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Can Civilization Reboot Without Fossil Fuels?
An anonymous reader writes: We often talk about our dependence on fossil fuels, and vigorously debate whether and how we should reduce that dependence. This article at Aeon sidesteps the political bickering and asks an interesting technological question: if we had to rebuild society, could we do it without all the fossil fuels we used to do it the first time? When people write about post-apocalyptic scenarios, the focus is usually on preserving information long enough for humanity to rebuild. But actually rebuilding turns out to be quite a challenge when all the easy oil has been bled from the planet.
It's not that we're running out, it's that the best spots for oil now require high tech machinery. This would create a sort of chicken-and-egg problem for a rebuilding society. Technological progress could still happen using other energy production methods. But it would be very slow — we'd never see the dramatic accelerations that marked the industrial age, and then the information age. "A slow-burn progression through the stages of mechanization, supported by a combination of renewable electricity and sustainably grown biomass, might be possible after all. Then again, it might not. We'd better hope we can secure the future of our own civilization, because we might have scuppered the chances of any society to follow in our wake."
It's not that we're running out, it's that the best spots for oil now require high tech machinery. This would create a sort of chicken-and-egg problem for a rebuilding society. Technological progress could still happen using other energy production methods. But it would be very slow — we'd never see the dramatic accelerations that marked the industrial age, and then the information age. "A slow-burn progression through the stages of mechanization, supported by a combination of renewable electricity and sustainably grown biomass, might be possible after all. Then again, it might not. We'd better hope we can secure the future of our own civilization, because we might have scuppered the chances of any society to follow in our wake."
Its simple, we use plutonium from the nukes to boil water and thus giving way to the next steampunk era.
We already know how to create biodiesel and other fuels from non fossil sources. If we limited their use to critical needs, and had everything else using renewable electric sources, then we probably could do without oil. The biggest challenge appears to be the lack of tar and asphalt for road construction; we'd have to find a workable substitute. For everything else, suitable engineered substitutes exist.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
The idea that human society would operate in a fundamentally different manner after an apocalyptic event is probably not very realistic. We would have little reason to worry about anything but erecting energy production facilities as quickly and easily as possible. Fighting for survival trumps all.
The idea that an apocalyptic event would provide an opportunity for a big do-over is also probably not very realistic. The science fiction scenario is mass death, few people left, little knowledge retained, but is it much more likely large numbers of people would survive or nobody would survive.
If you take the cost of energy out any development would be as fast if not faster. But that is an economic problem, not a technical one. You could produce solar energy for free if you decide that those technologies are owned by everyone.
It depends on how many of the engineers are left to rebuild with the knowledge we have now. Fissile fuels are the easiest so without that engineering knowledge we will need to use at least some, but not as much.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
No
We can't. Without that much free energy it's not possible to sustain our current technology level. Renewables just aren't enough and never will. They will help to sustain what little technology we'll able to afford in the ecotechnic (agrarian) future that lies ahead but that's all. No more Information Age, no more industry. The Amish had it right.
At least that would keep the crazy desert people away.
After all, humans spent something like a millennial fighting holy wars. If there was one central government, we might have a Pax Romana-type ordeal, which could greatly speed up development.
Yes, yes we could.
Coal - Use wood instead (We will find a way to provide alternative to coal)
Oil - Improved synthetic oil (Hell, even vegetable oil for low-level mechanics)
Natural Gas - Alternative production means.
As a society, we could rebuild without fossil fuels, albeit it would look different, but we could do it. Then, we would find another way to attack mother nature. but as always, Earth Abides (http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Abides-George-R-Stewart/dp/0345487133/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429014471&sr=8-1&keywords=the+earth+abides)
No.
Concentrated fossil fuels were, realistically, necessary to extend the day so we had longer for non-productive, learning tasks, and to keep us warm and feed us hot food at scale.
Yes, you can get all this from burning wood sustainably, and from animal fats etc., but wood and animal fats are interchangeable with other requirements. Coal's advantages are that it can pretty much only be burned, it is dug out of the ground so doesn't make as much use of multi-use wood and animal products, and it burns hotter.
The industrial revolution, the submitter is right, is all about massive sustained heat, but the renaissance, which occurred well before it, depended on warm weather and good food yields, and then on healthy bodies and indoor illumination for study. You're going to need some fossil fuels to enable comfort for thinking and learning at scale.
Captcha: subsidy
If we wind up with the level of 1950s technology, there is always nuclear. Since thorium and uranium are relatively plentiful, it wouldn't take much to get civilization back on its feet by using the mighty atom.
Right now, this is an impossiblity. Carter's presidential order after 3MI banning all new construction on commercial reactors has royally fucked us over as a country, marrying us to coal and oil for the known future. However, a future society that isn't led around by the short hairs by a fossil fuel lobby can get back on track, if not further by good old fission, and do it in a safe manner.
Water provudes lots of clean (i.e. solar) electric power. Maybe not as much as New York City wants, but when half the people are dead, the rest can rebuild without coal or oil. Yeah, we can do it.
I don't see the problem. Switching to e.g. bio-fuels is a problem now because you're diverting established agricultural output from food crops to bio-fuel, reducing the supply of food in the existing market, and driving up prices. If you're "re-booting" civilization, then you don't have an established market to upset, so there aren't the same issues. It might slow things down a bit to have to generate your fuel in renewable ways, but you'd still get there in the end. Burn wood (and re-plant the trees), make ethanol from grain, maybe make the switch to battery power sooner, with solar/hydro/tidal/geothermal sources of energy.
The first electric cars were made in the 1800's, but they didn't get much of a chance then, because fossil fuel powered cars were there. Without fossil fuels, they would probably have been developed faster and become much more significant. Lighter-than-air aircraft were swept aside by fossil fuel powered airplanes, but without the fossil fuels, that type of craft might have developed and prospered, and the skies might be filled with Zeppelins.
Sure, history would take a very different course, but there are plenty of technological paths for human ingenuity to follow without fossil fuels.
Oh no... it's the future.
