There's industrialization and then there's industrialization.
Joel Send a noteboard - 22/08/2011 12:53:35 AM
No, you don't need oil to run a car or else fall back on trees, mankind has known how to distill booze for a long, long time, and booze - or ethanol - can be brewed fairly cheaply out of damn near anything if taste is not an issue... we have in fact been using it for that purpose for longer than we've had oil wells. But it take sup a lot more land and labor to make than drilling up some pre-existing crap that actually has more joules per liter than booze anyway. So people wouldn't absolutely need fossil fuels to go industrial... not too surprising since we went industrial before we had oil wells all over the place. What that means is that as industrialization on some world that has coal and oil [which is probably a given consideirng its origins] is going to start off and have someone say "Hey, you know that black rock and liquid crap? Well it's a hell of lot cheaper and better at producing fire and heat then alcohol, tallow, and such" and whichever group, business, region, etc that decides to use it first is suddenly going to find themselves on the top of the heap, what with the leap in productivity and all.
Alcohol is not petroleum, after all, as you helpfully pointed out yourself. True, we had industrialization before we were using oil, but not before we were using fossil fuels; industrialization is almost synonymous with the use of coal (although, to be entirely fair, that may have as much to do with coking steel as burning fuel). The crux of the matter is large scale industrializations need for high yield compact energy sources, and that the only better option we've found is fission is a testament to how well petroleum fits that bill. The Nazis were pretty technically advanced for their day and the best they could do was try (and fail) to synthesize petroleum FROM coal, which is pretty strong evidence coal's not enough (and still a fossil fuel anyway). Meanwhile, even fission doesn't offer a way to put Skylab in orbit without truly obscene fuel costs; if we'd had to build it entirely out of steel or some kind of expensive carbon steel material I doubt we could have done it.
Now if we're talking about how likely coal and oil are to form, that's hard to say under the classic 'only one example' problem we have. But unless some world spewed out a tech culture in an absurdly short piece of time compared to us, the odds would favor it strongly, you should get coal and oil on any planet that's had lots of biomass for hundreds of millions of years. As oil goes you need a prolonged period of biomass falling to the bottom of the ocean faster than it decomposes for it to form in quantity, which makes guessing at the average amount of oil that forms on a planet kinda hard, but natural gas, coal, and other hydrocarbons achieve the same purpose and all form variously so that basically 'lotta biomass for a long time equals fossil fuels' is a reasonable guesstimate.
You can hypothesize some reasonable alternate worlds where you'd have issues though. Uranium, especially the useful stuff for power generation, has a very short half-life, and not all stars live as long as the Earth is old. A world that had really radiaiton-sturdy critters and lots of fresh uranium might bypass fossil fuels by noting that 'those rocks are very warm' and cobble together some craptacular Chernobyl nightmare in the Stonehenge stage, especially if the stuff arrived significantly, like a uranium rich asteroid 'sent by the gods' that kills the unworthy and must be handled with holy lead tongs. A cooler longer-lived star might allow life billions of extra years to form then find itself pretty much screwed on every developing nuclear power from a lack of significant remaining radioactive material... and for that matter the so-called 'goldilocks zone' for most stars smaller than ours is likely to give you tidally locked planets which you may recall from prior conversations is not likely to be well-suited for life, especially the tons of biomass per acre needed not just to support the kinda of life likely to be forming civilizations, and would probably have very little coal or oil. Stars even a little bit larger than ours, since stellar life is exponentially shorter as mass increases, would die before the dinosaurs reared their heads. You can't rule out oddballs, but tech is a trend thing, same as evolution itself in many respects. And brain mass, beyond a certain minimum, isn't all there is to it. A raccoon's brain is considerably smaller than an elephant's but I'd give them much better odds at replacing us if all the primates suddenly got eliminated, most big quadrupeds have very little use for delicate bones in their extremities to serve as some sort of hand, some world of big-brained hoofed critters as the apex critter might easily never have tech develop.
You can hypothesize some reasonable alternate worlds where you'd have issues though. Uranium, especially the useful stuff for power generation, has a very short half-life, and not all stars live as long as the Earth is old. A world that had really radiaiton-sturdy critters and lots of fresh uranium might bypass fossil fuels by noting that 'those rocks are very warm' and cobble together some craptacular Chernobyl nightmare in the Stonehenge stage, especially if the stuff arrived significantly, like a uranium rich asteroid 'sent by the gods' that kills the unworthy and must be handled with holy lead tongs. A cooler longer-lived star might allow life billions of extra years to form then find itself pretty much screwed on every developing nuclear power from a lack of significant remaining radioactive material... and for that matter the so-called 'goldilocks zone' for most stars smaller than ours is likely to give you tidally locked planets which you may recall from prior conversations is not likely to be well-suited for life, especially the tons of biomass per acre needed not just to support the kinda of life likely to be forming civilizations, and would probably have very little coal or oil. Stars even a little bit larger than ours, since stellar life is exponentially shorter as mass increases, would die before the dinosaurs reared their heads. You can't rule out oddballs, but tech is a trend thing, same as evolution itself in many respects. And brain mass, beyond a certain minimum, isn't all there is to it. A raccoon's brain is considerably smaller than an elephant's but I'd give them much better odds at replacing us if all the primates suddenly got eliminated, most big quadrupeds have very little use for delicate bones in their extremities to serve as some sort of hand, some world of big-brained hoofed critters as the apex critter might easily never have tech develop.
