Well, yes. But personally, my argument against plastics (and more generally fossil fuels) has never been that we should stop using them: just that we stop using them for things for which we have viable alternatives.
There is still the Malthusian side of the situation. The world population has doubled in my lifetime, and I'm not that old. That's double the strain on the planet assuming the same standard of living.
@@PsRohrbaugh It's probably too late for our species. People will never be willing to do what's required to ensure our long term survival and advancement.
@@Apistevist deep down, I suspect that you’re right. But somewhere along the way, I decided to act like I don’t think it’s too late, to change the things I can, and see what happens. But I can’t say I blame people for being pessimistic.
@@Apistevist See that is the issue where you assume "people" are a uniform blob with any power or impact. The main issue in climate change are big corporations, not private homes. If the entirety of germany e.g. stopped driving cars and used electric cars, the planet wouldn't notice a difference. What we need is not witch hunt private people, but governments that make rules for the companies that make up most of the co2. The second issue is if e.g. again germany does make these laws, if other countries dont follow it will have no effect. If the US, China and India keep increasing their co2 emissions, nothing a small european country can do will matter.
I have no idea if this is accurate, but in one of my college classes a professor said that if we switched all world-wide electrical production over the nuclear, we'd only have about 50 years of material for reactors. Not saying we should ignore nuclear, just remember that it's not unlimited.
Whatever extinction level event happens whether it be an asteroid like Apophis, envirnomental collapse or a war it's not only energy sources that would be affected. Infrastructure - food, health care, information access, communications, travel etc. would all be severely damaged. Not very long ago humans scrabbled for existence and could die from an infection. Hard to imagine from the paradise we take for granted.
Wow. You are really negative. Don't forget our species was also not able to only survive but thrive without the majority of the things you just listed.
@@matthamilton356maybe we'd be fine, but our mordern way of life is what allows us to support and feed such a large population. Take the tech away and a large number will die before a new balance is found.
@@Teqnyqif there's an extinction level event to cause this downfall, most of the population will already be dead. The whole bit about ammonia, there won't be hundreds of millions of people to feed anymore.
@@Parc_Ferme Great, but the assumption in the video is that all infrastructure is destroyed and rendered unsalvageable. So I restate my question: Where is the power coming from?
The Wind or the sun could provide the energy. Starting by small energy sources to process small amounts of material, production could be scaled with time. Is what mars colonist want to do right? It is most likely to be plausible.
And what about hydrogen? Not all books and knowledge would be lost in a catastrophe like the one described, electricity and much of the science behind would still be a thing, and that means electrolysis is viable. There is a ton of water around, so instead of carbon and natural gas, hydrogen could be an alternative, provided that the proper engineering level is reached (like making bronze tanks for example). There's also methane that is being extracted and used as a fuel today from biowaste (here in Buenos Aires there is a small plant that does exactly that, and while small, it does provide electricity for the national grid).
Using charcoal to bootstrap aluminum and ceramic industries would give us the ability to make solar furnaces capable of exceeding the temperature of the sun. Petroleum is far too valuable to long term survival to burn, and coal too, besides being toxic.
Solar furnaces cannot exceed the temperature of the solar surface that is providing the energy to the solar lens system. It is a fundamental limit, I have forgotten the name of the optics principle involved but it can be found in Google and Wikipedia, you will find the information if you spend some time searching for it. I can explain, to a degree anyway, how it works on an intuitive level - basically what is going on is that the lens system of a solar furnace works both ways, if the focal point of the solar furnace is somehow raised above the temp of the emitting surface on the Sun, then the lens system will work backwards and act to transmit heat from the object at the focal point to the Sun, so rather than the Sun heating the object at the focal point the object at the focal point tries to heat the Sun. Without eg using an oxyacetylene torch to heat the object beyond the temp of the solar emitting surface, what will happen is the Sun can only heat the object until the temps are in equilibrium, then the energy stops flowing. Hope this helps.@@MakeDo-Turner_Smith
The question about the great filter is always a scary thought to think about. Are we the first civilization ever to be in front of the great filter or is the great filter in front of us? Either thought Is scary
The great filter does not exist, at least there is absolutely no reason to believe in a great filter. Occams razor states you should prefer the simpler solution to a problem. If you want to solve the Fermi paradox a large number of tiny filters is a far simpler explanation than one great filter and it has exactly the same outcome. Our existence in the here and now is dependent on billions of tiny steps. Each little step with a probability of it not happening, if one of those steps had not happened we would be here now. If those tiny steps had happened a bit slower we would not have arisen before earth becomes uninhabitable. With billions of steps involved and all having a tiny chance of not happening it's, from a statistical perspective, not exactly far fetched that we may be the only civilization in the observable universe. We lack a lot of knowledge about what was needed for us to get here. So it's mostly guessing and speculation, but with equally reasonable assumptions you can arrive either at the universe is teeming with life or we're the only 'intelligent civilization' in the visible universe or anything in between.
@@silentwilly2983 That's just a restatement of the same argument. A "great filter" is just grouping your "large number of tiny filters" into a small enough number of clearly-labeled boxes for our brains to process the concept easier. You could write every single interaction of every electron since the beginning of the universe as individual "tiny filters" but that's hardly conducive to meaningful discussion.
Not really scary, because we live in a block universe. The past, present, and future have already happened. Most people just don't realize it. We in a way are already dead. So the circle of life is just completing it's self. Nothing to fear. No one escapes death.
@@altrag No it's not, with a billion tiny filters the often posed question of 'is the great filter before or behind us?' is completely non-sensical as, by defining billions tiny filters as a great filter, implies by definition we're in the filter. If you want to frame it differently, we have a few billions years of tiny filters behind us, and trillions of years of tiny filters ahead of us, so in that perspective the great filter is by definition ahead of us. And if you want to see it in a grander context, it's inconceivable we survive into eternity so from that perspective there will always be a great filter ahead of us as long as we exist. But these last two perspective add 0 value to explaining the Fermi paradox. People talking about a great filter also tend to talk about big catastrophic events, nuclear war, great singularity, meteorite impact etc, those refer to one big filter, large (self) destructing events to explain the big silence, not a large number of tiny filters that lead to exactly the same outcome of the big silence. And no, lots of tiny filters certainly is conducive to meaningful discussion, this contrary to one large imaginary filter one can only speculate about. With a large number of smaller filters one can apply statistics, one can define and study some of those filters and say something meaningful about them. You can determine that only a few dozen halving factors are needed to reduce the statistically expected number of civilization in the visible universe to be less than 1. Once you realize that, all those people claiming it's a statistical certainty that others are out there become a bit silly.
Electricity plus water and air, in conjunction with catalysts, can be used to make fluid hydrocarbons. (Perhaps solid too.) Porsche is doing it today. I'd suggest compact modular thorium reactors as the electricity source - thousands and thousands (millions?) of them.
I very greatly doubt we get knocked back to "stone age". I see us going back to pre-industrial level, say 15th to 18th century level. And ancient Rome invented very durable concrete, without our technology.
But if we returned to the pre industrial age the ecosystem would not quickly recover. Without a "garden of eden" where edible foods are abundant we will be in trouble. Modern crops work with modern techniques, but pest species that target our crops have been thriving right alongside us. Only people living in places where subsistence farming is still practiced will have much chance of successfully sustaining agriculture. Only a few hunter gatherers will survive in most places. Even hunter gatherers will be ravaged by parasites that we forgot how to handle without industry. We have lost so much of the knowledge we used to get where we are today that we will not quickly bounce back.
@@emptyshirt Its more that we built modern technology around the crops that we've been growing and selectively breeding for thousands of years, not the other way around, those crops will still be around and producing food even with pests and diseases, just ask literally anyone who has grown their own crops in gardens, as not everyone uses fertilizers and pesticides to get good results. Not to mention you have the farmers that grow "Organic" food are very restricted on use of fertilizers and pesticides yet they still grow enough food to turn a profit. The main issue will be, without industrial fertilizer and pesticides, there will be less food and crops to go around, leading to starvation in most areas but there will still be plenty of land to successfully farm crops on mass once switched over to subsistence farming and bounce back the population soon enough. Not to mention that it would be hard to lose a lot of our knowledge given how we've written and have so many books as well as put a lot of that knowledge into other technologies that could survive an apocalypse and stick around for long enough for people to learn from it.
@@emptyshirt Most people in farming circles haven't lost knowledge, it's just disconnected city people who have. You don't need industry to prevent parasites, you need to wash your hands and cook your food. The harder thing to deal with would be modern values, I'll admit I wouldn't be able to murder kittens to keep population under control but before spaying was common that's what my grandpa did.
@@blackkittycat15 consider groundwater. In many agricultural regions the groundwater is tens of meters deeper than it used to be. Those areas will be untenable for preindustrial farming methods. Low lying areas will be swept over when existing reservoirs fail, so those are bad too. Groundwater contamination will plague some communities who try and grow crops in the formerly urbanized areas. Nuisance species like lespodeza cuneata and heracleum mantegazziantum and many others will trouble non-industrial farmers like never before and the climate will be somewhat unstable in the coming century... Simply reverting to late iron age techniques is not enough to put us on track to re-industrialize.
Kind of a faulty premise to begin with. What apocalyptic disaster could erase all the refined materials already present on Earth? Even global thermonuclear war would leave large areas or former cities, mines, farms, etc. untouched. There is pretty much no scenario where humanity would have to restart from scratch (and even then, collective knowledge would jump-start that process). If we're talking human extinction and another species evolving intelligence, we can't possibly imagine what they would be capable of. If they were even 10% more intelligent than us, they might find innovations we can't even imagine.
You should not think of a "blasting" intro to the apocalypse but all you need is the destruction of social stratification. No more healthcare, infant mortality peaking, life expectancy tumbling. No more educating in reading, writing and calculating. Within 3 generations we are back in the stone age. A virus could do this. Remember the run on toiletpaper in the corona crisis? Now imagine a real dangerous virus. Cities will not be supplied, people go plundering the countryside, large scale food production stops. Getting food and water will be our daily routines. Our present society is a house of cards. You just have to take out a few cards to bring the house down.
People always say, "Food, Clothing, and Shelter", but that is OLD style thinking. You don't really need Clothing. Unless it is cold. MOST importantly, OVER ALL, you need WATER. So, it SHOULD be, "Water, Food, Shelter, and Clothing", in that order.
I personally think that this is the key to the fermi paradox and why we dont see evidence for intelligent life out there. I think at a certain point, most civilizations become cradle locked as the first technologically advanced civilization burns itself out, the next cannot reach the same heights and thus becomes forever locked to their world.
I think it's the distance. The star nearest to ours is 25 trillion miles away. The vast majority of our radio signals would be undetectable at that distance. We have to be able to detect quadrillionths of a watt in order to communicate with the Voyager spacecraft, and they're only 1/40000 as distant as Proxima Centauri. Humans can't even fathom the distances required to communicate with even the closest solar systems. The only signals that would be detectable at that range are the precisely directed and extremely powerful radio signals of the SETI project, and they were only released in very narrow bands
If you consider that the massive carboniferous forests that led to the formation of all our fossil fuels were themselves unlikely and that circumstances were unique... it never happened again. Many habitable worlds might not have had a Carboniferous age at all and thus no fossil fuels.
Same. managing To get to cradle equilibrium is a better goal than space colonisation. The problem is that it requires the entirety of the world to come together. Space colonisation is a race between factions and needs no such thing.
Well it most likely all started with just handfuls of plucky experimenters way back in the day. They passed on what they knew to others by word of mouth and monkey-see-monkey-do teaching. I don’t think the number of knowledgeable experts is a problem.
I think there should be plenty of people who could figure out basics. Hack, I could make you a basic electrical grid in post apocalyptic world, The only thing I rill miss is how to make wire, which reminds me, there must be a youtube video for me to watch now. To me difficult part is heavy machinery, you can't really make it without fossil fuels. Trains, trams, and trolley buses can run on electricity so they do seem somewhat viable, tho you would need to figure out semiconductors.
If the guy on the primitive technology channel was able to figure out how to smelt iron in a jungle barefoot, I think a post-apocalyptic society would be able to do it.
again this is wrong, you cannot go back to the old ways of doing things because then there were 1 or 2 billion people. We now have 8+ billion people and the ONLY MF'ing thing keeping them alive, half of them just barely, are markets of scale. Without markets of scale and oil refining at the current level half the planet would die of starvation within 2 years. You might as well say the biggest issue is not having people who know how to turn whales into lamp oil.
Very informative and an interesting thought experiment. I wonder if you have considered other ways to make steel such as those methods used by SSAB? There is no denying that fossil fuels have been convenient for fueling our population and technology growth, however, humans are extremely good at solving these challenges when we want to.
a cool idea to the fermi paradox. One planet only having a finite amount of chances to gather resources of the planet to reach space, and be able to gather more resources.
Depending on the type of technology and betterment of material making, we will never need infinite amounts of specific elements available, but only the tech-developed, abundant, mass manufactured types to replace our current thinking of necessities. For example, graphene can conduct better than copper, despite being one atom thick, and is extremely durable. A method of producing graphene sheets better than now will solve copper shortage.
The irony of fossil fuel is that it is made from natural sources. Dead plant and animal material, it always amazes me when I think about it. It’s literally the circle of life.
its made of gigantic trees and tree ferns. we dont have those today. we leave behind plastics. there is no other civilisation after us. we are it, the last of!
Precisely. If not for coal how many trees would be left in much of Europe. One of the reasons the Sub-Sahara is a desert is because people only had wood for cooking.
@@MountainFisher I don’t think you understand my comment. Coal deposits are putrid Trees buried billions of years ago. And the Sahara was formed because of a tilt in the earth rotation millions of years ago. Nothing to do with wood used for cooking
This is a slick apology for using fossil fuels. I am impressed with how it is presented so we keep the Saudi's and West Texas oil people in business at the expense of every else. I hope the producers sleep well.
