Necessity is the mother of invention. The Chinese had very high grade porcelain for many of their household needs. As a consequence, they never bothered to invent glass for these needs. Europe and the Middle East did, and also discovered the telescope and microscope along the way. Porcelain is arguably better for mugs and bowls and can be made much thinner than glass can. However, that happy little accident of history gave the western barbarians a slight edge in one realm of civilization.
So, could we rebuild our civilization without fossil fuels? Maybe. Likely no, it would be different and very strange to our eyes. Heck, it might even be 'better', as they then would not be dealing with our particular type of climate change. Though, they may have their own problems to deal with.
For the record, the earliest known (Nimrud or Layard) lens came from naturally occurring rock-crystal and was recovered in Iraq, which is between China and western Europe. (Also, the Egyptians had lenses.) Also, Chinese astronomy was far more advanced than western astronomy until recent times, even without telescopes (introduced in the 17th century), in part due to cross-pollination with Persian, Indian and Islamic astronomy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrud_lenshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_astronomy
I also sometimes wonder if we might create a slower buy culturally deeper and more contemplative civilization without the crystal meth that is fossil fuel.
But then again maybe not. Maybe we'd never overcome the activation energy for innovation. You can't do true experiments in history.
'Culturally deeper'? Western civilisation is the most complex culture the world has ever known.
There seems to be this strange idea that 'culture' means 'has a religious festival' or somesuch. You hear of some traveller lionising a travel destination as being so culturally deep because they happened to visit when a festival was on. Then, because the home country doesn't have that festival or ritual, it's seen as culturally bereft.
There is a ridiculously wide assortment of activities you can get involved in when you're not a scratching at the earth for subsistence - including debating the difference in what 'culture' means with someone on the other side of the world. Whether you're seeing a movie, running a fantasy football league, doling out soup in a soup kitchen, filibustering to stop some random law, fishing through your credit cards for one the plane's entertainment system will accept, chewing the fat with a passerby while sitting on your stoop on a hot night, spending a Saturday doing a gastro-tour of a great vineyard region... pretty much any activity you can think of, right down to submitting your tax forms... these are all culture. The more different kinds of people you throw together, the greater the variety of cultural activities available.
The idea that we are culturally bereft is just plain wrong. We may not have our priorities right with certain aspects of our culture, but we are drowning in culture. I just don't see how culture would be 'deeper' with less interaction between people from the removal of fossil fuels - we had that for human history up until a couple of hundred years ago, and culture was both slow to change and quite unfair, without being any deeper than it is now.
Nature is opportunistic and, to some degree, utterly immoral. The "pollution" of cyanobacteria creating an Oxygen rich atmosphere or of lignin rich trees littering the world with their branches, trunks, and stumps that wouldn't be biodegradable for tens of millions of years, all of that pales in comparison to the raw brutality of the food chain. Organisms murder one another in cold blood to steal the nutrients of their bodies. It doesn't get more opportunistic and selfish than that, but that's nature. It's only since mankind got the upper hand on nature that it's been possible to view nature in any other light than primarily harsh and uncaring (like a supernova or volcano). Humanities tendencies towards selfishness and opportunism are perfectly natural, asking us to be different is actually asking humans to be unnatural.
Which I think is justified, but we should make clear what is being asked and not painting humans as being something their not (i.e. uniquely exploitive, violent, selfish, etc.)
The biodegradability thing is pretty funny too, again human waste absolutely pales in comparison to trees and lignin, at least water bottles can't reproduce.
I can't tell if your post is sarcasm or not, but I'd just like to point out that while not perfect we have 1) intelligence as individuals and 2) political mechanisms as a species that would enable a change of course (if one is possible to begin with) whereas the cyanobacteria lacked both of those things.
It's the satirization of the idea that 'mother nature' is some kind of right thinking steward of life on this planet that you commonly find amongst people who call fossil fuels meth.
Similar to the way one might satirize traditional marriage by pointing out that tradition advocates a lot of things that traditional marriage people would find abhorrent, if you take a view of tradition that extends past the start of the industrial revolution.
I don't think fleitz was being sarcastic per se - certainly I didn't read it as suggesting human evolution was a 'bad thing'.
Rather pointing out that (at the time) oxygen in the atmosphere was hostile to more complex forms of life. As we know, oxygen is a pretty unpleasant element in its raw state - but we managed to work around that particular problem.
Chinese windows used to be covered with paper. Plenty of light gets through, although you'd have to open the windows or actually go outside to see what's outside. (Apparently, viewing the outside in the comfort of your bedroom is a luxury that most people don't need.)
In warmer regions, people would just tear out the paper in the summer and apply new paper before winter.
I may have glass windows, but usually they are covered up with blinds and or curtains. Especially in the bedroom. It's nice to be able to open them up and let light in when I need to, but I wouldn't put it on a list of necessities.
How would you be able to make glass without fossil fuels?
We've already deforested the planet... you don't get to burn biomass.
A modern, technological civilization gets one bite at the apple, no more (unless they can manage to make it to another planet, where they have all the starting blocks to work with). You don't even get to salvage much from the previous civilization, since all but the crudest products go stale pretty quickly.
Oh, for a post-apocalyptic world? There, of course, would be challenges to 're-do' the world to where we are now. Hopefully it never comes to that, but those people will probably be a lot different than we are now. Heck, we are a lot different then our grandparents are in terms of tech and what we think is obvious as a tech.
Also, I dont think most of the material will be lost. Take aluminum. It's nearly un'rust'able and really doesn't degrade over the time spans we are talking about. Making it from scratch is not obvious, you need electrolysis [1] and some other not terribly clear ideas. That said, you can do it in a garage; you don't need a foundry. And those ideas are likely to survive the end of the world, seeing as aluminum is so useful.
