Not sure why your comment was dead since it's a good question. The answer is with charcoal, which is how it used to be done. It's less efficient (charcoal isn't as strong as coal so the furnaces have to be smaller) but it worked fine in the past. You obviously couldn't have the same steel output using charcoal. In the past places started running out of trees to turn into charcoal which is why they switched to coal in the first place.
In Sweden they are building a prototype of the Hybrit process, using hydrogen to reduce the ore. The plan is to convert the blast furnaces in Sweden and Finland within a couple of decades.
Now this isn't a particularly low tech way of going about it, and producing the hydrogen requires massive amounts of electricity. So probably not an option if you're bootstrapping civilization after a collapse.
Yes, because we can create hydrocarbons from other sources, just not as readily-available and cheap so our lifestyle would be very different, much "slower" so to speak.
> so our lifestyle would be very different, much "slower" so to speak
This is not just about lifestyle. When you're spending all your time hunting animals to eat or digging up hard-to-reach coal/low-energy peat so you don't freeze to death in Winter, you can't do other work like research, and you can't support a population growth that enabled our advances.
To give an extreme example, Hunter-Gatherers generally didn't spend all their time hunting. There's every indication they spent only as much as early farmers at most. In some cases it was a few tens of hours per week per person. Population growth is a separate, rather more complicated topic.
But then you cannot have libraries, you cannot have universities, you cannot have laboratories or factories. Not if you have to constantly relocate to find more food.
Many of the groups we call "Hunter-Gatherers" weren't nomadic, despite popular imagination. Estimates for the early Holocene are that around 20-30% of all groups in some regions were at least partially sedentary. Some of the most well-studied modern groups were fully sedentary, and had high social and political complexity to boot.
There's a game called Seedship in which you direct a space ship that carries last remaining humans in existence to a new planet that will become their new home.
You go from one planet to the next assessing their suitability. When you decide to settle the game ends.
You can't travel indefinitely because ships systems degrade and people die.
One of the worst fates for me in this game is settling humanity of the world devoid of natural resources.
This causes them to regress to neolithic level of technology and never to progress beyond that.
You can lose a lot of people. They will recover.
You can lose science and culture. They will rebuild it eventually.
But if you land them on a planet without resources... there's no hope for their future.
English is werid, for example loose and lose make no sense pronunciation-wise, they're pronounced the same. I've seen plenty of people use loose instead of lose for this reason. I learned English as a second language and the emphasis was on written first so quite a lot of times my spelling was better than that of native speakers. And that makes no sense, one shouldn't learn English that way, write it first then speak it. Personally I don't care if people make these kind of mistakes as long as their communication doesn't lose the meaning.
In fact they are not pronounced the same. English is weird, sure, but I think if you have that kind of misconception then it's going to seem far stranger.
"Loose" rhymes with "juice", "lose" rhymes with "news", if that helps.
I don't know, I personally understood the comment without any problem and wasn't even aware that loose was used instead of lose until it was pointed out. I got the meaning perfectly well from the context. To me these kind of comments pointing out to misspelled words are pedantic at best.
And I take back that they're pronounced the same, I ran it through my head a few sentences and there's a difference at the end but it still does not make any sense and these rules are quite arbitrary and sometimes even contradictory.
Why does lose pronounce the way it does when nose doesn't pronounce as noose, pose doesn't pronounce as poose, lol.. It's even funny if you ask me.
Let the grammar police whip me down with downvotes but I still stand up by my opinion, English is a frigging weird language full of quirks. I speak 4 languages and 2 of them are Latin based and almost never run into the same kind of issues as English. French does not pronounce the way it is written but at least is consistent about it.
And nobody bothered to respond to the original comment other than making pedantic remarks. You've got too much free time on your hands.
Lose generally (RP, and I think 'most' dialects) does not rhyme with news.
'Lose' rhymes with 'two's [complement]'; 'news' rhymes with 'pews'. (The latter pair has a /j/ or 'yuh sound' before the vowel.)
(Heh, really is a can of worms isn't it: 'choose' rhymes with 'lose'; not with 'loose'. Poor ESL learners, no envy from me! Hindi/devanagari, which I'm learning as a second language, is so easy by comparison.)
Ah, well, I neglected to think/realise AmE was generally 'nooze' too... So I might have to retract 'most dialects' (at least in the way I meant it which was counting speakers rather than distinct dialects).
The other form you often see this in is long 'u's being 'oo' rather than (as I would say) roughly 'ew'. (Duplicate, repudiate, muse, etc.)
My mnemonic for lose vs loose:
A "loser" is someone who loses, i.e. does not win/gain.
I think this is easier to remember, because we are exposed to this word "loser" quite a lot.
So "lose" is the word for "not winning" (or similar worded).
"Looser" on the other hand we don't see very often. The meaning is "more loose".
It makes a lot of sense to for people to stop progressing once the resources they need are depleted but that is not true for other species which may thrive when humans are out. And I think other species could obtain the spark intelligence we got too and evolve from there.
Yes. They may already have more raw brainpower than us but they live in environment where they don't have enough tool materials for sufficiently useful tools to evolve precise manipulation skills.
They also can't use fire to command more than just energy their bodies produce.
Hence no dolphin technical civilisation. Land apes have beaten them to it.
Our civilization is built on cards. One of the damndest things is too much interconnectedness, which does make those beautiful numbers on graphs go up, but isn't the best outcome for a robust society. Just look at the initial shock that coronavirus-19 did to shipping. We live in a just-in-time logistical framework.
Beasts of burden, then Water wheels and windmills, then hydro electric dams and electric wind turbines. We’d have to start with rudimentary electronics.
The industrial revolution happened in one tiny part of the world with a variety of unique features. Seems likely that it could've been missed entirely had England's history been slightly different. E.g. part of why the industrial revolution was possible was because an argricultural revolution preceeded it. So there was a temporary increase in capital accumulation (since agriculture was more productive) followed by a rise in population (families could be larger), so this capital could be deployed in new industries using the cheap labor that had recently been born and wasn't needed to produce food.
Had the industrial revolution not followed this agricultural revolution it seems possible that society would've been stuck in another Malthusian trap and there would not be enough surplus for the industrial revolution to get started.
It answers the question "could we boot a modern civilization without fossil fuels"? A re-boot of modern civilization would be able to mine the garbage pits of current humanity.
Depends on how far we fall. If world population is a few thousands per continent, there are not enough people to do anything other than subsistence farming. By the time population builds up enough to think about anything else we have forgotten too much to know how use use those garbage pits - if indeed there is anything left. (As the article notes the first generation will probably use scavenge solar panels, but won't be able to recreate them when they fail)
You need a large population of farmers growing food to have excess for non farmers. We get around that with fossil fuels today. You also need surplus because the weather is not uniform, so you need enough for your society to supply itself for a few bad years, including the "freeloaders" doing something else.
How do you do the metallurgy, manufacture the concrete, or synthesize the petrochemicals in the absence of fossil fuel energy?
Examples given in the article were on the scale of post nuclear conflict societal collapse. No ports, no highways, no railways, no dual use infrastructure at all. No more fossil fuel deliveries happening. No deliveries of anything.
Rebuilding in that environment would be challenging in the extreme. I'm not sure that any rebuilding happens in the vast majority of places.
If you can manage to make mirrors (maybe even using rotating mercury) using wood for your initial heat source you might be able to use solar thermal for metallurgy.
As the article points out, the coal or charcoal in steel production isn't just a heat source, it's also a reduction reaction. Heat speeds up the oxidation reaction, so you need something in the crucible/fire that is capable of scavenging oxygen before it binds with the iron.
> metallurgy, manufacture the concrete, or synthesize the petrochemicals in the absence of fossil fuel energy
I think you could use biomass to bootstrap these. Biosmass wouldn't be sustainable, but once you have the metallurgy, etc in place you could then build wind turbines.
True, it wouldn't support anything close to the scale of steel production today.
