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It was also before we'd burned all the easily accessible fossil fuels.

smallmancontrov 1y ago
We mined all of the easily accessible drywall gypsum too, I guess we wouldn't be able to have houses either and would have to live outside in the cold and rain!
- nradov 1y ago
  Perhaps the aliens will share advanced technology with us such as how to build a tent.
  - datavirtue 1y ago
    I can't wait until everyone realizes how easy it is to rebuild Göbekli Tepe with hand tools.
- wat10000 1y ago
  There are lots of other building materials available. What other sources of energy are there which are suitable for driving a new industrial revolution if you’re starting over? Wind and solar aren’t worth too much without high tech to enable them. Biomass is insufficient. Nuclear needs high tech. Hydro could do, but it’s pretty limiting.
  - smallmancontrov 1y ago
    Insufficient for a hydrocarbon sugar high, but hardly insufficient for bootstrapping a civilization. Yeah, bio and hydro are limiting. So we would deal with the limits for longer until we worked our way past them. It's wildly condescending to imagine that this would be a show-stopper, doubly so when you review the history of all the things that were historically not stopped by the lack of fossil fuels.
kulahan 1y ago
Thankfully, unless somehow everything manmade disappears, we'll have scraps of windmills, solar panels, and hydro electric generators - with that laying around, it's easy to eventually figure out the underlying concepts and rebuild them.
jandrese 1y ago
Electrification of transportation is already well underway. Obviously ships and planes will lag behind, and may even be forced to use biofuels if we run out of fossil fuels, but the idea that the world will stop when we run out is outdated. Green power generation is also making huge strides forward, and battery technology is improving enough to make fully green grids a reality. We already see articles about how some countries are managing to go entire days without burning any fossil fuels for power generation. This will increase over time despite what the doomsayers predict. We aren't there yet, but the progress is almost inevitable. The bigger problem is that we've already burned so much fossil fuel that we are noticeably altering the climate. This is going to cause a lot of stresses in the future, especially in a post-collapse scenario.
- wat10000 1y ago
  They’re going days without burning fossil fuels by using high tech solar panels and windmills and such. What happens when they stop being made and they eventually break down? You’ll have to bootstrap tech again but without low-tech sources of concentrated energy. Electrified transport is great today, useless two hundred years ago.
  - jandrese 1y ago
    Solar panels are somewhat high tech, but wind turbines are 17th century technology. The electric motor you need to attach to turn it into a generator is also pretty low tech. You can even use lead acid batteries to even out the power delivery, and those can be incredibly low tech and also highly recyclable. Obviously you're not going to get to 100% in a week if you're rebuilding civilization from the ground up, but if you can retain some of the knowledge you can get a big step up and hopefully avoid some of the pitfalls that caused the downfall of society in the first place.

We mined all of the easily accessible drywall gypsum too, I guess we wouldn't be able to have houses either and would have to live outside in the cold and rain!

nradov 1y ago
Perhaps the aliens will share advanced technology with us such as how to build a tent.
- datavirtue 1y ago
  I can't wait until everyone realizes how easy it is to rebuild Göbekli Tepe with hand tools.
wat10000 1y ago
There are lots of other building materials available. What other sources of energy are there which are suitable for driving a new industrial revolution if you’re starting over? Wind and solar aren’t worth too much without high tech to enable them. Biomass is insufficient. Nuclear needs high tech. Hydro could do, but it’s pretty limiting.
- smallmancontrov 1y ago
  Insufficient for a hydrocarbon sugar high, but hardly insufficient for bootstrapping a civilization. Yeah, bio and hydro are limiting. So we would deal with the limits for longer until we worked our way past them. It's wildly condescending to imagine that this would be a show-stopper, doubly so when you review the history of all the things that were historically not stopped by the lack of fossil fuels.

kulahan 1y ago

Thankfully, unless somehow everything manmade disappears, we'll have scraps of windmills, solar panels, and hydro electric generators - with that laying around, it's easy to eventually figure out the underlying concepts and rebuild them.

jandrese 1y ago

Electrification of transportation is already well underway. Obviously ships and planes will lag behind, and may even be forced to use biofuels if we run out of fossil fuels, but the idea that the world will stop when we run out is outdated. Green power generation is also making huge strides forward, and battery technology is improving enough to make fully green grids a reality. We already see articles about how some countries are managing to go entire days without burning any fossil fuels for power generation. This will increase over time despite what the doomsayers predict. We aren't there yet, but the progress is almost inevitable. The bigger problem is that we've already burned so much fossil fuel that we are noticeably altering the climate. This is going to cause a lot of stresses in the future, especially in a post-collapse scenario.

wat10000 1y ago
They’re going days without burning fossil fuels by using high tech solar panels and windmills and such. What happens when they stop being made and they eventually break down? You’ll have to bootstrap tech again but without low-tech sources of concentrated energy. Electrified transport is great today, useless two hundred years ago.
- jandrese 1y ago
  Solar panels are somewhat high tech, but wind turbines are 17th century technology. The electric motor you need to attach to turn it into a generator is also pretty low tech. You can even use lead acid batteries to even out the power delivery, and those can be incredibly low tech and also highly recyclable. Obviously you're not going to get to 100% in a week if you're rebuilding civilization from the ground up, but if you can retain some of the knowledge you can get a big step up and hopefully avoid some of the pitfalls that caused the downfall of society in the first place.