An interesting point, but I can't see how it could happen.<p>The industrial revolution was sparkled not by sudden availability of raw resources (they were always there, including coal), but by advances in physics and philosophy (probably the most important person founding the change was Thomas Aquinas, who defined the separation between secular and religious pursuits, and declared that scientific understanding of the world is actually something good in its own right — but it took nearly 500 years for his ideas to finally take off). The coal, on the other hand, was equally available in 1200 as well as in 1760.<p>If there will be no more coal (doubtful — at least 600 years of proven reserves exist), humanity will find the replacement. Energy resources are so cheap that we have to actually restrain ourselves to limit our footprint on the planet (otherwise, nobody would care). Oil is dirty cheap and still actually flows right from the earth in some lucky places. Uranium is so cheap we are happy with ~1% utilisation rate in "classical" nuclear reactors (breeder reactors would allow full utilisation, but they cost more — so why bother if uranium is so darn cheap? With breeders, we have enough uranium for MILLIONS of years with our current energy consumption rates).<p>It is knowledge that must be preserved, but utter destruction of human knowledge is no longer a "boring" apocalypse scenario. It is quite interesting how this can possibly happen, and what can be done to prevent it.
A large part of the problem is centralization- if oil refineries or manufacturing hubs halfway across the world fail, we're suddenly out of supplies needed to function. The sort of collapse talked about here is scary precisely because it could happen everywhere at once. Likewise, because oil drilling depends on technology sourced from all over the world, you can't have a "local restart"- you'd have to reboot the entire planet all in one go.<p>Historically, the "fall of Rome" wasn't as big a setback in human history as its made out to be- cultural progress shifted over to Persian countries, who kept on doing science and other nice stuff until Europe got itself back together. Meanwhile China ticked along unconcerned about the whole thing. It wouldn't work the same way in today's world, but that's a solvable problem.<p>I've read about wood gas as a possible energy source for a non-global economy- non-ideal stuff in many respects, and requires the survival of a good amount of know-how, but providing a locally-sourced oil alternative in a pinch.
I wrote this in response to much of the hoopla around the 'threat' of A.I super-intelligence, and other unlikely disasters.<p>The future of humanity as a species is worth thinking about, but we also ought to be considering the very real possibility of getting stuck in the awful conditions humans endured in the past, alongside more farfetched (and less likely) scenarios.<p>I wish I had some unique idea about how to do that, but I suppose discussion is just as good.
Ultimately, and what the OP ignores, is rebuilding society [and resource exploitation to do so in general] like can be done with the rubble of the existing civilization.<p>It will be a long, slow road to recovery but all you really need to be able to do is setup one hydroelectric dam and you have enough energy to rebuild civilization.<p>We could build those with 1800s technology and, frankly, many of the innovations of the 1800s today are possible by just recycling the bones of a large city.<p>So I don't think this doomsday scenario will be as bad as the OP fears. We just may get booted down to the 1700-1800s and take 300 years rebuilding.
If books and blueprints for advanced technology were available, I wonder what is the potential for leapfrogging technologies. So instead of burning coal to power steam factories, we could skip straight to powering electric generators via dams and turbines. Water power fortunately is not going anywhere, and provides a considerable amount of electricity.<p>The big issue is energy for transportation and for growing crops. I wonder what the prospects for things like switchgrass based ethanol are. I see promising news reports, but nothing has come of it yet.
So, the idea is to create a society that survives even this scenario.
Distributed Library's,that survive Alexandria.
Rugged Tech, that can be made even with just sun power and leftovers.
Social networks, that allow for continued cooperation even during times of enforced isolation by disease and war.
Social networks that enforce social behavior, by the world bearing witness.
Tech that evades the control of the temporary mighty, warlords and priest castes, that try to "stabilize" society by freezing it between the holy cycles of overpopulation and civil war.
Lots of work.
Doable Work.