To a 19th century standard of living, absolutely! To a late-20th/early-21st century standard of living, probably not.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Maybe switch browsers or hot-swap a bad hard drive please no reboot!
love is just extroverted narcissism
The classic multipurpose "biodeiesel" of old was charcoal, a renewable source of fuel for high-temperature furnaces suitable for making iron and high-quality steel. Its use today is pretty much limited to barbeques and re-enactment smithing but a post-apocalyptic world could easily return to it for such purposes.
Trees don't grow quickly and the production of charcoal was never enough to sustain the demands for process heat for a society even a tenth as large as it is today but assuming a massive post-apocalyptic die-back and natural reforestation it would probably work. It doesn't require any process plant or chemicals to produce after all.
Lower-temperature needs such as locomotive and boiler steam could be met with simple logging of reforested areas without the extra step of turning wood into charcoal.
As an old-timer (or at least a mid-timer), I can remember this very issue being raised and discussed as far back as the late 1970s by people in the SF community, such as Jerry Pournelle, for one example. Of course, then we had the prospects of global thermonuclear war hanging over our heads as well, so the idea of the world having to rebuild everything didn't seem far-fetched at all.
The other issue was whether we could even keep modern technological-industrial civilization running. There was a very serious fear that "resource depletion" would cause everything to collapse without any need to invoke armageddon. Those fears have, thus far, proven mostly unfounded for reasons alluded in TFA: because we have developed high-tech machinery that can recover even low-grade deposits of ores and fossil fuels. That still doesn't mean the question won't crop up again at some time in the future, though, and we still have periodic scares over commodities such as: copper, gold, rare earths, and of course, "Peak Oil". The solution that Pournelle advocated back in the 1970s, exploiting the resources of outer space, is still out on the fringe somewhere.
Without them for energy? Yes.
Fossil fuels are far more important as fertilizer and medicine than they are as energy products. We can, fairly easily, replace them as energy sources with alternatives that may be more expensive but are viable.
We don't have shit for a way to replace the fertilizer supply, which means we'd probably have a great dying due to starvation if we completely abandon fossil fuels.
Then of course theres all the medicines we make from oil. If the starvation dying doesn't get you, the lack of medical supplies is going to curb another large portion of our population.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The current state of complexity of our civilization is given by a web of supply chains that make it possible to produce very specialized and sophisticated products.
Liquid fuel production requires more than extracting oil from the ground, you have to distill the fractions, filter unwanted contaminants, crack heavy fractions to produce lighter compounds, and do pyrolysis to get gasoline from what is essentially tar.
This all requires a supply chain of materials to be able to construct the tools and equipments to produce what you'll pump into your car.
Then there are fertilizers, you needs sources of fossilized guano that are located around the world, and others like Ammonia based fertilizers that are mostly produced using fossil fuel sources.
Then you have catalyzer metals for reactors, the list is enormous...
And if you think that since the trade barriers have mostly gone, that has meant that most countries have shed duplicate capacity and have specialized and concentrated on only some parts of the supply chain.
That means if things go downhill you pretty much have no way to get some resources, tool or equipment spares and no knowledge how to remake those.
That is why we have sent Doc Brown in a heavily modded De Lorean into the future to bring back the technology of crystallic fusion to reboot us, once we get rid of Big Oil and the Big Banks. Destruction of Morgan-Stanley and Goldman-Sachs alone is incentive enough to trigger a nuclear war.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What if it is the great filter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
What if intelligent life needs to develop technology capable of allowing it to leave its solar system before it depletes easily accessible raw materials and fuel sources.
In the scope of a global disaster a species would not only need to preserve its knowledge regarding advances, it would also need to scrounge the resources to rebuild the tech.
As long as there is plentiful solar power, we'll be able to reboot civilization over and over again. And it'll be easier than starting from scratch due to all the tech we'll have lying around.
Billions of people survive simply by burning wood. 'Fire' is a long-solved problem.
Rebooting society without beard oil, 3d printers, and espresso? Hipster's worst nightmare.
Hint: most of the stuff today isn't necessary anyway.
Most people don't realize this but the earliest electric car was in 1828. Problem is the greed of oil companies which has kept electricity off the roads because once cars become electric the oil companies loose a form of control over people. Tides have been changing recently, however if electricity were to have grown instead of oil I think we would be living in a very different world.
Energy is important, no doubt. But the real question would be: what amount of knowledge remains.
Our first requirement would be food. Organic agriculture requires mostly knowledge, and not much else except some human or animal labour.
A second requirement for (fast) booting is communication. This not necessarily requires a lot of energy, just infrastructure. Snail mail would do. Low power electronic devices would be great.
Then about energy: loads of it is just wasted these days. There's a lot of unneeded transport, house warming or cooling, all relative luxuries which are not directly needed for survival. We'd only need a fraction of what we use today for agriculture and communication. Leaves the industry for construction materials like steel and concrete. They would require a lot energy but are also not directly needed for survival.
Society would look different, but i also think the world would be perfectly liveable if we had only, say, 2% of the energy we are using today. We'd see more animals. But i'm not thinking it's such bad scenario as long as the/some knowledge survives, which is likely as long humans survive.
Yes it can, but that depends on what you think it means. There have been civilizations without the wheel. It will be entierly differnt from what we have now, but yes, it is possible.
We might need to give up on many things that we think are normal now; but that has happend as well in the past.
It will also depend if we receive it peacefully or by force. Will we be prepared for it. If oil and coal run out to,orrow because some aliens stole it all will be different than when we decide that we focus on renewable energy sources and use it less and less till it becomes 0.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That got us to the 1900's.
It still makes electricity.
There are lots of interconnected technologies that would be interesting to restart.
We did it once without knowing where we were headed.
Doing it a second time with a roadmap seems doable.
Just don't expect it to happen in less than a decade.
Or one could wait a few billion years and have oil again.
