I hate to cite wiki as wonderful source but sentence 1 for industrialization is: Industrialisation (or industrialization) is the process of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an industrial one

And just a reminder it is okay to delete our prior comments in whole or part, when it only happens on my end and I skip a deletion I end up getting these messages back from you that a virtually impossible to reply to with wads and wads of prior comments in them.



Using my own prior definition that's in response to, the Hanseatic League did not go from having the vast majority of their pop doing agri to a small minority doing it. The great cities with their industries of that era were a tiny fraction of the populace... I don't see how this contradicts my point either since the lives, rights, etc of the people in those towns were utterly different than those of serfs living a few miles away, essentially just representing what small pockets of industrialization do, those town and cities had vastly more influence person for person than the average man did.



I don't know what you base that statement off of. There have been plenty of wood burning engines and cars that run off them. It's actually pretty straightforward to convert a car to run off of wood and get around a mile a pound of wood as opposed to about 2-4 miles a pound of gas. The only reason the old wood burning cars tended to have short mileage was because they were all emergency conversions kits developed for pre-existing vehicles in areas and times where long drives weren't common and firewood was, and you could just load extra wood into your trunk, it's not like it need special storage. Like I said, I am not responsible for your lack of familiarity with how engines and other tech actually work. Using a good selection, something like hybrid poplar that can sustainable produce a few tons of wood per acre per year, one can run a wood burning car the usual 10-12,000 miles a year off a couple acres, similar to what's necessary to heat a home. It's not ideal but it is doable, like the $5 and $50 hammers ... for the record you can also make plastics out of wood.



You could run a helicopter off firewood too, it just wouldn't be as good, though handy if you're surveying forested land perhaps. You know that ALICE rocket fuel is actually made out of aluminum and ice right? And that most of our rockets run off hydrogen and oxygen, not crude oil? If it burns, it can do the job, ultimately the best fuel for rockets is the one that produces the most thrust per pound, not the cheapest, oil is cheap, it is not a super-fuel. Most model rockets run off sugar and potassium nitrate (or niter) not coal or oil.



You can always 'take it with you' if you have to, you spin the energy into fly wheels or charge batteries with it.



Yes, so significantly that travel between even close stars in under a century is only possible if you either have and absurdly high energy to mass fuel (fusion or antimatter) or you don't carry fuel (laser sails), it doesn't matter if you're using coal, ethanol, or firewood to drive your economy they are all orders of magnitude to small to do the job.



A minor issue, as fast as the escape velocity of a star tends to be, it's a pitifully tiny amount compared to the speeds necessary to carry out space travel on anything not resembling a geological timescale.



Decelerating isn't a big issue, the matter around an alien star all moves fairly close to it's own speed, if you've got a big sail of dumb cheap material you just spread it and allow micro collisions with all the local gas to slow you, that's how theoretical light sail ships work, you shove them with lasers until you get the right speed, they retract their sails, then reopen them near their destination to brake. Seeing as most of the local material will tend to already be doing a nice orbit around the star, you can still use gravitational assist or slingshot pretty effectively too. The sail would also get significant braking force from the solar illumination coming from the approaching star. Even a more conventional 'fueled' ship would probably use this.



If you're using fusion, as fueling off gas giants implies, the energy needed to remove hydrogen from the gravity well is pretty tiny compared to what it will produce and is expended during topping off your tanks so you'll already have paid your energy bill. If you're running of methane and straight chemical burn of it, you'd probably want to go for a very high orbit, using a hollow tether to pump fuel up, with your height limited by the tensile strength of the cord, same as a space elevator.



Well, as I've said, I can't see a civilization choosing not to use fossils fuels if they had them available, they're handy in the same way a bunch of half rotted furniture inside a castle in the forest is handier as firewood than all those trees but not necessary. Theoretically a culture might develop that viewed black rock or fluid as 'evil', buried by the gods in Hades where it occasionally seeps up to ooze into men's hearts, in which case even when they know it's handy they might avoid using it for the same reason we get queasy about using insects or fecal matter as food sources or all the queasiness that used to be and to some degree still does surround organ transplants. Our first useful medical nanotech is likely to use viruses in some fashion, it will take some selling to get a lot of people comfortable with their docs come in and saying "I'm going to inject you with this big hypodermic full of viral material to cure you" if vaccines are any guide. One doesn't necessarily overcome such things, if the chemical model of a specific hydrocarbon happened to coincidentally look identical to their symbol for the Evil God of Fire and Greed, for instance, their own green zealots would probably have a pretty easily sale convincing people not to use it. Absent those factors, or maybe if the had good computers before a fossil fuel economy got going and had discovered AGW and it was, or they thought it was, just as bad as we tend to assume, I can't really see anyone bypassing a fossil fuel economy if they're available to be used.