Almost certainly not the case that coal and oil are prerequisites, though things might have been harder without them, progress wouldn't necessarily have halted. Different approaches would have been taken. Growing fuel crops, for example, rather than building more mines. The important point here is that improvement in wealth and life expectancy in England started well before the industrial revolution. That revolution was enabled by this growth in wealth and longevity, and thus greater investment in technology, not vice versa.<p><a href="https://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html" rel="nofollow">https://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html</a><p>"We claim that the exogenous decline of adult mortality at the end of the seventeenth century can be one of the causes driving both the decline of interest rate and the increase in agricultural production per acre in preindustrial England. Following the intuition of the life-cycle hypothesis, we show that the increase in adult life expectancy must have implied less farmer impatience and it could have caused more investment in nitrogen stock and land fertility, and higher production per acre. We analyse this dynamic interaction using an overlapping generation model and show that the evolution of agricultural production and capital rates of return predicted by the model coincide fairly well with their empirical pattern."
I don't understand this. There is no way we would lose all knowledge in the described situations. So why couldn't existing knowledge be used to re-boot society? Sure it might take 100-200 years, but it would happen
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.<p>It doesn't take some disastrous event for this to happen. It just takes time. The USGS has resource estimates for all major minerals.[1] For each one, there's an estimate of world resources. Check out iron ore.[2] "World resources are estimated to exceed 230 billion tons of iron contained within greater than 800 billion tons of crude ore." That sounds huge, until you see that current mining is 3.2 billion tons a year. There's less than a century of iron left.<p>It's like that for most minerals. There are not millennia of supply left. In most cases, it's a century or two.<p>The original article says "From about 1760 onwards we've improved our situation dramatically." I've been saying something similar for a while, but I usually date the start of the industrial revolution from 1825, when the first steam-powered railroad started carrying goods and passengers commercially. This was the moment when the industrial revolution got out of beta. It was also when humans started making serious dents in mined natural resources. Before steam power, mining was a small-time activity. Nobody could dig much, and nobody could move much. Today, as mentioned above, 3.2 billion tons a year of iron alone are mined. That's all in less than 200 years.<p>It's not going to go on for another 200 years. The highest grade minerals in easily accessible areas were mined out decades ago. Most mining today is already working low-grade ore. Going for even lower grade ore is possible, but that just postpones the end.<p>Minerals are more of a problem than energy. There are many energy sources, some of which are renewable. Minerals can be recycled, but you lose some at each go-round. Asteroid mining might help some day, but not unless we find some far cheaper way of operating in space.<p>Heavy industrial civilization has a finite lifespan.<p>[1] <a href="http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals" rel="nofollow">http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals</a>
[2] <a href="http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_ore/mcs-2015-feore.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_ore/mc...</a>
I can't see how it could happen - and the reason is even more depressing: world war 3. That will cause "the reset" and after few hundred years the civilization will start growing again. Some of the current knowledge will be lost but it will be reinvented again but better.
And then again, we could develop a benevolent AI which is able to design a practical fusion reactor solution which gives the human race essentially unlimited power resources to apply toward cleaning up the planet.<p>Why is that so much harder to consider than the bad scenarios? I suppose evolutionarily the optimistic people probably didn't reproduce as often as the pessimistic people did but still.
Mad Max was originally about peak oil collapse. Nuclear holocaust was retconned in circa Thunderdome.<p>The author apparently doesn't know that fissioning the thorium and uranium in an average rock yields 1,000 times the energy needed to melt it.[1] The ground you walk on is literally beaming with energy, and it's incredibly easy to have out.<p>[1] 2000 GJ and 2 GJ per cubic meter, respectively.
Really, the <i>best</i> thing for the survival of the species would be population control (down to something like 2 billion) and eugenics of some sort.<p>Unfortunately, both are highly immoral.
Please stop underestimating A.I. power of destruction. A.I. is not danger itself, it's people using A.I. are. Like nuclear power, we use it for clear energy and we use it for destruction. Real AGI is 1000x more deadly than nuclear power in wrong hands..