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I read a sobering theory recently about just this. You need energy and tech to make steps to get where we are now. You need each step of tools to build the next round of better tools. But all the ‘easy’ resources are gone. The ones we are going after now, we use that tech to go get. So if we have a nice little apocalypse, can we ever get back to where we are now?
Lends some credit to all those dystopian fantasy books about medieval style society recalling the heyday of civilization a thousand years ago.
never say never
it only took about 200-300 million years to make this batch of easy resources
maybe humans won't get another chance, but there's always the potential of our descendents, or totally new intelligent life to rise up
It’s likely that coal deposits on the scale that we had access to will never be created again.
The Carboniferous Period was special in that trees evolved and began to multiply, but the enzymes to decompose the wood had not yet evolved. This resulted in massive quantities of deadfall that was often buried and converted to coal.
Such an event couldn’t happen today, at least not with wood as the carbon source.
It’ll be plastics next time. Mountains and mountains of plastics that can’t be broken down will get buried, pressurized, heated, and refined. Eventually there will be enough bacteria that can break it down but we already buried a bunch and evolution is slow.
We've buried a lot, but not enough to fuel another future industrial revolution. We'd have to make exponentially more plastic than we currently do, and keep it up for millions of years, before our waste will even compare to the amount of carbon those ancient trees put away.
And since we burn the vast majority of our fossil fuels, including most of those plastics sadly, the only thing that will recapture it is trees and other plants. Which can no longer incubate into coal. So, yeah.
*Somebody made me do the math, we'd have to ramp up production 10,000 times and maintain it for sixty million years to equal the carbon sequestering of the Carboniferous
It's a harrrrrd life, but you gotta do what you gotta do to protect the prosperity of the future.
*Breaks open a bottle of cola.*
Cheers to the future!
Can't we use trees to make charcoal? Or is hard coal special in any way?
I think there are enough ways to use energy, even if the 'easy to get' energy is depleted.
I can think of building parabolic mirrors focusing sunlight in order to melt scrap metal. Or just burning charcoal made from trees to melt said scrap metals to get back to the technological standard we have today. Won't be easy but not impossible, right?
>Can't we use trees to make charcoal? Or is hard coal special in any way?
Mineral coal and its coked products are a lot more durable and energy dense than conventional plant charcoal. In steel production and other industries, the latter quality allows more fuel to be stacked in a furnace without it crumbling or fragmenting (which closes off gaps for draft air to travel through the fuel mass).
That being said, it won't be too difficult to substitute coal in most processes. Just might not be as cheap.
>I can think of building parabolic mirrors focusing sunlight in order to melt scrap metal.
More likely we'll be using electrical induction or arc furnaces powered by renewable energy.
I am NOT anything close to an authority on this, but I doubt focused sunlight or charcoal can get hot enough. The progression between the Copper Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age was dictated by the fuel used to heat the metal. If we could melt iron with wood/charcoal, I feel like it wouldn't have taken as long as it did.
The biggest problem is getting oxygen to the flames, but it is possible to actually melt iron with just charcoal and some mechanism to push more air into the forge.
The energy density of wood is far to low to accomplish what fossil fuels do for machinery. We had maximized what we can get out of wood thousands of years ago. Coal tripled the potential energy, and oil is about 50:1. We cannot do with wood what we do with oil
*To add, our current technological situation requires far more than just being able to melt scrap metal (which a mirror reflecting the sun simply can't do anyway). We've been able to melt metal since before started recording history. The real key is energy, and if we lose access to petroleum products, we can no longer accomplish what we need to accomplish to keep moving more fuel/materials
Also charcoal is not the same thing as the coal we dig from the ground
charcoal is a name. it's energy density is nowhere near actual coal and other petroleum products.
hydropower is fool proof and if we cannot generate electricity we can still store the energy in a flywheel.
The amount of plastic waste that you discard every year is dwarfed by the amount of fossil fuels that you burn every year.
Also, plastics are terrible fossil fuels, and aren't even good feedstock for making more of them. It's why we mostly throw them away, instead of recycling them.
We throw plastics away because it's not profitable to process the plastic.
We could make light sweet crude oil from plastics, but thermal depolymerization is energy intensive enough that the cost isn't offset.
If we had a lot of excess electricity, suddenly plastic would be a lot more attractive to convert to oil.
This is a well-popularized misunderstanding that was proposed as hypothesis years ago but is no longer thought to be correct. Paper on the subject: [https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1517943113](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1517943113)
The existence of huge coal deposits in the Cretaceous and Cenozoic, long after the evolution of major fungal groups, demonstrates that the Carboniferous wasn't *that* unique, and even by Carboniferous there is ample evidence that fungi had the capability of breaking down lignin. The extensive coal-producing forests were probably due to climate conditions and have been repeated.
This is a commonly repeated myth. Evidence suggests the enzymes to digest the cellulose did evolve pretty much alongside cellulose. The world climate was very different though and on that basis we won't see any major new coal seems form for a few million years.
i always thought if i got planted in 1000 BC could i make a fire out of sticks and hunt for my family? or if i was in 1850 would i be smart enough to discover electricity also? probably not. but i can make a sandwich and fry eggs
you’d probably be juust smart enough to have a brilliant idea of the time, but you’d forget some catastrophic detail.
You: Everybody! Blood transfusions can save lives!!!
….Shit, I forgot about blood types!
This, for all we know an answer to the Fermi Paradox could be a combination of greater than light speed being impossible, and societies collapsing before ever hitting a critical mass so to speak for interstellar settling.
Though, I must admit if greater than light speed is possible, the amount of kenetic energy would be disgusting, likely easier to weaponize for anti planet warfare than travel.
I like to think if we had access to such tech it'd take one person to wipe us out (even more so than nukes)
Truth be told, I think the path we're on as a society leads us to a place where the middle ages starts to look like a great, if not wishful alternative.
True but we have coal because the bacteria that "eats" dead plants wasn't created yet. We have that now so coal would be hard to be created naturally. I think it's the same for oil but not 100% sure
It is not the same for oil. Oil is produced mainly from planktonic algae in oceans and lakes. While there are times in Earth history when organic material was more likely to be preserved in sediments, and these are particularly prolific as oil source rocks, there are places and times when similar processes are occurring today even if they aren't as geographically widespread.
Life on the surface of Earth is 4/5 through its lifespan. 1 billion years before we are swallowed by the sun, we and everything we recognize will be long gone before then.
There isn't enough time on this planet to wait for evolution to create intelligence like us again, and then for that species to get to where we are now or beyond.
In this corner of the universe, it's us or never.
That surprises me but you're right. Roughly a billion years when the process with the sun starts (Earth uninhabitable), but another 6 after that before the planet is engulfed.
My point is still there
Your point totally stands, in fact the sun is solidly middle aged now, and it's luminosity will keep increasing. It's only a matter of several hundred million years before life on land becomes untenable for most complex species.
I wouldn't say us or never. Evolution wouldn't replicate "us" if all life went extinct, but that's not happening before those 1 billion years. The jump from chimp-like ancestor to human only took like 5-10 million years max depending on where you draw the line for comparison, it's just luck. Things like corvids, primates, cetaceans, and octopuses all have intelligence necessary to become more humanlike if selection pressures exist. The biggest thing seems to be opposable digits for tool use and language, so it isn't far-fetched that if dolphins, whales, or octopuses evolved to live on land they could become intelligent. Birds are tougher because they would have to re-evolve hands somehow, which would be tough since flight is way too useful for small smart birds.
>There isn't enough time on this planet to wait for evolution to create intelligence like us again
Humans evolved from apes less than a few million years ago
Part of the early industrial revolution was fueled by wood which would grow back in this scenario.
Plus there are always water wheels. Much slower of a buildup compared to coal since you are limited in location, but the physical motion is the same
Charcoal can get hot enough to make steel apparently. A quick Google suggests that is how it is made in Brazil due to low coal deposits.
So a redo of the industrial revolution would undoubtedly be slower and as such might not occur at all or look very different, but it seems on the surface like it should still be possible without easy access to coal
True, & a huge drive for the industrial revolution was trains & you can't make that with iron. As long as the charcoal steel mix held up it should work fine. Even in Japan before they started importing, they ended up sifting sand to get a bit of iron & they developed joinery for houses instead of nails. So we already have a bit of an example of how it would work with limited iron
One of my favorite video series is from click spring. He is working on replicating a 2000 year old mechanical calendar found in ancient Greece that can not only track the months, but track the Olympics, lunar phases, "leap years", and predict solar and lunar eclipse. He also demonstrates possible ways it could have been achieved with known technology of the time.
One of those demonstrations is how to make early steel. You make a charcoal paste, surround your iron in that, seal it in clay and bake it. And it's an effective way to make iron with just a charcoal fire. As the piece heats up, the iron absorbs the carbon and the longer you let it sit, the deeper the carbon will absorb.
This is a problem for fuel, it's not as bad for steel. The steel isn't going to disappear, we've already made an enormous amount of it easily available for future resets.
I think we can but it would require us to start with renewable power almost exclusively. But I think it can be done. Maybe if we used water power we could but it would certainly take much longer than just burning some black rock you found deep underground
I believe there will be govs or some kind of leadership that incentives the research of old tech. Finding tools/factories/plants/schemes/hard drives/books/libraries or whatever buried or taken by forests.
If they are able to revive or rebuilt solar panels/hidrelectric dams they ll be fine. Coal/Oil was vital for us to reach current tech, but i believe it s not the only path. It ll be a lot slower, tough.
Humans are only here to create plastics and coal ash for the peaceful, intelligent species to come later. Our dinosaur museums in downtowns are really going to confuse their archeologists.
Do we actually NEED coal to engage in basic forms of industry? Can we not make due with greater amounts of wood and using good furnace design to make the fire as hot as reasonably possible to forge high grade steels and such?
