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Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels? (2016)

131 points by free0ne 6y ago

zalkota 6y ago
No, how the hell do we create steel without coal.
- jeffreyrogers 6y ago
  Not sure why your comment was dead since it's a good question. The answer is with charcoal, which is how it used to be done. It's less efficient (charcoal isn't as strong as coal so the furnaces have to be smaller) but it worked fine in the past. You obviously couldn't have the same steel output using charcoal. In the past places started running out of trees to turn into charcoal which is why they switched to coal in the first place.
- adrianmonk 6y ago
  The article goes into detail about how Brazil is creating steel without coal right now.
- jabl 6y ago
  In Sweden they are building a prototype of the Hybrit process, using hydrogen to reduce the ore. The plan is to convert the blast furnaces in Sweden and Finland within a couple of decades. Now this isn't a particularly low tech way of going about it, and producing the hydrogen requires massive amounts of electricity. So probably not an option if you're bootstrapping civilization after a collapse.
yourapostasy 6y ago
Yes, because we can create hydrocarbons from other sources, just not as readily-available and cheap so our lifestyle would be very different, much "slower" so to speak.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  > so our lifestyle would be very different, much "slower" so to speak This is not just about lifestyle. When you're spending all your time hunting animals to eat or digging up hard-to-reach coal/low-energy peat so you don't freeze to death in Winter, you can't do other work like research, and you can't support a population growth that enabled our advances.
  - rjsw 6y ago
    It doesn't take very long to dig up enough peat to keep you warm all winter.
  - virtue3 6y ago
    water wheels / windmills are pretty effective for reducing some forms of labor. IE grinding cereals.
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    To give an extreme example, Hunter-Gatherers generally didn't spend all their time hunting. There's every indication they spent only as much as early farmers at most. In some cases it was a few tens of hours per week per person. Population growth is a separate, rather more complicated topic.
    - outworlder 6y ago
      But then you cannot have libraries, you cannot have universities, you cannot have laboratories or factories. Not if you have to constantly relocate to find more food.
      - AlotOfReading 6y ago
        Many of the groups we call "Hunter-Gatherers" weren't nomadic, despite popular imagination. Estimates for the early Holocene are that around 20-30% of all groups in some regions were at least partially sedentary. Some of the most well-studied modern groups were fully sedentary, and had high social and political complexity to boot.
scotty79 6y ago
There's a game called Seedship in which you direct a space ship that carries last remaining humans in existence to a new planet that will become their new home. You go from one planet to the next assessing their suitability. When you decide to settle the game ends. You can't travel indefinitely because ships systems degrade and people die. One of the worst fates for me in this game is settling humanity of the world devoid of natural resources. This causes them to regress to neolithic level of technology and never to progress beyond that. You can lose a lot of people. They will recover. You can lose science and culture. They will rebuild it eventually. But if you land them on a planet without resources... there's no hope for their future. EDIT: corrected spelling of word 'lose'
- Schiendelman 6y ago
  In both of your uses of “loose” the correct word is “lose”!
  - grugagag 6y ago
    English is werid, for example loose and lose make no sense pronunciation-wise, they're pronounced the same. I've seen plenty of people use loose instead of lose for this reason. I learned English as a second language and the emphasis was on written first so quite a lot of times my spelling was better than that of native speakers. And that makes no sense, one shouldn't learn English that way, write it first then speak it. Personally I don't care if people make these kind of mistakes as long as their communication doesn't lose the meaning.
    - vcxy 6y ago
      In fact they are not pronounced the same. English is weird, sure, but I think if you have that kind of misconception then it's going to seem far stranger. "Loose" rhymes with "juice", "lose" rhymes with "news", if that helps.
      - MauranKilom 6y ago
        To add to this (because the difference was really not clear to me from your suggested rhymes): The difference is in the sound of the final s. "loose" ends with "s" from "set", whereas "lose" ends with the z from "zoo". And while the vocal sound is the same according to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lose https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lose and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loose https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loose, I feel that there is (or can be) some difference there. Just like in "jews" vs "juice".
siltpotato 6y ago
Our civilization is built on cards. One of the damndest things is too much interconnectedness, which does make those beautiful numbers on graphs go up, but isn't the best outcome for a robust society. Just look at the initial shock that coronavirus-19 did to shipping. We live in a just-in-time logistical framework.
fractal618 6y ago
Beasts of burden, then Water wheels and windmills, then hydro electric dams and electric wind turbines. We’d have to start with rudimentary electronics.
- fractal618 6y ago
  There’s a cool project I used to be part of called open source ecology. Another great resource is apropedia
fractal618 6y ago
The article says an industrial revolution would be difficult at best. Industrial Revolution would be relative to the unique scenario. People will always innovate
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  We spent several hundred thousand years without an Industrial Revolution. Don't take it for granted.
- jeffreyrogers 6y ago
  The industrial revolution happened in one tiny part of the world with a variety of unique features. Seems likely that it could've been missed entirely had England's history been slightly different. E.g. part of why the industrial revolution was possible was because an argricultural revolution preceeded it. So there was a temporary increase in capital accumulation (since agriculture was more productive) followed by a rise in population (families could be larger), so this capital could be deployed in new industries using the cheap labor that had recently been born and wasn't needed to produce food. Had the industrial revolution not followed this agricultural revolution it seems possible that society would've been stuck in another Malthusian trap and there would not be enough surplus for the industrial revolution to get started.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