Advanced civilization of some sort exists in at least pieces on every continent now. Odds are very low that it would all collapse overnight short of an extreme nuclear conflict. Let's be honest. If most of global civilization collapse and one or two major states survived, battered and bloody from whatever chaos happened, they could reboot advanced civilization where it previously existed. From the American perspective at least, if most of the world went to Hell, the US could simply invade and conquer most of the petrol states and distribute their oil to the broken states in large enough quantities to reboot their economies and political systems.**
** If we truly faced a global collapse and the US military were mostly intact, it would be operating under totally different rules of engagement. Troops landing in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, etc. to start pumping the oil would not be "policing," they would likely have the latitude to annihilate entire population centers if the natives prevented them from jump starting the European and Asian economies.
People seem to think that dino-oil was discovered and then magic happened and we have the microchip suddenly. Before that, we used all kinds of other oils and fuels. charcoal and steam, whale oil, peanut oil, HEMP OIL (for all you stoners out there), and the list goes on. The internal combustion engine existed before petrol, and most were diesel, and ran off of other oils.. all petroleum did was edge out entire markets because it was so plentiful at first, it was dirt cheap and effective.... always a profitable and exploitable haven.
So what would we do? Well, once the power goes out, and people stop freaking out that they can't google it or look it up on instructables or youtube.. you go to the library, or local 4H outreach and read the older books, and see how they did things before.
It's all out there, the biggest hurdle we will have to face is how soft and skilless most of us have become. We are more likely to die out because our priorities have gone stupid. Most will be more worried about their cell phones or car and all that. man, first you have to worry about food, shelter, water, sanitation and safety first. Then you can worry about communications, and longer range communication, and power, manufacturing, and such.
When the power goes out, when the water turns off, when the oil dries up.. its going to be the farmers, the hillbillies, southeast asia and every third world country that's been doing without from the beginning of time that will be the new kings, and we will learn from them, because we ask how would we do it? They're doing it right now.
Now, could we do it again without? probably, but the progress would be slower.
Biomass in general is completely viable. There are some wonderful biogas/syngas generators on the market that range from personal single home models to big municipal power plants.
You can take farm field dross... weeds... anything that burns... pelletize it in a pellet maker, then feed that as well as wood cut into 2 inch by 2 inch chunks into a syngas generator. Boom... biofuel.
People run cars and trucks and trailers on it directly as well. You can produce syngas, pressurize it in a tank just as you would propane or natural gas... and then feed it into an engine.
it is also carbon neutral.
You know all those people trying to come up with algae oil?... well that's dumb because you can take ANY plant matter and turn it into syngas. Any old crap.
The energy infrastructure would be different of course. You'd be farming your fuel. But it would be as sustainable as solar power. And the residue after the biogas process can be removed to either fertilize fields... or the tar that is produced and be used the same way we use tar now... to water proof and seal things. which you might not appreciate as relevant until you realize that pretty much every street is held together with a mixture of tar and gravel. That right, that black stuff that steams out of those pots when they're laying road is mostly tar.
You can also refine traditional hydrocarbon fuels out of biogas. Diesel, gasoline, kerosene, etc.
So yeah... we don't need that shit in the ground. It is of course cheaper to just get it out of the ground then to farm it and produce it in a syngas generator... but we can produce it if we need to do it.
What is more, contrary to what the alarmists would have you believe, we have a LOT of fossil fuels left. Possibly that is bad news for global warming but in so far as the oil industry is concerned... they can pump for a long long time. That fracking innovation is a shot across the bow to anyone that thought they were going to peter out at the existing well count. There is a huge difference between existing reserves and ACTUALLY how much oil is in the ground. And given time they're going to pull it ALL up until that stops becoming profitable.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I'm of the opinion if our civilization should collapse for what ever reason, then that's it. We'll have lived in mankind's golden age.
People have brought up biofuels but remember that we are in a collapse scenario. We already will have lost easy access to artificial fertilizers, so farming output will already be lower than we are use to now (also I believe the easy access Phosphate deposits are long gone too, not sure on that one).
So even today we can't grow enough crops for biofuel while still supporting our needs for food. In a collapse scenario: no way.
Also don't forget how much of a pinnacle technology stuff like the semiconductor industry is. A very sophisticated and perhaps even fragile supply chain is needed. In a collapse the semiconductor industry might well be the first to become unsustainable. Yet it and other peak technologies are what enabled us to get to this place we got to now.
PS don't expect all our "knowledge" to last over a collapse either. A lot of the detail knowledge that makes our economy tick is actually undocumented personal knowledge and experience of the people working in it. Let a collapse come along and they don't have an opportunity to pass on that knowledge and you end up with the saturn experience where even without a total collapse merely 50 years after last using those rockets a lot of know-how had to be re-engineered or reverse-engineered again. Now imagine the same thing happening in all industries across the entire product range.
Having to reboot would be a nightmare and most likely not fully possible anymore.
NOT the complete present population. Read 'The Stand' about the virus, and the second culling...
Maybe 1 in 10 would get past the apocalypse, if lucky. How many will have even the slightest clue
about making charcoal, biofuel extraction or natural substitutes for plastic...
How many would know how to use tools, much less build them?
So Bartertown becomes real, and Master-Blaster too.
Or 'A Boy And His Dog'....
So, all the geeks, start from zero. No internet, few books, what's in your head?
Because what's in your head is pretty much all that you will have...
Being a geek is not a survival trait in general.
Technological evolution, like biological evolution gradually move from simple to complex. Simple being the wood (trees) next to your village. Oil used to ooze out of the ground and coal could be easily collected lying on the ground in shallow dug pits. Trees may not have repopulated, and easily to gather fossil fuels are no longer plentiful and easy to get. Copper and tin are not easy to access either – thus no bronze age or early metals. There will be no raw materials to forge heavy goods. Nope, when mankind reboots, its tribal for good.
If human civilization survives the fossil fuel crisis that is likely to occur, it may be better off in the long run. Second only, perhaps to religion, conflicts over fossil fuels have fueled the most inhuman acts in our history.
For the sake of completeness, I would like to let you know that the fine article is by Lewis Dartnell, the author of the book "The Knowledge". What you have read in a short sample from the book, which is an excellent read. If you are into knowledge to restart a civilization (think food, chemistry, electricity, clothes), then you probably will appreciate the book.
