Can Civilization Reboot Without Fossil Fuels? 365
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."
We have already figured most of this out. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Who needs roads when you can have flying cars!!!!
Re:We have already figured most of this out. (Score:4, Interesting)
We've already got a lot of roads - where would we need to build new ones, if there's a collapse?
There are existing roads connecting our major centres - granted, they'll need maintenance, but that's mostly patching, as opposed to kilometres of new roads - so why would we need more than maintenance-level stocks of tar and asphalt?
Re:We have already figured most of this out. (Score:4, Insightful)
so why would we need more than maintenance-level stocks of tar and asphalt?
Because people dig up the old asphalt roads so they can burn the tar to stay warm ?
Re:We have already figured most of this out. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We have already figured most of this out. (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably not*. The "old asphalt roads" are 90-96% aggregate (rocks). The asphalt is really just a flexible binder for the harder stuff. Also, the lighter volatiles have long since evaporated from the asphalt cement, so it won't readily light. Come to think about it, the asphalt cement is, cut with water, emulsifiers and other additives to improve application and durability.
*I did some calculation to determine the heat content of asphalt concrete roads as compared to wood, and I've decided that both may be useful, depending on context:
I set out to demonstrate that your comment wasn't very useful, but it looks like old asphalt roads may, in fact, be useful for keeping warm, with the caveat that some other material will be needed to start (and maintain) an asphalt concrete fire.
Re:We have already figured most of this out. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:We have already figured most of this out. (Score:5, Informative)
This, right here.
Asphalt gets worn down by rain and sunlight (yes, UV radiation.) Plants and ice force cracks into it. temperatures make it shrink and grow, causing mini tidal actions of a sort that eventually breaks it down. Landslides, erosion, and slow-motion soil subsidence will cover or tear off bits of it in all but the most level of terrains. Trees and wind will cover it in dirt until plants take root in that dirt and do the rest. Out here in the Pacific Northwest, moss and lichens will, if not treated, cover the road in a carpet and allow seeds to take root in it.
You'd be amazed how fast a modern-built road goes to hell. I think only the Romans were able to build a road that lasted for any real length of time with little-to-no maintenance, but only because they really over-engineered the things (on the plus side, even today a couple of millennia later some stretches are still used and routinely ignored maintenance-wise).
Put it this way: The Chinese have a saying that a new road is good for ten years, but bad for the next ten thousand. ;)
Olde-timey carbon fuel (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Olde-timey carbon fuel (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yes, any cellulose material will do pretty much. The best charcoal is from hardwoods or dense-fibred cellulose and that, unfortunately, takes time to grow. Crushing, compressing and drying the feedstock before turning it into charcoal would help but it's more work.
The most common source of charcoal in Britain and generally in Europe was hazel and beech which could be coppiced without cutting down the trees and waiting for them to regrow.
Re:Olde-timey carbon fuel (Score:5, Informative)
Yes... and no. During the charcoal era, iron and steel were produced in very small quantities because the amount of fuel and labor needed to produce the charcoal was immense. (And resulted in massive deforestation.) What make iron and steel cheap and powered the industrial revolution wasn't charcoal, it was coke [wikipedia.org] - a fossil fuel.
Yes... and no. Low tech methods of producing charcoal typically involve losing as much as 80% of the process material to produce mostly low quality (I.E. insufficient for iron and steel making) charcoal.
In a low population, charcoal powered scenario, you're unlikely to have locomotives and boilers - it would take literally decades and square miles of forest to produce sufficient iron and steel.
What most people don't grasp when they postulate post-apocalyptic scenarios is the synergistic nature of the advances that powered the industrial revolution - and that ultimately fossil fuels lay at the root of them all. Coke for cheap steel and coal for cheap long distance transportation in particular.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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If we can use technology to overcome the social problems, we're halfway there. This will probably involve some arm-twisting, but IMHO some arms need twisting (and breaking) if we are ever to avoid the second Dark Age that seems to be on the horizon, at least in the USA. Some elected officials have been overtly advocating for a theocracy, insisting that the USA is a "Christian" nation, that the separation of church and state is not g
Re:We have already figured most of this out. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 problem is that we don't just use fossil fuels for fueling our cars and power pants. It makes the polymers used in almost every electrical component. It fuels the industrial mining of almost every metal and mineral used in those components (good luck hand-panning for rare earth minerals, or removing millions of tons of earth using only steam engines). It fuels the entire shipping industry that moves everything around (enabling modern industrial processing of raw materials).