Note that the article doesn't match the title. It answers the question "could we boot a modern civilization without fossil fuels"? A re-boot of modern civilization would be able to mine the garbage pits of current humanity.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Depends on how far we fall. If world population is a few thousands per continent, there are not enough people to do anything other than subsistence farming. By the time population builds up enough to think about anything else we have forgotten too much to know how use use those garbage pits - if indeed there is anything left. (As the article notes the first generation will probably use scavenge solar panels, but won't be able to recreate them when they fail) You need a large population of farmers growing food to have excess for non farmers. We get around that with fossil fuels today. You also need surplus because the weather is not uniform, so you need enough for your society to supply itself for a few bad years, including the "freeloaders" doing something else.
swiley 6y ago
Who cares about fuel, you can get a lot of energy from renewable resources and nuclear just fine, the later mostly requiring metallurgy and concrete. Much more interesting are petrochemicals, many are possible to synthesize without petroleum but it's way less economical.
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  How do you do the metallurgy, manufacture the concrete, or synthesize the petrochemicals in the absence of fossil fuel energy? Examples given in the article were on the scale of post nuclear conflict societal collapse. No ports, no highways, no railways, no dual use infrastructure at all. No more fossil fuel deliveries happening. No deliveries of anything. Rebuilding in that environment would be challenging in the extreme. I'm not sure that any rebuilding happens in the vast majority of places.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    If you can manage to make mirrors (maybe even using rotating mercury) using wood for your initial heat source you might be able to use solar thermal for metallurgy.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      As the article points out, the coal or charcoal in steel production isn't just a heat source, it's also a reduction reaction. Heat speeds up the oxidation reaction, so you need something in the crucible/fire that is capable of scavenging oxygen before it binds with the iron.
  - CodeGlitch 6y ago
    > metallurgy, manufacture the concrete, or synthesize the petrochemicals in the absence of fossil fuel energy I think you could use biomass to bootstrap these. Biosmass wouldn't be sustainable, but once you have the metallurgy, etc in place you could then build wind turbines.
    - 6y ago
hesdeadjim 6y ago
It's easy for me to end up existentially depressed if I go too far down this line of thinking. But, frankly, we are fucked here on Earth. We're consuming resources at an exponential rate with a population way, way outside what the planet can support sustainably. And we won't fix it before it's too late, because our base human nature wants more, bigger, better at the expense of all else. I'm with Musk on this, the only way we survive is to get the hell off Earth. But the reasons why are more than just to have a "backup plan" for humanity. One of humanity's best traits is our adaptability. Put us under stressors and we inevitably adapt to any situation, no matter how dire. Now stick a group of humans in space (or Mars, no difference), task them with creating a self-sustaining technological society, give them a lot of time, and when you come back what you find will be a radically different culture than anything we could relate to on Earth. That group of humans will have been forced, for generations, to be ruthlessly efficient with their sustainability and use of resources. We are social creatures, and with that comes the social pressure to conform for the survival of the group. Because of these pressures, the base nature of individual greed we witness here on Earth won't have the space to thrive. Given even more time, we may even be lucky enough to see that trait bred out of us. If that were to happen, we may just have a shot at long-term survival as a species.
- decafninja 6y ago
  Reminds me of The Expanse. Or countless other science fiction stories involving Earth vs. the colonies (whether they be on Mars, the Moon, or orbitals). Not sure if it's a coincidence that such stories often involve Earth and her colonies ending up in war.
  - tastyfreeze 6y ago
    That is an easy trope that follows history. For example, England is responsible for 63 national independence days. Colonies need support initially. But, once they get established and self sustaining it seems to be the natural progression to wonder why they still are subjects of a far away, likely exploitive, ruler.
    - 6y ago
wcarss 6y ago
Ringworld goes into this topic quite a bit, so it was interesting to me to see that the author is an astrobiologist who wrote "The Knowledge", about restarting civilization from scratch. Niven (who wrote Ringworld) also co-wrote "Lucifer's Hammer" with Jerry Pournelle, which was like a fun book version of a big-cast disaster movie, about a comet colliding with the earth in the mid-1970s. Lucifer's Hammer had some fairly realistic assessments of life in the following 5-10 years after the event, centred around restarting production. One big point was about some books very similar in concept to "The Knowledge" being used to preserve necessary information, and another was about recapturing some existing nuclear facilities to try to sustain life at all, given the big energy requirements for agriculture and basic personal heat after the event (because of e.g. huge amounts of atmospheric dust) Reading this article also made me realize, with surprise, that I've never thought about this aspect of Fermi's paradox! One of the many variables that led to our civilization's rise may be the simple fact that we had hundreds of millions of years of abundant life before us that failed to industrialize. Imagine if human-like life had evolved a billion years ago, when the reservoirs of petrochemicals were a billion years less developed? If it turns out that both life and sentient life are actually surprisingly common, it might be the case that most civilizations are borne unto planets not yet ready to support their technological advancement, and all they can do is burn out the wick before they reach a powderkeg moment. The great filter could work the other way -- we could be the rare success merely by dint of having shown up 'late'. Fun article!
- Kaibeezy 6y ago
  Fossil fuel depletion is also a key impetus for the action in Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card. TV Tropes calls this a "Morton's Fork" and describes it for this book as: What spurs the decision to change the past even though it'll erase our timeline and existence is the fact that Earth is doomed to an even worse apocalyptic scenario than the one they've already experienced. The human population will be reduced to under 10 million, and humanity will be plunged back into the Stone Ages with little hope of ever rising to civilization ever again, as they have exhausted all easily available energy sources and climate change means they will soon be facing a new ice age. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/PastwatchTheRedemptionOfChristopherColumbus https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/PastwatchT...
