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Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels?

173 points by Hooke 12y ago

a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
Industrial civilization is definitely a one shot deal. All the surface metal deposits are gone. You need massive industrial infrastructure to access the remaining ores. You couldn't even progress to the iron or bronze age after a reboot.
- mobiplayer 12y ago
  Well, depends on how you look at it. All (most of?) those metals are somewhere, aren't they? Actually there are many of those metals on the surface, there's not even need to dig for them.
  - codeulike 12y ago
    Once you've got the metal, how are you going to heat it up so that you can re-shape it?
    - mobiplayer 12y ago
      That's an interesting question, however it is not what I was replying to. I'm not sure your question should be pointed at me :) In any case here's my quick answer: I hope they come off as Lego bricks.
    - eropple 12y ago
      Why not wood? You can easily build wood fires hot enough to work refined aluminum (all those cans, good for something!), copper (rip out the plumbing and wires en masse, it won't be pure but it'll be close enough), tin, and zinc; with copper, tin, and zinc those you can create bronze and brass. Iron would be out of the question with simply a wood fire, but--assuming other knowledge was intact, of course--you could build a forced-draft charcoal burner which can easily get hot enough to melt down some forms of iron. When I started thinking about this problem I was expecting it to be a tough one, but I think it's achievable.
      - abakker 12y ago
        Iron and Steel can be worked on a charcoal/wood fire. Maybe it won't be easy, but the scale of malleability is basically linear with temperature. Every 100 degrees and it gets a bit softer. Metallurgically, this won't necessarily yield the best parts if we can't reach critical temperatures - 1900°F, but even then, there are plenty of forgiving alloys out there, and plenty of metal that can be re-worked without melting it down. The bigger difficulty in my mind is having all the alloys identified. It is pretty business even with good modern tools.
      - fleitz 12y ago
        Take your wood fire, add some aluminium you scavenged from an aircraft, then add some rust. Voila, 2500 C. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite
        jnbiche 12y ago
        This should be a top-level comment. There are probably other similarly low-tech ideas that could be used to bootstrap a civilization.
    - panglott 12y ago
      The problem with wood as a fuel is that any densifying human culture can burn it faster than it grows. Industrial uses compete with household uses for cooking fuel and heating. Europe in the 14th to 16th centuries saw massive deforestation in England, Germany, and elsewhere, and the state had to reserve stands of large timber as a military resource for shipbuilding. This was a significant concern in the early Tudor and Elizabethan era, for example, and the Black Forest reached its smallest extent during this time also, IIRC. Wood for fuel came from intensive coppice stands, and significant wood was imported as well. As the article says: "Wartime gasifier cars could achieve about 1.5 miles per kilogram [of wood]." Comparing the time it takes to grow a kg of wood versus the value of moving a car only 1.5 miles illustrates the problem pretty nicely. Wood is not a sustainable fuel for an industrial civilization, at anything like current rates of consumption.
- ginko 12y ago
  >All the surface metal deposits are gone. Well, they're not so much gone as converted into various structures all over the globe. I see no reason why later civilizations couldn't mine the remains of former cities.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    Pretty much this - mining would be done on old landfill sites and cities, at least for metals. Fossil fuels are a different type of problem - we're not going to get all that carbon back. Conversely maybe a reboot civilization would develop differently - forests to solar thermal to PV and batteries. It would be slower, but certainly possible.
    - codeulike 12y ago
      How are you going to do any metalwork with your scavenged metal? Heat it up with a big mirror? Its very very hard without high energy density fuel. The article suggests charcoal (did you read the article?) but thats problematic too.
      - XorNot 12y ago
        Just because it would be a slower development path doesn't mean it's impossible. It would be slower, but any given civilization would have only a few viable options for development - so yes, I think you'd find a civilization which values glass and mirrors and polishing technology to get the heat necessary for metal working.
        tinco 12y ago
        I don't think a civilization built on a shit load of aluminium scrap is going to develop very slowly. Don't forget aluminium is a wonder metal that's only been around for like a hundred years. All really important metals can be melted at temperatures that can easily be reached with a well built furnace and natural fuel like wood.
- legulere 12y ago
  Metals don't just vanish, they're still here in products that can be recycled.
  - mariusz79 12y ago
    That depends how long would it take for another civilization to arise from the ashes of the current one. Metals don't just vanish but most of them are chemically active and will in time rust, disintegrate, get absorbed by organics and pretty much vanish.
- bitL 12y ago
  In other words, if there ever were a nuclear war affecting the whole world, the generations after will be stuck with whatever remains they got forever, baring some unexpected easy energy discovery or a resource-rich asteroid hitting the planet without wiping out the life.
- fleitz 12y ago
  This is so far from the truth that it's not even funny. There are tonnes of surface metal deposits, it's just you'd get shot for opening a mine there because it's in the middle of the national park. Also, what do you call a 'garbage dump' other than a surface deposit rich in metals? All of the metals we've ever mined are on the surface. We didn't put them back down into the mine... (or at least when we did it's the open pit variety)
  - bitL 12y ago
    How do you mine rust? Or thin surfaces of precious metals on electronics without the availability of chemicals which take a lot of fossil fuels to manufacture?
codeulike 12y ago
boils down to this quote: In a world without readily mined coal, would there ever be the opportunity to test profligate prototypes of steam engines, even if they could mature and become more efficient over time? How feasible is it that a society could attain a sufficient understanding of thermodynamics, metallurgy and mechanics to make the precisely interacting components of an internal combustion engine, without first cutting its teeth on much simpler external combustion engines – the separate boiler and cylinder-piston of steam engines? Although there are other potential energy sources, without easily mined coal lying around, no-ones ever going to have the resources to do enough trial-and-error engineering to get anywhere. tldr: Easily mined coal is vital, just like day 1 minecraft.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  There is a lot of coal left: "America has plenty of coal. Its mines produced 1.2 billion tons in 2006, nearly all of it destined for electricity generation.31 That was a record year, but it barely scratched the surface of U.S. recoverable coal reserves, which are estimated at about 270 billion tons." http://www.nap.edu/reports/energy/supply.html http://www.nap.edu/reports/energy/supply.html
  - codeulike 12y ago
    Perhaps. Depends how you define 'recoverable'. Could it be recovered without machinery that runs on oil?
    - fleitz 12y ago
      You might want to google 'coal steam shovel'
  - SilasX 12y ago
    Right, but the point is, all the easy coal was mined first. To get those enormous stockpiles, you need advanced tools. The article thus asks: if we lost those tools, and the knowledge/infra to make them, would we have enough readily available energy to practice and re-discover them, given that you need those tools to get to the remaining energy?
saltedshiv 12y ago
The article presents a very interesting thought experiment, but I think the answer is flatly no, with explanation for this belief being the context of the article. Based on the narrative, I think the premise and definition of "modern civilization" was basically how our society is configured today, regions, space between cities, social architecture, travel, available goods and resources, etc. Under that thought, the answer is as I said before, flatly no. Without fossil fuels, the world could not take shape in the way it has due to the sheer density of energy for its weight. We currently have nothing else like that, and all of our advancements into new generations of energy rely on products manufactured with fossil fuels, cheap fossil fuels at that. Even today, we do not have such a resource readily available and as safe as fossil fuels. That being said, "a modern civilization" could come into existence without fossil fuels. I do not doubt the ingenuity of humans whether I am in the same period of time with them or not. My belief on this is based on how our society would be structured when you cannot travel so far away from the epicenter of a city because of the cost of fuel. This type of thought experiment is fun.