Oil and coal do a fuckload lot more these days than make gasoline for our little cars and run our power plants. That's just the obvious use that most of us see every day. Odds are that every single thing your own today is either made from petrochemicals or somehow heavily dependent on them. I myself own exactly one piece of wood furniture made by a local artisan and a few books left by my great-grandmother that may be exceptions to this. Everything else was shipped using petrol, created with coal-based power, or contains petrochemical based polymers. Even the food I eat is mostly shipped in from large farms and ranches in another part of the country.
Re:We have already figured most of this out. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would argue that using hydrocarbons, particularly the long-chain hydrocarbons like petroleum and bitumen, as a source of energy (motive or otherwise) is the most ludicrously wasteful use one can imagine. Oil's importance to material technologies and industrial processes is enormous, and using them to make gas for automobiles is, quite frankly, profoundly stupid. That's not even taking into account the various environmental hazards of the combustion of such substances.
Some day we'll have the energy production capability to create long-chain hydrocarbons out of methane, and then we'll have a nearly unlimited supply of stock for producing materials we make out of oil today, but until then, what we put in our cars seems much more like a short-term problem.
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If I had mod points today, I'd mod you up. Personally I'm skeptical that CO_2 will lead to a climate disaster, but either way burning all our oil and coal is incredibly stupid as they are the base stock for pretty much all organic chemistry synthesis, and while sure, if/when we master fusion or get off of our backsides and start burning thorium and drop PV solar to the point where it can interpolate or provide industrial daytime energy in suitable locations we can work comparatively inefficient magic with
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They did before they were available. They dug the Panama Canal with Steam Power and manpower. If you can build that, you can build almost anything.
Building raceways to use mechanical water power is even easier, and can help bootstrap the other technologies. Before steam, most factories were water powered.
One such factory took in ore, and brass products like pots, pans, pins, wire, etc were produced.
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Re:We have already figured most of this out. (Score:4, Interesting)
Diesel engines were originally designed to run on vegetable oil and the Model T was originally designed to run on alcohol fermented from agricultural waste. So two prime movers could exist without fossil fuels. Burning oil and alcohol can also run steam engines. As could chemical batteries. Evidence suggests the Greeks and even Egyptians used available metals to build batteries. So we could have electricity, cars, trains, and ships. Perhaps even airplanes. At that point you can boot strap up. Most of the Science used in Engineering these days is hundreds of years old. So while it may be slower it is plausible.
Diesel died under mysterious circumstances, some people suspect assassination by oil interests. The Model T's ability to burn alcohol was killed by US Prohibition. Some people say Prohibition was at least some what driven by the oil interests trying to kill off alternative fuels.
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This is what killed Diesel as a car fuel in the US [popularmechanics.com]
That, and how dirty, sooty, and smelly the pre-EPA regulated diesel was. And the higher taxes levied by states in order to tax trucking more than cars due to their higher incidence of damage to the roads. And the tendency for non-treated diesel to gel in the winter time making it unreliable for cold environments until relatively recently.
The failure of diesel to catch on in the USA is hardly mysterious.
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blacktop roads exist because we didn't know what to do with all that sludge from the refineries.
if money and labor was no object we would make roads out of roman concrete, and would probably pave far fewer roads than we have.
That blacktop is crap anyways, it falls apart in northern climates after a few seasons and patches are less stable than the original leading to a cycle of deterioration. (drive in Michigan to see what the post-apocalyptic highway system will look like)
Re:We have already figured most of this out. (Score:4, Informative)
It's like trying to switch to an all self-grown, vegetarian diet after growing a single tomato and saying "See, it's easy to grow all your own food."
