Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels? (2016)

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 205 posts

Re: Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels? (2016)

#51

Post by SuoDuanDao »

ajot wrote: post #42
fredophile wrote: post #31

My impression is that the big road block to unlocking something like the industrial revolution is the precision of your tools. During the industrial revolution there were big advances in metal tools. Maudslay's development of a metal lathe that could be used to make metal tools was a huge step forward. I think if you can reach this point of development you should be able to make continued progress using non-fossil fu…

You can make coal from biomass, mainly wood (I'm not sure if some other plants could be used), but I guess it is antieconomical if you need lots of coal for high furnaces to make iron and/or steel.

it was economical in the middle ages for hundreds of years! But, having decent steel for your knights' armaments was also an existential concern for most power centers, a more peaceful society might deal with different economics.

Re: Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels? (2016)

#52

Post by AtlasBarfed »

Biofuels and wind would probably be the basis of the energy sector of a civilization reboot.

All the easily extracted oil is long gone on earth. There used to be deposits bubbling up from the ground, oil extraction now depends on several centuries of accumulated knowledge, industry, infrastructure, and resource maps to get to tar sands, deep water deposits, fracking, etc.

Re: Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels? (2016)

#54

Post by outworlder »

grugagag wrote: post #25
vcxy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact they are not pronounced the same. English is weird, sure, but I think if you have that kind of misconception then it's going to seem far stranger. "Loose" rhymes with "juice", "lose" rhymes with "news", if that helps.

I don't know, I personally understood the comment without any problem and wasn't even aware that loose was used instead of lose until it was pointed out. I got the meaning perfectly well from the context. To me these kind of comments pointing out to misspelled words are pedantic at best. And I take back that they're pronounced the same, I ran it through my head a few sentences and there's a difference at the end but…

> Let the grammar police (...)

Wouldn't this be a case for the orthography police?

Re: Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels? (2016)

#55

Post by function_seven »

OJFord wrote: post #48
vcxy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact they are not pronounced the same. English is weird, sure, but I think if you have that kind of misconception then it's going to seem far stranger. "Loose" rhymes with "juice", "lose" rhymes with "news", if that helps.

Lose generally (RP, and I think 'most' dialects) does not rhyme with news. 'Lose' rhymes with 'two's [complement]'; 'news' rhymes with 'pews'. (The latter pair has a /j/ or 'yuh sound' before the vowel.) (Heh, really is a can of worms isn't it: 'choose' rhymes with 'lose'; not with 'loose'. Poor ESL learners, no envy from me! Hindi/devanagari, which I'm learning as a second language, is so easy by comparison.)

> 'news' rhymes with 'pews'

This must be a regional thing. I've never heard someone pronounce "news" as "nyooze". "Pews" is pronounced that way, however.

Re: Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels? (2016)

#56

Post by outworlder »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #14
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so our lifestyle would be very different, much "slower" so to speak This is not just about lifestyle. When you're spending all your time hunting animals to eat or digging up hard-to-reach coal/low-energy peat so you don't freeze to death in Winter, you can't do other work like research, and you can't support a population growth that enabled our advances.

To give an extreme example, Hunter-Gatherers generally didn't spend all their time hunting. There's every indication they spent only as much as early farmers at most. In some cases it was a few tens of hours per week per person. Population growth is a separate, rather more complicated topic.

But then you cannot have libraries, you cannot have universities, you cannot have laboratories or factories. Not if you have to constantly relocate to find more food.

Re: Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels? (2016)

#57

Post by jobigoud »

wcarss wrote: post #29

Ringworld goes into this topic quite a bit, so it was interesting to me to see that the author is an astrobiologist who wrote "The Knowledge", about restarting civilization from scratch. Niven (who wrote Ringworld) also co-wrote "Lucifer's Hammer" with Jerry Pournelle, which was like a fun book version of a big-cast disaster movie, about a comet colliding with the earth in the mid-1970s. Lucifer's Hammer had some fai…

Another "if" I'm often wondering is about the size of the Earth. Had we shown up on something the size of the Moon or Ganymede, the amount of resources we would have had at our disposal would have been a lot smaller. We would probably have figured that we weren't the center of the Solar system much sooner though.

On the other hand if an intelligent species spawns on a much larger planet they can progress much longer before depleting their resources.

Re: Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels? (2016)

#58

Post by bluGill »

fredophile wrote: post #31

My impression is that the big road block to unlocking something like the industrial revolution is the precision of your tools. During the industrial revolution there were big advances in metal tools. Maudslay's development of a metal lathe that could be used to make metal tools was a huge step forward. I think if you can reach this point of development you should be able to make continued progress using non-fossil fu…

What is the use of a precision tool without the metallurgy to go with them?

Re: Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels? (2016)

#59

Post by bobthepanda »

CodeGlitch wrote: post #45
bilbo0s wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do the metallurgy, manufacture the concrete, or synthesize the petrochemicals in the absence of fossil fuel energy? Examples given in the article were on the scale of post nuclear conflict societal collapse. No ports, no highways, no railways, no dual use infrastructure at all. No more fossil fuel deliveries happening. No deliveries of anything. Rebuilding in that environment would be challenging in the ex…

> metallurgy, manufacture the concrete, or synthesize the petrochemicals in the absence of fossil fuel energy I think you could use biomass to bootstrap these. Biosmass wouldn't be sustainable, but once you have the metallurgy, etc in place you could then build wind turbines.

Biomass doesn’t burn hot enough.

Re: Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels? (2016)

#60

Post by robin_reala »

function_seven wrote: post #55
OJFord wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lose generally (RP, and I think 'most' dialects) does not rhyme with news. 'Lose' rhymes with 'two's [complement]'; 'news' rhymes with 'pews'. (The latter pair has a /j/ or 'yuh sound' before the vowel.) (Heh, really is a can of worms isn't it: 'choose' rhymes with 'lose'; not with 'loose'. Poor ESL learners, no envy from me! Hindi/devanagari, which I'm learning as a second language, is so easy by comparison.)

> 'news' rhymes with 'pews' This must be a regional thing. I've never heard someone pronounce "news" as "nyooze". "Pews" is pronounced that way, however.

Default en-GB pronunciation is njuːz.
Post reply on HN