An extra data point. If we crash and burn, then earth will be too hot for multicellular life by the time the coal and oil are replenished. So the one and only industrial revolution has happened.
And given ~4,000m years of life so far and the heating only a few hundred million years away, we only just made it. Which suggests it is pretty hard to build intelligent life. Maybe because computation is very expensive so the gradient is steep. Robin Hanson has a paper on this point.
It wasnt until relatively late in the second industrial revolution that coal completely replaced wood. And oil came very late. I think an industrial revolution could happen a second time without fossil fuel.
That’s unlikely. By the late 19th century there was no stopping the industrial revolution. Without coal maybe it would have slowed down a bit. But science was advancing at a rapid pace, and various other technologies from telephones to electricity were well on their way. It’s hard for us to imagine a world without coal, since we took that path. But I don’t see why it couldn’t be done. There would probably be a lot more investment in hydro and wind power (both of which were a thing before the industrial revolution.) And eventually solar. Cars would be hard, but electric trains aren’t inconceivable.
An extra data point. If we crash and burn, then earth will be too hot for multicellular life by the time the coal and oil are replenished. So the one and only industrial revolution has happened.
And given ~4,000m years of life so far and the heating only a few hundred million years away, we only just made it. Which suggests it is pretty hard to build intelligent life. Maybe because computation is very expensive so the gradient is steep. Robin Hanson has a paper on this point.
It wasnt until relatively late in the second industrial revolution that coal completely replaced wood. And oil came very late. I think an industrial revolution could happen a second time without fossil fuel.
Good point. However it would have petered out very quickly though as the wood was all burned.
That’s unlikely. By the late 19th century there was no stopping the industrial revolution. Without coal maybe it would have slowed down a bit. But science was advancing at a rapid pace, and various other technologies from telephones to electricity were well on their way. It’s hard for us to imagine a world without coal, since we took that path. But I don’t see why it couldn’t be done. There would probably be a lot more investment in hydro and wind power (both of which were a thing before the industrial revolution.) And eventually solar. Cars would be hard, but electric trains aren’t inconceivable.