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But that's a chicken-and-egg problem. How would someone that doesn't know about oil or fossil fuels or nuclear power make a process for creating fossil fuel? Similarly, how would someone leap from gold and polished mirrors to nuclear reactors and solar cells without knowledge of nuclear reactions or the photovoltaic effect?
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Jan 4, 2020 15:39
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DrSunshine posted:But that's a chicken-and-egg problem. How would someone that doesn't know about oil or fossil fuels or nuclear power make a process for creating fossil fuel? Similarly, how would someone leap from gold and polished mirrors to nuclear reactors and solar cells without knowledge of nuclear reactions or the photovoltaic effect? In my fanfic, their energy generation becomes driven by biological research rather than chemical.
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Jan 4, 2020 15:59
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DrSunshine posted:But that's a chicken-and-egg problem. How would someone that doesn't know about oil or fossil fuels or nuclear power make a process for creating fossil fuel? Similarly, how would someone leap from gold and polished mirrors to nuclear reactors and solar cells without knowledge of nuclear reactions or the photovoltaic effect? An advanced society where the idea that flammable things can be used for fuel is unknown is alien enough to be hard to speculate on, but I can't think of any level of resource extraction which will lead us there.
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Jan 4, 2020 17:25
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DrSunshine posted:But that's a chicken-and-egg problem. How would someone that doesn't know about oil or fossil fuels or nuclear power make a process for creating fossil fuel? Similarly, how would someone leap from gold and polished mirrors to nuclear reactors and solar cells without knowledge of nuclear reactions or the photovoltaic effect? The original question was what happens when we bounce back from an apocalypse, where we assume that at least some people know about the things they want to rebuild. Enough people know enough about the basics of nuclear reactions and photovoltaics and semiconductors to find instructions and plans to bridge the gaps. If we lose the memory of technology existing, yeah, we'd have to rediscover it from scratch.
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Jan 4, 2020 17:53
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DrSunshine posted:But that's a chicken-and-egg problem. How would someone that doesn't know about oil or fossil fuels or nuclear power make a process for creating fossil fuel? Similarly, how would someone leap from gold and polished mirrors to nuclear reactors and solar cells without knowledge of nuclear reactions or the photovoltaic effect? Why don't they know? We know without anyone telling us that stuff and we don't have a world full of books and examples to help us figure it out.
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Jan 4, 2020 17:56
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Infinite Karma posted:The original question was what happens when we bounce back from an apocalypse, where we assume that at least some people know about the things they want to rebuild. Enough people know enough about the basics of nuclear reactions and photovoltaics and semiconductors to find instructions and plans to bridge the gaps. Ah. I guess I'd read that question of "bouncing back" as in "bouncing back from a hard reset to the Stone age".
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Jan 4, 2020 18:50
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DrSunshine posted:Ah. I guess I'd read that question of "bouncing back" as in "bouncing back from a hard reset to the Stone age". That was how I meant it. If we still retained at least a basic knowledge of what was possible and how, it would be much easier to bounce back from using the resources available in our detritus. If we reverted to stone age and had to learn it all again I think it would be very hard with depleted resources and non-natural distribution. D-Pad fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Jan 4, 2020 |
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Jan 4, 2020 19:54
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Yeah if civilization gets completely wiped out and then replaced by squids and they evolve intelligence and we spent all the oil they are hosed.
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Jan 4, 2020 20:25
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What kind of preposterous thing can wipe out a civilization so completely? A comet/massive asteroid strike? If climate change resulted in a 20c temperature increase, the world would still be habitable for some people, even if billions died in the process. Likewise for nuclear war or supervolcanoes or any other catastrophe that didn't literally scour the surface of all plant and animal life, and every possible edifice and shelter was ineffective against it. People survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki... not a lot, but enough that if that was the percentage of humanity left to rebuild the Earth, we wouldn't fall back to the stone age. In the context of all intelligent life, if they're comparably physically hardy to humans, there's no reason to think that a large number of them develop complex intelligence and technology and then self-destruct. It's hard to kill a species as tough as us. We're thinking of how to live on Mars and the Moon, places far less hospitable than even the worst Earth could ever be. We're not omnipotent, but if we're not seeing intelligent life everywhere, it's more likely that it's hard to communicate and detect each other, rather than never being alive at the same time.
