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

Post by JumpCrisscross » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 4:30 AM UTC

el_nahual wrote: post #135

mikewarot wrote: post #50

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> 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)

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…

Post by whatshisface » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 5:03 AM UTC

njarboe wrote: post #144

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…

One interesting thing to contemplate along these lines is that the U235 to U238 ratio of naturally occurring uranium changes through time on Earth. They had about the same abundance when the Solar System was created but they have different half lives. U235 is about 0.70 billion years and U238 at about 4.47 billion years. Currently U235 is only 0.7% of natural uranium, but one can make a nuclear reactor with natural w…

Post by Animats » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 5:17 AM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #140

Animats wrote: post #131

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That would require the ability for the grid to say "no" and for industries to respond to "nos". That's available now, if you buy power in large enough amounts. It's not popular.[1] [1] https://seuc.senate.ca.gov/interruptibleservicecontractissue...

Yeah, there's just a bunch of issues today with how grids are operated. In order for this to really work well, we need national standards for both grid operators and grid users. The reason for all of this being both unpopular and requiring big purchases is because it's pretty much a 1 off deal between the grid operator and the purchaser. It requires that they both both come into the room to make a deal. Instead, we n…

Post by basilgohar » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 5:29 AM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #167

TeMPOraL wrote: post #111

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Conversely, were we born on a world a bit larger than Earth, we wouldn't be able to reach orbit the way we did, due to limits of chemical rocket propulsion.

> chemical rocket propulsion. If anyone wants to learn more about the history of this specific/niche topic, there's actually an interesting book (with a foreword by Isaac Asimov), Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants by John Drury Clark: * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677285.Ignition_ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Drury_Clark * PDF copy: http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books…

Post by 8bitsrule » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 5:49 AM UTC