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I would think that a civilization like ours wouldn’t have left the amount of fossil fuels that we still find. We certainly aren’t going to leave that much for f

I would think that a civilization like ours wouldn’t have left the amount of fossil fuels that we still find. We certainly aren’t going to leave that much for future civilizations.

wmf 3y ago
This was mentioned in The Mote in God's Eye. Later civilizations had to go straight to renewables or nuclear because no accessible fossil fuels were left.
- wrycoder 3y ago
  And good luck doing either without accessible fossil fuels.
  - Retric 3y ago
    The jump to either is fairly trivial because hydropower is so abundant. 18% of the worlds current electricity is supplied by hydroelectric power. Considering we developed nuclear energy using 1940’s industrial capacity hydro could easily bridge the gap. Similarly while trains needed fossil fuels ships didn’t and allowed for very efficient transportation of goods on the ocean and inland through areas with sufficient rainfall. The major historic use of coal was for heating, but much of the earth never gets that cold.
    - Salgat 3y ago
      Most industry is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for vehicles. That includes nearly all construction. How would we get around that bottleneck?
      - Retric 3y ago
        0 fossil fuels doesn’t mean zero fuels. Further starting from scratch with different constraints means different optimizations.
    - elbasti 3y ago
      The issue isn't electricity, it's energy. How do you run your first ironworks without coal? You can't really exploit hydro for electricity without industrialization, and you can't really have an industrial revolution without coal.
      - Salgat 3y ago
        Good point, even to this day coal/coke is required to create steel (electric-arc is only used for recycling steel).
        Robotbeat 3y ago
        That’s not true. We use syngas (about 50% H, 50% CO) in all the iron ore reduction plants built in the Us in the last few decades, and they can run almost entirely on hydrogen. Additionally, coal wasn’t even used for making steel in the US basically at all until 1827 (charcoal has fewer impurities like the sulfur found in a lot of early coke). The US primarily used charcoal from wood even for iron production until well into the mid 1800s (and by 1884, charcoal was still used for 10% of iron and steel production in the US, and charcoal was still used in some niche areas even into the 1940s). And steam locomotives in the US were also often powered by wood in the 1800s.
      - mdorazio 3y ago
        The same way the first ironworks were run - with charcoal, which you make from organics.
        elbasti 3y ago
        But without coal you quickly run out of forest. I mean, England did, and they were coal rich!
        Retric 3y ago
        England ran out of Land not forests. They set aside large tracts of land for growing wood starting in the Middle Ages because having wood was useful both as a construction material and for burning. Critically, you can move wood long distances so running out locally isn’t an major issue as long as you don’t run out globally.
    - krisoft 3y ago
      > hydropower is so abundant Almost all of our current hydropower is based on damns made of concrete. Creating the cement for that is very energy intensive. Also turbines and generators are made of metals which require a lot of energy to melt. Probably you can bootstrap a waterpower based industry somehow without fossil fuels but it is not trivial. The other thing is that each incremental step in such a process has to provide some benefit to the participants. For example you are not going to have generators without readily available good quality copper wire, but bootstrapping a copper refining and wire making industry without fossil fuels is very hard. Those people need to see a reason for doing it in a world where there is no electricity yet therefore there is very little need for said copper wires.