Overall, ideas are like genetics, once you get one great working thing it's hard to loose that mechanism. Give yourself more credit, you are smarter than you think.
We could also cultivate algae. There is the "open-pond" system and the "vertical growth" system where water is cycled into an installation made of transparent bags. Algae take nutrients from the water (and light from the sun) to develop and are then filtered out as they grow. They turn the algae into biofuel (algal oil).
No, we couldn't cultivate algae. You don't get good at that stuff until after you've already had an industrial civilization for a hundred or more years.
Where will you get the "transparent bags", for instance? Sure after the algae fuels are going good, presumably you can make anything you need... but that's the bootstrapping problem again.
Do you know what you needed to start using petroleum? 18th/19th century pumping equipment. Can you bootstrap biofuels with that?
We have not "deforested the planet". What are you running on about?
You can make glass without fossil fuels. If you have energy you can make fossil fuels from air. The key part to replacing fossil fuels is having the energy. Hopefully cheap and in great supply.
> We have not "deforested the planet". What are you running on about?
Take a look at the before and after pictures. Forest covered half of North America. It's all gone. Prior to that, covered most of Europe, the British Isles.
We've deforested it. It takes something on the order a million years for that to recover, supposing it does.
> If you have energy you can make fossil fuels from air.
We're talking about a scenario where they won't have the energy to do that. It's a bootstrapping problem. Everyone commenting here is saying "but that's ok, we'll have all we need to make this fancy stuff"...
When the problem itself is posed as "what if we no longer have all we need to make fancy stuff".
> We have not "deforested the planet". What are you running on about?
Take a look at the before and after pictures. Forest covered half of North America. It's all gone. Prior to that, covered most of Europe, the British Isles.
We've deforested it. It takes something on the order a million years for that to recover, supposing it does.
Care to back up your deforestation assertion with research?
The reality is that there's been a significant amount of reforestation around the world. Some parts are better off than others, but in the US and Europe, for examples, there is more forest today than there was in the late 19th century.
Can a caveman melt some sand in a woodfire? Yeh probably.
That glass will be worthless for any sort of technology. And by the time he can make better glass, he's all out of stuff to burn.
You don't get to do technological civilization twice. The first one uses up all the easy-to-use resources, and supposing there is anything left at all, it won't be usable without the technology that they won't have.
Europe got to use glass because it had plenty of forests to burn. Those are gone. They won't be coming back any time soon.
Actually, I think a related but better question is, what would technology look like without the assumption of a stable base-load of electricity on the grid? What if your power availability simply went up and down depending on the wind, or cloud cover, or the tides.
There's a kind of poetry I think, a kind of awareness, that your devices may spin up and down with the seasons instead of marching incessantly and unstoppably onward.
Hydro power averages ~90W per person in the US ~225W peak @ ~40% capacity factor. In many ways that's not a lot of power, but it's plenty to kick start other renewable sources in the apocalypse scenario or average out power from renewables.
As to renewables the simple solutions is to over provision and add spare transit capacity. You move electricity 1,000 KM with minimal losses at fairly low cost so with reasonable transit you get to average over a vary large area.
Over building renewables and transport capacity would probably be worse than the status quo in terms of cost and carbon generation. Peak power, which is dictated by people's general schedule, dictates both the generation and capacity requirements. It doesn't make any sense to over build renewables when everyone is using power after the sun went down or when you can't control when the wind blows. In ERCOT, (Texas) the price of electricity overnight (when the wind is blowing) often goes negative meaning that the power producer pays you to use electricity.
This is why the next generation of battery technology is going to be so groundbreaking. It will allow batteries to become more economical feasible both on a small and large scale. It simply cause renewables to become more societally efficient.
Dams are one of the best kind of battery there is. They store gargantuan amounts of energy with very little complexity. Basically: pump water up into the dam to "charge," and let water flow and run the turbines to "release" energy.
That's why hydro power is absolutely critical to a renewable grid. It's the only scalable way to normalize supply and demand.
Despite, the inefficiencies (losing 20-30%) there are large environmental impacts associated with turning a large amount of land into a lake. Additionally, when a drought occurs almost all the storage capacity is lost.
We are at the stage with battery technologies, where it would make absolutely to build hydro storage, even given the current trend of removing dams.
That thought-experiment precludes nuclear fission, which provides energy at a consistent rate at orders of magnitude greater than fossil fuels and renewable energy sources.
In the context of this article's thought experiment, fission's probably out of the question.
However, for other scenarios, it is indeed a viable option, considering that it's statistically the safest (last I checked), very clean, and packs a high energy density.
The problem, though, is that fissile material is subject to a lot of the same availability problems as fossil fuels (if not worse), plus quite a few safety concerns (particularly when it comes to radiation, though coal mining poses this sort of risk, too). The energy density is much better, so we could probably get by for a very long time (especially with things like breeder reactors, increased use of thorium instead of or alongside uranium or plutonium, etc.), but ultimately, we'll need to transition to something like fusion power at the very least.
Easily available in what context, though? To us in the modern day, yeah, it's probably pretty trivial to mine such nuclear fuels, but the article discusses a lack of that technology.
There is less fissile material than fossil fuels. And the reactors are huge and heavy. Thousands of year maybe at current consumption levels, not if all energy consumption was replaced with nuclear.
The article's thought experiment is useless, it's not even internally consistent. He imagines a world where we could be able to collect old solar panels, but all knowledge is lost. Now what on earth is going to destroy every library in every town all over the earth, but leave solar panels on the rooftops intact? A single small-town library would contain huge amounts of useful knowledge. If we include the knowledge contained in the heads of the survivors, the only realistic way of losing all (or even most) useful knowledge is killing everyone.
