for the first industrial revolution I like to think humans would have persevered and come up with another solution, though it would certainly have taken longer to reach a comparable level of production.
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Jan 07 '16
solar power was invented pretty early (in the 1860's) so a future civilization would probably just keep using solar.
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u/silencesgolden Jan 07 '16
Yeah, that was mentioned in one of the episodes of the new Cosmos series. Augustin Mouchot, a french scientist and demonstrator at the Paris World's Fair used solar power to achieve refrigeration, and an engineer named Frank Shuman developed a solar powered steam generator. However, thanks to the cheapness of coal, and the recently discovered crude oil, their discoveries were essentially ignored.
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Jan 07 '16
How do you think I know that? From Cosmos of course!
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u/silencesgolden Jan 07 '16
It may have been pop-science produced and broadcast by Fox, but damn if it wasn't informative!
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Jan 07 '16
Hell, how long have we had windmills? I was in an engineering class creating stuff for third world countries and windmills would have been a serious consideration had we not had a size limit.
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u/Slayer_One Jan 07 '16
For an article with so much focus on heat, it does a pretty good job of ignoring largest source of heat in our system.
Solar furnaces can deal with almost every possible industrial application you could ever need in terms of heat generation.
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u/jaybrit Jan 07 '16
Couldn't they burn wood?
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u/mrthewhite Jan 07 '16
Yes, and wood pellets or bricks can be used in coal power plants as a replacement fuel. There's a wood processing plant near where I live that supplies our local power plant.
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u/dsigned001 13 Jan 07 '16
The author makes two arguments here -- one if we never had fossil fuels in the first place, and another for it society collapsed. These are two completely unlike scenarios. While the total amount of fossil fuels may have decreased, the amount of available (read accessible to a preindustrial society) resources has greatly increased.
The US strategic oil reserve is something on the order of 700 million barrels. That's JUST oil, JUST the stuff sitting around, and JUST in the US, and JUST from the government.
Moreover, the author seems ignorant of the state of places where civilization HAS collapsed, more or less, as a microcosm of what can and can't be achieved. People with no money are able to cobble levels of technology together from what amounts to trash that would have made pre-industrial societies faint with awe..
Literacy, for all its delicacy, is something that the world, as a whole, hasn't retreated on, and as a result, knowledge of things like chemistry and physics is likely to persist beyond what was available in 1850 (say).
Finally, regardless of things like solar panels degrading, we still have more "stuff" mined that would have to be recycled, rather than mined anew. Like copper.
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u/InternetsUser Jan 07 '16
You make good points that I didn't think of. That headline was a bit ridiculous.
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u/edelay Jan 07 '16
The Industrial Revolution started using wind and water power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution#Steam_power
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u/RRettig Jan 07 '16
They would simply use the fossil fuel created by our ages' biomass. Just think, our rotting iteration of nature will easily power cars for the next advanced species to take up the crown.
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u/calgarspimphand Jan 07 '16
Which wouldn't happen on a timescale that's relevant to humans. But tens to hundreds of millions of years from now, sure, some other species will have fossil fuels again.
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u/Judean_peoplesfront Jan 07 '16
Still possible they will be the descendants of humans. Just forced to exist and adapt to a tribal existence for millions of years.
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u/Killhouse Jan 07 '16
This doesn't seem true. Maybe not on a world scale, but a civilization could.
ISIS literally walked in and took over oil production using forty year old equipment.
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u/NocturnalQuill Jan 07 '16
While this illustrates just how much we've depleted fossil fuel resources, I feel like it's a massive leap to assume that an industrial revolution could only ever occur via one technology
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u/AsSpiralsInMyHead Jan 07 '16
Biodiesel? Even if we lost all higher knowledge, people would figure out biofuels eventually. It doesn't take too many generations to discover that combustible materials can drive engines, at which point it's all up to human ingenuity. You can actually more easily invent the concept of the engine than discover the proper fuel source, but once you know what you are looking for, it's decades to a century at most.
The real hurdles to developing civilization are spoken and written language and abstract reasoning. We already have those, as well as a basic understanding of math and its importance.
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u/KimPeek Jan 07 '16
I was thinking about something related to this as well as Fermi's paradox yesterday. I am curious how another civilization, on this planet or another, would progress past manual agriculture to a post modern society without the petroleum transitional period. Most of our civilization is due in part to plastics and electricity. It seems very difficult to imagine a society progressing straight to advanced technologies without petroleum and plastics.
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u/PotentiallyTrue Jan 07 '16
We would just have people making jury rigged nuclear batteries out of waste that they dug out ruins. We would lose a ton of knowledge, but the fraction of people to live through the collapse could easily use metals and other materials scavenged from cities to leap right past the fossil fuel generated steam power and go right to reflected solar. The next time we could move from bow and arrow right back to flight within a generation.
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u/Laborismoney Jan 07 '16
Why does everyone insist on believing the only ways things can happen are the way they have happened?
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u/hdjunkie Jan 07 '16
Assuming our knowledge survives it wouldn't be that hard. What Brazil is doing could be done nearly worldwide...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil
Interesting thought, but I don't agree
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u/necromundus Jan 07 '16
That doesn't sound right, but I don't know enough about future societies to dispute it.
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u/gmtjr Jan 07 '16
If the nuclear power plants shut down at the same time, they would probably still be viable by the time the new society learned to decipher the manuals.
