Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels?
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So, could we rebuild our civilization without fossil fuels? Maybe. Likely no, it would be different and very strange to our eyes. Heck, it might even be 'better', as they then would not be dealing with our particular type of climate change. Though, they may have their own problems to deal with.
The grass is always greener...
But then again maybe not. Maybe we'd never overcome the activation energy for innovation. You can't do true experiments in history.
Damn cyanobacteria thinking unsustainably and killing the planet for everyone else...
Rather pointing out that (at the time) oxygen in the atmosphere was hostile to more complex forms of life. As we know, oxygen is a pretty unpleasant element in its raw state - but we managed to work around that particular problem.
Similar to the way one might satirize traditional marriage by pointing out that tradition advocates a lot of things that traditional marriage people would find abhorrent, if you take a view of tradition that extends past the start of the industrial revolution.
Which I think is justified, but we should make clear what is being asked and not painting humans as being something their not (i.e. uniquely exploitive, violent, selfish, etc.)
The biodegradability thing is pretty funny too, again human waste absolutely pales in comparison to trees and lignin, at least water bottles can't reproduce.
There seems to be this strange idea that 'culture' means 'has a religious festival' or somesuch. You hear of some traveller lionising a travel destination as being so culturally deep because they happened to visit when a festival was on. Then, because the home country doesn't have that festival or ritual, it's seen as culturally bereft.
There is a ridiculously wide assortment of activities you can get involved in when you're not a scratching at the earth for subsistence - including debating the difference in what 'culture' means with someone on the other side of the world. Whether you're seeing a movie, running a fantasy football league, doling out soup in a soup kitchen, filibustering to stop some random law, fishing through your credit cards for one the plane's entertainment system will accept, chewing the fat with a passerby while sitting on your stoop on a hot night, spending a Saturday doing a gastro-tour of a great vineyard region... pretty much any activity you can think of, right down to submitting your tax forms... these are all culture. The more different kinds of people you throw together, the greater the variety of cultural activities available.
The idea that we are culturally bereft is just plain wrong. We may not have our priorities right with certain aspects of our culture, but we are drowning in culture. I just don't see how culture would be 'deeper' with less interaction between people from the removal of fossil fuels - we had that for human history up until a couple of hundred years ago, and culture was both slow to change and quite unfair, without being any deeper than it is now.
/rant
We've already deforested the planet... you don't get to burn biomass.
A modern, technological civilization gets one bite at the apple, no more (unless they can manage to make it to another planet, where they have all the starting blocks to work with). You don't even get to salvage much from the previous civilization, since all but the crudest products go stale pretty quickly.
Also, I dont think most of the material will be lost. Take aluminum. It's nearly un'rust'able and really doesn't degrade over the time spans we are talking about. Making it from scratch is not obvious, you need electrolysis [1] and some other not terribly clear ideas. That said, you can do it in a garage; you don't need a foundry. And those ideas are likely to survive the end of the world, seeing as aluminum is so useful.
Overall, ideas are like genetics, once you get one great working thing it's hard to loose that mechanism. Give yourself more credit, you are smarter than you think.
[1]http://www.chemguide.co.uk/inorganic/extraction/aluminium.ht...
You can make glass without fossil fuels. If you have energy you can make fossil fuels from air. The key part to replacing fossil fuels is having the energy. Hopefully cheap and in great supply.
Take a look at the before and after pictures. Forest covered half of North America. It's all gone. Prior to that, covered most of Europe, the British Isles.
We've deforested it. It takes something on the order a million years for that to recover, supposing it does.
Take a look at the before and after pictures. Forest covered half of North America. It's all gone. Prior to that, covered most of Europe, the British Isles.
We've deforested it. It takes something on the order a million years for that to recover, supposing it does.
> If you have energy you can make fossil fuels from air.
We're talking about a scenario where they won't have the energy to do that. It's a bootstrapping problem. Everyone commenting here is saying "but that's ok, we'll have all we need to make this fancy stuff"...
