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Comment by informatimago | Hacker News Reader

Actually, most planets don't have plate tectonics, (and what is the probability of a dinosaur extinction event?) So their population is "first generation", and they basically don't have fossil fuels. So no industrial age, and no powerful ergols for rockets. When we'll get there, we'll find mostly Star Gate-like civilizations: non-technological civilisations with lots of slaves and manual work.

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No fossil fuels doesn't nessesarily mean no industrial age. Many of factories and saw mills used to be located at rapids or waterfalls for the power and water access.

I suspect lacking a good surface fuel source might be more limiting. Imagine the difficulties making metal tools with no wood to burn.

Fossil fuels are even more accidental than that. Most of them come from the fact that woody materials evolved long before anything evolved that could break them down. Wood was the original plastic.

It's quite possible that we stand where we are as a result of a very long series of very unlikely events and conditions.

But we really just don't know.

Hope we find out someday. The laws of physics are cruel-- maybe someday we can see everything in a 100M light year radius to us is devoid of life, but theres still the other billions of light years where trillions of dice rolls are happening for a chance at civilization.

I am reminded of those few galaxies in Bootes Void who legitimately wouldn't be too wrong in thinking their galaxy was the observable universe until they could see beyond the dark.

Why would Boote Void residents not see all other galaxies? It’s just a relatively low density space nothing special about it. You’re probably thinking of Barnard 68 - dark nebula, and it’s too small to host a galaxy.

Sans fossil fuels, wouldn't we just have figured out how to scale something else? Ethanol maybe?

I think maybe we would have had slow industrialization until we figured out fission, solar PV, and good batteries.

Even if you have a planet that does not have large deposits of oil and natural gas you will have steam based Industrial Age once you get to that point you can use gasification to create what is essentially fossil fuel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasification

Gasification can be used with any organic mater, wood and hay are pretty common materials.

It might be slower but it would still get you there.

It would seem we are both ridiculously lucky and also quite unfortunate to have fossil fuels.

I am almost certain that we don't know enough to say that most planets don't have plate tectonics; even if one assumes that gas giants do not, they are certainly disproportionally represented in the sample of planets we know of, on account of being easier to detect, due to their size.

I believe that there is some speculation that plate tectonics is necessary to sustain the sort of environmental stability, over long periods, believed necessary for complex life to evolve.

> Actually, most planets don't have plate tectonics

I think that is speculation at best. Looking just at our local system, Mercury appears to have active tectonics, Venus is now believed to have active tectonics, Earth obviously does, and Mars is believed to have had them at one point if not currently. And there seems to be evidence of both tectonics and liquid water on Titan.

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