fredophile 6y ago
My impression is that the big road block to unlocking something like the industrial revolution is the precision of your tools. During the industrial revolution there were big advances in metal tools. Maudslay's development of a metal lathe that could be used to make metal tools was a huge step forward. I think if you can reach this point of development you should be able to make continued progress using non-fossil fuel power sources. Are there other natural materials that could be used instead of metal to achieve this level of precision? I'm pretty skeptical on this. Are there energy sources, other than coal, that could be used to develop early metallurgy to the point where someone could re-invent Maudslay's lathe? I suspect that there are and given enough time someone would find one. It might take longer to reach this point but I believe we could get there.
- lawrenceyan 6y ago
  Charcoal is technically an unlimited renewable resource.
  - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
    Unlimited only if you don't take time into account. A big reason for the switch from charcoal to coal in steelmaking was running out of trees to make charcoal from.
    - lawrenceyan 6y ago
      Not really an issue. Knowledge steadily accumulates over time. The key foundations of human intelligence and ingenuity will always remains regardless of whether or not fossil fuels exist for us to exploit. Non-renewable resources only served to speed up our industrialization.
      - mikewarot 6y ago
        > Knowledge steadily accumulates over time. No, it doesn't. Only knowledge that people consider to have value will be retained over time. Many things are lost to history, for example.. nobody knows how to make cobblestone. (Or so I'm told)
fallingfrog 6y ago
In addition to wood fuel, the other major non-fossil fuel available might be hydro power. The Hoover dam and the Tennessee valley authority produce huge amounts of electricity which could support some sort of industry.
- jobigoud 6y ago
  But could we build the Hoover Dam with just wood and small hydro as power sources? Could we even build the meta things required to build the Hoover Dam, like the tools, the trucks transporting the concrete, the cranes, the roads to go there…
fallingfrog 6y ago
One might argue that the boon of fossil fuels was actually the cause of a lot of chaos and war since the technological change it enabled was so rapid and norms around war took a long time to catch up. Millions of young people from all over Europe went into the First World War with their heads full of ideas about bravery and daring and adventure only to get thrown into a vast industrial meat grinder. The Second World War was mostly caused by the aftershocks of the first. Maybe if things had progressed more slowly, we could have avoided the upheaval.
- TheUndead96 6y ago
  I agree with this, which is why the idea of fusion energy is both exciting and terrifying (and why governments may even be hesitant to disclose breakthroughs). In the theoretical ideal, fusion energy would provide such a surplus of energy that it could rewrite borders and trade deals overnight.
vitiral 6y ago
civboot.org, we should try today :D
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Biofuels and wind would probably be the basis of the energy sector of a civilization reboot. All the easily extracted oil is long gone on earth. There used to be deposits bubbling up from the ground, oil extraction now depends on several centuries of accumulated knowledge, industry, infrastructure, and resource maps to get to tar sands, deep water deposits, fracking, etc.
dang 6y ago
Discussed a bit in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13957198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13957198
ehejsbbejsk 6y ago
I believe we should find ways that are more efficient but ruling out fossil fuels altogether is going to cause a massive global depression.
hikerclimber 6y ago
i don't think so.
mordymoop 6y ago
Rebooting with the current knowledge base, possibly. Booting from scratch with no fossil fuels, doubtful. I have long suspected that one of the Great Filters is the propensity of a planet to generate fossil energy. You will really only find large quantities of oil in a narrow range of circumstances, depending on specific levels of tectonic activity, duration and abundance of life, sedimentation patterns due to rainfall and ocean distributions, and low to moderate levels of atmospheric oxidizer.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  Imagine if Earth is entirely water. The poor fish can develop mega brains but they would still be more or less stuck under water with no real viable technologies.
  - romanovcode 6y ago
    I mean, aren't dolphins, whales and orcas already have pretty much close to human-level intelligence?
    - ars 6y ago
      No? They are very smart, but human level? Not even close. They are similar to apes in intelligence perhaps. That's not human level.
      - romanovcode 6y ago
        I mean, I think that one of the reasons humans are smart is just because of writing so that the knowledge gets passed down with much more ease. I think if these animals could write and read somehow they would be just as smart (if not smarter) than some humans :)
        ars 6y ago
        People who can't read or write aren't less smart than other humans. No, there are no animals at all, anywhere even close to the smartness of humans. It's not a small difference, it's a HUGE gap. When we talk about how smart apes, or dolphins are, we are talking relative to other animals. Relative to humans, it's almost nothing.
davidhbolton 6y ago
I've seen no mention of the myriad other uses we make from petroleum other than transport uses. There's 144 (out of 6000) listed here. https://www.ranken-energy.com/index.php/products-made-from-petroleum/ https://www.ranken-energy.com/index.php/products-made-from-p... It would be a pretty bleak society without many of these never mind all of the various medicinal stuff such as antiseptics, antihistamines, vitamin capsules, cortisone, glycerin, asparin
- rebuilder 6y ago
  Not to downplay the importance of petroleum, but surely a lot of those things can be made without it as well. Aspirin for example?
- ajross 6y ago
  Basic hydrocarbons can be pretty easily synthesized, though. Refining them out of oil is cheaper, but not so much cheaper that we'd have to forego this stuff.
- tastyfreeze 6y ago
  Without ability to synthesize medications society would need to go back to herbal medicines. Too bad 90% of society knows jack squat about the natural sources of commonly used medications.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    It wouldn't matter much if we did. Many are only available in some areas. Often they are in such impure forms that you can't actually use them even if you know it is there. And concentration is varied enough that you can't do precision treatment.
hinkley 6y ago
