We Will Be the Last Civilization on Earth

I have no idea if this is accurate, but in one of my college classes a professor said that if we switched all world-wide electrical production over the nuclear, we'd only have about 50 years of material for reactors.
Not saying we should ignore nuclear, just remember that it's not unlimited.

Those spent fuel rods are a massive liability. Not like we can just shut down a reactor and walk away if we have to.

@@DrugDealer541 So, that would put us at 400 years worth of energy production?

​@@PsRohrbaughwere you been under 🪨

​@@PsRohrbaughwas he a hippie ?

There is still the Malthusian side of the situation. The world population has doubled in my lifetime, and I'm not that old. That's double the strain on the planet assuming the same standard of living.

@@PsRohrbaugh It's probably too late for our species. People will never be willing to do what's required to ensure our long term survival and advancement.

@@Apistevist deep down, I suspect that you’re right. But somewhere along the way, I decided to act like I don’t think it’s too late, to change the things I can, and see what happens. But I can’t say I blame people for being pessimistic.

@@bramverhees755 Ultimately it doesn't matter. The concern of our existence is contingent on our existence.

@@Apistevist See that is the issue where you assume "people" are a uniform blob with any power or impact. The main issue in climate change are big corporations, not private homes. If the entirety of germany e.g. stopped driving cars and used electric cars, the planet wouldn't notice a difference. What we need is not witch hunt private people, but governments that make rules for the companies that make up most of the co2. The second issue is if e.g. again germany does make these laws, if other countries dont follow it will have no effect. If the US, China and India keep increasing their co2 emissions, nothing a small european country can do will matter.

Some places are paradise. Most places seem like hell these days.

Wow. You are really negative. Don't forget our species was also not able to only survive but thrive without the majority of the things you just listed.

​@@matthamilton356maybe we'd be fine, but our mordern way of life is what allows us to support and feed such a large population. Take the tech away and a large number will die before a new balance is found.

​@@Teqnyqif there's an extinction level event to cause this downfall, most of the population will already be dead. The whole bit about ammonia, there won't be hundreds of millions of people to feed anymore.

@@matthamilton356- not 8 billion people.

And what about hydrogen? Not all books and knowledge would be lost in a catastrophe like the one described, electricity and much of the science behind would still be a thing, and that means electrolysis is viable. There is a ton of water around, so instead of carbon and natural gas, hydrogen could be an alternative, provided that the proper engineering level is reached (like making bronze tanks for example).
There's also methane that is being extracted and used as a fuel today from biowaste (here in Buenos Aires there is a small plant that does exactly that, and while small, it does provide electricity for the national grid).

Using charcoal to bootstrap aluminum and ceramic industries would give us the ability to make solar furnaces capable of exceeding the temperature of the sun.
Petroleum is far too valuable to long term survival to burn, and coal too, besides being toxic.

yeah these were both my first thoughts when he mentioned the issues in the video

Solar furnaces cannot exceed the temperature of the solar surface that is providing the energy to the solar lens system. It is a fundamental limit, I have forgotten the name of the optics principle involved but it can be found in Google and Wikipedia, you will find the information if you spend some time searching for it. I can explain, to a degree anyway, how it works on an intuitive level - basically what is going on is that the lens system of a solar furnace works both ways, if the focal point of the solar furnace is somehow raised above the temp of the emitting surface on the Sun, then the lens system will work backwards and act to transmit heat from the object at the focal point to the Sun, so rather than the Sun heating the object at the focal point the object at the focal point tries to heat the Sun. Without eg using an oxyacetylene torch to heat the object beyond the temp of the solar emitting surface, what will happen is the Sun can only heat the object until the temps are in equilibrium, then the energy stops flowing. Hope this helps.@@MakeDo-Turner_Smith

Thay use arc furneces gor silicon smellting

We are building an alien intelligence right now. Before the end of this century it will outperform us in every possible task 💟

Headgear

Don't worry, AI will become sentient and destroy all of us before the aliens arrive!

All of us r us

It is possible to create methane instead of digging it out of the ground. Don't remember process though...

All you need is an endless supply of expendable labor.

All those civs collapsed and the next civ rebuilt by moving to where there is plenty of unexploited resources.

100% true, and also true is we can't replicate that today.