When the problem itself is posed as "what if we no longer have all we need to make fancy stuff".
Pictures of North America? What pictures? North America is more heavily forested than it was 100 years ago.
>We're talking about a scenario where they won't have the energy to do that. It's a bootstrapping problem.
We can do it with nuclear power. Maybe even renewables, depending on what happens with battery technology.
>When the problem itself is posed as "what if we no longer have all we need to make fancy stuff"
That will never happen. There are options. It's just a question of what makes the most sense.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science...
and
http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2014/10/13/where-are-w...
Where will you get the "transparent bags", for instance? Sure after the algae fuels are going good, presumably you can make anything you need... but that's the bootstrapping problem again.
Do you know what you needed to start using petroleum? 18th/19th century pumping equipment. Can you bootstrap biofuels with that?
The reality is that there's been a significant amount of reforestation around the world. Some parts are better off than others, but in the US and Europe, for examples, there is more forest today than there was in the late 19th century.
If you're just going to pick irrelevant, arbitrary comparison points, why not claim that it's gotten better since 1982?
I think that glass is much older than you think.
Can a caveman melt some sand in a woodfire? Yeh probably.
That glass will be worthless for any sort of technology. And by the time he can make better glass, he's all out of stuff to burn.
You don't get to do technological civilization twice. The first one uses up all the easy-to-use resources, and supposing there is anything left at all, it won't be usable without the technology that they won't have.
Europe got to use glass because it had plenty of forests to burn. Those are gone. They won't be coming back any time soon.
In warmer regions, people would just tear out the paper in the summer and apply new paper before winter.
There's a kind of poetry I think, a kind of awareness, that your devices may spin up and down with the seasons instead of marching incessantly and unstoppably onward.
(Heating in the winter might be tougher of course. But a house heated to 80F during the day might be 50F in the morning, so might be tolerable?) Or Find ways to store the heat during day and slowly release it at night. Tanks of water in the attic?)
In my experience, a house heated to 80F can be 30F within a matter of a couple of hours, depending on the number of windows, temperature outside, and insulation levels.
I certainly don't think that's a solution to winter problems in cold-weather climates.
As for storing the heat, I'm not really sure what you mean. Surely it would be inefficient to generate extra heat during the day and store it, as opposed to just creating some in the evening?
Add in some passive solar and you can keep a house in the continual US warm without active heat sources fairly easily. The major issue is it stops looking like a traditional house and costs more up front, but it’s not a major issue.
PS: ~6 hours * 1kw/m^2. Take a 30' x 30' roof and that's ~600 kwh per day or an average of 24kw of heating. Though you do need to keep the now off the roof in the winter, but a steep enough rough does that fairly easily.
Ideally, if you can build your entire house below the frost line, you're laughing - but this isn't always feasible.
My understanding is if you live near a stream or pond it's a great way to make heat pumps far more efficient, but otherwise just having a large rock slab in the middle of your house combined with solar heating is far cheaper for heating, but not that useful for cooling if your area does not cool off at night.
Of course, all this is reliant on knowledge of the local geography and climate before you purchase and get set up. If you're limited to where you are right now, you're kind of stuck with what you can put on your property right now. Which could be as limited as running on-grid but growing your own food.
12-17 days after the power failed, the contractor measured temperatures in houses that had had neither power nor occupants during that time. "None of the air or surface temperatures in the 31 houses inspected had fallen below 0°C."
There is a proviso: "In very cold temperatures (for example, -30°C), high winds or houses without basements, the rate of cooling will be much faster than observed in the southern Quebec houses of this study."
Now, I lived for a year in a house which was poorly insulated, and where you could feel the draft through the window frame. When it was -15F outside 2L pop bottles would freeze on the floor of the pantry even when the heat was on, and when the furnace went out during Thanksgiving weekend the inside temperature quickly dropped. Even then, it didn't match the freezing outside temperature over a couple of hours. I can well believe that your experience is true, but it is atypical.