I doubt that small-town libraries will get rid of all books. Libraries do have collections of local history which are unlikely to be part of a digital archive. (Eg, phone books from the 1950s, local high school yearbooks, photo collections and films about the annual downtown parade, publications from the local genealogical society, etc.)
But if in 100 years small-town libraries have mostly switched to digital collections, then yes, it's possible for the knowledge to disappear even if the infrastructure remains.
I don't think it's likely, but it's not completely inconsistent.
I thought of that too, but I wonder how much energy it takes to do fusion research and get the first power-producing fission reactor built from the starting point of knowing nothing about nuclear physics.
I don't think it takes a lot of energy to get a reactor running - there are even natural ones around. Mining involves some chemicals but is fairly low-tech. Enrichment requires a lot of precision in the centrifuges, but not a lot of raw energy; you would need high quality tools and dedicated skilled labour, but you don't need grid power. Most of the high-tech engineering of modern reactors is around safety, but in this scenario presumably you'd just use slave labour.
Research is another question, but it's likely that a society that was more heavily based on electricity would discover relativity sooner than we did.
As another commenter pointed out, hydroelectricity can compensate for fluctuations in other types of renewable energy. Pumped storage power plants (a form of hydro where you use gravity as a gigantic battery) can also help smooth out any remaining fluctuation.
This could, however, change the balance of power between different regions of the world. Fossil fuels favor coastal flatlands where it's easy to transport bulk materials. A civilization that depends on hydroelectricity, on the other hand, might favor a more mountainous terrain. The capitol in the postapocalyptic world of The Hunger Games is located somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, powered by hydro.
Our usual concept of business hours might also have to disappear, if we're going to rely on hydro to smooth out fluctuations in other energy sources. We may no longer be able to afford peak usage at certain times of day, and therefore spread out power-consuming activites across all hours of the day and night. This helps eliminate the rush hour, which is itself a terrible waste of energy.
If push comes to shove and we need to ration power, I suppose this will put more pressure on battery technology. People will have to store up on power at certain times of the day, and use it until the next charge-up time. It will be a bit like fetching water from the well every morning.
But even under such circumstances, some people are clever enough to put a tank on the roof and install pipes/faucets to simulate a constant water supply. Batteries are to an intermittent power supply what a tank is to an intermittent water supply. We as a species can't tolerate inconvenience. We'll find a way to make life as convenient as possible, no matter what the circumstances. Intermittent meat supply? Brb, gonna store up on ham and bacon during the hunting season.
I like your idea. I've actually thought it wouldn't be that bad for people to not use electricity hungry appliances at night? Fans to bring in cool air from outside, really no need to cook or wash clothes at night. Just a small battery for TV's and a few lights?
(Heating in the winter might be tougher of course. But a house heated to 80F during the day might be 50F in the morning, so might be tolerable?) Or Find ways to store the heat during day and slowly release it at night. Tanks of water in the attic?)
> But a house heated to 80F during the day might be 50F in the morning
In my experience, a house heated to 80F can be 30F within a matter of a couple of hours, depending on the number of windows, temperature outside, and insulation levels.
I certainly don't think that's a solution to winter problems in cold-weather climates.
As for storing the heat, I'm not really sure what you mean. Surely it would be inefficient to generate extra heat during the day and store it, as opposed to just creating some in the evening?
If a house drops from 80F to 30F within a couple of hours then it is poorly insulated, and likely has a lot of air exchange. http://www.winnipeg.ca/epp/pdfs/CoolingRatesOfHouses.pdf looked at how houses cooled during a power outage in Quebec in January. "The mean outside temperature during this period was between -7 and -8°C, with daytime highs of up to 3°C. ... The temperature was as low as -23°C during that period."
12-17 days after the power failed, the contractor measured temperatures in houses that had had neither power nor occupants during that time. "None of the air or surface temperatures in the 31 houses inspected had fallen below 0°C."
There is a proviso: "In very cold temperatures (for example, -30°C), high winds or houses without basements, the rate of cooling will be much faster than observed in the southern Quebec houses of this study."
Now, I lived for a year in a house which was poorly insulated, and where you could feel the draft through the window frame. When it was -15F outside 2L pop bottles would freeze on the floor of the pantry even when the heat was on, and when the furnace went out during Thanksgiving weekend the inside temperature quickly dropped. Even then, it didn't match the freezing outside temperature over a couple of hours. I can well believe that your experience is true, but it is atypical.
On the other side of things, Passivhaus designs (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house ) give an example of what can be done with good design, for houses designed for freezing weather. They need only 10W/m² of heat, which can often be met by normal activity (people, computers, screens, coffee makers, etc.)
It's possible to have south facing windows in Germany which let in more solar energy in winter than is released by heat loss.
It's cheap to add a fairly large heat sink in the middle of your house during construction. Brick or stone walls vs plaster or just a large tank of water.
Add in some passive solar and you can keep a house in the continual US warm without active heat sources fairly easily. The major issue is it stops looking like a traditional house and costs more up front, but it’s not a major issue.
PS: ~6 hours * 1kw/m^2. Take a 30' x 30' roof and that's ~600 kwh per day or an average of 24kw of heating. Though you do need to keep the now off the roof in the winter, but a steep enough rough does that fairly easily.
You've got a fairly large heat sink right under every house. The trick is to "wire" into it during the build. Stick a geothermal heat transfer unit and run water pipes under the ground where the earth maintains a constant year round temperature. Use this to control the climate along with decent insulation and you'll dramatically reduce your climate control costs.
Ideally, if you can build your entire house below the frost line, you're laughing - but this isn't always feasible.