My village has lots of 13c-14c buildings with no issues. meanwhile the new buildings are already covered in mold and cracking apart in just years

And everyone inside those structures were dead when they moved in.

Every single planet that has life on it also has fossil fuel deposits. Living organisms are made out of carbon and that carbon will accumulate when those organisms die and eventually turn into coal and oil and gas.

If the atmosphere contains sufficient carbon to support life, It contains sufficient carbon to produce fossil carbon. It's all the other improbabilities that make it rare and unlikely.

That moon hypothesis is absurd.

Your odds of winning the lottery are much lower than the odds of other planets like earth existing.

Or maybe there is an intelligent, powerful creator.

Well it most likely all started with just handfuls of plucky experimenters way back in the day. They passed on what they knew to others by word of mouth and monkey-see-monkey-do teaching. I don’t think the number of knowledgeable experts is a problem.

There were no “old skills” when we learned.

I think there should be plenty of people who could figure out basics. Hack, I could make you a basic electrical grid in post apocalyptic world, The only thing I rill miss is how to make wire, which reminds me, there must be a youtube video for me to watch now.
To me difficult part is heavy machinery, you can't really make it without fossil fuels. Trains, trams, and trolley buses can run on electricity so they do seem somewhat viable, tho you would need to figure out semiconductors.

If the guy on the primitive technology channel was able to figure out how to smelt iron in a jungle barefoot, I think a post-apocalyptic society would be able to do it.

again this is wrong, you cannot go back to the old ways of doing things because then there were 1 or 2 billion people. We now have 8+ billion people and the ONLY MF'ing thing keeping them alive, half of them just barely, are markets of scale. Without markets of scale and oil refining at the current level half the planet would die of starvation within 2 years. You might as well say the biggest issue is not having people who know how to turn whales into lamp oil.

But if we returned to the pre industrial age the ecosystem would not quickly recover. Without a "garden of eden" where edible foods are abundant we will be in trouble. Modern crops work with modern techniques, but pest species that target our crops have been thriving right alongside us. Only people living in places where subsistence farming is still practiced will have much chance of successfully sustaining agriculture. Only a few hunter gatherers will survive in most places. Even hunter gatherers will be ravaged by parasites that we forgot how to handle without industry.
We have lost so much of the knowledge we used to get where we are today that we will not quickly bounce back.

​@@emptyshirt Its more that we built modern technology around the crops that we've been growing and selectively breeding for thousands of years, not the other way around, those crops will still be around and producing food even with pests and diseases, just ask literally anyone who has grown their own crops in gardens, as not everyone uses fertilizers and pesticides to get good results. Not to mention you have the farmers that grow "Organic" food are very restricted on use of fertilizers and pesticides yet they still grow enough food to turn a profit.
The main issue will be, without industrial fertilizer and pesticides, there will be less food and crops to go around, leading to starvation in most areas but there will still be plenty of land to successfully farm crops on mass once switched over to subsistence farming and bounce back the population soon enough.
Not to mention that it would be hard to lose a lot of our knowledge given how we've written and have so many books as well as put a lot of that knowledge into other technologies that could survive an apocalypse and stick around for long enough for people to learn from it.

​@@emptyshirtno we haven't.

​@@emptyshirt Most people in farming circles haven't lost knowledge, it's just disconnected city people who have. You don't need industry to prevent parasites, you need to wash your hands and cook your food. The harder thing to deal with would be modern values, I'll admit I wouldn't be able to murder kittens to keep population under control but before spaying was common that's what my grandpa did.

@@blackkittycat15 consider groundwater. In many agricultural regions the groundwater is tens of meters deeper than it used to be. Those areas will be untenable for preindustrial farming methods. Low lying areas will be swept over when existing reservoirs fail, so those are bad too. Groundwater contamination will plague some communities who try and grow crops in the formerly urbanized areas.
Nuisance species like lespodeza cuneata and heracleum mantegazziantum and many others will trouble non-industrial farmers like never before and the climate will be somewhat unstable in the coming century... Simply reverting to late iron age techniques is not enough to put us on track to re-industrialize.

I mean I’m well into my thirties and the lack of internet terrifies me even haha, although I know I could live without it.

more than just convenient - irreplaceable.

You forget business interests. In particular, resistance of existing big business to change the established model.