But it could be a step in a bootstrap process. Build some hydro/nuclear/wind power plants, then you can start looking into hydrogen reduction for steel production.
Enough people know that Wootz steel is possible through mixing wrought and cast iron in the right sort of vessel that we'd have at least some steel with decent carbon content. Or pattern welding will be fine for most things.
With careful management and modern forestry techniques I believe sustainable (or close to sustainable) charcoal production is possible, I can remember seeing CSIRO do a study using Australian Mallee trees. These grow fast enough such that you can rotate which part of the plantation you are harvesting to enable something close to continuous production. I can't find paper https://publications.csiro.au/rpr/pub?pid=csiro:EP115427 is closest thing google turns up.
You also get eucalypt oil as a by-product from harvesting these trees wikipedia tells me this has a high enough octane rating to serve as a fuel in it's own right.
You run out of biomass before you can bootstrap yourself enough to build wind turbines. Sure the dutch built windmills, but they didn't have refined metals in to make a generator.
You need to know the location of the minerals. Or you better hope the war didn't kill all the people who do know the location of, say rutile and ilmenite deposits.
Then there's the matter of getting enough people down into the mines to get enough out. Historically this was done via slavery, but those ancient civilizations first needed to acquire giant, mean, ugly armies in order to get the slaves. Where do you find a few hundred thousand unarmed people to enslave after a nuclear war?
Actually, first you would have to find a few hundred thousand armed people and convince them to join your army to enslave all the other people. And you would have to have quite a bit of luck. If you didn't, one, or maybe even a group, of the few hundred thousand soldiers you found to be in your army might figure out that they can just kill you and it will be their army.
The ancient way was hard. The entire process would not be as easy as many believe.
When the Dutch built windmills it wasn't the lack of metallurgy that prevented generators. It was just that generators weren't invented yet. Electricity was barely understood during the Dutch Golden Age.
It's easy for me to end up existentially depressed if I go too far down this line of thinking.
But, frankly, we are fucked here on Earth. We're consuming resources at an exponential rate with a population way, way outside what the planet can support sustainably. And we won't fix it before it's too late, because our base human nature wants more, bigger, better at the expense of all else.
I'm with Musk on this, the only way we survive is to get the hell off Earth. But the reasons why are more than just to have a "backup plan" for humanity.
One of humanity's best traits is our adaptability. Put us under stressors and we inevitably adapt to any situation, no matter how dire. Now stick a group of humans in space (or Mars, no difference), task them with creating a self-sustaining technological society, give them a lot of time, and when you come back what you find will be a radically different culture than anything we could relate to on Earth.
That group of humans will have been forced, for generations, to be ruthlessly efficient with their sustainability and use of resources. We are social creatures, and with that comes the social pressure to conform for the survival of the group. Because of these pressures, the base nature of individual greed we witness here on Earth won't have the space to thrive. Given even more time, we may even be lucky enough to see that trait bred out of us. If that were to happen, we may just have a shot at long-term survival as a species.
Reminds me of The Expanse. Or countless other science fiction stories involving Earth vs. the colonies (whether they be on Mars, the Moon, or orbitals). Not sure if it's a coincidence that such stories often involve Earth and her colonies ending up in war.
That is an easy trope that follows history. For example, England is responsible for 63 national independence days.
Colonies need support initially. But, once they get established and self sustaining it seems to be the natural progression to wonder why they still are subjects of a far away, likely exploitive, ruler.
Another thing that seems common to this theme is that the space colonies are often depicted as having a better technology base than Earth. Again, unsure if this is coincidental, or if it's just the authors' way of depicting human space colonists in lieu of the "scary alien invaders from outer space" fighting Earth.
> I'm with Musk on this, the only way we survive is to get the hell off Earth
And as a plan, I think that's basically completely stupid. Even our worst case climate change projections give us an Earth that is incredibly more habitable than any extraterrestrial environment. The worst conditions you can find on this entire planet today are more habitable than the best you can find elsewhere in our star system.
Think of what it would take to have a self-sustaining Mars colony, for instance. If we have the ability to do that, then surely it would be a lot easier to do that same thing here on Earth at a fraction of the cost and risk. Why not just do that instead?
Luddites always whine about the resources "wasted" on space exploration, science, and now the beginnings of industry, but they don't appreciate how in so many ways the fruits of our efforts in space end up benefiting all of us here on Earth.
And since those people claim to be concerned with finite resources and a fragile biosphere, why constrain ourselves to the resources of our mother planet (which resource extraction and utilization demonstrably damages) instead of moving our industry to the dead vacuum of space and tapping the near-infinite mass and energy of the rest of the Universe?
Much as I love Star Trek etc. It does appear that space travel is inherently bad for us planet dwellers what with the havoc it wreaks on the bodies of people who spend long periods in space. I'd love it not be so, but I do wonder if one possible future is exploration by autonomous robots establishing automated mining of asteroids and distant planets.
You misunderstand. I'm not against space exploration or colonizing Mars at all. I'm saying that considering "Mars colony" our only hope for survival with a fucked Earth is not a reasonable idea.
If we can get off the planet we should at least try. This is how our species has advanced and spread across the planet. If something is in grasp we try. Many fail, some succeed.
Most of Magellan's crew died or abandoned the expedition. That doesn't mean it wasn't a worthwhile endeavor for our species.
Our species hasn't particularly proven itself worthy of preservation if the Earth were to die. Given how poorly we continue to treat each other and the other local species I think we can chill out here on Earth and not worry about it.
If lack of resources would inevitably make a greater culture why not just wait until we run low on resources here on earth? Kind of sounds like a self solving problem. But if material success degenerates culture like you say then wouldn't the success of the space colony create its own future greedy culture? Hard Times --> Strong People --> Good Times --> Weak People --> Hard Times
> I'm with Musk on this, the only way we survive is to get the hell off Earth.
The problem with this line of thinking is is that when people say "we" they don't really mean it in "the human kind" sense. Because that's either logistically impossible, or if it's not, you get to leave with the same people that want "bigger, better" and they'll ruin it for everyone else.
So educating these people should come first no matter which scenario humanity pursues.
> The problem with this line of thinking is is that when people say "we" they don't really mean it in "the human kind" sense.
I think they mean it in the 'species' sense: that there's another planet that serves as a redundant node in the network of the human species. If one node fails, another is on hand to keep the network going and rebuild the failing node.
> So educating these people should come first
People who talk about 'educating others' on some important thing often convey a deep sense of hubris. I hope that's not actually true of you, but please just be aware that your comment implies this.
I meant what I said as a reply to parent's assertion about resource consumption and unsustainability, so I don't know, maybe it is hubris.
But I feel like it's safe to assume that the vast majority of people don't really think about how their behaviours in respect to consumption impacts the world as a whole. I'm probably not educated enough in this respect either, but I am pretty sure that following a philosophy where owning less things is better than owning more things is preferable.
Yes, I know that in the big picture of the environmental issues the planet has it is not individual contributions that have the largest impact. However the companies that do, are the ones that hold the same "uneducated" people in decision making positions.
So, that's why I concluded that better environmental education as a whole would mean less need for humans to flee to other planets. If I'm wrong and that's not the case, then it means the Wachowkis were right, humanity really is a virus.
Coming to your other point:
> I think they mean it in the 'species' sense:
If parent meant it like you're suggesting, it's not by saving the whole species as it is now (ie, 7+ billions of people) but as descendants of the lucky few that get to leave Earth. That in my opinion is definitely not the same as saving the species.
If you can build a viable Mars colony, to say nothing of a working O’Neil cylinder, then you can make domes habitats on Earth, and much more cheaply and easily than either of the prior two options, right?
Even if Earth is exhausted of all its resources, the two things that Earth will continue to have, is (1) gravity at 9.8 m/s^2, and (2) a magnetic field.
It’s possible the magnetic field can be eliminated, if the planet’s core turns solid, in which case, we all need to go underground. But the planet will continue to get sunlight, and it will continue to have gravity.
