Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

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I struggle to think of a planet that wouldn't have the necessary ingredients for an industrial revolution. I don't think you need fossil fuels at all; on Earth, even without fossil fuels, we probably could have eventually gone from biofuels to wind/hydro power to solar/nuclear (these requiring a lot of energy for the refinement/processing of raw resources). It would have been a slow and gradual process, but if this process took about ~150 years with fossil fuels, I bet it would have only taken something like 500 years without them - a tiny blip in time, really.

I think any planet capable of hosting carbon-based life would be able to at least produce wind energy, and probably most (assuming a rocky planet with liquid water and an atmosphere containing oxygen) would be able to develop all the energy types I mentioned. Solar and nuclear might be relatively less feasible if certain elements aren't common on that planet, and battery storage might also suffer from lack of resources. But wind and hydro alone are probably sufficient to eventually be able to develop controlled fusion down the line and have most energy-resource issues obviated.

Even if you imagine some exotic form of life not like ours at all, on a planet that doesn't necessarily have water or an atmosphere, the life has to be able to derive energy from some kind of external source, whether it's by facilitating some chemical reaction like our deep sea micro-organisms or photosynthesis. Most likely that energy can be harvested in an automated fashion, and it's probably relatively abundant if life is able to evolve to the point of intelligence. For it to be completely inaccessible due to lack of resources, IMO you'd have to get into truly strange scenarios like intelligent life somehow developing in a nebula or the atmosphere of a gas giant.

Imagine dolphins become incredibly intelligent and sapient, how would they ever have an Industrial Revolution?

Under water I always imagine that a biological revolution would be more likely, and technologies that evolve (so to speak) out of organisms that make deposits like coral. So you would have a "limestone age", followed by something harder. At some point metals would come into the picture, but it would likely look very different than our "tech tree"/

It's probably not about the resources, but more about the temperature, atmosphere, pressure, etc. I mean, look at the other planets in our solar system. It's clearly at least very unlikely that a planet can support life.

I mean, I disagree about fossil fuels. I don't believe we make the necessary advancements without incredibly energy dense fuel. Everything you listed required a base of energy dense fuels for the process in some fashion. It's very hand wavy to say. Well we would've just figured it out. I'm not convinced?

So if we were the first large life to form on the planet, and there weren't any fossil fuels, I think we'd be screwed. I think we would've stalled until something burned us as fuel.

> Everything you listed required a base of energy dense fuels for the process in some fashion

What about wood, or more "advanced" biofuels (idk, some kind of highly productive grass or a refined algae product), prevents us from developing wind and hydro power? Those were both developed before fossil fuels were widely used anyway. They produced mechanical power instead of electrical, but only because electricity was not understood yet.

The more energy you have, the easier it is to scale energy production up, but you have the resources required to initiate that process with just biofuels. And once you have a base of wind and hydro energy, that allows you to begin the feedback loop of using that energy to assist in constructing more power generation in a virtuous cycle.

edit: I'll also add that the industrial revolution came about after there had already been notable advances in mechanization and manufacturing - the introduction of fossil fuels quite literally threw gas on the fire, but people had started developing increasingly sophisticated machinery like the cotton gin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin) and mechanically-powered loom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancashire_Loom) before fossil fuels started being widely used. And indeed, many of these were hydro-powered.

It's a bit more complicated than this, but one shortcoming is that wood simply doesn't burn hot enough to smelt steel (1100 or so?). Coal was, for us, effectively an essential step.

Advances you mention in your third paragraph don't include the jumps in precision that were predicated on this capability, and indeed necessary for the next steps.

There may of course be some civilisations out there that managed what you're describing - it's a big ol' universe after all - but my gut feel is mitochondria is probably the great filter, rather than an abundance of energy-dense naturally occurring fuel.

This link pops up regularly on HN. It's a spectacularly good read, highly relevant here, in terms of the necessary set of converging prerequisites for an industrial revolution:

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

Mitochondria are just a hack to integrate efficient oxygen metabolism into archaean cells, and I wish people wouldn't worship them so much. Mitochondria started as free living cells that had that metabolism. There's no reason life on a different world couldn't develop it directly in the same lineage as cells destined for multicellularity.

Worship?

I appreciate I only have a sample size of one - but then, so does the 'it's no big deal' crowd.

On this planet we have no alternative routes to the same outcome, and no clear evidence that alternative routes a) couldn't have come about, or b) did but were subsequently out-competed.

I suggest everyone with a Fermi-opinion is in the same camp - massively speculative and a single datapoint (unless you count the myriad (in their absence) counter-points).

The original bacteria that were engulfed to become mitochondria are the "alternative route". It's clearly possible for a cell to have oxygen metabolism on its own because that's how we got here. So the question is, is endosymbiosis the only way to integrate that with a large, complex cell? When you phrase it that way, it should be clear which way the odds lie.

But yes, "worship" is not quite the right word for whatever obsession it is that people have with mitochondria.

Sorry I'm a bit late to reply here, but I still think coal isn't strictly necessary. You don't need steel to develop wind and hydropower, and you can electrify with metals that don't require such high temperatures.

Once you have sufficient electrical power, you can heat things in other ways - for example, aluminum smelting requires even higher temperatures than steel and uses electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting.

Lewis Dartnell's 2016 story published in Aeon (and based on his 2014 book) pops up periodically - eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25187100

The title of the piece is Could we reboot a modern civilisation without fossil fuels?, and is well worth the read.

So, sure, yeah, aluminium melts at about 650 degrees (I considered this fact when looking at aluminium pizza trays for my oven, which can, though rarely does, go beyond 450) and is smelted about 150 more than that.

But in order to smelt it you of course need receptacles that won't melt at that temperature - ie, steel (plus insulation). I was off by a couple of hundred degrees in my earlier comment - steel smelting is around 1300-1500 degrees. So we're back to the original problem.

As to wind and hydro, sure, yes, you can easily generate power from those, as we did for millennia using mostly timber constructs. Though I'm not sure if you're suggesting getting electrical power from those sources is easy, absent some sophisticated technological capabilities (wire-making, for starters).

I don’t think fossil fuels truly come into play until the late 19th century.. Even then to a smallish extent. The great inventors and discoverers did not require them. They are definitely key in manufacturing at scale and globalisation, but I don’t think the development of technology is/was dependent on access to fossil fuels.

>I don’t think fossil fuels truly come into play until the late 19th century

Oil may not have been used much before the latter half of the 19th century, but coal certainly was.

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