Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

"Actually, no, let's go even more conservative. You think our economic and scientific progress will stagnate. Today's civilizations will crumble, and many more civilizations will fall and rise. Sure, we'll eventually get the ability to expand throughout the galaxy. But it will take 100,000 years. That's 10x the amount of time that has passed since human civilization began in the Levant."

How far will these civilizations crumble? What will they use for energy, given that we have exhausted the easily accessible sources of coal and oil?

"Spreading throughout the galaxy would certainly be harder if nothing like mind uploading (which I'll discuss in a future piece, and which is part of why I think future space settlements could have "value lock-in" as discussed above) can ever be done."

"Mind uploading" is the wrong way to look at it. How about "mind copying" for a best case (whether that copying requires the destruction of the original is another issue); "mind simulation" is a less palatable case.

"But space expansion seems feasible, and our galaxy is empty. These two things seem in tension. A similar tension - the question of why we see no signs of extraterrestrials, despite the galaxy having so many possible stars they could emerge from - is often discussed under the heading of the Fermi Paradox."

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. (Yeah, that's pretty lame.)

> What will they use for energy, given that we have exhausted the easily accessible sources of coal and oil?

That’s a source of much depression for me. We’re so close to being ready to fill the galaxy, while simultaneously close to a collapse that might prevent any future civilization from doing the same.

And what if we really are the only hope in the galaxy, or even beyond that, to propagate life that can truly appreciate the universe?

You can bootstrap without fossil fuels. It’s tough to rely on biomass with ~8 billion people, but if the population is smaller, it works fine. Also, we used to rely on hydroelectric produced hydrogen for nitrogen fertilizer for decades before steam reforming of fossil fuels became cheaper and proven (around 1950). Trains ran on biomass in much of the US. Early European American settlers used biomass and bio-sourced iron (bog iron made of deposits from iron bacteria) for iron implements. We used a lot of hydro for industrial prime motive power, too, in the 1800s in the US, for grinding grains, etc, etc. before that, the Netherlands and others harnessed wind for industrial purposes. Wind, hydro, and biomass is enough to kickstart a hydrogen economy and bootstrap into solar, modern wind, modern batteries, nuclear, etc. Fossil fuels are just a convenient shortcut and not always as useful as they seem (see: the Resource Curse, how resource-poor Japan is still able to industrialize, etc). If the Fracking Revolution hadn’t happened, the US would still be burning a lot more coal, but we’d probably have more electrification of transport, etc.

So I think if humanity used up every scrap of fossil fuel, we’d still be able to bootstrap to industrialization and modernity. But using up all fossil fuels is actually pretty hard (which is why climate change is hard to mitigate…). There’s hundreds of years of gas and oil, probably a thousand years of coal, etc. Biomass can be used up over a faster time, but if you modulate its harvesting, it can last indefinitely and even when you scour the landscape of trees and desertify the landscape, over tens of thousands of years, nature will reverse what you did (minus extinct species).

What I think is missing here is the ROI on each Joule. Coal accessible from the surface is effectively free, as are oil seeps. It's certainly possible to bootstrap absent fossil fuels, it takes a lot more work to generate them, thus generating less net civilizational surplus. Since the natural tendency is to use surplus is to improve quality of life, it requires a tremendous amount of concentrated surplus to be able to invest in something very expensive with a very long timeline for return on investment like space settlement.

In other words, absent tons of "free" resources like fossil fuels, it will require a larger percentage of available civilizational surplus to be dedicated to space than it would today. That implies either strong wealth inequality (more than today), authoritarian central government with high taxes, or a unified population interested in long term investments. The first two seem more likely than the latter.

I honestly don’t think it’s that bad. Wood has a pretty big ROI. It’s not even underground, you just chop it down. But it’s also not hard to accidentally cut down all your trees on your island or whatever. As long as you can maintain some fairly sustainable fuel harvesting practices, trees can provide cheap and high energy ROI, enough to bootstrap hydro and wind from which hydrogen can be made and any manner of modern energy (although nuclear and solar and batteries are even more efficient). Biomass can serve as a feedstock for chemicals via steam reforming to syngas and then Fischer-Tropsch to anything else, and biomass is abundant enough for that non-energy purpose even with 8 billion people as long as your prime energy comes elsewhere.

Gotta realize that the fossil fuel energy surplus is often highly wasted on authoritarian regimes and such. Industrious nations can & do find other sources of energy, and there are many to choose from (hydro, wind, biomass, geothermal, nuclear fission, tidal, photovoltaic, solar thermal, ocean temperature gradient, even space based solar, nuclear fusion, etc).

Simply wind energy and hydrogen electrolysis would work. Both are relatively simple.

I think we have a kind of fatalism when it comes to energy sources which isn’t helped by the fact that advocates of one energy source often invest a lot of time in downplaying other energy sources, but we actually have a LOT of good, economic-surplus-compatible options to choose from, and fossil fuels are just one.

The real key is knowledge and precision. From that, and nearly any mix of energy sources and raw materials, comes abundance.

Thank you for these posts, I learned a lot!

You can bootstrap without fossil fuels.

No human civilization did that. Until coal and iron were found near each other, industry did not get beyond wood and brass.

Not true. In the early American colonies, the colonists used charcoal and bog iron to supply local blacksmiths. The Iron Age in particular enabled widespread metal use precisely because sources of iron ore and charcoal are very broadly distributed geographically. Ironically (heh), it was the Bronze Age which relied more heavily on trade as you needed both copper and tin (which was especially rare geographically) to make bronze, which meant you had to have fairly vast trading networks. The development of iron smelting was a pretty important invention that vastly simplified and diversified availability of weapons-quality metal.

(Although to make hardenable steel—probably essential for industrialization—is harder than mere iron and requires better process control… but charcoal can still be the fuel source. And it was, for ancient steelmaking.)

EDIT: in fact, even in the first Industrial Revolution, water power was more important economically for motive power in Britain than coal driven steam power. Globally, coal didn’t start to exceed traditional biomass for prime energy until around 1900.

> And what if we really are the only hope in the galaxy, or even beyond that, to propagate life that can truly appreciate the universe?

That’s assuming that there is any value in humans spreading throughout the universe.

It’s hard to imagine there being a higher purpose to the universe than some form of intelligence capable of appreciating it.

> "Mind uploading" is the wrong way to look at it. How about "mind copying" for a best case (whether that copying requires the destruction of the original is another issue); "mind simulation" is a less palatable case.

One way we could do it, it's to slowly replace one by one natural neuron by a virtual or synthetic one and by keeping all synapse correctly connected. It should allow an "upload" (well more a conversion) without breaking consciousness continuity.

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