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If we were to have a mass extinction event today, the "survivors" would quickly find that all the readily accessible surface level fuel sources are long gone an

by yodon 5y ago

If we were to have a mass extinction event today, the "survivors" would quickly find that all the readily accessible surface level fuel sources are long gone and have already been consumed. In the 1600's or 1700's it wouldn't have been that difficult, but today the challenge of getting access to power is going to make restarting civilization somewhere between difficult and impossible. Try finding enough burnable wood near an emerging city/town to provide warmth and power while you restart civilization and I think you'll discover that humanity has already cut down the majority of the forests, tapped the majority of the oil Wells that can produce oil without lots of supporting tech, and mined most of the easily mineable coal. Sure, you can get a bit of power, but it's going to take a lot of both power and specialized skilled labor to restart our power sources civilization after a mass extinction event. The chances are extremely good that even if you can resume making babies you can't resume making the power those babies will need to achieve the goals we would have for them. On the surface of the Earth today it takes more power and skills to gain access to power than survivors are likely to have.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
Trees grow back pretty quickly (they're talking timescales of thousands of years for this plan) and that's all humanity needs for energy to start. The main reason we need all that power is for our creature comforts. We don't technically need them to survive but we don't know how to live without them anymore. There being billions of us doesn't help either. A rebooted humanity shouldn't have too much difficulty with that though.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- yodon 5y ago
  If you have a mass extinction event and go more than a generation or two without restarting, all the skills and education will be gone which means you're restarting from zero. We needed readily available high grade energy sources to get to high grade renewables, and those trying to restart civilization will as well, but by the time the get there their forest will be consumed just as ours are, and they won't have oil and coal to discover to get them the bridge to solar or nuclear or high tech wind and tidal power.
  - hfkfktnekfm 5y ago
    Are you saying that in 100 years all the books in the world will be gone? Absolutely nothing will survive, and post apocalyptic man will not think at all about preserving this knowledge?
    - joe_g_young 5y ago
      Radiation cats [1] would serve as a warning when books disappear. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interference_Task_Force#Fran%C3%A7oise_Bastide_and_Paolo_Fabbri https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interference_Task_Forc...
  - zizee 5y ago
    > We needed readily available high grade energy ... You say this as if it is a fact. It's a decent theory, but it's hardly so certain that you should write with such conviction.
  - roca 5y ago
    > all the skills and education will be gone which means you're restarting from zero. Not at all. There will be books containing most human knowledge. It would be hard work for the rebooters to reacquire those skills but much, much easier than redeveloping them from scratch. Plus in many cases there will be artifacts around that can either be reused directly or as models. > those trying to restart civilization will as well Rebooting doesn't have to follow the same development path that we took to get here. It would be very interesting and potentially important to try to find shorter, easier paths to modern technology. It's not obvious to me that such paths can't exist. If they do exist we can record them to guide future generations. I'm only personally familiar with the (current) high end of technology, but for example once you get to the point where you're building microprocessors we know that you should build something simple like RISC-V which lets you skip generations of mistakes. If you actually build RISC-V then we can arrange to have a whole lot of archived software ready for you to use.
njarboe 5y ago
Plenty of water power.
- yodon 5y ago
  It takes a lot of tech to turn a River into a source of heat, and it takes still more tech to produce that tech that you need to pull it off. Water is an easy source of power for some things, but for most chemical processes what you need is heat (and most of the tech you're going to need to restart civilization is at some level going to be rooted in chemical processes)
  - chmod775 5y ago
    > It takes a lot of tech to turn a River into a source of heat. No it doesn't. Turning motion into electricity is fairly easy, and turning electricity into heat is even more so. The biggest hurdle will be manufacturing quality mechanical parts, but you can do without quality in a pinch. Also producing heat is a matter of survival, not civilization. We can safely assume people will at least be able to make a fire.
    - yodon 5y ago
      You're thinking like a modern resident, not like someone living a decade after a global extinction event. Turning water into electricity requires significant infrastructure for making motors and generators and bearings and permanent magnets and transmission lines and the like (even if in principle the math/physics is easy)
      - chmod775 5y ago
        1. Bootstrap a smithy 2. Make incrementally better tools. You don't need to get to the level of medieval clockmakers, just as long as you're not hitting metal with a rock. 3. Make a draw plate. 4. Make lots and lots of copper wire. 5. Build a water wheel whichever way you want. 6. Attach bigger wheel (TM) and connect to smaller wheel (TM) with a rope drive. 7. Use copper wire to build a power generator attached to smaller wheel (TM). Unless humanity got completely wiped off the planet with no artifacts left behind, most of the above should not be necessary though.
chmod775 5y ago
Turning wind, sun, or water into a good source of electricity is fairly low-tech. There's also still a ton of easily accessible lignite everywhere, which our present civilization doesn't really care about for its inefficiency and ecological concerns.
- calvinmorrison 5y ago
  Also wood gasification can trivially take wood inputs and run internal combustion engines.
bserge 5y ago
Not sure anyone will shed a tear for the loss of this civilization after the mass extinction event was caused by them (us).
mxfh 5y ago
The 1600s were the worst time to find wood. Forestation levels now are quite significantly above that period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holznot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holznot
seabj0rn 5y ago
Back to whale oil I suppose!
yosito 5y ago
> Try finding enough burnable wood near an emerging city/town to provide warmth and power while you restart civilization and I think you'll discover that humanity has already cut down the majority of the forests Tree cover is actually increasing. Your comment reads like you've only ever seen a forest on TV... I suggest you step away from your computer screen and go for a hike.
- yodon 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure anywhere there is a functioning port or navigable water way the number of trees within a day's walk is insufficient to support the needs of the population that humanity would need in that location to restart civilization. The fact that you can get in your car and drive to a beautiful forest doesn't actually help much.
  - hfkfktnekfm 5y ago
    Amazon, Africa, .... And you underestimate how quickly forests will grow back. Sure, it will take maybe 100 years, but civilization was built in 4000, so there is no rush. Also, Saudi Arabia is sitting on an ocean of oil, not that hard to extract.
  - helloworld11 5y ago
    Nonsense. You really should go take a good look at Google Earth. I come from a major port city in a first world country and literally right outside the city's urban area start forests that stretch for hundreds of kilometres. I know for a fact that many other cities like this along coastlines exist.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
Water, wind, and solar would all be available to people rebooting civilization. The ancient Romans used these, and more. https://brewminate.com/energy-in-ancient-times/ https://brewminate.com/energy-in-ancient-times/
masklinn 5y ago
Trees are really not the issue, once you stop fucking with them they grow back quickly. It’s the ores which are going to be problematic. As well as the coal obviously but there charcoal is an option, just not as easy.