I so love this example. How many people even have enough space in their suburban yards to grow enough vegetables to meet their needs for even a few weeks, much less for a full year? Yea, you might get enough tomatoes out of that garden to put on your salads for a few months and even have enough to can a few jars worth, but you are NEVER going to feed even one person on a quarter of an acre.
Add to that this idea that we can just grow biodiesel producing plants to fuel our cars and I'm laughing. There is simply no way we have enough land, water and natural fertilizer to make that work on a world wide scale, unless you don't mind having a large fraction of the world's population starving...
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Asphalt is aggregate (usually crushed rocks) stabilized with petroleum tar products. Concrete on the other hand uses similar aggregate, but is bonded with cement (often portland cement), which although doesn't contain petrol products, but takes a lot of energy to mine and kiln fire which gives it a large carbon footprint which is only partially offset by the fact that during the "setting" process, cement actually absorbs carbon dioxide from the air (converting calcium-hydroxide into hard interlocking calci
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Solar cement kilns have been demonstrated. The limestone and shale that are calcined to make Portland Cement don't care how they are heated, They just need to reach a high enough temperature for a while. We mostly use fossil fuels today for the process, but concentrated sunlight works fine.
Humans are Human (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Humans are Human (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Humans are Human (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, most large civilizations have collapsed, and for very similar reasons: over consumption of resources.
Parasitism. There's a common thread in the end of most empires, large or small. The build up of incompetent bureaucracies and the elevation of power struggles and who gets what over survival of the empire.
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It does seem to be a predictable cycle, historically.
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In the case of the Mayans, it may have been weather change: extended drought - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org] .
Re:Humans are Human (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, if a catastrophe occurs, and half the human population on the planet dies, then we will have a butt-load of human corpses. Can we somehow use them to generate energy? There be lots of fat in those critters.
And, well, for the survivors, we could enslave a bunch of folks to peddle on fitness studio bikes hooked up to dynamos. Hey, all the electricity you will every need, but you will need to hire the whip guy out of Ben Hur.
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A lot of fat in those (North Americans and Northern Europeans) who don't starve to death.
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You'll have to fight the zombies for them. Zombies love the fatties.
Economics would be the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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exactly
the age of burning oil from the ground is a burp in the timeline. it will never go away completely it will cease to dominate
by the end of this century, feedstock for pharmaceuticals and plastic will be grown from genetically engineered biological sources and our transport will use batteries. truck won't run on batteries but large shipments will cease to dominate. everything will be continuously microdelivered (for those large shipments which can't/ won't go away, diesel engines will probably still do
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Complete loss of human knowledge is also a common trope in post-apocalyptic fiction, but I think that too would be unlikely. I doubt something is going to completely fry every single circuit and book. The entire content of wikipedia fits on a thumb drive. I've got one. And while no, wikipedia itself is not the same thing as having every technical journal, you can get a pretty good idea of the concepts that drive our technological society from it. Not having to re-derive Maxwell's equations is a huge leg up.
It depends (Score:2)
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.
How far back, perhaps (Score:2, Insightful)
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 fu
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After an apocalyptic event, the definition of "safe" would change. Unlimited energy for weapons production and agriculture versus the possibility of a meltdown? In a world where might makes right and food shortages are a major problem, nuclear power, no matter how unsafe, becomes incredibly safe relative to the alternative. If such an event ever happened, manhattan project level nuclear technology would be the the most valuable thing to salvage in terms of rebooting civilization.
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Small problem with nuclear reactors after the apocalypse: I don't trust anyone to operate a nuclear reactor safely NOW, especially private industry. For-profit companies have an incentive to sacrifice quality in the name of profits. Then there's the problem of waste storage; There is no precedent for humans to maintain a facility for a long enough period of time for the waste to cease to be dangerous.
There are better ways to go that are much safer. I don't care what you say, nuclear is not the magic bul
Hydroelectric (Score:3)
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Just because there aren't the same issues doesn't mean there aren't different and equally intractable issues - such as the lack of cheap long distance transport, and the lack of cheap fertilizers and high performance farm machinery. The result is that you still end up in the same place we are today - bio-diesel competing with food over scarce resources.
