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That should continue to be a scare. It is likely we are or have peaked. The way I see it, we bootstrapped our existing tech off high energy density oil. If i
by ddingus 3y ago
That should continue to be a scare.
It is likely we are or have peaked.
The way I see it, we bootstrapped our existing tech off high energy density oil.
If it were gone, we would find it extremely difficult to repeat it all.
Now that we have built all this up, it is also our opportunity to bootstrap something far more sustainable, or we do risk a serious regression and a lot of people die.
Longer term, we use oil for far too much.
Getting off of it preserves a resource we may well find need of again.
- walleeee 3y agoIt is especially maddening that our fossil inheritance, dipped into with wisdom and in moderation, could have been a profound and lasting gift for all future life on earth, instead of threatening its very existence. The dose makes the poison
- anonylizard 3y agoTechnology generally speaking only moves forward. Some technologies will be lost in a civilizational collapse, but the most important ones generally survive. If another collapse happens, and without oil, people could believably bootstrap straight from electricity + batteries. There'll be endless amounts of quality scrap material and manuals. A lot of critical small scale appliances can be powered by hand-cranked motors.
- ddingus 3y agoIt does not work that way. What you don't understand is the energy density multiplied by massive availability is what made the difference. There is chemistry in all of that too. We make so damn many things with fossil fuels it's hard to comprehend. If we were to collapse, we would be left with some remnants that we would be unable to reproduce! The tech needed for that runs on fuels we would find ourselves unable to procure. That's coping, not building or bootstrapping.