      - Retric 3y ago
        Historically the Industrial Revolution was mostly bootstrapped by hydro / biofuel power. Useful combustion engines were only invented fairly late in the process. You don’t need to start with massive dams, you need to bootstrap industry to get to that point. Even 0.1% of the worlds current electricity generation is a massive amount of energy. There’s this idea that the Industrial Revolution ran on coal but Coal was an inferior fuel for steel production until ~1827 or so. Eventually steam locomotives beat horse / manpower drawn canal boats, but it a close contest until surprisingly recently. Hell the last commercial cargo sailing ship was in use until the 1960’s long after nuclear power became a thing.
      - adrianN 3y ago
        Bootstrapping a hydropower based industry with fossil fuels is not trivial either.
      - Jensson 3y ago
        > Almost all of our current hydropower is based on damns made of concrete. Creating the cement for that is very energy intensive. Is that really harder than building hundreds of kilometers of aqueducts? Humans have known how to engineer water flows for thousands of years, if we valued power we would build those dams. That power would be more expensive so it would slow down the industrial revolution but it would still happen. Also you don't need continuous power for an industrial revolution, that is convenient but factories are still revolutionary even if they just run half the year.
- trompetenaccoun 3y ago
  Fossil fuels are a renewable resource on the geological time frame. They're not use once and gone forever. Most of the oil we know of today was formed in the Mesozoic and later. So after the Silurian. In fact, suspiciously, only a small percentage of what exists today is assumed to have been formed in the Paleozoic. If anything the notion that they'd have used up the fossil fuel only supports the idea that such a civilization may have existed, if anything. But of course one can also point to the simple fact that we're already transitioning to renewables and we're far from being short. We just do it because it's better. So why couldn't a past civilization have done the same?
mynameisvlad 3y ago
Fossil fuels can be regenerated over a long enough period of time. We all eventually decompose.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  My understanding (which could certainly be incorrect) is that most fossil fuels formed between the evolution of trees and fungi that could breakdown lignin and so most fossil fuel deposits were ancient even to the dinosaurs. I doubt that significant stores would form between now and the deadline for life on earth in a few hundred million years.
  - adamesque 3y ago
    I’ve recently seen some work claiming this link is exaggerated: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/
    - junofan 3y ago
      Yeah, (un)fortunately simple math is all you need to see the carbon cycle could not possibly have worked that way. There isn’t enough carbon produced under the proposed scenarios to support hundreds of years of tree growth, let alone millions. There was probably other stuff that broke down lignin.
  - brazzy 3y ago
    >most fossil fuels formed between the evolution of trees and fungi that could breakdown lignin This is only true for coal, not for oil (which is formed mostly from sea plankton biomass that is mixed into sediment layers).
mcmoor 3y ago
Or maybe fossil fuels used to have springs all over the place. In medieval times there actually used to be oils streaming to surface and used in mundane lamps.
geysersam 3y ago
Maybe there was even more to start with?