These 2 key things, are found nowhere else in this universe. Except for Venus, which has a similar gravity, but it’s so hot, the surface can melt lead.
And we still don’t yet have a high probability of the closest extra-solar planet, that can sustain life with earth-like gravity and a magnetic field.
Even an asteroid that eliminated the dinosaurs was still not able to eliminate life on Earth. Why? Because of this water world, its gravity, and its magnetic field.
So the best solution to having a backup for humanity, is to probably (1) dig a hole deep in the ground, and establish a deep mine colony there. Or (2) build a deep ocean habitat, and establish a deep marine colony there.
That way, if an asteroid hits land, then the deep ocean colony can survive. Or if the asteroid hits the ocean, then the deep mine colony can survive.
Ringworld goes into this topic quite a bit, so it was interesting to me to see that the author is an astrobiologist who wrote "The Knowledge", about restarting civilization from scratch. Niven (who wrote Ringworld) also co-wrote "Lucifer's Hammer" with Jerry Pournelle, which was like a fun book version of a big-cast disaster movie, about a comet colliding with the earth in the mid-1970s.
Lucifer's Hammer had some fairly realistic assessments of life in the following 5-10 years after the event, centred around restarting production. One big point was about some books very similar in concept to "The Knowledge" being used to preserve necessary information, and another was about recapturing some existing nuclear facilities to try to sustain life at all, given the big energy requirements for agriculture and basic personal heat after the event (because of e.g. huge amounts of atmospheric dust)
Reading this article also made me realize, with surprise, that I've never thought about this aspect of Fermi's paradox! One of the many variables that led to our civilization's rise may be the simple fact that we had hundreds of millions of years of abundant life before us that failed to industrialize. Imagine if human-like life had evolved a billion years ago, when the reservoirs of petrochemicals were a billion years less developed?
If it turns out that both life and sentient life are actually surprisingly common, it might be the case that most civilizations are borne unto planets not yet ready to support their technological advancement, and all they can do is burn out the wick before they reach a powderkeg moment. The great filter could work the other way -- we could be the rare success merely by dint of having shown up 'late'.
Fossil fuel depletion is also a key impetus for the action in Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card.
TV Tropes calls this a "Morton's Fork" and describes it for this book as: What spurs the decision to change the past even though it'll erase our timeline and existence is the fact that Earth is doomed to an even worse apocalyptic scenario than the one they've already experienced. The human population will be reduced to under 10 million, and humanity will be plunged back into the Stone Ages with little hope of ever rising to civilization ever again, as they have exhausted all easily available energy sources and climate change means they will soon be facing a new ice age.
Another "if" I'm often wondering is about the size of the Earth. Had we shown up on something the size of the Moon or Ganymede, the amount of resources we would have had at our disposal would have been a lot smaller. We would probably have figured that we weren't the center of the Solar system much sooner though.
On the other hand if an intelligent species spawns on a much larger planet they can progress much longer before depleting their resources.
Those bodies are too small to have a real atmosphere. Nor would they have molten cores which provide the magnetospheres essential for their radiation shielding and being able to have an electric ground. While neither of these are necessary, per se, they are extremely helpful (especially having an electric ground) and I think make a big difference when we're talking about advanced life vs microbial.
Conversely, were we born on a world a bit larger than Earth, we wouldn't be able to reach orbit the way we did, due to limits of chemical rocket propulsion.
I thought this, too, but someone did the math and were not as close to the boundary as you think. It's something like the Earth would have to be 10x bigger to prevent chemical rocketry from working.
From working at all, sure, but how big would those rockets have to be?
Rocketry doesn’t exist just because some idealists wanted to go to space. It exists because governments wanted to invent new ways to bomb their enemies. A V-2 allows you to bomb England from continental Europe (and wasn’t even a cost-effective solution for that); nobody was going to build a Saturn V-sized rocket for that use case, and even if they wanted to, it’s not clear that they could get it to work without lots of testing with smaller prototypes.[1] Compounding this issue is that, on this hypothetically larger planet, whatever enemies you’d want to bomb in the first place could also be much farther away! Whereas on Earth it’s not hard to reach any other point on the planet; a little over a decade from the V-2 we had ICBM’s.
[1] By way of analogy, Lofstrom loops are theoretically much more efficient than rockets, but to find out for sure we’d have to build a full scale example, and that would be extremely expensive even if we didn’t run into any unforeseen cost overruns or delays—which we inevitably would because this would be the first time we built anything like this. It would be like ITER except at least ITER has a practical application if it works.
If anyone wants to learn more about the history of this specific/niche topic, there's actually an interesting book (with a foreword by Isaac Asimov), Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants
by John Drury Clark:
It's so interesting that you mentioned that because just yesterday I came across a video [0] on Scott Manley's YouTube channel where he discusses this book exactly.
We probably would have kept working on nuclear powered rockets and have settled the solar system with the tech by now if chemical rockets hadn't been sufficient for ICBMs.
Add to this. With many of works of sci-fi and really really old species I wonder what is the realistic from stellar formation standpoint. So how long ago was there first planet with sufficient amount of metals to form an advanced civilisation? Or even hypothetical species living in space. It does take some time for stars to form go through life cycle and the release the heavier elements.
> Imagine if human-like life had evolved a billion years ago, when the reservoirs of petrochemicals were a billion years less developed?
Perhaps then we (they?) would have had time to contemplate the consequences of burning through that massive biochemical battery with wild abandon!
> The great filter could work the other way -- we could be the rare success merely by dint of having shown up 'late'.
Personally I like the idea of a middle ground between this and the more common inversion: that there's an optimal planetary resource balance wherein a species can develop enough technology to keep the wick from burning out, but energy densities are not sufficient to ignite the same kind of powder keg we have.
Filter-traversing civilizations would be even rarer, then.
One interesting thing to contemplate along these lines is that the U235 to U238 ratio of naturally occurring uranium changes through time on Earth. They had about the same abundance when the Solar System was created but they have different half lives. U235 is about 0.70 billion years and U238 at about 4.47 billion years.
Currently U235 is only 0.7% of natural uranium, but one can make a nuclear reactor with natural water as a regulator with ratios of about 3%. So for most of Earth's history an intelligent race could probably develop nuclear power at the wood burning level of energy production. If nuclear and coal were developed in tandem, I can't imagine coal winning out. It is so much less safe and dirty.
There is even geologic formations where natural nuclear reactors existed in the past[1].
When people say "nuclear reactors are safe," they mean advanced modern designs with computers everywhere and precise engineering, not a Bronze-age clay kiln filled to the brim with enriched material.
I know how bad particulate matter is, but I'm not sure if you've thought through the implications of running a nuclear reactor in biodegradable containment and without any way to safely access the inside. I guess it might make a nice dystopian novel, perhaps the bronze age nuclear power company sends in war captives or something like that.
Yes, it would be very harmful to humans, but so were most industrial processes. We have now eliminated almost all of them in the West (some exported to other countries). I guess my main point is that if nuclear power had been around for as long as steam power then society would have grown up around it. It would be familiar, like fire (fossil fuels) is, and the human race could judge its merits much more rationally in comparison to other power sources.
There are many a history book of war captives (slaves) being sent into gold/silver mines for a quick death.
A nuclear power plant running on the surface shielded by nothing more than some bricks would be way worse than any other ancient industrial technology. Water would get in and leach away any soluble isotopes, poisoning the surrounding area for millennia. Anything you tried to heat using the nuclear pile would become radioactive, because ancient societies don't have a way to transport heat. (In the modern world we use high pressure pipes and heat exchangers. Then, if anything more than household heating is desired, you need generators to convert the energy into an industrially useful form.) They would have to put whatever they wanted to warm up directly inside the reactor. So, you would quickly end up with uninhabitable cities, and everything made in the "cursed furnaces," would slowly kill the owner. The only reason nuclear power is safe is because engineers have figured out how to contain it.