On the other side of things, Passivhaus designs (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house ) give an example of what can be done with good design, for houses designed for freezing weather. They need only 10W/m² of heat, which can often be met by normal activity (people, computers, screens, coffee makers, etc.)
It's possible to have south facing windows in Germany which let in more solar energy in winter than is released by heat loss.
Cooking by fire takes a bit of practice, but even that is easy with some practice. Admittedly, this in many cases isn't considered renewable, but you can remove a cord of wood (approx. 85 cu. ft.) per acre per year without ever depleting your supply. People in Northern climes claim they require 5-6 cords to get through their winters, but with a well insulated and geothermally "heated" house, you could reduce this fairly effectively. A wood gasifier can be used to drive gas burning engines - I'm not sure I'd recommend it for cooking due to potential CO output - you certainly wouldn't want to use it for cooking inside the house.
We have an abundance of energy all around us and while the technologies that harness this energy aren't perhaps as efficient as we'd like yet, they're efficient enough that harnessing a bunch and wiring them together with a battery bank, charge controller and power inverter is enough that you can power your home sustainably with a much reduced need for fossil fuels. There's certainly enough for lights (especially if you're running all LED lights) and T.V.
For the moment, portability of tools and machinery (think chain saws, sawmills etc.), the need for gasoline still isn't removed completely - you could go back to a felling axe and use your own energy, but trust me, as time gets on, you'll realize you spend an awful lot of time rushing to beat winter and wasting time doing things that are done far quicker with power tools. We're now at a point where you can comfortably live off-grid and (mostly) power your home with sustainable energy without giving up too many off the creature comforts you've come to take for granted. With some efforts to reduce your reliance on modern appliances - such as dishwashers, dryers, hairdryers, electric stoves etc. a modest battery bank would be enough to have enough electricity on demand to keep you running relatively normally.
I think there's a difference in living sustainably and using fossil fuels. It's possible to live much more sustainably and still utilize fossil fuels at a consciously reduced rate.
Perhaps something similar could be applied here? An air compressor powered by some renewable fuel (like wood gas) could pump air into portable canisters for use in power tools (or just be hooked directly into the tools themselves, much like in modern automotive repair shops) would solve this at the expense of some portability.
In the above case, neither electricity nor combustion are necessary. The above example does rely on wind power, however (though the site claims that wind speeds as low as 8 MPH are sufficient); I'm not sure if there are any similar compressors that run on other energy sources.
Admittedly, some Amish communities do use diesel generators to power more conventional compressors, but I have a feeling that these would be easier to adapt to the posited post-apocalyptic wood-gas-fueled world.
As to renewables the simple solutions is to over provision and add spare transit capacity. You move electricity 1,000 KM with minimal losses at fairly low cost so with reasonable transit you get to average over a vary large area.
This is why the next generation of battery technology is going to be so groundbreaking. It will allow batteries to become more economical feasible both on a small and large scale. It simply cause renewables to become more societally efficient.
That's why hydro power is absolutely critical to a renewable grid. It's the only scalable way to normalize supply and demand.
We are at the stage with battery technologies, where it would make absolutely to build hydro storage, even given the current trend of removing dams.
However, for other scenarios, it is indeed a viable option, considering that it's statistically the safest (last I checked), very clean, and packs a high energy density.
The problem, though, is that fissile material is subject to a lot of the same availability problems as fossil fuels (if not worse), plus quite a few safety concerns (particularly when it comes to radiation, though coal mining poses this sort of risk, too). The energy density is much better, so we could probably get by for a very long time (especially with things like breeder reactors, increased use of thorium instead of or alongside uranium or plutonium, etc.), but ultimately, we'll need to transition to something like fusion power at the very least.
I am not sure what time spans you speak about. Thousands of years is possible on fission with current technology and at current levels of demand.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379
(and understand that "thousands of years on fission with current technology" is pretty far from the truth)
I can envision a future where libraries have few books. Here's one at a school in Florida - http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/25/us-usa-florida-lib... . Here's a broader commentary about libraries which don't have physical collections, including a public library in San Antonio - http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/is-a-libra... .
