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Comment by Salgat | Hacker News Reader

I'm more curious what would have happened if fossil fuels weren't available on the scale present today. It's pretty remarkable if you think about it, it's basically a shortcut to bypass energy generation limitations for several centuries. What if humans came along before fossil fuels had a chance to form? Would we have had an industrial revolution?

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You need oceans and geologic activity for life, so there would always be oil. Coal is from trees dying and piling up faster than they rot…so vascular plants need to develop much earlier than fungi.

It's by no means inevitable that intelligent life (us) would have deposits of fossil fuels available to jumpstart a high technology civilization, akin to the small bit of "fuel" packed into a seed for the young plant to use until it can sprout and photosynthesize. In fact, I wonder if this is the "great filter" and we've already lucked past it.

Oil is the fossilized remains of plankton. Anywhere life develops would have oil eventually.

Right, if:

1) plankton or something plankton-like develops and generates a lot of biomass, and

2) its remains aren't dispersed or digested by other organisms, and

3) it has time to turn into petroleum, and

4) all of this happens far enough ahead of intelligent life so that it's ready when they need it, and in sufficient quantity to bother.

You could build a "Drake equation" model about how likely this is, and maybe it's pretty likely, but it's not inevitable.

(2) seems like the key one to me. We seem to actually be quite "lucky" (in the short term) that it took a epochal hot minute for something to evolve to consume dead life so it could just accumulate to such a degree that we now burn like, trillions of ancient dead microorganisms to drive around the block.

> You need oceans and geologic activity for life

For life like our life that is. There's so many assumptions here.

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