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Comment by windows_tips | Hacker News Reader

>How could the industrial boom in China or the USA in the late 1800s and early 1900s have happened without emvironmental destruction? How can growth happen in China now without it?

Possibly if they had used solar-thermal power generation and focused on battery tech instead of exploiting petroleum so heavily.

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I'm reading "The Progress of Invention in the 19th Century"[0] right now, and it's at least partly dissuading me of the whole "We couldn't possibly have developed without fossil fuels" idea, along with the similar "If we collapse now we'll never build back up without abundant surface fossil fuels."

Worthwhile electric generators really weren't that far behind worthwhile steam engines. Without any fossil fuels, I think we would've just built lots of hydro and wind.

[0]: https://gutenberg.org/files/41538/41538-h/41538-h.htm

Sarcasm?

There was already heavy investment in steam technology. Using the sun the boil water instead of coal or wood is much less resource intensive and completely eliminates external supply chains.

Did they have enough tech by that point to even begin to figure out mass manufacturing of solar cells to focus enough energy into water to make steam? Burning something that burns well is a much more intuitive and scalable process...

Also, mining the easy stocks (at that point) is a low tech affair too. Which was powered by... combustion of fuel and human labor.

We still can’t make solar panels with 100% efficiency, what hope did they have?

You don't need solar cells to heat water to boiling, just glass or a metal like aluminum or silver.

With glass you can build a lens to concentrate light. With a metal you can build a concentrating mirror.

Good points. But lens building is a complex endeavour that requires tooling at the manufacturing level (especially computing power!) - no matter the choice of available material, yes? Doing it with high precision at a civilisation-powering scale seems like an impossible ask of a species that was still considering much of their Home planet to be “new” (Americas).

Galileo was making lenses hundreds of years before the time we are talking about. Also, eye and magnifying glasses existed then.

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