I doubt that small-town libraries will get rid of all books. Libraries do have collections of local history which are unlikely to be part of a digital archive. (Eg, phone books from the 1950s, local high school yearbooks, photo collections and films about the annual downtown parade, publications from the local genealogical society, etc.)
But if in 100 years small-town libraries have mostly switched to digital collections, then yes, it's possible for the knowledge to disappear even if the infrastructure remains.
I don't think it's likely, but it's not completely inconsistent.
Research is another question, but it's likely that a society that was more heavily based on electricity would discover relativity sooner than we did.
Also you don't have to enrich uranium at all if you can instead enrich water for a heavy water reactor or use a graphite moderated reactor.
Even better, if the available power is low, just run things slower. Does web browsing really need all .8KW my desktop can drain out of the wall?
I have no idea what the entire setup uses when I'm web surfing, but the spare bedroom I'm in gets noticeably warmer. Would it kill me for the system to just spin down a little and make me wait and extra 2 or 3 seconds for a page to load?
This could, however, change the balance of power between different regions of the world. Fossil fuels favor coastal flatlands where it's easy to transport bulk materials. A civilization that depends on hydroelectricity, on the other hand, might favor a more mountainous terrain. The capitol in the postapocalyptic world of The Hunger Games is located somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, powered by hydro.
Our usual concept of business hours might also have to disappear, if we're going to rely on hydro to smooth out fluctuations in other energy sources. We may no longer be able to afford peak usage at certain times of day, and therefore spread out power-consuming activites across all hours of the day and night. This helps eliminate the rush hour, which is itself a terrible waste of energy.
If push comes to shove and we need to ration power, I suppose this will put more pressure on battery technology. People will have to store up on power at certain times of the day, and use it until the next charge-up time. It will be a bit like fetching water from the well every morning.
But even under such circumstances, some people are clever enough to put a tank on the roof and install pipes/faucets to simulate a constant water supply. Batteries are to an intermittent power supply what a tank is to an intermittent water supply. We as a species can't tolerate inconvenience. We'll find a way to make life as convenient as possible, no matter what the circumstances. Intermittent meat supply? Brb, gonna store up on ham and bacon during the hunting season.
Although there are other potential energy sources, without easily mined coal lying around, no-ones ever going to have the resources to do enough trial-and-error engineering to get anywhere.
tldr: Easily mined coal is vital, just like day 1 minecraft.
"America has plenty of coal. Its mines produced 1.2 billion tons in 2006, nearly all of it destined for electricity generation.31 That was a record year, but it barely scratched the surface of U.S. recoverable coal reserves, which are estimated at about 270 billion tons."
The article thus asks: if we lost those tools, and the knowledge/infra to make them, would we have enough readily available energy to practice and re-discover them, given that you need those tools to get to the remaining energy?
So even what we currently think of as "small" or "negligible" deposits might be more than enough for productive use within the now-smaller population.
What matters is volume and economics. The amount of man-hours per tonne of coal extracted by modern mines is far, far lower than during the early phases of industrialization. And that means that some coal mines, even ones that are easily mined, are just not economically competitive in modern times. But they're still there, the coal's still there, it's still easy to get at.
E.g. shale oil was unrecoverable oil during the industrial revolution and through the mid-20th century.
Further, efficiency of utilization increases with technological advancement. I don't know about coal at this point in time, but I can guarantee you the coal-burning plants of today are getting more electricity per ton(?) of coal than a plant in the early 1900s.
That kind of means petro, diesel, and coal. That's not a hard fuel requirement though.
This sort of misses the point that under this thought experiment there is no future technology, and that to get at the vast reserves we have left would require that technology. We won't be deep sea drilling or fracking if we get rebooted. Nor will we be digging holes in the prairies and having crude gush to the surface.
So... in a post-apocalyptic scenario in which civilization has regressed to unindustrialized agriculture, there would be fossil fuels available only with 500+ years of Industrial Revolution advancement?
I'm not sure how that would be helpful.