> The trick to maximising timber production is to employ coppicing – cultivating trees such as ash or willow that resprout from their own stump, becoming ready for harvest again in five to 15 years. This way you can ensure a sustained supply of timber and not face an energy crisis once you’ve deforested your surroundings. Coppice and pollard creates 'water shoots' - long, straight, copious branches. For crafting material, the taper of the material creates problems, so coppice gives you better results. Similarly, charcoal made from coppiced wood will have a fairly uniform diameter, and few side branches to create snags. Post-industrial, that should allow you to make more charcoal per batch, but I don't know if that matters as much for brick retorts. For steel making, I don't know how important air gaps are versus calorie content of the furnace. Uniformity would certainly get you more calories into it but might also suffocate the fire.
mtw 6y ago
In Canada, hydro dams generate most of the electricity. It attracts amongst others huge aluminium smelters in Quebec. So the idea of not being able to generate industrial products with solar panels or dams is not a 100% valid argument
Razengan 6y ago
There must be planets with intelligent life but without petrochemicals. What if humans had evolved before fossil fuels had had enough time to form?
blargmaster42_8 6y ago
No.
readthenotes1 6y ago
By 2016, we knew "Now they’re almost gone." was wrong.kinda hard to read the rest when the starting thesis is wrong. (I had no idea the British pronounced "pews" and "poos" identically, btw. Presidente for Life Xi must be horrified.)
xphos 6y ago
I think the scale of wood production and iron production is very much demonstrated by the romans. This guys series goes over medieval metal production and He has sources with entire cities (Elba) in Rome produced iron ore in the range of 10 million ton of iron ore per year. They wouldn't be mining it unless they could use it and even if they only recovered 1%of the ore into iron they are still ending up with 100,000 tons of iron a year which is significant. We should underestimate human engineering just because we picked a certain technology path. scroll to article 1 yourself https://acoup.blog/2020/11/06/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-addendum-crucible-steel-and-cast-iron/ https://acoup.blog/2020/11/06/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
MichaelZuo 6y ago
It really depends on how far back civilization is reset, if a collapse occurs all the way back to the stone age, it would mean game over then for at least a few hundred million years. If the iron age, probably cans reboot if the population is kept small enough to avoid any Malthusian traps.
hikerclimber 6y ago
i don't think so... I think it will just blow up.
carapace 6y ago
What is the essences of civilization anyway? I mean most of the things we need aren't energy intensive.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  A lot of it is precision and scale. Without coke (the coal product) how would you bootstrap large steel production? Electric furnaces exist but use a lot of energy. Without steel and the loss of knowledge on mass producing precision equipment, we lose most of modern medicine's advancements.
  - carapace 6y ago
    Yes to precision, that seems like a primary metric for "height" of civilization. But I wonder about scale. Like how much steel do we actually need? More to the point of the OP I suspect that energy usage per capita isn't intrinsically linked to quality of life or "height" of civilization at least above some baseline level. > we lose most of modern medicine's advancements. E.g. stone knives are sharp enough to serve as scalpels? Is that what you mean?
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      Without structural steel, we lose the ability for large structures (e.g. bridges, skyscrapers, large scale ships, etc.) and we probably denude the world of trees. You would be hard pressed to find any new construction using no steel at all. Steel is very easy to sanitize. Most of modern medicine also needs metal shaped precisely. Take out the precision and the sanitization and we're back to medicine that might kill people more often than it helps.
      - carapace 6y ago
        I hear you, but I'm not convinced there aren't possibilities for e.g. carbon fiber and ceramics and such (I'd include basalt fibers but I realized that might have high energy inputs too.)
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Well, it'd be hard to not have any methane hydrates. There is a larger hydrocarbon store of them under the sea, than there was ever oil. We've only begun to tap it, and its estimated there are centuries more reserves than there was oil. If a planet has deep seas that are cold at the bottom, then they'll have methane hydrates. They're pretty much continuously renewed. I see a much more optimistic future for most galactic races.
hikerclimb 6y ago
I hope not
api 6y ago
I think the answer is yes, but much more slowly and it probably would not look the same. It would be slower, more efficient, more durable, and it would probably take a lot longer to get things like air and space flights. Think bootstrapped company vs big money VC backed company. Fossil fuels are like a boatload of VC. It accelerates things but also promotes certain dysfunctions and wastefulness. Of course maybe our slow renewable civilization would eventually find nuclear fission and take off like ours.
8bitsrule 6y ago
Depends on what that means, but fossils have only been in widespread use for a couple of centuries, yet a lot of important discoveries were made before them. The energies from wind, water, animals and burning plants were widely in use before coal took off in Europe about 3 centuries ago. Without (only a century of) oil, even without coal, the discovery of EM fields still would have led to (slower) development of hydro and wind electricity gear. Wherever you've got abundant electric, the rest follows. With technology to tap into it, the sun pours FAR more power onto the surface than needed to get 'modern'.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  > the sun pours FAR more power onto the surface than needed to get 'modern'. One of the agruments economists make for not switching away from fossil fuels is that we'd be consigning worlds poor to endless poverty. Invariable followed by the accusation that you don't care about poor people. But if you look at the supply of oil and gas it's obvious there never was would be enough to lift the worlds poor out of poverty. If you want a hard example of that during it's modernization push China burned through most of it's coal reserves. Not sustainable. There is though enough solar and wind.
  - demosito666 6y ago
    And another thing that is missed in this discussion: the article assumes that there will be much fewer people left than we have today. It's very hard to support something as huge and as cold as Moscow on renewables. But if there are few people, they live in compact villages in warm climate, there is no existential pressure to burn fossils for heating and heavy industries. You have a breathing room.
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      Thing about places that are far north and cold. If you look at a map usually they are less than 1500 miles from some place sunnier.