- fleitz 12y ago
  We have things far more energy dense, like RTGs and conventional nuclear power plants.
  - saltedshiv 12y ago
    Yes, but the only way we can manipulate those energy sources is predicated by the existence of cheap malleable fossil fuels
- PepeGomez 12y ago
  On the contrary, I think it's far too pessimistic. Expecting that the technological and scientific progress would stop where we started using fossil fuels is ridiculous. The changes started much sooner in the renaissance, with printing press, scientific method and calculus. The printing press made spreading information much cheaper than it used to be. The scientific method allowed systematic gathering new knowledge instead of relying on traditions. Calculus allowed precise calculations of things that could be only estimated previously. Iron, steel, bricks, mortar, cement and glass all predate widespread use of fossil fuels by millenia. Chemicals and plastics are made from oil because it's cheaper that way. The main chemical produced from oil is ethylene, which could be easily made from alcohol. (The only reason why drinking alcohol isn't made from oil as well is because it's illegal.) Nitrogen can be fixed with bacteria. Fossil fuels helped in many ways, but in others lead us astray, with lots of effort spent on inferior dead end technologies only because fossil fuels made them cheaper. Of course you could power combustion engines with wood gas, but why would you develop them in the first place? Many people assume that combustion engines are used because they are superior to other technologies, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Combustion engines are a poor choice for powering vehicles in almost every way imaginable. They work well only in a narrow range of speeds, have low torque, are relatively large for the power they produce, can't start on their own... The only reason why they won over electric motors is that the fuel used to be incredibly cheap and easily transported. Almost all progress was about finding workarounds for their inherent drawbacks. You could remove the whole drivetrain and stick electric motors directly to the wheels and you would have a better car than the best combustion engine car. There is a reason why electric cars are not allowed in races. Almost everything is made of plastics because it's cheaper that way, even where a slightly more expensive alternative would last basically forever. Agriculture started relying on easily available pesticides instead of developing resistant strains or practices that prevent the evolution and spread of pathogens. Many plant diseases adapted specifically to the few commercialy grown variants, so that inordinate amounts of pesticides are needed to keep the plants no more healthy than they used to be without pesticides. And as the plum pox shows, diseases may be even beneficial in some ways. The few widely grown strains affected by it were replaced by a wide variety of different plums. The industrial revolution probably wouldn't be that different, only with steam and combustion engines skipped and starting straight with electricity.
zimbatm 12y ago
Steampunk would finally become real
- fixermark 12y ago
  There are some Amish communities that take advantage of pneumatic power. Pressurize a bunch of air, and you have a ready supply of energy to drive turbines that can do the work that on-grid houses do with electrical appliances. The only downside is that you do the pressurization by going out back and turning a big crank for awhile. It's not precisely steampunk in the sense that you don't have too many sentient barrels running around, but it's impressive.
  - cpr 12y ago
    At least in the Ohio Amish communities (in businesses), I believe they actually use diesel-driven air compressors out back. They're not averse to fossil fuels, because you have to pay for them as you go. Getting on grid means you're going into debt for a month at a time. That's at least a big part of their aversion to electric.
    - lmm 12y ago
      Is it really just that? Plenty of poorer communities already have prepaid electricity (put coins in the meter). Surely someone would be willing to sell them some at a small markup.
Balgair 12y ago
Necessity is the mother of invention. The Chinese had very high grade porcelain for many of their household needs. As a consequence, they never bothered to invent glass for these needs. Europe and the Middle East did, and also discovered the telescope and microscope along the way. Porcelain is arguably better for mugs and bowls and can be made much thinner than glass can. However, that happy little accident of history gave the western barbarians a slight edge in one realm of civilization. So, could we rebuild our civilization without fossil fuels? Maybe. Likely no, it would be different and very strange to our eyes. Heck, it might even be 'better', as they then would not be dealing with our particular type of climate change. Though, they may have their own problems to deal with. The grass is always greener...
- api 12y ago
  I also sometimes wonder if we might create a slower buy culturally deeper and more contemplative civilization without the crystal meth that is fossil fuel. But then again maybe not. Maybe we'd never overcome the activation energy for innovation. You can't do true experiments in history.
  - fleitz 12y ago
    We exist because our ancestors fucked up our nice nitrogen only atmosphere by polluting with deadly reactive oxygen. Damn cyanobacteria thinking unsustainably and killing the planet for everyone else... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
    - joe_inferno 12y ago
      I can't tell if your post is sarcasm or not, but I'd just like to point out that while not perfect we have 1) intelligence as individuals and 2) political mechanisms as a species that would enable a change of course (if one is possible to begin with) whereas the cyanobacteria lacked both of those things.
      - 12y ago
M112358 12y ago
What about (recoverable) nuclear power plants?
- Sanddancer 12y ago
  Nuclear fuels need to be regularly swapped out for reprocessing as the fissionable material is used up. To get nuclear plants online, you'd have to have a good neutron source to kickstart a breeding process.
  - MatthaeusHarris 12y ago
    All you need is enough smoke detectors...
100k 12y ago
There was a throwaway line about this in one of Larry Niven's Ringworld novels. The Ringworld was an artificial structure, so had no fossil fuel deposits. The protagonist muses that it must be hard for the inhabitants to bootstrap civilization, because they have to go from alcohol-based biomass fuels straight to nuclear fusion.
- aeturnum 12y ago
  It's also a theme in his The Mote in God's Eye.
  - arbitrage 12y ago
    And Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      But Farmers book solved it in an 'act of god' like manner by using lightning and something akin to a high voltage supercapacitor used to catch the lightning.
maerF0x0 12y ago
Open source ecology's "Global Village Construction Set" has open source blue prints for various machines. The idea being that poor nations, people who dont want DRM on their tractor and post apocalyptic societies can rebuild faster. They do presume a decent amount of parts though, its not straight from caves, it presumes people will be able to access parts or scrounge them from rubble. http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
- yincrash 12y ago
  Those still require fuel, no?
  - undersuit 12y ago
    Their tractor page include this line: We are interested in a Piston Engine Construction Set – modular, in-line scalable engine that can be adapted to spark ignition, compression ignition, or steam power. That kind of means petro, diesel, and coal. That's not a hard fuel requirement though.
    - random28345 12y ago
      As long as it includes ethanol, then it's sorta renewable.
  - tsotha 12y ago
    If you have to you can run vehicles off of anything that burns. Thus the wood-fired trucks in North Korea.
  - delbel 12y ago
    Two acres of sunflower seeds will produce enough oil to run a tractor for one season.
spdustin 12y ago
sigh Can't we stop burning stuff to make things go?
- fixermark 12y ago
  Technically no. Depending on how loosely we're defining "burning," your mitochondria burn energy-rich chemicals to make you go. It's a question of quantity and sustainability, not mechanism.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  What do you propose instead? There are only a few fundamental sources of energy (which is a non-negotiable component of "making things go"): - Nuclear decay (geothermal, RTG) - Nuclear fusion/fission (nuclear power, solar power) - Redox reactions (fossil fuel, food digestion) - Planetary momentum (geothermal, tidal)
  - gonvaled 12y ago