Factor the cost of combustion into the cost of extraction, and you'll find that our useable reserves are rapidly approaching zero. Indeed, we may be in overshoot already.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/upshot/if-we-dig-out-all-o...
Based on the narrative, I think the premise and definition of "modern civilization" was basically how our society is configured today, regions, space between cities, social architecture, travel, available goods and resources, etc. Under that thought, the answer is as I said before, flatly no.
Without fossil fuels, the world could not take shape in the way it has due to the sheer density of energy for its weight. We currently have nothing else like that, and all of our advancements into new generations of energy rely on products manufactured with fossil fuels, cheap fossil fuels at that.
Even today, we do not have such a resource readily available and as safe as fossil fuels.
That being said, "a modern civilization" could come into existence without fossil fuels. I do not doubt the ingenuity of humans whether I am in the same period of time with them or not.
My belief on this is based on how our society would be structured when you cannot travel so far away from the epicenter of a city because of the cost of fuel.
This type of thought experiment is fun.
The printing press made spreading information much cheaper than it used to be. The scientific method allowed systematic gathering new knowledge instead of relying on traditions. Calculus allowed precise calculations of things that could be only estimated previously.
Iron, steel, bricks, mortar, cement and glass all predate widespread use of fossil fuels by millenia. Chemicals and plastics are made from oil because it's cheaper that way. The main chemical produced from oil is ethylene, which could be easily made from alcohol. (The only reason why drinking alcohol isn't made from oil as well is because it's illegal.) Nitrogen can be fixed with bacteria.
Fossil fuels helped in many ways, but in others lead us astray, with lots of effort spent on inferior dead end technologies only because fossil fuels made them cheaper. Of course you could power combustion engines with wood gas, but why would you develop them in the first place? Many people assume that combustion engines are used because they are superior to other technologies, but nothing could be farther from the truth.
Combustion engines are a poor choice for powering vehicles in almost every way imaginable. They work well only in a narrow range of speeds, have low torque, are relatively large for the power they produce, can't start on their own... The only reason why they won over electric motors is that the fuel used to be incredibly cheap and easily transported. Almost all progress was about finding workarounds for their inherent drawbacks. You could remove the whole drivetrain and stick electric motors directly to the wheels and you would have a better car than the best combustion engine car. There is a reason why electric cars are not allowed in races.
Almost everything is made of plastics because it's cheaper that way, even where a slightly more expensive alternative would last basically forever. Agriculture started relying on easily available pesticides instead of developing resistant strains or practices that prevent the evolution and spread of pathogens. Many plant diseases adapted specifically to the few commercialy grown variants, so that inordinate amounts of pesticides are needed to keep the plants no more healthy than they used to be without pesticides. And as the plum pox shows, diseases may be even beneficial in some ways. The few widely grown strains affected by it were replaced by a wide variety of different plums.
The industrial revolution probably wouldn't be that different, only with steam and combustion engines skipped and starting straight with electricity.
Interesting! If you have time, could you please elaborate?
No nuclear energy technologies get a mention in the article which seems like a strange omission.
However, the author goes into quite a bit of detail about the validity of photo-voltaic panels, having obviously done some research into how solar panels work, life-expectancy, manufacturing. It's for this reason why I'm wondering why fission wasn't researched.
Nuclear is carbon-neutral, it's about 1000x the energy density of combustion, have lifetimes of several generations, and (at least in the States) have security measures that would make it resilient to "post-apocalyptic" scenarios. It seems ripe for this kind of thought-experiment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fissile_material#Fissile_vs_fi...
[2] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glob...
Now on the other hand, I find it puzzling how so many people in this thread (and also part of the assumptions in the article) seem to forget all the things we could do perfectly well without fossil fuels.
Glass? Brick? Mortar? Is it maybe because in America you don't see as many obviously before-fossil-fuel buildings that contain all these materials?
I don't see many people mentioning specific years, neither could could I find a clear number on several WP pages, but considering most of the graphs about production/consumption, we didn't start using fossil fuels until about 1800-1850 (with coal), with significant numbers not even beginning to appear until after 1850.