131 points by free0ne 6y ago

zalkota 6y ago

No, how the hell do we create steel without coal.

jeffreyrogers 6y ago
Not sure why your comment was dead since it's a good question. The answer is with charcoal, which is how it used to be done. It's less efficient (charcoal isn't as strong as coal so the furnaces have to be smaller) but it worked fine in the past. You obviously couldn't have the same steel output using charcoal. In the past places started running out of trees to turn into charcoal which is why they switched to coal in the first place.
adrianmonk 6y ago
The article goes into detail about how Brazil is creating steel without coal right now.
jabl 6y ago
In Sweden they are building a prototype of the Hybrit process, using hydrogen to reduce the ore. The plan is to convert the blast furnaces in Sweden and Finland within a couple of decades. Now this isn't a particularly low tech way of going about it, and producing the hydrogen requires massive amounts of electricity. So probably not an option if you're bootstrapping civilization after a collapse.

yourapostasy 6y ago

Yes, because we can create hydrocarbons from other sources, just not as readily-available and cheap so our lifestyle would be very different, much "slower" so to speak.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
> so our lifestyle would be very different, much "slower" so to speak This is not just about lifestyle. When you're spending all your time hunting animals to eat or digging up hard-to-reach coal/low-energy peat so you don't freeze to death in Winter, you can't do other work like research, and you can't support a population growth that enabled our advances.
- rjsw 6y ago
  It doesn't take very long to dig up enough peat to keep you warm all winter.
- virtue3 6y ago
  water wheels / windmills are pretty effective for reducing some forms of labor. IE grinding cereals.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  To give an extreme example, Hunter-Gatherers generally didn't spend all their time hunting. There's every indication they spent only as much as early farmers at most. In some cases it was a few tens of hours per week per person. Population growth is a separate, rather more complicated topic.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    But then you cannot have libraries, you cannot have universities, you cannot have laboratories or factories. Not if you have to constantly relocate to find more food.
    - AlotOfReading 6y ago
      Many of the groups we call "Hunter-Gatherers" weren't nomadic, despite popular imagination. Estimates for the early Holocene are that around 20-30% of all groups in some regions were at least partially sedentary. Some of the most well-studied modern groups were fully sedentary, and had high social and political complexity to boot.

scotty79 6y ago

There's a game called Seedship in which you direct a space ship that carries last remaining humans in existence to a new planet that will become their new home. You go from one planet to the next assessing their suitability. When you decide to settle the game ends. You can't travel indefinitely because ships systems degrade and people die. One of the worst fates for me in this game is settling humanity of the world devoid of natural resources. This causes them to regress to neolithic level of technology and never to progress beyond that. You can lose a lot of people. They will recover. You can lose science and culture. They will rebuild it eventually. But if you land them on a planet without resources... there's no hope for their future. EDIT: corrected spelling of word 'lose'

Schiendelman 6y ago
In both of your uses of “loose” the correct word is “lose”!
- grugagag 6y ago
  English is werid, for example loose and lose make no sense pronunciation-wise, they're pronounced the same. I've seen plenty of people use loose instead of lose for this reason. I learned English as a second language and the emphasis was on written first so quite a lot of times my spelling was better than that of native speakers. And that makes no sense, one shouldn't learn English that way, write it first then speak it. Personally I don't care if people make these kind of mistakes as long as their communication doesn't lose the meaning.
  - vcxy 6y ago
    In fact they are not pronounced the same. English is weird, sure, but I think if you have that kind of misconception then it's going to seem far stranger. "Loose" rhymes with "juice", "lose" rhymes with "news", if that helps.
    - MauranKilom 6y ago
      To add to this (because the difference was really not clear to me from your suggested rhymes): The difference is in the sound of the final s. "loose" ends with "s" from "set", whereas "lose" ends with the z from "zoo". And while the vocal sound is the same according to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lose https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lose and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loose https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loose, I feel that there is (or can be) some difference there. Just like in "jews" vs "juice".

siltpotato 6y ago

Our civilization is built on cards. One of the damndest things is too much interconnectedness, which does make those beautiful numbers on graphs go up, but isn't the best outcome for a robust society. Just look at the initial shock that coronavirus-19 did to shipping. We live in a just-in-time logistical framework.

fractal618 6y ago

Beasts of burden, then Water wheels and windmills, then hydro electric dams and electric wind turbines. We’d have to start with rudimentary electronics.

fractal618 6y ago
There’s a cool project I used to be part of called open source ecology. Another great resource is apropedia

fractal618 6y ago

The article says an industrial revolution would be difficult at best. Industrial Revolution would be relative to the unique scenario. People will always innovate

BurningFrog 6y ago
We spent several hundred thousand years without an Industrial Revolution. Don't take it for granted.
jeffreyrogers 6y ago
The industrial revolution happened in one tiny part of the world with a variety of unique features. Seems likely that it could've been missed entirely had England's history been slightly different. E.g. part of why the industrial revolution was possible was because an argricultural revolution preceeded it. So there was a temporary increase in capital accumulation (since agriculture was more productive) followed by a rise in population (families could be larger), so this capital could be deployed in new industries using the cheap labor that had recently been born and wasn't needed to produce food. Had the industrial revolution not followed this agricultural revolution it seems possible that society would've been stuck in another Malthusian trap and there would not be enough surplus for the industrial revolution to get started.

bryanlarsen 6y ago

Note that the article doesn't match the title. It answers the question "could we boot a modern civilization without fossil fuels"? A re-boot of modern civilization would be able to mine the garbage pits of current humanity.

