Coal and the Fermi Paradox

[TeethWhitener]

Perhaps lucky after all, otherwise Attila would have had nuclear weapons ...

Attila might have ended up an historical footnote if Rome or Constantinople had had nukes.

On the other hand, if Archimedes had been born in Enlightenment England, we might be learning Archimedes’s three laws of motion today...

 

[Barakn]

I take umbrage with the notion that genius springs ex nihilo. Newtons' development of calculus (contemporaneously with Liebniz) relied on the work of Fermat, among others. Einstein's Special Relativity uses Lorentz's transformation. "If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders of Giants" -Isaac Newton

 

[Frabjous]

What about hydropower?

 

[BWV]

What about hydropower?

how do you do that at scale without cement and steel?

 

[Keith_McClary]

how do you do that at scale without cement and steel?

The Cornalvo Dam is a Roman gravity dam in Badajoz province, Extremadura, Spain, dating to the 1st or 2nd century AD. The earth dam with stone cladding on the water face is still in use.

 

[Vanadium 50]

how do you do that at scale without cement and steel

Beavers. Very large beavers.

 

[BWV]

View attachment 277099
The Cornalvo Dam is a Roman gravity dam in Badajoz province, Extremadura, Spain, dating to the 1st or 2nd century AD. The earth dam with stone cladding on the water face is still in use.

and how does it generate electricity?

 

[Frabjous]

Beavers. Very large beavers.

Can modern civilation stand without a full spectrum pastry selection?

Fowler - ”In a world ruled by a giant beaver, mankind builds many dams to please the beaver overlord. The low-lying city of Copenhagen is flooded, thousands die. Devastated, the Danes never invent their namesake pastry.”

Statistically, one should assume that you are in the middle of something. Why should you be special and be there at the beginning or end. Therefore we only have a couple of hundred years left. We do not know if technological civilizations are stable.

 

[Keith_McClary]

and how does it generate electricity?

How do concrete/cement and steel generate electricity?

 

[Keith_McClary]

Beavers. Very large beavers.

World’s Longest Beaver Dam Is in Canada, Can Be Seen From Space
This is just regular beavers (but two families of them).

 

[BWV]

Forget it, I’m done here

 

[Frabjous]

A recent look at the Drake equation says that “another technological species likely has evolved on a habitable planet in our own Milky Way galaxy if the odds against it evolving on anyone habitable planet are better than one chance in 60 billion.”
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1350/are-we-alone-in-the-universe-revisiting-the-drake-equation/

 

[cybernetichero]

The only reason Humans tamed fire in the first place was to keep warm in the cold weather. We feel uncomfortable in the cold the way a frog (for example) does not. An ectotherm would have no reason to desire fires in the first place and may just view them as a danger or a nuisance. All other uses are secondary to that primal need. If humans were cold blooded the stone age might never have ended.

 

[BvU]

Propose to close the thread ...

$\$

 

[Roderick]

Folks,

This is a silly debate. We must argue based on the evidence and not on mere speculation. The author is right - energy dense fuels played a key role in the development of man's technological civilization. Our civilization is extremely energy intensive. Neither wind or solar power is a likely path. And please no nonsense about renewable energy. Wind and power today only account for 2% of the world's primary energy. The path to an advanced technological civilization is much easier with energy dense fuels like hydrocarbons than wind, solar or crops. The later professor David McKay of Cambridge, a well known physicist, calculated the massive land usage required to use low density energy sources to support our civilization. The land consumption would be so high as to crowd out our energy intensive agriculture.

 

[Roderick]

The only reason Humans tamed fire in the first place was to keep warm in the cold weather. We feel uncomfortable in the cold the way a frog (for example) does not. An ectotherm would have no reason to desire fires in the first place and may just view them as a danger or a nuisance. All other uses are secondary to that primal need. If humans were cold blooded the stone age might never have ended.

That is clearly wrong. Modern civilization is in all aspects energy intensive ranging from transportation, manufacturing, lighting, etc. Invariably intelligent creatures would want greater control over their environment and expend resources to create an artificial climate.

 

[Frabjous]

The energy density (MJ/kg) of coal is ~25, wood is ~16 and oil is in the 40‘s. The US electricity generation is 63% fossil fuels, 20% nuclear and 18% renewable.

We went down a certain energy path. It is not clear that there are not others.

 

[jim mcnamara]

Enough speculation. We cannot support speculation and un-cited claims about history "woulda-been". PF does not work that way.

Thread closed.