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Jan 4, 2020 20:53
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Infinite Karma posted:What kind of preposterous thing can wipe out a civilization so completely? A comet/massive asteroid strike? If climate change resulted in a 20c temperature increase, the world would still be habitable for some people, even if billions died in the process. Likewise for nuclear war or supervolcanoes or any other catastrophe that didn't literally scour the surface of all plant and animal life, and every possible edifice and shelter was ineffective against it. People survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki... not a lot, but enough that if that was the percentage of humanity left to rebuild the Earth, we wouldn't fall back to the stone age. I agree with you, just saying that in the event of something like that happening (a weird and powerful contagion of some sort? even that is unlikely to kill everyone) we have basically used up a rung of the ladder needed for spaceflight.
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Jan 4, 2020 21:03
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A friend of mine wrote a scifi story of a species leapfrogging to nuclear power from steam due to the lack of fossil fuels. An asteroid hitting is one reason why it'd be nice if we built underwater cities; I don't know how deep we could build underground cities to survive a 1km wide asteroid hitting us.
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Jan 4, 2020 21:14
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dex_sda posted:Yeah if civilization gets completely wiped out and then replaced by squids and they evolve intelligence and we spent all the oil they are hosed. Not really, in the couple hundred million years it would take for a new squid civilization to replace ours, new fields of oil would have formed. The sun would be lot harder to deal with at that stage but hey bonus: More energy for their solar cells!
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Jan 4, 2020 21:30
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Libluini posted:Not really, in the couple hundred million years it would take for a new squid civilization to replace ours, new fields of oil would have formed. (note: not a geologist, just a physicist, so I could be wrong) I wouldn't be so sure it would be in significant quantities - for oil, probably, yeah, but the conditions are pretty specific. Coal basically has no chance of forming, as it formed before fungus that could decompose trees evolved.
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Jan 4, 2020 22:29
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Raenir Salazar posted:A friend of mine wrote a scifi story of a species leapfrogging to nuclear power from steam due to the lack of fossil fuels. XCOM Terror in the Deep was a documentary
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Jan 4, 2020 22:33
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dex_sda posted:(note: not a geologist, just a physicist, so I could be wrong) Nah. I mean, coal formed more rapidly before lignin metabolism evolved, but many existing deposits are younger than that. It's just that it takes tens of millions of years for lovely lignite deposits to build up and another hundred million for them to harden more into bituminous.
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Jan 4, 2020 23:14
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DrSunshine posted:But that's a chicken-and-egg problem. How would someone that doesn't know about oil or fossil fuels or nuclear power make a process for creating fossil fuel? Similarly, how would someone leap from gold and polished mirrors to nuclear reactors and solar cells without knowledge of nuclear reactions or the photovoltaic effect? Well, humans created compressed versions of wood to make fires by using fire. In Texas people were drilling for water and would sometimes stumble on oil. But at the time it was a black curse. It took a while for that to turn into black gold. Or someone throws a black rock on a fire and having it explode. While you had no knowledge of doing so prior to the explosion.
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Jan 4, 2020 23:25
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The whole "it's simple a rule you must have fossil fuels to have civilization!" seems so weird, like it's mixing some sort of wish for what would be good with an absolute rule. Like if some second civilization of squid people after the original people people blew themselves and most of the coal up I can imagine some squid in squid england at the start of the squid industrial revolution hooking up a crude generator to a hydroelectric dam, to electrify the rails for his Werner von Siemens squid train, doing the math and saying "oh no, this will never scale up! our industrial civilization will never be able to exceed 150 million individuals worldwide!" and then just crumpling up the train and throwing it away. Like we are going to meet a spaceship of these second civilization squid, they will tell us about how their first world countries only make up like 4% of their population and how the rest of the world is other squid they see as simply beasts and land to be exploited for their resources and labor and we will simply be shocked and horrified and tell them that sir, we are up to 4 or 5 generations since we did that (mostly). Like it's easy to talk about how a civilization without nearly limitless access to simple coal energy would grow much slower and would be less comfortable and I bet the squid british empire would take 400 years to get through the industrial revolution instead of a couple decades if they couldn't just throw more coal at every problem they encountered, but like, the end result of a power poor world seems like more inequality and a shittier world for more people, not an alien race that looks it over and decides it wouldn't be fair and just never progresses. Squid british empire would look at the situation where their the only ones that can ever achieve modernity as a bonus, not a drawback (everyone else would see it as a drawback, but like, what are they gonna do about it?)
