The cheap and easy energy of fossil fuels made the leap to modern civilization possible. Beyond the environmental and social impacts of continuing to use fossil fuels when alternatives exist, would (hypothetically) post-apocalyptic humanity be able to reboot civilization if all the easy fossil fuels have been mined?
Many people follow an erroneous line of reasoning on this, though it's understandable because there's some subtlety and complexity involved.
We have been exploiting natural resources like crazy, which has depleted and will deplete many reserves over time, but not all reserves. Most importantly, the reserves that get exploited change over time due to capacity, cost effectiveness, and so on. Which means that there are many instances where particular reserves stop being exploited before they've been depleted, usually because they are too small or not high enough quality or too expensive to be competitive on the market.
Take coal, for example. There is still a huge amount of coal in easily mined locations all around the world that is not currently being used. If civilization had to "reboot" they could easily make use of those sources of coal. They aren't being used at present because they aren't competitive, they can't produce the volume of coal at the prices and of the quality that the market demands currently. But there's still tons of coal out there that you can basically just walk up to and dig out of the ground with a shovel. To some degree that same situation exists with a lot of other resources as well (such as iron ore).
Petroleum is perhaps the most likely resource to be depleted in the future, but even in that case there are still lots of smaller reserves that are easy to exploit but are not because they're too small or too expensive.
Realistically the early stages of an industrial revolution in a civilizational reboot wouldn't be significantly constrained, but later stages might be, though at that point they'd have options to work around it (for example, gasification of coal, earlier recycling, migration to non-fossil fuel power sources during early phases, and so on).
Probably not. If we fuck this up, no beings around here are going to get another attempt at industrial civilization for millions of years - all the lower rungs on the ladder have been burnt away.
Right. And that is the most terrifying piece of it all. Most of the people I know either don't think about it or think the magic of science and innovation will rescue us. But if we fall below a certain level of expertise, we will be gkbers. You can't make solar panels with charcoal fires.
I keep thinking of us as mice munching on grain from an overturned truck. Life is great (and the population explodes) until the grain is gone. Then woe to the mice.
Of course, people point to other great challenges we have overcome as a species. But is this time really different?
"mice munching on grain from an overturned truck.... But is this time really different?"
Your metaphor misleads you. It is inaccurate to characterize humanity as passively consuming a single pre-existing resource that it is utterly incapable of recreating. We are generating knowledge as well, and knowledge really is power, and from that we generate yet more resources of other types.
The question of whether we can outrun our own consumption is an interesting question that is not a guaranteed "yes", but the built-in hopelessness of your metaphor isn't part of the answer. It is inaccurate to the point of being anti-knowledge. The universe is awash in negentropy, and the true, physics-based boundaries of our growth are still inconceivably larger than we are right now.
I appreciate your comment. Sometimes I feel I am too pessimistic, but either way you're correct that it's not a precise metaphor. I do feel like the majority of humans (including myself, most of the time) are more like the mice than not--from what I see it's a minority that are pushing the bounds of knowledge. Of course, a small percent of 7B people is a large absolute number.
Whenever I get too pessimistic, I think of the gobs and gobs of money to be made solving this issue (while still maintaining or improving our current standard of living). That said, I think many market optimists (not that I'm calling you one) don't really get EROEI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inves...
Finally, if someone invents a 10x battery at an affordable price, the whole game changes.
The knowledge is increasingly being stored on relatively ephemeral media -- Spinning, naonstructured platters of rust don't last very long, and take a lot of power to drive.
If things really go to hell, I'm willing to bet that huge amounts of knowledge -- possibly even the vast majority of human knowledge -- will end up getting lost gradually, either as it becomes too expensive to keep the servers that store it running, or as the drives fail and it becomes an inefficient use of resources to replace them.
I've done some pretty serious 'rebooting' and I guarantee you that building any of those designs 'from scratch' is not going to work without decades of lead time to create the pre-requisites. I doubt there are shortcuts to go from nothing to diy truck that do not lead past many long years of grunt-work to get the basics in place that will allow you to make the next step.
It would be a lot more impressive if that list worked its way up from having nothing but hand-tools that use no energy to basic generating capacity, smaller power tools, larger power tools, actual machinery.
If you don't have a plan like that in place this will lead absolutely nowhere, try making a hydraulic piston without a really good lathe, a supply of oil, a good seal, a pump and so on. The list of pre-requisites for something as simple as a hydraulic piston is very long.
Metal fabrication is just like software building layer upon layer of capabilities.
Absolutely agree, for many of those machines it would prove far more valuable to compile a history of early, working designs that are more easily produced with simple methods and tools and update them judiciously making use of current art but maintaining simplicity. Then create a roadmap of development leading from one catalogue of tools (and techniques) to the next.
The whole project should not be undertaken as "what would I design if I wanted to restart civilization tomorrow" but as "what would I design if I were to be transported to 1500 with nothing but this catalogue".
And then there's the matter of infrastructure, quite a few of those machines assume a readily available supply of fuel, electricity or hard to get substances such as oil for lubrication and other raw materials such as bar stock, rolled sheet and so on.
If anything the 'reboot' would simply re-use or salvage that what was left over from the aftermath of whatever did us in in the first place, it's a lot easier to fix an old jeep than to make a new one and it will still outperform a horse when doing tractor duty.
Engineers are actually pretty good at making new blueprints.
In fact, they already did it once. Coal-fired steam engines powered civilization once, and could easily do it again. Probably better, using modern techniques such as fluidized beds, pelletizing, etc.
There's this perception that oil will some day "run out" suddenly, like the last sip at the bottom of a milkshake.
It doesn't work that way. If it happens, oil will gradually become more expensive, until the point where it becomes more economic to use coal (or fission, or fusion, or whatever). At that point, the amount of oil remaining becomes moot.
In the US we've got "high" energy prices but nowhere near as high as in Europe, so we can probably tolerate another doubling or two of prices before it gets really, really unbearable.
Until that happens there won't be any substantial pressure to get a LFTR program going, which will definitely solve the problem.
It sometimes really gets to me that we're all suffering a lot because a few politicians won't be adults and do their job and fix the energy situation. But there are a lot more campaign contributions from existing big business than theoretical new big businesses.
Energy costs in the US are differently distributed, more into the future perhaps, more incidentally on the community perhaps, but the market means that the costs are the same (give or take 10% for transport)
The world has always been about to end, and there have always been people ready to make money scaring people over it. This time is no different. In fact, we are better equipped to deal with our current problems than any generation of humanity has ever been.
Does Thorium solve the irradiation problem? Tell me when we'll actually have nuclear-powered cars or planes.
Petroleum isn't just a fuel source, its a highly portable fuel source.
Clearly advanced battery tech will resolve most of that, but jets/rockets don't sound like they'll be using either batteries or nuclear as a fuel source anytime soon.
Thorium does have some neutron radiation. If only it could be directed - say at the ground - then a car could fairly safely be Thorium-powered. Maybe not as dangerous to society as petrol fumes etc.
And it's not just oil. It's all the minerals we've been mining since the dawn of civilization - take copper: before copper age one could find nuggets of pure copper metal [1], in ancient Egypt it was produced from ores with 10-12% copper [2]. 21st century copper ore has an average of 0.6% copper in it [3]. I doubt that ancient Egyptians could have done much anything with 0.6% ores.
But that copper hasn't been destroyed; it's just tied up in the form of pipes, power lines, etc. If civilization collapsed, our successors could "mine" pure copper from the ruins of our cities. If anything, pure copper would be more easily accessible post-collapse than in the Copper Age, because industrial civilization has already done the hard work of converting it from 0.6% ores to pure copper.