My impression is that the big road block to unlocking something like the industrial revolution is the precision of your tools. During the industrial revolution there were big advances in metal tools. Maudslay's development of a metal lathe that could be used to make metal tools was a huge step forward. I think if you can reach this point of development you should be able to make continued progress using non-fossil fuel power sources.
Are there other natural materials that could be used instead of metal to achieve this level of precision? I'm pretty skeptical on this.
Are there energy sources, other than coal, that could be used to develop early metallurgy to the point where someone could re-invent Maudslay's lathe? I suspect that there are and given enough time someone would find one. It might take longer to reach this point but I believe we could get there.
Unlimited only if you don't take time into account. A big reason for the switch from charcoal to coal in steelmaking was running out of trees to make charcoal from.
Not really an issue. Knowledge steadily accumulates over time.
The key foundations of human intelligence and ingenuity will always remains regardless of whether or not fossil fuels exist for us to exploit. Non-renewable resources only served to speed up our industrialization.
No, it doesn't. Only knowledge that people consider to have value will be retained over time. Many things are lost to history, for example.. nobody knows how to make cobblestone. (Or so I'm told)
There’s an important distinction here between losing the knowledge of how X people made Y, and losing the knowledge of how to do Y. For instance, the secret of Greek fire was lost to history, but I’m pretty sure napalm does the job just fine these days.
As for Roman concrete, the Romans were blessed with some really nice volcanic ash, but we can build things out of concrete that the Romans never could thanks to rebar alone.
Here in the Midwest, far away from the granite blocks imported by ships there were companies that made additively "cobblestones", with their names on them, in my walkway there are such stones made in Attica, Indiana. The knowledge of how those were made, is apparently lost.
Those things are tough like you wouldn't believe.
There are masonry techniques that are considered lost arts is probably what he's referring to, including types of load bearing cobblestone construction.
An example that comes to mind is a brick townhouse nearby that was struck by a car and part of a structural brick rounded wall collapsed. It remained that way for many years because the owner simply couldn't find a mason that knew how to rebuild it.
There are certainly many periods of knowledge regression in history. Following the decline of the Roman Empire, many technologies were lost for centuries. In some cases the knowledge was preserved within one geographic area but lost to another.
Even modern technology can be lost. Look inside any company with a lackluster documentation culture to see this in action on a small scale.
Even NASA had to spent considerable time re-discovering how the Saturn 5 was put together.
Edit - I think I meant this as a reply to the GP, but I'll leave it here.
This one strikes painfully close to home! I grew up on an old colonial street in a major Latin American city. Beautiful street "paved" with cobblestones.
Somehow the cobblestones managed to look both randomly placed and have some "lines" that gave it a very orderly look. The cobblestones were placed in some substrate that allowed moss to grow between them.
At some point about 10 years ago, the city decided to tear up a giant trench in the middle of the street to replace some sewage. When they were done, they covered the trench with concrete and then re-placed the stones they had removed onto the concrete.
It looks nothing like it used to. Just messy. I think that if someone who didn't grow up there were to see it, they would think it was a perfectly charming street, but really it lost so, so much.
I asked around and apparently nobody knows how to lay cobblestones anymore. There was a certain art to how they were placed and the substrate selected: dirt, then sand (what kind? how coarse?) then stones, then something else. This ensured that they would never wash away even in the torrential rains we get here every year.
Placing cobblestones seems like an easy thing to do. Just rocks on dirt, right? But how do you ensure they never move, they never wash away, they don't get covered in dirt or greenery.
The craziest thing is that the street had remained basically pristine for what was probably 100+ years, but the new stones on concrete are already falling out.
> apparently nobody knows how to lay cobblestones anymore
This is regional. I went to a talk on cobblestone streets in New York. There are entire books dedicated to the craft, and new scholarship on it ongoing. (It pertains closely to the question of prefabricated infrastructure.)
One of the scariest things I ever read was the true story of how the British Navy discovered and then lost the knowledge of how to cure scurvy.
IIRC, they found that limes (or lemons) would prevent scurvy on long voyages; then the ships got faster AND the switched to a citrus fruit lemons (or limes) that didn't have enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy, but they didn't realize it because the faster voyages didn't allow enough time for scurvy to develop; then on some longer voyages sailors did develop scurvy despite eating the citrus fruit, so the Navy erroneously concluded that citrus fruit didn't cure scurvy after all.
Admirals resisted submarines and carriers until catastrophe forced their hands.
Most people don't realize that scurvy had actual fatalities on most British ships that went on long voyages.
Similarly, in Japan in the late 1800's, deckhands had a ration of free rice (mainly carbohydrates), so that's all they ate. As a result, there were ships half full of sailors laying ill from almost no vitamins, mainly B1, resulting in beriberi.
That continued with the army into the early 1900's:
I was told that gold and silver smithing, for jewelry, has lost techniques since the 1700s. There are well-known pieces of jewelry from that era that are not reproducible now.
There was a government project on how to design a 10,000 year sculpture indicating that this is a nuclear wasteland.
No telling how to cut across language cultural barrier in case of a great reset.
It won't go away baring climate shift but you're limited to 2 watts per square meter of forest cover, though, and that's forest you'll be tempted to turn into agricultural land.
You can make coal from biomass, mainly wood (I'm not sure if some other plants could be used), but I guess it is antieconomical if you need lots of coal for high furnaces to make iron and/or steel.
it was economical in the middle ages for hundreds of years! But, having decent steel for your knights' armaments was also an existential concern for most power centers, a more peaceful society might deal with different economics.
Yup. It's pretty interesting the places that managed their woodlands responsibly over a long time - Japan and England both had pretty sophisticated approaches to not running out of this resource over the long term.
Still in the UK, the moorlands you generally see were once woodlands - apparently that's why they have the distinctive terrain you now see. That's not in the era of written history mind and was for farming rather than iron.
For the demand of middle ages. Which wouldn't be nearly enough to even low level of industrialisation. For weapons and individual components and tools yes. But we can forget railways, ships, complex concrete structures. Basically most things large scale.
I think there might be some confusion here. Let me restate my argument to see if it clears things up.
I believe that if you can achieve precision tools you can use those tools to meet societies ongoing energy needs using renewable energy sources. This means that if you have non-fossil fuel energy sources available to advance metallurgy and toolmaking to the point you can make precision tools then you can reboot civilization without fossil fuels. I also think it is very likely that humans could do this but it might take longer than it did with fossil fuels.
In addition to wood fuel, the other major non-fossil fuel available might be hydro power. The Hoover dam and the Tennessee valley authority produce huge amounts of electricity which could support some sort of industry.
But could we build the Hoover Dam with just wood and small hydro as power sources? Could we even build the meta things required to build the Hoover Dam, like the tools, the trucks transporting the concrete, the cranes, the roads to go there…
One might argue that the boon of fossil fuels was actually the cause of a lot of chaos and war since the technological change it enabled was so rapid and norms around war took a long time to catch up. Millions of young people from all over Europe went into the First World War with their heads full of ideas about bravery and daring and adventure only to get thrown into a vast industrial meat grinder. The Second World War was mostly caused by the aftershocks of the first. Maybe if things had progressed more slowly, we could have avoided the upheaval.
I agree with this, which is why the idea of fusion energy is both exciting and terrifying (and why governments may even be hesitant to disclose breakthroughs). In the theoretical ideal, fusion energy would provide such a surplus of energy that it could rewrite borders and trade deals overnight.
Biofuels and wind would probably be the basis of the energy sector of a civilization reboot.
All the easily extracted oil is long gone on earth. There used to be deposits bubbling up from the ground, oil extraction now depends on several centuries of accumulated knowledge, industry, infrastructure, and resource maps to get to tar sands, deep water deposits, fracking, etc.