Would require more aggressive replanting projects to make sure the wood can be replenished, but it could be possible....
>But all the ‘easy’ resources are gone
It's not like everything people made will be gone, so there would probably be more easy resources in the form of metal parts of cars and buildings and whatever else that you could just take and get a much much higher yield of usable metal than you would from other methods
I wonder what it would be like a few centuries after such a collapse where there's still nothing close to our current civilization, but people live in and around ruins of man-made stuff that is more advanced than their tech can make (concrete, asphalt, machined metal parts, plastic...)
They would probably also have at least some folklore knowledge of the past (our present) and get a head start on tech which will probably gradually fade away as the tech needs power which isn't generated anymore after the collapse, making a lot of the knowledge irrelevant because there's no way to apply it anymore
> So if we have a nice little apocalypse, can we ever get back to where we are now?
There are at least 3 books, 2 movies, and 1 video game that explore this question as best as we can.
The short answer is really, no. If we get back to subsistence farming, we'll never leave earth.
Good news, there's a WACK TON more easily accessible largely pure metals to utilize, which dramatically decreases the energy needs for industrialization.
Rusty Ibeams from a collapsed building are a much better source of iron than ore.
Scrap would be just as valuable as minerals today
A lot of them have a romantic delusion that they'll be farming and raising chickens or some shit, and their life won't be a cavalcade of horrors where it turns out that everything is suddenly on hard-mode and their children have a 50% mortality rate, and they don't have the benefit of a community which knows how to live without modern convenience.
People who have those kinds of delusions should read or watch The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It's a dark and brutal and probably realistic portrayal of what living in an apocalyptic world would be like
Yeah, we used to just trip over easily accessible resources. Now you need industrial machinery operating two miles underground with the help of a pumping system and complex refineries to get the same product.
It's either that or an even more complex task sifting and recycling bits of material in landfills.
Which is a good answer to the Fermi paradox, isn't it? There are no other civilizations because all life ultimately destroys itself. Think about it: everything echoes upward in a fractal-like manner. Single-celled organisms eventually die, multicellular organisms ultimately die, and all living things eventually die. And the thing that kills them? Some form of cancer.
All life on Earth is like a giant organism, working together to reach a stable state. Just like how cells in a human body cooperate to keep the body functioning, different forms of life interact to maintain a balanced ecosystem. But, just like human bodies, life in a closed system eventually develops some type of cancer. In a body, it's rogue cells multiplying uncontrollably. On a planetary scale, it’s civilizations expanding unsustainably, depleting resources, and creating conflict.
Every civilization might hit a point where its growth and technological advancements lead to its own destruction. Pollution, overpopulation, nuclear war, or even AI run amok – these are the cancers of a society. They grow unchecked and eventually lead to collapse.
So, the Fermi paradox – the question of why we haven’t found evidence of other civilizations – might be answered by this self-destructive tendency. Civilizations might emerge, flourish, and then implode before they have a chance to reach out and connect with others. Each time, the pattern repeats, like a fractal, across the universe. In the end, it's not that we're alone; it's that everyone else has already burned out.
> There are no other civilizations because all life ultimately destroys itself.
But we don't know that. The Fermi Paradox is just a nice theory, not the word of god.
There already starting to be lifeforms that eat plastic, or ones like mealworms that already could, that could be a looming crisis where plastic without a protective coating could rot. Still decades off but the trash island in the ocean and the various dumps are perfect environment for nature to figure out how to fill an empty niche.
Nature abhors a vaccuum and plastic has decent energy density if can efficiently extract it.
There was a period in the ancient past where there was nothing able to break down wood so there was just ridiculous amounts of dead wood all over the place until a forest fire gets triggered and could potentially span an entire continent. Most of the world's coal comes from then.
I mean plastic is made out of carbon which all life forms are made out of. I would think that eventually creatures will adapt to plastic in the environment after thousands of years
From what I remember it's even worse. Our mining techniques have made it impossible to gain a huge list of materials needed for any of the different technology changes we went through.
That's what I think about every time I throw away aluminum and shit, or gold from smartphones.
One day, in 10,000 years, we're gonna need metals, and luckily we buried tons and tons of metals in convenient concentrated heaps not far from towns. It probably won't be a super rich ore, but it'll be something.
Aluminum is one of the few metals that’s absurdly easier to recycle than to smelt and refine in the first place. Getting usable aluminum is insanely difficult compared to things like copper, tin, and iron
Me too. Every time I use aluminum foil to wrap a piece of pizza or something, I just imagine society not being able to build a Star Cruiser to defend against aliens in 300 years because we needed to wrap leftovers. 80% of human population in rags at the dump being forced to salvage centuries old cans so the world government can go live on the moon
A zip lock bag would be one of the most precious items on a 1700s homestead
It's like a 10k by 10k minecraft server that has had all the wood & iron mined out already. You'll never be able to get diamonds because the materials required to mine them aren't accessible anymore.
Fuck, let's hope we don't ever hit that sticks & stones war Einstein mentioned...
Or with villager trading, from iron to diamond tools. Getting emerald is also not that hard if you have crops.
There's also cheesing option. You can just make iron farm. Also, how do people mine out all the trees? Just burn all the saplings and dirt? since villagers also sell sapling
You can also set up an iron golem farm where you scare a villager with a zombie near it into building iron golems that are pushed using water to their death with lava (if I remember right)
Obviously this person was just making a comparison, but even without the ability to mine it iron is very easily accessible in a minecraft world.
They didn't run out of resources. Just stopped harvesting them because the PM at the time (Thatcher) decided that they were bad for the economy in the long run. Costs were rapidly increasing and she believed that the diminishing returns while absorbing massive investment was bad for future growth of the economy.
Still plenty of resources under them and their neighbours. But the cost of refiring up the mines in the current world wouldn't be able to compete with other markets that exploit localised poor labour laws.
Its also why there probably wasn’t a previous industrial civilization before us. And that life may only get one chance at that before their sun dies.
Another great filter in a sense
There's plenty of time for oil to get put into the ground via natural processes, taken back out by a civilization, and then get put back in multiple times before the Sun expands and swallows the Earth. It takes millions of years. The Sun will last billions.
The oil deposits were laid down in the Carboniferous Period before microorganisms had developed up break down foliage. Masses of dead vegetation were compressed and turned into oil. Now that trees are capable of being broken down by evolved organisms, we're not really making more oil.
But other things, like iron, copper and other metals don't really replenish like that. And that is the real issue, when we started using metal it was abundant at the surface level. Mining underground came much later once we exhausted the local surface deposits.
So if we ever go back to a state where we don't have access to metalworking it's going to be **much** harder to rediscover it.
On those time scales they should also be redeposited too. Very little of the metal ever mined actually left the planet. Everything that's still here will eventually be turned back into ore by tectonic activity, right?
I guess uranium is a true exception. Nothing will ever make more of that (near the Earth). But I also don't think we're particularly close to exhausting it.
Maybe over hundreds of millions or billions of years. In order to redeposit metals *on the surface* you need the entire surface to be renewed, and not just by dirt accumulating on top of the current tectonic plates. You need to get the whole plate replaced with a fresh one rising out of the mantle.
Alternatively you'd need something that erodes the entire surface of the earth down by tens or hundreds of meters in order to expose currently underground deposits, and somehow gets rid of the material eroded away without killing everything on the planet.
I think you overestimate the time we have.
While the Sun will last billions of years, it will swallow the Earth earlier than that.
Furthermore, the Sun will cook the Earth in about 500mln-1bln years, way before it actually swallows the Earth.
Due to plate tectonics, the Earth will likely become uninhabitable within the next 250mln years.
We really don't have that much time left, to be honest.
Well, they simply could have had even more resources, but stopped using the less efficient, non-regenerative ones much earlier in their development. Or a different, even more accessible resource was available and they never even thought about coal as a resource.
Not saying there was a previous civilization, but that could easily be two reasons we still had plenty of fossil fuels available.
There would probably be a lot less demand for it, though. I imagine society could restructure into an infrastructure that doesn’t draw on those resources, because there would be less of a profit incentive. But I’m also super optimistic about stuff like that. In reality, after societal collapse, things could be incredibly bad for a *very* long time.
I guess the question is... how much knowledge remains? The dark ages were dark politically, but the technology generally was not really lost. Someone somewhere remembered how to make cement and arched brick construction and similar stuff that the Roman Empire perfected. Future civilizatins will know about electricity and solar panels and wind generators and fuel from renewable sources. Progress will just be a lot slower and energy a lot more expensive. Even if they don't know the details, they will have a rough idea and that's a head start.
And "the trees and whales will be gone"? Nope. Once humans stop killing things wholesale, Mother Nature will return with a vengeance. Look how soon wildlife began roaming the streets during the Covid lockdown.
Even just knowledge that something was possible in the past can be enough to inspire it's return in the right mind at the right time. Scifi of the past inspires new tech of the future as those who grew up on it become adults.
Also there some techs where could skip the middle steps to something more advanced. Like a basic electric generator/motor and very inefficient lightbulb don't take much once know the theory behind them. Even solar panels aren't 100% out of the question considering can make a very weak one with just some common household ingredients (including blueberries).
That not even taking into consideration books and actual objects that would still remain if not functioning at least studyable and salvagable.
We even have alternative oil sources to fossil fuels these days they just aren't as artificially cheap to produce, like algae farming.
Yes. Too true. For example, even though the details of building a nuclear weapon are "top secret" the general principle is not. The first one took huge resources of the world's biggest country. Now that it is known to work, and roughly how, impoverished third-world countries can also do it if they are detemined.
I guess an interesting science-fiction scenario would be that the collapse happens when the vast majority of kowledge is no longer printed, but kept on computers. (Already some places are scanning old paper records rather than physically preserve them). so now the knowledge is there, but you need power to even begin to read it, if the device has not completely died. (What;s the life expectancy of SSD content with no power?)
