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

Were that the case the Hanseatic League would've begun the Industrial Revolution, because the cottage industries of Medieval towns were primarily non-agricultural as well; the difference came with mechanization in the form of things like the steam engine you referenced. At that point compact high yield energy sources became vital; yes, wood can run steam engines but, as I said at the outset, if you try to run a car off the amount of wood that will a gas tank you'll be lucky to make it to the nearest gas station. If all you want to do on your island is mill enough of the grain you grow to feed yourself and your family a tidal mill is obviously a superior return for your effort than mining coal you don't need to run that mill. If you want to fly the chopper that brought you there back to the mainland, you better start prospecting and building a refracting tower, because if you try to load it up with enough wood to do the job you won't get off the ground. MAYBE you could do it with ethanol (ironically, the first cars were DESIGNED to burn ethanol as well as octane), but I rather doubt it; fighting gravity is a constant battle in which your fuels weight makes it a mixed blessing.
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.

Geothermal seems a lot more plausible than nuclear to me, but you can't take it with you (that's always the rub with geothermal). All the issues about compact high yield energy sources increase significantly when we start talking about space travel; first you have to get out of the planetary gravity well, and for interstellar travel you then have to get out of the stellar gravity well. Unless you plan on using a gravity whip at the end, you'll probably want to keep enough fuel to brake with when you get wherever you're going (though several forms of propulsion do offer the option of letting you use scoops on the nearest gas giant, but then you need a way to carry those scoops out of the well along with your crew, life support and engine). If a civilization can reach that point without fossil fuels they can probably find a non-fossil fuel alternative (after all, we've never used fossil fuels for space travel, and the fuel we DO use isn't ultimately energy efficient, it's just that the energy cost of electrolysis in FL doesn't directly impact fuel consumption on the shuttle), but it's hard to imagine many scenarios where they COULD reach that point without fossil fuels. That may just be a limitation of my imagination, but either way it's started me thinking, belatedly or not.
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I dispute that industrialization is primarily about non-agricultural production. - 22/08/2011 03:10:19 PM 642 Views
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