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Comment by spurgu | Hacker News Reader

Question I'm asking myself is, what's the likelihood there would have ever been fossil fuel deposits with the potential to kickstart a civilization?

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Humans had civilization before we knew how to use fossil fuels, we just didn't have industrial civilization. AIUI civilization mostly consists of agreeing to live and work together in groups bigger than Dunbar's number.

I've seen two pretty common definitions of "civilization". One is agriculture; one is writing.

There have been plenty of "barbarian" groups that coordinated on very large scales.

Yeah of course would you'd need to redefine civilization as "inudstrial" civilization for my argumentn to make sense. Still, check out parent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563017

tl;dr: we've kickstarted civilization due to our harnessing of energy. If the venusians didn't have that option they would've probably lived as cavemen and couldn't have prevented or foreseen the disaster.

Unless the disaster was self-inflicted by the Venusians, when they unleashed the sequestered carbon by harvesting energy.

This is one of the reasons this story sticks in my mind.

We could always have done a lot with wood and steam engines or even making wood gas or ethanol.

A lot yes, but anything near what we've done now? Over the course of a couple of [thousands|million|billion] years sure.

And if at a slower pace that would definitely (or should have) resulted in quicker reaction skills/abilities than we have now with a 50-100 year timespan within where our established way of being will have collapsed.

We eventually would have discovered fission, and without fossil fuel alternatives it would have taken off on a much larger scale.

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