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Jan 5, 2020 00:42
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Killer robot posted:Nah. I mean, coal formed more rapidly before lignin metabolism evolved, but many existing deposits are younger than that. It's just that it takes tens of millions of years for lovely lignite deposits to build up and another hundred million for them to harden more into bituminous. The brown coal formed later is much lower quality, is my understanding.
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Jan 5, 2020 00:48
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One thing is I could imagine some post-apoc civilization just doing Manhatten Project scale projects to jump start various aspects of an advanced modern economy instead of leaving it to the "free market".
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Jan 5, 2020 01:08
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Raenir Salazar posted:One thing is I could imagine some post-apoc civilization just doing Manhatten Project scale projects to jump start various aspects of an advanced modern economy instead of leaving it to the "free market". I mean, I can imagine some alien race that has a planet with some better cleaner easier to extract fossil fuel (like dinosaurs that just drop hydrogen cell batteries or something) wondering how we could do it without their thing and not being able to get over "but without dinosaur batteries how do they feed and uplift 8 billion people to modern standards" and us going "lol, we don't, like not 20%" and them not being to get over how awful we are to the point their wish we wouldn't exist and be so awful into some weird "humans can't exist"
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Jan 5, 2020 01:26
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Like I'm reminded of this Youtube lecture thing Crash Course which posits tacitly assumes as true that without exponential surplus energy, complex society cannot function and will come tumbling down. Which okay might be true to some extent, but clearly as oil supplies becomes less cheap, you switch to other sources of energy and make the painful transition to transform your economy to use that other energy source. In the scenario in which fossil fuels finally either run dry or get too expensive to be continued to be used to fuel the commuter economy then sure "hydrogen" might be more of a "battery" or whatever but if you switch to electric cars then you can use other sources of energy, such as nuclear energy or heavily invest in nuclear fusion to get the surplus energy from a different source to keep society going or transform it into a different kind of society than one that relies on exponential growth forever. I think that video series is interesting but veers a little too libertarian and prepper in mentality even if the guy in contrast to libertarians seems to assume that the free market is nearing complete collapse which is interesting for a libertarian. e: I think I actually last watched his videos back in the early 2000's; apparently its been updated for 2014.
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Jan 5, 2020 01:50
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Think of dropping a motorcycle into 1600 europe, even if they didnt turn it on. The metal existing itself would change the planet if they did nothing but scrap it immediately. The rubber would change material sciences maybe 100 years after but it accelerates certain aspects of the society because they have a n item to reference as what can be done.
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Jan 5, 2020 01:58
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Isn't part of the problem that the easily accessible stuff (everything needed in industry, from helium to lithium to radioisotopes) will have been mined out, depleted and wrecked so bad that they might not get very far past fire and the wheel (assuming these squid need bicycles)? I'm not saying that a successor civilization wouldn't be able to work around these issues, but it does make building that civilization that much harder.