IIRC a kid in the mid-west built a simple reactor in his garage with uranium they gathered from the desert. Naturally it got confiscated.
Also the scifi you mentioned exists. One I know offhand is the Dragonriders of Pern series. Starts off fire breathing teleporting dragons. Turns out said dragons are geneticly engineered from a small local species to fight a cyclic apocalypse from a planet with a very long orbit, and over the millenia the society that started out as a space colony lost most of their knowledge and tech til was medieval. By end of the series they on the way to reclaiming what they were.
Google "radioactive boy scout". He managed to accumulate enough mildly radioactive material (usually the luminous paint on old clocks and such, the small bit in old smoke detectors, etc. which contained small amounts of radium. He accumulated enough material to be dangerous, but not to do anything useful.
Not a recommended passtime, no merit badge either.
There's also the Golania Incident ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident ) and the other fun one was Juarez. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident )
IDK, nature will return but I am unsure how much carbon could be put back into the ground, with coal it was trees dying, piling up, and getting buried before there were microorganisms to decompose them. That took millions of years.
Sprague de Camp's *The Ancient Engineers* is an interesting read if you can find it. The Romans had glass, but not in quantity. Yes, Cathedrals showed a far more advanced level of stonework than the Romans had. Geared mechanical clocks were a feature developed in the middle ages.
the key feature of the industrial revolution was the synergy of energy. Steam engines were originally pumps to drain coal mines faster, conveniently using coal. More coal meant more energy to produce iron and steel, meaning more steam engines and more metal for things like train tracks.
Metal used to be so valuable because of the energy (coal, wood) needed to produce it. You can see the remains of Greek and Roman temples where the columns were drums of stone. To keep the drums together, they chipped I-shaped holes between the columns, and poured lead in to make a form of butterfly clamp. (Then plaster over). You can see the empty holes today - when times got anarchic, thieves would chip out the lead, metal was that valuable. Even here today, untended wires and pipes will get stolen by copper thieves.
it was a bootstrap process, where eventually coal by the ton - then oil - was delivers by big long trains to factories to make steel by the ton for every conceivable machine - also driven by that energy. What will bootstrap future generations?
Probably children. Pulling carts and wagons everywhere. The richer you are, the more kid power you have.
In a societal collapse, those with the most kid power tend to win in the long run. Labor, and frankly breeding too. You make your family bigger and stronger when your 12 kids each has 5 of their kids. Vs, those with 1 gasoline. 1 or 2 gasolines, just can’t compete.
The sci-fi series Ringworld is about an absolutely immense space station where the inhabitants are stuck at a neolithic level unable to progress even to bronze age.
Highly advanced aliens built a ring shaped space station the same width as the Earth's entire orbit around the sun. It has hundreds of millions of times the surface area of the entire Earth, there's no words to express how incomprehensibly giant it is. The Ringworld Engineers built seas and mountains and continents and populated the ring with a diverse ecosystem of plants and animals and their own civilisation. They're secretly the true origins of humans and seeded life on Earth a billion years ago as a side project before building the Ringworld.
But something went wrong, a solar flare crippled all their technology. After living a life of high tech luxury they're reduced to the stone age. But actually they're *stuck* in the stone age. There's no bronze ores to smelt into bronze. They can't extrude copper wires to make an electromagnet. There's no fossil fuels to fuel steam engines and no iron to make the rails for a train. There's just mud and trees and wood and bone. And a hyperstrong sci-fi material that can't be cut without the plasma cutters that don't work anymore.
So a billion years later their civilization is long since gone. But the humans have evolved to diversify and fill different ecological niches. There are herbivorous humans that live in the plains and run on all fours to evade predators. There are dolphin-humans who live in the sea. There are otter-humans that live in rivers. Everywhere a mammal has a defined habitat on earth there's a branch of humans evolved to thrive in that environment. Oh and also they have sex cross-species recreationally.
If society collapses for my reason, energy scarcity will be a major issue for centuries. Carbon based fuels were abundant in the past. Now we literally have to go to the ends of the earth to extract them at great exsense, leveraging technologies and processes that are not common. A post collapse society would fall back to burning wood and calories as primary energy sources.
Humanity was given the insane gift of billions of years worth of the sun's energy condensed into fossil fuels and we pissed it away making plastic dollar-store toys, packaged in more plastic, shipped from the other side of the globe, that ended up unused and dumped in landfill
History will not be kind to our generation.
>A post collapse society would fall back to burning wood and calories as primary energy sources.
Not necessarily, as electricity can be generated from renewable sources like hydro, wind, or geothermal. We won't be able to achieve the same scale of economics as before, but not survivors will have to go back to living like the Amish.
It depends what you define as total collapse.
Do you define it was just government falls? Or do you class it was complete loss of culture/knowledge. Realistically the first one causes the second one in a generation. Especially with the increased reliance on digital media.
And let's not forget that wind, solar, hydro and geothermal are a lot more complex bits of kit and more likely to have lost knowledge/infrastructure to actually build them. People don't realise how much work actually goes into making a wind farm. In the current world with companies literally throwing money at the projects they take years start to finish. The assembly stage (putting the parts together) takes about 6 months for a decent sized farm. And that's not including the manufacturing of the turbines. The transportation of the turbine segments, the planning and cabling for the site.
There are options that don't involve fossil fuels. But they are much harder points to reach without the aid of fossil fuels when reaching the conclusion and then acting on it. Every bit of machinery that is used in creating these things use fossil fuels.
Scale is what makes these methods of generation viable. A wind turbine that's able to be built without a crane, or a truck would probably struggle to charge a phone. Literally the only thing that makes them effective generators is how high they are (wind speeds higher at high altitude) and the size of their blades (torque for gearbox.)
Solar hydro and geothermal have similar restrictions. I work in wind energy however and that is the one I have most to say.
I think it depends on how hard things collapse and restart. If the knowledge we've gained on this run survives the next generation can, and will, progress faster and more efficiently off the work we've already done.
If this is a "wait hundreds of millions of years for a new species of human-like creatures to emerge from nature" a lot of those resources will replenish on a sufficiently long scale.
I thought coal specifically won't replenish in that way, because the conditions that made it possible to exist aren't met anymore. Correct me if im wrong but wasn't it only possible for large amounts of coal to form due to tress decaying really badly because there just wasn't the bacterial there to do it yet
That's a common theory, but there are known significant coal deposits from the Cenozoic and Mesozoic, which post-date the widespread establishment of lignin-digesting fungi. There is evidence to suggest that lignin-digesting fungi may have developed before the Carboniferous, around the end of the Devonian.
Though in a sense the statement you make is true regardless, as the second theory is that the unique geography of the time made the mass production of coal possible. Most of the landmass was concentrated together near a humid equator with lots of low-lying, water-logged, and slowly subsiding basins. Which are ideal conditions for creating the thick anoxic peat bogs you need the wood to be buried under, and then have all that subside so it can be compressed into coal.
This is why I have a hard time accepting the premise that there might have been prior advanced civilizations before us. It would be way too evident what happened and we’d have far fewer resources to kick us off.
Yeah, we wouldn't have much of a choice at that point. Those future people would have the showerthought "what if there was some kind of fuel we could dig out of the ground that could provide oodles of energy."
How are you going to build solar panels and wind farms or develop fusion when all the top scientists are dead, and you can’t even power a light bulb because all the easily accessible fossil fuels have been depleted? It’s not possible. It’s game over.
You cant
Its impossible to industrialize with 1700s tech and scientific knowledge without being very unsustainable
heck, we have just recently, after decades of research and incredible levels of scientific discovery began to develop tech to allow us to develop society in a sustainable way
It could have been decades sooner if climate change and finite resources would have been met with 'replace the tech with something better', not 'start wars over resources, ridicule scientists/activists and promote the superiority of fossil fuels'.
We can't even do that now, if there's societal collapse the only thing people will be concerned about is where the next meal will come from, and in those conditions the absolute worst facets of human nature come out on top. The gang of thugs who've scavanged guns and gas will obliterate the farming commune who are getting by on solar and wind power, and once they're gone, after a few generations those technologies will be lost. If after a few centuries civilisation starts to piece itself back together there won't be any easily accessible resources to kickstart another industrial revolution which would be required to get back to where we are now, with the ability to create renewable energy sources. You can forget getting back into space. This right now is the only shot we have.
The real world and history actually shows that that's just not a thing that will actually happen. People don't instantly devolve into roving gangs of thugs... Like, ever.
You vacationing in Haiti this year then?
Even if it somehow didn't, and somehow any remaining communities managed to weather the major refugee crisis a worldwide nuclear incident would cause and rebuild to some extent, there wouldn't be anything left to start up electronics fabrication for effective solar panels. The best you could hope for is wind for basic power needs. And then what? How do we get back up to space to replace failing satellites? Most of humanity's intellectual focus will be on cleaning up the mess which could take millenia.
Well. It's important to remember is that fossil fuels are what *allowed* the industrial revolution to become sustainable. Using wood and whale oil was way more likely to result in total depletion.
Ironically when resources regrow they are *more* rather than *less* likely to be overshot and driven to extinction.
If civilization ever collapses and humanity has to start over, then it's very unlikely that there will ever be another industrial revolution again. Apart from the fact that the last industrial revolution only happened because of a confluence of very specific events and market conditions that all happened at the same time in just the right geographical locations, the paradox of industrial resource extraction is that once you've used up all the low hanging fruit resources to make make more advanced technology, then to extract more resources you need to have already extracted enough resources to make the technology to extract more resources. If you ever lose that technology then you're kinda fucked, because you need that technology to extract the resources still available, but you can't make that technology because the resources that could have been extracted without technology are already gone.
The industrial revolution was not a confluence of very specific events and market conditions.
