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I Study Climate Change. The Data Is Telling Us Something New.
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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We've discovered the breaking point of paradise. Hope the next sentient species is a little less selfish.
Unfortunately, I don't know if it would be possible for another species to reach our level of technology or civilization. We built up our society off of easily accessible energy resources (surface-level coal being our first source of industrial energy). This energy excess allowed us to develop other sources of energy, solar, wind, nuclear, etc. But if you tried starting from zero again, you could never get to this point, at least along the same path, as you need a high level of technology to access any available energy resources. Thus, if any new species took our place, they could only ever rise to the level of the pre-industrial revolution.
At the very least, even basic electricity production requires copper windings. Which requires copper wire. Which requires refined copper. Which requires copper ore. Which requires copper mining.
Generations of people with manual tools will need to die in the mines for enough electricity to be generated to run a small medical clinic, let alone get post-climate humans to a point of modern civilization.
While it's definitely bleak, it's not quite as bleak as that. Remember that we're leaving behind vast amounts of 'waste', much of which contains things like copper, aluminium, steel and other useful components in relatively easily refinable states.
Future civilisations will be digging through our waste, wondering why we were so profligate, but glad to have it all to hand.
I had thought about this scenario before too, but now I can think of many other scenarios where this doesn't happen.
Examples: a complete loss of most of humanity's technological know-how to where we don't even know how or why use those materials, loss of knowledge of where many of these (mostly difficult to harvest?) resources are buried, and warring between factions for access to these resources. Not only each of those scenarios individually, but also a combination of all of them plus other factors working against this happening.
I think that the eventual best case scenario for humanity will be going back to pre-industrial living and technology.
Those are fair points, but consider that they just put the next civilization at the same level we were; we didn't have the technological know-how until we invented it, we didn't know how or why to use different ores until we worked it out, we didn't know where the ores were to be found until we gound them, and harvesting pre-refined material is much less intensive than that, and well, we've warred, and continued to war over access to resources.
Basically, we've dug up lots of the easily accessible ore, which has a low density (you need to dig up maybe 4 tonnes of rock to get a tonne of iron ore, and that is only between 50-75% iron, for instance) and buried it more shallowly, and at higher density. There's still work to do to extract it, but it's manageable with fairly low tech.
Energy sources are a little more complex, but we've bound up a lot of hydrocarbons in plastic and the like, which should be usable, if not ideal in their raw form.
Those are good points too, that I hadn't thought about. I thought it would be challenging, but maybe it wouldn't be as challenging as I had imagined it.
But who knows, maybe we would be better off going back to pre-industrial times anyway?
But how would I find interesting conversations on Lemmy if my highest tech gadget was a loom?!? :)
Haha, we would have to go back to the printed press and handwritten letters!
Perhaps if it’s a few million years later and all us dead humans have turned into coal and oil, like the dinosaurs of the past.
Im quite confident that this takes a few hundred million years until we talk about usable quantities.
That's a good thing, right? The vast majority of the results of technology and "civilization" has turned out to be nothing but a curse on this planet.
To an extent, but we have the chance of transitioning into a solar and wind society and remediate that damage. Subsequent species would not have that potential.
I wasn't even talking about subsequent species, but our own species in the future. As for solar and wind, I'm afraid that the way that population growth and energy consumption growth interacts with the material requirements for solar and wind, that is also going to hit a wall in the not too distant future.
They wouldn't be able to take the same oath we did but that isn't saying they could never get to where we're at more or less.
The enlightenment spawn the industrial revolution but it didn't necessarily have to. Scientific inquiry could have eventually lead us to somewhere near where we're at now without fossil fuels. The path would look wildly different and there's a fairly high likelihood mass slavery could play a role in that but it's still possible.
Kind of a tangent here but the book children of time goes into some depth on how the author thinks a race of super intelligent spiders could overcome many of the same hurdles we had to in wildly different ways to become a space-aring civilization. It's science fiction and obviously not an in depth study into how feasible it all would be but it did get me thinking that there is more than one way to skin a cat.
I disagree. To unlock workable solar and wind powered electricity, you need something to carry you energetically through the 'tech tree.' I simply don't think you can get to that level of technology without some fossil fuel use.
Solar maybe not but i could see an intelligent species figuring out that if they wrapped some copper wire around something under a waterfall that stuff happened.
Hell maybe they'd skip most of what we've done and just stick uranium into cars.
I really don't have enough scientific knowledge to offer in depth arguments as to the how of it but I think it's reasonable to assume that at least some. If not most. Of the discoveries we take for granted in modern times could have happened without oil. It would be a very different world for sure. Though.
It's really actually kind of fascinating when you think of how that energy source was made, with a mass die off of carbiniferous (I think) rootless trees, aka scale trees that all fell due to not being able to support their own weight probably because the incredible amount of oxygen in the atmosphere at the time, then the carbon from those trees got buried and pressed into "fuel diamonds", plentiful and packed with all the energy a type 0 civilization would ever need, but the very fact that using the results of that die off to power our species unabashedly, has doomed us, because we finally reached that ever important ceiling that ecologists/biologists are always talking about. We thought we outsmarted evolution and nature, but we are just as much a part of it as any other being or object.
It's kind of beautiful to me.