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If you were more familiar with engineering you'd not say something like that Isaac Send a noteboard - 22/08/2011 01:53:33 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.

Industrialization of a society means nothing more than the switch over from the super-majority of the populace being devoted to agriculture to other production. In such a case it is possible for the majority of people to live far away from their primary direct source of food... try not to get to tied up in various sociological or political concepts when we're talking about hypothetical alien races anyway. A stem engine works well with coal, it also works well with wood, kerosene, natural gas, ethanol, and if necessary a bunch of mirrors directing focused sunlight into the chamber or a big chunk of uranium in there. That you are only familiar with tech in a sort of broad sense of what it looks like and not how it works is not my fault. But me on our hypothetical island and I won't be digging for coal or oil I'll build a tidal mill. What's great about hydrocarbons and heat engines is you can place your machinery pretty much any place it's convenient and instead of devoting acres and acres of land to growing firewood or ethanol or mirrors you can just dig the stuff up, typically form places where the land isn't particularly useful to agriculture. All that matters is energy and labor, mental and physical, you utilize the most efficient combination of those available, until you find something better or are forced to fall back on the runner up.

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.

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.

As I said, a fossil fuel stage is not NECESSARY, it is simply so much more convenient that it is almost guaranteed to be used. I don't HAVE TO have trees to build and heat my home, they just happen to be very convenient. And we have no idea what is required for life, let alone intelligent life, besides ourselves, so we use ourselves as the baseline. It is entirely possible on some wretched ice moon orbiting a gas giant far from any star there is life swimming around in a sub-surface sea driven by tidal effects of the moon's orbit. Life their might go technological when the fish-dudes start using the heat from volcanic pockets to turn turbines. We don't rule anything out but we focus on where we know life as we know it could work when engaging in speculation.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
- Albert Einstein
King of Cairhien 20-7-2
Chancellor of the Landsraad, Archduke of Is'Mod

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If ever there was a reason to cut greenhouse gas emissions Camilla - 19/08/2011 10:14:00 AM 866 Views

I've seen Start Trek, I know the real threat is you killing whales. snoopcester - 19/08/2011 10:34:08 AM 526 Views

I know

Camilla - 19/08/2011 10:36:22 AM 474 Views

You make a fair point snoopcester - 19/08/2011 11:22:53 AM 449 Views

Re: You make a fair point Camilla - 19/08/2011 02:06:05 PM 425 Views

Re: You make a fair point snoopcester - 19/08/2011 02:10:43 PM 423 Views

It's the other other white meat.

Joel - 19/08/2011 07:13:19 PM 477 Views

There's so much wrong with that Isaac - 19/08/2011 01:08:57 PM 505 Views

"They don't recycle; kill them all. "

Joel - 19/08/2011 07:11:15 PM 499 Views

Very Space Hippy

Isaac - 19/08/2011 10:39:10 PM 517 Views

It's still debatable whether we've abandoned the evolutionary ladder. Joel - 19/08/2011 11:16:58 PM 597 Views

You'll welcome to debate that with a biologist, it's not my specialty or interest Isaac - 20/08/2011 04:46:43 AM 551 Views

I've seen a lot of mainstream biologists suggest human evolution may be mostly mental now. Joel - 21/08/2011 11:32:48 AM 570 Views

Neither of us are biologists though and it's not really relveant anyway Isaac - 21/08/2011 01:21:06 PM 517 Views

I'm not ignoring it, just wondering why over half the planet ignores it and lives in misery. Joel - 21/08/2011 01:55:53 PM 525 Views

If you have occassion to spend time in those places you'll know why Isaac - 21/08/2011 02:38:44 PM 457 Views

How does literal mud huts as the norm respresent living standards rising "a lot". Joel - 22/08/2011 12:29:35 AM 576 Views

You seem to have cherry-picked what you wanted to hear out of my comments Isaac - 22/08/2011 01:07:10 AM 348 Views

"It's a stability thing, not a Western greed thing" seemed to encapsulate your comments. Joel - 22/08/2011 03:10:17 PM 485 Views

Only if you really cherry pick them Isaac - 23/08/2011 02:48:08 AM 497 Views

This seems to have descended into an insoluble partisan debate. Joel - 23/08/2011 07:43:07 PM 559 Views