by yodon 5y ago

GekkePrutser 5y ago

Trees grow back pretty quickly (they're talking timescales of thousands of years for this plan) and that's all humanity needs for energy to start. The main reason we need all that power is for our creature comforts. We don't technically need them to survive but we don't know how to live without them anymore. There being billions of us doesn't help either. A rebooted humanity shouldn't have too much difficulty with that though.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yodon 5y ago
If you have a mass extinction event and go more than a generation or two without restarting, all the skills and education will be gone which means you're restarting from zero. We needed readily available high grade energy sources to get to high grade renewables, and those trying to restart civilization will as well, but by the time the get there their forest will be consumed just as ours are, and they won't have oil and coal to discover to get them the bridge to solar or nuclear or high tech wind and tidal power.
- hfkfktnekfm 5y ago
  Are you saying that in 100 years all the books in the world will be gone? Absolutely nothing will survive, and post apocalyptic man will not think at all about preserving this knowledge?
  - joe_g_young 5y ago
    Radiation cats [1] would serve as a warning when books disappear. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interference_Task_Force#Fran%C3%A7oise_Bastide_and_Paolo_Fabbri https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interference_Task_Forc...
- zizee 5y ago
  > We needed readily available high grade energy ... You say this as if it is a fact. It's a decent theory, but it's hardly so certain that you should write with such conviction.
- roca 5y ago
  > all the skills and education will be gone which means you're restarting from zero. Not at all. There will be books containing most human knowledge. It would be hard work for the rebooters to reacquire those skills but much, much easier than redeveloping them from scratch. Plus in many cases there will be artifacts around that can either be reused directly or as models. > those trying to restart civilization will as well Rebooting doesn't have to follow the same development path that we took to get here. It would be very interesting and potentially important to try to find shorter, easier paths to modern technology. It's not obvious to me that such paths can't exist. If they do exist we can record them to guide future generations. I'm only personally familiar with the (current) high end of technology, but for example once you get to the point where you're building microprocessors we know that you should build something simple like RISC-V which lets you skip generations of mistakes. If you actually build RISC-V then we can arrange to have a whole lot of archived software ready for you to use.