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
1) hydrocarbon fuels predate biological life, but they are called fossil fuels anyway
2) everything on earth is to some degree finite, but there is no proven scarcity of fossil fuels
3) there is plenty of locations of extracting fossil fuels that don't require risky methods
4) all of biological life is built upon the exact same carbon cycle that our fossil fuels participate in
Still don't think these environmentalists want to punish individuals and the planet? Just look at California:
- California eliminating public green spaces (making climate change worse)
- California building reservoirs as a solution even though current reservoirs are not full
- California not working on new desalination plants
- California letting industry take 80% the water, and exemption from any participation in reducing water usage
I'm not opposed to clean technology replacing dirty tech, I'm just 100% opposed to raising the price of energy as that will just reduces capital to invest in clean tech.
Reboot to anything resembling existing society is doubtful, but I don't think that needs to be such a tragic epitaph.
http://www.thewaterchannel.tv/...
Nuclear power.
Guffaw.
Oil is a renewable resource, assuming you're willing to wait 85 million years. When we all die, our bodies will eventually create oil, just as the dinosaurs did, for the next species to rise up and use. You just gotta wait a really, really long time.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Wind and hydro-electric production are implamentable without signifigant prerequsite manufacturing. Yes, they are more efficient with high-tech equipment; but if the more basic generators created an "island of power" were more high-tech manufacturing could be performed you could easily kick-start back to a modern system.
Use the low-tech hydro-power for a biofuel plant (power digging or recycling equipment) and the production of better hydro-power generators (or solar-power, etc).
Don't get me wrong: there are some massive hurdles to overcome; but for key infrastructure we could replace oil even in a boot-strap society.
Note: the whole supply-chain is far more complex than most people realize. The dark ages weren't so much about lost knowledge as lost infrastructure. In a "new society", getting the needed resources to the needed location would, I think, be the biggest single problem. You can't just build a microprocessor plant out of the blue; it requires hundreds of other systems to make it go.
The biggest issues on a "global restart" are "population" and "infrastructure / government"... at least in terms of moving back to an industrial society.
We have not needed fossil fuels for a long time. The technology, and knowledge to live our society like it is today has been around for a very long time. It just is not proffitable like fossil fuels.
It can, but it won't.
We were sustainable a hundred years ago so that is a good model.
However the current population is not energy sustainable on that model.
Nature will sort it out like it always does when critters get too frisky and over populate and over consume resources.
How soft or hard the landing, the only ones than can effect outcomes are us (and the guy upstairs).
Just don't expect divine intervention without divine effort.
If we had to rebuild society, could we do it without all the fossil fuels we used to do it the first time?
Not only could we do it, we have already done so. The 18th century was the century where a sawmill was actually a mill. Like this one. Mills made cement, drilled canons, ground paint, tobacco, oak bark and corn, kept our feet dry, pressed oil, made felt and more. Many of them still do, for historical reasons. See the links (you have to use a Babel Fish if you do not read Dutch). Our "Golden Age" was run mostly on wind, and other countries also used water.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
There is plenty of metal for a post-apocalyptic rebirth of society. Wood can be turned into charcoal, and from there you have iron-working. Wood gas can be used to power engines.
Stupid article, written by stupid elite intellectual postmoderns sitting in an airconditioned office whose familiarity with living in such conditions stretches perhaps so far as reading about it in the doctor's waiting lounge or "camping" modern 21st century American style, ala hundred-dollar footwear, thousands of dollars of advanced fabrics, aluminum everything, carefully crafted nutritional freeze-dried meals, all used to camp at prepared campsites where the major concern of the campers is "how do I keep my 'sport' beverages cold?" or "how do I make sure I my organic shampoo doesn't run into the pristine nearby lake?"
It's hard to even know where to start tearing this thing apart.
His initial sentence is ludicrous: "It took a lot of fossil fuels to forge our industrial world. Now they're almost gone." What? We have thousands of years of coal at current consumption rates, setting aside the fact that such an apocalyptic scenario he's talking about would mean that likely 75-90% of humanity is dead and our consumption rate would obviously drop. While coal today may be hard to retrieve IN BRITAIN, it's not hard to find in other places.
Secondly, even the use of oil (that he keeps referring to) presupposes an extant level of technology that is unlikely to survive such a situation. If we've fallen so low that we can't retrieve coal from the ground, do you really think we would be able to build engines that could even use oil? People seem to forget that there's a crapton of accumulated skills and techniques - mostly forgotten to the bulk of civilization - involved in building things like steam engines. Hell, he goes off on building a society based on alternative generation of electricity, failing to note that even making WIRE involves a rather high level of technological development.
Thirdly,"How could an industrialising society produce crucial building materials such as iron and steel, brick, mortar, cement and glass without resorting to deposits of coal?" Well, there are ample examples of civilizations that were quite 'civilized' that didn't use coal or oil - Rome, etc used WOOD, and they were able to reach rather comfortable levels of advancement without fossil fuels. Last time I checked, the Romans were pretty damn good at engineering and cement - in some ways better with cement than we are today.
He then maunders off mulling the ability of such a rebuilding society focusing on using solar power or wood gasification, setting aside the final reality: if one is in an apocalyptic situation, desperate for food, shelter, clean water, and simply working hard trying to live, "giving a shit" about the environment, CO2 loading, and pollution outside your immediate circumstances falls far below one's level of concern because it's ultimately a LUXURY to worry about impacts on future generations when you're trying to survive tonight or to the end of the week.
Seriously ridiculous article, starting from ridiculous premises and reaching ridiculous conclusions.
-Styopa
I'll admit I have no idea of the link between fossil fuels and modern medicine. I was under the impression that most medicines are extractions of natural compounds.
I can cite many examples of scalable food production systems that don't depend on fossil fuels, however, and demonstrations that industrial agriculture that is reliant on fossil fuels for fertilizer are non-sustainable beyond the constraints of supply - they degrade and deplete soil fertility in the long run, leading to desertification.
Have a look at the works of Bill Mollison, Geoff Lawton, Alan Savory, Mark Shepard, Sepp Holzer, Willie Smits if you're interested.