bluGill 6y ago
Depends on how far we fall. If world population is a few thousands per continent, there are not enough people to do anything other than subsistence farming. By the time population builds up enough to think about anything else we have forgotten too much to know how use use those garbage pits - if indeed there is anything left. (As the article notes the first generation will probably use scavenge solar panels, but won't be able to recreate them when they fail) You need a large population of farmers growing food to have excess for non farmers. We get around that with fossil fuels today. You also need surplus because the weather is not uniform, so you need enough for your society to supply itself for a few bad years, including the "freeloaders" doing something else.

swiley 6y ago

Who cares about fuel, you can get a lot of energy from renewable resources and nuclear just fine, the later mostly requiring metallurgy and concrete. Much more interesting are petrochemicals, many are possible to synthesize without petroleum but it's way less economical.

bilbo0s 6y ago
How do you do the metallurgy, manufacture the concrete, or synthesize the petrochemicals in the absence of fossil fuel energy? Examples given in the article were on the scale of post nuclear conflict societal collapse. No ports, no highways, no railways, no dual use infrastructure at all. No more fossil fuel deliveries happening. No deliveries of anything. Rebuilding in that environment would be challenging in the extreme. I'm not sure that any rebuilding happens in the vast majority of places.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  If you can manage to make mirrors (maybe even using rotating mercury) using wood for your initial heat source you might be able to use solar thermal for metallurgy.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    As the article points out, the coal or charcoal in steel production isn't just a heat source, it's also a reduction reaction. Heat speeds up the oxidation reaction, so you need something in the crucible/fire that is capable of scavenging oxygen before it binds with the iron.
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  > metallurgy, manufacture the concrete, or synthesize the petrochemicals in the absence of fossil fuel energy I think you could use biomass to bootstrap these. Biosmass wouldn't be sustainable, but once you have the metallurgy, etc in place you could then build wind turbines.
  - 6y ago

hesdeadjim 6y ago

It's easy for me to end up existentially depressed if I go too far down this line of thinking. But, frankly, we are fucked here on Earth. We're consuming resources at an exponential rate with a population way, way outside what the planet can support sustainably. And we won't fix it before it's too late, because our base human nature wants more, bigger, better at the expense of all else. I'm with Musk on this, the only way we survive is to get the hell off Earth. But the reasons why are more than just to have a "backup plan" for humanity. One of humanity's best traits is our adaptability. Put us under stressors and we inevitably adapt to any situation, no matter how dire. Now stick a group of humans in space (or Mars, no difference), task them with creating a self-sustaining technological society, give them a lot of time, and when you come back what you find will be a radically different culture than anything we could relate to on Earth. That group of humans will have been forced, for generations, to be ruthlessly efficient with their sustainability and use of resources. We are social creatures, and with that comes the social pressure to conform for the survival of the group. Because of these pressures, the base nature of individual greed we witness here on Earth won't have the space to thrive. Given even more time, we may even be lucky enough to see that trait bred out of us. If that were to happen, we may just have a shot at long-term survival as a species.

decafninja 6y ago
Reminds me of The Expanse. Or countless other science fiction stories involving Earth vs. the colonies (whether they be on Mars, the Moon, or orbitals). Not sure if it's a coincidence that such stories often involve Earth and her colonies ending up in war.
- tastyfreeze 6y ago
  That is an easy trope that follows history. For example, England is responsible for 63 national independence days. Colonies need support initially. But, once they get established and self sustaining it seems to be the natural progression to wonder why they still are subjects of a far away, likely exploitive, ruler.
  - 6y ago

wcarss 6y ago

Ringworld goes into this topic quite a bit, so it was interesting to me to see that the author is an astrobiologist who wrote "The Knowledge", about restarting civilization from scratch. Niven (who wrote Ringworld) also co-wrote "Lucifer's Hammer" with Jerry Pournelle, which was like a fun book version of a big-cast disaster movie, about a comet colliding with the earth in the mid-1970s. Lucifer's Hammer had some fairly realistic assessments of life in the following 5-10 years after the event, centred around restarting production. One big point was about some books very similar in concept to "The Knowledge" being used to preserve necessary information, and another was about recapturing some existing nuclear facilities to try to sustain life at all, given the big energy requirements for agriculture and basic personal heat after the event (because of e.g. huge amounts of atmospheric dust) Reading this article also made me realize, with surprise, that I've never thought about this aspect of Fermi's paradox! One of the many variables that led to our civilization's rise may be the simple fact that we had hundreds of millions of years of abundant life before us that failed to industrialize. Imagine if human-like life had evolved a billion years ago, when the reservoirs of petrochemicals were a billion years less developed? If it turns out that both life and sentient life are actually surprisingly common, it might be the case that most civilizations are borne unto planets not yet ready to support their technological advancement, and all they can do is burn out the wick before they reach a powderkeg moment. The great filter could work the other way -- we could be the rare success merely by dint of having shown up 'late'. Fun article!

Kaibeezy 6y ago
Fossil fuel depletion is also a key impetus for the action in Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card. TV Tropes calls this a "Morton's Fork" and describes it for this book as: What spurs the decision to change the past even though it'll erase our timeline and existence is the fact that Earth is doomed to an even worse apocalyptic scenario than the one they've already experienced. The human population will be reduced to under 10 million, and humanity will be plunged back into the Stone Ages with little hope of ever rising to civilization ever again, as they have exhausted all easily available energy sources and climate change means they will soon be facing a new ice age. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/PastwatchTheRedemptionOfChristopherColumbus https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/PastwatchT...