    I wouldn't call solar power "nuclear-based", unless you want to call most other energy sources (including fossil fuels, wind, tides, ...) "nuclear-based" too (since the primary energy source is the sun, which generates energy via nuclear reactions, of course, but is besides the point)
bane 12y ago
Actually, I think a related but better question is, what would technology look like without the assumption of a stable base-load of electricity on the grid? What if your power availability simply went up and down depending on the wind, or cloud cover, or the tides. There's a kind of poetry I think, a kind of awareness, that your devices may spin up and down with the seasons instead of marching incessantly and unstoppably onward.
- mrfusion 12y ago
  I like your idea. I've actually thought it wouldn't be that bad for people to not use electricity hungry appliances at night? Fans to bring in cool air from outside, really no need to cook or wash clothes at night. Just a small battery for TV's and a few lights? (Heating in the winter might be tougher of course. But a house heated to 80F during the day might be 50F in the morning, so might be tolerable?) Or Find ways to store the heat during day and slowly release it at night. Tanks of water in the attic?)
  - mod 12y ago
    > But a house heated to 80F during the day might be 50F in the morning In my experience, a house heated to 80F can be 30F within a matter of a couple of hours, depending on the number of windows, temperature outside, and insulation levels. I certainly don't think that's a solution to winter problems in cold-weather climates. As for storing the heat, I'm not really sure what you mean. Surely it would be inefficient to generate extra heat during the day and store it, as opposed to just creating some in the evening?
    - Retric 12y ago
      It's cheap to add a fairly large heat sink in the middle of your house during construction. Brick or stone walls vs plaster or just a large tank of water. Add in some passive solar and you can keep a house in the continual US warm without active heat sources fairly easily. The major issue is it stops looking like a traditional house and costs more up front, but it’s not a major issue. PS: ~6 hours * 1kw/m^2. Take a 30' x 30' roof and that's ~600 kwh per day or an average of 24kw of heating. Though you do need to keep the now off the roof in the winter, but a steep enough rough does that fairly easily.
Randgalt 12y ago
"It took a lot of fossil fuels to forge our industrial world. Now they're almost gone." - it's wrong from the start. We have hundreds of years of fossil fuels available with current technology. With future technology, it could be even longer.
- gwern 12y ago
  > We have hundreds of years of fossil fuels available with current technology. So... in a post-apocalyptic scenario in which civilization has regressed to unindustrialized agriculture, there would be fossil fuels available only with 500+ years of Industrial Revolution advancement? I'm not sure how that would be helpful.
- hnnewguy 12y ago
  >"With future technology, it could be even longer." This sort of misses the point that under this thought experiment there is no future technology, and that to get at the vast reserves we have left would require that technology. We won't be deep sea drilling or fracking if we get rebooted. Nor will we be digging holes in the prairies and having crude gush to the surface.
  - fleitz 12y ago
    We simply burn the forests... given the absence of the majority of humanity there is plenty of forest to burn.
    - balabaster 12y ago
      and you can burn 1 cord per acre per year without depleting the forest at all... the trick is to keep consumption to no more than that.
- alexqgb 12y ago
  As the Times recently reported, burning all known reserves - and dumping the resulting carbon emissions into the atmosphere - would raise the average surface temperature by more than 16 degrees. That's more than enough to trigger a the world's sixth great extinction and wipe out life as we know it, ourselves included. Factor the cost of combustion into the cost of extraction, and you'll find that our useable reserves are rapidly approaching zero. Indeed, we may be in overshoot already. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/upshot/if-we-dig-out-all-our-fossil-fuels-heres-how-hot-we-can-expect-it-to-get.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/upshot/if-we-dig-out-all-o...
nitrogen 12y ago
Quoting an interesting comment that was flagged for some reason: saltedshiv 1 hour ago [flagged]The article presents a very interesting thought experiment, but I think the answer is flatly no, with explanation for this belief being the context of the article.Based on the narrative, I think the premise and definition of "modern civilization" was basically how our society is configured today, regions, space between cities, social architecture, travel, available goods and resources, etc. Under that thought, the answer is as I said before, flatly no.Without fossil fuels, the world could not take shape in the way it has due to the sheer density of energy for its weight. We currently have nothing else like that, and all of our advancements into new generations of energy rely on products manufactured with fossil fuels, cheap fossil fuels at that.Even today, we do not have such a resource readily available and as safe as fossil fuels.That being said, "a modern civilization" could come into existence without fossil fuels. I do not doubt the ingenuity of humans whether I am in the same period of time with them or not.My belief on this is based on how our society would be structured when you cannot travel so far away from the epicenter of a city because of the cost of fuel.This type of thought experiment is fun. Copy/paste on Android lost the original paragraphs. The original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368235
nmeofthestate 12y ago
Wouldn't fission be an easier and more useful (reliable) energy technology than solar? No nuclear energy technologies get a mention in the article which seems like a strange omission.
- badloginagain 12y ago
  I was about to post a similar sentiment. I allowed it since the thought experiment expressed that there is no current knowledge, and you don't get to fission without going through the industrial revolution (extreme temperatures, quality of metals, support services required by a stable/advanced society). However, the author goes into quite a bit of detail about the validity of photo-voltaic panels, having obviously done some research into how solar panels work, life-expectancy, manufacturing. It's for this reason why I'm wondering why fission wasn't researched. Nuclear is carbon-neutral, it's about 1000x the energy density of combustion, have lifetimes of several generations, and (at least in the States) have security measures that would make it resilient to "post-apocalyptic" scenarios. It seems ripe for this kind of thought-experiment.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- crimsonalucard 12y ago
  If all conventional power was replaced with the current technology used in most nuclear power plants we would be out of fissionable material within a year. I'm not sure how long it would last if we use breeder reactors though...
  - rwcarlsen 12y ago
    I think you mean fissile instead of fissionable [1]. Current reactor technologies consume a very small fraction of fissionable material. Reactors discharge nearly as much fissionable material as they take in. And the lifetime of uranium resource is highly dependent on the price you are willing to pay. Seawater contains enough uranium to supply all reactors in the world at current consumption rates for ~60,000 years [2] estimated to only be about 8x the current spot price [3]. Using fast reactor technology that has already been developed and researched heavily could also stretch the resource by another factor of 100X or more. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fissile_material#Fissile_vs_fissionable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fissile_material#Fissile_vs_fi... [2] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glob... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Seawater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Seawater
cmurf 12y ago
There's a paradox here, the problem and the solution, is literally wholesale asset destruction. We'd have to abandon a lot of infrastructure. A good portion would even need to be recycled, not for reclamation, but to prevent ecological disaster ensuing from its just rotting in place. And that's sorta why we get entertained with cataclysmic scifi themes, because it gives a "no choice" instigator for that asset destruction. But doing this by choice and quickly? Difficult.
FredNatural 12y ago
The fundamental premise that we're running out of fossil fuels is erroneous. Engage dorm-room palaver....
yellowapple 12y ago
The article misses geothermal energy, which doesn't exactly require an existing industrialized society to use while providing abundant thermal energy. Places like Iceland, Yellowstone, Hawaii, etc. could easily become Humanity v2's centers of industrial reconstruction.