That can be a good option when you need both winter heating and summer cooling, but ground source heating tends to be surprisingly expensive. Not to mention many houses sit on bed rock.
My understanding is if you live near a stream or pond it's a great way to make heat pumps far more efficient, but otherwise just having a large rock slab in the middle of your house combined with solar heating is far cheaper for heating, but not that useful for cooling if your area does not cool off at night.
If you live near a river/stream, depending on the depth, flow and head (gradient drop) you can also use that for power generation. If it's not that deep, it'll only be useful for this in months where it's not frozen solid, but if it's deeper, then you'll still have flow under the ice to drive your turbine. In the winter however, wind tends to be more prevalent, so you can use a wind turbine to generate more power.
Of course, all this is reliant on knowledge of the local geography and climate before you purchase and get set up. If you're limited to where you are right now, you're kind of stuck with what you can put on your property right now. Which could be as limited as running on-grid but growing your own food.
If you maintain the climate in your house with geothermal energy or using different building techniques such as earth berm which maintain the internal climate of your property naturally, you just need to supplement via some other means rather than drive all the heating and cooling via high energy devices. The earth maintains a fairly constant temperature below approx. 4-6 feet and so as long as your home is insulated well, you would not find it fluctuating so wildly as you suggest.
Cooking by fire takes a bit of practice, but even that is easy with some practice. Admittedly, this in many cases isn't considered renewable, but you can remove a cord of wood (approx. 85 cu. ft.) per acre per year without ever depleting your supply. People in Northern climes claim they require 5-6 cords to get through their winters, but with a well insulated and geothermally "heated" house, you could reduce this fairly effectively. A wood gasifier can be used to drive gas burning engines - I'm not sure I'd recommend it for cooking due to potential CO output - you certainly wouldn't want to use it for cooking inside the house.
We have an abundance of energy all around us and while the technologies that harness this energy aren't perhaps as efficient as we'd like yet, they're efficient enough that harnessing a bunch and wiring them together with a battery bank, charge controller and power inverter is enough that you can power your home sustainably with a much reduced need for fossil fuels. There's certainly enough for lights (especially if you're running all LED lights) and T.V.
For the moment, portability of tools and machinery (think chain saws, sawmills etc.), the need for gasoline still isn't removed completely - you could go back to a felling axe and use your own energy, but trust me, as time gets on, you'll realize you spend an awful lot of time rushing to beat winter and wasting time doing things that are done far quicker with power tools. We're now at a point where you can comfortably live off-grid and (mostly) power your home with sustainable energy without giving up too many off the creature comforts you've come to take for granted. With some efforts to reduce your reliance on modern appliances - such as dishwashers, dryers, hairdryers, electric stoves etc. a modest battery bank would be enough to have enough electricity on demand to keep you running relatively normally.
I think there's a difference in living sustainably and using fossil fuels. It's possible to live much more sustainably and still utilize fossil fuels at a consciously reduced rate.
There was an article here on HN a while back about "Amish hackers", and one of the things I ended up learning from that was the Amish reliance on air compressors; compressed air was regarded as "Amish electricity" and would often be creatively applied to various (usually agricultural) machinery.
Perhaps something similar could be applied here? An air compressor powered by some renewable fuel (like wood gas) could pump air into portable canisters for use in power tools (or just be hooked directly into the tools themselves, much like in modern automotive repair shops) would solve this at the expense of some portability.
You can get portable air compressors. The thing is, it takes some energy to actually compress that air... which invariably comes from either an electrically powered or gas powered turbine. You could theoretically drive this by wood gas in a renewable fashion. In the building of my workshop, I'm considering air powered tools for this reason. Though, to some extent you could drive an alternator and generate electricity to run electrically powered tools. I'm not sure what a wood gas chainsaw would look like :P
In the above case, neither electricity nor combustion are necessary. The above example does rely on wind power, however (though the site claims that wind speeds as low as 8 MPH are sufficient); I'm not sure if there are any similar compressors that run on other energy sources.
Admittedly, some Amish communities do use diesel generators to power more conventional compressors, but I have a feeling that these would be easier to adapt to the posited post-apocalyptic wood-gas-fueled world.
Look up Riena LLP who build net zero structures in Fairbanks, AK. Key to the design, an embedded 5,000 gallon vertical stratification thermal storage tank. That and several feet of insulation and a deep foundation.
Some island countries experience daily outages of power, actually. It winds up being pretty easy to work around when you've planned to expect it (this includes things like backup power sources and so forth).
I'd be very surprised if your desktop draws .8 kW when you're browsing the web. Your discrete GPU should be drawing around 10 W at idle, and you're averaging < 30% of your CPU's < 150 W TDP. That's at most 60W, so with a HDD and some fans and 20% loss in the PSU you're maybe touching 100 W.
would not want to see how many batteries or other storage you would want to put in to support a hospital. without some easy power generation you could be in a lurch real quick
Yeah of course, I'm exaggerating for effect. Still, I have two monitors that eat up about 25-30W each, and I also have a desktop with an Power Supply rated at 800W.
I have no idea what the entire setup uses when I'm web surfing, but the spare bedroom I'm in gets noticeably warmer. Would it kill me for the system to just spin down a little and make me wait and extra 2 or 3 seconds for a page to load?
boils down to this quote: In a world without readily mined coal, would there ever be the opportunity to test profligate prototypes of steam engines, even if they could mature and become more efficient over time? How feasible is it that a society could attain a sufficient understanding of thermodynamics, metallurgy and mechanics to make the precisely interacting components of an internal combustion engine, without first cutting its teeth on much simpler external combustion engines – the separate boiler and cylinder-piston of steam engines?