You should not think of a "blasting" intro to the apocalypse but all you need is the destruction of social stratification. No more healthcare, infant mortality peaking, life expectancy tumbling. No more educating in reading, writing and calculating. Within 3 generations we are back in the stone age. A virus could do this. Remember the run on toiletpaper in the corona crisis? Now imagine a real dangerous virus. Cities will not be supplied, people go plundering the countryside, large scale food production stops. Getting food and water will be our daily routines. Our present society is a house of cards. You just have to take out a few cards to bring the house down.

They were here during the pyramid’s building era.

Yeah ..but you're wrong because the narrator has an accent And uses three syllable words.....😂😂these ppl are gullable

Hydrogen from renewable energy can replace all fossil fuels.

You missed the Randall Carlson scoured to the bedrock theory.

Yeah…

Roman concrete production was very different than modern concrete and would not scale to the level we use it today.

How often do you think about the Roman Empire? 👀

@@bluesteel8376 But their buildings are still there.

It's possible to use for instance electric arc furnaces to reach the temperatures required. So the moment you can get rotating motion like say from a wind mill like they built even before the industrial revolution or a hydrodam, there is already a path one could in theory follow to reach very high temperatures.

"Could" being the operative word. It's not guaranteed we will ever be able to use it for energy production.

I agree but we need to invest trillions more and each and every year until we succeed. We should also invest trillions into tapping into geothermal energy. Geothermal can easily provide all our energy needs for thousands of years.

All the Fusion comments... yes I like the idea and maybe in the next 100 years we will get there. But meanwhile we have fission reactors, which, in spite of all the (false) negative hype, are much more environmentally friendly than current power technologies (even solar and wind considering the poisons and coal required to make them). The current fission technology in use is only one of three fission technologies already developed. A working Thorium reactor has already been built and safety mechanisms now are available to overcome the problems. The final fission technology even recycles current Fission waste and makes it reusable... and lowers the potency of the byproducts lifetime from tens of thousands to a few dozen years.

@@moverseve With AI leading the way I doubt it will be 20 years. I'm guessing 10- 15.

Unfortunately, “viable” cold fusion has always been about ten years away … for the last 50 or 60 years

I think it's the distance. The star nearest to ours is 25 trillion miles away. The vast majority of our radio signals would be undetectable at that distance. We have to be able to detect quadrillionths of a watt in order to communicate with the Voyager spacecraft, and they're only 1/40000 as distant as Proxima Centauri.
Humans can't even fathom the distances required to communicate with even the closest solar systems. The only signals that would be detectable at that range are the precisely directed and extremely powerful radio signals of the SETI project, and they were only released in very narrow bands

That’s terrifying

If you consider that the massive carboniferous forests that led to the formation of all our fossil fuels were themselves unlikely and that circumstances were unique... it never happened again. Many habitable worlds might not have had a Carboniferous age at all and thus no fossil fuels.

@@Gandalf-The-Green very possible.

Same. managing To get to cradle equilibrium is a better goal than space colonisation. The problem is that it requires the entirety of the world to come together. Space colonisation is a race between factions and needs no such thing.

Where are we getting the energy for those types of heating? Isn’t that the whole point of the video?

Same as some piramides could produce electricity 'under the right circumstances'. It's a weird theory but worth a shot

Here in Brazil, the energy source of 80% that is produced come from water (hydroelectrics).

@@Parc_Ferme Great, but the assumption in the video is that all infrastructure is destroyed and rendered unsalvageable. So I restate my question: Where is the power coming from?

The Wind or the sun could provide the energy. Starting by small energy sources to process small amounts of material, production could be scaled with time.
Is what mars colonist want to do right?
It is most likely to be plausible.

The great filter does not exist, at least there is absolutely no reason to believe in a great filter. Occams razor states you should prefer the simpler solution to a problem. If you want to solve the Fermi paradox a large number of tiny filters is a far simpler explanation than one great filter and it has exactly the same outcome. Our existence in the here and now is dependent on billions of tiny steps. Each little step with a probability of it not happening, if one of those steps had not happened we would be here now. If those tiny steps had happened a bit slower we would not have arisen before earth becomes uninhabitable. With billions of steps involved and all having a tiny chance of not happening it's, from a statistical perspective, not exactly far fetched that we may be the only civilization in the observable universe. We lack a lot of knowledge about what was needed for us to get here. So it's mostly guessing and speculation, but with equally reasonable assumptions you can arrive either at the universe is teeming with life or we're the only 'intelligent civilization' in the visible universe or anything in between.