FredNatural 12y ago
The fundamental premise that we're running out of fossil fuels is false. Let the palaver begin...
narrator 12y ago
Anyone ever read "A World Made by Hand" by Kunstler? He looked at this kind of thing back during the peak oil scare in 2008. It's not a happy book.
jacquesm 12y ago
For the number of people left there will be plenty of fuel even if it isn't fossil fuel. Rebooting modern civilization would be a breeze for the few that would make it to the other side and the energy available would put an upper limit on the number of people we could sustain. Main occupation for the foreseeable future: undertaker.
coldtea 12y ago
Can we reboot a modern civilization with less consumption, less work but for all, and more free time?
- delbel 12y ago
  Sure, just outlaw inflation.
- crpatino 12y ago
  Probably not, or at least not us. If technology was going to give us a paradise of universal coverage of basic needs and free time self enrichment for all, that would have happened on the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Instead, we got 2 world wars and a big economic depression in between. The problem is we are social primates, and the alpha ape cannot afford to let all the beta apes to live in peace singing kumbaya; otherwise, he would not have remained an alpha for much longer. So, even if technology/machines were providing more and more of our needs, bigger and improved ways to enforce artificial scarcity over the low status levels of society were put in practice. And where straightforward coercion failed, artificial needs and wants rose to the task, creating a prison of the mind.
whacker 12y ago
Well, for one thing and a major enabler for the green revolution is nitrate fertilizers - which is a petroleum product. Without it, our population would be limited to a much lower number. Also, without the food security that these fertilizers give us, much progress would not happen.
baxter001 12y ago
I've seen three or so pieces like this in the last month, they all seem to have been inspired by a (much more depressing) short narrative piece Adbusters did a couple of months ago.
Jedd 12y ago
Is this a candidate for the great filter? The word 'filter' doesn't appear in the article, or on this page (at time of typing), but the whole argument really seems to lend itself to the possibility that a complicating requirement of a civilisation advanced enough to talk to (or visit) us, requires at least one long iteration of presumably CO2-rich, plant-abundant, age - followed by a sufficiently long period to turn that into what we think of as fossil fuels. And then have intelligent life pop up that can work out how to discover, obtain, and utilise that resource.
- crpatino 12y ago
  Actually, yes. I am going to play fanboy here and recommend Star's Reach: A Novel of the Deindustrial Future. http://www.amazon.com/Stars-Reach-Novel-Deindustrial-Future/dp/098437647X/ http://www.amazon.com/Stars-Reach-Novel-Deindustrial-Future/... I don't want to spoil it for future readers, but the basic premise is: the solution to the Fermi paradox is that intelligent life is fairly common in the galaxy, but instead of nuking themselves off, most species that achieve complex technology wreak their native planet's environment and trigger a civilization collapse. Later on, some species are able to bounce back and rebuild a somewhat advanced civilization, but the mix of taboos against 'rapid growth' and lack of highly concentrated energy sources make those civilizations much more conservative, and the common memes of Scifi (e.g. the "technology indistinguishable from magic" thing) are never realized. Think a sort of cross over between Dune and the Hunger Games.
jheriko 12y ago
does nuclear power count? it kind of solves the energy crisis if you are willing to ignore the hippies and the accidents
- funkyy 12y ago
  Actually nuclear plants could be placed in remote islands so electricity would be brought using underwater cables. But then - I think people would never harness nuclear power since it was created as an alternative to coal and oil. Without them no one would even think of using such a thing.
  - jheriko 12y ago
    i think nuclear power was realised as a result of the revolution in physics at the turn of the century... nothing to do with looking for alternatives.
jkyle 12y ago
Yeast is the mother of civilization. It gave us bread, beer, and wine. Everything after that is details. :)
- crpatino 12y ago
  I like how you think, but I don't think that's the same question as was posed by the article.
exabrial 12y ago
Yes, America would be fine. But China/India where the vast vast majority of pollution originates would collapse.
jwatte 12y ago
Biomass. Coal. Cellulose. Lots of alternative paths could be followed if necessary.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
These ideas are based partly on faulty reasoning, I made a post on exactly that topic a few days back, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9357326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9357326 In short, it's unlikely that a civilizational reboot would be bereft of fossil fuels to spur its early stages of development and growth (they most important stages, by far) because such stages require very little fossil fuels compared to an industry in full swing and many small, lower quality, less profitable (though still easily exploited) reserves will have been passed over by modern industry. It's unlikely that even in a severe future resource crunch that every coal mine will be stripped bare and every oil well pumped dry. We won't resort to digging out a pittance worth of coal out of some abandoned mine that is now in the middle of a suburb, we'll do as we're doing now, adapting new technologies to push the boundaries of new, substantive reserves. Such as open pit strip mining of coal using drag lines, fracking, tar sands, deep ocean drilling, etc. But those small reserves, those reserves that are economically disadvantageous and inconvenient for us to exploit today, they would probably be adequate for bootstrapping industry again, likely sufficiently to enable them to develop more sustainable approaches. Or simply other ways of doing things. It would take hundreds of years of intensive use for humanity to exploit all of the easily extractable coal in the world, I put the odds of that happening as very low (if humanity can survive a few hundred more years then they have a pretty good chance of surviving indefinitely, in my opinion). And with coal you can do anything else, make plastics, make hydrocarbons, what-have-you. Mind, I'm not advocating this, I'm simply pointing out the flaw in the logic here. Personally I'd rather we switched over to mostly nuclear power sooner rather than later.
tripzilch 12y ago
What about aluminium? It's pretty much the reverse--hard to mine, easy to work. So that's a big bonus pre-fossil fuel society didn't have, the aluminium is already mined and out there. Now on the other hand, I find it puzzling how so many people in this thread (and also part of the assumptions in the article) seem to forget all the things we could do perfectly well without fossil fuels. Glass? Brick? Mortar? Is it maybe because in America you don't see as many obviously before-fossil-fuel buildings that contain all these materials? I don't see many people mentioning specific years, neither could could I find a clear number on several WP pages, but considering most of the graphs about production/consumption, we didn't start using fossil fuels until about 1800-1850 (with coal), with significant numbers not even beginning to appear until after 1850. Any idea what sort of technologies we already had before that? It's not too bad :) Yet, the Industrial Revolution was already on its way since 1760. We had microscopes, architecture, surgery, books, printing presses ... And just because most things today are made out of plastic doesn't mean they have to be. A lot of those things exist only because plastic is so ridiculously cheap it's not even cost-effective to develop an alternative. Remember old things being built to last? That's how you make up for the ridiculous cheapness of plastic. It almost sounds cheesy and old-timey to repeat, but if you do the mental math it adds up: a styrofoam cup is maybe 1000x as cheap, so it made economical sense to consume and throw away. I already easily use a coffee mug on average 1000s of times (daily coffee times a bunch of years) before it breaks, and that's without even trying. Some of the plastic things, like shopping bags, don't even really last if you try (shopping bag, used four times before it rips somewhere?) that's the sort of thing we'll stop making as soon as the margins stop being insane and use the resources spent on something 1000x more durable instead of 1000x as cheap. Remember that oil and/or plastic won't just 100% disappear, suddenly. It's a really weird luxury state we live in at the moment, but plastic is still pretty awesome as a material even if it's quite expensive and not as plentiful (just look at glass or fine pottery), in particular as durable alternatives become economical again.