Although there are other potential energy sources, without easily mined coal lying around, no-ones ever going to have the resources to do enough trial-and-error engineering to get anywhere.
tldr: Easily mined coal is vital, just like day 1 minecraft.
"America has plenty of coal. Its mines produced 1.2 billion tons in 2006, nearly all of it destined for electricity generation.31 That was a record year, but it barely scratched the surface of U.S. recoverable coal reserves, which are estimated at about 270 billion tons."
Right, but the point is, all the easy coal was mined first. To get those enormous stockpiles, you need advanced tools.
The article thus asks: if we lost those tools, and the knowledge/infra to make them, would we have enough readily available energy to practice and re-discover them, given that you need those tools to get to the remaining energy?
There is (at present) still plenty of easily mined coal in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. Think of a few feet of overburden, then a hundred feet of coal. That could easily be mined by human muscle power.
It's also worth remembering that proven reserves are thought of in the context of current and projected global population and consumption. The thought experiment begins with a "post-global calamity/collapse" situation, in which the total population is much, much smaller.
So even what we currently think of as "small" or "negligible" deposits might be more than enough for productive use within the now-smaller population.
I can ride a bicycle to a coal deposit in about an hour and pick coal off the ground with my bare hands. There are plenty of easily mined coal deposits that have not been exhausted.
What matters is volume and economics. The amount of man-hours per tonne of coal extracted by modern mines is far, far lower than during the early phases of industrialization. And that means that some coal mines, even ones that are easily mined, are just not economically competitive in modern times. But they're still there, the coal's still there, it's still easy to get at.
Yes. Humans were converting wood to coal 15 000 years ago, it doesn't require any infrastructure at all. We have large forests in Europe, Canada and Russia that can be used relatively sustainably to produce vast amounts of energy for bootstrapping us up. During WW2 they even had internal combustion engines running off wood chips.
As technology improves, the extent of "recoverable" expands.
E.g. shale oil was unrecoverable oil during the industrial revolution and through the mid-20th century.
Further, efficiency of utilization increases with technological advancement. I don't know about coal at this point in time, but I can guarantee you the coal-burning plants of today are getting more electricity per ton(?) of coal than a plant in the early 1900s.
There was a throwaway line about this in one of Larry Niven's Ringworld novels. The Ringworld was an artificial structure, so had no fossil fuel deposits. The protagonist muses that it must be hard for the inhabitants to bootstrap civilization, because they have to go from alcohol-based biomass fuels straight to nuclear fusion.
But Farmers book solved it in an 'act of god' like manner by using lightning and something akin to a high voltage supercapacitor used to catch the lightning.
Open source ecology's "Global Village Construction Set" has open source blue prints for various machines. The idea being that poor nations, people who dont want DRM on their tractor and post apocalyptic societies can rebuild faster. They do presume a decent amount of parts though, its not straight from caves, it presumes people will be able to access parts or scrounge them from rubble.
Their tractor page include this line: We are interested in a Piston Engine Construction Set – modular, in-line scalable engine that can be adapted to spark ignition, compression ignition, or steam power.
That kind of means petro, diesel, and coal. That's not a hard fuel requirement though.
"It took a lot of fossil fuels to forge our industrial world. Now they're almost gone." - it's wrong from the start. We have hundreds of years of fossil fuels available with current technology. With future technology, it could be even longer.
>"With future technology, it could be even longer."
This sort of misses the point that under this thought experiment there is no future technology, and that to get at the vast reserves we have left would require that technology. We won't be deep sea drilling or fracking if we get rebooted. Nor will we be digging holes in the prairies and having crude gush to the surface.
> We have hundreds of years of fossil fuels available with current technology.
So... in a post-apocalyptic scenario in which civilization has regressed to unindustrialized agriculture, there would be fossil fuels available only with 500+ years of Industrial Revolution advancement?
Except that in current economy, consumption increases with availability. So if one day the "future technology" gave us access to 100x more fossil fuel, that would make them 100x cheaper and people would quickly find ways to waste energy 100x faster on thing that used to be too expensive to consider.
As the Times recently reported, burning all known reserves - and dumping the resulting carbon emissions into the atmosphere - would raise the average surface temperature by more than 16 degrees. That's more than enough to trigger a the world's sixth great extinction and wipe out life as we know it, ourselves included.
Factor the cost of combustion into the cost of extraction, and you'll find that our useable reserves are rapidly approaching zero. Indeed, we may be in overshoot already.
The article presents a very interesting thought experiment, but I think the answer is flatly no, with explanation for this belief being the context of the article.
Based on the narrative, I think the premise and definition of "modern civilization" was basically how our society is configured today, regions, space between cities, social architecture, travel, available goods and resources, etc. Under that thought, the answer is as I said before, flatly no.
Without fossil fuels, the world could not take shape in the way it has due to the sheer density of energy for its weight. We currently have nothing else like that, and all of our advancements into new generations of energy rely on products manufactured with fossil fuels, cheap fossil fuels at that.
Even today, we do not have such a resource readily available and as safe as fossil fuels.
That being said, "a modern civilization" could come into existence without fossil fuels. I do not doubt the ingenuity of humans whether I am in the same period of time with them or not.
My belief on this is based on how our society would be structured when you cannot travel so far away from the epicenter of a city because of the cost of fuel.
On the contrary, I think it's far too pessimistic. Expecting that the technological and scientific progress would stop where we started using fossil fuels is ridiculous. The changes started much sooner in the renaissance, with printing press, scientific method and calculus.
The printing press made spreading information much cheaper than it used to be. The scientific method allowed systematic gathering new knowledge instead of relying on traditions. Calculus allowed precise calculations of things that could be only estimated previously.
