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

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

#201

Post by mikewarot »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #171
el_nahual wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one strikes painfully close to home! I grew up on an old colonial street in a major Latin American city. Beautiful street "paved" with cobblestones. Somehow the cobblestones managed to look both randomly placed and have some "lines" that gave it a very orderly look. The cobblestones were placed in some substrate that allowed moss to grow between them. At some point about 10 years ago, the city decided to tear up…

> apparently nobody knows how to lay cobblestones anymore This is regional. I went to a talk on cobblestone streets in New York. There are entire books dedicated to the craft, and new scholarship on it ongoing. (It pertains closely to the question of prefabricated infrastructure.)

Make - as in mold and fire in a kiln... with ingredients upknown.

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

#202

Post by Gibbon1 »

demosito666 wrote: post #196
Gibbon1 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the sun pours FAR more power onto the surface than needed to get 'modern'. One of the agruments economists make for not switching away from fossil fuels is that we'd be consigning worlds poor to endless poverty. Invariable followed by the accusation that you don't care about poor people. But if you look at the supply of oil and gas it's obvious there never was would be enough to lift the worlds poor out of poverty.…

And another thing that is missed in this discussion: the article assumes that there will be much fewer people left than we have today. It's very hard to support something as huge and as cold as Moscow on renewables. But if there are few people, they live in compact villages in warm climate, there is no existential pressure to burn fossils for heating and heavy industries. You have a breathing room.

Thing about places that are far north and cold. If you look at a map usually they are less than 1500 miles from some place sunnier.

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

#203

Post by lumost »

whatshisface wrote: post #200
njarboe wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it would be very harmful to humans, but so were most industrial processes. We have now eliminated almost all of them in the West (some exported to other countries). I guess my main point is that if nuclear power had been around for as long as steam power then society would have grown up around it. It would be familiar, like fire (fossil fuels) is, and the human race could judge its merits much more rationally in…

A nuclear power plant running on the surface shielded by nothing more than some bricks would be way worse than any other ancient industrial technology. Water would get in and leach away any soluble isotopes, poisoning the surrounding area for millennia. Anything you tried to heat using the nuclear pile would become radioactive, because ancient societies don't have a way to transport heat. (In the modern world we use…

More than likely such material would be used for primitive siege weapons and for “salting the earth”.

There would be a nonzero chance of Bronze Age civilization wiping itself out through environmental catastrophe.

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

#204

Post by AngusH »

mikewarot wrote: post #198
AngusH wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it sounds like a Sett: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sett_(paving) (which is often called a cobblestone) Edit: Still being laid in Edinburgh...

Here in the Midwest, far away from the granite blocks imported by ships there were companies that made additively "cobblestones", with their names on them, in my walkway there are such stones made in Attica, Indiana. The knowledge of how those were made, is apparently lost. Those things are tough like you wouldn't believe.

Ah, interesting and definitely not a Sett.

I had assumed you meant that the stone had been manufactured into a block, but this is clearly something else.

Some kind of special concrete formulation do you think?

The formula kept as a trade secret, then lost when the company closed or got bought or something I suppose?

Rather unfortunate, alas.

Edited

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

#205

Post by [deleted] »

godelski wrote: post #104
canniballectern wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As land creatures, we haven't explored the underwater tech tree in much detail. If there are fishpeople with mega brains out there somewhere, they might have figured out some stuff that we haven't.

There are certain limitations we know about though. Like that making a spaceship would be more difficult. Not only getting out of the water and then into space, but just that you have to have your capsule at a higher pressure. Though landing might be a bit easier because you don't have to use boats to get people out. But then landing and exploring another planet will be much harder, and don't get me started on what t…

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