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Jan 5, 2020 02:05
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Infinite Karma posted:What kind of preposterous thing can wipe out a civilization so completely? Kerning Chameleon gains godlike power and wishes the human race out of existence. quote:A comet/massive asteroid strike? If climate change resulted in a 20c temperature increase, the world would still be habitable for some people, even if billions died in the process. Likewise for nuclear war or supervolcanoes or any other catastrophe that didn't literally scour the surface of all plant and animal life, and every possible edifice and shelter was ineffective against it. People survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki... not a lot, but enough that if that was the percentage of humanity left to rebuild the Earth, we wouldn't fall back to the stone age. Jokes aside, being in the path of a gamma ray burst would probably do it. And a 20C temperature increase would probably kickstart a runaway greenhouse effect that would render the planet a Venusian hellworld. That aside, I mean, there's recorded evidence of civilizations in the past undergoing radical reversions in complexity, scope, and power. Knowledge can, and does get lost, because all knowledge is in the end a cultural artifact, something created and transmitted by culture. It's perhaps a trivial example, but haven't you ever met someone who's very old, but has knowledge of a skill, or perhaps a family recipe, that they never bothered to teach to subsequent generations? When that person dies, their bit of knowledge dies with them. It's easy to conceive of a civilization-ending event, such as a meteor impact, a nuclear war, or catastrophic climate change, that causes enough of the world's civilization to splinter and fracture, that in subsequent generations, the knowledge of the processes used to sustain our current civilization are lost irrevocably. Think of any object that's found or made in your present life, the car you drive, the city you live in. Every single thing we have had to be engineered, designed, made somehow. Even a paperclip! There is a tremendously complex process involved in mining the iron out of the ground, turning it into steel, turning the steel into machine parts, and then logistically sending it out and around. Without millions of engineers, scientists, technicians, tradespeople, workers, and countless others, nothing that we take for granted in society is possible, and any kind of simplification where knowledge of those basic processes is lost means that we'd have to rediscover all of them from scratch. That is to say - yes, there are backyard and hobbyist blacksmiths who've made cool Youtube videos of stuff they've DIYed, but what about the iron and steel they were using? There's a guy with a channel devoted to making beautiful videos of him machining stuff on his lathe, but what about the parts needed to make the lathe in the first place? I don't know how to design and level a road, or construct a building. I don't know what steps go into manufacturing a printed circuit board. But I'm sure that, with some years of time and effort, I could figure out how to plant a row of crops, or fashion a lean-to out of wood and sticks, or make a rock into a stone hand-axe. That's Stone Age technology right there! If you take a random sample of all of the world's people, and remove 99% of everyone else, and scatter these people all over the world, there's absolutely no guarantee that what they could figure out or pass on to the next generation would be anything more than Stone-Age. So, I guess what I mean to say is that when we lose a civilization due to a sufficiently big impact, it unravels at the base, in a cascading process. It's like the "for want of a nail" rhyme. If we lose enough billions of people in this winnowing process - whatever it may be - we might lose enough of the people who have knowledge of the basic processes of society that, after they die, there won't be enough knowledge remaining among the descendants to rebound. Just memories and folk tales passed down by mouth, vague dreams of a bygone age.
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Jan 5, 2020 02:26
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Most of us don't even really understand the importance and scale of industrial processes totally unrelated to agriculture which are designed entirely around the existence of corn!
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Jan 5, 2020 02:34
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In the absences of fossil fuel deposits people would likely figure something out either by accident or over time and through loads effort. When Europeans came to the Americas basically every other thing they saw they thought was impossible for the Native Americans to have done because they didn't have X or Y. Its highly possible that we have become blinded or discarded other valid answers to the solution since we have had centuries of reliance on fossil fuels. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Jan 5, 2020 |
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Jan 5, 2020 05:05
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Massive steampunk machines. Powered by human souls. Honestly steam probably is the easiest alternative without fossil fuels; and maybe diesel? Can't that work with just vodka?
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Jan 5, 2020 05:21
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You can run a biodiesel engine on just about any liquid combustible. First demonstration used peanut oil in 1893.
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Jan 5, 2020 07:18
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Raenir Salazar posted:Massive steampunk machines. hate to break it to you but our quest of using steam as power lead us to coal as a cheap means to keep the boilers steaming away. Coal is steam power.
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Jan 5, 2020 07:20
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:hate to break it to you but our quest of using steam as power lead us to coal as a cheap means to keep the boilers steaming away. If we don't have coal though we use wood and charcoal; as we're basically out of coal as it is. All the nice coal that was easy to mine is all gone. So you couldn't use coal for steampunk railways.
