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>But without easily accessible fossil fuels, it's much harder to envision the next civilization having an industrial revolution. They might indeed never rise to
by trhway 6y ago
>But without easily accessible fossil fuels, it's much harder to envision the next civilization having an industrial revolution. They might indeed never rise to our level of technology again.
knowledge is the key. Even Ancient Greeks could have built a wind electricity generator if they knew how - ie. if they knew about copper wire and electrical charge movement in it. And you can collect sun light and focus it on a boiler while still being in Ancient Greeks situation - that gives you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile which can be used to generate electricity too. And they could have possibly have that too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaic_pile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaic_pile or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector#Cat_whisker_detector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector#Cat_whisker_d... - piece of crystal and a wire making a diode - and you can have primitive radio.
So, the newly built civilization bypassing fossil fuels would even be better :)
- lmm 6y ago> Even Ancient Greeks could have built a wind electricity generator if they knew how - ie. if they knew about copper wire and electrical charge movement in it. Did they have the level of materials science to build a practical one? They weren't able to produce steel, for example.
- trhway 6y agoThat is my point - the necessary material science in many respects is just a knowledge. If you have copper it is relatively easy to make copper wire, at least some crude one, if you know what it is for. It took 2000 years to build the knowledge, yet having that knowledge one can rebuild a lot of stuff in orders of magnitude shorter timeframe. Btw, that reminded about that book that i liked a lot back then as a child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island - rebuilding a significant pieces of civilization starting from scratch almost.
- lmm 6y agoIt's not though - it's a whole interlinked ecosystem of industry and even if you have the knowledge that doesn't mean you'd be able to bootstrap. A simple example is that most wind turbines today are likely built from steel that was made in an electric arc furnace, which themselves require massive amounts of electricity to run. (And that's just the basic material, to say nothing of the tools and processes you need to actually build one).
- jacobush 6y agoIt’s one thing to build highly optimised things and another to build things that work just well enough.
- lmm 6y ago"Just well enough" may not be enough to rebuild society with. The Greeks didn't lack the knowledge of how to make a steam engine - they had novelty steam engines - but they lacked the industrial base that could actually make them productive.
- trhway 6y agoi imagine how in the year 3000 the people will be arguing why the people of the 21st century, i.e. we, wouldn't build say a fusion engines and power generators (we do have "novelty" fusion devices) , or may be even FTL space ship when it happens to be such a simple thing :) We probably have the tech for the fusion, or very close to it, yet we don't know how to put it together and/or in what direction to make that small final push.
- adrianN 6y agoYou can build turbines that produce a few kW out of wood.