173 points by Hooke 12y ago

Industrial civilization is definitely a one shot deal. All the surface metal deposits are gone. You need massive industrial infrastructure to access the remaining ores. You couldn't even progress to the iron or bronze age after a reboot.

mobiplayer 12y ago
Well, depends on how you look at it. All (most of?) those metals are somewhere, aren't they? Actually there are many of those metals on the surface, there's not even need to dig for them.
- codeulike 12y ago
  Once you've got the metal, how are you going to heat it up so that you can re-shape it?
  - mobiplayer 12y ago
    That's an interesting question, however it is not what I was replying to. I'm not sure your question should be pointed at me :) In any case here's my quick answer: I hope they come off as Lego bricks.
  - eropple 12y ago
    Why not wood? You can easily build wood fires hot enough to work refined aluminum (all those cans, good for something!), copper (rip out the plumbing and wires en masse, it won't be pure but it'll be close enough), tin, and zinc; with copper, tin, and zinc those you can create bronze and brass. Iron would be out of the question with simply a wood fire, but--assuming other knowledge was intact, of course--you could build a forced-draft charcoal burner which can easily get hot enough to melt down some forms of iron. When I started thinking about this problem I was expecting it to be a tough one, but I think it's achievable.
    - abakker 12y ago
      Iron and Steel can be worked on a charcoal/wood fire. Maybe it won't be easy, but the scale of malleability is basically linear with temperature. Every 100 degrees and it gets a bit softer. Metallurgically, this won't necessarily yield the best parts if we can't reach critical temperatures - 1900°F, but even then, there are plenty of forgiving alloys out there, and plenty of metal that can be re-worked without melting it down. The bigger difficulty in my mind is having all the alloys identified. It is pretty business even with good modern tools.
    - fleitz 12y ago
      Take your wood fire, add some aluminium you scavenged from an aircraft, then add some rust. Voila, 2500 C. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite
      - jnbiche 12y ago
        This should be a top-level comment. There are probably other similarly low-tech ideas that could be used to bootstrap a civilization.
  - panglott 12y ago
    The problem with wood as a fuel is that any densifying human culture can burn it faster than it grows. Industrial uses compete with household uses for cooking fuel and heating. Europe in the 14th to 16th centuries saw massive deforestation in England, Germany, and elsewhere, and the state had to reserve stands of large timber as a military resource for shipbuilding. This was a significant concern in the early Tudor and Elizabethan era, for example, and the Black Forest reached its smallest extent during this time also, IIRC. Wood for fuel came from intensive coppice stands, and significant wood was imported as well. As the article says: "Wartime gasifier cars could achieve about 1.5 miles per kilogram [of wood]." Comparing the time it takes to grow a kg of wood versus the value of moving a car only 1.5 miles illustrates the problem pretty nicely. Wood is not a sustainable fuel for an industrial civilization, at anything like current rates of consumption.
ginko 12y ago
>All the surface metal deposits are gone. Well, they're not so much gone as converted into various structures all over the globe. I see no reason why later civilizations couldn't mine the remains of former cities.
- XorNot 12y ago
  Pretty much this - mining would be done on old landfill sites and cities, at least for metals. Fossil fuels are a different type of problem - we're not going to get all that carbon back. Conversely maybe a reboot civilization would develop differently - forests to solar thermal to PV and batteries. It would be slower, but certainly possible.
  - codeulike 12y ago
    How are you going to do any metalwork with your scavenged metal? Heat it up with a big mirror? Its very very hard without high energy density fuel. The article suggests charcoal (did you read the article?) but thats problematic too.
    - XorNot 12y ago
      Just because it would be a slower development path doesn't mean it's impossible. It would be slower, but any given civilization would have only a few viable options for development - so yes, I think you'd find a civilization which values glass and mirrors and polishing technology to get the heat necessary for metal working.
      - tinco 12y ago
        I don't think a civilization built on a shit load of aluminium scrap is going to develop very slowly. Don't forget aluminium is a wonder metal that's only been around for like a hundred years. All really important metals can be melted at temperatures that can easily be reached with a well built furnace and natural fuel like wood.
legulere 12y ago
Metals don't just vanish, they're still here in products that can be recycled.
- mariusz79 12y ago
  That depends how long would it take for another civilization to arise from the ashes of the current one. Metals don't just vanish but most of them are chemically active and will in time rust, disintegrate, get absorbed by organics and pretty much vanish.
bitL 12y ago
In other words, if there ever were a nuclear war affecting the whole world, the generations after will be stuck with whatever remains they got forever, baring some unexpected easy energy discovery or a resource-rich asteroid hitting the planet without wiping out the life.
fleitz 12y ago
This is so far from the truth that it's not even funny. There are tonnes of surface metal deposits, it's just you'd get shot for opening a mine there because it's in the middle of the national park. Also, what do you call a 'garbage dump' other than a surface deposit rich in metals? All of the metals we've ever mined are on the surface. We didn't put them back down into the mine... (or at least when we did it's the open pit variety)
- bitL 12y ago
  How do you mine rust? Or thin surfaces of precious metals on electronics without the availability of chemicals which take a lot of fossil fuels to manufacture?

codeulike 12y ago

boils down to this quote: In a world without readily mined coal, would there ever be the opportunity to test profligate prototypes of steam engines, even if they could mature and become more efficient over time? How feasible is it that a society could attain a sufficient understanding of thermodynamics, metallurgy and mechanics to make the precisely interacting components of an internal combustion engine, without first cutting its teeth on much simpler external combustion engines – the separate boiler and cylinder-piston of steam engines? Although there are other potential energy sources, without easily mined coal lying around, no-ones ever going to have the resources to do enough trial-and-error engineering to get anywhere. tldr: Easily mined coal is vital, just like day 1 minecraft.

ghshephard 12y ago
There is a lot of coal left: "America has plenty of coal. Its mines produced 1.2 billion tons in 2006, nearly all of it destined for electricity generation.31 That was a record year, but it barely scratched the surface of U.S. recoverable coal reserves, which are estimated at about 270 billion tons." http://www.nap.edu/reports/energy/supply.html http://www.nap.edu/reports/energy/supply.html
- codeulike 12y ago
  Perhaps. Depends how you define 'recoverable'. Could it be recovered without machinery that runs on oil?
  - fleitz 12y ago
    You might want to google 'coal steam shovel'
- SilasX 12y ago
  Right, but the point is, all the easy coal was mined first. To get those enormous stockpiles, you need advanced tools. The article thus asks: if we lost those tools, and the knowledge/infra to make them, would we have enough readily available energy to practice and re-discover them, given that you need those tools to get to the remaining energy?

saltedshiv 12y ago

The article presents a very interesting thought experiment, but I think the answer is flatly no, with explanation for this belief being the context of the article. Based on the narrative, I think the premise and definition of "modern civilization" was basically how our society is configured today, regions, space between cities, social architecture, travel, available goods and resources, etc. Under that thought, the answer is as I said before, flatly no. Without fossil fuels, the world could not take shape in the way it has due to the sheer density of energy for its weight. We currently have nothing else like that, and all of our advancements into new generations of energy rely on products manufactured with fossil fuels, cheap fossil fuels at that. Even today, we do not have such a resource readily available and as safe as fossil fuels. That being said, "a modern civilization" could come into existence without fossil fuels. I do not doubt the ingenuity of humans whether I am in the same period of time with them or not. My belief on this is based on how our society would be structured when you cannot travel so far away from the epicenter of a city because of the cost of fuel. This type of thought experiment is fun.