Same. I remember reading something about how we're developing batteries to run on sand to replace lithium batteries for things like computers. It's still in its infancy but the concept was proven as viable. If we can develop away from using lithium as a battery source to instead run on sand, then I'm sure a future civilisation would also be able to create ways to do things alternatively to us.
Yeah, fossil fuels might have actually harmed our potential. We gained a descent understanding of the universe without figuring out how do form a society capable of unified, deliberate problem solving. Even when humans colonize space we will just fight and kill each other. We are spoiled children.
When I was much younger, I wondered if a “previous” iteration of beings surpassed our current peak, and their technology remnants, or in some cases, their ghosts, are what some, today, claim to have witnessed.
Nope. Demographics determine a civilization's destiny. This is exactly why South America and Africa represent evolutionary dead ends for the human race. Why? Low IQs are out breeding the individuals responsible for nearly all of technological innovation and infrastructure sustainment efforts in the past century. The "muddying of civilization waters" has a net negative effect by lowering the median IQ, which destroys all incentives because of corruption, poverty, plight, and brain drain. This is exactly why South American and African countries are underdeveloped corrupt hellholes and will remain this way pretty much forever.
The only reason we developed the way we did is because super rich people realized they could get super rich doing shitty things. The extreme lobbying against nuclear power is a perfect example of this, Had we not stopped building nuclear power plants in the 80's, the amount of natural resources being consumed would have plummeted.
The technology we have using minerals such as copper may never be realized. In Earth 1.0 we found chunks of nearly pure copper laying on the surface. In Earth 2.0 they would have to dig way down to find tiny amounts of copper. It may never be exploited due to it being so rare.
This applies to fossil fuels too. Methane would be discovered as a byproduct of animals and decay. Oil might never be found, for they wouldn't know to look for it. The first oil wells were built on places oil literally bubbled up onto the ground. Coal was also on the surface, which is no longer the case in most cases. Maybe they'd find coal/tar sands that we mostly avoid, but in 50-100 years those will be harder to find too.
It's possible to use for instance electric arc furnaces to reach the temperatures required. So the moment you can get rotating motion like say from a wind mill like they built even before the industrial revolution or a hydrodam, there is already a path one could in theory follow to reach very high temperatures.
it sucks people are so stupid to believe the doomsday cult of climate change and IPCC scam and will destroy everything in the name of protecting delusional claims of failed academics. So far every single catastrophe was caused by the doomsday cult rather than "climate"
Totally agree. Some people have said that AI will solve many of our current issues. But it isn't necessarily a lack of ingenuity, there are entrenched human systems that have no intention of allowing humanity to progress, and I don't know how AI will help us with that, in fact, I think those entrenched systems of greed will probably utilize AI to further strengthen their position.
We do not have the technology. You think because something can in theory be done it will be done? If an answer to a problem is uneconomical then it is not an answer. You COULD grow all the oranges this world needs in Manitoba but they would be so uneconomical that nobody except the top few percent of people in wealth could afford them. I mean they used to grow oranges in private greenhouses in what were called orangeries in Britain and France, the waste heat from the furnaces that heated aristocratic mansions kept the greenhouses hot enough, but try buying one orange in January on the streets of London or Paris in 1850, you would be waiting a long time. Like till 1920. A single orange would cost you the equivalent of about $100. Our current state of technology could keep a billion or so people on the planet alive in relative high tech plenty as most of us enjoy now (at least in the west), but try keeping 8 billion or more people alive without fossil/oil refining. We could quit pumping oil today entirely, half the people on this planet would starve within two years.
@@markwalker3499 I feel that human greed is much more of an issue than what you're describing. In fact the issues you're describing are exactly the kinds of problems that AI COULD solve. But the entrenched greed of people will fight solutions every step of the way if it means they need to lose power in order to see a solution come to fruition.
Alex, I usually don’t comment on UA-cam. Just wanted to say you and the Astrum team create some of the best content on UA-cam in my opinion. The flow of the presentation, topics discussed, and your narration are spot on! Great work and please keep it going!
When the aliens decide that we are intelligent enough to actually leave the planet for other places, they will show us how to make the fuel that will get us there. To get to the very nearest star, at the speeds were capable of, will take thousands and thousands of years. It's a lot of generations. Throw another tire on the Fire. Recycle. Until China and India take it seriously, why should we? 9:10
You are delusional to think humanity will ever live anywhere other than earth. There is no other place in the solar system we could live. Mars is a complete non-starter. Life will never be sustainable there due to virtually no atmosphere, no electro-magnetic field, and no viable water; and the nearest star system to us is over four light-years away; and probably doesn't have a life sustaining planet within its system.
I disagree about some things here, for a start there are definitely repositories that would safe guard the information on how most things here work. I also believe that in the case of stone age, iron age etc... They had to learn those techniques from scratch we already know about them so we would already have our start in the iron age plus because even if we don't have machines that doesn't mean we don't have the hand tools and know how, around at the moment.
Second was where I stated that we are not starting truly from the stone age. The Japanese for example have been creating steel using their own techniques for hundreds of years, without the tech we use today so no it doesn't spell the same situation in my mind
I was having the same conversation. People who do survive across the globe would have preexisting knowledge and skills that our earliest ancestors did not. Further, we would be able to reverse engineer existing resources like steel and alloys. That would give future civilization a head start. Also, I think he has understated the technological advances our pre-industrial ancestors possessed. Concrete is one big example he mentioned. The Romans had concrete that is widely understood to be superior to what we have now.
So as some have mentioned Nuclear is an option. To get there we'd still need some initial hot burning fuel. But with copper decently accessible we can start doing electricity to make hydrogen, which burns at up to 2000c in air. Since we'd probably use electrolysis on water, we also got pure oxygen, in the stoimetric ratio at that. So thats 2600c flames, enough for even silicon. We can do U and Th with that too. W is another beast, and I actually dont know how they melt it today, without looking it up. Electric arc kilns perhaps?
Many of our inventions and tech are based on what is easily available around us. A civilisation after us would find new ways to get to space. And currently do to plate tectonics new areas of fossil fuels will resurface. But conserving energy needs to be a virtue for any civilisation that want to last.
The geological processes that created the fossil fuels resources we’ve been using are hundreds of million years in the making. Plate tectonics is not a driver in fossil fuel creation from the decay, deposition, compaction at depth under heat and pressure of organic matter. Plate tectonics might be a driver in making mineral resources more accessible though.
@@Apistevist We could do both; materialism and consumerism are not serving us well, and that's where we need to conserve. Doesn't mean spend bare minimum energy, just means be smart/efficient and sustainable with it
Do we need to go to other planets? The answer is we do not. There is generally millions of light years between galaxies. We just need to sit and wait for terrestrials from advanced planets to move us along.
After having read American Prometheus this past spring, and now patiently waiting for Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer, nuclear war has really been on my mind a lot more lately…. And this type of subject matter overall. Great video.
@JohnnyNiteTrain ... 'nuclear war' will not be allowed by our visitors ('aliens/gods') from our future who want to control the condition of the world they inherit. Our 'free will' is subject to Their determinism. Surely you have noticed how they protect key players from George Washington to Adolf Hitler because they dare not change their history/ancestors too much, although small tweaks are attempted
I'm definitely probably missing something in this scenario, but why couldnt humans just use charcoal power to reach up to a point of electrical generation capability without fossil fuels (like the late 1800s and early 1900s) but instead use electrical resistance and arc furnaces to melt/work higher temperature materials without needing fossil fuels to generate the heat?
@@m1abrams1776 You heat water to make steam and send the steam through turbines to make electricity...all this can be made with copper wire and iron-adjacent materials. Also, the video legit said charcoal is carbon neutral. The gasses are released from charcoal that came directly from trees that took the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Co2 didnt appear or disappear- you cant add CO2 into that chemical equation
You’ll run out of trees well before you get anywhere near a decently sized civilization that can dip back into nuclear or renewables. Cultures regularly denuded their entire landscapes for fuel as early as the Iron Age.
I'm always in awe, every time a new Astrum video comes out. Initially I craved for the talent these guys put in their creations; but recently, I found myself more and more entertained in how could they pick a different, entirely new subject, and do an amazing work in presenting it. I love their rythm and balance, the perfect equilibrium they reach in presenting the visuals while the narration goes on... Amazing job, love it.
It's always seemed to me to be a solution to the Fermi paradox. The amount of factors that had to come together just right in order for there to be huge fossil fuel deposits was remarkable. On how many planets would that occur? It's not impossible but so is winning the lottery a dozen times in a row. Then you've got all the other factors that allowed complex life -and ultimately civilization - to evolve. For example, how many proto planets got hit by just the right size and direction of a massive celestial object to form a moon that stabilises the planet's rotation so that you don't have environmental chaos? And that's just one factor. But that's a discussion for another day...
Every single planet that has life on it also has fossil fuel deposits. Living organisms are made out of carbon and that carbon will accumulate when those organisms die and eventually turn into coal and oil and gas.
If the atmosphere contains sufficient carbon to support life, It contains sufficient carbon to produce fossil carbon. It's all the other improbabilities that make it rare and unlikely.
I think more people need to realize that regardless of how it affects the environment, fossil fuels are a necessary step and part of society. We won’t ever fully remove them, though now that we have good energy production, we can spend time working to replace them a lot of the time.
I did a technology module for my OU degree back in the mid-eighties. And one of our lectures was "When will oil run out?" The consensus seemed to be before the end of the century. And yet, here we are, forty years later, still with plenty of oil. It turns out that there is oil everywhere - far, far more than we ever thought. It gets harder to get to, of course, but, as the easier oil is used up, we simply adapt, accept higher costs, invent new technology, and move on the the more difficult oil. I can see no end to this. And the same is pretty much true of all the other essentials you mention. It would appear that, if we want to destroy the Earth twice, there are more than enough resources still left to do it all over again.
it seems more and more likely to me that oil is produced by a geological process, and that it is just not the remains of millions of years of organic life.
The amount of new oil fields we discover every year has decreased rapidly. It is only known sources that were not easily accessible enough to dig cheap are getting digged now since prices are increasing. This drives innovation and technologies like fracking get cheaper than thought possible yars ago. However, the amount of oil - and mostly anything else - is indeed very limited and will run out unless we either change to other resources like sun and wind power or asteroid mining. We NEED to stop wasting oil urgently and fast, because it will only reach for 2 more generations of people. And this without even considering climate change, glyphosat, world war 3, AI singularity and whatnot.
Lots of popular misconceptions in this video: 1. Biomethane and biofuel liquid fuels are a thing. 2. Bioplastics are a thing. 3. Molten Oxide Electrolysis can be used to make iron from ore with nothing but electricity. 4. Hydrogen is also a thing and it can be made with electricity and water. That hydrogen can be used to make fertilizers, cement, steel, and yes, purified silicon. Also rocket fuel. 5. Electricity can be made with wind power, solar, hydroelectricity, bioenergy, geothermal, and nuclear. Fossil fuels are not currently necessary with current technology and while they were the path to development we took, they are not necessary to get to this level for the above reasons missed out in this video.
I agree with all alternatives, but at the same time a new civilization starting from scratch wouldn't be able to acquire all this knowledge without having other easier energy sources at disposal and many years or even centuries of experimentation and research.
@chpsilva water wheels evolve to hydropower easily and predate the use of fossil fuels. Windmills evolve to wind electric generators easily and predate the use of fossil fuels. Bioenergy predates the use of fossil fuels including to run steam engines. Utilizing geothermal hotsprings for various purposes evolves into geothermal power easily and predates fossil fuels. Focusing solar energy to generate high heat using reflective surfaces predates fossils fossil fuels and can easily evolve into temp solar generation. The only thing on that list that was introduced after fossil fuels was nuclear power. Humans first created pure hydrogen in 1671, identified it 1766, used electrolysis to make it around 1800, and made an internal combustion engine using hydrogen in 1806. We never needed fossil fuels. There were other paths that presented themselves earlier that we could have taken but didn't. We never needed them, only ever needed them cause we unnecessarily built a civilization dependent on them, don't need them anymore, and other civilizations could develop without them no problem.
None of those are energy sources. None of those can exist without the existing fossil fuel foundation. None of those can power current civilization at the levels we expect.
An easier alternative for smelting would be mirror arrays - polished tin should be enough to create multifaceted mirrors that could focus sunlight on the ore you are trying to smelt, with temperatures only being limited by optical quality. Using biological sources for many chemicals would also be a much "easier"/elegant solution, though the necessary understanding might be hard to transfer without digital information processing (imagine needing to learn all of biochemistry from nothing but old paper scrolls)... I think a different kind of society would have no problem creating a technical civilization based more on optics and bioengineering, than on fossil fuels/electricity and mass fabrication/machining/etc..
Some of these stock clips are so odd it really makes you wonder if whoever made them isn't actually an alien themselves. Like some of these people do things people just don't do at all. I can't get over it, it's so odd! :O
This is a great summary of the important materials throughout history in a chronological order and their temperature points. Feels like this is what schools should show us before we start science class. Giving context will make lessons more interesting
A full summary before beginning seems a bit unnecessary, but some historical context for STEM courses would be nice. A lot of the time just knowing why someone wanted to solve a problem and their limitations help you understand the solution.
@@andrewhooper7603 yea, just feel that lessons should have summaries based on important context instead of mindless regurgitations that some teachers do.
You could replace fossil fuels with H2 and O2 (burns at about 3000°C) which can be easily obtained by electrolysing water. Or you can just smelt your metal ores directly with the electricity, arc furnaces exist/could be invented again.