Rebooting with the current knowledge base, possibly. Booting from scratch with no fossil fuels, doubtful. I have long suspected that one of the Great Filters is the propensity of a planet to generate fossil energy. You will really only find large quantities of oil in a narrow range of circumstances, depending on specific levels of tectonic activity, duration and abundance of life, sedimentation patterns due to rainfall and ocean distributions, and low to moderate levels of atmospheric oxidizer.
Imagine if Earth is entirely water. The poor fish can develop mega brains but they would still be more or less stuck under water with no real viable technologies.
As land creatures, we haven't explored the underwater tech tree in much detail. If there are fishpeople with mega brains out there somewhere, they might have figured out some stuff that we haven't.
They are stuck behind bronze age. I just don't see any technology without having these things as prerequisites. Even electricity is generally impossible when you live in a big conductor.
There are certain limitations we know about though. Like that making a spaceship would be more difficult. Not only getting out of the water and then into space, but just that you have to have your capsule at a higher pressure. Though landing might be a bit easier because you don't have to use boats to get people out. But then landing and exploring another planet will be much harder, and don't get me started on what their airlocks would be like. Or clean rooms! Hell, anything optical or electronic you're going to have a much harder time with.
On the other hand, biological systems tend to use copious amounts of water to facilitate not just chemical reaction, but also keeping things moving (at molecular scale) or suspended and protected from shocks (at macroscale). It's easier to float things in water than in the air. The water-people could thus have certain advantages in their technological process.
(On the other other hand, salt water is metal killer...)
> (On the other other hand, salt water is metal killer...)
I think this is the key. The modern world is an electrified world. But the other things you point out are in some cases advantages are also disadvantages. But I think the biggest thing is metal and electricity.
I think spaceship construction may be actually less difficult. No risk of fire. No pressure hull required (only little pressure needed to stop water from boiling, and depressurization isn't explosive).
I think even with our current knowledge no. We still haven't even really figured out how to do the energy sector without fossil fuels (we're pretty darn close though). But outside of that we have a lot of problems. One of the biggest challenges in climate is that the population has been so hyper focused with energy and transportation (because they are the primary drivers, but only 60% of emissions). Modern society needs steel, concrete, plastics, medicines, cooling systems, food, etc. We have major challenges in making many of those things green.
I think we actually could do it today. The major issue is we couldn't do it without some major costs (It wouldn't be cheap or free).
What we'd have to change is the way society consumes energy. Right now, we operate under the paradigm of "I request energy, the grid ramps up and down to fill demand".
Instead, we could to switch over to "I ask the grid if capacity is available and use energy when it is".
That would require the ability for the grid to say "no" and for industries to respond to "nos". Nothing terribly hard about that with current data connections.
Easiest way to set that up is with energy bidding. When production is high and demand is low, price goes down. When production is low and demand is high, price goes up. Some applications could even chose to just ignore it and always take (However, everyone could not do that).
What would be the consequence of such a system? That'd mean things like manufacturing would have to have some ramping capabilities. Homes might have to tolerate temps shifting higher or lower than is comfortable. Goods might need to be transported at a much slower pace (Trans oceanic shipping, in particular, would need to be completely changed). And some industries would probably die all together with current tech (such as the airline and cruise industry).
The next question is what do we consider as using fossil fuels? For example, I wouldn't call burning wood a fossil fuel (even though it releases CO2 into the atmosphere) nor would I consider turning vegetable oil into plastic as using a fossil fuel. Both could be done today to keep the same amount of products, but would significantly change the cost characteristics of such things. Plastics would suddenly become a lot more expensive, for example.
Steel production might go down, but would not be eliminated.
Concrete would be one that you'd have to define what you mean by "fossil fuel" as it would release CO2 but isn't technically a fossil fuel. The process of making concrete can be done without burning oil.
Yeah, there's just a bunch of issues today with how grids are operated.
In order for this to really work well, we need national standards for both grid operators and grid users. The reason for all of this being both unpopular and requiring big purchases is because it's pretty much a 1 off deal between the grid operator and the purchaser. It requires that they both both come into the room to make a deal.
Instead, we need something closer to the NEM in Australia. There needs to be a standard bidding mechanism for buying/selling energy on the market.
Our electric meters need to be hooked up to a grid pricing network and our appliances need to be able to talk to that network through our meters.
Once there is a standard communication protocol and pricing network, then you'll start to see neat things happen with smarter power consuming products.
For that to work, however, it needs to be setup nationally. It won't work if every single grid invents their own market or bidding standard. Ideally, this would be an international standard.
There needs to be a standard bidding mechanism for buying/selling energy on the market.
No, not a spot market in electricity. California tried that two decades ago, with an auction every 15 minutes. It was such a disaster that PG&E, which had lobbied for it, went bankrupt. Speculators caused blackouts. The current system has a market, but it's a day-ahead system where generators bid to provide power tomorrow, and there's a small spot market for fine-tuning.
In the EU there's combination of spot market and strict grid management that involves all wholesale electricity customers. There are also attempts to manage households but no approach has clearly won. For example it's very inconvenient to move your cooking time according to grid conditions. It likely has to wait for proliferation of batteries.
We already have a bit of that. My company operates an iron foundry. It is night shift only because electric rates are cheaper at night. This is slowly catching on.
Until people have electric cars though, for most there is no point. Most of what I do with electric I will do at any price when I want to. My oven needs to work when I'm hungry. My furnace needs to keep the pipes from freezing (there is some load balance opportunities here). I turn lights on when it is dark.
I think the modern world is also considered the electrified world. On demand power is what drives the modern world. It enables such luxuries and tools like computers, phones, power tools, the internet, etc. The grid responding no sounds like something that would be out of a 1980's anti-USSR propaganda, and I can't help but feel like such a world would be considered dystopian by most. And we currently don't have the capacity or technology to store electricity for long periods (i.e. by renewables) without another support structure like nuclear or biomass.
Additionally, we don't have electric vehicles/machinery that can adequately replace many of the essential tools that we have today. Try mining on a fully electric system. I don't think you're going to get very far right now. Maybe some of these processing systems could be electrified but not the whole thing (hey, maybe we'd go small modular reactors and that'd power these machines? But I doubt it).
The reason I bring up such things like concrete and steel, besides the logistics of constructing them (again, getting heat is a problem), is because when we talk about fossil fuels it is really a proxy conversation for climate and emissions. It is a danger that we are only focusing on this and not other things.
>> One of the biggest challenges in climate is that the population has been so hyper focused with energy and transportation
I do think Gates[0] wrote a decent article on the subject matter and how we need to start widening our net if we're really going to solve the problem.
It would be a pretty bleak society without many of these never mind all of the various medicinal stuff such as antiseptics, antihistamines, vitamin capsules, cortisone, glycerin, asparin
Basic hydrocarbons can be pretty easily synthesized, though. Refining them out of oil is cheaper, but not so much cheaper that we'd have to forego this stuff.
Without ability to synthesize medications society would need to go back to herbal medicines. Too bad 90% of society knows jack squat about the natural sources of commonly used medications.
It wouldn't matter much if we did. Many are only available in some areas. Often they are in such impure forms that you can't actually use them even if you know it is there. And concentration is varied enough that you can't do precision treatment.
> The trick to maximising timber production is to employ coppicing – cultivating trees such as ash or willow that resprout from their own stump, becoming ready for harvest again in five to 15 years. This way you can ensure a sustained supply of timber and not face an energy crisis once you’ve deforested your surroundings.
Coppice and pollard creates 'water shoots' - long, straight, copious branches. For crafting material, the taper of the material creates problems, so coppice gives you better results.
Similarly, charcoal made from coppiced wood will have a fairly uniform diameter, and few side branches to create snags. Post-industrial, that should allow you to make more charcoal per batch, but I don't know if that matters as much for brick retorts.
For steel making, I don't know how important air gaps are versus calorie content of the furnace. Uniformity would certainly get you more calories into it but might also suffocate the fire.