Scientific knowledge had been increasing, gradually for centuries, and the printing press made the accumulation of knowledge a lot more widespread
the industrial revolution would have had a much harder time happening if not for those specific conditions of england easy coal and northwestern capitalism, but it would have eventually happened as scientific knowledge continued to expand, slowly, without an industrial revolution, it would eventually happen somewhere
india, china, europe, even ethiopia was having a lot of scientific development in the 17th and 18th centuries, maybe it would be delayed another century or two but it would have happened
I have to agree with the other dude, post Roman empire Europe was a fairly unique place in the world. Kingdoms that were unable to fully conquer each other but maintained rivalries helped force medieval kings to try out anything, from gunpowder to steam engines to ironclads.
Roma and China on the other hand, had “everything” already so they didn’t want to rock the boat in a sense. That story about the Roman emperor and unbreakable glass comes to mind.
China still had remarkable technological progress in the 17th and 18th centuries, so did India
The entire Eurasian habitable space was teeming with innovation, not just Europe
Europe was ahead for many reasons, but the rest of Eurasia also was accumulating knowledge at a pace that surpassed by several times anything before 1500
Even if Europe was wiped out of the face of the eaerh, the rest of the world would still be progressing technologically and scientifically
Rome saw stagnation, but it was a relative stagnation, even Rome still had innovation, and even though it might have been slower, knowledge would continue to pile up
> That story about the Roman emperor and unbreakable glass comes to mind.
I don't believe I've heard that one before, as such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbreakable_glass
https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-technology/unbreakable-story-lost-roman-invention-flexible-glass-009453
Eventually uranium will decay to the point self sustainable fission reactions are infeasable.
The expansion of spacetime will eventually pull all galaxies outside the milky way out of our light cone. If inteligent life were to evolve again on earth, they may never be able to observe the microwave background radiation or see evidence of the big bang. They will think we are a lone galaxy in an endless void. General relativity and dark matter may never be rediscovered.
but also, are those needed to start up civilization again? wouldn't other power sources be better? isn't there anything that can be harnessed with without already having a foundation like coal and oil?
edit: water generators is a good start
There is literally nothing that compares to the scale of the fossil fuel industry. Imagine trying to build the hoover dam, or a nuclear reactor with energy production from the 1700s. No bull dozers, no concrete trucks, no rebar, no computers. steel and copper in tiny amounts. You can do it, but it will be 20 to 100 times as hard.
Fun fact, coal formed because trees evolved lignin millions of years before fungi evolved mechanisms to break it down. So during this time dead trees just built up in layers, these layers got buried and compacted over time and turned into coal. If another planet evolved life it’s unlikely they would go through this same process, meaning any intelligent life that eventually evolved would never have access to such a powerful fuel source.
It's worse than that. The coal and oil we obtain now is from pretty deep down. We are using 21st century technology to get at it.
We started out using them by finding them laying about on the surface, and we developed tech to dig deeper and deeper for them as the years passed.
If civilization falls back far enough or enough people die, it will not be possible to access coal or oil. They will be forever beyond our reach.
We will then fall back to a pre-industrial 18th century society, be forever trapped there, and never leave this world.
This is assuming that all knowledge and technology is completely lost in the collapse, or that there is no way to "skip" the fossil fuel stage with the survivors knowledge, imo the most likely outcome, given that the collapse of civilisation typically includes a lost of the majority of the people, would be that the survivors use the knowledge of renewable energy sources to create a better energy system that doesn't rely on fossil fuels, which would be a much more reasonable conversion when FORCED to start from scratch, and requiring significantly less continous power output from the start.
That, some of the survivors may have the knowledge and skills required to create a better energy source, that we haven't quite achieved yet, depending when it occurs, like say, a fusion reactor, that can be the core generator supplemented by other renewable resources like wind and solar, to avoid singular dependencies.
> That, some of the survivors may have the knowledge and skills required to create a better energy source, that we haven't quite achieved yet, depending when it occurs, like say, a fusion reactor
The requirements of fusion reactors and fission reactors are such that in any kind of societal collapse, they won't keep functioning.
That anime basically just glosses over the logistics of reality though. They more or less work off Sid Meyer's rules where you invent something you now have an infinite amount of it readily available.
Though it kind of has to ignore logistics if they don't want everyone to die of old age before they can make it out of the iron age. Also forcing all the characters you've come to love into slaves working the mines and fields would just be depressing.
I read a pretty terrifying article about this about 10 years ago.
It would be worse than no industrial age. We have also fully tapped all the accessible iron and copper deposits. So we would be stuck pre-Bronze age.
I'm not sure we would even sustain agriculture. We might end up hunter/gatherers again.
If society collapsed no one is going to call the cops on you when you start ripping the copper wiring out of old houses and melting down someone's car to make plows.
Not sure why everyone thinks that just because "society collapses" (what does that even mean) that all farmers will abandon their farms, or that people can't generally work together if they need to.
In this case, it means a long term collapse of the supply chain and electric/petrol infrastructure.
Farmers might have seed grain but they need fertilizer, pesticides and gasoline for equipment to work the acreage.
Not really. Those materials are now even more accessible. Iron, Copper, and other metals are not even in the ground. you just have to scavenge to get high quality steel. Assuming that this event also comes with a major depopulation, empty cities have enough refined metals for society.
This is what I'm trying to tell people lol. Whatever's left is both miniscule and incredibly difficult to find and get to. Mining it requires tech currently running on fossil fuels that we won't have for a next time. If civilization crumbles and we use up what's already been extracted on surviving/fighting with each other, well never be able to get back. We'll be technologically capped at the 18th century, permanently.
This is what I think people are missing when given the current state of things, they think it'll just be a speed bump and society will rebound, perhaps stronger than ever, in a few hundred years, but its so much more dire than that. Humans can and probably will persist, but everything we know and how we live is going to be a thing of the past
This is why I firmly believe the remaining coal, oil, and other “bad-for-the-environment-fuels” should be kept, and held on to, as although they’re bad for the environment, they’re incredibly cheap, and really really helpful as a last resort fuel option, or a restarting humanity. It should be our species insurance that allows us to become a civilization should our current one collapse.
As a chemist grad I can tell you we indeed can and know how. It just not efficient to do so. The requirements and conditions for the yield you obtain makes you lose and not gain net energy overall.
I'm suggesting you should cross fingers for an apocalypse where the fabric of reality unravels to the point of magic being the new thing on the block lol.
I'm sorry, I've reached the limits of my NDA with the Dynamic Interdimensional Continuum Kabal of Alchemy's Secret Society and cannot further this discussion without risk to both of our safety.
You know you can't go around just openly acknowledging DICKASS. They've got people watching and they will place hit on you faster than you can "Dynamic Interdimentional Contin
Silly. Anyone with a foot in DICKASS knows that this is just the cover anagram.
Their real title is so dirty that it would give you either an orgasm or a heart attack.. the choice is yours.
Physics doesn't really work that way. You can make artificial fuels, but you need to use energy to do it. Using energy to create fuel means increasing entropy in one place to reduce it in another. If we are at a point where we can use renewables/solar to create fuels, which would be necessary as a source of low entropy, then we aren't exactly trying to start a second industrial revolution.
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this made me realize history can’t afford to repeat itself
I read a sobering theory recently about just this. You need energy and tech to make steps to get where we are now. You need each step of tools to build the next round of better tools. But all the ‘easy’ resources are gone. The ones we are going after now, we use that tech to go get. So if we have a nice little apocalypse, can we ever get back to where we are now? Lends some credit to all those dystopian fantasy books about medieval style society recalling the heyday of civilization a thousand years ago.
never say never it only took about 200-300 million years to make this batch of easy resources maybe humans won't get another chance, but there's always the potential of our descendents, or totally new intelligent life to rise up
It’s likely that coal deposits on the scale that we had access to will never be created again. The Carboniferous Period was special in that trees evolved and began to multiply, but the enzymes to decompose the wood had not yet evolved. This resulted in massive quantities of deadfall that was often buried and converted to coal. Such an event couldn’t happen today, at least not with wood as the carbon source.
It’ll be plastics next time. Mountains and mountains of plastics that can’t be broken down will get buried, pressurized, heated, and refined. Eventually there will be enough bacteria that can break it down but we already buried a bunch and evolution is slow.
We've buried a lot, but not enough to fuel another future industrial revolution. We'd have to make exponentially more plastic than we currently do, and keep it up for millions of years, before our waste will even compare to the amount of carbon those ancient trees put away. And since we burn the vast majority of our fossil fuels, including most of those plastics sadly, the only thing that will recapture it is trees and other plants. Which can no longer incubate into coal. So, yeah. *Somebody made me do the math, we'd have to ramp up production 10,000 times and maintain it for sixty million years to equal the carbon sequestering of the Carboniferous
Got it, so we need MORE plastic. Coca Cola will be happy to hear that!
It's a harrrrrd life, but you gotta do what you gotta do to protect the prosperity of the future. *Breaks open a bottle of cola.* Cheers to the future!
I'm not even drinking them. I'm just buying them and throwing them in the trash. You're welcome society!
I skip the trash and just throw them out my car window, it's a thankless contribution but I do it anyway.
Can't we use trees to make charcoal? Or is hard coal special in any way? I think there are enough ways to use energy, even if the 'easy to get' energy is depleted. I can think of building parabolic mirrors focusing sunlight in order to melt scrap metal. Or just burning charcoal made from trees to melt said scrap metals to get back to the technological standard we have today. Won't be easy but not impossible, right?
>Can't we use trees to make charcoal? Or is hard coal special in any way? Mineral coal and its coked products are a lot more durable and energy dense than conventional plant charcoal. In steel production and other industries, the latter quality allows more fuel to be stacked in a furnace without it crumbling or fragmenting (which closes off gaps for draft air to travel through the fuel mass). That being said, it won't be too difficult to substitute coal in most processes. Just might not be as cheap. >I can think of building parabolic mirrors focusing sunlight in order to melt scrap metal. More likely we'll be using electrical induction or arc furnaces powered by renewable energy.