And how you produce H2 without electricity ?! Can you imagine the level of tech just to produce 1 single generator when all you have is sticks and stones? Even producing 1 banal stell bolt - is "alien tech" at that stage.
@@M4V3RiCkU235 dont forget electrolyse of water is only about 50% efficiency, so it's not great but could still be an alternative for fossil fuel, like train, truck or planes. It has already been used in rocket so it's not un imaginable to be used else where
@@M4V3RiCkU235 simple mechanical energy and a motor could still electrolyse water. You can grab a 9 volt battery and stick it in salt water and produce hydrogen and oxygen, and the fun thing about it is that you can burn h2 and o2 right back into water.
for the heating problems, what about methods of generating heat than combustion? it should be possible to set up glass panels in a way that focuses all the light into one spot, heating it up enough to melt even silicon. you also don't necessarily need fossil fuels first to generate electricity. copper melts at 1085c, meaning charcoal (or solar) can melt it, so you could absolutely make turbines out of it and start generating electricity by placing them in waterfalls for example. from there, you could use that electricity to generate the heat required to melt other metals.
@@davidkavanagh189 couldn't you store the heat though? you don't need to transmit it all at once, you could store it in salt for example, which is very good at retaining heat, and slowly build it up without ever overheating the components, right? even if that doesn't work, the solar option still works, reflecting sunlight with quartz or something.
@@davidkavanagh189 that's not really a valid argument. right now nobody is working on this problem because it's not a problem, civilization hasn't collapsed yet. in the past, people used combustion because they didn't think of any other options, but if civilization collapsed humanity would still retain knowledge of the old world, so people would have an advantage and try things those who came before never did.
@@Deltexterity And how exactly would this collapsed society manage to make the super precise lensing for your sun machine or the complex materials and technology to make your electric metal melter? I think you'd find that burning stuff would still be the answer.
Great video. Do not apologize for giving people real information. If they don't like it, it's because they are ideologically driven and that doesn't help anybody. They can stuff it. Thank you for admitting we don't know how much oil is out there. 20 years ago, a giant percentage of reputable people honestly believed that there was only another 30 years of oil left, and that we had already reached peak oil production. They forget just how much mankind can innovate.
I honestly appreciate any channel that converts kilometers to miles and Celsius to Fahrenheit (and vice-versa) for it's viewers; It makes it a hell of a lot easier for those of us using a different measurement option than the one being presented.
Wrong. Americans are too complacent. There's nothing like being confronted with the need to evolve and to join the world and the need to abandon those obsolete imperial measures. The American scientific community does it already. It's time to go metric. Like losing those little wheels behind a child's first bicycle...
25 years ago, when I first started taking interest in stuff like this, we had about 50 years of oil reserves left. Now we're all the way down to 50 years left. Not sure what we're going to do in 25 years when we only have 50 years of reserves left, probably raise prices 2-3x more.
I do feel like we could get to the temperatures we needed with other means but it would undoubtedly be far far far more difficult. I doubt that a civilization would boom as quick as ours has without it but I don't think it is impossible.
Induction furnaces will always be possible as many forms of electricity not reliant on fossil fuels will always be possible. And unlike in this thought experiment, even launching all of our nukes won't destroy the electrical motors that have already been produced and are already stuffed with copper. The electronics of these motors will be severely degraded if they are above ground. Electrical devices don't need electronics to function, though. Just conductors and insulators. The motor windings will of most motors will survive. That's just copper. That and survivors will have millions of sump pumps safely in pits in basements to raid. Water is a decent shield against radiation so anything under water will be salvageable. It won't function, but survivors can look at their structure. Not to mention the landfills and random dumps filled with underground deposits of all things from manuals to older, sturdier manufactured goods.
@@timothypopik2288 Oh You're 100% right. The implication is it wouldn't have boomed at all. Our technology progression probably would have taken many many more generations and be far slower.
Imagine the destruction and waste Russian subhumans are causing right as we speak. Even just the destroyed concrete buildings and other structures in Ukraine... It's insanity. Also, the Chinese with their huge ghost cities. These nations should be annihilated.
Unfortunately, wars are actually the greatest promoters of new technology and advancements in technology. Most of our current tech is a result of WW2 or the fights there after, created by and for the military to stay one step ahead. Everything from internet, gps, advances in computing.
@@Dsrt_Rat i know that . but given the enormous amount of sheer waste and altogether ruin , the efficiency of such endeavour is ridiculous . war promotes innovation like nothing else ( even cold war ) . just because a common threat is the only way to make people at large willing to work together towards doing better . it's experimentally obvious , however pathetic , that prolonged peace times don't actually serve civilisation .
obtaining tin is quite hard due it's rareness and scattered locations. It's thought by some that it was because of this it was one of the main factor in the collapse of the bronze age.. Once one source of tin had dried up it put extra pressure on the remaining sites which quickly exhausted one mine after another. Even with modern techniques tin is still a rare commodity so unless we went straight to iron/steel we wouldn't get beyond pointed sticks with chipped stones to do any cutting etc.
I can just imagine what would be made first from iron - knives and swords. Fossil fuels are really stored solar energy. And plastics which potentially a huge source of energy are littering the planet. They could be burnt (to the further degradation of the environment) with no energy required to mine them (already above the ground in abundance). One irony in all of this is that had the population been restricted in the first place, those living could have enjoyed everything we have now but with a much lower consumption of the resources we currently use as if they were inexhaustible.
8 billion strong? 4 billion strong were already too much. Strong is a strange word to use in this instance. 3 is a crowd. 8 billion is a mess nobody can fix.
Methane can be extracted from a lot of biological processes like fermentation. It's slower, but if you use renewables for heating and cooking, you'd be able to make due. Also, one could use alcohol to achieve higher temperatures. Alcohol production isn't that hard with rudimentary tools, though main difficulty with that one is keeping it from "evaporating".
The Pyramids weren’t built with fossil fuels, the granite wasn’t cut from mountains and transported to its location and foisted 100’s of feet up a pyramid. The mathematicians and chemists that put together the plans and the building materials didn’t need fossil fuels to the work that they did that has stood for over 5000 years. Could they have gone to the Stars if they continued their incredible development from over 5000 years ago?
There is no need to go to the stars other than curiosity. Who are they trying to impress anyway? A human life is only on this earth for the blink of an eye, compared to the grand scheme of things.
About melting metal. You've forgotten about a thing called a "solar furnace". One that is located at South Table Mountain campus can create a temperature of 3000 degrees C. Granted, the next civilization would have to build such solar furnaces in the first place, and they probably won't be as effective as fossil fuel furnaces. But still, dealing with iron and other metal IS possible without fossil fuels.
We only have to find ways to produce electricity without fossil fuels. Electricity can produce high enough temperatures to melt all kinds of metals. You can produce electricity without any high temperature materials via the sun. Sun ovens (mirror chambers) get water boiling, which turns brass or bronze turbines (at first). Once you can produce enough electricity with those, you can start refining higher melting point metals. Similarly, biogas can be produced without any metals at all. You just need big stone tanks and lots of plant waste, manure, excrement and other materials that produce gasses when digested by bacteria. That gas can be used in ovens to produce high temperatures either directly for melting metals with a relatively low to medium melting point (at first) or to produce electricity later on with those metals and alloys. Such a civilization could actually be much more sustainable from the get go and skip the dreadful fossil fuels. Maybe their development is a tad bit slower, but that doesn't have to be the case either. If we had skipped fossil fuels and all the decades and hundreds of years of development for machinery to use them and instead had that time used to develop machinery to produce electricity right away, we'd still have arrived at our current development level at the same time. Naturally, back in those ages we didn't have the knowledge we have today, so that would have never happened (save for external intervention.👽). But today we have this knowledge and could skip a lot of steps to speed up the process. Fossil fuels are a convenient source of energy but by far not the only source that allows for the development of a high-tech civilization.
We need to find a way to record everything we've learned, good and bad, in a durable form, that future civilizations could understand. Hopefully, they could do it better than we did.
It’s called stone carving. Done the same way as the Rosetta Stone. Then hopefully someone has kept their language and writing lol and it’s one of the languages written down.
@@whosaidthat5236 ...and by durable, I meant more than a few thousand years. Rocks don't last forever. Even the whole earth has an expiration date. It would have to be stored in many places, OFF earth.
other than dying at 20 from a mild infection. All we would need to survive and prosper would be water ,shelter, fire, clothing and alcohol.+ not to have the apocalypse to start in the winter.
I agree but we need to invest trillions more and each and every year until we succeed. We should also invest trillions into tapping into geothermal energy. Geothermal can easily provide all our energy needs for thousands of years.
All the Fusion comments... yes I like the idea and maybe in the next 100 years we will get there. But meanwhile we have fission reactors, which, in spite of all the (false) negative hype, are much more environmentally friendly than current power technologies (even solar and wind considering the poisons and coal required to make them). The current fission technology in use is only one of three fission technologies already developed. A working Thorium reactor has already been built and safety mechanisms now are available to overcome the problems. The final fission technology even recycles current Fission waste and makes it reusable... and lowers the potency of the byproducts lifetime from tens of thousands to a few dozen years.
If sufficient knowledge of engineering and science survives, we can kickstart civilization easily. If you know what you need and why you need it, you can find plenty of coal still, and from there build up. Without the knowledge, it will probably take a couple of thousand years more (and look probably very different to today's world) but human ingenuity is irrepressible.
You forgot to talk about Glass, which is also very important material in our world and requires temperatures around 1500°C. To sum it up : in a world deprived of fossil fuel you wouldn't be able to build Solar panels (steel+glass+silicon), Windmills (steel+concrete+fibre glass+electronics/silicon), any kind of electrical power plant including hydraulic (steel+concrete+divin+mining+metallurgy of complex alloys)... Basically, you can't build a "renewable world" unless you already have "non renewable resources"
I'm pretty sure the amount of gas my kids generate could probably feed a space program while also feeding a small star. Don't get me wrong, I love my little gas clouds.
The point isn't whether or not we can survive, it's whether we can become technologically advanced enough for things such as space travel. At best it would make things significantly more difficult.
@@MrKing-qd7gi There is an inherent paradox in that statement. We can survive (and actually maintain a massive human population with a high quality of life) while eliminating fossil fuels. We (probably) cannot venture beyond the orbit of our Moon without them (at least not at present; give us a few hundred years, and all bets are off!). But by pursuing any massive leap in technology at present (space travel is only one such possibility) aided by fossil fuels *_(indeed, by continuing to extract and burn them for any reason at all),_* we both threaten our survival and virtually guarantee a significantly lower quality of life for billions of humans (both presently alive, and in the future). And I think it would be a true tragedy if we destroyed our civilization in an attempt to elevate it! How many billions of humans have lived and died, gradually expanding the body of human knowledge and our capacity to think in new and exciting ways, only for the people alive in the 21st century to be selfish and short-sighted and screw it all up? So...ensuring that the Earth remains a planet that can support us is orders of magnitude more important than landing astronauts (or gods forbid, colonist astronauts) on Mars in some half-witted attempt to safeguard our species against existential threats to life on Earth, especially since WE are the main existential threat.
@@VoIcanomanYou understand it is 100% certain there will be a natural disaster that will wipe humanity out given enough time? The conclusions about colonizing other planets are simple to draw from that. We must pursue it now while we have the means and resources to do it.
We burn coal because we can, not because we have to. Think about rail vs car travel. There isn't anything that can't be done really without fossil fuels, it just requires more work. You might be living is smaller house right now, one not made for concrete etc...but you would still be living in a house. Also think what would happen if we lived in a world where there was 1000 times as much oil as there is now. We might all be using rocket cars as fuel efficient engines might not have been invented. Our economy is dependent on oil until it isn't. Then we will have to shift things around it will cause problems. We shouldn't think that technological progress is dependent on oil, as scarcity drives new innovations to get around the road blocks.
The saddest part of the climate debate, is that most people (on the left and right) believe that switching to clean alternatives would be costly and job killing. In fact, the exact opposite is true. High oil tax plus instant rebates for all citizens would create the greatest economic boom in world history without hurting consumers in the least. Even if climate wasn't a problem, it would be foolish to not do it as quickly as possible.
So the next civilization after this one might be a steampunk one? That would be interesting! At least without electronics, it would be harder to have a surveillance state!
My view on fossil fuels has been to be thankful for the point they have gotten us to. However, we are also very technologically advanced now and capable of using other forms of energy that can be much more sustainable than fossil fuels. We are at a point now where we might be able to minimize fossil fuel consumption while continuing to innovate and improve!
There is nothing available today that can replace fossil fuels. Over 80% of global energy comes from fossil fuels. Steel, concrete, silicone, plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, and energy are derived from fossil fuels. There are currently over 6000 products made from fossil fuels. From contact lenses to toothpaste. From camping gear to tires.
fossil fuels are not a problem for people. they are a problem for globalist elites interested in restricting people's freedom/power. that is why "misinformation" is a problem (not a problem when media corporations do it, only when independent small time people say the wrong thing). its not a threat to normal people. it is *empowering* for normal people to say what they think. who it does not help, is the elites wanting things to remain a certain way.
This scenario doesn't even take into account climate change and how much harder it will be to organize society as we leave the climate sweet spot we've benefitted from over the last few thousand years...
Fossil fuel is both a blessing and a curse. The easy access to high density forms of energy in oil, gas and coal has catapulted our species forward but we are at a point where we risk stagnating that progress unless we continue to develop newer and better sources of energy. There is a direct tie between energy consumption and quality of life that I don’t see any reason doesn’t continue. If want to get to a space faring post scarcity society we need more energy than fossil fuels alone can provide. Even if you are a skeptic of global warming that should be reason enough to embrace development of alternate sources of energy.