@@silentwilly2983 That's just a restatement of the same argument. A "great filter" is just grouping your "large number of tiny filters" into a small enough number of clearly-labeled boxes for our brains to process the concept easier. You could write every single interaction of every electron since the beginning of the universe as individual "tiny filters" but that's hardly conducive to meaningful discussion.

Scary eh? Well that's one way to think about it.

Not really scary, because we live in a block universe. The past, present, and future have already happened. Most people just don't realize it. We in a way are already dead. So the circle of life is just completing it's self.
Nothing to fear. No one escapes death.

@@altrag No it's not, with a billion tiny filters the often posed question of 'is the great filter before or behind us?' is completely non-sensical as, by defining billions tiny filters as a great filter, implies by definition we're in the filter. If you want to frame it differently, we have a few billions years of tiny filters behind us, and trillions of years of tiny filters ahead of us, so in that perspective the great filter is by definition ahead of us. And if you want to see it in a grander context, it's inconceivable we survive into eternity so from that perspective there will always be a great filter ahead of us as long as we exist. But these last two perspective add 0 value to explaining the Fermi paradox. People talking about a great filter also tend to talk about big catastrophic events, nuclear war, great singularity, meteorite impact etc, those refer to one big filter, large (self) destructing events to explain the big silence, not a large number of tiny filters that lead to exactly the same outcome of the big silence.
And no, lots of tiny filters certainly is conducive to meaningful discussion, this contrary to one large imaginary filter one can only speculate about. With a large number of smaller filters one can apply statistics, one can define and study some of those filters and say something meaningful about them. You can determine that only a few dozen halving factors are needed to reduce the statistically expected number of civilization in the visible universe to be less than 1. Once you realize that, all those people claiming it's a statistical certainty that others are out there become a bit silly.

its made of gigantic trees and tree ferns. we dont have those today. we leave behind plastics. there is no other civilisation after us. we are it, the last of!

Precisely. If not for coal how many trees would be left in much of Europe. One of the reasons the Sub-Sahara is a desert is because people only had wood for cooking.

@@MountainFisher I don’t think you understand my comment. Coal deposits are putrid Trees buried billions of years ago. And the Sahara was formed because of a tilt in the earth rotation millions of years ago. Nothing to do with wood used for cooking

I just always think that all that carbon was in the cycle then lost underground, and eventually there wouldn't be enough on the surface to sustain

I always crack up when people say something is "natural", as though there is anything else on earth. I'm not sure we have found anything supernatural.

Where are you going to get the massive amounts of energy required to split the water molecule into its component atoms of hydrogen and oxygen? Cart before the horse.

To think that only fossil fuels can get us here is an intense lack of creativity .
There are alternatives obviously.

@@sylvesteruchia5263We can use techno-optimists as fuel. And food.

@@grahamstrouse1165 The person who did this did not fully explore other alternatives and their implimentation.
They just made a case for fossil fuels without diving deep into what other alternatives would look like . That's all im saying . Like there was a world before plastics (and it wasn't stone-age-like) alternatives to plastics do exist right now (or are in development ). I feel the person didnt cover all the bases in this vid.

Depending on the type of technology and betterment of material making, we will never need infinite amounts of specific elements available, but only the tech-developed, abundant, mass manufactured types to replace our current thinking of necessities. For example, graphene can conduct better than copper, despite being one atom thick, and is extremely durable. A method of producing graphene sheets better than now will solve copper shortage.

Exactly. People seem to think that garbage dumps would supply such materials in abundance.

​@@plessis2023Even they would cool down and fall back to the Earth. They don't disappear into space.

This applies to fossil fuels too. Methane would be discovered as a byproduct of animals and decay. Oil might never be found, for they wouldn't know to look for it. The first oil wells were built on places oil literally bubbled up onto the ground. Coal was also on the surface, which is no longer the case in most cases. Maybe they'd find coal/tar sands that we mostly avoid, but in 50-100 years those will be harder to find too.

​@charlesminckler2978 what percentage of the earths land mass do you assume humans inhabit??

