My quick and dirty favorite, The Free Dictionary, copies the American Heritage definition:

v.tr.
1. To develop industry in (a country or society, for example).
2. To organize (the production of something) as an industry.
v.intr.
To become industrial.

It doesn't get much more specific unless you trace back to "industry" which CAN be used in any sense from the very narrow one I'm employing to others much broader than the one your employing, and all points in between plus others. The OED is actually WORSE, so in this case dictionaries arguing with dictionaries seems pointless since they don't offer a meaning precise enough to be worth disputing.

Sorry, I don't mind truncating old comments, for precisely the reason you state, but I almost never take the initiative to do it, because I don't want any of those involved in the discussion to lose the train of a complex thought(s) OR anyone thinking I'm trying to edit, conceal or quote out of context their statements. It's a logic and transparency thing; I do pretty much skip right past the parts of the conversation from last week that I've read a half a dozen times. Again, sorry if it's inconvenient, and I can try to make things a bit more compact; I just try to err on the side of caution as a rule, which means never even considering doing things with other peoples comments that I'd barely even notice if they did to mine.

Wikipedia's as good or bad as any other source: To the extent their stats are independently and objectively sourced in turn they're reliable, but the more controversial the subject the more likely ANY source is to be attacked (fairly or not) as biased. I've had people object to US budget statements because they were pulled from Wikipedia, and never mind that Wikipedia linked them directly to the GAO. As to that definition of industrialization versus agriculture, if that's the way we're parsing it the difference is one of scale, since the Medieval town was definitely not agricultural but, by that definition, very industrial, just locally instead of generally. By that metric America became an industrialized nation around 1930.

OK, but then we're back to talking about industrialization as something that began with the Industrial Revolution (which is probably where we should be) and a chicken/egg scenario, because while that may have been POSSIBLE on Earth without fossil fuels, that's not how it actually HAPPENED. Did industrialization lead to machines like the steam engine and widespread use of coal, or was it an effect of those things? Ask James Burke but, once again, while correlation doesn't imply causality, it doesn't preclude it either. All the advantages and incentives to industrialize have always been there, so it's at least a curiosity that the steam engine is older than Christianity but industrialization is about the same age as the US--and widespread (Western) use of coal.


For the record, the "you'll be lucky to get to the nearest gas station" comment was hyperbole; it was meant to illustrate that the difference between energy contents in gasoline and wood makes an equal mass of gas yield 3-5 times as much energy, depending on the type of wood and gasoline mixes as well as their combustion efficiency, so to get the same mileage out of a "tank" of wood a sedan will need about a 50 gallon tank (which incidentally means carrying around about 300 pounds of wood instead of 100 pounds of gas, though the net effect of that is probably negligible). If cost were the only or even primary factor we'd never have domesticated the horse, TN moonshiners would've never have run booze in octane burning cars and the most profitable company in history would be Jack Daniel Distillery instead of Exxon Mobil. Likewise, I suppose you COULD make plastics out of wood; you could make it out of any mass(es) of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, but some forms require less energy than others to convert to plastics.


I wasn't aware of ALICE, but was aware of military grade rockets using oxygen and hydrogen (I alluded to that further down, but maybe you were replying as you read and hadn't gotten to that point yet). That's kind of a special case though; you also know as well as I that, despite the impressive energy yield of a Saturn V, the energy CONSUMED by producing that fuel (not to mention compressing it to a compact liquid form) is greater, because there's no way around the Second Law of Thermodynamics (unless maybe we try making rocket fuel with branes, but that's a rant for another thread.... ) With rockets we have the luxury of spending extra energy slowly over a long period to get a fuel that will deliver a less (but still a lot of) energy in a very short period, and the added impetus of having to provide it to a vehicle we can't refuel; whatever it's got when launched is all it will ever have. If it burns it can do the job--in principle. In practice, replacing the 20-30 gallon (i.e. 120-180 pound) gas tanks on these choppers with 360-900 pounds of logs for a steam boiler, since running out of fuel (or burning it too slowly) has consequences a bit more serious than coasting to a gentle stop on the roadside.