Fascinating, particularly your current info on fossil fuels. This gave me a better understanding about how all the fossil fuels we have burnt is what has gotten us to this point now. That really does ring true.
Very interesting analysis. The "future" civilization that might need to start from scratch is us in 30, 40, 50 years, even if no catastrophic event occurs. We would still need to figure out how to proceed civilization without fossil fuels...And 50 years is just around the cornee.
I've thought about this for decades. I think our landfills and the plastics we bury are the energy source of a post apocalypse civilization. Furthermore, all the refined metals and other valuable resources we bury in landfills are actually a gift to those future peope, or maybe ourselves. In most of the world, especially the developed countries, recycling is just a propagandized pipe dream. Maybe that's for the best.
Where I live, trash no longer ends up in landfills. 99% (yes, 99%) of it is either recycled or incinerated, creating electricity and heat. However, there is still enough stuff in the form of vehicles, buildings and just everyday objects for any future civilization to rise from the ashes.
@@orsaz924 The average person DOES recycle. Its those in power that decide what happens to it after it is collected. Mostly it is just sent to third world countries. Or burnt, making recycling pointless.
7:26 A lack of concrete isn’t going to hinder a civilisation reboot. Look at the Greeks, Ancient Egyptians, the Mesoamerican civilisations, The Indus Civilisation, the Mesopotamians, etc. Cement was never used by these peoples but life seemed to go on perfectly well for them. The more pressing problem is finding a strong and resilient material for foundations in earthquake-prone regions. Or maybe not. Given the premiss in this video, the world population might have dwindled to the point where the remaining humans will have decided to just move to areas where earthquakes are exceptionally rare.
Chilean here. In Santiago, one of the oldest buildings standing is San Francisco church. It has lasted centuries withstanding earthquakes, thanks to its foundations being supported by rounded stones. The whole building rocks and rolls when there's an earthquake. It is thought that technique was native's idea. So, you can build earthquake resistant large buildings without concrete. That church is made of stone.
@@MariaMartinez-researcher Mind-boggling-ly cool! I always thought the rollers were a modern invention. I had no idea that it was at least a few centuries old. Thanks, Maria for sharing that, I really appreciate it 😃
@@MariaMartinez-researcher Iglesia de San Francisco, Santiago de Chile was built in 1554. It was completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1583. It was rebuilt in 1622 and large portions collapsed in 1643, 1647, 1730, and 1751 due to earthquakes. You can see the mortar between the adobe bricks from the outside of the church, which makes sense since forms concrete have been discovered as far back as 6500 BCE. Spanish burial chambers dated 4000 BCE even contains forms of concrete. That church has concrete.
Could we build a few structures without concrete? Yes. But why are our bridges now mostly concrete? Cost and the ability for scale. We would support a far less concentrated society without it. We need more nuclear power to move forward.
@@External2737 Hi 👋🏼. I confess I did not think of bridges. But I don’t think there are that many buildings so even if concrete is scarce it will still cover non-building structures. Of course, I might be mistaken, after all I am not an expert. But then again, there is that roman aqueduct in Spain; maybe tweaking things here or there might enable building bigger bridges? Then again, an aqueduct is not a carrying the same load as a bridge.
A lot of wrongs here. Green cement and steel can be made. Look at Sweden. Farmland is abundant. Therefore wood is not taking land. Wood can in part replace fossils. Sersch Advanced Biofuels Conference.
If you ask a person from a century ago that you'll be able to talk to someone many kilometers away from the palm of your hand and instant, they'd think you were ludicrous. That synopsis still holds true to this day. The next generation WILL find a means to expand civilization and the human intellect.
@@neoncyberia Might have to go back to before the invention of mirrors or telescopes as people communicated with the use of those over massive distances too and some of those could fit into the palm of your hand.
The hypothesis is an event that brings us back to the stone age. There will be no educational system so people cannot read, write or calculate. The old books would become meaningless. To have people develloping education and science you would need a social stratification that makes these people free of hunting and gathering. And then it would be a very long time to the production of e.g. a color coded resistor. We are talking 10.000ths of years.
@@neoncyberia Its common for people to not realize that people living in the distant past were just as clever as we are now, they just didn't have almost everything around them fully documented, defined, and have that information available to everyone yet like we do now.
Physics limits us. Continuous exponential growth in any way, shape, or form is fundamentally impossible. The only reason things changed so much over the past few centuries is because knowledge and technology compounded to create exponential growth, and yet now we are running up against limits. The world a century from now probably won't look all that different from the world of today technology wise, there will be some improvements but no colossal leaps.
Here’s a question. If we could do it over again would we really want to build this society? A society based on extraction of limited resources no matter what? What would be the goals of a new civilization?
Very well-made and informative video; thanks for putting it together. However, I must say it only covers the subject from a known perspective. That is, after "reset", people will start doing the same thing we did. What if that won't be the case? What if other "sources" of energy will be unveiled? What if there won't be any need for fossil fuels? That would be an interesting subject and would make for a fascinating video :)
The silicon refining problem could potentially be solved again by methane. Methane + Oxygen burns hot enough to refine silicon. Another option is splitting water into Hydrogen and Oxygen then burning together - this also reaches sufficient temperatures.
Where are you going to get the massive amounts of energy required to split the water molecule into its component atoms of hydrogen and oxygen? Cart before the horse.
@@grahamstrouse1165 The person who did this did not fully explore other alternatives and their implimentation. They just made a case for fossil fuels without diving deep into what other alternatives would look like . That's all im saying . Like there was a world before plastics (and it wasn't stone-age-like) alternatives to plastics do exist right now (or are in development ). I feel the person didnt cover all the bases in this vid.
Most of your presentation was a litany of dependence on fossil fuel technology. Yet, the ultimate question is not how difficult it will be to move past that dependency, but the looming imperative that we absolutely must take seriously the warning signs of global climate catastrophe. Your analysis also seems to overlook a fundamental fact about modern civilization-- given even mass catastrophe, our power to adapt and recover will be shaped by the knowledge we have acquired already. Not all of that knowledge will be lost forever, but will provide a head start to recovery. No matter what happens, we should consider survival and technical development as one and the same process. As you point out at 14:36, future civilizations will face shortages of familiar raw materials. Even so, they also could develop new technologies to bypass petrochemical issues. So, this may not be an either/or debate, but rather dramatically reordered priorities for the use of many different energy sources, from solar to geothermal-- all with an eye to proper management of our only livable environment.
You forgot to add that all the low hanging fruit has been taken. They would have problems getting easy metal ores, but there would probably be a lot of scrap. As far as getting back into space they would be having to synthesize rocket fuel some other way.
I would like to believe if they decided to build at least close to a carbon neutral society, human ingenuity would thrive and find new ways to get to space.
If we keep up at this pace - we might destroy our own planet without even realizing it, while we are looking up at the stars, in an active search for a substitute one, amongst far away planets and galaxies. What a waste of potential and a mad insensibility, isn't it?
Can I imagine a world without chips? Yes, there were NONE around when I was born! So it is not that long ago. The same is true of plastics. If they had not happened, we would have found alternatives.
a) because that's the point of the video, it's just asking whether or not the next civilization COULD do it, not whether or not they would. b) because all life on earth is expansionist, it's like one of the defining traits of life, something that replicates and spreads as much as it can.
Even with the end of civilization during a catastrophic event, there is a strong likelihood that some people familiar with forging would survive. That would greatly speed the recovery. Also, those trained in agriculture would aid and teach their trade. Same goes for woodworkers, Stonemans, and more. Not to mention those that survive that understand wind and water power and animal husbandry. I don't believe we drop below the iron age...maybe that's the starting point.
The scenario presented is full of so many flaws it's quite literally impossible. 1: Ruins of civilization would still exist to recover knowledge of technology making it possible for survivors to ever fall to the stone age, iron age would be the lowest possible. 2: Realistically a great portion of survivors would be the well educated and the wealthy to have had the knowledge & resources to survive such catastrophes. 3: shoutout to the submarines that literally could just be chilling deep enough during said catastrophe.
Population: "If we only had a fairly clean way of making energy..." Nuclear Energy: "Ahh I'm right here...over here...hello...hello" We're afraid of the energy source that's killed/impacted the least amount of people. Meanwhile, China is building the equivalent of 2 new coal power plants PER WEEK!
Because it's a scenario of us being the last space travelling society. For argument sake, he could have said we go extinct and evolution brings in technologically advanced lions. Could those lions with the resources left by us get to space? Rebooting our civilization is just an easier parallel to make.
Well, yes. But personally, my argument against plastics (and more generally fossil fuels) has never been that we should stop using them: just that we stop using them for things for which we have viable alternatives.
There is still the Malthusian side of the situation. The world population has doubled in my lifetime, and I'm not that old. That's double the strain on the planet assuming the same standard of living.
@@PsRohrbaugh It's probably too late for our species. People will never be willing to do what's required to ensure our long term survival and advancement.
@@Apistevist deep down, I suspect that you’re right. But somewhere along the way, I decided to act like I don’t think it’s too late, to change the things I can, and see what happens. But I can’t say I blame people for being pessimistic.
@@astralshore Ultimately it doesn't matter. The concern of our existence is contingent on our existence.
@@Apistevist See that is the issue where you assume "people" are a uniform blob with any power or impact. The main issue in climate change are big corporations, not private homes. If the entirety of germany e.g. stopped driving cars and used electric cars, the planet wouldn't notice a difference. What we need is not witch hunt private people, but governments that make rules for the companies that make up most of the co2. The second issue is if e.g. again germany does make these laws, if other countries dont follow it will have no effect. If the US, China and India keep increasing their co2 emissions, nothing a small european country can do will matter.
Damn, if only we'd invented nuclear reactors.
I have no idea if this is accurate, but in one of my college classes a professor said that if we switched all world-wide electrical production over the nuclear, we'd only have about 50 years of material for reactors.
Not saying we should ignore nuclear, just remember that it's not unlimited.
Those spent fuel rods are a massive liability. Not like we can just shut down a reactor and walk away if we have to.
@@DrugDealer541 So, that would put us at 400 years worth of energy production?
@@PsRohrbaughwere you been under 🪨
@@PsRohrbaughwas he a hippie ?
Whatever extinction level event happens whether it be an asteroid like Apophis, envirnomental collapse or a war it's not only energy sources that would be affected. Infrastructure - food, health care, information access, communications, travel etc. would all be severely damaged.
Not very long ago humans scrabbled for existence and could die from an infection. Hard to imagine from the paradise we take for granted.
Some places are paradise. Most places seem like hell these days.
Wow. You are really negative. Don't forget our species was also not able to only survive but thrive without the majority of the things you just listed.
@@matthamilton356maybe we'd be fine, but our mordern way of life is what allows us to support and feed such a large population. Take the tech away and a large number will die before a new balance is found.
@@Teqnyqif there's an extinction level event to cause this downfall, most of the population will already be dead. The whole bit about ammonia, there won't be hundreds of millions of people to feed anymore.
@@matthamilton356- not 8 billion people.
Can't wait till the alien civilisation DLC drops.
We are building an alien intelligence right now. Before the end of this century it will outperform us in every possible task 💟
Headgear
Don't worry, AI will become sentient and destroy all of us before the aliens arrive!
All of us r us
It is possible to create methane instead of digging it out of the ground. Don't remember process though...
There are also electric arcs that can melt materials, and induction works to heat and even microwave could be used to heat a wide range of materials.
Where are we getting the energy for those types of heating? Isn’t that the whole point of the video?
Same as some piramides could produce electricity 'under the right circumstances'. It's a weird theory but worth a shot
Here in Brazil, the energy source of 80% that is produced come from water (hydroelectrics).
@@Parc_Ferme Great, but the assumption in the video is that all infrastructure is destroyed and rendered unsalvageable. So I restate my question: Where is the power coming from?
The Wind or the sun could provide the energy. Starting by small energy sources to process small amounts of material, production could be scaled with time.
Is what mars colonist want to do right?
It is most likely to be plausible.
Technically it might be possible to build an arc furnace in order to smelt silicon, using only charcoal-available materials to build it
And what about hydrogen? Not all books and knowledge would be lost in a catastrophe like the one described, electricity and much of the science behind would still be a thing, and that means electrolysis is viable. There is a ton of water around, so instead of carbon and natural gas, hydrogen could be an alternative, provided that the proper engineering level is reached (like making bronze tanks for example).
There's also methane that is being extracted and used as a fuel today from biowaste (here in Buenos Aires there is a small plant that does exactly that, and while small, it does provide electricity for the national grid).
Using charcoal to bootstrap aluminum and ceramic industries would give us the ability to make solar furnaces capable of exceeding the temperature of the sun.
Petroleum is far too valuable to long term survival to burn, and coal too, besides being toxic.
yeah these were both my first thoughts when he mentioned the issues in the video
Solar furnaces cannot exceed the temperature of the solar surface that is providing the energy to the solar lens system. It is a fundamental limit, I have forgotten the name of the optics principle involved but it can be found in Google and Wikipedia, you will find the information if you spend some time searching for it. I can explain, to a degree anyway, how it works on an intuitive level - basically what is going on is that the lens system of a solar furnace works both ways, if the focal point of the solar furnace is somehow raised above the temp of the emitting surface on the Sun, then the lens system will work backwards and act to transmit heat from the object at the focal point to the Sun, so rather than the Sun heating the object at the focal point the object at the focal point tries to heat the Sun. Without eg using an oxyacetylene torch to heat the object beyond the temp of the solar emitting surface, what will happen is the Sun can only heat the object until the temps are in equilibrium, then the energy stops flowing. Hope this helps.@@MakeDo-Turner_Smith
Thay use arc furneces gor silicon smellting
Seems to me previous civilizations built structures that lasted thousands of years out of the most common building material on earth.
