There is another well known corollary -- if we consume the bulk of fossil fuels this time around, it's unlikely that recovery after a major civilisation collapse would be possible.
Naturally the kind of leadership that declines to consider what will happen over the next 20-30 years is even less likely to be concerned about the subsequent 200-300.
> There is another well known corollary -- if we consume the bulk of fossil fuels this time around, it's unlikely that recovery after a major civilisation collapse would be possible.
There will still be coal. Coal reserves are unbelievable.
Even if we consume that too, we should be fine so as long as there is wood. You can power cars and tanks with wood.
If we have no trees left... there are probably other, more pressing, concerns. For humans, that is.
The good thing about Earth is that there is life, not just humans. Other species may take our place if we fail, in time. Emphasis on may, since evolution doesn't guarantee this. But it seems that at least on this planet intelligence has been consistently rewarded (primates, birds, dolphins, octopuses).
If there is life, there will be an energy source. No matter what it is, that energy source can be harvested by machines too. It may take longer for a civilization to do so, depending on the difficulty of the power source. But in the end, it doesn't really matter. We are dealing with cosmological time scales after all.
Even dolphins would be able to develop an industrialized civilization. No coal needed, they can just exploit temperature gradients. Metalworking would be more difficult, but that's their problem to solve. Right after they solve fine object manipulation.
Hence I said 'bulk of fossil fuels', not 'some, but leave plenty of coal behind'.
In either case, the fossil fuels that are increasingly difficult / expensive to obtain now, in an era with comparatively abundant free energy, would be even more difficult / expensive to obtain in an energy-scarce world.
And yes, I'm aware that things can burn. As a species we've known how to burn things for a very long time, but the industrial revolution really only kicked off when we used coal to power steam engines. Wood - even charcoal - simply doesn't burn hot enough for much beyond food and brass.
> Even dolphins would be able to develop an industrialized civilization.
Indeed, I've read a long thread on a world building site where it seemed conclusive that a sea based intelligence could never discover some key technology like metallurgy without being bootstrapped by an external civilization... and dolphins don't have hands like octopus.
Why? My instinct is the opposite: if 6 billion people die, we drop two orders of magnitude in biodiversity, most biomes die more or less completely (save a couple pioneer species) then we have 100 million people still living in nooks and crannies. Worst case in air conditioned spaces near nuclear plants. And those people re-engineer society in a more stable way.
That’s not a worst case or best case scenario, it’s a middle way. Worst case scenarios though could still include human survival through genetic modification (planet run by teenagers with bioengineered lungs) or underground air conditioned tunnels.
I just find total human extinction almost entirely implausible. Can you describe a scenario where that is the likely outcome?
It seems like 1000 PPM of CO2 is guaranteed, 5000 is theoretically possible but the lethal concentration for total human extinction is 10,000... is that even possible?
Or are we worried about temperature? Or cropland death?
> And those people re-engineer society in a more stable way.
I am envious of your optimism, but I see no evidence to suggest that small communities of highly stressed and resource-starved humans can produce anything better than a much larger number of relatively non-stressed humans with easy access to abundant resources.
I wasn't proposing any particular scenario that would cause a civilisational collapse, merely that a large supply of free, easy to obtain, high-density energy may be a prerequisite for any transition to an industrial age (and naturally all that may follow). I accept we only have one data point to hand, but it doesn't contradict this proposition.
This is a pretty scary thought. We have one shot. If we waste it our species won't escape the planet for another million years, if ever. If we manage it, the stars are our's.
If that isn't another low probability Great Filter, I don't know what is. Gravity is the ultimate cage.
Naturally the kind of leadership that declines to consider what will happen over the next 20-30 years is even less likely to be concerned about the subsequent 200-300.