fleitz 12y ago
We have things far more energy dense, like RTGs and conventional nuclear power plants.
- saltedshiv 12y ago
  Yes, but the only way we can manipulate those energy sources is predicated by the existence of cheap malleable fossil fuels
PepeGomez 12y ago
On the contrary, I think it's far too pessimistic. Expecting that the technological and scientific progress would stop where we started using fossil fuels is ridiculous. The changes started much sooner in the renaissance, with printing press, scientific method and calculus. The printing press made spreading information much cheaper than it used to be. The scientific method allowed systematic gathering new knowledge instead of relying on traditions. Calculus allowed precise calculations of things that could be only estimated previously. Iron, steel, bricks, mortar, cement and glass all predate widespread use of fossil fuels by millenia. Chemicals and plastics are made from oil because it's cheaper that way. The main chemical produced from oil is ethylene, which could be easily made from alcohol. (The only reason why drinking alcohol isn't made from oil as well is because it's illegal.) Nitrogen can be fixed with bacteria. Fossil fuels helped in many ways, but in others lead us astray, with lots of effort spent on inferior dead end technologies only because fossil fuels made them cheaper. Of course you could power combustion engines with wood gas, but why would you develop them in the first place? Many people assume that combustion engines are used because they are superior to other technologies, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Combustion engines are a poor choice for powering vehicles in almost every way imaginable. They work well only in a narrow range of speeds, have low torque, are relatively large for the power they produce, can't start on their own... The only reason why they won over electric motors is that the fuel used to be incredibly cheap and easily transported. Almost all progress was about finding workarounds for their inherent drawbacks. You could remove the whole drivetrain and stick electric motors directly to the wheels and you would have a better car than the best combustion engine car. There is a reason why electric cars are not allowed in races. Almost everything is made of plastics because it's cheaper that way, even where a slightly more expensive alternative would last basically forever. Agriculture started relying on easily available pesticides instead of developing resistant strains or practices that prevent the evolution and spread of pathogens. Many plant diseases adapted specifically to the few commercialy grown variants, so that inordinate amounts of pesticides are needed to keep the plants no more healthy than they used to be without pesticides. And as the plum pox shows, diseases may be even beneficial in some ways. The few widely grown strains affected by it were replaced by a wide variety of different plums. The industrial revolution probably wouldn't be that different, only with steam and combustion engines skipped and starting straight with electricity.

zimbatm 12y ago

Steampunk would finally become real

fixermark 12y ago
There are some Amish communities that take advantage of pneumatic power. Pressurize a bunch of air, and you have a ready supply of energy to drive turbines that can do the work that on-grid houses do with electrical appliances. The only downside is that you do the pressurization by going out back and turning a big crank for awhile. It's not precisely steampunk in the sense that you don't have too many sentient barrels running around, but it's impressive.
- cpr 12y ago
  At least in the Ohio Amish communities (in businesses), I believe they actually use diesel-driven air compressors out back. They're not averse to fossil fuels, because you have to pay for them as you go. Getting on grid means you're going into debt for a month at a time. That's at least a big part of their aversion to electric.
  - lmm 12y ago
    Is it really just that? Plenty of poorer communities already have prepaid electricity (put coins in the meter). Surely someone would be willing to sell them some at a small markup.

Balgair 12y ago

Necessity is the mother of invention. The Chinese had very high grade porcelain for many of their household needs. As a consequence, they never bothered to invent glass for these needs. Europe and the Middle East did, and also discovered the telescope and microscope along the way. Porcelain is arguably better for mugs and bowls and can be made much thinner than glass can. However, that happy little accident of history gave the western barbarians a slight edge in one realm of civilization. So, could we rebuild our civilization without fossil fuels? Maybe. Likely no, it would be different and very strange to our eyes. Heck, it might even be 'better', as they then would not be dealing with our particular type of climate change. Though, they may have their own problems to deal with. The grass is always greener...

api 12y ago
I also sometimes wonder if we might create a slower buy culturally deeper and more contemplative civilization without the crystal meth that is fossil fuel. But then again maybe not. Maybe we'd never overcome the activation energy for innovation. You can't do true experiments in history.
- fleitz 12y ago
  We exist because our ancestors fucked up our nice nitrogen only atmosphere by polluting with deadly reactive oxygen. Damn cyanobacteria thinking unsustainably and killing the planet for everyone else... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
  - joe_inferno 12y ago
    I can't tell if your post is sarcasm or not, but I'd just like to point out that while not perfect we have 1) intelligence as individuals and 2) political mechanisms as a species that would enable a change of course (if one is possible to begin with) whereas the cyanobacteria lacked both of those things.
    - 12y ago

M112358 12y ago

What about (recoverable) nuclear power plants?

Sanddancer 12y ago
Nuclear fuels need to be regularly swapped out for reprocessing as the fissionable material is used up. To get nuclear plants online, you'd have to have a good neutron source to kickstart a breeding process.
- MatthaeusHarris 12y ago
  All you need is enough smoke detectors...

100k 12y ago

There was a throwaway line about this in one of Larry Niven's Ringworld novels. The Ringworld was an artificial structure, so had no fossil fuel deposits. The protagonist muses that it must be hard for the inhabitants to bootstrap civilization, because they have to go from alcohol-based biomass fuels straight to nuclear fusion.

aeturnum 12y ago
It's also a theme in his The Mote in God's Eye.
- arbitrage 12y ago
  And Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    But Farmers book solved it in an 'act of god' like manner by using lightning and something akin to a high voltage supercapacitor used to catch the lightning.

maerF0x0 12y ago

Open source ecology's "Global Village Construction Set" has open source blue prints for various machines. The idea being that poor nations, people who dont want DRM on their tractor and post apocalyptic societies can rebuild faster. They do presume a decent amount of parts though, its not straight from caves, it presumes people will be able to access parts or scrounge them from rubble. http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/

yincrash 12y ago
Those still require fuel, no?
- undersuit 12y ago
  Their tractor page include this line: We are interested in a Piston Engine Construction Set – modular, in-line scalable engine that can be adapted to spark ignition, compression ignition, or steam power. That kind of means petro, diesel, and coal. That's not a hard fuel requirement though.
  - random28345 12y ago
    As long as it includes ethanol, then it's sorta renewable.
- tsotha 12y ago
  If you have to you can run vehicles off of anything that burns. Thus the wood-fired trucks in North Korea.
- delbel 12y ago
  Two acres of sunflower seeds will produce enough oil to run a tractor for one season.

spdustin 12y ago

sigh Can't we stop burning stuff to make things go?