I find it plausible that in a universe as big as ours there could be another planet that's been around as long as ours and thus had time for large scale life and thus large fossil fuel deposits to form. I just hadn't consciously considered the possibility that a fossil fuel stage (and thus fossil fuels) might be NECESSARY for ANY species to develop advanced technology. It's a big universe and we do have only the one test case, but it's still hard for me to imagine a world with enough radioactive material to make fission an early option without being too radioactive for cellular life to subsist. Maybe DNA isn't a requirement for life, but any place that radioactive would probably make stable speciation a challenge because genes would be contantly be bombarded with relative intense radiation levels, more than, say, the average number of cosmic rays that strike an organisms reproductive organs in its life time. It's probably a moot point anyway because, unless we're talking about a fairly massive or anomalous planet, something like this just isn't a route to modern technological development.
Honorbound and honored to be Bonded to Mahtaliel Sedai
Last First in wotmania Chat
Slightly better than chocolate.
Love still can't be coerced.
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LoL. Be well, RAFOlk.
Last First in wotmania Chat
Slightly better than chocolate.
Love still can't be coerced.
Please Don't Eat the Newbies!
LoL. Be well, RAFOlk.
If ever there was a reason to cut greenhouse gas emissions
19/08/2011 10:14:00 AM
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I've seen Start Trek, I know the real threat is you killing whales.
19/08/2011 10:34:08 AM
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I know
19/08/2011 10:36:22 AM
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You make a fair point
19/08/2011 11:22:53 AM
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There's so much wrong with that
19/08/2011 01:08:57 PM
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"They don't recycle; kill them all. "
19/08/2011 07:11:15 PM
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Very Space Hippy
19/08/2011 10:39:10 PM
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It's still debatable whether we've abandoned the evolutionary ladder.
19/08/2011 11:16:58 PM
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You'll welcome to debate that with a biologist, it's not my specialty or interest
20/08/2011 04:46:43 AM
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I've seen a lot of mainstream biologists suggest human evolution may be mostly mental now.
21/08/2011 11:32:48 AM
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Neither of us are biologists though and it's not really relveant anyway
21/08/2011 01:21:06 PM
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I'm not ignoring it, just wondering why over half the planet ignores it and lives in misery.
21/08/2011 01:55:53 PM
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If you have occassion to spend time in those places you'll know why
21/08/2011 02:38:44 PM
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How does literal mud huts as the norm respresent living standards rising "a lot".
22/08/2011 12:29:35 AM
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You seem to have cherry-picked what you wanted to hear out of my comments
22/08/2011 01:07:10 AM
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"It's a stability thing, not a Western greed thing" seemed to encapsulate your comments.
22/08/2011 03:10:17 PM
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Only if you really cherry pick them
23/08/2011 02:48:08 AM
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This seems to have descended into an insoluble partisan debate.
23/08/2011 07:43:07 PM
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*rudely butts in*
23/08/2011 04:38:33 AM
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American companies don't go to China SOLELY to screw the working class, no;that's largely incidental
25/08/2011 08:03:05 PM
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we should abdon the myth of the evolutionary ladder
20/08/2011 11:49:35 PM
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Probably; as discussed in Brams thread it should never be seen as predictive, let alone prophetic.
21/08/2011 11:55:09 AM
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Well, for this context I think the use is okay
21/08/2011 11:59:19 AM
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That's an interesting point about the NEED for fossil fuels as a stepping stone to advanced culture.
21/08/2011 12:33:59 PM
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Not a need, just an edge
21/08/2011 02:06:23 PM
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There's industrialization and then there's industrialization.
22/08/2011 12:53:35 AM
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If you were more familiar with engineering you'd not say something like that
22/08/2011 01:53:33 AM
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I dispute that industrialization is primarily about non-agricultural production.
22/08/2011 03:10:19 PM
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Well you can argue that with a dictionary I suppose
23/08/2011 03:50:52 AM
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I'm not above that, but the dictionary definitions I've found are disappointingly self-referential.
24/08/2011 02:25:21 AM
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That tends to be the case, it is a kinda vague term outside of specific context
24/08/2011 09:12:19 AM
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Tends to moot that part of the debate though.
26/08/2011 12:31:21 AM
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and we wonder why so many people ignore "scientist"
19/08/2011 01:17:38 PM
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Think it's better to ignore "reporters on a slow news day," to be honest *NM*
19/08/2011 02:38:23 PM
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Hypothetical aliens are perfectly wise
19/08/2011 06:24:13 PM
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You may be confusing aliens with God.
19/08/2011 07:08:01 PM
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