I would think that a civilization like ours wouldn’t have left the amount of fossil fuels that we still find. We certainly aren’t going to leave that much for future civilizations.

wmf 3y ago

This was mentioned in The Mote in God's Eye. Later civilizations had to go straight to renewables or nuclear because no accessible fossil fuels were left.

wrycoder 3y ago
And good luck doing either without accessible fossil fuels.
- Retric 3y ago
  The jump to either is fairly trivial because hydropower is so abundant. 18% of the worlds current electricity is supplied by hydroelectric power. Considering we developed nuclear energy using 1940’s industrial capacity hydro could easily bridge the gap. Similarly while trains needed fossil fuels ships didn’t and allowed for very efficient transportation of goods on the ocean and inland through areas with sufficient rainfall. The major historic use of coal was for heating, but much of the earth never gets that cold.
  - Salgat 3y ago
    Most industry is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for vehicles. That includes nearly all construction. How would we get around that bottleneck?
    - Retric 3y ago
      0 fossil fuels doesn’t mean zero fuels. Further starting from scratch with different constraints means different optimizations.
  - elbasti 3y ago
    The issue isn't electricity, it's energy. How do you run your first ironworks without coal? You can't really exploit hydro for electricity without industrialization, and you can't really have an industrial revolution without coal.
    - Salgat 3y ago
      Good point, even to this day coal/coke is required to create steel (electric-arc is only used for recycling steel).
      - Robotbeat 3y ago
        That’s not true. We use syngas (about 50% H, 50% CO) in all the iron ore reduction plants built in the Us in the last few decades, and they can run almost entirely on hydrogen. Additionally, coal wasn’t even used for making steel in the US basically at all until 1827 (charcoal has fewer impurities like the sulfur found in a lot of early coke). The US primarily used charcoal from wood even for iron production until well into the mid 1800s (and by 1884, charcoal was still used for 10% of iron and steel production in the US, and charcoal was still used in some niche areas even into the 1940s). And steam locomotives in the US were also often powered by wood in the 1800s.
    - mdorazio 3y ago
      The same way the first ironworks were run - with charcoal, which you make from organics.
      - elbasti 3y ago
        But without coal you quickly run out of forest. I mean, England did, and they were coal rich!
        Retric 3y ago
        England ran out of Land not forests. They set aside large tracts of land for growing wood starting in the Middle Ages because having wood was useful both as a construction material and for burning. Critically, you can move wood long distances so running out locally isn’t an major issue as long as you don’t run out globally.
  - krisoft 3y ago
    > hydropower is so abundant Almost all of our current hydropower is based on damns made of concrete. Creating the cement for that is very energy intensive. Also turbines and generators are made of metals which require a lot of energy to melt. Probably you can bootstrap a waterpower based industry somehow without fossil fuels but it is not trivial. The other thing is that each incremental step in such a process has to provide some benefit to the participants. For example you are not going to have generators without readily available good quality copper wire, but bootstrapping a copper refining and wire making industry without fossil fuels is very hard. Those people need to see a reason for doing it in a world where there is no electricity yet therefore there is very little need for said copper wires.
    - Retric 3y ago
      Historically the Industrial Revolution was mostly bootstrapped by hydro / biofuel power. Useful combustion engines were only invented fairly late in the process. You don’t need to start with massive dams, you need to bootstrap industry to get to that point. Even 0.1% of the worlds current electricity generation is a massive amount of energy. There’s this idea that the Industrial Revolution ran on coal but Coal was an inferior fuel for steel production until ~1827 or so. Eventually steam locomotives beat horse / manpower drawn canal boats, but it a close contest until surprisingly recently. Hell the last commercial cargo sailing ship was in use until the 1960’s long after nuclear power became a thing.
    - adrianN 3y ago
      Bootstrapping a hydropower based industry with fossil fuels is not trivial either.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      > Almost all of our current hydropower is based on damns made of concrete. Creating the cement for that is very energy intensive. Is that really harder than building hundreds of kilometers of aqueducts? Humans have known how to engineer water flows for thousands of years, if we valued power we would build those dams. That power would be more expensive so it would slow down the industrial revolution but it would still happen. Also you don't need continuous power for an industrial revolution, that is convenient but factories are still revolutionary even if they just run half the year.
trompetenaccoun 3y ago
Fossil fuels are a renewable resource on the geological time frame. They're not use once and gone forever. Most of the oil we know of today was formed in the Mesozoic and later. So after the Silurian. In fact, suspiciously, only a small percentage of what exists today is assumed to have been formed in the Paleozoic. If anything the notion that they'd have used up the fossil fuel only supports the idea that such a civilization may have existed, if anything. But of course one can also point to the simple fact that we're already transitioning to renewables and we're far from being short. We just do it because it's better. So why couldn't a past civilization have done the same?

mynameisvlad 3y ago

Fossil fuels can be regenerated over a long enough period of time. We all eventually decompose.

hotpotamus 3y ago
My understanding (which could certainly be incorrect) is that most fossil fuels formed between the evolution of trees and fungi that could breakdown lignin and so most fossil fuel deposits were ancient even to the dinosaurs. I doubt that significant stores would form between now and the deadline for life on earth in a few hundred million years.
- adamesque 3y ago
  I’ve recently seen some work claiming this link is exaggerated: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/
  - junofan 3y ago
    Yeah, (un)fortunately simple math is all you need to see the carbon cycle could not possibly have worked that way. There isn’t enough carbon produced under the proposed scenarios to support hundreds of years of tree growth, let alone millions. There was probably other stuff that broke down lignin.
- brazzy 3y ago
  >most fossil fuels formed between the evolution of trees and fungi that could breakdown lignin This is only true for coal, not for oil (which is formed mostly from sea plankton biomass that is mixed into sediment layers).

mcmoor 3y ago

Or maybe fossil fuels used to have springs all over the place. In medieval times there actually used to be oils streaming to surface and used in mundane lamps.

geysersam 3y ago

Maybe there was even more to start with?