fixermark 12y ago
Technically no. Depending on how loosely we're defining "burning," your mitochondria burn energy-rich chemicals to make you go. It's a question of quantity and sustainability, not mechanism.
sliverstorm 12y ago
What do you propose instead? There are only a few fundamental sources of energy (which is a non-negotiable component of "making things go"): - Nuclear decay (geothermal, RTG) - Nuclear fusion/fission (nuclear power, solar power) - Redox reactions (fossil fuel, food digestion) - Planetary momentum (geothermal, tidal)
- gonvaled 12y ago
  I wouldn't call solar power "nuclear-based", unless you want to call most other energy sources (including fossil fuels, wind, tides, ...) "nuclear-based" too (since the primary energy source is the sun, which generates energy via nuclear reactions, of course, but is besides the point)

bane 12y ago

Actually, I think a related but better question is, what would technology look like without the assumption of a stable base-load of electricity on the grid? What if your power availability simply went up and down depending on the wind, or cloud cover, or the tides. There's a kind of poetry I think, a kind of awareness, that your devices may spin up and down with the seasons instead of marching incessantly and unstoppably onward.

mrfusion 12y ago
I like your idea. I've actually thought it wouldn't be that bad for people to not use electricity hungry appliances at night? Fans to bring in cool air from outside, really no need to cook or wash clothes at night. Just a small battery for TV's and a few lights? (Heating in the winter might be tougher of course. But a house heated to 80F during the day might be 50F in the morning, so might be tolerable?) Or Find ways to store the heat during day and slowly release it at night. Tanks of water in the attic?)
- mod 12y ago
  > But a house heated to 80F during the day might be 50F in the morning In my experience, a house heated to 80F can be 30F within a matter of a couple of hours, depending on the number of windows, temperature outside, and insulation levels. I certainly don't think that's a solution to winter problems in cold-weather climates. As for storing the heat, I'm not really sure what you mean. Surely it would be inefficient to generate extra heat during the day and store it, as opposed to just creating some in the evening?
  - Retric 12y ago
    It's cheap to add a fairly large heat sink in the middle of your house during construction. Brick or stone walls vs plaster or just a large tank of water. Add in some passive solar and you can keep a house in the continual US warm without active heat sources fairly easily. The major issue is it stops looking like a traditional house and costs more up front, but it’s not a major issue. PS: ~6 hours * 1kw/m^2. Take a 30' x 30' roof and that's ~600 kwh per day or an average of 24kw of heating. Though you do need to keep the now off the roof in the winter, but a steep enough rough does that fairly easily.

Randgalt 12y ago

"It took a lot of fossil fuels to forge our industrial world. Now they're almost gone." - it's wrong from the start. We have hundreds of years of fossil fuels available with current technology. With future technology, it could be even longer.

gwern 12y ago
> We have hundreds of years of fossil fuels available with current technology. So... in a post-apocalyptic scenario in which civilization has regressed to unindustrialized agriculture, there would be fossil fuels available only with 500+ years of Industrial Revolution advancement? I'm not sure how that would be helpful.
hnnewguy 12y ago
>"With future technology, it could be even longer." This sort of misses the point that under this thought experiment there is no future technology, and that to get at the vast reserves we have left would require that technology. We won't be deep sea drilling or fracking if we get rebooted. Nor will we be digging holes in the prairies and having crude gush to the surface.
- fleitz 12y ago
  We simply burn the forests... given the absence of the majority of humanity there is plenty of forest to burn.
  - balabaster 12y ago
    and you can burn 1 cord per acre per year without depleting the forest at all... the trick is to keep consumption to no more than that.
alexqgb 12y ago
As the Times recently reported, burning all known reserves - and dumping the resulting carbon emissions into the atmosphere - would raise the average surface temperature by more than 16 degrees. That's more than enough to trigger a the world's sixth great extinction and wipe out life as we know it, ourselves included. Factor the cost of combustion into the cost of extraction, and you'll find that our useable reserves are rapidly approaching zero. Indeed, we may be in overshoot already. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/upshot/if-we-dig-out-all-our-fossil-fuels-heres-how-hot-we-can-expect-it-to-get.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/upshot/if-we-dig-out-all-o...

nitrogen 12y ago

Quoting an interesting comment that was flagged for some reason: saltedshiv 1 hour ago [flagged]The article presents a very interesting thought experiment, but I think the answer is flatly no, with explanation for this belief being the context of the article.Based on the narrative, I think the premise and definition of "modern civilization" was basically how our society is configured today, regions, space between cities, social architecture, travel, available goods and resources, etc. Under that thought, the answer is as I said before, flatly no.Without fossil fuels, the world could not take shape in the way it has due to the sheer density of energy for its weight. We currently have nothing else like that, and all of our advancements into new generations of energy rely on products manufactured with fossil fuels, cheap fossil fuels at that.Even today, we do not have such a resource readily available and as safe as fossil fuels.That being said, "a modern civilization" could come into existence without fossil fuels. I do not doubt the ingenuity of humans whether I am in the same period of time with them or not.My belief on this is based on how our society would be structured when you cannot travel so far away from the epicenter of a city because of the cost of fuel.This type of thought experiment is fun. Copy/paste on Android lost the original paragraphs. The original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368235

nmeofthestate 12y ago

Wouldn't fission be an easier and more useful (reliable) energy technology than solar? No nuclear energy technologies get a mention in the article which seems like a strange omission.

badloginagain 12y ago
I was about to post a similar sentiment. I allowed it since the thought experiment expressed that there is no current knowledge, and you don't get to fission without going through the industrial revolution (extreme temperatures, quality of metals, support services required by a stable/advanced society). However, the author goes into quite a bit of detail about the validity of photo-voltaic panels, having obviously done some research into how solar panels work, life-expectancy, manufacturing. It's for this reason why I'm wondering why fission wasn't researched. Nuclear is carbon-neutral, it's about 1000x the energy density of combustion, have lifetimes of several generations, and (at least in the States) have security measures that would make it resilient to "post-apocalyptic" scenarios. It seems ripe for this kind of thought-experiment.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
crimsonalucard 12y ago
If all conventional power was replaced with the current technology used in most nuclear power plants we would be out of fissionable material within a year. I'm not sure how long it would last if we use breeder reactors though...
- rwcarlsen 12y ago
  I think you mean fissile instead of fissionable [1]. Current reactor technologies consume a very small fraction of fissionable material. Reactors discharge nearly as much fissionable material as they take in. And the lifetime of uranium resource is highly dependent on the price you are willing to pay. Seawater contains enough uranium to supply all reactors in the world at current consumption rates for ~60,000 years [2] estimated to only be about 8x the current spot price [3]. Using fast reactor technology that has already been developed and researched heavily could also stretch the resource by another factor of 100X or more. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fissile_material#Fissile_vs_fissionable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fissile_material#Fissile_vs_fi... [2] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glob... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Seawater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Seawater

cmurf 12y ago

There's a paradox here, the problem and the solution, is literally wholesale asset destruction. We'd have to abandon a lot of infrastructure. A good portion would even need to be recycled, not for reclamation, but to prevent ecological disaster ensuing from its just rotting in place. And that's sorta why we get entertained with cataclysmic scifi themes, because it gives a "no choice" instigator for that asset destruction. But doing this by choice and quickly? Difficult.

FredNatural 12y ago

The fundamental premise that we're running out of fossil fuels is erroneous. Engage dorm-room palaver....

yellowapple 12y ago

The article misses geothermal energy, which doesn't exactly require an existing industrialized society to use while providing abundant thermal energy. Places like Iceland, Yellowstone, Hawaii, etc. could easily become Humanity v2's centers of industrial reconstruction.