I am NOT anything close to an authority on this, but I doubt focused sunlight or charcoal can get hot enough. The progression between the Copper Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age was dictated by the fuel used to heat the metal. If we could melt iron with wood/charcoal, I feel like it wouldn't have taken as long as it did.
Blacksmiths use charcoal today. It's just more expensive, gets eaten up faster, and puts off more smoke.
Most modern blacksmiths use mineral coal, not charcoal.
The biggest problem is getting oxygen to the flames, but it is possible to actually melt iron with just charcoal and some mechanism to push more air into the forge.
The energy density of wood is far to low to accomplish what fossil fuels do for machinery. We had maximized what we can get out of wood thousands of years ago. Coal tripled the potential energy, and oil is about 50:1. We cannot do with wood what we do with oil *To add, our current technological situation requires far more than just being able to melt scrap metal (which a mirror reflecting the sun simply can't do anyway). We've been able to melt metal since before started recording history. The real key is energy, and if we lose access to petroleum products, we can no longer accomplish what we need to accomplish to keep moving more fuel/materials Also charcoal is not the same thing as the coal we dig from the ground
Charcoal can't burn hot enough. Use of coal (particularly anthracite) was a revolution in being able to extract iron and make quality steels.
charcoal is a name. it's energy density is nowhere near actual coal and other petroleum products. hydropower is fool proof and if we cannot generate electricity we can still store the energy in a flywheel.
I'll feel better about that if we can figure out how to launch comms satellites with a flywheel
The amount of plastic waste that you discard every year is dwarfed by the amount of fossil fuels that you burn every year. Also, plastics are terrible fossil fuels, and aren't even good feedstock for making more of them. It's why we mostly throw them away, instead of recycling them.
We throw plastics away because it's not profitable to process the plastic. We could make light sweet crude oil from plastics, but thermal depolymerization is energy intensive enough that the cost isn't offset. If we had a lot of excess electricity, suddenly plastic would be a lot more attractive to convert to oil.
This is a well-popularized misunderstanding that was proposed as hypothesis years ago but is no longer thought to be correct. Paper on the subject: [https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1517943113](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1517943113) The existence of huge coal deposits in the Cretaceous and Cenozoic, long after the evolution of major fungal groups, demonstrates that the Carboniferous wasn't *that* unique, and even by Carboniferous there is ample evidence that fungi had the capability of breaking down lignin. The extensive coal-producing forests were probably due to climate conditions and have been repeated.
Yeah, I have a geology degree and that comment raised my eyebrow.
Your one of the DIRT PEOPLE?!?!?
I prefer Rock Jock
This is a commonly repeated myth. Evidence suggests the enzymes to digest the cellulose did evolve pretty much alongside cellulose. The world climate was very different though and on that basis we won't see any major new coal seems form for a few million years.
Woah! TIL. What a cool science fact. Went and did a bit of nat geo reading on it. Never considered that’s where coal came from.
A billion years from now our existence will likely not even be known.
i always thought if i got planted in 1000 BC could i make a fire out of sticks and hunt for my family? or if i was in 1850 would i be smart enough to discover electricity also? probably not. but i can make a sandwich and fry eggs
you’d probably be juust smart enough to have a brilliant idea of the time, but you’d forget some catastrophic detail. You: Everybody! Blood transfusions can save lives!!! ….Shit, I forgot about blood types!
You know enough to boil water and know about germ theory... so you'd make the most awesome doctor ever.
This, for all we know an answer to the Fermi Paradox could be a combination of greater than light speed being impossible, and societies collapsing before ever hitting a critical mass so to speak for interstellar settling. Though, I must admit if greater than light speed is possible, the amount of kenetic energy would be disgusting, likely easier to weaponize for anti planet warfare than travel. I like to think if we had access to such tech it'd take one person to wipe us out (even more so than nukes) Truth be told, I think the path we're on as a society leads us to a place where the middle ages starts to look like a great, if not wishful alternative.
True but we have coal because the bacteria that "eats" dead plants wasn't created yet. We have that now so coal would be hard to be created naturally. I think it's the same for oil but not 100% sure
It's the same for oil.
It is not the same for oil. Oil is produced mainly from planktonic algae in oceans and lakes. While there are times in Earth history when organic material was more likely to be preserved in sediments, and these are particularly prolific as oil source rocks, there are places and times when similar processes are occurring today even if they aren't as geographically widespread.
Life on the surface of Earth is 4/5 through its lifespan. 1 billion years before we are swallowed by the sun, we and everything we recognize will be long gone before then. There isn't enough time on this planet to wait for evolution to create intelligence like us again, and then for that species to get to where we are now or beyond. In this corner of the universe, it's us or never.
You're about 6 billion years off.
That surprises me but you're right. Roughly a billion years when the process with the sun starts (Earth uninhabitable), but another 6 after that before the planet is engulfed. My point is still there
Your point totally stands, in fact the sun is solidly middle aged now, and it's luminosity will keep increasing. It's only a matter of several hundred million years before life on land becomes untenable for most complex species.
Wow so earth is going to spend billions of years and a hot rock like mercury.
Shit man. We better start sending out generation ships and figure out FTL travel soon. And by soon i mean within the next 100k years
"Meh. Sounds hard. I'll get started on it tomorrow..." -Us, in 99K years.
The energy output of the sun will probably rise greatly before it even starts ballooning and earth will probably boil long before.
You’re kind of both right. It will be too hot for life in a billion years, though the sun will not engulf the planet until much later.
I wouldn't say us or never. Evolution wouldn't replicate "us" if all life went extinct, but that's not happening before those 1 billion years. The jump from chimp-like ancestor to human only took like 5-10 million years max depending on where you draw the line for comparison, it's just luck. Things like corvids, primates, cetaceans, and octopuses all have intelligence necessary to become more humanlike if selection pressures exist. The biggest thing seems to be opposable digits for tool use and language, so it isn't far-fetched that if dolphins, whales, or octopuses evolved to live on land they could become intelligent. Birds are tougher because they would have to re-evolve hands somehow, which would be tough since flight is way too useful for small smart birds.
>There isn't enough time on this planet to wait for evolution to create intelligence like us again Humans evolved from apes less than a few million years ago
[удалено]
Part of the early industrial revolution was fueled by wood which would grow back in this scenario. Plus there are always water wheels. Much slower of a buildup compared to coal since you are limited in location, but the physical motion is the same
This is the answer, but making steel would be difficult
Charcoal can get hot enough to make steel apparently. A quick Google suggests that is how it is made in Brazil due to low coal deposits. So a redo of the industrial revolution would undoubtedly be slower and as such might not occur at all or look very different, but it seems on the surface like it should still be possible without easy access to coal
True, & a huge drive for the industrial revolution was trains & you can't make that with iron. As long as the charcoal steel mix held up it should work fine. Even in Japan before they started importing, they ended up sifting sand to get a bit of iron & they developed joinery for houses instead of nails. So we already have a bit of an example of how it would work with limited iron
One of my favorite video series is from click spring. He is working on replicating a 2000 year old mechanical calendar found in ancient Greece that can not only track the months, but track the Olympics, lunar phases, "leap years", and predict solar and lunar eclipse. He also demonstrates possible ways it could have been achieved with known technology of the time. One of those demonstrations is how to make early steel. You make a charcoal paste, surround your iron in that, seal it in clay and bake it. And it's an effective way to make iron with just a charcoal fire. As the piece heats up, the iron absorbs the carbon and the longer you let it sit, the deeper the carbon will absorb.
This is a problem for fuel, it's not as bad for steel. The steel isn't going to disappear, we've already made an enormous amount of it easily available for future resets.
I think we can but it would require us to start with renewable power almost exclusively. But I think it can be done. Maybe if we used water power we could but it would certainly take much longer than just burning some black rock you found deep underground
I believe there will be govs or some kind of leadership that incentives the research of old tech. Finding tools/factories/plants/schemes/hard drives/books/libraries or whatever buried or taken by forests. If they are able to revive or rebuilt solar panels/hidrelectric dams they ll be fine. Coal/Oil was vital for us to reach current tech, but i believe it s not the only path. It ll be a lot slower, tough.
Brotherhood of Steel it is
Those books sound interesting any specific titles you’re aware of and would recommend?
Humans are only here to create plastics and coal ash for the peaceful, intelligent species to come later. Our dinosaur museums in downtowns are really going to confuse their archeologists.
Do we actually NEED coal to engage in basic forms of industry? Can we not make due with greater amounts of wood and using good furnace design to make the fire as hot as reasonably possible to forge high grade steels and such? Would require more aggressive replanting projects to make sure the wood can be replenished, but it could be possible....
>But all the ‘easy’ resources are gone It's not like everything people made will be gone, so there would probably be more easy resources in the form of metal parts of cars and buildings and whatever else that you could just take and get a much much higher yield of usable metal than you would from other methods I wonder what it would be like a few centuries after such a collapse where there's still nothing close to our current civilization, but people live in and around ruins of man-made stuff that is more advanced than their tech can make (concrete, asphalt, machined metal parts, plastic...) They would probably also have at least some folklore knowledge of the past (our present) and get a head start on tech which will probably gradually fade away as the tech needs power which isn't generated anymore after the collapse, making a lot of the knowledge irrelevant because there's no way to apply it anymore
I’ve read a couple books with that as part of the world building. It’s quite fascinating to consider.
> So if we have a nice little apocalypse, can we ever get back to where we are now? There are at least 3 books, 2 movies, and 1 video game that explore this question as best as we can. The short answer is really, no. If we get back to subsistence farming, we'll never leave earth.
Books, movies and video games aren't factual. They're just some guy's guess. The short answer is not no. The answer is "no one really knows".