njarboe 5y ago

Plenty of water power.

yodon 5y ago
It takes a lot of tech to turn a River into a source of heat, and it takes still more tech to produce that tech that you need to pull it off. Water is an easy source of power for some things, but for most chemical processes what you need is heat (and most of the tech you're going to need to restart civilization is at some level going to be rooted in chemical processes)
- chmod775 5y ago
  > It takes a lot of tech to turn a River into a source of heat. No it doesn't. Turning motion into electricity is fairly easy, and turning electricity into heat is even more so. The biggest hurdle will be manufacturing quality mechanical parts, but you can do without quality in a pinch. Also producing heat is a matter of survival, not civilization. We can safely assume people will at least be able to make a fire.
  - yodon 5y ago
    You're thinking like a modern resident, not like someone living a decade after a global extinction event. Turning water into electricity requires significant infrastructure for making motors and generators and bearings and permanent magnets and transmission lines and the like (even if in principle the math/physics is easy)
    - chmod775 5y ago
      1. Bootstrap a smithy 2. Make incrementally better tools. You don't need to get to the level of medieval clockmakers, just as long as you're not hitting metal with a rock. 3. Make a draw plate. 4. Make lots and lots of copper wire. 5. Build a water wheel whichever way you want. 6. Attach bigger wheel (TM) and connect to smaller wheel (TM) with a rope drive. 7. Use copper wire to build a power generator attached to smaller wheel (TM). Unless humanity got completely wiped off the planet with no artifacts left behind, most of the above should not be necessary though.

chmod775 5y ago

Turning wind, sun, or water into a good source of electricity is fairly low-tech. There's also still a ton of easily accessible lignite everywhere, which our present civilization doesn't really care about for its inefficiency and ecological concerns.

calvinmorrison 5y ago
Also wood gasification can trivially take wood inputs and run internal combustion engines.

bserge 5y ago

Not sure anyone will shed a tear for the loss of this civilization after the mass extinction event was caused by them (us).

mxfh 5y ago

The 1600s were the worst time to find wood. Forestation levels now are quite significantly above that period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holznot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holznot

seabj0rn 5y ago

Back to whale oil I suppose!

yosito 5y ago

> Try finding enough burnable wood near an emerging city/town to provide warmth and power while you restart civilization and I think you'll discover that humanity has already cut down the majority of the forests Tree cover is actually increasing. Your comment reads like you've only ever seen a forest on TV... I suggest you step away from your computer screen and go for a hike.

yodon 5y ago
I'm pretty sure anywhere there is a functioning port or navigable water way the number of trees within a day's walk is insufficient to support the needs of the population that humanity would need in that location to restart civilization. The fact that you can get in your car and drive to a beautiful forest doesn't actually help much.
- hfkfktnekfm 5y ago
  Amazon, Africa, .... And you underestimate how quickly forests will grow back. Sure, it will take maybe 100 years, but civilization was built in 4000, so there is no rush. Also, Saudi Arabia is sitting on an ocean of oil, not that hard to extract.
- helloworld11 5y ago
  Nonsense. You really should go take a good look at Google Earth. I come from a major port city in a first world country and literally right outside the city's urban area start forests that stretch for hundreds of kilometres. I know for a fact that many other cities like this along coastlines exist.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

Water, wind, and solar would all be available to people rebooting civilization. The ancient Romans used these, and more. https://brewminate.com/energy-in-ancient-times/ https://brewminate.com/energy-in-ancient-times/

masklinn 5y ago

Trees are really not the issue, once you stop fucking with them they grow back quickly. It’s the ores which are going to be problematic. As well as the coal obviously but there charcoal is an option, just not as easy.