All you need is an endless supply of expendable labor.
All those civs collapsed and the next civ rebuilt by moving to where there is plenty of unexploited resources.
100% true, and also true is we can't replicate that today.
My village has lots of 13c-14c buildings with no issues. meanwhile the new buildings are already covered in mold and cracking apart in just years
And everyone inside those structures were dead when they moved in.
The question about the great filter is always a scary thought to think about. Are we the first civilization ever to be in front of the great filter or is the great filter in front of us? Either thought Is scary
The great filter does not exist, at least there is absolutely no reason to believe in a great filter. Occams razor states you should prefer the simpler solution to a problem. If you want to solve the Fermi paradox a large number of tiny filters is a far simpler explanation than one great filter and it has exactly the same outcome. Our existence in the here and now is dependent on billions of tiny steps. Each little step with a probability of it not happening, if one of those steps had not happened we would be here now. If those tiny steps had happened a bit slower we would not have arisen before earth becomes uninhabitable. With billions of steps involved and all having a tiny chance of not happening it's, from a statistical perspective, not exactly far fetched that we may be the only civilization in the observable universe. We lack a lot of knowledge about what was needed for us to get here. So it's mostly guessing and speculation, but with equally reasonable assumptions you can arrive either at the universe is teeming with life or we're the only 'intelligent civilization' in the visible universe or anything in between.
@@silentwilly2983 That's just a restatement of the same argument. A "great filter" is just grouping your "large number of tiny filters" into a small enough number of clearly-labeled boxes for our brains to process the concept easier. You could write every single interaction of every electron since the beginning of the universe as individual "tiny filters" but that's hardly conducive to meaningful discussion.
Scary eh? Well that's one way to think about it.
Not really scary, because we live in a block universe. The past, present, and future have already happened. Most people just don't realize it. We in a way are already dead. So the circle of life is just completing it's self.
Nothing to fear. No one escapes death.
@@altrag No it's not, with a billion tiny filters the often posed question of 'is the great filter before or behind us?' is completely non-sensical as, by defining billions tiny filters as a great filter, implies by definition we're in the filter. If you want to frame it differently, we have a few billions years of tiny filters behind us, and trillions of years of tiny filters ahead of us, so in that perspective the great filter is by definition ahead of us. And if you want to see it in a grander context, it's inconceivable we survive into eternity so from that perspective there will always be a great filter ahead of us as long as we exist. But these last two perspective add 0 value to explaining the Fermi paradox. People talking about a great filter also tend to talk about big catastrophic events, nuclear war, great singularity, meteorite impact etc, those refer to one big filter, large (self) destructing events to explain the big silence, not a large number of tiny filters that lead to exactly the same outcome of the big silence.
And no, lots of tiny filters certainly is conducive to meaningful discussion, this contrary to one large imaginary filter one can only speculate about. With a large number of smaller filters one can apply statistics, one can define and study some of those filters and say something meaningful about them. You can determine that only a few dozen halving factors are needed to reduce the statistically expected number of civilization in the visible universe to be less than 1. Once you realize that, all those people claiming it's a statistical certainty that others are out there become a bit silly.
Electricity plus water and air, in conjunction with catalysts, can be used to make fluid hydrocarbons. (Perhaps solid too.) Porsche is doing it today. I'd suggest compact modular thorium reactors as the electricity source - thousands and thousands (millions?) of them.
I very greatly doubt we get knocked back to "stone age". I see us going back to pre-industrial level, say 15th to 18th century level.
And ancient Rome invented very durable concrete, without our technology.
But if we returned to the pre industrial age the ecosystem would not quickly recover. Without a "garden of eden" where edible foods are abundant we will be in trouble. Modern crops work with modern techniques, but pest species that target our crops have been thriving right alongside us. Only people living in places where subsistence farming is still practiced will have much chance of successfully sustaining agriculture. Only a few hunter gatherers will survive in most places. Even hunter gatherers will be ravaged by parasites that we forgot how to handle without industry.
We have lost so much of the knowledge we used to get where we are today that we will not quickly bounce back.
@@emptyshirt Its more that we built modern technology around the crops that we've been growing and selectively breeding for thousands of years, not the other way around, those crops will still be around and producing food even with pests and diseases, just ask literally anyone who has grown their own crops in gardens, as not everyone uses fertilizers and pesticides to get good results. Not to mention you have the farmers that grow "Organic" food are very restricted on use of fertilizers and pesticides yet they still grow enough food to turn a profit.
The main issue will be, without industrial fertilizer and pesticides, there will be less food and crops to go around, leading to starvation in most areas but there will still be plenty of land to successfully farm crops on mass once switched over to subsistence farming and bounce back the population soon enough.
Not to mention that it would be hard to lose a lot of our knowledge given how we've written and have so many books as well as put a lot of that knowledge into other technologies that could survive an apocalypse and stick around for long enough for people to learn from it.
@@emptyshirtno we haven't.
@@emptyshirt Most people in farming circles haven't lost knowledge, it's just disconnected city people who have. You don't need industry to prevent parasites, you need to wash your hands and cook your food. The harder thing to deal with would be modern values, I'll admit I wouldn't be able to murder kittens to keep population under control but before spaying was common that's what my grandpa did.
@@blackkittycat15 consider groundwater. In many agricultural regions the groundwater is tens of meters deeper than it used to be. Those areas will be untenable for preindustrial farming methods. Low lying areas will be swept over when existing reservoirs fail, so those are bad too. Groundwater contamination will plague some communities who try and grow crops in the formerly urbanized areas.
Nuisance species like lespodeza cuneata and heracleum mantegazziantum and many others will trouble non-industrial farmers like never before and the climate will be somewhat unstable in the coming century... Simply reverting to late iron age techniques is not enough to put us on track to re-industrialize.
Kind of a faulty premise to begin with. What apocalyptic disaster could erase all the refined materials already present on Earth? Even global thermonuclear war would leave large areas or former cities, mines, farms, etc. untouched. There is pretty much no scenario where humanity would have to restart from scratch (and even then, collective knowledge would jump-start that process).
If we're talking human extinction and another species evolving intelligence, we can't possibly imagine what they would be capable of. If they were even 10% more intelligent than us, they might find innovations we can't even imagine.
You should not think of a "blasting" intro to the apocalypse but all you need is the destruction of social stratification. No more healthcare, infant mortality peaking, life expectancy tumbling. No more educating in reading, writing and calculating. Within 3 generations we are back in the stone age. A virus could do this. Remember the run on toiletpaper in the corona crisis? Now imagine a real dangerous virus. Cities will not be supplied, people go plundering the countryside, large scale food production stops. Getting food and water will be our daily routines. Our present society is a house of cards. You just have to take out a few cards to bring the house down.
They were here during the pyramid’s building era.
Yeah ..but you're wrong because the narrator has an accent And uses three syllable words.....😂😂these ppl are gullable
Hydrogen from renewable energy can replace all fossil fuels.
You missed the Randall Carlson scoured to the bedrock theory.
People always say, "Food, Clothing, and Shelter", but that is OLD style thinking.
You don't really need Clothing. Unless it is cold.
MOST importantly, OVER ALL, you need WATER.
So, it SHOULD be, "Water, Food, Shelter, and Clothing", in that order.
I personally think that this is the key to the fermi paradox and why we dont see evidence for intelligent life out there. I think at a certain point, most civilizations become cradle locked as the first technologically advanced civilization burns itself out, the next cannot reach the same heights and thus becomes forever locked to their world.
I think it's the distance. The star nearest to ours is 25 trillion miles away. The vast majority of our radio signals would be undetectable at that distance. We have to be able to detect quadrillionths of a watt in order to communicate with the Voyager spacecraft, and they're only 1/40000 as distant as Proxima Centauri.
Humans can't even fathom the distances required to communicate with even the closest solar systems. The only signals that would be detectable at that range are the precisely directed and extremely powerful radio signals of the SETI project, and they were only released in very narrow bands
That’s terrifying
If you consider that the massive carboniferous forests that led to the formation of all our fossil fuels were themselves unlikely and that circumstances were unique... it never happened again. Many habitable worlds might not have had a Carboniferous age at all and thus no fossil fuels.
@@Gandalf-The-Green very possible.
Same. managing To get to cradle equilibrium is a better goal than space colonisation. The problem is that it requires the entirety of the world to come together. Space colonisation is a race between factions and needs no such thing.
I think the biggest issue would be finding people who know enough about the old skills to actually smelt iron etc.
Well it most likely all started with just handfuls of plucky experimenters way back in the day. They passed on what they knew to others by word of mouth and monkey-see-monkey-do teaching. I don’t think the number of knowledgeable experts is a problem.
There were no “old skills” when we learned.
I think there should be plenty of people who could figure out basics. Hack, I could make you a basic electrical grid in post apocalyptic world, The only thing I rill miss is how to make wire, which reminds me, there must be a youtube video for me to watch now.
To me difficult part is heavy machinery, you can't really make it without fossil fuels. Trains, trams, and trolley buses can run on electricity so they do seem somewhat viable, tho you would need to figure out semiconductors.
If the guy on the primitive technology channel was able to figure out how to smelt iron in a jungle barefoot, I think a post-apocalyptic society would be able to do it.
again this is wrong, you cannot go back to the old ways of doing things because then there were 1 or 2 billion people. We now have 8+ billion people and the ONLY MF'ing thing keeping them alive, half of them just barely, are markets of scale. Without markets of scale and oil refining at the current level half the planet would die of starvation within 2 years. You might as well say the biggest issue is not having people who know how to turn whales into lamp oil.
Very informative and an interesting thought experiment.
I wonder if you have considered other ways to make steel such as those methods used by SSAB?
There is no denying that fossil fuels have been convenient for fueling our population and technology growth, however, humans are extremely good at solving these challenges when we want to.
more than just convenient - irreplaceable.
You forget business interests. In particular, resistance of existing big business to change the established model.
a cool idea to the fermi paradox. One planet only having a finite amount of chances to gather resources of the planet to reach space, and be able to gather more resources.
Depending on the type of technology and betterment of material making, we will never need infinite amounts of specific elements available, but only the tech-developed, abundant, mass manufactured types to replace our current thinking of necessities. For example, graphene can conduct better than copper, despite being one atom thick, and is extremely durable. A method of producing graphene sheets better than now will solve copper shortage.
The irony of fossil fuel is that it is made from natural sources. Dead plant and animal material, it always amazes me when I think about it. It’s literally the circle of life.
its made of gigantic trees and tree ferns. we dont have those today. we leave behind plastics. there is no other civilisation after us. we are it, the last of!
Precisely. If not for coal how many trees would be left in much of Europe. One of the reasons the Sub-Sahara is a desert is because people only had wood for cooking.
@@MountainFisher I don’t think you understand my comment. Coal deposits are putrid Trees buried billions of years ago. And the Sahara was formed because of a tilt in the earth rotation millions of years ago. Nothing to do with wood used for cooking
I just always think that all that carbon was in the cycle then lost underground, and eventually there wouldn't be enough on the surface to sustain
I always crack up when people say something is "natural", as though there is anything else on earth. I'm not sure we have found anything supernatural.
This is a slick apology for using fossil fuels. I am impressed with how it is presented so we keep the Saudi's and West Texas oil people in business at the expense of every else. I hope the producers sleep well.
I like to think maybe the “next” civilization would figure out different ways to surpass what we have done to this point
Same. I remember reading something about how we're developing batteries to run on sand to replace lithium batteries for things like computers.
It's still in its infancy but the concept was proven as viable. If we can develop away from using lithium as a battery source to instead run on sand, then I'm sure a future civilisation would also be able to create ways to do things alternatively to us.
Yeah, fossil fuels might have actually harmed our potential. We gained a descent understanding of the universe without figuring out how do form a society capable of unified, deliberate problem solving. Even when humans colonize space we will just fight and kill each other. We are spoiled children.
When I was much younger, I wondered if a “previous” iteration of beings surpassed our current peak, and their technology remnants, or in some cases, their ghosts, are what some, today, claim to have witnessed.
Nope. Demographics determine a civilization's destiny. This is exactly why South America and Africa represent evolutionary dead ends for the human race. Why? Low IQs are out breeding the individuals responsible for nearly all of technological innovation and infrastructure sustainment efforts in the past century. The "muddying of civilization waters" has a net negative effect by lowering the median IQ, which destroys all incentives because of corruption, poverty, plight, and brain drain. This is exactly why South American and African countries are underdeveloped corrupt hellholes and will remain this way pretty much forever.
The only reason we developed the way we did is because super rich people realized they could get super rich doing shitty things. The extreme lobbying against nuclear power is a perfect example of this, Had we not stopped building nuclear power plants in the 80's, the amount of natural resources being consumed would have plummeted.
The technology we have using minerals such as copper may never be realized. In Earth 1.0 we found chunks of nearly pure copper laying on the surface. In Earth 2.0 they would have to dig way down to find tiny amounts of copper. It may never be exploited due to it being so rare.
Exactly. People seem to think that garbage dumps would supply such materials in abundance.
@@plessis2023Even they would cool down and fall back to the Earth. They don't disappear into space.
This applies to fossil fuels too. Methane would be discovered as a byproduct of animals and decay. Oil might never be found, for they wouldn't know to look for it. The first oil wells were built on places oil literally bubbled up onto the ground. Coal was also on the surface, which is no longer the case in most cases. Maybe they'd find coal/tar sands that we mostly avoid, but in 50-100 years those will be harder to find too.
@charlesminckler2978 what percentage of the earths land mass do you assume humans inhabit??
@@dystopiandream7134 I have no clue. I would bet it's near 100% of places that have oil bubbling up through the ground, or piles of coal all about.
thorium reactors, hemp building materials, precision fermentation for protein..? could have seriously changed our trajectory since the 50-60s
The Romans were quite good at making concrete.