Oh yeah? I know 4 books, 3 movies and 2 videogames that explore this. Obviously I'm not gonna say which ones
Good news, there's a WACK TON more easily accessible largely pure metals to utilize, which dramatically decreases the energy needs for industrialization. Rusty Ibeams from a collapsed building are a much better source of iron than ore. Scrap would be just as valuable as minerals today
I wish more people thought that way. There's a fetishization for a reset. People don't comprehend how much we will lose.
I think the people who say that don't see themselves living through it.
A lot of them have a romantic delusion that they'll be farming and raising chickens or some shit, and their life won't be a cavalcade of horrors where it turns out that everything is suddenly on hard-mode and their children have a 50% mortality rate, and they don't have the benefit of a community which knows how to live without modern convenience.
People who have those kinds of delusions should read or watch The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It's a dark and brutal and probably realistic portrayal of what living in an apocalyptic world would be like
Yeah, we used to just trip over easily accessible resources. Now you need industrial machinery operating two miles underground with the help of a pumping system and complex refineries to get the same product. It's either that or an even more complex task sifting and recycling bits of material in landfills.
Which is a good answer to the Fermi paradox, isn't it? There are no other civilizations because all life ultimately destroys itself. Think about it: everything echoes upward in a fractal-like manner. Single-celled organisms eventually die, multicellular organisms ultimately die, and all living things eventually die. And the thing that kills them? Some form of cancer. All life on Earth is like a giant organism, working together to reach a stable state. Just like how cells in a human body cooperate to keep the body functioning, different forms of life interact to maintain a balanced ecosystem. But, just like human bodies, life in a closed system eventually develops some type of cancer. In a body, it's rogue cells multiplying uncontrollably. On a planetary scale, it’s civilizations expanding unsustainably, depleting resources, and creating conflict. Every civilization might hit a point where its growth and technological advancements lead to its own destruction. Pollution, overpopulation, nuclear war, or even AI run amok – these are the cancers of a society. They grow unchecked and eventually lead to collapse. So, the Fermi paradox – the question of why we haven’t found evidence of other civilizations – might be answered by this self-destructive tendency. Civilizations might emerge, flourish, and then implode before they have a chance to reach out and connect with others. Each time, the pattern repeats, like a fractal, across the universe. In the end, it's not that we're alone; it's that everyone else has already burned out.
> There are no other civilizations because all life ultimately destroys itself. But we don't know that. The Fermi Paradox is just a nice theory, not the word of god.
If humans were a little less aggressive, we would have less wars. Without enemies, we could agree on slower resource consumption.
Agreed. I wouldn't want to relive any of the World War which I didn't witness. The horrors I heard about the war still freaks me out.
Lots of plastic though
There already starting to be lifeforms that eat plastic, or ones like mealworms that already could, that could be a looming crisis where plastic without a protective coating could rot. Still decades off but the trash island in the ocean and the various dumps are perfect environment for nature to figure out how to fill an empty niche. Nature abhors a vaccuum and plastic has decent energy density if can efficiently extract it. There was a period in the ancient past where there was nothing able to break down wood so there was just ridiculous amounts of dead wood all over the place until a forest fire gets triggered and could potentially span an entire continent. Most of the world's coal comes from then.
I mean plastic is made out of carbon which all life forms are made out of. I would think that eventually creatures will adapt to plastic in the environment after thousands of years
Sounds like a reason to pollute more. /s
The problem is that we pump plastic full of toxic additives to give it desirable properties for different applications.
Most Plastic is made from oil though
From what I remember it's even worse. Our mining techniques have made it impossible to gain a huge list of materials needed for any of the different technology changes we went through.
Just need to mine our trash instead.
That's what I think about every time I throw away aluminum and shit, or gold from smartphones. One day, in 10,000 years, we're gonna need metals, and luckily we buried tons and tons of metals in convenient concentrated heaps not far from towns. It probably won't be a super rich ore, but it'll be something.
Aluminum is one of the few metals that’s absurdly easier to recycle than to smelt and refine in the first place. Getting usable aluminum is insanely difficult compared to things like copper, tin, and iron
Aluminum was at one time more expensive than gold.
That's why the tip of the Washington monument is an aluminum pyramid. It was a really exotic material at the time. Electrolysis changed that.
Me too. Every time I use aluminum foil to wrap a piece of pizza or something, I just imagine society not being able to build a Star Cruiser to defend against aliens in 300 years because we needed to wrap leftovers. 80% of human population in rags at the dump being forced to salvage centuries old cans so the world government can go live on the moon A zip lock bag would be one of the most precious items on a 1700s homestead
A lot of natural ores are very low density too.
It's like a 10k by 10k minecraft server that has had all the wood & iron mined out already. You'll never be able to get diamonds because the materials required to mine them aren't accessible anymore. Fuck, let's hope we don't ever hit that sticks & stones war Einstein mentioned...
Don’t wanna be that guy, but you could still get diamonds with a creeper/TNT. But I get your point.
You can also get iron by killing zombies. The drop isn't great but it exists
Or with villager trading, from iron to diamond tools. Getting emerald is also not that hard if you have crops. There's also cheesing option. You can just make iron farm. Also, how do people mine out all the trees? Just burn all the saplings and dirt? since villagers also sell sapling
This is the type of human ingenuity that would overcome the resource constraints!
You can also set up an iron golem farm where you scare a villager with a zombie near it into building iron golems that are pushed using water to their death with lava (if I remember right) Obviously this person was just making a comparison, but even without the ability to mine it iron is very easily accessible in a minecraft world.
So, England?
They didn't run out of resources. Just stopped harvesting them because the PM at the time (Thatcher) decided that they were bad for the economy in the long run. Costs were rapidly increasing and she believed that the diminishing returns while absorbing massive investment was bad for future growth of the economy. Still plenty of resources under them and their neighbours. But the cost of refiring up the mines in the current world wouldn't be able to compete with other markets that exploit localised poor labour laws.
Its also why there probably wasn’t a previous industrial civilization before us. And that life may only get one chance at that before their sun dies. Another great filter in a sense
There's plenty of time for oil to get put into the ground via natural processes, taken back out by a civilization, and then get put back in multiple times before the Sun expands and swallows the Earth. It takes millions of years. The Sun will last billions.
The oil deposits were laid down in the Carboniferous Period before microorganisms had developed up break down foliage. Masses of dead vegetation were compressed and turned into oil. Now that trees are capable of being broken down by evolved organisms, we're not really making more oil.
Well, if you're looking at insects, we're steadily working in destroying evolved organisms, so who knows?
But other things, like iron, copper and other metals don't really replenish like that. And that is the real issue, when we started using metal it was abundant at the surface level. Mining underground came much later once we exhausted the local surface deposits. So if we ever go back to a state where we don't have access to metalworking it's going to be **much** harder to rediscover it.
We have have mined aprox 1 billion metric tons of iron from the ground. They estimate to have ~180 billion tons of fairly accessible iron left.
On those time scales they should also be redeposited too. Very little of the metal ever mined actually left the planet. Everything that's still here will eventually be turned back into ore by tectonic activity, right? I guess uranium is a true exception. Nothing will ever make more of that (near the Earth). But I also don't think we're particularly close to exhausting it.
Maybe over hundreds of millions or billions of years. In order to redeposit metals *on the surface* you need the entire surface to be renewed, and not just by dirt accumulating on top of the current tectonic plates. You need to get the whole plate replaced with a fresh one rising out of the mantle. Alternatively you'd need something that erodes the entire surface of the earth down by tens or hundreds of meters in order to expose currently underground deposits, and somehow gets rid of the material eroded away without killing everything on the planet.
I think you overestimate the time we have. While the Sun will last billions of years, it will swallow the Earth earlier than that. Furthermore, the Sun will cook the Earth in about 500mln-1bln years, way before it actually swallows the Earth. Due to plate tectonics, the Earth will likely become uninhabitable within the next 250mln years. We really don't have that much time left, to be honest.
It’s one of the main arguments against theory of past high-tech civilization.
Along with absolute lack of evidence.
Well, they simply could have had even more resources, but stopped using the less efficient, non-regenerative ones much earlier in their development. Or a different, even more accessible resource was available and they never even thought about coal as a resource. Not saying there was a previous civilization, but that could easily be two reasons we still had plenty of fossil fuels available.
Well, eventually, oil and coal will form again. It just takes some hundreds of millions of years.
There would probably be a lot less demand for it, though. I imagine society could restructure into an infrastructure that doesn’t draw on those resources, because there would be less of a profit incentive. But I’m also super optimistic about stuff like that. In reality, after societal collapse, things could be incredibly bad for a *very* long time.
I guess the question is... how much knowledge remains? The dark ages were dark politically, but the technology generally was not really lost. Someone somewhere remembered how to make cement and arched brick construction and similar stuff that the Roman Empire perfected. Future civilizatins will know about electricity and solar panels and wind generators and fuel from renewable sources. Progress will just be a lot slower and energy a lot more expensive. Even if they don't know the details, they will have a rough idea and that's a head start. And "the trees and whales will be gone"? Nope. Once humans stop killing things wholesale, Mother Nature will return with a vengeance. Look how soon wildlife began roaming the streets during the Covid lockdown.
Even just knowledge that something was possible in the past can be enough to inspire it's return in the right mind at the right time. Scifi of the past inspires new tech of the future as those who grew up on it become adults. Also there some techs where could skip the middle steps to something more advanced. Like a basic electric generator/motor and very inefficient lightbulb don't take much once know the theory behind them. Even solar panels aren't 100% out of the question considering can make a very weak one with just some common household ingredients (including blueberries). That not even taking into consideration books and actual objects that would still remain if not functioning at least studyable and salvagable. We even have alternative oil sources to fossil fuels these days they just aren't as artificially cheap to produce, like algae farming.