Not to stray off topic, but while I was initially glancing at the headline I formed a different sort of context and thought it was worth sharing. Why not see how well we would fare by attempting to do so right now? In an apocalyptic scenario - the colder it is, the faster you figure out how to stay warm without being too choosy about what needs to be done. We don't all live in cozy climates like that of San Diego. Besides if a nation had the option to be a bit more self sufficient it would be a strategic advantage. I don't care to rehash the nuances of alternative sources because I think I have enough of a grip on the subject that going in to it would be counter productive. It boils down to how much can be produced at x amount of expense. I would like to think folks would keep the nuclear option as far back on the back burner as it could go, but it will always be an option. Since it will always be an option the thing to do is to wonder if nuclear energy could be produced safer. I am not a geologist or nuclear engineer so I pose a question: Is it possible to operate a nuclear reactor deep under ground - far below any underground aquifer? Meltdowns would be easier to contain I assume. However, cooling would be design challenge. Why not use the heat generated as an artificial geothermal source where at least some folks wouldn't have to consume as much energy running a hot water tank or boiler? In all the arguments about global warming I have yet to hear somebody mention or try to quantify the excess heat produced by the inefficiency of air conditioners and heaters lost to the atmosphere. Even without the nuclear option our waste heat could be harnessed to make it easier to heat water. Sounds like a good infrastructure to share amongst a community. Neither have I heard of sodas, liquid crack energy drinks, (I'm not judging - it just sounded funny), or beer being a source of CO2 but now I'm getting too far out in left field.... Another source of waste energy that could be better tapped is methane from decaying organics which is currently harvested commercially in anaerobic digesters. I guess the big polka-dot elephant in the room is the oil cartels. Maybe I'm just naive, but I'm bored of hearing arguments about dependence on foreign fuels, oil profits, fracking woes, environmental devastation and bought out shelved technologies - it's gotten too damn stale. Somebody care to lend some perspective?
Short answer: No, never going to happen. We will ALWAYS use oil in some way because there are things you just cannot do without it.
Long answer: What will happen is that we will use less and less of it over time as the cost of recover and use of the fuel get's higher and higher. Eventually it will fall out of favor due to cost and availability and use will slow down, but it will never really stop, it will just fade into obscurity like coal powered steam engines have. So massive industrial use may stop in time due to costs, but it will be with us forever.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The Moties always start a new cycle by jumping straight to fusion.
Saves a lot of time...
No combination of alternative fuels can or will ever replace the 160 exajoules of energy that industrial civilization currently consumes each year. Attempting to do so will result in ecological disaster. Thorium nuclear would get us near that again, but it's not likely to be something we do in the case of a complete industrial civilization collapse.
So what happens is that we "reboot" to a smaller scale civilization with a limited population. No matter what happens, there's still a lot of refined metal, particularly copper wire, laying around so we will probably have electricity no matter what. We also have plenty of mirrors that can be re-purposed for mini-smelting operations and water purification. Moreover, there will still be plenty of functional practical machines and devices. Cars will be a valuable source of alternators for electricity generation. Simple items, like stainless steel tables and bowls will last for hundreds of years. Steam is likely to make a comeback.
We won't reboot, and the population bottleneck from 2100 to 2200 may be quite severe, but some will survive and muddle through.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
If you're going to start over then start with human behaviour, and can we recover without fossil fuels?
Yes, look at first comment and realize that fossil fuels were never the way to go, and human BEHAVIOUR is the problem.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
It's only taken us 150 years to go from happenstance discovery of oil on the earth surface to deep water rigs, and we were working with non-fossil fuels back then. Somehow, I think 50 years would be more than sufficient to bring us back to where we are given that political stability existed, and 20-25 might be more realistic.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This would start with the same hydromechanical power that preceded the industrial revolution: small dams providing direct mechanical power for mills and machinery. At the same time, you can smelt metals with wood, After initial reboot, being able to machine metals and draw wire would lead to hydroelectricity.
No need for reboot, civilization is not a machine.
Ha ha
I believe global warming and ocean acidification is a serious threat. I also believe that solar energy has great potential as an energy source. However, I think the question being framed here creates a false dichotomy. Is it not possible that we might have a world where we have renewable, nuclear, and fossil fuels? Just because we reduce the use of something doesn't mean we have to eliminate it. The fact is that modern civilization needs plastics, mechanical lubrication, and other fossil fuel bi-products. Even if we reduce fossil fuel use by 80%, we can still have these things.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Of course can we rebuild society and technology without oil. For starters we began the first time with coal and wood. We could do that again. Second, we would still have some knowledge about the first time. So we can base the second attempt on electricity and use windmills (which we also did in the past). The whole oil thing was not very prominent 150 years ago. And most oil products can also be made out of plant oils.
We don't have shit for a way to replace the fertilizer supply
HaHaHa! Coffee out the nose! +1 funny...
We used animal excrements in different forms as fertilizers. We could do so again. And before we were able to use oil in medicine, we were not without medicine. so it is possible to reach certain technological levels without oil. If we have not a total crash of society (which the article implies) then moving to non oil products can be achieved. Presently, the EU and US are producing more agricultural products than required. There are estimates that it would be easily possible to keep that surplus even when switching to organic methods of production. However, some abandoned acres must be reactivated. in Africa large agricultural areas are not used because people are blowing themselves up or farmers go bankrupt because the West is selling cheap subsidized agricultural products. So depending on the scenario we would be able to replace oil and coal completely. This even works for steel.
Various googled websites calculate fossil fuel usage for every citizen int he developed world is equivalent to the labor of between 100 to 200 slaves in the old days. (not including their upkeep) Granted a lot of this is wasted in our luxurious "suburban plantation" lifestyle. But could a standard of living be kept in fossil fuel free society?
Oil is not the complete set of fossil fuels. It may be that we have run the oil age too long and it would be hard to get to oil again, but lets look back 100 years ago and notice that it was the coal age then. We switched from coal to oil not because we ran out of coal; we did it because the oil was more efficient. If we needed to reboot it would go back to coal, and there are still vast easily exploited coal fields. We could coal power civilization until we got back to petroleum; but really we're already changing over to a natural gas age, just like 100 years ago they were changing to petroleum. And we could just skip petroleum, do coal, and then gassified coal and go on towards whatever we have next, which really could be fusion.