It sounds like the main issue is needing fossil fuels for reaching high temperatures.
Yeah…
Roman concrete production was very different than modern concrete and would not scale to the level we use it today.
How often do you think about the Roman Empire? 👀
@@bluesteel8376 But their buildings are still there.
It's possible to use for instance electric arc furnaces to reach the temperatures required. So the moment you can get rotating motion like say from a wind mill like they built even before the industrial revolution or a hydrodam, there is already a path one could in theory follow to reach very high temperatures.
It sucks that we have the technology to solve all our problems but lack the cooperation to achive it.
it sucks people are so stupid to believe the doomsday cult of climate change and IPCC scam and will destroy everything in the name of protecting delusional claims of failed academics. So far every single catastrophe was caused by the doomsday cult rather than "climate"
Totally agree. Some people have said that AI will solve many of our current issues. But it isn't necessarily a lack of ingenuity, there are entrenched human systems that have no intention of allowing humanity to progress, and I don't know how AI will help us with that, in fact, I think those entrenched systems of greed will probably utilize AI to further strengthen their position.
...Said every human that has ever lived.
We do not have the technology. You think because something can in theory be done it will be done? If an answer to a problem is uneconomical then it is not an answer. You COULD grow all the oranges this world needs in Manitoba but they would be so uneconomical that nobody except the top few percent of people in wealth could afford them. I mean they used to grow oranges in private greenhouses in what were called orangeries in Britain and France, the waste heat from the furnaces that heated aristocratic mansions kept the greenhouses hot enough, but try buying one orange in January on the streets of London or Paris in 1850, you would be waiting a long time. Like till 1920. A single orange would cost you the equivalent of about $100. Our current state of technology could keep a billion or so people on the planet alive in relative high tech plenty as most of us enjoy now (at least in the west), but try keeping 8 billion or more people alive without fossil/oil refining. We could quit pumping oil today entirely, half the people on this planet would starve within two years.
@@markwalker3499 I feel that human greed is much more of an issue than what you're describing. In fact the issues you're describing are exactly the kinds of problems that AI COULD solve.
But the entrenched greed of people will fight solutions every step of the way if it means they need to lose power in order to see a solution come to fruition.
Alex, I usually don’t comment on UA-cam. Just wanted to say you and the Astrum team create some of the best content on UA-cam in my opinion. The flow of the presentation, topics discussed, and your narration are spot on! Great work and please keep it going!
I've wondered for decades if we might be inadvertently landlocking the future of humanity to Earth by wasteful resource usage today.
When the aliens decide that we are intelligent enough to actually leave the planet for other places, they will show us how to make the fuel that will get us there. To get to the very nearest star, at the speeds were capable of, will take thousands and thousands of years. It's a lot of generations. Throw another tire on the Fire. Recycle. Until China and India take it seriously, why should we? 9:10
absolutelf advertent
if humanity dose not collapse and they are still relying on fossil fuels by then they probably have bigger problems
Or waterlocking it eventually.
You are delusional to think humanity will ever live anywhere other than earth. There is no other place in the solar system we could live. Mars is a complete non-starter. Life will never be sustainable there due to virtually no atmosphere, no electro-magnetic field, and no viable water; and the nearest star system to us is over four light-years away; and probably doesn't have a life sustaining planet within its system.
I disagree about some things here, for a start there are definitely repositories that would safe guard the information on how most things here work. I also believe that in the case of stone age, iron age etc... They had to learn those techniques from scratch we already know about them so we would already have our start in the iron age plus because even if we don't have machines that doesn't mean we don't have the hand tools and know how, around at the moment.
Lol, and second?
That depends who of us survive. Do you know how to do these things?
Second was where I stated that we are not starting truly from the stone age. The Japanese for example have been creating steel using their own techniques for hundreds of years, without the tech we use today so no it doesn't spell the same situation in my mind
I was having the same conversation. People who do survive across the globe would have preexisting knowledge and skills that our earliest ancestors did not. Further, we would be able to reverse engineer existing resources like steel and alloys. That would give future civilization a head start. Also, I think he has understated the technological advances our pre-industrial ancestors possessed. Concrete is one big example he mentioned. The Romans had concrete that is widely understood to be superior to what we have now.
lol ur arguing about the hypothetical conditions of the doomsday and not the actual point being made in the video
Food, clothing, shelter and WATER.
So as some have mentioned Nuclear is an option. To get there we'd still need some initial hot burning fuel. But with copper decently accessible we can start doing electricity to make hydrogen, which burns at up to 2000c in air. Since we'd probably use electrolysis on water, we also got pure oxygen, in the stoimetric ratio at that. So thats 2600c flames, enough for even silicon.
We can do U and Th with that too. W is another beast, and I actually dont know how they melt it today, without looking it up. Electric arc kilns perhaps?
Many of our inventions and tech are based on what is easily available around us. A civilisation after us would find new ways to get to space. And currently do to plate tectonics new areas of fossil fuels will resurface. But conserving energy needs to be a virtue for any civilisation that want to last.
My reply is above ..I suggest you read it..
Um... No. The oil isn't under the tectonic plates. That's miles down.
The geological processes that created the fossil fuels resources we’ve been using are hundreds of million years in the making. Plate tectonics is not a driver in fossil fuel creation from the decay, deposition, compaction at depth under heat and pressure of organic matter. Plate tectonics might be a driver in making mineral resources more accessible though.
No, we don't need to conserve, we need to build up as fast as possible.
@@Apistevist We could do both; materialism and consumerism are not serving us well, and that's where we need to conserve. Doesn't mean spend bare minimum energy, just means be smart/efficient and sustainable with it
Do we need to go to other planets? The answer is we do not. There is generally millions of light years between galaxies. We just need to sit and wait for terrestrials from advanced planets to move us along.
After having read American Prometheus this past spring, and now patiently waiting for Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer, nuclear war has really been on my mind a lot more lately…. And this type of subject matter overall. Great video.
@JohnnyNiteTrain ... 'nuclear war' will not be allowed by our visitors ('aliens/gods') from our future who want to control the condition of the world they inherit. Our 'free will' is subject to Their determinism. Surely you have noticed how they protect key players from George Washington to Adolf Hitler because they dare not change their history/ancestors too much, although small tweaks are attempted
I'm definitely probably missing something in this scenario, but why couldnt humans just use charcoal power to reach up to a point of electrical generation capability without fossil fuels (like the late 1800s and early 1900s) but instead use electrical resistance and arc furnaces to melt/work higher temperature materials without needing fossil fuels to generate the heat?
I am not trying to be smart, but you might want to see how charcoal is made.Coal is kind of the same thing without the problem of making charcoal.
burning charcoal still gives off green house gases and where would you get the electricity for your electric furnaces?
@@keithgutshall9559 Dude said in the video making and using charcoal is carbon neutral...
@@m1abrams1776 You heat water to make steam and send the steam through turbines to make electricity...all this can be made with copper wire and iron-adjacent materials. Also, the video legit said charcoal is carbon neutral. The gasses are released from charcoal that came directly from trees that took the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Co2 didnt appear or disappear- you cant add CO2 into that chemical equation
You’ll run out of trees well before you get anywhere near a decently sized civilization that can dip back into nuclear or renewables. Cultures regularly denuded their entire landscapes for fuel as early as the Iron Age.
2:07 made me chuckle because I don’t think my teenage son would have a will to live without internet even if he survives the apocalypse.😂😂
I mean I’m well into my thirties and the lack of internet terrifies me even haha, although I know I could live without it.
I'm always in awe, every time a new Astrum video comes out. Initially I craved for the talent these guys put in their creations; but recently, I found myself more and more entertained in how could they pick a different, entirely new subject, and do an amazing work in presenting it. I love their rythm and balance, the perfect equilibrium they reach in presenting the visuals while the narration goes on... Amazing job, love it.
I can imagine a civilization focused on mining plastics or even focusing on genetic engineering to breed new kinds of bamboo or hemp.
It's always seemed to me to be a solution to the Fermi paradox.
The amount of factors that had to come together just right in order for there to be huge fossil fuel deposits was remarkable.
On how many planets would that occur?
It's not impossible but so is winning the lottery a dozen times in a row.
Then you've got all the other factors that allowed complex life -and ultimately civilization - to evolve.
For example, how many proto planets got hit by just the right size and direction of a massive celestial object to form a moon that stabilises the planet's rotation so that you don't have environmental chaos?
And that's just one factor.
But that's a discussion for another day...
Every single planet that has life on it also has fossil fuel deposits. Living organisms are made out of carbon and that carbon will accumulate when those organisms die and eventually turn into coal and oil and gas.
If the atmosphere contains sufficient carbon to support life, It contains sufficient carbon to produce fossil carbon. It's all the other improbabilities that make it rare and unlikely.
That moon hypothesis is absurd.
Your odds of winning the lottery are much lower than the odds of other planets like earth existing.
Or maybe there is an intelligent, powerful creator.
I think more people need to realize that regardless of how it affects the environment, fossil fuels are a necessary step and part of society. We won’t ever fully remove them, though now that we have good energy production, we can spend time working to replace them a lot of the time.
I did a technology module for my OU degree back in the mid-eighties. And one of our lectures was "When will oil run out?" The consensus seemed to be before the end of the century. And yet, here we are, forty years later, still with plenty of oil. It turns out that there is oil everywhere - far, far more than we ever thought.
It gets harder to get to, of course, but, as the easier oil is used up, we simply adapt, accept higher costs, invent new technology, and move on the the more difficult oil. I can see no end to this.
And the same is pretty much true of all the other essentials you mention. It would appear that, if we want to destroy the Earth twice, there are more than enough resources still left to do it all over again.
it seems more and more likely to me that oil is produced by a geological process, and that it is just not the remains of millions of years of organic life.
The amount of new oil fields we discover every year has decreased rapidly. It is only known sources that were not easily accessible enough to dig cheap are getting digged now since prices are increasing. This drives innovation and technologies like fracking get cheaper than thought possible yars ago. However, the amount of oil - and mostly anything else - is indeed very limited and will run out unless we either change to other resources like sun and wind power or asteroid mining. We NEED to stop wasting oil urgently and fast, because it will only reach for 2 more generations of people. And this without even considering climate change, glyphosat, world war 3, AI singularity and whatnot.
Lots of popular misconceptions in this video: 1. Biomethane and biofuel liquid fuels are a thing.
2. Bioplastics are a thing.
3. Molten Oxide Electrolysis can be used to make iron from ore with nothing but electricity.
4. Hydrogen is also a thing and it can be made with electricity and water. That hydrogen can be used to make fertilizers, cement, steel, and yes, purified silicon. Also rocket fuel.
5. Electricity can be made with wind power, solar, hydroelectricity, bioenergy, geothermal, and nuclear.
Fossil fuels are not currently necessary with current technology and while they were the path to development we took, they are not necessary to get to this level for the above reasons missed out in this video.
I agree with all alternatives, but at the same time a new civilization starting from scratch wouldn't be able to acquire all this knowledge without having other easier energy sources at disposal and many years or even centuries of experimentation and research.
@chpsilva water wheels evolve to hydropower easily and predate the use of fossil fuels. Windmills evolve to wind electric generators easily and predate the use of fossil fuels. Bioenergy predates the use of fossil fuels including to run steam engines. Utilizing geothermal hotsprings for various purposes evolves into geothermal power easily and predates fossil fuels. Focusing solar energy to generate high heat using reflective surfaces predates fossils fossil fuels and can easily evolve into temp solar generation. The only thing on that list that was introduced after fossil fuels was nuclear power.
Humans first created pure hydrogen in 1671, identified it 1766, used electrolysis to make it around 1800, and made an internal combustion engine using hydrogen in 1806.
We never needed fossil fuels. There were other paths that presented themselves earlier that we could have taken but didn't. We never needed them, only ever needed them cause we unnecessarily built a civilization dependent on them, don't need them anymore, and other civilizations could develop without them no problem.
None of those are energy sources. None of those can exist without the existing fossil fuel foundation. None of those can power current civilization at the levels we expect.
An easier alternative for smelting would be mirror arrays - polished tin should be enough to create multifaceted mirrors that could focus sunlight on the ore you are trying to smelt, with temperatures only being limited by optical quality.
Using biological sources for many chemicals would also be a much "easier"/elegant solution, though the necessary understanding might be hard to transfer without digital information processing (imagine needing to learn all of biochemistry from nothing but old paper scrolls)...
I think a different kind of society would have no problem creating a technical civilization based more on optics and bioengineering, than on fossil fuels/electricity and mass fabrication/machining/etc..
Excuse me but what are you going to insulate those electric wires with?
Some of these stock clips are so odd it really makes you wonder if whoever made them isn't actually an alien themselves. Like some of these people do things people just don't do at all. I can't get over it, it's so odd! :O
You don't use dollar store baskets clearly made for standard 8x11 paper to carry leaves? Everyone else does
This was very informative, I wasnt expecting to learn so much from your topic. Great stuff
Last thing on the mind of people who would have survived, is space travel.
This is a great summary of the important materials throughout history in a chronological order and their temperature points. Feels like this is what schools should show us before we start science class. Giving context will make lessons more interesting
A full summary before beginning seems a bit unnecessary, but some historical context for STEM courses would be nice. A lot of the time just knowing why someone wanted to solve a problem and their limitations help you understand the solution.
Did your school not teach this?
@@paulrivers7248 Talking about the way it's summarised. anyway it's been over 20 years since i had any form of school.
@@andrewhooper7603 yea, just feel that lessons should have summaries based on important context instead of mindless regurgitations that some teachers do.