fredophile 6y ago

My impression is that the big road block to unlocking something like the industrial revolution is the precision of your tools. During the industrial revolution there were big advances in metal tools. Maudslay's development of a metal lathe that could be used to make metal tools was a huge step forward. I think if you can reach this point of development you should be able to make continued progress using non-fossil fuel power sources. Are there other natural materials that could be used instead of metal to achieve this level of precision? I'm pretty skeptical on this. Are there energy sources, other than coal, that could be used to develop early metallurgy to the point where someone could re-invent Maudslay's lathe? I suspect that there are and given enough time someone would find one. It might take longer to reach this point but I believe we could get there.

lawrenceyan 6y ago
Charcoal is technically an unlimited renewable resource.
- jeffreyrogers 6y ago
  Unlimited only if you don't take time into account. A big reason for the switch from charcoal to coal in steelmaking was running out of trees to make charcoal from.
  - lawrenceyan 6y ago
    Not really an issue. Knowledge steadily accumulates over time. The key foundations of human intelligence and ingenuity will always remains regardless of whether or not fossil fuels exist for us to exploit. Non-renewable resources only served to speed up our industrialization.
    - mikewarot 6y ago
      > Knowledge steadily accumulates over time. No, it doesn't. Only knowledge that people consider to have value will be retained over time. Many things are lost to history, for example.. nobody knows how to make cobblestone. (Or so I'm told)

fallingfrog 6y ago

In addition to wood fuel, the other major non-fossil fuel available might be hydro power. The Hoover dam and the Tennessee valley authority produce huge amounts of electricity which could support some sort of industry.

jobigoud 6y ago
But could we build the Hoover Dam with just wood and small hydro as power sources? Could we even build the meta things required to build the Hoover Dam, like the tools, the trucks transporting the concrete, the cranes, the roads to go there…

fallingfrog 6y ago

One might argue that the boon of fossil fuels was actually the cause of a lot of chaos and war since the technological change it enabled was so rapid and norms around war took a long time to catch up. Millions of young people from all over Europe went into the First World War with their heads full of ideas about bravery and daring and adventure only to get thrown into a vast industrial meat grinder. The Second World War was mostly caused by the aftershocks of the first. Maybe if things had progressed more slowly, we could have avoided the upheaval.

TheUndead96 6y ago
I agree with this, which is why the idea of fusion energy is both exciting and terrifying (and why governments may even be hesitant to disclose breakthroughs). In the theoretical ideal, fusion energy would provide such a surplus of energy that it could rewrite borders and trade deals overnight.

vitiral 6y ago

civboot.org, we should try today :D

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

Biofuels and wind would probably be the basis of the energy sector of a civilization reboot. All the easily extracted oil is long gone on earth. There used to be deposits bubbling up from the ground, oil extraction now depends on several centuries of accumulated knowledge, industry, infrastructure, and resource maps to get to tar sands, deep water deposits, fracking, etc.

dang 6y ago

Discussed a bit in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13957198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13957198

ehejsbbejsk 6y ago

I believe we should find ways that are more efficient but ruling out fossil fuels altogether is going to cause a massive global depression.

hikerclimber 6y ago

i don't think so.

mordymoop 6y ago

Rebooting with the current knowledge base, possibly. Booting from scratch with no fossil fuels, doubtful. I have long suspected that one of the Great Filters is the propensity of a planet to generate fossil energy. You will really only find large quantities of oil in a narrow range of circumstances, depending on specific levels of tectonic activity, duration and abundance of life, sedimentation patterns due to rainfall and ocean distributions, and low to moderate levels of atmospheric oxidizer.

Aperocky 6y ago
Imagine if Earth is entirely water. The poor fish can develop mega brains but they would still be more or less stuck under water with no real viable technologies.
- romanovcode 6y ago
  I mean, aren't dolphins, whales and orcas already have pretty much close to human-level intelligence?
  - ars 6y ago
    No? They are very smart, but human level? Not even close. They are similar to apes in intelligence perhaps. That's not human level.
    - romanovcode 6y ago
      I mean, I think that one of the reasons humans are smart is just because of writing so that the knowledge gets passed down with much more ease. I think if these animals could write and read somehow they would be just as smart (if not smarter) than some humans :)
      - ars 6y ago
        People who can't read or write aren't less smart than other humans. No, there are no animals at all, anywhere even close to the smartness of humans. It's not a small difference, it's a HUGE gap. When we talk about how smart apes, or dolphins are, we are talking relative to other animals. Relative to humans, it's almost nothing.

davidhbolton 6y ago

I've seen no mention of the myriad other uses we make from petroleum other than transport uses. There's 144 (out of 6000) listed here. https://www.ranken-energy.com/index.php/products-made-from-petroleum/ https://www.ranken-energy.com/index.php/products-made-from-p... It would be a pretty bleak society without many of these never mind all of the various medicinal stuff such as antiseptics, antihistamines, vitamin capsules, cortisone, glycerin, asparin

rebuilder 6y ago
Not to downplay the importance of petroleum, but surely a lot of those things can be made without it as well. Aspirin for example?
ajross 6y ago
Basic hydrocarbons can be pretty easily synthesized, though. Refining them out of oil is cheaper, but not so much cheaper that we'd have to forego this stuff.
tastyfreeze 6y ago
Without ability to synthesize medications society would need to go back to herbal medicines. Too bad 90% of society knows jack squat about the natural sources of commonly used medications.
- bluGill 6y ago
  It wouldn't matter much if we did. Many are only available in some areas. Often they are in such impure forms that you can't actually use them even if you know it is there. And concentration is varied enough that you can't do precision treatment.