Many medicines are purely synthesized, typically from fosil sources. Of course an other large group is indeed from natural sources. Some types of medicine are even made both ways.
His credentials include co-founder of Earth Day and early computer bulletin boards.
http://www.amazon.com/Whole-Ea...
He proposes urban living, nuclear power, and GMO, to chargin of faux-liberals.
Given enough time, the fact that basic principles of electricity, magnetism, and combustion are well disseminated throughout society seems to guarantee an eventual rise form the ashes. However, it will not be rapid. Wind power will be the easiest to re-establish. Coal remains fairly abundant and easy to find (easy to mine is trickier). However, this is not the initial problem. Roving pirate gangs would be a major threat to any attempt to settle and grow. Immediate needs will almost certainly trump the desire to rebuild when a person's child will be dead from hunger next week. Thus the amount of mental and temporal capital invested in the idea of rebuilding will be limited. I submit getting back to the age of steam would be fairly quick in some areas, but anything like modern society will take a very long time. My friends and I have had this discussion many times over the last 15 years and determined the following: Petroleum was not a major economic consideration in the West until the mid- to late- 1800s. The biggest impediments to rapid rise back to such a level would be loss of knowledge and difficulty in locating easy-to-extract coal. After that, we will have a tougher time rebuilding unless we embrace other sources of energy. Remember that solar will not be a likely option as the energy to purify large quantities of silicon (currently a requirement) will not be initially available. Unless one embraces solar-fueled steam power.
We don't have shit for a way to replace the fertilizer supply, .
Yes, we have exactly that. Shit is a perfect fertilizer supply. Today, it is easier to dump it in the sea or something, fossil-based fertilizer is cheaper. And nicer to work with. But you can collect all the sewage and use it for fertilizer. People must then stop using the toilet as generic garbage disposal, but a death penalty for poisoning the fertilizer supply might take care of that.
A drop in farm productivity can be countered with more area - we don't really need golf courses. Houses built on arable land can be moved/demolished.
Solar developments. There would be nothing stopping solar research to the point it wasn't A) cost prohibitive and B) lousy in the conversion area. I think we'd see it spike to 100% efficiency quicker than we have currently seen as it would be a necessity.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Margaret Atwood, in her book Oryx and Crake, comments that rebuilding after a civilization collapse would be much more difficult than most people imagine. We've exploited all of the easy-to-get minerals and other resources, so our descendants would have very little to rebuild with, given the tools they might have available. (They'd be pretty much stone age, and might not be able to get out of it.)
The article gives a post-apocalyptic senario. Most of the high-techy alternatives like solar and nuclear require an establish industrial infrastructure to produce. You will not bootstrap to building a solar panel outside your mud-hut by rubbing two sticks together to melt sand into silicon. You will build a solar panel by producing refined copper and silicon in factories running on coal-generated electricity until you have enough capacity to replace the coal. So no, there is no realistic senario in which you just skip burning fossil fues and go straight to high-tech (unless you want to run the plant by chopping down and burning all the forests, which is probably a worse solution than fossil fuels). Even something like hydro-power requires industrial infrastructure to build large scale. Otherwise how will you get the steel and cement to build the dam? Or the steel and copper for the turbines and windings?
If you don't care much about growing 'extra' crops, alcohol burns real good, and makes a decent fuel. maybe not as good as petro, but it works.
you can also get horsepower from... horses. Or oxen, or whatever.
Seriously, just ask the Pennsylvania Dutch, the tech they use is probably on par with what you would use to rebuild after a zombie apocalypse (or whatever)
Actually shit is a great fertilizer. Along with all the dead bodies rotting that would need to be buried to prevent disease and such fertilizing soil may not be as big an issue. But like you said no medicines in bulk and no energy to produce equals a great sucky situation.
Without them for energy? Yes.
Fossil fuels are far more important as fertilizer and medicine than they are as energy products. We can, fairly easily, replace them as energy sources with alternatives that may be more expensive but are viable.
We don't have shit for a way to replace the fertilizer supply, which means we'd probably have a great dying due to starvation if we completely abandon fossil fuels.
Then of course theres all the medicines we make from oil. If the starvation dying doesn't get you, the lack of medical supplies is going to curb another large portion of our population.
... in the short term
The bigger question is what it would take to get us back to the point where we *can* get to those petrochemicals... where we can build the machines we can build today.
Infrastructure is a big worry, and societal collapse... but if we could magically turn people into a well-organized, forward-thinking group I assert we could get from there to here pretty quickly.
Electricity is quite doable, though not to modern levels, without modern resources. Electricity gives you the ability to make the machines that will make the machines.
Electricity also gives you biodesil (though yes, that will be competing with food crops as, yes, starvation and disease will affect many, many more people).
has \ Had advanced tecnology based on dead dinosaur Juice and still didnt manage a civilisation!
Humans lived for THOUSANDS of years without fossil fuels. I don't see being without them as a consequence of global disaster resulting in the death of the human race. There are dozens of IFs that could be tacked onto any supposition like this, but the bottom line is that humans are adaptable creatures just like any other living organism on the planet. We'd find a way; necessity being the mother of invention et al.
IF the entire biome of the planet was destroyed then we surely would be effed along with all living things on the planet anyway, and nature would start all over again, like it most likely did several times during the Heavy Bombardment period of Earth's pre-history.
IF some tree species survived along with a number of food crops and game animals, then humans would be fine. A touch set back on the clock of technological achievement, but we'd be fine; probably happier!
The whole postulate is rube FUD.
Hardly proof, but in Asimov's Foundation series, the Encyclopedists were setup on a resource-poor planet. This caused them to develop highly efficient technology, including things like pen-sized nuclear reactors. The point I'm making is, if we were hit with disaster, we will find a way to re-build, but we may end up building things quite differently than before, depending on what resources are available. No matter what, it'll suck for the first few generations, but assuming we survived, it's at least plausible that we could come out better for it in the future.