In Canada, hydro dams generate most of the electricity. It attracts amongst others huge aluminium smelters in Quebec. So the idea of not being able to generate industrial products with solar panels or dams is not a 100% valid argument
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadNow this isn't a particularly low tech way of going about it, and producing the hydrogen requires massive amounts of electricity. So probably not an option if you're bootstrapping civilization after a collapse.
This is not just about lifestyle. When you're spending all your time hunting animals to eat or digging up hard-to-reach coal/low-energy peat so you don't freeze to death in Winter, you can't do other work like research, and you can't support a population growth that enabled our advances.
You go from one planet to the next assessing their suitability. When you decide to settle the game ends.
You can't travel indefinitely because ships systems degrade and people die.
One of the worst fates for me in this game is settling humanity of the world devoid of natural resources.
This causes them to regress to neolithic level of technology and never to progress beyond that.
You can lose a lot of people. They will recover. You can lose science and culture. They will rebuild it eventually. But if you land them on a planet without resources... there's no hope for their future.
EDIT: corrected spelling of word 'lose'
"Loose" rhymes with "juice", "lose" rhymes with "news", if that helps.
The difference is in the sound of the final s. "loose" ends with "s" from "set", whereas "lose" ends with the z from "zoo".
And while the vocal sound is the same according to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lose and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loose, I feel that there is (or can be) some difference there. Just like in "jews" vs "juice".
Why does lose pronounce the way it does when nose doesn't pronounce as noose, pose doesn't pronounce as poose, lol.. It's even funny if you ask me.
Let the grammar police whip me down with downvotes but I still stand up by my opinion, English is a frigging weird language full of quirks. I speak 4 languages and 2 of them are Latin based and almost never run into the same kind of issues as English. French does not pronounce the way it is written but at least is consistent about it.
And nobody bothered to respond to the original comment other than making pedantic remarks. You've got too much free time on your hands.
Wouldn't this be a case for the orthography police?
> Wouldn't this be a case for the orthography police?
At least we already have the semantics police on the scene
'Lose' rhymes with 'two's [complement]'; 'news' rhymes with 'pews'. (The latter pair has a /j/ or 'yuh sound' before the vowel.)
(Heh, really is a can of worms isn't it: 'choose' rhymes with 'lose'; not with 'loose'. Poor ESL learners, no envy from me! Hindi/devanagari, which I'm learning as a second language, is so easy by comparison.)
This must be a regional thing. I've never heard someone pronounce "news" as "nyooze". "Pews" is pronounced that way, however.
I'm en-US, obviously :)
The other form you often see this in is long 'u's being 'oo' rather than (as I would say) roughly 'ew'. (Duplicate, repudiate, muse, etc.)
... and "lose" to bring this full circle.
"Looser" on the other hand we don't see very often. The meaning is "more loose".
With all the ingenuity you can't make reasonable amount of chemical elements that don't occur in your environment.
They also can't use fire to command more than just energy their bodies produce.
Hence no dolphin technical civilisation. Land apes have beaten them to it.
I played three games, my highscore: 10,040
Industrial Revolution would be relative to the unique scenario. People will always innovate
Had the industrial revolution not followed this agricultural revolution it seems possible that society would've been stuck in another Malthusian trap and there would not be enough surplus for the industrial revolution to get started.
It answers the question "could we boot a modern civilization without fossil fuels"? A re-boot of modern civilization would be able to mine the garbage pits of current humanity.
You need a large population of farmers growing food to have excess for non farmers. We get around that with fossil fuels today. You also need surplus because the weather is not uniform, so you need enough for your society to supply itself for a few bad years, including the "freeloaders" doing something else.
Much more interesting are petrochemicals, many are possible to synthesize without petroleum but it's way less economical.
Examples given in the article were on the scale of post nuclear conflict societal collapse. No ports, no highways, no railways, no dual use infrastructure at all. No more fossil fuel deliveries happening. No deliveries of anything.
Rebuilding in that environment would be challenging in the extreme. I'm not sure that any rebuilding happens in the vast majority of places.
I think you could use biomass to bootstrap these. Biosmass wouldn't be sustainable, but once you have the metallurgy, etc in place you could then build wind turbines.
But it could be a step in a bootstrap process. Build some hydro/nuclear/wind power plants, then you can start looking into hydrogen reduction for steel production.
You also get eucalypt oil as a by-product from harvesting these trees wikipedia tells me this has a high enough octane rating to serve as a fuel in it's own right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_oil
Now this might be difficult to achieve in a near collapse. I'm not sure the size of plantations you would need I assume would be pretty massive.
Then there's the matter of getting enough people down into the mines to get enough out. Historically this was done via slavery, but those ancient civilizations first needed to acquire giant, mean, ugly armies in order to get the slaves. Where do you find a few hundred thousand unarmed people to enslave after a nuclear war?
Actually, first you would have to find a few hundred thousand armed people and convince them to join your army to enslave all the other people. And you would have to have quite a bit of luck. If you didn't, one, or maybe even a group, of the few hundred thousand soldiers you found to be in your army might figure out that they can just kill you and it will be their army.
The ancient way was hard. The entire process would not be as easy as many believe.
But, frankly, we are fucked here on Earth. We're consuming resources at an exponential rate with a population way, way outside what the planet can support sustainably. And we won't fix it before it's too late, because our base human nature wants more, bigger, better at the expense of all else.
I'm with Musk on this, the only way we survive is to get the hell off Earth. But the reasons why are more than just to have a "backup plan" for humanity.
One of humanity's best traits is our adaptability. Put us under stressors and we inevitably adapt to any situation, no matter how dire. Now stick a group of humans in space (or Mars, no difference), task them with creating a self-sustaining technological society, give them a lot of time, and when you come back what you find will be a radically different culture than anything we could relate to on Earth.
That group of humans will have been forced, for generations, to be ruthlessly efficient with their sustainability and use of resources. We are social creatures, and with that comes the social pressure to conform for the survival of the group. Because of these pressures, the base nature of individual greed we witness here on Earth won't have the space to thrive. Given even more time, we may even be lucky enough to see that trait bred out of us. If that were to happen, we may just have a shot at long-term survival as a species.
Colonies need support initially. But, once they get established and self sustaining it seems to be the natural progression to wonder why they still are subjects of a far away, likely exploitive, ruler.
And as a plan, I think that's basically completely stupid. Even our worst case climate change projections give us an Earth that is incredibly more habitable than any extraterrestrial environment. The worst conditions you can find on this entire planet today are more habitable than the best you can find elsewhere in our star system.
Think of what it would take to have a self-sustaining Mars colony, for instance. If we have the ability to do that, then surely it would be a lot easier to do that same thing here on Earth at a fraction of the cost and risk. Why not just do that instead?
Luddites always whine about the resources "wasted" on space exploration, science, and now the beginnings of industry, but they don't appreciate how in so many ways the fruits of our efforts in space end up benefiting all of us here on Earth.
And since those people claim to be concerned with finite resources and a fragile biosphere, why constrain ourselves to the resources of our mother planet (which resource extraction and utilization demonstrably damages) instead of moving our industry to the dead vacuum of space and tapping the near-infinite mass and energy of the rest of the Universe?
2. Spinning habitats create artificial gravity (though astronauts on the ISS do okay in zero g for months or more). No new tech advances necessary.
Humans are nothing if not adaptable and ingenious. Space is just next in a long line of "inhospitable" areas we've colonized.
Most of Magellan's crew died or abandoned the expedition. That doesn't mean it wasn't a worthwhile endeavor for our species.
The problem with this line of thinking is is that when people say "we" they don't really mean it in "the human kind" sense. Because that's either logistically impossible, or if it's not, you get to leave with the same people that want "bigger, better" and they'll ruin it for everyone else.
So educating these people should come first no matter which scenario humanity pursues.
I think they mean it in the 'species' sense: that there's another planet that serves as a redundant node in the network of the human species. If one node fails, another is on hand to keep the network going and rebuild the failing node.