@@gab882 been almost 30 for me
You could replace fossil fuels with H2 and O2 (burns at about 3000°C) which can be easily obtained by electrolysing water. Or you can just smelt your metal ores directly with the electricity, arc furnaces exist/could be invented again.
And how you produce H2 without electricity ?! Can you imagine the level of tech just to produce 1 single generator when all you have is sticks and stones? Even producing 1 banal stell bolt - is "alien tech" at that stage.
@@M4V3RiCkU235 dont forget electrolyse of water is only about 50% efficiency, so it's not great but could still be an alternative for fossil fuel, like train, truck or planes. It has already been used in rocket so it's not un imaginable to be used else where
@@M4V3RiCkU235 simple mechanical energy and a motor could still electrolyse water. You can grab a 9 volt battery and stick it in salt water and produce hydrogen and oxygen, and the fun thing about it is that you can burn h2 and o2 right back into water.
@@M4V3RiCkU235 Why without electricity, he said you can melt copper and iron with coal, so there is your material for your generator.
@Hoellenmann what about wind power that's not being used I.e. when the demand is low but wind is high use the excess to create hydrogen?
At current rates of usage fossil fuels will never run out in any of our lifetimes. Remember Antarctica. Remember the deep oceanic crust deposits.
for the heating problems, what about methods of generating heat than combustion? it should be possible to set up glass panels in a way that focuses all the light into one spot, heating it up enough to melt even silicon. you also don't necessarily need fossil fuels first to generate electricity. copper melts at 1085c, meaning charcoal (or solar) can melt it, so you could absolutely make turbines out of it and start generating electricity by placing them in waterfalls for example. from there, you could use that electricity to generate the heat required to melt other metals.
Combustion is the only way to generate those heats. Electric can't do it. The heating elements themselves would melt.
@@davidkavanagh189 couldn't you store the heat though? you don't need to transmit it all at once, you could store it in salt for example, which is very good at retaining heat, and slowly build it up without ever overheating the components, right?
even if that doesn't work, the solar option still works, reflecting sunlight with quartz or something.
@@Deltexterity Combustion is the only way. If there was an alternative, it would be being worked on by people a lot smarter than you or I.
@@davidkavanagh189 that's not really a valid argument. right now nobody is working on this problem because it's not a problem, civilization hasn't collapsed yet. in the past, people used combustion because they didn't think of any other options, but if civilization collapsed humanity would still retain knowledge of the old world, so people would have an advantage and try things those who came before never did.
@@Deltexterity And how exactly would this collapsed society manage to make the super precise lensing for your sun machine or the complex materials and technology to make your electric metal melter? I think you'd find that burning stuff would still be the answer.
The space is vast void. There’s a lot more out there to discover. Amazing video on this video. God bless you always.
Great video. Do not apologize for giving people real information. If they don't like it, it's because they are ideologically driven and that doesn't help anybody. They can stuff it. Thank you for admitting we don't know how much oil is out there. 20 years ago, a giant percentage of reputable people honestly believed that there was only another 30 years of oil left, and that we had already reached peak oil production. They forget just how much mankind can innovate.
I honestly appreciate any channel that converts kilometers to miles and Celsius to Fahrenheit (and vice-versa) for it's viewers; It makes it a hell of a lot easier for those of us using a different measurement option than the one being presented.
Metric is used everywhere except Myanmar, Liberia, and the US. 95% use metric because it is the only thing that makes sense.
Wrong. Americans are too complacent. There's nothing like being confronted with the need to evolve and to join the world and the need to abandon those obsolete imperial measures. The American scientific community does it already. It's time to go metric. Like losing those little wheels behind a child's first bicycle...
Different? I think the word you're looking for is inferior.
@@BillPinkNye "Those of us" are eternal kids. Spoiled brats...
@@FridgeMinority Ok so it is and old abandoned system with huge flaws. How do you convert between units? For me it is dead easy with Metric.
We really need to "Manhattan Project" ourselves into fusion power. Have the whole planet focus on that and share whatever comes of it.
No, please, no
@@RawOlympia Why?
@@CosmicCleric fusion power is not my thing. I know younger people like it, but they have not seen the damage...sorry ~
@@RawOlympia Think you're talking about Fission (damage), not Fusion.
@@CosmicCleric oops! thnx!
25 years ago, when I first started taking interest in stuff like this, we had about 50 years of oil reserves left.
Now we're all the way down to 50 years left. Not sure what we're going to do in 25 years when we only have 50 years of reserves left, probably raise prices 2-3x more.
I do feel like we could get to the temperatures we needed with other means but it would undoubtedly be far far far more difficult. I doubt that a civilization would boom as quick as ours has without it but I don't think it is impossible.
Induction furnaces will always be possible as many forms of electricity not reliant on fossil fuels will always be possible. And unlike in this thought experiment, even launching all of our nukes won't destroy the electrical motors that have already been produced and are already stuffed with copper.
The electronics of these motors will be severely degraded if they are above ground. Electrical devices don't need electronics to function, though. Just conductors and insulators.
The motor windings will of most motors will survive. That's just copper. That and survivors will have millions of sump pumps safely in pits in basements to raid. Water is a decent shield against radiation so anything under water will be salvageable. It won't function, but survivors can look at their structure.
Not to mention the landfills and random dumps filled with underground deposits of all things from manuals to older, sturdier manufactured goods.
try to boom without fossil fuels to give us fertilizer
@@timothypopik2288 Oh You're 100% right. The implication is it wouldn't have boomed at all. Our technology progression probably would have taken many many more generations and be far slower.
i wonder how much of that energy has been used so far on weapons , in wars , i.e. the most inefficient method of mutual suicide .
Imagine the destruction and waste Russian subhumans are causing right as we speak. Even just the destroyed concrete buildings and other structures in Ukraine... It's insanity. Also, the Chinese with their huge ghost cities. These nations should be annihilated.
Unfortunately, wars are actually the greatest promoters of new technology and advancements in technology. Most of our current tech is a result of WW2 or the fights there after, created by and for the military to stay one step ahead. Everything from internet, gps, advances in computing.
@@Dsrt_Rat i know that . but given the enormous amount of sheer waste and altogether ruin , the efficiency of such endeavour is ridiculous . war promotes innovation like nothing else ( even cold war ) . just because a common threat is the only way to make people at large willing to work together towards doing better . it's experimentally obvious , however pathetic , that prolonged peace times don't actually serve civilisation .
@@florin-titusniculescu5871 I do agree with you
Thanks!
obtaining tin is quite hard due it's rareness and scattered locations. It's thought by some that it was because of this it was one of the main factor in the collapse of the bronze age.. Once one source of tin had dried up it put extra pressure on the remaining sites which quickly exhausted one mine after another. Even with modern techniques tin is still a rare commodity so unless we went straight to iron/steel we wouldn't get beyond pointed sticks with chipped stones to do any cutting etc.
I can just imagine what would be made first from iron - knives and swords. Fossil fuels are really stored solar energy. And plastics which potentially a huge source of energy are littering the planet. They could be burnt (to the further degradation of the environment) with no energy required to mine them (already above the ground in abundance). One irony in all of this is that had the population been restricted in the first place, those living could have enjoyed everything we have now but with a much lower consumption of the resources we currently use as if they were inexhaustible.
8 billion strong? 4 billion strong were already too much. Strong is a strange word to use in this instance. 3 is a crowd. 8 billion is a mess nobody can fix.
Methane can be extracted from a lot of biological processes like fermentation. It's slower, but if you use renewables for heating and cooking, you'd be able to make due. Also, one could use alcohol to achieve higher temperatures. Alcohol production isn't that hard with rudimentary tools, though main difficulty with that one is keeping it from "evaporating".
Alcohol is also a product of fermentation...
@@ThePmfatima yeah of course, doesn't everyone know that? Didn't think this needed to be seplled out.
The Pyramids weren’t built with fossil fuels, the granite wasn’t cut from mountains and transported to its location and foisted 100’s of feet up a pyramid. The mathematicians and chemists that put together the plans and the building materials didn’t need fossil fuels to the work that they did that has stood for over 5000 years. Could they have gone to the Stars if they continued their incredible development from over 5000 years ago?
Yeah stacking heavy rocks is exactly the same as building industrial infrastructure to produce the necessary technology to leave the planet
Yeah but the guy has an accent so all of us are wrong😂😂
There is no need to go to the stars other than curiosity. Who are they trying to impress anyway? A human life is only on this earth for the blink of an eye, compared to the grand scheme of things.
This video gives me Dr. Stone vibes. Great video which also brings awareness to our current global energy consumption!
I was searching for a comment like this XD
Dr. Stone is amazing
About melting metal. You've forgotten about a thing called a "solar furnace". One that is located at South Table Mountain campus can create a temperature of 3000 degrees C. Granted, the next civilization would have to build such solar furnaces in the first place, and they probably won't be as effective as fossil fuel furnaces. But still, dealing with iron and other metal IS possible without fossil fuels.
Good one!
We only have to find ways to produce electricity without fossil fuels. Electricity can produce high enough temperatures to melt all kinds of metals. You can produce electricity without any high temperature materials via the sun. Sun ovens (mirror chambers) get water boiling, which turns brass or bronze turbines (at first). Once you can produce enough electricity with those, you can start refining higher melting point metals.
Similarly, biogas can be produced without any metals at all. You just need big stone tanks and lots of plant waste, manure, excrement and other materials that produce gasses when digested by bacteria. That gas can be used in ovens to produce high temperatures either directly for melting metals with a relatively low to medium melting point (at first) or to produce electricity later on with those metals and alloys.
Such a civilization could actually be much more sustainable from the get go and skip the dreadful fossil fuels. Maybe their development is a tad bit slower, but that doesn't have to be the case either. If we had skipped fossil fuels and all the decades and hundreds of years of development for machinery to use them and instead had that time used to develop machinery to produce electricity right away, we'd still have arrived at our current development level at the same time. Naturally, back in those ages we didn't have the knowledge we have today, so that would have never happened (save for external intervention.👽). But today we have this knowledge and could skip a lot of steps to speed up the process. Fossil fuels are a convenient source of energy but by far not the only source that allows for the development of a high-tech civilization.
We need to find a way to record everything we've learned, good and bad, in a durable form, that future civilizations could understand. Hopefully, they could do it better than we did.
As long as they are human. They will fall into the same trap, of self interest.
It’s called stone carving. Done the same way as the Rosetta Stone. Then hopefully someone has kept their language and writing lol and it’s one of the languages written down.
🤣😂😘
@@whosaidthat5236
@@whosaidthat5236 record EVERYTHING WE'VE LEARNED by carving on rocks.....ok dokey dude.
@@whosaidthat5236 ...and by durable, I meant more than a few thousand years. Rocks don't last forever. Even the whole earth has an expiration date. It would have to be stored in many places, OFF earth.
This video was amazing. I've been watching your videos for years but this was my favourite so far. Please continue making themed videos like this
other than dying at 20 from a mild infection. All we would need to survive and prosper would be water ,shelter, fire, clothing and alcohol.+ not to have the apocalypse to start in the winter.
This is why Fusion is so important. It could literally save the world and change our future.
"Could" being the operative word. It's not guaranteed we will ever be able to use it for energy production.
I agree but we need to invest trillions more and each and every year until we succeed. We should also invest trillions into tapping into geothermal energy. Geothermal can easily provide all our energy needs for thousands of years.
All the Fusion comments... yes I like the idea and maybe in the next 100 years we will get there. But meanwhile we have fission reactors, which, in spite of all the (false) negative hype, are much more environmentally friendly than current power technologies (even solar and wind considering the poisons and coal required to make them). The current fission technology in use is only one of three fission technologies already developed. A working Thorium reactor has already been built and safety mechanisms now are available to overcome the problems. The final fission technology even recycles current Fission waste and makes it reusable... and lowers the potency of the byproducts lifetime from tens of thousands to a few dozen years.
@@moverseve With AI leading the way I doubt it will be 20 years. I'm guessing 10- 15.
Unfortunately, “viable” cold fusion has always been about ten years away … for the last 50 or 60 years
If sufficient knowledge of engineering and science survives, we can kickstart civilization easily. If you know what you need and why you need it, you can find plenty of coal still, and from there build up. Without the knowledge, it will probably take a couple of thousand years more (and look probably very different to today's world) but human ingenuity is irrepressible.
You forgot to talk about Glass, which is also very important material in our world and requires temperatures around 1500°C. To sum it up : in a world deprived of fossil fuel you wouldn't be able to build Solar panels (steel+glass+silicon), Windmills (steel+concrete+fibre glass+electronics/silicon), any kind of electrical power plant including hydraulic (steel+concrete+divin+mining+metallurgy of complex alloys)... Basically, you can't build a "renewable world" unless you already have "non renewable resources"
I'm pretty sure the amount of gas my kids generate could probably feed a space program while also feeding a small star. Don't get me wrong, I love my little gas clouds.
You love their chemical warfare tactics
Love those little farts!
Humanity survived thousands of years without needing iron or concrete. The issue here is we are stuck in a post-industrial mindset, not a natural one.
The point isn't whether or not we can survive, it's whether we can become technologically advanced enough for things such as space travel. At best it would make things significantly more difficult.
@@MrKing-qd7gi There is an inherent paradox in that statement. We can survive (and actually maintain a massive human population with a high quality of life) while eliminating fossil fuels. We (probably) cannot venture beyond the orbit of our Moon without them (at least not at present; give us a few hundred years, and all bets are off!). But by pursuing any massive leap in technology at present (space travel is only one such possibility) aided by fossil fuels *_(indeed, by continuing to extract and burn them for any reason at all),_* we both threaten our survival and virtually guarantee a significantly lower quality of life for billions of humans (both presently alive, and in the future). And I think it would be a true tragedy if we destroyed our civilization in an attempt to elevate it! How many billions of humans have lived and died, gradually expanding the body of human knowledge and our capacity to think in new and exciting ways, only for the people alive in the 21st century to be selfish and short-sighted and screw it all up?