hinkley 6y ago

> The trick to maximising timber production is to employ coppicing – cultivating trees such as ash or willow that resprout from their own stump, becoming ready for harvest again in five to 15 years. This way you can ensure a sustained supply of timber and not face an energy crisis once you’ve deforested your surroundings. Coppice and pollard creates 'water shoots' - long, straight, copious branches. For crafting material, the taper of the material creates problems, so coppice gives you better results. Similarly, charcoal made from coppiced wood will have a fairly uniform diameter, and few side branches to create snags. Post-industrial, that should allow you to make more charcoal per batch, but I don't know if that matters as much for brick retorts. For steel making, I don't know how important air gaps are versus calorie content of the furnace. Uniformity would certainly get you more calories into it but might also suffocate the fire.

mtw 6y ago

In Canada, hydro dams generate most of the electricity. It attracts amongst others huge aluminium smelters in Quebec. So the idea of not being able to generate industrial products with solar panels or dams is not a 100% valid argument

Razengan 6y ago

There must be planets with intelligent life but without petrochemicals. What if humans had evolved before fossil fuels had had enough time to form?

blargmaster42_8 6y ago

No.

readthenotes1 6y ago

By 2016, we knew "Now they’re almost gone." was wrong.kinda hard to read the rest when the starting thesis is wrong. (I had no idea the British pronounced "pews" and "poos" identically, btw. Presidente for Life Xi must be horrified.)

xphos 6y ago

I think the scale of wood production and iron production is very much demonstrated by the romans. This guys series goes over medieval metal production and He has sources with entire cities (Elba) in Rome produced iron ore in the range of 10 million ton of iron ore per year. They wouldn't be mining it unless they could use it and even if they only recovered 1%of the ore into iron they are still ending up with 100,000 tons of iron a year which is significant. We should underestimate human engineering just because we picked a certain technology path. scroll to article 1 yourself https://acoup.blog/2020/11/06/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-addendum-crucible-steel-and-cast-iron/ https://acoup.blog/2020/11/06/collections-iron-how-did-they-...

MichaelZuo 6y ago

It really depends on how far back civilization is reset, if a collapse occurs all the way back to the stone age, it would mean game over then for at least a few hundred million years. If the iron age, probably cans reboot if the population is kept small enough to avoid any Malthusian traps.

hikerclimber 6y ago

i don't think so... I think it will just blow up.

carapace 6y ago

What is the essences of civilization anyway? I mean most of the things we need aren't energy intensive.

bobthepanda 6y ago
A lot of it is precision and scale. Without coke (the coal product) how would you bootstrap large steel production? Electric furnaces exist but use a lot of energy. Without steel and the loss of knowledge on mass producing precision equipment, we lose most of modern medicine's advancements.
- carapace 6y ago
  Yes to precision, that seems like a primary metric for "height" of civilization. But I wonder about scale. Like how much steel do we actually need? More to the point of the OP I suspect that energy usage per capita isn't intrinsically linked to quality of life or "height" of civilization at least above some baseline level. > we lose most of modern medicine's advancements. E.g. stone knives are sharp enough to serve as scalpels? Is that what you mean?
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Without structural steel, we lose the ability for large structures (e.g. bridges, skyscrapers, large scale ships, etc.) and we probably denude the world of trees. You would be hard pressed to find any new construction using no steel at all. Steel is very easy to sanitize. Most of modern medicine also needs metal shaped precisely. Take out the precision and the sanitization and we're back to medicine that might kill people more often than it helps.
    - carapace 6y ago
      I hear you, but I'm not convinced there aren't possibilities for e.g. carbon fiber and ceramics and such (I'd include basalt fibers but I realized that might have high energy inputs too.)

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Well, it'd be hard to not have any methane hydrates. There is a larger hydrocarbon store of them under the sea, than there was ever oil. We've only begun to tap it, and its estimated there are centuries more reserves than there was oil. If a planet has deep seas that are cold at the bottom, then they'll have methane hydrates. They're pretty much continuously renewed. I see a much more optimistic future for most galactic races.

hikerclimb 6y ago

I hope not

api 6y ago

I think the answer is yes, but much more slowly and it probably would not look the same. It would be slower, more efficient, more durable, and it would probably take a lot longer to get things like air and space flights. Think bootstrapped company vs big money VC backed company. Fossil fuels are like a boatload of VC. It accelerates things but also promotes certain dysfunctions and wastefulness. Of course maybe our slow renewable civilization would eventually find nuclear fission and take off like ours.

8bitsrule 6y ago

Depends on what that means, but fossils have only been in widespread use for a couple of centuries, yet a lot of important discoveries were made before them. The energies from wind, water, animals and burning plants were widely in use before coal took off in Europe about 3 centuries ago. Without (only a century of) oil, even without coal, the discovery of EM fields still would have led to (slower) development of hydro and wind electricity gear. Wherever you've got abundant electric, the rest follows. With technology to tap into it, the sun pours FAR more power onto the surface than needed to get 'modern'.

Gibbon1 6y ago
> the sun pours FAR more power onto the surface than needed to get 'modern'. One of the agruments economists make for not switching away from fossil fuels is that we'd be consigning worlds poor to endless poverty. Invariable followed by the accusation that you don't care about poor people. But if you look at the supply of oil and gas it's obvious there never was would be enough to lift the worlds poor out of poverty. If you want a hard example of that during it's modernization push China burned through most of it's coal reserves. Not sustainable. There is though enough solar and wind.
- demosito666 6y ago
  And another thing that is missed in this discussion: the article assumes that there will be much fewer people left than we have today. It's very hard to support something as huge and as cold as Moscow on renewables. But if there are few people, they live in compact villages in warm climate, there is no existential pressure to burn fossils for heating and heavy industries. You have a breathing room.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    Thing about places that are far north and cold. If you look at a map usually they are less than 1500 miles from some place sunnier.