Iron, steel, bricks, mortar, cement and glass all predate widespread use of fossil fuels by millenia. Chemicals and plastics are made from oil because it's cheaper that way. The main chemical produced from oil is ethylene, which could be easily made from alcohol. (The only reason why drinking alcohol isn't made from oil as well is because it's illegal.) Nitrogen can be fixed with bacteria.
Fossil fuels helped in many ways, but in others lead us astray, with lots of effort spent on inferior dead end technologies only because fossil fuels made them cheaper. Of course you could power combustion engines with wood gas, but why would you develop them in the first place? Many people assume that combustion engines are used because they are superior to other technologies, but nothing could be farther from the truth.
Combustion engines are a poor choice for powering vehicles in almost every way imaginable. They work well only in a narrow range of speeds, have low torque, are relatively large for the power they produce, can't start on their own... The only reason why they won over electric motors is that the fuel used to be incredibly cheap and easily transported. Almost all progress was about finding workarounds for their inherent drawbacks. You could remove the whole drivetrain and stick electric motors directly to the wheels and you would have a better car than the best combustion engine car. There is a reason why electric cars are not allowed in races.
Almost everything is made of plastics because it's cheaper that way, even where a slightly more expensive alternative would last basically forever. Agriculture started relying on easily available pesticides instead of developing resistant strains or practices that prevent the evolution and spread of pathogens. Many plant diseases adapted specifically to the few commercialy grown variants, so that inordinate amounts of pesticides are needed to keep the plants no more healthy than they used to be without pesticides. And as the plum pox shows, diseases may be even beneficial in some ways. The few widely grown strains affected by it were replaced by a wide variety of different plums.
The industrial revolution probably wouldn't be that different, only with steam and combustion engines skipped and starting straight with electricity.
I was about to post a similar sentiment. I allowed it since the thought experiment expressed that there is no current knowledge, and you don't get to fission without going through the industrial revolution (extreme temperatures, quality of metals, support services required by a stable/advanced society).
However, the author goes into quite a bit of detail about the validity of photo-voltaic panels, having obviously done some research into how solar panels work, life-expectancy, manufacturing. It's for this reason why I'm wondering why fission wasn't researched.
Nuclear is carbon-neutral, it's about 1000x the energy density of combustion, have lifetimes of several generations, and (at least in the States) have security measures that would make it resilient to "post-apocalyptic" scenarios. It seems ripe for this kind of thought-experiment.
If all conventional power was replaced with the current technology used in most nuclear power plants we would be out of fissionable material within a year. I'm not sure how long it would last if we use breeder reactors though...
I think you mean fissile instead of fissionable [1]. Current reactor technologies consume a very small fraction of fissionable material. Reactors discharge nearly as much fissionable material as they take in. And the lifetime of uranium resource is highly dependent on the price you are willing to pay. Seawater contains enough uranium to supply all reactors in the world at current consumption rates for ~60,000 years [2] estimated to only be about 8x the current spot price [3]. Using fast reactor technology that has already been developed and researched heavily could also stretch the resource by another factor of 100X or more.
While nuclear fission is an important component of our power-generating technology, it's a hard to see an 18th century society developing it as a solution to a shortage of charcoal.
The article misses geothermal energy, which doesn't exactly require an existing industrialized society to use while providing abundant thermal energy. Places like Iceland, Yellowstone, Hawaii, etc. could easily become Humanity v2's centers of industrial reconstruction.
What about aluminium? It's pretty much the reverse--hard to mine, easy to work. So that's a big bonus pre-fossil fuel society didn't have, the aluminium is already mined and out there.
Now on the other hand, I find it puzzling how so many people in this thread (and also part of the assumptions in the article) seem to forget all the things we could do perfectly well without fossil fuels.
Glass? Brick? Mortar? Is it maybe because in America you don't see as many obviously before-fossil-fuel buildings that contain all these materials?
I don't see many people mentioning specific years, neither could could I find a clear number on several WP pages, but considering most of the graphs about production/consumption, we didn't start using fossil fuels until about 1800-1850 (with coal), with significant numbers not even beginning to appear until after 1850.
Any idea what sort of technologies we already had before that? It's not too bad :) Yet, the Industrial Revolution was already on its way since 1760.
We had microscopes, architecture, surgery, books, printing presses ...
And just because most things today are made out of plastic doesn't mean they have to be. A lot of those things exist only because plastic is so ridiculously cheap it's not even cost-effective to develop an alternative. Remember old things being built to last? That's how you make up for the ridiculous cheapness of plastic. It almost sounds cheesy and old-timey to repeat, but if you do the mental math it adds up: a styrofoam cup is maybe 1000x as cheap, so it made economical sense to consume and throw away. I already easily use a coffee mug on average 1000s of times (daily coffee times a bunch of years) before it breaks, and that's without even trying. Some of the plastic things, like shopping bags, don't even really last if you try (shopping bag, used four times before it rips somewhere?) that's the sort of thing we'll stop making as soon as the margins stop being insane and use the resources spent on something 1000x more durable instead of 1000x as cheap. Remember that oil and/or plastic won't just 100% disappear, suddenly. It's a really weird luxury state we live in at the moment, but plastic is still pretty awesome as a material even if it's quite expensive and not as plentiful (just look at glass or fine pottery), in particular as durable alternatives become economical again.
In short, it's unlikely that a civilizational reboot would be bereft of fossil fuels to spur its early stages of development and growth (they most important stages, by far) because such stages require very little fossil fuels compared to an industry in full swing and many small, lower quality, less profitable (though still easily exploited) reserves will have been passed over by modern industry. It's unlikely that even in a severe future resource crunch that every coal mine will be stripped bare and every oil well pumped dry. We won't resort to digging out a pittance worth of coal out of some abandoned mine that is now in the middle of a suburb, we'll do as we're doing now, adapting new technologies to push the boundaries of new, substantive reserves. Such as open pit strip mining of coal using drag lines, fracking, tar sands, deep ocean drilling, etc.