The article is dealing with the wrong problem. The question is not how you achieve the highly mechanized and wasteful civilization we have now, but how you define "civilized." Personally, I feel that many earlier non-mechanized societies were at least if not more civilized than we are now.
Closely tied to the land and limited to steam powered transport that could be fueled by wood and biomass if need be, this entire continent of North America had it's kickstart. Granted, we didn't have iThingies and ship oranges from the other side of the continent, but it was a "civilized" society.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Chances are, if we all die out and a so called "new society" arise.. it will be a couple million/billion years in the future, by then, WE will have turned into fossil fuel. But by the time a new civilization arise, by complete chance, on the planet, the sun will most likely have imploded.
Since plastics use a significant amount of oil, they would either have to be recycled from landfills (in areas in which there was no previous plastics recycling) or the oceans. Wood (if constantly re-grown in cultures as some countries are already doing) can also be a replacement for plastics.
I would argue that fossil fuel is not the only determinant ...
The hard part is that we have become almost dependent on integrated circuits. This goes for any computer device, all control devices in manufacturing, and much more ...
If civilization collapses, how can we get back the IC fabs going with specialized material?
I wrote about it in a previous comment: 19th century technology vs. mid 20th century.
And expanded a bit on it in information readability and longevity in the digital age.
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1 person plenty of fuel of any kind that you want to use. ...
3 trillion not so much.
Population is the root of many of our problems.
Everybody here is fixated on oil to the point of not discussing anything much else.
Windmills, watermills, these are what started the industrial revolution and would likely be useful a 2nd time round. Watermills and windmills are simple tech that can be built from wood and stone. I expect we'd go also back to using horses a lot if our current system collapsed. Modern electronic technology is not built to last, they wouldn't much left of it working after a couple of decades.
Too many people here seem to think mad max is a documentary.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
We don't have shit for a way to replace the fertilizer supply,
. . . I see what you did there.
If the starvation dying doesn't get you, the lack of medical supplies is going to curb another large portion of our population.
Any future speculated "civilization" is going to be very different from our current one, that is for sure. Life is going to be much less convenient. I still believe that "advancement" will be possible.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
actually at the very least we do have shit
Just make more easy fossil fuels :)
really easy recipe, just don't die off in a couple hundred million years, voila, new fossil fuels.
Asphalt gets worn down by [all sorts of stuff] ...
Like fossil fuels in general, Asphalt is used for road surfaces currently solely because it's overall cheaper (better price-performance) than many alternatives that we know damn well how to use. Restart a crashed civilization without cheap oil and one or more of these other alternatives will be used.
Asphalt is cheap because it's one of the side-effects of oil refining - a product that is valuable enough as a paving material that it's more profitable to sell it as-is than to "crack" it into lighter stuff and boost the fuel output (or other products) by a couple percent.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Need to clarify assumptions:
Assume humanity has to essentially start over, recapitulating previous stages - tribes, city states, kingdoms/empires, nations, global expansion (if possible).
Assume the biosphere recovers fast enough that it is not a barrier to civilization's redevelopment.
Assume nearly all technology is forgotten and much of science is lost except some basic concepts - needing to be redeveloped.
Assume religion again gains dominance over understanding of the world, but remembers being deeply challenged by science - and so suppresses science and technological change for centuries, while preserving some key bits (like germ theory, maybe surgery) that can be controlled to elevate the status of religion.
Assume easy availability of concentrated metals (ruins of cities) accelerates the process of recovering early civilization, but delays development of mining and refining technologies, preventing a return to hard to get fossil fuels and delaying metallurgy and other material science.
Based on this, civilization can at least recover to pre- enlightenment levels. And once more, reform within religion will be key to going beyond that. Possibly this time organized religion will try to retain control over science to suppress the potential harm to religion and control what technologies get released that might threaten a static hierarchical society. Long term, that will fail, but could work for centuries. Technologies might be limited to the powerful, with most people trapped on small farms that barely feed them with little surplus. Not so much a "dark" age of ignorance, as a "slow" age of tightly controlled progress, where stability is paramount, improvement of the lives of the masses a distant last.
Pollution = average pollution per capita times population. In a post-apocalyptic scenario after an event on a scale that would cause a "reboot", there would not be 8 billion people around. Burning some fossile fuel for a period in order to get enough of an economy going that would allow the infrastructure to then build a better green infrastructure, should not be an issue.
Here's your fundamental error: "I'll admit I have no idea of the link between fossil fuels and modern medicine. I was under the impression that most medicines are extractions of natural compounds."
Fossil fuels ARE natural!!!!!
There are no giant man-made factories deep within the Earth building crude oil molecules from other substances. The oil (and the ither things like Helium and Natual Gas often found down there with it) occur in nature with no human involvement.
What far too many young people who have been de-educated rather than educated by our modern trashed-by-unionization education system (which, by unionizing, tightly-aligned with the Democrats and their various eco-activist groups) do not understand is just how much of what is around them is derived from crude oil. It's not just Gasoline and Jet Fuel, but it is many lubricants that are needed in "electric" stuff (and windmills and so-on), as well as plastics, dyes, medicines, chemicals used in cleaning, farming, and other manufacturing. THOUSANDS of things many people who scowl at petroleum and the OBVIOUSLY EVIL "Big Oil" simply could not live without. Ignorance is bliss, it seems.
You don't "need" oil, you need sources of hydrocarbons. The cracking and reforming of a diverse range of renewable and alternate fossil hydrocarbons is a very well understood process.
If a civilisation reboot stalls it will be due to the loss some more subtle enabler, either knowledge or a key, but low volume, natural resource.
For get oil, worry about the little details that will break the re/build process.
not enough 'splosions? need more lens flare?
It's unlikely anyone will read this, so I'll be brief.
Globalization has made everything cheaper, but it has also made everyone dependent on everyone else. If there is a 90 day interruption of transport, most of the population will die of starvation and conflict. The survivors will probably not be able to organize a large enough group of people to restart a technological society above a stone age level. I was going to write a book about the subject, but when I realized that there was no possible solution I dropped the project. There's no value without a solution. If you think that a solution is possible, follow the supply chain for everything you need. Make sure you count the number of people and the distances involved. The people who count are the ones who have the skills required. The others are dead weight and will perish.