You're the one who dragged it to that Isaac - 23/08/2011 08:10:03 PM 474 Views

Did I? Joel - 25/08/2011 10:18:29 PM 465 Views

*rudely butts in* Vodalus - 23/08/2011 04:38:33 AM 541 Views

American companies don't go to China SOLELY to screw the working class, no;that's largely incidental Joel - 25/08/2011 08:03:05 PM 585 Views

we should abdon the myth of the evolutionary ladder random thoughts - 20/08/2011 11:49:35 PM 391 Views

Probably; as discussed in Brams thread it should never be seen as predictive, let alone prophetic. Joel - 21/08/2011 11:55:09 AM 498 Views

Well, for this context I think the use is okay Isaac - 21/08/2011 11:59:19 AM 468 Views

That's an interesting point about the NEED for fossil fuels as a stepping stone to advanced culture. Joel - 21/08/2011 12:33:59 PM 568 Views

Not a need, just an edge Isaac - 21/08/2011 02:06:23 PM 384 Views

There's industrialization and then there's industrialization. Joel - 22/08/2011 12:53:35 AM 746 Views

If you were more familiar with engineering you'd not say something like that Isaac - 22/08/2011 01:53:33 AM 742 Views

I dispute that industrialization is primarily about non-agricultural production. Joel - 22/08/2011 03:10:19 PM 648 Views

Well you can argue that with a dictionary I suppose Isaac - 23/08/2011 03:50:52 AM 506 Views

I'm not above that, but the dictionary definitions I've found are disappointingly self-referential. Joel - 24/08/2011 02:25:21 AM 431 Views

That tends to be the case, it is a kinda vague term outside of specific context Isaac - 24/08/2011 09:12:19 AM 591 Views

Tends to moot that part of the debate though. Joel - 26/08/2011 12:31:21 AM 605 Views

Re: Tends to moot that part of the debate though. Isaac - 26/08/2011 05:52:59 PM 762 Views

Re: Tends to moot that part of the debate though. Joel - 28/08/2011 09:44:52 AM 547 Views

yes I was just jumping into the middle of the discussion. random thoughts - 22/08/2011 03:03:49 PM 428 Views

and we wonder why so many people ignore "scientist" random thoughts - 19/08/2011 01:17:38 PM 522 Views

Think it's better to ignore "reporters on a slow news day," to be honest *NM* beetnemesis - 19/08/2011 02:38:23 PM 192 Views

Or even acquire a sense of humour. *NM* Camilla - 19/08/2011 08:36:07 PM 215 Views

That was the City of Pearl series by Karen Traviss Aeryn - 19/08/2011 02:04:51 PM 491 Views

Re: That was the City of Pearl series by Karen Traviss Camilla - 19/08/2011 02:06:27 PM 447 Views

Hypothetical aliens are perfectly wise aerocontrols - 19/08/2011 06:24:13 PM 436 Views

You may be confusing aliens with God.

Joel - 19/08/2011 07:08:01 PM 463 Views

Not confused aerocontrols - 19/08/2011 11:41:56 PM 482 Views

It's a an amusing disconnect to watch. Joel - 20/08/2011 12:25:00 AM 478 Views

Naturally. Camilla - 19/08/2011 08:36:28 PM 565 Views

So, basically, we're the poor white trash of the universe. Joel - 19/08/2011 07:06:23 PM 523 Views

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<quote id="222166">
<quote id="222161"><quote id="222111">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.</quote></quote>
<quote id="222161">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.</quote>

Industrialization of a society means nothing more than the switch over from the super-majority of the populace being devoted to agriculture to other production. In such a case it is possible for the majority of people to live far away from their primary direct source of food... try not to get to tied up in various sociological or political concepts when we're talking about hypothetical <i>alien races</i> anyway. A stem engine works well with coal, it also works well with wood, kerosene, natural gas, ethanol, and if necessary a bunch of mirrors directing focused sunlight into the chamber or a big chunk of uranium in there. That you are only familiar with tech in a sort of broad sense of what it looks like and not how it works is not my fault. But me on our hypothetical island and I won't be digging for coal or oil I'll build a tidal mill. What's great about hydrocarbons and heat engines is you can place your machinery pretty much any place it's convenient and instead of devoting acres and acres of land to growing firewood or ethanol or mirrors you can just dig the stuff up, typically form places where the land isn't particularly useful to agriculture. All that matters is energy and labor, mental and physical, you utilize the most efficient combination of those available, until you find something better or are forced to fall back on the runner up.

<quote id="222161"><quote id="222111">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.</quote>
<quote id="222161">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.</quote></quote>
<quote id="222161">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, <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ancient-nuclear-reactor">something like this</a> just isn't a route to modern technological development.</quote>

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