But those small reserves, those reserves that are economically disadvantageous and inconvenient for us to exploit today, they would probably be adequate for bootstrapping industry again, likely sufficiently to enable them to develop more sustainable approaches. Or simply other ways of doing things. It would take hundreds of years of intensive use for humanity to exploit all of the easily extractable coal in the world, I put the odds of that happening as very low (if humanity can survive a few hundred more years then they have a pretty good chance of surviving indefinitely, in my opinion). And with coal you can do anything else, make plastics, make hydrocarbons, what-have-you.
Mind, I'm not advocating this, I'm simply pointing out the flaw in the logic here. Personally I'd rather we switched over to mostly nuclear power sooner rather than later.
The word 'filter' doesn't appear in the article, or on this page (at time of typing), but the whole argument really seems to lend itself to the possibility that a complicating requirement of a civilisation advanced enough to talk to (or visit) us, requires at least one long iteration of presumably CO2-rich, plant-abundant, age - followed by a sufficiently long period to turn that into what we think of as fossil fuels. And then have intelligent life pop up that can work out how to discover, obtain, and utilise that resource.
I don't want to spoil it for future readers, but the basic premise is: the solution to the Fermi paradox is that intelligent life is fairly common in the galaxy, but instead of nuking themselves off, most species that achieve complex technology wreak their native planet's environment and trigger a civilization collapse.
Later on, some species are able to bounce back and rebuild a somewhat advanced civilization, but the mix of taboos against 'rapid growth' and lack of highly concentrated energy sources make those civilizations much more conservative, and the common memes of Scifi (e.g. the "technology indistinguishable from magic" thing) are never realized.
Think a sort of cross over between Dune and the Hunger Games.
There's a paradox here, the problem and the solution, is literally wholesale asset destruction. We'd have to abandon a lot of infrastructure. A good portion would even need to be recycled, not for reclamation, but to prevent ecological disaster ensuing from its just rotting in place.
And that's sorta why we get entertained with cataclysmic scifi themes, because it gives a "no choice" instigator for that asset destruction. But doing this by choice and quickly? Difficult.
For the number of people left there will be plenty of fuel even if it isn't fossil fuel. Rebooting modern civilization would be a breeze for the few that would make it to the other side and the energy available would put an upper limit on the number of people we could sustain.
Main occupation for the foreseeable future: undertaker.
If technology was going to give us a paradise of universal coverage of basic needs and free time self enrichment for all, that would have happened on the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Instead, we got 2 world wars and a big economic depression in between.
The problem is we are social primates, and the alpha ape cannot afford to let all the beta apes to live in peace singing kumbaya; otherwise, he would not have remained an alpha for much longer. So, even if technology/machines were providing more and more of our needs, bigger and improved ways to enforce artificial scarcity over the low status levels of society were put in practice.
And where straightforward coercion failed, artificial needs and wants rose to the task, creating a prison of the mind.
Well, for one thing and a major enabler for the green revolution is nitrate fertilizers - which is a petroleum product. Without it, our population would be limited to a much lower number.
Also, without the food security that these fertilizers give us, much progress would not happen.
I've seen three or so pieces like this in the last month, they all seem to have been inspired by a (much more depressing) short narrative piece Adbusters did a couple of months ago.
Nuclear fuels need to be regularly swapped out for reprocessing as the fissionable material is used up. To get nuclear plants online, you'd have to have a good neutron source to kickstart a breeding process.
Actually nuclear plants could be placed in remote islands so electricity would be brought using underwater cables.
But then - I think people would never harness nuclear power since it was created as an alternative to coal and oil. Without them no one would even think of using such a thing.
Quoting an interesting comment that was flagged for some reason:
saltedshiv 1 hour ago [flagged]The article presents a very interesting thought experiment, but I think the answer is flatly no, with explanation for this belief being the context of the article.Based on the narrative, I think the premise and definition of "modern civilization" was basically how our society is configured today, regions, space between cities, social architecture, travel, available goods and resources, etc. Under that thought, the answer is as I said before, flatly no.Without fossil fuels, the world could not take shape in the way it has due to the sheer density of energy for its weight. We currently have nothing else like that, and all of our advancements into new generations of energy rely on products manufactured with fossil fuels, cheap fossil fuels at that.Even today, we do not have such a resource readily available and as safe as fossil fuels.That being said, "a modern civilization" could come into existence without fossil fuels. I do not doubt the ingenuity of humans whether I am in the same period of time with them or not.My belief on this is based on how our society would be structured when you cannot travel so far away from the epicenter of a city because of the cost of fuel.This type of thought experiment is fun.
Industrial civilization is definitely a one shot deal. All the surface metal deposits are gone. You need massive industrial infrastructure to access the remaining ores. You couldn't even progress to the iron or bronze age after a reboot.
Well, they're not so much gone as converted into various structures all over the globe. I see no reason why later civilizations couldn't mine the remains of former cities.
Pretty much this - mining would be done on old landfill sites and cities, at least for metals. Fossil fuels are a different type of problem - we're not going to get all that carbon back. Conversely maybe a reboot civilization would develop differently - forests to solar thermal to PV and batteries. It would be slower, but certainly possible.
How are you going to do any metalwork with your scavenged metal? Heat it up with a big mirror? Its very very hard without high energy density fuel. The article suggests charcoal (did you read the article?) but thats problematic too.