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Jan 5, 2020 07:48
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:hate to break it to you but our quest of using steam as power lead us to coal as a cheap means to keep the boilers steaming away. Massive steampunk machines localized around volcanically active areas. Steampunk road warriors traveling from geyser to geyser. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 09:49 on Jan 5, 2020 |
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Jan 5, 2020 08:59
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Mortal Engines on a volcanic hellscape would have been a hell of a lot more visually interesting, at least.
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Jan 5, 2020 09:08
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dex_sda posted:The brown coal formed later is much lower quality, is my understanding. It's lower quality because it's younger. Over time more moisture and volatiles will be pushed out. Today's high quality coal was peat or lignite millions of years ago.
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Jan 6, 2020 05:11
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You know what's also steam? Nuclear power. What's the role for nuclear in thought experiments like these? I understand the idea that if all your energy has to come from the sun then a sequestered source of energy from the sun from the past is going to be important, but nuclear power seems like it can provide pretty good baseload without requiring millions of years to build up. Am I wrong?
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Jan 6, 2020 11:05
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Uranium is a lot harder to find than coal.
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Jan 6, 2020 12:15
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Is there any reason why you couldn’t go wood - biofuel - solar/wind - nuclear?
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Jan 6, 2020 14:28
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Raenir Salazar posted:A friend of mine wrote a scifi story of a species leapfrogging to nuclear power from steam due to the lack of fossil fuels. Raenir Salazar posted:Massive steampunk machines. I'm not sure if you're confused about what "steam" power is or if you're leaving out some details here that would cause what you did say to make more sense. "Steam" isn't an energy source, steam cycles are one type of process for converting heat into work. Nuclear plants use steam cycles*, coal plants use steam cycles, plants that use other burnable poo poo can use steam cycles too. A species without fossil fuels could use like, charcoal or alcohol or wood gas or even just burning raw wood or other plant matter something to generate heat for a steam cycle. And maybe they would be encouraged to go really hard into nuclear when they discovered that because massive scale use of biofuels is unworkable. But "skipping fossil fuels and going straight from steam to nuclear" as I've interpreted what you've said is nonsense edit: I felt like "leapfrogged" implied skipping, but did you mean "developed nuclear power very quickly because of fuel supply issues"? I guess, but the physics behind nuclear power are different enough from combustion and nonintuitive enough that I'm not sure just having a need for a new power source would accelerate it *there are proposed ideas for fission reactors that use other ways to get usable energy from fission reactions, especially for spacecraft propulsion, but commercial plants are all steam BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Jan 6, 2020 |
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Jan 6, 2020 14:31
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To generate power you just need to turn a turbine. Humans have found heating water to create steam works well, especially when you heat that water with fossil fuels or nuclear reactors. But you could heat that water with concentrated sunlight or volcanoes or anything that burns. You could also turn that turbine with animals or wind or flowing water or anything else that can move it.
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Jan 6, 2020 16:21
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I imagine a planet without plate tectonics and minimal volcanism wouldn't have almost any fossil fuels, and that seems to be the majority of rocky bodies we've surveyed in our solar system. Burning living matter makes enough heat to do basic materials science, and burning it without oxygen is a simple way of making charcoal for more intense heat. Fossil fuels are useful and easy, but it would be easy to imagine a world where combustible materials are considered industrial products and not household ones (and with a less extensive society until they figure out solar, hydro/wind, and nuclear electricity generation).
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Jan 6, 2020 16:47
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BattleMaster posted:I'm not sure if you're confused about what "steam" power is or if you're leaving out some details here that would cause what you did say to make more sense. I never asked so I don't know if it was just a lack of petrol but coal was nevertheless in abundance w.r.t my friend's story. So I think it was steampower and then skipping to nuclear without developing the internal combustion engine is my best guess as to what I can remember. There's nothing about splitting the atom that requires gasoline based internal combustion engines to understand the figure out the physics of it. For the most part I'm just being very enthusiastic about a post-apocalyptic steampunk thing and isn't being entirely serious for most of it except the part where I wonder/speculate about using steam engines without coal for the post-destruction recovery on a massive scale since in our case any future society recovering would have basically zero coal available to work with.
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Jan 6, 2020 16:58
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