4 ms·

I'm sure someone has simulated that but it appears highly likely that a planet with plants (or any carbon based life) will at some point "generate" fossil fuels

by dx034 9y ago

I'm sure someone has simulated that but it appears highly likely that a planet with plants (or any carbon based life) will at some point "generate" fossil fuels. And maybe, if we hadn't found oil, we would've come up with more efficient ways to use electricity generated from renewable sources. Would've taken longer but we could've made up for that later in the process. Batteries were known at the time of the oil revolution and electricity from hydro & wind were also known.

pasquinelli 9y ago
or maybe we wouldn't have bothered with electricity because of a lack of energy reserves.
- dx034 9y ago
  There's plenty of hydro energy available. Not having fossil fuels would've shifted where we settle. Texas would likely be less economically successful compared to Canada which has plenty of hydro capacity and hydro reserves. Long-distance electricity transportation would've come up later making ACs less popular. In the US, that would've favoured the north heavily over the south. In Asia, Singapore would've never been as successful (they say themselves that success came with the AC). Maybe China would've become dominant much earlier.
tremon 9y ago
That's a nice thought experiment. Our capability of harnessing energy from renewable sources (but not electrical energy) covers 3,000 years already: sailing ships and windmills. By the time magnetism and later electricity were discovered, we already had wind-powered propulsion, milling, and water drainage. What made them impractical for industrial uses (the first applications for coal power were steam-powered textile mills iirc) was the same issue we have with solar and wind today: output is dependent on external factors that we can't control. Coal became valuable exactly because it was the first controllable energy source. It's hard to imagine us making the same amount of progress without an ever-present energy source (coal caches, fuel tanks, and the electrical energy grid). And it's hard to imagine why we would construct an energy grid without a prior ever-present energy source. Looking at our current means of energy storage, it seems that only hydro-electric storage is a viable option if you discount fossil fuels. So without fossil fuels, I think an electrical grid could have originated only in very specific locations: lots of wind power, and a natural basin to be converted into a reservoir with relative ease. We would have seen massively different industrial sprawl in such a scenario, and I wonder if such a situation would ever give rise to a truly continental electrical grid like we have now.
- wongarsu 9y ago
  Apart from hydro power as a very steady energy source, we also have thousands of years of history of using another arbitrarily controllable renewable resource: wood. We even processed wood to turn it into coal. And in the absence of trees we could have been burning other plants. Granted, the amount of wood you can extract within a decade from an area without turning it into a desert or grassland is limited, but in the last 400 years we turned our focus more and more on sustainable forestry and as a result got quite good at using wood in a renewable, carbon-neutral way.
  - jbattle 9y ago
    I suspect too that our usage patterns for wood are "subsidized" by the availability of coal. There was just an article here the other day that talked about how deforestation in Ethiopia (for use as fuel) has had dramatic ecological impacts up and down the Nile. IIRC Coal caught on in England in part because deforestation had gotten so bad that they needed another source of fuel to run industrial engines

by dx034 9y ago

pasquinelli 9y ago

or maybe we wouldn't have bothered with electricity because of a lack of energy reserves.

dx034 9y ago
There's plenty of hydro energy available. Not having fossil fuels would've shifted where we settle. Texas would likely be less economically successful compared to Canada which has plenty of hydro capacity and hydro reserves. Long-distance electricity transportation would've come up later making ACs less popular. In the US, that would've favoured the north heavily over the south. In Asia, Singapore would've never been as successful (they say themselves that success came with the AC). Maybe China would've become dominant much earlier.

tremon 9y ago

That's a nice thought experiment. Our capability of harnessing energy from renewable sources (but not electrical energy) covers 3,000 years already: sailing ships and windmills. By the time magnetism and later electricity were discovered, we already had wind-powered propulsion, milling, and water drainage. What made them impractical for industrial uses (the first applications for coal power were steam-powered textile mills iirc) was the same issue we have with solar and wind today: output is dependent on external factors that we can't control. Coal became valuable exactly because it was the first controllable energy source. It's hard to imagine us making the same amount of progress without an ever-present energy source (coal caches, fuel tanks, and the electrical energy grid). And it's hard to imagine why we would construct an energy grid without a prior ever-present energy source. Looking at our current means of energy storage, it seems that only hydro-electric storage is a viable option if you discount fossil fuels. So without fossil fuels, I think an electrical grid could have originated only in very specific locations: lots of wind power, and a natural basin to be converted into a reservoir with relative ease. We would have seen massively different industrial sprawl in such a scenario, and I wonder if such a situation would ever give rise to a truly continental electrical grid like we have now.

wongarsu 9y ago
Apart from hydro power as a very steady energy source, we also have thousands of years of history of using another arbitrarily controllable renewable resource: wood. We even processed wood to turn it into coal. And in the absence of trees we could have been burning other plants. Granted, the amount of wood you can extract within a decade from an area without turning it into a desert or grassland is limited, but in the last 400 years we turned our focus more and more on sustainable forestry and as a result got quite good at using wood in a renewable, carbon-neutral way.
- jbattle 9y ago
  I suspect too that our usage patterns for wood are "subsidized" by the availability of coal. There was just an article here the other day that talked about how deforestation in Ethiopia (for use as fuel) has had dramatic ecological impacts up and down the Nile. IIRC Coal caught on in England in part because deforestation had gotten so bad that they needed another source of fuel to run industrial engines