Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels? (2016) • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by egberts1 » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 7:27 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #65

CodeGlitch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You run out of biomass before you can bootstrap yourself enough to build wind turbines. Sure the dutch built windmills, but they didn't have refined metals in to make a generator.

Hydroelectric, slow but effective to establish an electric kiln that works with titanium.

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

#72

Post by shrimp_emoji » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 7:27 PM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #50

lawrenceyan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really an issue. Knowledge steadily accumulates over time. The key foundations of human intelligence and ingenuity will always remains regardless of whether or not fossil fuels exist for us to exploit. Non-renewable resources only served to speed up our industrialization.

> Knowledge steadily accumulates over time. No, it doesn't. Only knowledge that people consider to have value will be retained over time. Many things are lost to history, for example.. nobody knows how to make cobblestone. (Or so I'm told)

I've never heard that about cobblestone, but Roman concrete and "Damascus" steel are other examples.

Granted, we've recently (mostly) rediscovered how to make those, but it shows knowledge accumulation isn't monotonic.

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

#73

Post by SuoDuanDao » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

jabl wrote: post #68

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Large areas were also deforested to provide the charcoal. Roughly 100kg wood to produce 1kg iron. The Ruhr valley area was denuded already in Roman times due to this.

Yup. It's pretty interesting the places that managed their woodlands responsibly over a long time - Japan and England both had pretty sophisticated approaches to not running out of this resource over the long term.

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

#74

Post by Nbox9 » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 7:33 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #58

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?

You can get pretty far along metallurgy with burning wood and charcoal.

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

#75

Post by jabl » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

zalkota wrote: post #2

No, how the hell do we create steel without coal.

In Sweden they are building a prototype of the Hybrit process, using hydrogen to reduce the ore. The plan is to convert the blast furnaces in Sweden and Finland within a couple of decades.

Now this isn't a particularly low tech way of going about it, and producing the hydrogen requires massive amounts of electricity. So probably not an option if you're bootstrapping civilization after a collapse.

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

#76

Post by mLuby » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #28

hesdeadjim wrote: post #22

It's easy for me to end up existentially depressed if I go too far down this line of thinking. But, frankly, we are fucked here on Earth. We're consuming resources at an exponential rate with a population way, way outside what the planet can support sustainably. And we won't fix it before it's too late, because our base human nature wants more, bigger, better at the expense of all else. I'm with Musk on this, the onl…

> I'm with Musk on this, the only way we survive is to get the hell off Earth And as a plan, I think that's basically completely stupid. Even our worst case climate change projections give us an Earth that is incredibly more habitable than any extraterrestrial environment. The worst conditions you can find on this entire planet today are more habitable than the best you can find elsewhere in our star system. Think of…

Why not both?

Luddites always whine about the resources "wasted" on space exploration, science, and now the beginnings of industry, but they don't appreciate how in so many ways the fruits of our efforts in space end up benefiting all of us here on Earth.

And since those people claim to be concerned with finite resources and a fragile biosphere, why constrain ourselves to the resources of our mother planet (which resource extraction and utilization demonstrably damages) instead of moving our industry to the dead vacuum of space and tapping the near-infinite mass and energy of the rest of the Universe?

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

#77

Post by mordymoop » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

Rebooting with the current knowledge base, possibly. Booting from scratch with no fossil fuels, doubtful. I have long suspected that one of the Great Filters is the propensity of a planet to generate fossil energy. You will really only find large quantities of oil in a narrow range of circumstances, depending on specific levels of tectonic activity, duration and abundance of life, sedimentation patterns due to rainfall and ocean distributions, and low to moderate levels of atmospheric oxidizer.

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

#78

Post by bobthepanda » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

jabl wrote: post #70

bobthepanda wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biomass doesn’t burn hot enough.

How do you think they made iron before the industrial revolution? Hint: charcoal.

Going back to just pig iron would be pretty terrible. The Old World cleared nearly all of its forests getting to that point.

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

#79

Post by Aperocky » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 7:40 PM UTC

mordymoop wrote: post #77

Rebooting with the current knowledge base, possibly. Booting from scratch with no fossil fuels, doubtful. I have long suspected that one of the Great Filters is the propensity of a planet to generate fossil energy. You will really only find large quantities of oil in a narrow range of circumstances, depending on specific levels of tectonic activity, duration and abundance of life, sedimentation patterns due to rainfa…

Imagine if Earth is entirely water. The poor fish can develop mega brains but they would still be more or less stuck under water with no real viable technologies.

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

#80

Post by godelski » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 7:45 PM UTC

jobigoud wrote: post #57

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…

Those bodies are too small to have a real atmosphere. Nor would they have molten cores which provide the magnetospheres essential for their radiation shielding and being able to have an electric ground. While neither of these are necessary, per se, they are extremely helpful (especially having an electric ground) and I think make a big difference when we're talking about advanced life vs microbial.