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Comment by pacificmint | Hacker News Reader

> Additionally, without the very dense energy in the easily accessible fossil fuels we've very nearly mined out, restarting an industrial revolution would be at best extremely problematic.

I feel like this is the more important of the two points you made.

Even without Uranium, it's conceivable to have a second industrial revolution. We don't need nuclear power for that.

But without easily accessible fossil fuels, it's much harder to envision the next civilization having an industrial revolution. They might indeed never rise to our level of technology again.

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>But without easily accessible fossil fuels, it's much harder to envision the next civilization having an industrial revolution. They might indeed never rise to our level of technology again.

knowledge is the key. Even Ancient Greeks could have built a wind electricity generator if they knew how - ie. if they knew about copper wire and electrical charge movement in it. And you can collect sun light and focus it on a boiler while still being in Ancient Greeks situation - that gives you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile which can be used to generate electricity too. And they could have possibly have that too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaic_pile or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector#Cat_whisker_d... - piece of crystal and a wire making a diode - and you can have primitive radio.

So, the newly built civilization bypassing fossil fuels would even be better :)

> Even Ancient Greeks could have built a wind electricity generator if they knew how - ie. if they knew about copper wire and electrical charge movement in it.

Did they have the level of materials science to build a practical one? They weren't able to produce steel, for example.

That is my point - the necessary material science in many respects is just a knowledge. If you have copper it is relatively easy to make copper wire, at least some crude one, if you know what it is for. It took 2000 years to build the knowledge, yet having that knowledge one can rebuild a lot of stuff in orders of magnitude shorter timeframe. Btw, that reminded about that book that i liked a lot back then as a child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island - rebuilding a significant pieces of civilization starting from scratch almost.

It's not though - it's a whole interlinked ecosystem of industry and even if you have the knowledge that doesn't mean you'd be able to bootstrap. A simple example is that most wind turbines today are likely built from steel that was made in an electric arc furnace, which themselves require massive amounts of electricity to run. (And that's just the basic material, to say nothing of the tools and processes you need to actually build one).

It’s one thing to build highly optimised things and another to build things that work just well enough.

"Just well enough" may not be enough to rebuild society with. The Greeks didn't lack the knowledge of how to make a steam engine - they had novelty steam engines - but they lacked the industrial base that could actually make them productive.

i imagine how in the year 3000 the people will be arguing why the people of the 21st century, i.e. we, wouldn't build say a fusion engines and power generators (we do have "novelty" fusion devices) , or may be even FTL space ship when it happens to be such a simple thing :) We probably have the tech for the fusion, or very close to it, yet we don't know how to put it together and/or in what direction to make that small final push.

You can build turbines that produce a few kW out of wood.

As long as we don't forget how to build renewables we could skip the fossil fuel stage. Bootstrap solar panels and wind turbines using some biomass as fuel and continue from there.

Could we not bootstrap with coal? There's still plenty left. Oil would be an issue though.

There isn't any easy to get coal anymore, just as any other fuel.

We may be able to start low scale stuff to bootstrap renewables, but if we lose our knowledge, things get much harder.

We've dug out almost all the easily accessible minerals - we're currently mining minerals that are cheaply accessible to us with modern technology, but the ones that were cheaply accessible to pre-industrial civilizations are long gone.

For some minerals (e.g. metals) that might possible even be a bonus, as we've brought it up to the surface and it might be more accessible than before (a scrapyard that's buried under some soil could be an excellent place to mine iron), but there won't be shallow coal or shallow oil that a second industrialization could use as a cheap power source.

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