81–90 of 205 posts
It would be a pretty bleak society without many of these never mind all of the various medicinal stuff such as antiseptics, antihistamines, vitamin capsules, cortisone, glycerin, asparin
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…
Charcoal is technically an unlimited renewable resource.
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But it could be a step in a bootstrap process. Build some hydro/nuclear/wind power plants, then you can start looking into hydrogen reduction for steel production.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
I believe that if you can achieve precision tools you can use those tools to meet societies ongoing energy needs using renewable energy sources. This means that if you have non-fossil fuel energy sources available to advance metallurgy and toolmaking to the point you can make precision tools then you can reboot civilization without fossil fuels. I also think it is very likely that humans could do this but it might take longer than it did with fossil fuels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've seen no mention of the myriad other uses we make from petroleum other than transport uses. There's 144 (out of 6000) listed here. https://www.ranken-energy.com/index.php/products-made-from-p... It would be a pretty bleak society without many of these never mind all of the various medicinal stuff such as antiseptics, antihistamines, vitamin capsules, cortisone, glycerin, asparin