Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by edgyquant 952 days ago
This is often repeated but is an opinion and nothing more. There are an untold number of ways to discover the use of electricity
2 comments

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.

> 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.

"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....
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."

"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.
> "thanks to the good pumping system" (guess what powers that)

In the 19th Century?

Steam engines that burn part of the extracted coal. What else?

> by the late 19th century the seams were becoming exhausted

Those particular seams, maybe. They're not the only seams, dude.

I think we're done here.

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

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

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

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