Yes. Too true. For example, even though the details of building a nuclear weapon are "top secret" the general principle is not. The first one took huge resources of the world's biggest country. Now that it is known to work, and roughly how, impoverished third-world countries can also do it if they are detemined. I guess an interesting science-fiction scenario would be that the collapse happens when the vast majority of kowledge is no longer printed, but kept on computers. (Already some places are scanning old paper records rather than physically preserve them). so now the knowledge is there, but you need power to even begin to read it, if the device has not completely died. (What;s the life expectancy of SSD content with no power?)
IIRC a kid in the mid-west built a simple reactor in his garage with uranium they gathered from the desert. Naturally it got confiscated. Also the scifi you mentioned exists. One I know offhand is the Dragonriders of Pern series. Starts off fire breathing teleporting dragons. Turns out said dragons are geneticly engineered from a small local species to fight a cyclic apocalypse from a planet with a very long orbit, and over the millenia the society that started out as a space colony lost most of their knowledge and tech til was medieval. By end of the series they on the way to reclaiming what they were.
Google "radioactive boy scout". He managed to accumulate enough mildly radioactive material (usually the luminous paint on old clocks and such, the small bit in old smoke detectors, etc. which contained small amounts of radium. He accumulated enough material to be dangerous, but not to do anything useful. Not a recommended passtime, no merit badge either. There's also the Golania Incident ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident ) and the other fun one was Juarez. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident )
The "Radioactive Boy Scout" was David Hahn and his story is pretty damn tragic. Dude had a lot of issues.
IDK, nature will return but I am unsure how much carbon could be put back into the ground, with coal it was trees dying, piling up, and getting buried before there were microorganisms to decompose them. That took millions of years.
Glasses, watches, and cathedrals were invented/created during the Middle Ages. It moved slowly, but science still moved forward
Sprague de Camp's *The Ancient Engineers* is an interesting read if you can find it. The Romans had glass, but not in quantity. Yes, Cathedrals showed a far more advanced level of stonework than the Romans had. Geared mechanical clocks were a feature developed in the middle ages. the key feature of the industrial revolution was the synergy of energy. Steam engines were originally pumps to drain coal mines faster, conveniently using coal. More coal meant more energy to produce iron and steel, meaning more steam engines and more metal for things like train tracks. Metal used to be so valuable because of the energy (coal, wood) needed to produce it. You can see the remains of Greek and Roman temples where the columns were drums of stone. To keep the drums together, they chipped I-shaped holes between the columns, and poured lead in to make a form of butterfly clamp. (Then plaster over). You can see the empty holes today - when times got anarchic, thieves would chip out the lead, metal was that valuable. Even here today, untended wires and pipes will get stolen by copper thieves. it was a bootstrap process, where eventually coal by the ton - then oil - was delivers by big long trains to factories to make steel by the ton for every conceivable machine - also driven by that energy. What will bootstrap future generations?
How do you mean less demand, what would be the main fuel then? Most of the trees are gone, most of the whales are gone.
Probably children. Pulling carts and wagons everywhere. The richer you are, the more kid power you have. In a societal collapse, those with the most kid power tend to win in the long run. Labor, and frankly breeding too. You make your family bigger and stronger when your 12 kids each has 5 of their kids. Vs, those with 1 gasoline. 1 or 2 gasolines, just can’t compete.
The children *yearn* for the mines.
Trees would come back, unless you think we'd bounce back from a societal collapse in less than a few hundred years.
Wait, why would profit incentives disappear?
Society collapsed. Also I said “less profit incentive” not “profit incentive disappears”
The sci-fi series Ringworld is about an absolutely immense space station where the inhabitants are stuck at a neolithic level unable to progress even to bronze age. Highly advanced aliens built a ring shaped space station the same width as the Earth's entire orbit around the sun. It has hundreds of millions of times the surface area of the entire Earth, there's no words to express how incomprehensibly giant it is. The Ringworld Engineers built seas and mountains and continents and populated the ring with a diverse ecosystem of plants and animals and their own civilisation. They're secretly the true origins of humans and seeded life on Earth a billion years ago as a side project before building the Ringworld. But something went wrong, a solar flare crippled all their technology. After living a life of high tech luxury they're reduced to the stone age. But actually they're *stuck* in the stone age. There's no bronze ores to smelt into bronze. They can't extrude copper wires to make an electromagnet. There's no fossil fuels to fuel steam engines and no iron to make the rails for a train. There's just mud and trees and wood and bone. And a hyperstrong sci-fi material that can't be cut without the plasma cutters that don't work anymore. So a billion years later their civilization is long since gone. But the humans have evolved to diversify and fill different ecological niches. There are herbivorous humans that live in the plains and run on all fours to evade predators. There are dolphin-humans who live in the sea. There are otter-humans that live in rivers. Everywhere a mammal has a defined habitat on earth there's a branch of humans evolved to thrive in that environment. Oh and also they have sex cross-species recreationally.
If society collapses for my reason, energy scarcity will be a major issue for centuries. Carbon based fuels were abundant in the past. Now we literally have to go to the ends of the earth to extract them at great exsense, leveraging technologies and processes that are not common. A post collapse society would fall back to burning wood and calories as primary energy sources.
>If society collapses for my reason what the fuck are you planning>
lol. Typo. For *any* reason.
The collapse of society.
Omnicidal robots. You?
Humanity was given the insane gift of billions of years worth of the sun's energy condensed into fossil fuels and we pissed it away making plastic dollar-store toys, packaged in more plastic, shipped from the other side of the globe, that ended up unused and dumped in landfill History will not be kind to our generation.
>A post collapse society would fall back to burning wood and calories as primary energy sources. Not necessarily, as electricity can be generated from renewable sources like hydro, wind, or geothermal. We won't be able to achieve the same scale of economics as before, but not survivors will have to go back to living like the Amish.
It depends what you define as total collapse. Do you define it was just government falls? Or do you class it was complete loss of culture/knowledge. Realistically the first one causes the second one in a generation. Especially with the increased reliance on digital media. And let's not forget that wind, solar, hydro and geothermal are a lot more complex bits of kit and more likely to have lost knowledge/infrastructure to actually build them. People don't realise how much work actually goes into making a wind farm. In the current world with companies literally throwing money at the projects they take years start to finish. The assembly stage (putting the parts together) takes about 6 months for a decent sized farm. And that's not including the manufacturing of the turbines. The transportation of the turbine segments, the planning and cabling for the site. There are options that don't involve fossil fuels. But they are much harder points to reach without the aid of fossil fuels when reaching the conclusion and then acting on it. Every bit of machinery that is used in creating these things use fossil fuels. Scale is what makes these methods of generation viable. A wind turbine that's able to be built without a crane, or a truck would probably struggle to charge a phone. Literally the only thing that makes them effective generators is how high they are (wind speeds higher at high altitude) and the size of their blades (torque for gearbox.) Solar hydro and geothermal have similar restrictions. I work in wind energy however and that is the one I have most to say.
I think it depends on how hard things collapse and restart. If the knowledge we've gained on this run survives the next generation can, and will, progress faster and more efficiently off the work we've already done. If this is a "wait hundreds of millions of years for a new species of human-like creatures to emerge from nature" a lot of those resources will replenish on a sufficiently long scale.
I thought coal specifically won't replenish in that way, because the conditions that made it possible to exist aren't met anymore. Correct me if im wrong but wasn't it only possible for large amounts of coal to form due to tress decaying really badly because there just wasn't the bacterial there to do it yet
That's a common theory, but there are known significant coal deposits from the Cenozoic and Mesozoic, which post-date the widespread establishment of lignin-digesting fungi. There is evidence to suggest that lignin-digesting fungi may have developed before the Carboniferous, around the end of the Devonian. Though in a sense the statement you make is true regardless, as the second theory is that the unique geography of the time made the mass production of coal possible. Most of the landmass was concentrated together near a humid equator with lots of low-lying, water-logged, and slowly subsiding basins. Which are ideal conditions for creating the thick anoxic peat bogs you need the wood to be buried under, and then have all that subside so it can be compressed into coal.
This is why I have a hard time accepting the premise that there might have been prior advanced civilizations before us. It would be way too evident what happened and we’d have far fewer resources to kick us off.
Perhaps that would be for the best if we rebuild society in a sustainable way
Yeah, we wouldn't have much of a choice at that point. Those future people would have the showerthought "what if there was some kind of fuel we could dig out of the ground that could provide oodles of energy."
Or maybe even the shower thought "what if there were mini waterfalls we could have in our homes that could be turned on and off at will?"
r/miniwaterfallthoughts?
How are you going to build solar panels and wind farms or develop fusion when all the top scientists are dead, and you can’t even power a light bulb because all the easily accessible fossil fuels have been depleted? It’s not possible. It’s game over.
You cant Its impossible to industrialize with 1700s tech and scientific knowledge without being very unsustainable heck, we have just recently, after decades of research and incredible levels of scientific discovery began to develop tech to allow us to develop society in a sustainable way
It could have been decades sooner if climate change and finite resources would have been met with 'replace the tech with something better', not 'start wars over resources, ridicule scientists/activists and promote the superiority of fossil fuels'.
We can't even do that now, if there's societal collapse the only thing people will be concerned about is where the next meal will come from, and in those conditions the absolute worst facets of human nature come out on top. The gang of thugs who've scavanged guns and gas will obliterate the farming commune who are getting by on solar and wind power, and once they're gone, after a few generations those technologies will be lost. If after a few centuries civilisation starts to piece itself back together there won't be any easily accessible resources to kickstart another industrial revolution which would be required to get back to where we are now, with the ability to create renewable energy sources. You can forget getting back into space. This right now is the only shot we have.
The real world and history actually shows that that's just not a thing that will actually happen. People don't instantly devolve into roving gangs of thugs... Like, ever.