I spent 40 years acquiring a 5000+ volume technical library and a 1500 sq ft shop full of tools only to realize that over my lifetime things changed to the point that a solution was no longer possible.
So we all better hope transport doesn't stop for several months. People like me would manage for a while, but not long.
I thought Mote Prime was short on fossil fuels (and radioactives). Why not ask the Moties?
where 'plastic' = 'polymers'
If you are in a Western 2nd or 1st world country, then pretty much wherever you are, you are surrounded by polymer-based products including, but not limited to: perfumes, paint, wrapping, flooring, clothing (think spandex, spanks, nylon), dyes, glues, lubricants (of all kinds), shatter-proof windows, money, tires, asphalt, roofing shingles, the handles of just about any tool or appliance, eye-glasses, contact lenses, diapers, ink, water bottles, make-up, shoes, boots, baseball caps, computer cases, fans, laptops, cellphones, swimming pool liners, anything with fiberglass, battery casings, beer can holders, non-scratch covers for solar panels (as well as the casing for them).... get the idea?
Not saying it's good, just saying it's the price we pay for more, lighter, cheaper, (often) more durable, stuff ... and there is absolutely no way that will change any time soon.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
So, no fossil fuels limits metallurgy to what you can melt with a wood burning furnace. And if what the poster means by "fossil fuels" is actually any carbon producing energy source, wood is out too.
Without fossil fuels, we can't generate enough heat to smelt metals. Without metal tools, we can't build renewable power plants. In fact, we'd be stuck back in the stone age with no means of developing further.
The same substance that did it all before. Low carbon footprint too.
http://www.jackherer.com/thebo...
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Steel is just the element iron that has been processed to control the amount of carbon. Iron, out of the ground, melts at around 1510 degrees C (2750F). Steel often melts at around 1370 degrees C (2500F).
A solar furnace is a structure that uses concentrated solar power to produce high temperatures, usually for industry. Parabolic mirrors or heliostats concentrate light (Insolation) onto a focal point. The temperature at the focal point may reach 3,500 C (6,330 F),
The real answer to your question is that you have no imagination.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
We sort of have to use some non-carbon based fuels because in 200-400 years we'll be out of easy cheap oil, gas, coal. If we can mine the hydrates on the ocean floor then we are good for another 3k-9k years depending on who's numbers you use for available and recoverable.
At some point we need to move to thorium and / or fusion (if that ever gets out of being 30 years away as it has been for the last 50 years) or some other breakthrough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBmk7t5K35A
China has moved up its schedule for thorium from 30 years to 10-12. We'll be buying nuke plants from them in 15-20 years.
Read "Always Coming Home" - it's exactly this scenario. Some of the high-tech knowledge and history survives, but mostly people are living in small groups with severe limits on energy and transport. The resource scarcity also limits the damage one group can commit against others. You can build an airplane, but you cannot build hundreds of them.
The largest final, end-use demand for energy is seen in two sectors: Heating and transportation. In both these sectors, direct combustion of fossil fuels is almost universal. The market served by "electricity" is third in size behind these two. However, electrically powered heat pumps, particularly geothermal heat pumps (GHPs), and electric vehicles (EVs) are dramatically more efficient than fossil fueled systems. GHPs, even when using power generated using fossil fuels, will reduce fossil fuel consumption.
In the US, we have a few thousand electrical generation plants, but we have about 100 million buildings and many more automobiles -- almost all of which contain at least one fossil fuel burner. Even if the entire electrical system converted to "clean" power tomorrow, we'd still have a massive problem as a result of that 100's of millions of "distributed" fossil fuel burners.
In order to free ourselves of fossil fuels, we need to eliminate end-use direct combustion of fossil fuels by "fuel switching"; converting to electrical systems. The second step would be to de-carbonize the electrical generation system (using renewable systems). This is achievable.
Rebooting civilization also depends on metals. In antiquity they were nearly 100% (copper and gold already pure enough to bang with another rock into shape). But what qualifies as good ore has been in decline for millennia. In the 1800s, for example, good copper ore was 1.5% copper; now a third of that is good.
And as the quality of ore goes down, the energy needed to purify it goes up.
Biodiesel, etc., is a comedy. Either you use fertilizers (which itself takes fossil fuels) or go hunting for switchgrass; either way there's not nearly enough to run current society, never mind the surplus to rebuild it.
This is yet another "I got plaques on the wall so I am authorized to run your life" attack on liberty. The internal combustion engine and the automobile are the most sublime expressions of liberty. It is so much so that the Progressive Movement (the same one that gave us euthanizing the less competitive) targeted it with licensing and regulation that firearms have yet to catch up to. See The Orphaned Right: The Right to Travel By Automobile 1890-1950.
KM.EY
Of course, then we had the prospects of global thermonuclear war hanging over our heads as well, so the idea of the world having to rebuild everything didn't seem far-fetched at all.
I wasn't aware that threat had gone away. As of 2013, Russia had 8,500 warheads and the U.S. had 7,700. China and North Korea both have more now than they did in the 1970s.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Come on. Really ?
As interesting as your solar smelting idea is, unless the focal point covers the entire mass to be smelted it won't matter. For that you would need an array somewhat larger than this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And though in theory you could build a movable support structure for the mirrors from wood, maybe, you won't have the precision tools to make mirrors of a high enough quality to do the job. Even if you could, you would need a lot of those arrays to smelt on the required scale, and then you need to keep the metal uniformly hot to work it. A solvable engineering problem, but quite a hurdle without metal. You need metal to make tools to make higher grade metals to make higher quality tools to make everything else. You're going to have to burn something to get started.
The real answer to your question is that you have no imagination.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Making insults is not the same thing as making a point. Just because I already considered your proposed solution and dismissed it as unworkable doesn't mean I lack imagination. I don't lack imagination, you just aren't taking yours far enough.