So...ensuring that the Earth remains a planet that can support us is orders of magnitude more important than landing astronauts (or gods forbid, colonist astronauts) on Mars in some half-witted attempt to safeguard our species against existential threats to life on Earth, especially since WE are the main existential threat.
@@VoIcanomanYou understand it is 100% certain there will be a natural disaster that will wipe humanity out given enough time? The conclusions about colonizing other planets are simple to draw from that. We must pursue it now while we have the means and resources to do it.
@@VoIcanoman What is so special about human life? What about every other creature we share this planet with, and whose very existence we threaten?
Concrete was made for ever, ash and dirt type.. iron was required for most of that time also.
We burn coal because we can, not because we have to. Think about rail vs car travel. There isn't anything that can't be done really without fossil fuels, it just requires more work. You might be living is smaller house right now, one not made for concrete etc...but you would still be living in a house. Also think what would happen if we lived in a world where there was 1000 times as much oil as there is now. We might all be using rocket cars as fuel efficient engines might not have been invented. Our economy is dependent on oil until it isn't. Then we will have to shift things around it will cause problems. We shouldn't think that technological progress is dependent on oil, as scarcity drives new innovations to get around the road blocks.
The saddest part of the climate debate, is that most people (on the left and right) believe that switching to clean alternatives would be costly and job killing. In fact, the exact opposite is true. High oil tax plus instant rebates for all citizens would create the greatest economic boom in world history without hurting consumers in the least. Even if climate wasn't a problem, it would be foolish to not do it as quickly as possible.
Hasn't worked anywhere it's been tried. Canada is finally going to get rid of this idiotic ideology based on projection not economics.
So the next civilization after this one might be a steampunk one? That would be interesting! At least without electronics, it would be harder to have a surveillance state!
You mean driven by coal?
"And worst of all no internet?" I doubt the internet will be the last of the few survivors worries... Lol.
My view on fossil fuels has been to be thankful for the point they have gotten us to. However, we are also very technologically advanced now and capable of using other forms of energy that can be much more sustainable than fossil fuels. We are at a point now where we might be able to minimize fossil fuel consumption while continuing to innovate and improve!
There is nothing available today that can replace fossil fuels. Over 80% of global energy comes from fossil fuels. Steel, concrete, silicone, plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, and energy are derived from fossil fuels. There are currently over 6000 products made from fossil fuels. From contact lenses to toothpaste. From camping gear to tires.
fossil fuels are not a problem for people. they are a problem for globalist elites interested in restricting people's freedom/power. that is why "misinformation" is a problem (not a problem when media corporations do it, only when independent small time people say the wrong thing). its not a threat to normal people. it is *empowering* for normal people to say what they think. who it does not help, is the elites wanting things to remain a certain way.
This scenario doesn't even take into account climate change and how much harder it will be to organize society as we leave the climate sweet spot we've benefitted from over the last few thousand years...
Yeah, future populations of Earth may be very small during the periods when survival is most hard
Fossil fuel is both a blessing and a curse. The easy access to high density forms of energy in oil, gas and coal has catapulted our species forward but we are at a point where we risk stagnating that progress unless we continue to develop newer and better sources of energy. There is a direct tie between energy consumption and quality of life that I don’t see any reason doesn’t continue. If want to get to a space faring post scarcity society we need more energy than fossil fuels alone can provide. Even if you are a skeptic of global warming that should be reason enough to embrace development of alternate sources of energy.
Fascinating, particularly your current info on fossil fuels. This gave me a better understanding about how all the fossil fuels we have burnt is what has gotten us to this point now. That really does ring true.
Very interesting analysis. The "future" civilization that might need to start from scratch is us in 30, 40, 50 years, even if no catastrophic event occurs. We would still need to figure out how to proceed civilization without fossil fuels...And 50 years is just around the cornee.
An other which is running out is: phosphorus, which we also use for food production.
Sry fossil fuels do not exist dinosaurs never existed and there has never been any great mass extinctions
NIce ad placement at the end there. That's the way to do it right.
I've thought about this for decades. I think our landfills and the plastics we bury are the energy source of a post apocalypse civilization. Furthermore, all the refined metals and other valuable resources we bury in landfills are actually a gift to those future peope, or maybe ourselves. In most of the world, especially the developed countries, recycling is just a propagandized pipe dream. Maybe that's for the best.
Where I live, trash no longer ends up in landfills. 99% (yes, 99%) of it is either recycled or incinerated, creating electricity and heat. However, there is still enough stuff in the form of vehicles, buildings and just everyday objects for any future civilization to rise from the ashes.
Recycling would help us avoid an apocalypse in the first place
@@orsaz924 The average person DOES recycle. Its those in power that decide what happens to it after it is collected. Mostly it is just sent to third world countries. Or burnt, making recycling pointless.
@@darthdonkulous1810 You are right, and it's unfortunate that things are that way. Nevertheless, I wouldn't exactly call recycling a "pipe dream"
Our cities will be future ore deposits
7:26 A lack of concrete isn’t going to hinder a civilisation reboot. Look at the Greeks, Ancient Egyptians, the Mesoamerican civilisations, The Indus Civilisation, the Mesopotamians, etc. Cement was never used by these peoples but life seemed to go on perfectly well for them. The more pressing problem is finding a strong and resilient material for foundations in earthquake-prone regions. Or maybe not. Given the premiss in this video, the world population might have dwindled to the point where the remaining humans will have decided to just move to areas where earthquakes are exceptionally rare.
Chilean here. In Santiago, one of the oldest buildings standing is San Francisco church. It has lasted centuries withstanding earthquakes, thanks to its foundations being supported by rounded stones. The whole building rocks and rolls when there's an earthquake. It is thought that technique was native's idea.
So, you can build earthquake resistant large buildings without concrete. That church is made of stone.
@@MariaMartinez-researcher Mind-boggling-ly cool! I always thought the rollers were a modern invention. I had no idea that it was at least a few centuries old. Thanks, Maria for sharing that, I really appreciate it 😃
@@MariaMartinez-researcher Iglesia de San Francisco, Santiago de Chile was built in 1554. It was completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1583.
It was rebuilt in 1622 and large portions collapsed in 1643, 1647, 1730, and 1751 due to earthquakes.
You can see the mortar between the adobe bricks from the outside of the church, which makes sense since forms concrete have been discovered as far back as 6500 BCE. Spanish burial chambers dated 4000 BCE even contains forms of concrete. That church has concrete.
Could we build a few structures without concrete? Yes. But why are our bridges now mostly concrete? Cost and the ability for scale. We would support a far less concentrated society without it.
We need more nuclear power to move forward.
@@External2737 Hi 👋🏼. I confess I did not think of bridges. But I don’t think there are that many buildings so even if concrete is scarce it will still cover non-building structures. Of course, I might be mistaken, after all I am not an expert. But then again, there is that roman aqueduct in Spain; maybe tweaking things here or there might enable building bigger bridges? Then again, an aqueduct is not a carrying the same load as a bridge.
A lot of wrongs here. Green cement and steel can be made. Look at Sweden.
Farmland is abundant. Therefore wood is not taking land. Wood can in part replace fossils.
Sersch Advanced Biofuels Conference.
If you ask a person from a century ago that you'll be able to talk to someone many kilometers away from the palm of your hand and instant, they'd think you were ludicrous.
That synopsis still holds true to this day. The next generation WILL find a means to expand civilization and the human intellect.
Blind optimism isn't going to save us. Saying that things have improved in the past, doesn't meant that improvements will be made in the future.
@@neoncyberia Might have to go back to before the invention of mirrors or telescopes as people communicated with the use of those over massive distances too and some of those could fit into the palm of your hand.
The hypothesis is an event that brings us back to the stone age. There will be no educational system so people cannot read, write or calculate. The old books would become meaningless. To have people develloping education and science you would need a social stratification that makes these people free of hunting and gathering. And then it would be a very long time to the production of e.g. a color coded resistor. We are talking 10.000ths of years.
@@neoncyberia Its common for people to not realize that people living in the distant past were just as clever as we are now, they just didn't have almost everything around them fully documented, defined, and have that information available to everyone yet like we do now.
Physics limits us. Continuous exponential growth in any way, shape, or form is fundamentally impossible. The only reason things changed so much over the past few centuries is because knowledge and technology compounded to create exponential growth, and yet now we are running up against limits. The world a century from now probably won't look all that different from the world of today technology wise, there will be some improvements but no colossal leaps.
Here’s a question. If we could do it over again would we really want to build this society? A society based on extraction of limited resources no matter what? What would be the goals of a new civilization?
@@koreybReturn to monke
How are you going to steer that?
Exactly!
No Internet? Oh hell no. I hope I get it in the first exchange.
Very well-made and informative video; thanks for putting it together. However, I must say it only covers the subject from a known perspective. That is, after "reset", people will start doing the same thing we did. What if that won't be the case? What if other "sources" of energy will be unveiled? What if there won't be any need for fossil fuels? That would be an interesting subject and would make for a fascinating video :)
The silicon refining problem could potentially be solved again by methane. Methane + Oxygen burns hot enough to refine silicon. Another option is splitting water into Hydrogen and Oxygen then burning together - this also reaches sufficient temperatures.
Where are you going to get the massive amounts of energy required to split the water molecule into its component atoms of hydrogen and oxygen? Cart before the horse.
To think that only fossil fuels can get us here is an intense lack of creativity .
There are alternatives obviously.
@@sylvesteruchia5263We can use techno-optimists as fuel. And food.
@@grahamstrouse1165 The person who did this did not fully explore other alternatives and their implimentation.
They just made a case for fossil fuels without diving deep into what other alternatives would look like . That's all im saying . Like there was a world before plastics (and it wasn't stone-age-like) alternatives to plastics do exist right now (or are in development ). I feel the person didnt cover all the bases in this vid.
Most of your presentation was a litany of dependence on fossil fuel technology. Yet, the ultimate question is not how difficult it will be to move past that dependency, but the looming imperative that we absolutely must take seriously the warning signs of global climate catastrophe.
Your analysis also seems to overlook a fundamental fact about modern civilization-- given even mass catastrophe, our power to adapt and recover will be shaped by the knowledge we have acquired already. Not all of that knowledge will be lost forever, but will provide a head start to recovery.
No matter what happens, we should consider survival and technical development as one and the same process. As you point out at 14:36, future civilizations will face shortages of familiar raw materials. Even so, they also could develop new technologies to bypass petrochemical issues. So, this may not be an either/or debate, but rather dramatically reordered priorities for the use of many different energy sources, from solar to geothermal-- all with an eye to proper management of our only livable environment.
You forgot to add that all the low hanging fruit has been taken. They would have problems getting easy metal ores, but there would probably be a lot of scrap. As far as getting back into space they would be having to synthesize rocket fuel some other way.
I would like to believe if they decided to build at least close to a carbon neutral society, human ingenuity would thrive and find new ways to get to space.
yup! a carbon neutral/negative society could use synthetic fuels for space travel :)
If we keep up at this pace - we might destroy our own planet without even realizing it, while we are looking up at the stars, in an active search for a substitute one, amongst far away planets and galaxies. What a waste of potential and a mad insensibility, isn't it?
To quote Saint Greta Thunberg, "How dare you?"
Can I imagine a world without chips? Yes, there were NONE around when I was born! So it is not that long ago. The same is true of plastics. If they had not happened, we would have found alternatives.
Point of life is not measured in rocket-building potential.
what makes you think the next civilisation would see the need to travel to space?
The stars, people will want to reach the stars. That primal drive is behind space travel
a) because that's the point of the video, it's just asking whether or not the next civilization COULD do it, not whether or not they would.
b) because all life on earth is expansionist, it's like one of the defining traits of life, something that replicates and spreads as much as it can.
Even with the end of civilization during a catastrophic event, there is a strong likelihood that some people familiar with forging would survive. That would greatly speed the recovery. Also, those trained in agriculture would aid and teach their trade. Same goes for woodworkers, Stonemans, and more. Not to mention those that survive that understand wind and water power and animal husbandry. I don't believe we drop below the iron age...maybe that's the starting point.
The easy to mine raw materials are probably mostly depleted...no?
That is if any forges survive or even the materials to make one.
For sure!, Well said 🙂
The scenario presented is full of so many flaws it's quite literally impossible.
1: Ruins of civilization would still exist to recover knowledge of technology making it possible for survivors to ever fall to the stone age, iron age would be the lowest possible.
2: Realistically a great portion of survivors would be the well educated and the wealthy to have had the knowledge & resources to survive such catastrophes.
3: shoutout to the submarines that literally could just be chilling deep enough during said catastrophe.
There is a fiction book titled: A cantacle for Leibowitz that explores how civilization come back after a nuclear war.
Population: "If we only had a fairly clean way of making energy..."
Nuclear Energy: "Ahh I'm right here...over here...hello...hello"
We're afraid of the energy source that's killed/impacted the least amount of people. Meanwhile, China is building the equivalent of 2 new coal power plants PER WEEK!
Ok, how did we get from no space travel (in the title) to rebooting civilisation (the actual content)??! 🤨
I think the boys were trippin balls when they came up with this script's arc. 😁
If you can't rebuild civilization, you can't ever get to a point where you go to space again. It's a prerequisite. How is that not abundantly clear?
@@mrwjs 😄
Because it's a scenario of us being the last space travelling society. For argument sake, he could have said we go extinct and evolution brings in technologically advanced lions. Could those lions with the resources left by us get to space? Rebooting our civilization is just an easier parallel to make.