Any idea what sort of technologies we already had before that? It's not too bad :) Yet, the Industrial Revolution was already on its way since 1760.
We had microscopes, architecture, surgery, books, printing presses ...
And just because most things today are made out of plastic doesn't mean they have to be. A lot of those things exist only because plastic is so ridiculously cheap it's not even cost-effective to develop an alternative. Remember old things being built to last? That's how you make up for the ridiculous cheapness of plastic. It almost sounds cheesy and old-timey to repeat, but if you do the mental math it adds up: a styrofoam cup is maybe 1000x as cheap, so it made economical sense to consume and throw away. I already easily use a coffee mug on average 1000s of times (daily coffee times a bunch of years) before it breaks, and that's without even trying. Some of the plastic things, like shopping bags, don't even really last if you try (shopping bag, used four times before it rips somewhere?) that's the sort of thing we'll stop making as soon as the margins stop being insane and use the resources spent on something 1000x more durable instead of 1000x as cheap. Remember that oil and/or plastic won't just 100% disappear, suddenly. It's a really weird luxury state we live in at the moment, but plastic is still pretty awesome as a material even if it's quite expensive and not as plentiful (just look at glass or fine pottery), in particular as durable alternatives become economical again.
In short, it's unlikely that a civilizational reboot would be bereft of fossil fuels to spur its early stages of development and growth (they most important stages, by far) because such stages require very little fossil fuels compared to an industry in full swing and many small, lower quality, less profitable (though still easily exploited) reserves will have been passed over by modern industry. It's unlikely that even in a severe future resource crunch that every coal mine will be stripped bare and every oil well pumped dry. We won't resort to digging out a pittance worth of coal out of some abandoned mine that is now in the middle of a suburb, we'll do as we're doing now, adapting new technologies to push the boundaries of new, substantive reserves. Such as open pit strip mining of coal using drag lines, fracking, tar sands, deep ocean drilling, etc.
But those small reserves, those reserves that are economically disadvantageous and inconvenient for us to exploit today, they would probably be adequate for bootstrapping industry again, likely sufficiently to enable them to develop more sustainable approaches. Or simply other ways of doing things. It would take hundreds of years of intensive use for humanity to exploit all of the easily extractable coal in the world, I put the odds of that happening as very low (if humanity can survive a few hundred more years then they have a pretty good chance of surviving indefinitely, in my opinion). And with coal you can do anything else, make plastics, make hydrocarbons, what-have-you.
Mind, I'm not advocating this, I'm simply pointing out the flaw in the logic here. Personally I'd rather we switched over to mostly nuclear power sooner rather than later.
The word 'filter' doesn't appear in the article, or on this page (at time of typing), but the whole argument really seems to lend itself to the possibility that a complicating requirement of a civilisation advanced enough to talk to (or visit) us, requires at least one long iteration of presumably CO2-rich, plant-abundant, age - followed by a sufficiently long period to turn that into what we think of as fossil fuels. And then have intelligent life pop up that can work out how to discover, obtain, and utilise that resource.
I am going to play fanboy here and recommend Star's Reach: A Novel of the Deindustrial Future. http://www.amazon.com/Stars-Reach-Novel-Deindustrial-Future/...
I don't want to spoil it for future readers, but the basic premise is: the solution to the Fermi paradox is that intelligent life is fairly common in the galaxy, but instead of nuking themselves off, most species that achieve complex technology wreak their native planet's environment and trigger a civilization collapse.
Later on, some species are able to bounce back and rebuild a somewhat advanced civilization, but the mix of taboos against 'rapid growth' and lack of highly concentrated energy sources make those civilizations much more conservative, and the common memes of Scifi (e.g. the "technology indistinguishable from magic" thing) are never realized.
Think a sort of cross over between Dune and the Hunger Games.
And that's sorta why we get entertained with cataclysmic scifi themes, because it gives a "no choice" instigator for that asset destruction. But doing this by choice and quickly? Difficult.
