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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Our industrial revolution benefited immensely from large amounts of carbon buried in the ground where we could fairly easily get to it.

A follow-up species in a few million years might struggle to bootstrap theirs.

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There will be no follow-up species besides those we evolve into and/or create. We're going to inherit the observable universe to ourselves. Even if we go through a couple of apocalypses on the road to it, it's really hard to imagine a scenario where ALL humans die, so it's much more economic to rebuild a civilization from remaining humans than evolve intelligence again.

That's a whole bunch of unearned certainty, but the same point applies to a post-apocalyptic resurgence of humanity; the second industrial revolution is going to be missing the readily accessible coal and oil that drove the first one along.

We're from different memeplexes, but both of our assumptions are equally unearned.

But if we're talking about a second industrial revolution it won't be like the first one, because:

- There will be more carbon in the air, hence more wood to chop and burn

- There will books lying around describing how to leapfrog many steps

I don't think it'd take 10000 years again to restore civilization the second time around.

Might take 500 million though.

Earth is highly unlikely to support intelligent life 500 million years from now. Multicellular life entirely won’t exist in 1 billion years.

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