I should've been a bit less vague and a bit more specific since I know you know the technical distinction: I said, "energy" but when I was talking about high yield compact energy I meant "power". Yeah, burning hydrogen delivers more than burning octane, but you don't have to do electrolysis to get octane by the barrel. You're the scientist, so you tell me: If you burn 20 pounds of wood (the equivalent of a gallon of octane under ideal conditions) in half an hour (the rate at which a car getting 30 mpg at 60 mph would use it) will more of the energy go to your wheels, or your radiator?

And fight the Second Law every step of the way. I remember having this discussion years ago when my uncle was the first person to sing the praises of hydrogen fuel cells soon to hit the market and wondering how in the hell running cars with electrolysis could possibly be efficent, before finally deciding it MIGHT work if you could use some form of solar or an equivalent that could be exploited NO other way so that you weren't wasting energy to get your hydrogen. Near as I can tell that's basically what they are doing, but ultimately you have the same problem electric cars have always had: It may be cleaner if you're getting the juice from clean energy, but generating electricity at the local hydroplant and storing it in a battery for a car is automatically less efficient than simply hooking the car up to the power plant; it just has the advantage of actually being possible. Again, we BOTH know the reason geothermal hasn't caught on as a main stream power source is because it quickly becomes impractical the farther you get from a fault line.


No argument, but it seems slightly implausible to expect a civilization to jump straight from firewood to antimatter without any stops along the way at coal, petroleum or fission. If they lack any or all of those options that's still the only way it can happen, but I can't help thinking that will reduce the chance of it happening to a vanishingly small probability (although the expected value in a large unbounded universe of unknown extent is debatable). My point is simply that if they have little to no experience with seeking and finding compact high yield energy sources they'll be hard pressed to build a wood burning star destroyer.

Minor by comparison only; it's an issue we've only recently licked ourselves and nothing like a large scale. People (often including, I admit, me ) tend to think that once you get out of Earth orbit you can just keep going forever unless you get sucked in by some other massive objects gravity, but that just isn't so, it it? Unless you're move VERY fast initially you better have a remaining power source or the suns constant pull will slowly but inexorably slow you down until it pulls you back again, and the suns gravity technically has no more limit than that of any piece of matter. That's a pretty big hurdle to overcome, though it's nothing to the energy necessary to quickly traverse interstellar distances, and the same old issue of generating a LOT of energy in a VERY short time rears its head again. A species addressing that problem for the first time would likely envy our familiarity with it. Again, if they address it through some compact high yield energy source other than fossil fuels, no problem, but it's hard to imagine how they'd develop safe efficient nuclear or antimatter energy sources with nothing more than wood, water wheels and mirrors combined with lenses. Maybe if they've got an Olmpus Mons or two lying around, but frankly it's hard to think of many options, even if that's only because I'm an Earthling.



That makes sense; I certainly see how it would help, but are you saying a ship moving at the rate necessary for interstellar travel at any decent speed would be able to dissipate all that energy just by bouncing rarefied random gas molecules off its sails? Seems like they'd have to start doing it as soon as they hit the edge of a system and hope they were going all the way down the well anyway.



I'm thinking more in terms of the bigger you make the scoops to get more fuel, the more fuel you need to move that mass out of the planetary and stellar wells, then through the cosmos. We needed a whole Saturn V just to put an RV on the Moon and drop a subcompact back on Earth; once again, stellar gravity is much stronger and farther reaching than the Earth or Moons, so tacking on matter retreival devices big enough to do any good and still being able to haul them out of a gas giants gravity PLUS exit a star system means they better be grabbing a LOT of fresh fuel. Of course, the more they snag, the bigger they have to be; I'm not saying a decent engineer couldn't find the optimal size and shape, but the power needed just to get it off its home planet would necessarily shoot well above even what it took to launch a crew, ship and engine.



The problem I keep having, and maybe it is just Earthcentrism, is that all our large scale alternative energy sources have been products of an industrial era that almost literally exploded through the use of fossil fuels. How do you get silicon solar cells or gas centrifuges to run your manufacturing if you need manufacturing to get them? You can do a lot of things with a Franklin stove, but I doubt those are among them. Geothermal, maybe, if you can harness a big enough source (I guess you don't HAVE to have carbon to coke steel, but you're going to need something a little more heat resistant than wood to build a geothermal generator, and if you're going to make a wood turbine you better lubricate it VERY well.... )

EDIT: To include an all important negator.