Main occupation for the foreseeable future: undertaker.
If technology was going to give us a paradise of universal coverage of basic needs and free time self enrichment for all, that would have happened on the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Instead, we got 2 world wars and a big economic depression in between.
The problem is we are social primates, and the alpha ape cannot afford to let all the beta apes to live in peace singing kumbaya; otherwise, he would not have remained an alpha for much longer. So, even if technology/machines were providing more and more of our needs, bigger and improved ways to enforce artificial scarcity over the low status levels of society were put in practice.
And where straightforward coercion failed, artificial needs and wants rose to the task, creating a prison of the mind.
Also, without the food security that these fertilizers give us, much progress would not happen.
Engage dorm-room palaver....
Everything after that is details. :)
saltedshiv 1 hour ago [flagged]The article presents a very interesting thought experiment, but I think the answer is flatly no, with explanation for this belief being the context of the article.Based on the narrative, I think the premise and definition of "modern civilization" was basically how our society is configured today, regions, space between cities, social architecture, travel, available goods and resources, etc. Under that thought, the answer is as I said before, flatly no.Without fossil fuels, the world could not take shape in the way it has due to the sheer density of energy for its weight. We currently have nothing else like that, and all of our advancements into new generations of energy rely on products manufactured with fossil fuels, cheap fossil fuels at that.Even today, we do not have such a resource readily available and as safe as fossil fuels.That being said, "a modern civilization" could come into existence without fossil fuels. I do not doubt the ingenuity of humans whether I am in the same period of time with them or not.My belief on this is based on how our society would be structured when you cannot travel so far away from the epicenter of a city because of the cost of fuel.This type of thought experiment is fun.
Copy/paste on Android lost the original paragraphs. The original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368235
In any case here's my quick answer: I hope they come off as Lego bricks.
When I started thinking about this problem I was expecting it to be a tough one, but I think it's achievable.
Metallurgically, this won't necessarily yield the best parts if we can't reach critical temperatures - 1900°F, but even then, there are plenty of forgiving alloys out there, and plenty of metal that can be re-worked without melting it down.
The bigger difficulty in my mind is having all the alloys identified. It is pretty business even with good modern tools.
Voila, 2500 C.
As the article says: "Wartime gasifier cars could achieve about 1.5 miles per kilogram [of wood]." Comparing the time it takes to grow a kg of wood versus the value of moving a car only 1.5 miles illustrates the problem pretty nicely.
Wood is not a sustainable fuel for an industrial civilization, at anything like current rates of consumption.
Well, they're not so much gone as converted into various structures all over the globe. I see no reason why later civilizations couldn't mine the remains of former cities.
All really important metals can be melted at temperatures that can easily be reached with a well built furnace and natural fuel like wood.
With a wood-fired forge. Blacksmithing predates fossil fuels by quite a long time.
Not something you would do at home, but a power plant can.
We should, today, switch from burning coal to burning switchgrass.
You do need to carefully control the amount of carbon though.
There are tonnes of surface metal deposits, it's just you'd get shot for opening a mine there because it's in the middle of the national park.
Also, what do you call a 'garbage dump' other than a surface deposit rich in metals?
All of the metals we've ever mined are on the surface. We didn't put them back down into the mine... (or at least when we did it's the open pit variety)
It's not precisely steampunk in the sense that you don't have too many sentient barrels running around, but it's impressive.
They're not averse to fossil fuels, because you have to pay for them as you go. Getting on grid means you're going into debt for a month at a time. That's at least a big part of their aversion to electric.
Let the palaver begin...
Can't we stop burning stuff to make things go?
It's a question of quantity and sustainability, not mechanism.
There are only a few fundamental sources of energy (which is a non-negotiable component of "making things go"):
- Nuclear decay (geothermal, RTG)
- Nuclear fusion/fission (nuclear power, solar power)
- Redox reactions (fossil fuel, food digestion)
- Planetary momentum (geothermal, tidal)