@@dystopiandream7134 I have no clue. I would bet it's near 100% of places that have oil bubbling up through the ground, or piles of coal all about.

Same. I remember reading something about how we're developing batteries to run on sand to replace lithium batteries for things like computers.
It's still in its infancy but the concept was proven as viable. If we can develop away from using lithium as a battery source to instead run on sand, then I'm sure a future civilisation would also be able to create ways to do things alternatively to us.

Yeah, fossil fuels might have actually harmed our potential. We gained a descent understanding of the universe without figuring out how do form a society capable of unified, deliberate problem solving. Even when humans colonize space we will just fight and kill each other. We are spoiled children.

When I was much younger, I wondered if a “previous” iteration of beings surpassed our current peak, and their technology remnants, or in some cases, their ghosts, are what some, today, claim to have witnessed.

Nope. Demographics determine a civilization's destiny. This is exactly why South America and Africa represent evolutionary dead ends for the human race. Why? Low IQs are out breeding the individuals responsible for nearly all of technological innovation and infrastructure sustainment efforts in the past century. The "muddying of civilization waters" has a net negative effect by lowering the median IQ, which destroys all incentives because of corruption, poverty, plight, and brain drain. This is exactly why South American and African countries are underdeveloped corrupt hellholes and will remain this way pretty much forever.

The only reason we developed the way we did is because super rich people realized they could get super rich doing shitty things. The extreme lobbying against nuclear power is a perfect example of this, Had we not stopped building nuclear power plants in the 80's, the amount of natural resources being consumed would have plummeted.

When the aliens decide that we are intelligent enough to actually leave the planet for other places, they will show us how to make the fuel that will get us there. To get to the very nearest star, at the speeds were capable of, will take thousands and thousands of years. It's a lot of generations. Throw another tire on the Fire. Recycle. Until China and India take it seriously, why should we? 9:10

absolutelf advertent

if humanity dose not collapse and they are still relying on fossil fuels by then they probably have bigger problems

Or waterlocking it eventually.

You are delusional to think humanity will ever live anywhere other than earth. There is no other place in the solar system we could live. Mars is a complete non-starter. Life will never be sustainable there due to virtually no atmosphere, no electro-magnetic field, and no viable water; and the nearest star system to us is over four light-years away; and probably doesn't have a life sustaining planet within its system.

It's because new sources require more energy to extract the oil. E.g. Tar sands typically contain a thick solid bituminous mass that needs to be boiled & fractionally distilled.
New well sites are periodically located but they're harder to drill, e.g. deep-water sites.
Once these and the shale deposits are depleted, that's probably about it for conventional oil. Biotech might offer some mitigation, but who knows?

We could, but what would be the purpose?

Anerohic bacteria cultures of that scale would be its own issue

Lol, and second?

That depends who of us survive. Do you know how to do these things?

Second was where I stated that we are not starting truly from the stone age. The Japanese for example have been creating steel using their own techniques for hundreds of years, without the tech we use today so no it doesn't spell the same situation in my mind

I was having the same conversation. People who do survive across the globe would have preexisting knowledge and skills that our earliest ancestors did not. Further, we would be able to reverse engineer existing resources like steel and alloys. That would give future civilization a head start. Also, I think he has understated the technological advances our pre-industrial ancestors possessed. Concrete is one big example he mentioned. The Romans had concrete that is widely understood to be superior to what we have now.

lol ur arguing about the hypothetical conditions of the doomsday and not the actual point being made in the video

I agree. There's lots of things we rely on which can basically only be made from fossil fuels, such as plastics and certain medicines. It just seems incredibly wasteful to continue burning it when we have alternatives.

Alcohol is also a product of fermentation...

@@ThePmfatima yeah of course, doesn't everyone know that? Didn't think this needed to be seplled out.

Also hydrogen, it amazes me noone has mentioned this. Its easy to produce, only need water and electricity. It is also incredibly energy dense

it sucks people are so stupid to believe the doomsday cult of climate change and IPCC scam and will destroy everything in the name of protecting delusional claims of failed academics. So far every single catastrophe was caused by the doomsday cult rather than "climate"

Totally agree. Some people have said that AI will solve many of our current issues. But it isn't necessarily a lack of ingenuity, there are entrenched human systems that have no intention of allowing humanity to progress, and I don't know how AI will help us with that, in fact, I think those entrenched systems of greed will probably utilize AI to further strengthen their position.

