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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 t
by 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 agoIt doesn't take very long to dig up enough peat to keep you warm all winter.
- virtue3 6y agowater wheels / windmills are pretty effective for reducing some forms of labor. IE grinding cereals.
- AlotOfReading 6y agoTo 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 agoBut 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 agoMany 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.