Rebuild it to what? (Score:2)
To a 19th century standard of living, absolutely! To a late-20th/early-21st century standard of living, probably not.
No reboot please! (Score:2)
Maybe switch browsers or hot-swap a bad hard drive please no reboot!
not a new topic (Score:5, Interesting)
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 completely? No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Without them completely? No (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The problem is SUPPLY CHAIN!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Yes, we can. (Score:2)
silly question (Score:2)
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And it'll be easier than starting from scratch due to all the tech we'll have lying around.
If you assume that all our high tech factories will still be operational, that's hardly a reboot. And without that tech, how are you going make new photovoltaic cells ?
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If you assume that all our high tech factories will still be operational, that's hardly a reboot.
Read my post. I don't say that.
And without that tech, how are you going make new photovoltaic cells ?
Solar thermal.
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And without that tech, how are you going make new photovoltaic cells ?
Solar thermal.
Solar thermal only provides you with raw energy, not the extremely fine tuned equipment to make pure silicon crystals. And every step of the way requires other specialized equipment of materials. Right now, a factory in Taiwan can simply order a $3 widget from a Swiss factory catalog that takes raw materials from Australia and Brazil. Without that supply network, obtaining simple things like that become nearly impossible. And don't forget that without somebody else taking care of basic needs (food, water, s
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Solar thermal only provides you with raw energy, not the extremely fine tuned equipment to make pure silicon crystals. And every step of the way requires other specialized equipment of materials.
I thought we were speaking of the energy input. Of course, we can develop all that fine tuned equipment and that supply network too. After all, it's something that happened before. Food has been solved before as well.
Right now, a factory in Taiwan can simply order a $3 widget from a Swiss factory catalog that takes raw materials from Australia and Brazil. And in the apocalyptic future, they'll order from the local landfill what raw materials they need. Down the road, when the global trade network gets reestablished, then that Taiwanese factory can once again order that $3 widget.
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Mechanizing farming is the top priority, it is the prerequisite for industrialization. It cannot be done with solar thermal.
But solar thermal can be used as the primary energy input to produce fuel.
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Yes... wood/any biomass. (Score:2)
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 p
Robbin - to the bat cave! (Score:2)
Ironically (Score:2)
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.
Article is short sample from book (Score:2)
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.
Surviving the coming crisis (Score:2)
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/... [thewaterchannel.tv]
OIL is a RENEWABLE resource (Score:2)
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.
It would depend on how focused we are (Score:2)
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 ar
if we had to rebuild society... (Score:2)
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 [molendatabase.nl]. Mills made cement, drilled canons, ground paint [molendatabase.nl], tobacco [molendatabase.nl], oak bark and corn, kept our feet dry, pressed oil [molendatabase.nl], 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.
Classic postmodern stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
To answer the headline (Score:2)
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 ti
The Mote in God's Eye (Score:2)
The Moties always start a new cycle by jumping straight to fusion.
Saves a lot of time...
Yes, but slowly and not at the current scale (Score:2)
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, part
Your best bet would be hydropower (Score:3)
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.
The hard parts is the integrated circuits ... (Score:3)
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 [slashdot.org].
And expanded a bit on it in information readability and longevity in the digital age [baheyeldin.com].
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
What a defeatest attitude you got there... Without knowing the limits of the tech you think the tech cannot get us to the point we need. Who cares that solar panels only can convert about 10-15% of the power it receives now, screw it we cannot get what we need out of it.../s
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares that solar panels only can convert about 10-15% of the power it receives now
That's not the issue. The problem is that solar panels deteriorate over time, and that a collapsed society doesn't have the technological means to build new ones.
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That was not the argument the OP made. He said it is impossible for renewables to power current tech.
However it is also not necessarily true that the current panels would not last long enough to give that sort of boost to get new ones made.
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However it is also not necessarily true that the current panels would not last long enough to give that sort of boost to get new ones made.
They most likely wouldn't last long enough. After the initial collapse, the society would keep falling more and more, as people plunder whatever is left in a daily struggle for basic needs. The population would need to be reduced by several orders of magnitude, before there's any chance of stabilization and actual rebooting. By that time, most of the tech factories, knowledge, infrastructure, and useful materials will be destroyed.