...Said every human that has ever lived.

We do not have the technology. You think because something can in theory be done it will be done? If an answer to a problem is uneconomical then it is not an answer. You COULD grow all the oranges this world needs in Manitoba but they would be so uneconomical that nobody except the top few percent of people in wealth could afford them. I mean they used to grow oranges in private greenhouses in what were called orangeries in Britain and France, the waste heat from the furnaces that heated aristocratic mansions kept the greenhouses hot enough, but try buying one orange in January on the streets of London or Paris in 1850, you would be waiting a long time. Like till 1920. A single orange would cost you the equivalent of about $100. Our current state of technology could keep a billion or so people on the planet alive in relative high tech plenty as most of us enjoy now (at least in the west), but try keeping 8 billion or more people alive without fossil/oil refining. We could quit pumping oil today entirely, half the people on this planet would starve within two years.

@@markwalker3499 I feel that human greed is much more of an issue than what you're describing. In fact the issues you're describing are exactly the kinds of problems that AI COULD solve.
But the entrenched greed of people will fight solutions every step of the way if it means they need to lose power in order to see a solution come to fruition.

My reply is above ..I suggest you read it..

Um... No. The oil isn't under the tectonic plates. That's miles down.

The geological processes that created the fossil fuels resources we’ve been using are hundreds of million years in the making. Plate tectonics is not a driver in fossil fuel creation from the decay, deposition, compaction at depth under heat and pressure of organic matter. Plate tectonics might be a driver in making mineral resources more accessible though.

No, we don't need to conserve, we need to build up as fast as possible.

@@Apistevist We could do both; materialism and consumerism are not serving us well, and that's where we need to conserve. Doesn't mean spend bare minimum energy, just means be smart/efficient and sustainable with it

You don't use dollar store baskets clearly made for standard 8x11 paper to carry leaves? Everyone else does

I am not trying to be smart, but you might want to see how charcoal is made.Coal is kind of the same thing without the problem of making charcoal.

burning charcoal still gives off green house gases and where would you get the electricity for your electric furnaces?

@@keithgutshall9559 Dude said in the video making and using charcoal is carbon neutral...

@@RestrictedHades You heat water to make steam and send the steam through turbines to make electricity...all this can be made with copper wire and iron-adjacent materials. Also, the video legit said charcoal is carbon neutral. The gasses are released from charcoal that came directly from trees that took the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Co2 didnt appear or disappear- you cant add CO2 into that chemical equation

You’ll run out of trees well before you get anywhere near a decently sized civilization that can dip back into nuclear or renewables. Cultures regularly denuded their entire landscapes for fuel as early as the Iron Age.

I agree with all alternatives, but at the same time a new civilization starting from scratch wouldn't be able to acquire all this knowledge without having other easier energy sources at disposal and many years or even centuries of experimentation and research.

@chpsilva water wheels evolve to hydropower easily and predate the use of fossil fuels. Windmills evolve to wind electric generators easily and predate the use of fossil fuels. Bioenergy predates the use of fossil fuels including to run steam engines. Utilizing geothermal hotsprings for various purposes evolves into geothermal power easily and predates fossil fuels. Focusing solar energy to generate high heat using reflective surfaces predates fossils fossil fuels and can easily evolve into temp solar generation. The only thing on that list that was introduced after fossil fuels was nuclear power.
Humans first created pure hydrogen in 1671, identified it 1766, used electrolysis to make it around 1800, and made an internal combustion engine using hydrogen in 1806.
We never needed fossil fuels. There were other paths that presented themselves earlier that we could have taken but didn't. We never needed them, only ever needed them cause we unnecessarily built a civilization dependent on them, don't need them anymore, and other civilizations could develop without them no problem.

None of those are energy sources. None of those can exist without the existing fossil fuel foundation. None of those can power current civilization at the levels we expect.

An easier alternative for smelting would be mirror arrays - polished tin should be enough to create multifaceted mirrors that could focus sunlight on the ore you are trying to smelt, with temperatures only being limited by optical quality.
Using biological sources for many chemicals would also be a much "easier"/elegant solution, though the necessary understanding might be hard to transfer without digital information processing (imagine needing to learn all of biochemistry from nothing but old paper scrolls)...
I think a different kind of society would have no problem creating a technical civilization based more on optics and bioengineering, than on fossil fuels/electricity and mass fabrication/machining/etc..