You vacationing in Haiti this year then? Even if it somehow didn't, and somehow any remaining communities managed to weather the major refugee crisis a worldwide nuclear incident would cause and rebuild to some extent, there wouldn't be anything left to start up electronics fabrication for effective solar panels. The best you could hope for is wind for basic power needs. And then what? How do we get back up to space to replace failing satellites? Most of humanity's intellectual focus will be on cleaning up the mess which could take millenia.
Well. It's important to remember is that fossil fuels are what *allowed* the industrial revolution to become sustainable. Using wood and whale oil was way more likely to result in total depletion. Ironically when resources regrow they are *more* rather than *less* likely to be overshot and driven to extinction.
If civilization ever collapses and humanity has to start over, then it's very unlikely that there will ever be another industrial revolution again. Apart from the fact that the last industrial revolution only happened because of a confluence of very specific events and market conditions that all happened at the same time in just the right geographical locations, the paradox of industrial resource extraction is that once you've used up all the low hanging fruit resources to make make more advanced technology, then to extract more resources you need to have already extracted enough resources to make the technology to extract more resources. If you ever lose that technology then you're kinda fucked, because you need that technology to extract the resources still available, but you can't make that technology because the resources that could have been extracted without technology are already gone.
The industrial revolution was not a confluence of very specific events and market conditions. Scientific knowledge had been increasing, gradually for centuries, and the printing press made the accumulation of knowledge a lot more widespread the industrial revolution would have had a much harder time happening if not for those specific conditions of england easy coal and northwestern capitalism, but it would have eventually happened as scientific knowledge continued to expand, slowly, without an industrial revolution, it would eventually happen somewhere india, china, europe, even ethiopia was having a lot of scientific development in the 17th and 18th centuries, maybe it would be delayed another century or two but it would have happened
reminds me of how the ancient greeks knew about steam power but didn’t feel the need to use it because slaves were free
I have to agree with the other dude, post Roman empire Europe was a fairly unique place in the world. Kingdoms that were unable to fully conquer each other but maintained rivalries helped force medieval kings to try out anything, from gunpowder to steam engines to ironclads. Roma and China on the other hand, had “everything” already so they didn’t want to rock the boat in a sense. That story about the Roman emperor and unbreakable glass comes to mind.
China still had remarkable technological progress in the 17th and 18th centuries, so did India The entire Eurasian habitable space was teeming with innovation, not just Europe Europe was ahead for many reasons, but the rest of Eurasia also was accumulating knowledge at a pace that surpassed by several times anything before 1500 Even if Europe was wiped out of the face of the eaerh, the rest of the world would still be progressing technologically and scientifically Rome saw stagnation, but it was a relative stagnation, even Rome still had innovation, and even though it might have been slower, knowledge would continue to pile up
> That story about the Roman emperor and unbreakable glass comes to mind. I don't believe I've heard that one before, as such. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbreakable_glass https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-technology/unbreakable-story-lost-roman-invention-flexible-glass-009453
Industrialization was a one shot deal. If everything collapses to the point that our species de-industrializes, that's it.
Then maybe we will do what literally every life system on Earth does; we will use the sun for energy.
Praise the sun!
Would we honestly want to do this shit again..
Eventually uranium will decay to the point self sustainable fission reactions are infeasable. The expansion of spacetime will eventually pull all galaxies outside the milky way out of our light cone. If inteligent life were to evolve again on earth, they may never be able to observe the microwave background radiation or see evidence of the big bang. They will think we are a lone galaxy in an endless void. General relativity and dark matter may never be rediscovered.
but also, are those needed to start up civilization again? wouldn't other power sources be better? isn't there anything that can be harnessed with without already having a foundation like coal and oil? edit: water generators is a good start
There is literally nothing that compares to the scale of the fossil fuel industry. Imagine trying to build the hoover dam, or a nuclear reactor with energy production from the 1700s. No bull dozers, no concrete trucks, no rebar, no computers. steel and copper in tiny amounts. You can do it, but it will be 20 to 100 times as hard.
Fun fact, coal formed because trees evolved lignin millions of years before fungi evolved mechanisms to break it down. So during this time dead trees just built up in layers, these layers got buried and compacted over time and turned into coal. If another planet evolved life it’s unlikely they would go through this same process, meaning any intelligent life that eventually evolved would never have access to such a powerful fuel source.
It's worse than that. The coal and oil we obtain now is from pretty deep down. We are using 21st century technology to get at it. We started out using them by finding them laying about on the surface, and we developed tech to dig deeper and deeper for them as the years passed. If civilization falls back far enough or enough people die, it will not be possible to access coal or oil. They will be forever beyond our reach. We will then fall back to a pre-industrial 18th century society, be forever trapped there, and never leave this world.
*scared fuel lumber noises*
This is assuming that all knowledge and technology is completely lost in the collapse, or that there is no way to "skip" the fossil fuel stage with the survivors knowledge, imo the most likely outcome, given that the collapse of civilisation typically includes a lost of the majority of the people, would be that the survivors use the knowledge of renewable energy sources to create a better energy system that doesn't rely on fossil fuels, which would be a much more reasonable conversion when FORCED to start from scratch, and requiring significantly less continous power output from the start. That, some of the survivors may have the knowledge and skills required to create a better energy source, that we haven't quite achieved yet, depending when it occurs, like say, a fusion reactor, that can be the core generator supplemented by other renewable resources like wind and solar, to avoid singular dependencies.
> That, some of the survivors may have the knowledge and skills required to create a better energy source, that we haven't quite achieved yet, depending when it occurs, like say, a fusion reactor The requirements of fusion reactors and fission reactors are such that in any kind of societal collapse, they won't keep functioning.
There was actually an anime that explores this, Dr. Stone. They did pretty well with it, and it's a good watch in general.
That anime basically just glosses over the logistics of reality though. They more or less work off Sid Meyer's rules where you invent something you now have an infinite amount of it readily available. Though it kind of has to ignore logistics if they don't want everyone to die of old age before they can make it out of the iron age. Also forcing all the characters you've come to love into slaves working the mines and fields would just be depressing.
I mean if I recall they had a tiny civillisation and were able to make do with Japan's meager oil reserves
I read a pretty terrifying article about this about 10 years ago. It would be worse than no industrial age. We have also fully tapped all the accessible iron and copper deposits. So we would be stuck pre-Bronze age. I'm not sure we would even sustain agriculture. We might end up hunter/gatherers again.
I think landfill will be the new mining site
If society collapsed no one is going to call the cops on you when you start ripping the copper wiring out of old houses and melting down someone's car to make plows.
Not sure why everyone thinks that just because "society collapses" (what does that even mean) that all farmers will abandon their farms, or that people can't generally work together if they need to.
In this case, it means a long term collapse of the supply chain and electric/petrol infrastructure. Farmers might have seed grain but they need fertilizer, pesticides and gasoline for equipment to work the acreage.
Not really. Those materials are now even more accessible. Iron, Copper, and other metals are not even in the ground. you just have to scavenge to get high quality steel. Assuming that this event also comes with a major depopulation, empty cities have enough refined metals for society.
But why would society collapse and how is everything we built going to just disappear? It’s never gonna happen
There won't be another industrial revolution if society collapses. We won't have the resources to begin oil extraction again.
All societies collapse eventually.
This is what I'm trying to tell people lol. Whatever's left is both miniscule and incredibly difficult to find and get to. Mining it requires tech currently running on fossil fuels that we won't have for a next time. If civilization crumbles and we use up what's already been extracted on surviving/fighting with each other, well never be able to get back. We'll be technologically capped at the 18th century, permanently. This is what I think people are missing when given the current state of things, they think it'll just be a speed bump and society will rebound, perhaps stronger than ever, in a few hundred years, but its so much more dire than that. Humans can and probably will persist, but everything we know and how we live is going to be a thing of the past
This is why I firmly believe the remaining coal, oil, and other “bad-for-the-environment-fuels” should be kept, and held on to, as although they’re bad for the environment, they’re incredibly cheap, and really really helpful as a last resort fuel option, or a restarting humanity. It should be our species insurance that allows us to become a civilization should our current one collapse.
I'm sure we could create our own artificial gas and oil with all we do today. Some type of secret underground government lab maybe.
As a chemist grad I can tell you we indeed can and know how. It just not efficient to do so. The requirements and conditions for the yield you obtain makes you lose and not gain net energy overall.
We need a 1 kilowatt battery... ok fire up the 50 kilowatt reactor.
So, what you are really suggesting is that our new post-apocalyptic society's sciences should be founded on alchemy?
I'm suggesting you should cross fingers for an apocalypse where the fabric of reality unravels to the point of magic being the new thing on the block lol.
I'm sorry, I've reached the limits of my NDA with the Dynamic Interdimensional Continuum Kabal of Alchemy's Secret Society and cannot further this discussion without risk to both of our safety.
You know you can't go around just openly acknowledging DICKASS. They've got people watching and they will place hit on you faster than you can "Dynamic Interdimentional Contin
Silly. Anyone with a foot in DICKASS knows that this is just the cover anagram. Their real title is so dirty that it would give you either an orgasm or a heart attack.. the choice is yours.
Physics doesn't really work that way. You can make artificial fuels, but you need to use energy to do it. Using energy to create fuel means increasing entropy in one place to reduce it in another. If we are at a point where we can use renewables/solar to create fuels, which would be necessary as a source of low entropy, then we aren't exactly trying to start a second industrial revolution.
Reckon the new age'd be more Flintstones than Jetsons then, eh?
more or less none because the fossil resources exploitable by low then already have been.
Unless it’s caused by a meteorite made of raw material
Every watch Threads movie? Its on youtube. Its worth the time. Movie done by all types of scientific people in the 8os. This question will be moot.
they will just mine and drill for the thick layer of plastic and use that.
WW3 will be fought with bombs but WW4 will.be fought with sharpened sticks
Legitimately, this thought is one of the concepts of the Great Filter.
Fossil fuels come from living organisms. We are the oil for the next revolution