FredNatural 12y ago

The fundamental premise that we're running out of fossil fuels is false. Let the palaver begin...

narrator 12y ago

Anyone ever read "A World Made by Hand" by Kunstler? He looked at this kind of thing back during the peak oil scare in 2008. It's not a happy book.

jacquesm 12y ago

For the number of people left there will be plenty of fuel even if it isn't fossil fuel. Rebooting modern civilization would be a breeze for the few that would make it to the other side and the energy available would put an upper limit on the number of people we could sustain. Main occupation for the foreseeable future: undertaker.

coldtea 12y ago

Can we reboot a modern civilization with less consumption, less work but for all, and more free time?

delbel 12y ago
Sure, just outlaw inflation.
crpatino 12y ago
Probably not, or at least not us. If technology was going to give us a paradise of universal coverage of basic needs and free time self enrichment for all, that would have happened on the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Instead, we got 2 world wars and a big economic depression in between. The problem is we are social primates, and the alpha ape cannot afford to let all the beta apes to live in peace singing kumbaya; otherwise, he would not have remained an alpha for much longer. So, even if technology/machines were providing more and more of our needs, bigger and improved ways to enforce artificial scarcity over the low status levels of society were put in practice. And where straightforward coercion failed, artificial needs and wants rose to the task, creating a prison of the mind.

whacker 12y ago

Well, for one thing and a major enabler for the green revolution is nitrate fertilizers - which is a petroleum product. Without it, our population would be limited to a much lower number. Also, without the food security that these fertilizers give us, much progress would not happen.

baxter001 12y ago

I've seen three or so pieces like this in the last month, they all seem to have been inspired by a (much more depressing) short narrative piece Adbusters did a couple of months ago.

Jedd 12y ago

Is this a candidate for the great filter? The word 'filter' doesn't appear in the article, or on this page (at time of typing), but the whole argument really seems to lend itself to the possibility that a complicating requirement of a civilisation advanced enough to talk to (or visit) us, requires at least one long iteration of presumably CO2-rich, plant-abundant, age - followed by a sufficiently long period to turn that into what we think of as fossil fuels. And then have intelligent life pop up that can work out how to discover, obtain, and utilise that resource.

crpatino 12y ago
Actually, yes. I am going to play fanboy here and recommend Star's Reach: A Novel of the Deindustrial Future. http://www.amazon.com/Stars-Reach-Novel-Deindustrial-Future/dp/098437647X/ http://www.amazon.com/Stars-Reach-Novel-Deindustrial-Future/... I don't want to spoil it for future readers, but the basic premise is: the solution to the Fermi paradox is that intelligent life is fairly common in the galaxy, but instead of nuking themselves off, most species that achieve complex technology wreak their native planet's environment and trigger a civilization collapse. Later on, some species are able to bounce back and rebuild a somewhat advanced civilization, but the mix of taboos against 'rapid growth' and lack of highly concentrated energy sources make those civilizations much more conservative, and the common memes of Scifi (e.g. the "technology indistinguishable from magic" thing) are never realized. Think a sort of cross over between Dune and the Hunger Games.

jheriko 12y ago

does nuclear power count? it kind of solves the energy crisis if you are willing to ignore the hippies and the accidents

funkyy 12y ago
Actually nuclear plants could be placed in remote islands so electricity would be brought using underwater cables. But then - I think people would never harness nuclear power since it was created as an alternative to coal and oil. Without them no one would even think of using such a thing.
- jheriko 12y ago
  i think nuclear power was realised as a result of the revolution in physics at the turn of the century... nothing to do with looking for alternatives.

jkyle 12y ago

Yeast is the mother of civilization. It gave us bread, beer, and wine. Everything after that is details. :)

crpatino 12y ago
I like how you think, but I don't think that's the same question as was posed by the article.

exabrial 12y ago

Yes, America would be fine. But China/India where the vast vast majority of pollution originates would collapse.

jwatte 12y ago

Biomass. Coal. Cellulose. Lots of alternative paths could be followed if necessary.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

These ideas are based partly on faulty reasoning, I made a post on exactly that topic a few days back, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9357326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9357326 In short, it's unlikely that a civilizational reboot would be bereft of fossil fuels to spur its early stages of development and growth (they most important stages, by far) because such stages require very little fossil fuels compared to an industry in full swing and many small, lower quality, less profitable (though still easily exploited) reserves will have been passed over by modern industry. It's unlikely that even in a severe future resource crunch that every coal mine will be stripped bare and every oil well pumped dry. We won't resort to digging out a pittance worth of coal out of some abandoned mine that is now in the middle of a suburb, we'll do as we're doing now, adapting new technologies to push the boundaries of new, substantive reserves. Such as open pit strip mining of coal using drag lines, fracking, tar sands, deep ocean drilling, etc. But those small reserves, those reserves that are economically disadvantageous and inconvenient for us to exploit today, they would probably be adequate for bootstrapping industry again, likely sufficiently to enable them to develop more sustainable approaches. Or simply other ways of doing things. It would take hundreds of years of intensive use for humanity to exploit all of the easily extractable coal in the world, I put the odds of that happening as very low (if humanity can survive a few hundred more years then they have a pretty good chance of surviving indefinitely, in my opinion). And with coal you can do anything else, make plastics, make hydrocarbons, what-have-you. Mind, I'm not advocating this, I'm simply pointing out the flaw in the logic here. Personally I'd rather we switched over to mostly nuclear power sooner rather than later.

tripzilch 12y ago

What about aluminium? It's pretty much the reverse--hard to mine, easy to work. So that's a big bonus pre-fossil fuel society didn't have, the aluminium is already mined and out there. Now on the other hand, I find it puzzling how so many people in this thread (and also part of the assumptions in the article) seem to forget all the things we could do perfectly well without fossil fuels. Glass? Brick? Mortar? Is it maybe because in America you don't see as many obviously before-fossil-fuel buildings that contain all these materials? I don't see many people mentioning specific years, neither could could I find a clear number on several WP pages, but considering most of the graphs about production/consumption, we didn't start using fossil fuels until about 1800-1850 (with coal), with significant numbers not even beginning to appear until after 1850. Any idea what sort of technologies we already had before that? It's not too bad :) Yet, the Industrial Revolution was already on its way since 1760. We had microscopes, architecture, surgery, books, printing presses ... And just because most things today are made out of plastic doesn't mean they have to be. A lot of those things exist only because plastic is so ridiculously cheap it's not even cost-effective to develop an alternative. Remember old things being built to last? That's how you make up for the ridiculous cheapness of plastic. It almost sounds cheesy and old-timey to repeat, but if you do the mental math it adds up: a styrofoam cup is maybe 1000x as cheap, so it made economical sense to consume and throw away. I already easily use a coffee mug on average 1000s of times (daily coffee times a bunch of years) before it breaks, and that's without even trying. Some of the plastic things, like shopping bags, don't even really last if you try (shopping bag, used four times before it rips somewhere?) that's the sort of thing we'll stop making as soon as the margins stop being insane and use the resources spent on something 1000x more durable instead of 1000x as cheap. Remember that oil and/or plastic won't just 100% disappear, suddenly. It's a really weird luxury state we live in at the moment, but plastic is still pretty awesome as a material even if it's quite expensive and not as plentiful (just look at glass or fine pottery), in particular as durable alternatives become economical again.