[pavlov]

We’ve burned all the easily available fossil fuels though. So there won’t be another Industrial Revolution on the same blueprint as the one we experienced. The next one will be much more difficult.

I read somewhere that the Earth now has so much more fungi that substantial new fossil fuel deposits won’t develop even over hundreds of millions of years. If that’s true, we were lucky bastards to have chanced on the only easily accessible massive fuel resources in this planet’s entire history.

[narrator]

Abiotic oil is a pretty well developed theory. Lab experiments have show that temperature and pressures present in the earths core will form hydrocarbons from carbon and water. There's also all the extensive work by Gold on the deep hot biosphere. Also, the entire atmosphere of Titan is hydrocarbons for example, so it's not like hydrocarbons need life to exist. However, abiotic production is perhaps a few billion barrels of oil globally a year. Not close to enough to sustain our current civilization, but enough to try again in 10 or 20 thousand years.

[kragen]

there isn't any carbon or water in earth's core

hydrocarbons are energetically stable on titan because it's oxygen-deficient, a reducing environment. earth's surface is, by contrast, an oxidizing environment

the deep hot biosphere is unrelated

abiogenic petroleum prooduction is still not as well understood as you suggest

[hotnfresh]

Yeah, oil and coal in the quantities we found them were the result of a very specific set of physical and biological circumstances for the planet. It’s happened once. There’s a good chance it will never happen again in the remaining 900ish million years that the planet can support large, complex animals.

[Turing_Machine]

Oil, yes. Coal, no. There's still plenty of coal, mainly because we switched to burning oil and gas along the way.

[Qwertious]

Particularly peat, which notably forms in peat bogs at a rate of 1mm per year, on the surface. If society collapses then a millennium later there'll be a metre-thick new layer of the stuff in some areas.

[edgyquant]

This is often repeated but is an opinion and nothing more. There are an untold number of ways to discover the use of electricity

[Someone]

The problem isn’t how to use lots of energy, but how to produce it.

Before we started using coal as an energy source, wood was a popular source, but that was far from sustainable. See for example the graph in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestry_in_the_United_Kingdom...

If we had to start from that point again, there still would be lots of coal, but mostly not in places that are as easily accessible as what was there in the 1800s. If you have to manually dig a few hundred meters down to even reach coal, and (likely) wouldn’t even know where to dig, would you even consider starting digging?

Oil and gas similarly would be problematic. There’s very little at or near the surface left.

So, likely, the jump would have to be from wood to wind, solar or nuclear.

That has been shown to be possible for wind (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/10/wind-powered-facto...), but it will have to be different from what happened in the Industrial Revolution.

[Turing_Machine]

> If you have to manually dig a few hundred meters down to even reach coal

You don't, though.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/how-much-coal-is-le...

53% of the recoverable coal reserves in the United States can be recovered with surface mining.

[ceejayoz]

"Surface mining" involves quite a bit of industrial-scale digging. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine goes down 1,640 feet from the surface and looks like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Bannerak....

[Turing_Machine]

As I noted in the other post, the Big Hole in South Africa was dug to a depth of 240 meters by hand.

Coal mines of that depth nothing special, even with 19th Century steam technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining

"By 1856, the average depth in the Borinage was 361 meters (1,184 ft), and in 1866, 437 meters (1,434 ft) and some pits had reached down 700 to 900 meters (2,300 to 3,000 ft); one was 1,065 meters (3,494 ft) deep, probably the deepest coal mine in Europe at this time."

[ceejayoz]

"thanks to the good pumping system" (guess what powers that) and "by the late 19th century the seams were becoming exhausted" indicate the practical limitations faced by that.

[ceejayoz]

There's a significant difference between discovering electricity and powering a civilization off it.

[Qwertious]

Is there, though? Perhaps discovering electricity (I.e. electric generator and motor) inevitably leads to industrialization. We don't know, since we invented both complex water-powered textile machines and steam engines well before we invented electricity, so we don't really know how a complex medieval society would have reacted to it.