> So educating these people should come first
People who talk about 'educating others' on some important thing often convey a deep sense of hubris. I hope that's not actually true of you, but please just be aware that your comment implies this.
I meant what I said as a reply to parent's assertion about resource consumption and unsustainability, so I don't know, maybe it is hubris.
But I feel like it's safe to assume that the vast majority of people don't really think about how their behaviours in respect to consumption impacts the world as a whole. I'm probably not educated enough in this respect either, but I am pretty sure that following a philosophy where owning less things is better than owning more things is preferable.
Yes, I know that in the big picture of the environmental issues the planet has it is not individual contributions that have the largest impact. However the companies that do, are the ones that hold the same "uneducated" people in decision making positions.
So, that's why I concluded that better environmental education as a whole would mean less need for humans to flee to other planets. If I'm wrong and that's not the case, then it means the Wachowkis were right, humanity really is a virus.
Coming to your other point:
> I think they mean it in the 'species' sense:
If parent meant it like you're suggesting, it's not by saving the whole species as it is now (ie, 7+ billions of people) but as descendants of the lucky few that get to leave Earth. That in my opinion is definitely not the same as saving the species.
Even if Earth is exhausted of all its resources, the two things that Earth will continue to have, is (1) gravity at 9.8 m/s^2, and (2) a magnetic field.
It’s possible the magnetic field can be eliminated, if the planet’s core turns solid, in which case, we all need to go underground. But the planet will continue to get sunlight, and it will continue to have gravity.
These 2 key things, are found nowhere else in this universe. Except for Venus, which has a similar gravity, but it’s so hot, the surface can melt lead.
And we still don’t yet have a high probability of the closest extra-solar planet, that can sustain life with earth-like gravity and a magnetic field.
Even an asteroid that eliminated the dinosaurs was still not able to eliminate life on Earth. Why? Because of this water world, its gravity, and its magnetic field.
So the best solution to having a backup for humanity, is to probably (1) dig a hole deep in the ground, and establish a deep mine colony there. Or (2) build a deep ocean habitat, and establish a deep marine colony there.
That way, if an asteroid hits land, then the deep ocean colony can survive. Or if the asteroid hits the ocean, then the deep mine colony can survive.
Lucifer's Hammer had some fairly realistic assessments of life in the following 5-10 years after the event, centred around restarting production. One big point was about some books very similar in concept to "The Knowledge" being used to preserve necessary information, and another was about recapturing some existing nuclear facilities to try to sustain life at all, given the big energy requirements for agriculture and basic personal heat after the event (because of e.g. huge amounts of atmospheric dust)
Reading this article also made me realize, with surprise, that I've never thought about this aspect of Fermi's paradox! One of the many variables that led to our civilization's rise may be the simple fact that we had hundreds of millions of years of abundant life before us that failed to industrialize. Imagine if human-like life had evolved a billion years ago, when the reservoirs of petrochemicals were a billion years less developed?
If it turns out that both life and sentient life are actually surprisingly common, it might be the case that most civilizations are borne unto planets not yet ready to support their technological advancement, and all they can do is burn out the wick before they reach a powderkeg moment. The great filter could work the other way -- we could be the rare success merely by dint of having shown up 'late'.
Fun article!
TV Tropes calls this a "Morton's Fork" and describes it for this book as: What spurs the decision to change the past even though it'll erase our timeline and existence is the fact that Earth is doomed to an even worse apocalyptic scenario than the one they've already experienced. The human population will be reduced to under 10 million, and humanity will be plunged back into the Stone Ages with little hope of ever rising to civilization ever again, as they have exhausted all easily available energy sources and climate change means they will soon be facing a new ice age.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/PastwatchT...
On the other hand if an intelligent species spawns on a much larger planet they can progress much longer before depleting their resources.
Rocketry doesn’t exist just because some idealists wanted to go to space. It exists because governments wanted to invent new ways to bomb their enemies. A V-2 allows you to bomb England from continental Europe (and wasn’t even a cost-effective solution for that); nobody was going to build a Saturn V-sized rocket for that use case, and even if they wanted to, it’s not clear that they could get it to work without lots of testing with smaller prototypes.[1] Compounding this issue is that, on this hypothetically larger planet, whatever enemies you’d want to bomb in the first place could also be much farther away! Whereas on Earth it’s not hard to reach any other point on the planet; a little over a decade from the V-2 we had ICBM’s.
[1] By way of analogy, Lofstrom loops are theoretically much more efficient than rockets, but to find out for sure we’d have to build a full scale example, and that would be extremely expensive even if we didn’t run into any unforeseen cost overruns or delays—which we inevitably would because this would be the first time we built anything like this. It would be like ITER except at least ITER has a practical application if it works.
If anyone wants to learn more about the history of this specific/niche topic, there's actually an interesting book (with a foreword by Isaac Asimov), Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants by John Drury Clark:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677285.Ignition_
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Drury_Clark
* PDF copy: http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wLk2j7_KB0
Perhaps then we (they?) would have had time to contemplate the consequences of burning through that massive biochemical battery with wild abandon!
> The great filter could work the other way -- we could be the rare success merely by dint of having shown up 'late'.
Personally I like the idea of a middle ground between this and the more common inversion: that there's an optimal planetary resource balance wherein a species can develop enough technology to keep the wick from burning out, but energy densities are not sufficient to ignite the same kind of powder keg we have.
Filter-traversing civilizations would be even rarer, then.
But yeah, super fun to think about.
Currently U235 is only 0.7% of natural uranium, but one can make a nuclear reactor with natural water as a regulator with ratios of about 3%. So for most of Earth's history an intelligent race could probably develop nuclear power at the wood burning level of energy production. If nuclear and coal were developed in tandem, I can't imagine coal winning out. It is so much less safe and dirty.
There is even geologic formations where natural nuclear reactors existed in the past[1].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
When people say "nuclear reactors are safe," they mean advanced modern designs with computers everywhere and precise engineering, not a Bronze-age clay kiln filled to the brim with enriched material.
There are many a history book of war captives (slaves) being sent into gold/silver mines for a quick death.
There would be a nonzero chance of Bronze Age civilization wiping itself out through environmental catastrophe.
TIL. Fascinating, thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
Are there other natural materials that could be used instead of metal to achieve this level of precision? I'm pretty skeptical on this.
Are there energy sources, other than coal, that could be used to develop early metallurgy to the point where someone could re-invent Maudslay's lathe? I suspect that there are and given enough time someone would find one. It might take longer to reach this point but I believe we could get there.
The key foundations of human intelligence and ingenuity will always remains regardless of whether or not fossil fuels exist for us to exploit. Non-renewable resources only served to speed up our industrialization.
No, it doesn't. Only knowledge that people consider to have value will be retained over time. Many things are lost to history, for example.. nobody knows how to make cobblestone. (Or so I'm told)
Granted, we've recently (mostly) rediscovered how to make those, but it shows knowledge accumulation isn't monotonic.
As for Roman concrete, the Romans were blessed with some really nice volcanic ash, but we can build things out of concrete that the Romans never could thanks to rebar alone.
Can you expand on that? I didn't think cobblestones were made? Don't you just pick suitable stones?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sett_(paving)
(which is often called a cobblestone)
Edit: Still being laid in Edinburgh...
I had assumed you meant that the stone had been manufactured into a block, but this is clearly something else.
Some kind of special concrete formulation do you think?
The formula kept as a trade secret, then lost when the company closed or got bought or something I suppose?
Rather unfortunate, alas.
Edited
An example that comes to mind is a brick townhouse nearby that was struck by a car and part of a structural brick rounded wall collapsed. It remained that way for many years because the owner simply couldn't find a mason that knew how to rebuild it.
Even modern technology can be lost. Look inside any company with a lackluster documentation culture to see this in action on a small scale.
Even NASA had to spent considerable time re-discovering how the Saturn 5 was put together.