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He said it is impossible for renewables to power current tech.
And it is. Do you think you can smelt aluminum [wikipedia.org] with solar panels? That's an extreme example, but a legitimate one. Want something easier to relate to? I could cover my roof with solar panels and not have enough juice to run my air conditioning or clothes dryer. Of course, I could easily have a solar rig that uses the power grid to make up that deficit, and to absorb my surplus when I'm not running such appliances, but that's not exactly using renewables to power current tech.
Renewables can be used to
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
It goes much deeper than that. Even something as basic as modern wiring has become heavily dependent on petrochemicals and oil. We would have to relearn a whole new way of making wires with old-fashioned rubber insulation and hand-mined copper. And that's the SIMPLEST thing. Every single component that goes into modern electrical components is heavily dependent on petroleum. We used diesel powered machinery to mine for all the metals. We use petrochemicals and oil dependent polymers to make the insulators and many other parts. To construct a modern electrical grid without petroleum would require a complete re-engineering of our entire manufacturing infrastructure from the ground up (with engineers having to rethink almost almost everything they know).
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
Related. Here's a fun presentation from a guy trying to build a simple toaster from scratch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Who cares that solar panels only can convert about 10-15% of the power it receives now
That's not the issue. The problem is that solar panels deteriorate over time, and that a collapsed society doesn't have the technological means to build new ones.
All we'd need is something readily available to burn. Sounds like in this scenario there's going to be a lot of bodies laying about. Just saying.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Note that 90% of energy is wasted in datacenters for autoplaying videos, tracking, web 2.0, "we recommend you these stories", inefficient implementations etc.
Client devices could do with a single MIPS core and an unlit monochrome LCD, servers could run tight code written in C or whatever instead of PHP etc., and serve actual content rather than padding all pages with background noise and 3000x2000 background pictures.
Re: (Score:2)
Without that much free energy
Fossil fuels are far from free. And we have solar power which is vastly more plentiful than fossil fuels.
Re: (Score:3)
Early fossil fuels, when our society first starting using them, were basically free. Oil was seeping out at the surface layers, and good quality coal was easy to reach.
After a reboot, the remaining oil will be so well hidden, and so expensive to exploit, that it will probably never happen.
Re: (Score:3)
You know that saying about how when an elderly, distinguished professor says something is impossible, he's probably wrong?
Imagine what that means for an AC on Slashdot when he does the same thing.
False Dichotomy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
A combination of solar furnaces (mirrors and a steering mechanism to track the Sun), and thermal depolymerization ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) can break down most anything organic into crude oil type feedstocks. That includes items like paper and animal byproducts. There is lots and lots of feedstock buried in landfills. So to reboot that part of civilization, you can use those ingredients.
Re:Steampunk (Score:4, Informative)
Most electric plants are just fancy steam engines. Even the nuke plants. Boil water and drive the generators with the steam pressure.
Coal is just a more efficient version of wood. Wood is renewable and we already know we can run an industrial society on coal.
Also, look up the Stanley Steamer some time. We don't even need oil to have motor cars, just high enough quality metallurgy to build pressure containers. And if we save the books, we save metallurgy.
Re: Steampunk (Score:5, Insightful)
But, without lubrication, how would you run your machinery?
Use the lard extracted from liposuction.
It's a vast untapped resource.
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low RPM wind turbines can make use of graphite dust. Graphite is a mineral, and is geologically stable over time.
Alternatively, "lead bearings" are also a potential solution to that problem. Not everything needs to be made from oil.
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Except that the population of the world only hit one billion in 1800; by 1900 it was still under two billion - now we're at seven billion. Wood doesn't scale: it pollutes, renews only slowly, and provides bulky, inefficient fuel.
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Out of curiosity wa
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Personally, I feel that many earlier non-mechanized societies were at least if not more civilized than we are now.
As long as you were the same race, gender, religion and sexuality as the people in charge of your local village, and there were no competing civilisations nearby that wanted your stuff, and you didn't get the flu or any minor illness which generally resulted in death...