Also, if civilization collapses it's still fairly likely that a powerdrill will survive (not necessarily functioning, but intact enough that people will look at it and play with copper spirals). Actually, so will internal combustion engines probably, although that won't do much without the requisite metallurgy.

[ceejayoz]

> intact enough that people will look at it and play with copper spirals

We've mined out all the easy copper, too.

[Qwertious]

Yeah, scavenging copper from our ruins will make a lot more sense pre-industrialization.

[Turing_Machine]

There's still plenty of coal (hundreds of years worth), which is what fueled the original Industrial Revolution.

Petroleum and gas came much later.

Edit: 435 years worth of recoverable coal in the United States alone, of which 53% is recoverable by surface mining.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/how-much-coal-is-le...

[ceejayoz]

We're doing deep underground mining for coal, mountain-top removal mining, and stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288 ("surface" mining, technically) to get at it even today. How much readily accessible surface coal is left?

Note that your link says "include only the coal that can be mined with today's mining technology". A fresh industrial revolution likely wouldn't start with "today's mining technology".

[Turing_Machine]

How much readily accessible surface coal is left?

As the reference also says, 53% of it is recoverable by surface mining. Bagger 288 is only notable for being a big shovel. It doesn't do anything that couldn't be done by guys with smaller shovels. 30 meters deep is nothing. The Big Hole in South Africa was dug to 240 meters deep by hand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hole

Edit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining

"By 1856, the average depth in the Borinage was 361 meters (1,184 ft), and in 1866, 437 meters (1,434 ft) and some pits had reached down 700 to 900 meters (2,300 to 3,000 ft); one was 1,065 meters (3,494 ft) deep, probably the deepest coal mine in Europe at this time."

Maybe time to take the L and move on?

[ceejayoz]

The mine Bagger 288 services goes sixteen hundred feet deep.

The Big Hole is absolutely miniscule in comparison - 42 acres - and mining for diamonds is a lot more lucrative by volume.

You're not digging out https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Bannerak... by hand.

[Qwertious]

Ok but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peatland

[ceejayoz]

"Peatlands are under threat by commercial peat harvesting" is right there in the intro. The article indicates we've already wiped out half, and that's with coal/oil available as the better option.

The question isn't "is there stuff to burn", it's "is there enough to burn to bootstrap a self-sustaining industrial economy". Our industrial revolution took place in a time where oil bubbled to the surface in Texas, coal could be dug up from rich surface seams with a shovel, and copper as pure crystals.

[fatherzine]

For the better. The future society will develop technology at a slower pace, and their technology will be naturally constrained by sustainability concerns from the get-go. We've turned 'medieval' into a pejorative during the Enlightenment period (17th, 18th centuries) predominantly for political reasons. Think red vs blue false dichotomy in contemporary politics. From a spiritual, technological and cultural perspective the Medieval age wasn't quite the dark pit of despair its political enemies made it to be. Visit a village e.g. in the French country side, there is something deep inside us that recognizes it as more organically fulfilling than either Industrial towns, or Contemporary sprawls.

[kragen]

this is an interesting point of view, but after thinking about it for several years, i think it's mistaken. some of the reasons can't be put into words, but here's what i can explain

geothermal energy (so-called egs) and solar are each individually far more abundant than fossil fuels ever have been; wind energy is comparable to fossil fuels and easier to harness. hydropower is a smaller resource but still one that's sufficient for industrialization

fossil fuel exploitation for mass production of steel in blast furnaces was widespread in song china 800 years ago but didn't lead to the industrial revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Song_dynasty#St...

contrary to kris de decker's wishful thinking, medieval and early modern holland didn't have an industrial revolution either, despite wind power

the industrial revolution still hasn't reached much of the planet; consider how many people still subsist on agriculture or unskilled, non-mass-production urban labor, in places like my own country (my experience here is the part that's hard to put into words) but most especially in the regions where fossil fuels are most abundant

the hard part of the industrial revolution was probably science, liberalism, and capitalism; superstition and kleptocracy are the human default