Edit - I think I meant this as a reply to the GP, but I'll leave it here.
Somehow the cobblestones managed to look both randomly placed and have some "lines" that gave it a very orderly look. The cobblestones were placed in some substrate that allowed moss to grow between them.
At some point about 10 years ago, the city decided to tear up a giant trench in the middle of the street to replace some sewage. When they were done, they covered the trench with concrete and then re-placed the stones they had removed onto the concrete.
It looks nothing like it used to. Just messy. I think that if someone who didn't grow up there were to see it, they would think it was a perfectly charming street, but really it lost so, so much.
I asked around and apparently nobody knows how to lay cobblestones anymore. There was a certain art to how they were placed and the substrate selected: dirt, then sand (what kind? how coarse?) then stones, then something else. This ensured that they would never wash away even in the torrential rains we get here every year.
Placing cobblestones seems like an easy thing to do. Just rocks on dirt, right? But how do you ensure they never move, they never wash away, they don't get covered in dirt or greenery.
The craziest thing is that the street had remained basically pristine for what was probably 100+ years, but the new stones on concrete are already falling out.
This is regional. I went to a talk on cobblestone streets in New York. There are entire books dedicated to the craft, and new scholarship on it ongoing. (It pertains closely to the question of prefabricated infrastructure.)
IIRC, they found that limes (or lemons) would prevent scurvy on long voyages; then the ships got faster AND the switched to a citrus fruit lemons (or limes) that didn't have enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy, but they didn't realize it because the faster voyages didn't allow enough time for scurvy to develop; then on some longer voyages sailors did develop scurvy despite eating the citrus fruit, so the Navy erroneously concluded that citrus fruit didn't cure scurvy after all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy#19th_century
Admirals resisted submarines and carriers until catastrophe forced their hands.
Most people don't realize that scurvy had actual fatalities on most British ships that went on long voyages.
Similarly, in Japan in the late 1800's, deckhands had a ration of free rice (mainly carbohydrates), so that's all they ate. As a result, there were ships half full of sailors laying ill from almost no vitamins, mainly B1, resulting in beriberi.
That continued with the army into the early 1900's:
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/eating-too-much-rice-almost...
The Ruhr valley area was denuded already in Roman times due to this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmoor#Pre-history
I believe that if you can achieve precision tools you can use those tools to meet societies ongoing energy needs using renewable energy sources. This means that if you have non-fossil fuel energy sources available to advance metallurgy and toolmaking to the point you can make precision tools then you can reboot civilization without fossil fuels. I also think it is very likely that humans could do this but it might take longer than it did with fossil fuels.
All the easily extracted oil is long gone on earth. There used to be deposits bubbling up from the ground, oil extraction now depends on several centuries of accumulated knowledge, industry, infrastructure, and resource maps to get to tar sands, deep water deposits, fracking, etc.
They are similar to apes in intelligence perhaps. That's not human level.
I think if these animals could write and read somehow they would be just as smart (if not smarter) than some humans :)
No, there are no animals at all, anywhere even close to the smartness of humans. It's not a small difference, it's a HUGE gap.
When we talk about how smart apes, or dolphins are, we are talking relative to other animals. Relative to humans, it's almost nothing.
They are stuck behind bronze age. I just don't see any technology without having these things as prerequisites. Even electricity is generally impossible when you live in a big conductor.
(On the other other hand, salt water is metal killer...)
I think this is the key. The modern world is an electrified world. But the other things you point out are in some cases advantages are also disadvantages. But I think the biggest thing is metal and electricity.
What we'd have to change is the way society consumes energy. Right now, we operate under the paradigm of "I request energy, the grid ramps up and down to fill demand".
Instead, we could to switch over to "I ask the grid if capacity is available and use energy when it is".
That would require the ability for the grid to say "no" and for industries to respond to "nos". Nothing terribly hard about that with current data connections.
Easiest way to set that up is with energy bidding. When production is high and demand is low, price goes down. When production is low and demand is high, price goes up. Some applications could even chose to just ignore it and always take (However, everyone could not do that).
What would be the consequence of such a system? That'd mean things like manufacturing would have to have some ramping capabilities. Homes might have to tolerate temps shifting higher or lower than is comfortable. Goods might need to be transported at a much slower pace (Trans oceanic shipping, in particular, would need to be completely changed). And some industries would probably die all together with current tech (such as the airline and cruise industry).
The next question is what do we consider as using fossil fuels? For example, I wouldn't call burning wood a fossil fuel (even though it releases CO2 into the atmosphere) nor would I consider turning vegetable oil into plastic as using a fossil fuel. Both could be done today to keep the same amount of products, but would significantly change the cost characteristics of such things. Plastics would suddenly become a lot more expensive, for example.
Steel production might go down, but would not be eliminated.
Concrete would be one that you'd have to define what you mean by "fossil fuel" as it would release CO2 but isn't technically a fossil fuel. The process of making concrete can be done without burning oil.
That's available now, if you buy power in large enough amounts. It's not popular.[1]
[1] https://seuc.senate.ca.gov/interruptibleservicecontractissue...
In order for this to really work well, we need national standards for both grid operators and grid users. The reason for all of this being both unpopular and requiring big purchases is because it's pretty much a 1 off deal between the grid operator and the purchaser. It requires that they both both come into the room to make a deal.
Instead, we need something closer to the NEM in Australia. There needs to be a standard bidding mechanism for buying/selling energy on the market.
Our electric meters need to be hooked up to a grid pricing network and our appliances need to be able to talk to that network through our meters.
Once there is a standard communication protocol and pricing network, then you'll start to see neat things happen with smarter power consuming products.
For that to work, however, it needs to be setup nationally. It won't work if every single grid invents their own market or bidding standard. Ideally, this would be an international standard.
No, not a spot market in electricity. California tried that two decades ago, with an auction every 15 minutes. It was such a disaster that PG&E, which had lobbied for it, went bankrupt. Speculators caused blackouts. The current system has a market, but it's a day-ahead system where generators bid to provide power tomorrow, and there's a small spot market for fine-tuning.
An overview.[1]
[1] https://pjm.adobeconnect.com/_a16103949/p5yj7cc7p75/
Until people have electric cars though, for most there is no point. Most of what I do with electric I will do at any price when I want to. My oven needs to work when I'm hungry. My furnace needs to keep the pipes from freezing (there is some load balance opportunities here). I turn lights on when it is dark.
Additionally, we don't have electric vehicles/machinery that can adequately replace many of the essential tools that we have today. Try mining on a fully electric system. I don't think you're going to get very far right now. Maybe some of these processing systems could be electrified but not the whole thing (hey, maybe we'd go small modular reactors and that'd power these machines? But I doubt it).
The reason I bring up such things like concrete and steel, besides the logistics of constructing them (again, getting heat is a problem), is because when we talk about fossil fuels it is really a proxy conversation for climate and emissions. It is a danger that we are only focusing on this and not other things.
>> One of the biggest challenges in climate is that the population has been so hyper focused with energy and transportation
I do think Gates[0] wrote a decent article on the subject matter and how we need to start widening our net if we're really going to solve the problem.
[0] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-clima...
It would be a pretty bleak society without many of these never mind all of the various medicinal stuff such as antiseptics, antihistamines, vitamin capsules, cortisone, glycerin, asparin
Coppice and pollard creates 'water shoots' - long, straight, copious branches. For crafting material, the taper of the material creates problems, so coppice gives you better results.
Similarly, charcoal made from coppiced wood will have a fairly uniform diameter, and few side branches to create snags. Post-industrial, that should allow you to make more charcoal per batch, but I don't know if that matters as much for brick retorts.
For steel making, I don't know how important air gaps are versus calorie content of the furnace. Uniformity would certainly get you more calories into it but might also suffocate the fire.
What if humans had evolved before fossil fuels had had enough time to form?
(I had no idea the British pronounced "pews" and "poos" identically, btw. Presidente for Life Xi must be horrified.)