Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't have to kill everyone, just destroy the technological society and that would solve Fermi's paradox. Think about the things our technological society consumes, particularly petroleum. There's no way there is enough of it to last a thousand years (a blip on a cosmological time scale). We have no way of feeding our current population without fossil fuels for fertilizer. Maybe that ends in a technological transition to something else, or a social transition to something sustainable. Maybe. There aren't a lot of data points.

View on HN

I was hoping someone would bring up the technological aspect of a collapse of modern society and then regrowth. There are two major issues with humans post-collapse being able to create a technological society and these are lack of fossil fuels and surface deposits of metals being used up. Both of these work together to make an industrial evolution type event very difficult and perhaps impossible.

I would wager that there is a different type of technological path requiring less fossil fuels and less surface metals. I dont have any data to support this belief obviously but I do believe that given enough time a human society could develop technology to enable space colonization without the jumpstart of an industrial revolution. This would look like slow generational iteration as opposed to explosive revolution and therefore would be more sustainable IMO.

Metals wouldn’t be a problem. The metals we already mined will be all over the place in the form of abandoned junk from before the collapse

Iron is arguably the most important, and also degrades - past, as I understand it, the point at which it can be recovered by low-tech processes. The longer it takes to bootstrap a second industrial revolution the harder it would become.

Yeah this is the issue with metals and likely the largest barrier to a post collapse society. Likely ironworking would end up looking like pre-industrial japan where iron was very extremely valuable and of relatively low quality compared to the west due to the problems with smelting it from iron sands.

This is why I propose long term technological advancement without a second industrial revolution.

Surely any post-collapse society could just mine the cities for metals. And presumably with a much reduced population there would be plenty of arable land for growing oil bearing crops obviating the need for most fossil fuels.

It's disputed whether even modern ethanol production is energy-positive. But trying to start an entire biofuels production chain from scratch would certainly not be net positive, as you would need to already have mechanized agriculture and a petrochemical industry to get that efficiency.

Coal liquefaction would probably be superior to biofuels, as it seems we will give up using it before it is depleted.

Green fertiliser can be produced at ~3x the cost of petroleum-based fertilizers.

Nobody does it because it's uneconomical as long as oil is cheap.

Climate change will ruin food production, not global fertilizer shortages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com