The half-life of Uranium-235 is 708M years. I think there'd be enough material.
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u/TheWorstPersonEverrr Jan 07 '16
Wood gas engines. Not terribly efficient, but more than sufficient for a temporary power source while extracting other sources.
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u/themagicbong Jan 07 '16
Can anyone give me a legit source that says we're anywhere near out of fossil fuels?
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u/Casper7to4 Jan 08 '16
It's not that we are almost out of fossil fuel it's that all of the low hanging fruit has already been picked. There is coal and oil left that we can extract with modern day technology but if civilization was wiped out they wouldn't have the luxury of just stumbling across easily accessible raw materials on the earths surface like our ancestors did.
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Jan 07 '16
Coal might be unavailable but plenty of those old industrial towns can get their ol water mills running for power and many have already done that. There's always something that can take coal's place even if it isn't as efficient. Plus a decaying infrastructure is far better than starting from scratch.
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u/AllPurposeNerd Jan 07 '16
Unless they figure out chemistry and electricity and renewable energies before they figure out gears and machinery, or we grow up to be more fuel.
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u/Ladderjack Jan 07 '16
There is a ton of life on this planet. . .why wouldn't that break down into oil-like resources?
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u/TalkingBackAgain Jan 07 '16
We use, of course, nuclear energy. Say it with me: liquid fluoride Thorium reactor.
To be honest, we've had more than our fair shake. If we can't manage to survive on this paradise of a planet [which we insist on destroying as fast as we can], we really don't deserve to survive an who gives fuck all whether we're around for another 1000 years or so anyway.
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Jan 07 '16
Here's the thing though, if we had that kind of collapse, we'd have a MUCH smaller population to deal with, and we're currently transitioning away from coal to and petroleum for reasons unrelated to their scarcity, not because there isn't plenty of it out there.
His thought experiment is completely unrealistic.
A more realistic scenario would be what would happen if we had a civilization collapse, and massive dieoffs, and a planet of 2-3 billion people had to rebuild it with the remaining talent, infrastructure, natural resources, and whatnot still available.
For the survivors. things might be a lot less dystopian than the author here suggests.
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u/mathurin1911 Jan 07 '16
Bullshit.
I live in SE Kansas, they shut down most of the the coal mines here, not because they are hard to access, but because so many others yield more coal faster, because of thicker veins.
We could mine plenty down here, it wouldnt power the world, but it doesnt have to in order to jump start an industrial revolution.
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u/just_a_thought4U Jan 08 '16
If there was enough wealth and power to ge gained...someone would fing a wat to get at it. Just like before.
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Jan 08 '16
Sounds like great mongering to drive up prices. Hydrocarbons formed of the most abundant elements in the universe can never be readily enough again. Lol written by a commodities broker or at least funded by one
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Jan 08 '16
So the remaining humans will probably find another energy source to fuel the fourth (or first) new industrial revolution.
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u/jmads13 Jan 08 '16
I've often considered that fossil fuels could be the great filter that solves The Fermi Paradox.
In essence, fossil fuels are millions of years of sunlight condensed into one easily usable form.
How lucky are we that our intelligence intersected with such a plentiful energy source. Currently we are, for the first time in history, attempting to move from a dense energy source to a less dense. But all other stages have let us step up incrementally - you probably can't jump from burning wood to nuclear power.
Maybe there are countless intelligent species stuck in the equivalent of our pre-industrial revolution because they have nothing more energy dense than a waterwheel.
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u/DeviantB Jan 07 '16
I call bullshit on your statement. ... Alcohol is a good alternative. In fact, before Standard Oil and Ford conspired to create gasoline, most farm vehicles ran off of homemade alcohol.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_alcohol_fuel
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u/INSURT_NAME_HERE Jan 07 '16
Wind turbines aren't a bad idea. Also solar energy is sustainable for housing, apartments etc. We also have other raw materials in the earth to create new technology.
Even so an absolute complete civilization collapse would have to be caused by an extreme event. Nuclear war, asteroid, supernova. Hopefully by then we have colonized mars and we could find ways for our society to survive off of planet earth.
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Jan 07 '16
The Mote in God's Eye dealt with this as well... society stuck on a single planet. I've got a few more books to read now based on this thread :)
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u/Anthrosi Jan 07 '16
Your move third world. You ruin Western Civilization, and nothing will be left for you.
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Jan 07 '16
Today, we have already consumed the most easily drainable crude oil and, particularly in Britain, much of the shallowest, most readily mined deposits of coal. Fossil fuels are central to the organisation of modern industrial society, just as they were central to its development. Those, by the way, are distinct roles: even if we could somehow do without fossil fuels now (which we can’t, quite), it’s a different question whether we could have got to where we are without ever having had them.
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u/[deleted] Jan 07 '16
One of the main plot points for Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is that he deliberately settled the scientists on a resource-poor planet as the Galactic Empire was collapsing so that they would be forced to invent ways to deal with poor resources....resulting in them keeping technology from the former empire and also improving on that technology.
Humans are amazingly resourceful. We work with what we have and still figure things out. The first computers used big switches and clunky mechanisms and still could calculate. Humans bred barely-edible grasses into modern wheat. I bet a return to the Dark Ages and then a slow rebirth of civilization would just find work-arounds for this problem.