See my reply to your comment in a sibling thread. A wood fire can hit 1050C. There's plenty of easily-available metal in that range, and building a forced-draft charcoal burner will get you to 1350C. Iron melting points start around 1150C; steel is probably out of the question, but that doesn't mean much.
Just because it would be a slower development path doesn't mean it's impossible. It would be slower, but any given civilization would have only a few viable options for development - so yes, I think you'd find a civilization which values glass and mirrors and polishing technology to get the heat necessary for metal working.
I don't think a civilization built on a shit load of aluminium scrap is going to develop very slowly. Don't forget aluminium is a wonder metal that's only been around for like a hundred years.
All really important metals can be melted at temperatures that can easily be reached with a well built furnace and natural fuel like wood.
Plus, we already know what we did to get to where we are now. We can adapt that knowledge to get back to where we are now. It's going forward we're going to be stumbling in the dark, but we're doing that now anyway.
We can, make new hydrocarbon fuels. Grow plants that are high in fatty acids that we can run catalytic cracking processes on to make usable fuels. Or, use fermentation and the like to make alcohols from plants with a high sugar content. Again, slower, but at the same time, it would be part of the process.
Indeed you can. It's definitely the simplest way of doing it. However, by pulling the fatty acids out, etc, you can also pull out a lot of other useful products, like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. Additionally, a fire will produce a lot of ash and smoke, which both will need to be mitigated in one way or another.
In the case of rust, there are a lot of chemical similarities between it and hematite (though contamination with iron hydroxides might be a problem), which might (theoretically at least) make it potentially suitable for smelting into pig iron. I don't think any existing industrial processes do this, though.
Well, depends on how you look at it. All (most of?) those metals are somewhere, aren't they?
Actually there are many of those metals on the surface, there's not even need to dig for them.
The problem with wood as a fuel is that any densifying human culture can burn it faster than it grows. Industrial uses compete with household uses for cooking fuel and heating. Europe in the 14th to 16th centuries saw massive deforestation in England, Germany, and elsewhere, and the state had to reserve stands of large timber as a military resource for shipbuilding. This was a significant concern in the early Tudor and Elizabethan era, for example, and the Black Forest reached its smallest extent during this time also, IIRC. Wood for fuel came from intensive coppice stands, and significant wood was imported as well.
As the article says: "Wartime gasifier cars could achieve about 1.5 miles per kilogram [of wood]." Comparing the time it takes to grow a kg of wood versus the value of moving a car only 1.5 miles illustrates the problem pretty nicely.
Wood is not a sustainable fuel for an industrial civilization, at anything like current rates of consumption.
Why not wood? You can easily build wood fires hot enough to work refined aluminum (all those cans, good for something!), copper (rip out the plumbing and wires en masse, it won't be pure but it'll be close enough), tin, and zinc; with copper, tin, and zinc those you can create bronze and brass. Iron would be out of the question with simply a wood fire, but--assuming other knowledge was intact, of course--you could build a forced-draft charcoal burner which can easily get hot enough to melt down some forms of iron.
When I started thinking about this problem I was expecting it to be a tough one, but I think it's achievable.
Iron and Steel can be worked on a charcoal/wood fire. Maybe it won't be easy, but the scale of malleability is basically linear with temperature. Every 100 degrees and it gets a bit softer.
Metallurgically, this won't necessarily yield the best parts if we can't reach critical temperatures - 1900°F, but even then, there are plenty of forgiving alloys out there, and plenty of metal that can be re-worked without melting it down.
The bigger difficulty in my mind is having all the alloys identified. It is pretty business even with good modern tools.
That depends how long would it take for another civilization to arise from the ashes of the current one. Metals don't just vanish but most of them are chemically active and will in time rust, disintegrate, get absorbed by organics and pretty much vanish.
This is so far from the truth that it's not even funny.
There are tonnes of surface metal deposits, it's just you'd get shot for opening a mine there because it's in the middle of the national park.
Also, what do you call a 'garbage dump' other than a surface deposit rich in metals?
All of the metals we've ever mined are on the surface. We didn't put them back down into the mine... (or at least when we did it's the open pit variety)
How do you mine rust? Or thin surfaces of precious metals on electronics without the availability of chemicals which take a lot of fossil fuels to manufacture?
In other words, if there ever were a nuclear war affecting the whole world, the generations after will be stuck with whatever remains they got forever, baring some unexpected easy energy discovery or a resource-rich asteroid hitting the planet without wiping out the life.
There are some Amish communities that take advantage of pneumatic power. Pressurize a bunch of air, and you have a ready supply of energy to drive turbines that can do the work that on-grid houses do with electrical appliances. The only downside is that you do the pressurization by going out back and turning a big crank for awhile.
It's not precisely steampunk in the sense that you don't have too many sentient barrels running around, but it's impressive.
At least in the Ohio Amish communities (in businesses), I believe they actually use diesel-driven air compressors out back.
They're not averse to fossil fuels, because you have to pay for them as you go. Getting on grid means you're going into debt for a month at a time. That's at least a big part of their aversion to electric.
Is it really just that? Plenty of poorer communities already have prepaid electricity (put coins in the meter). Surely someone would be willing to sell them some at a small markup.
I wouldn't call solar power "nuclear-based", unless you want to call most other energy sources (including fossil fuels, wind, tides, ...) "nuclear-based" too (since the primary energy source is the sun, which generates energy via nuclear reactions, of course, but is besides the point)
So, could we rebuild our civilization without fossil fuels? Maybe. Likely no, it would be different and very strange to our eyes. Heck, it might even be 'better', as they then would not be dealing with our particular type of climate change. Though, they may have their own problems to deal with.
The grass is always greener...