Excuse me but what are you going to insulate those electric wires with?

it seems more and more likely to me that oil is produced by a geological process, and that it is just not the remains of millions of years of organic life.

The amount of new oil fields we discover every year has decreased rapidly. It is only known sources that were not easily accessible enough to dig cheap are getting digged now since prices are increasing. This drives innovation and technologies like fracking get cheaper than thought possible yars ago. However, the amount of oil - and mostly anything else - is indeed very limited and will run out unless we either change to other resources like sun and wind power or asteroid mining. We NEED to stop wasting oil urgently and fast, because it will only reach for 2 more generations of people. And this without even considering climate change, glyphosat, world war 3, AI singularity and whatnot.

@JohnnyNiteTrain ... 'nuclear war' will not be allowed by our visitors ('aliens/gods') from our future who want to control the condition of the world they inherit. Our 'free will' is subject to Their determinism. Surely you have noticed how they protect key players from George Washington to Adolf Hitler because they dare not change their history/ancestors too much, although small tweaks are attempted

And how you produce H2 without electricity ?! Can you imagine the level of tech just to produce 1 single generator when all you have is sticks and stones? Even producing 1 banal stell bolt - is "alien tech" at that stage.

@@M4V3RiCkU235 dont forget electrolyse of water is only about 50% efficiency, so it's not great but could still be an alternative for fossil fuel, like train, truck or planes. It has already been used in rocket so it's not un imaginable to be used else where

@@M4V3RiCkU235 simple mechanical energy and a motor could still electrolyse water. You can grab a 9 volt battery and stick it in salt water and produce hydrogen and oxygen, and the fun thing about it is that you can burn h2 and o2 right back into water.

@@M4V3RiCkU235 Why without electricity, he said you can melt copper and iron with coal, so there is your material for your generator.

​@Hoellenmann what about wind power that's not being used I.e. when the demand is low but wind is high use the excess to create hydrogen?

True, but if life can only be carbon based, then there should be plenty of it where life exists. Basically life needs to be present for a while. However we can't know how a different habitable planet with life would look like, they could have much more efficient fuel methods.
I'd rather say an "easy to access energy method" needs to be present

I don't know why you are making those assumptions, algae are both a major contributor to fossil fuels and one of the most successful and longest enduring types of life on Earth. Some fossil fuels require plants, plate techtonics, and a dynamic atmosphere and geology others don't. We can say that a set of conditions to produce heavy hydrocarbons occurred on at least 1 of 8 planets, and very possibly 3of 8 and some moons! That's for longer chain hydrocarbons. Short ones like ethane and methane are found EVERYWHERE! 5 of 8 planets in our system show huge amounts of these, as do MANY moons. More, methane is found all over the entire universe. Methane is natural gas, or one of them, and I'm sure you know how much of it and its siblings; propane/pentane/octane/heptane and their alternative forms that end in -ene or -ine to indicate carbon bond changes, are used every day. Crude oil is probably more rare, but we don't "know" that, hell, Mars could be like Jed Clampett's back yard!

The sheer mass of biological materials that went into creating the fossil fuels we use today (which we will have only taken a bit over three centuries to deplete) would likely be very rare, as it was rare even for Earth. A potential alien civilisation would only have a limited window in which to use it to become both energy independent and spacefaring. Definitely a filter.

In a universe as vast as ours your hypothesis rings of stupid Andy

@@timothypopik2288 Ah, very nice response! Your boring, simplistic and lazy ad hominems reek of projection. Also - you should maybe consider learning how to use a comma, Timbo.

No, please, no

@@RawOlympia Why?

@@CosmicCleric fusion power is not my thing. I know younger people like it, but they have not seen the damage...sorry ~

@@RawOlympia Think you're talking about Fission (damage), not Fusion.

@@CosmicCleric oops! thnx!

Imagine the destruction and waste Russian subhumans are causing right as we speak. Even just the destroyed concrete buildings and other structures in Ukraine... It's insanity. Also, the Chinese with their huge ghost cities. These nations should be annihilated.

Unfortunately, wars are actually the greatest promoters of new technology and advancements in technology. Most of our current tech is a result of WW2 or the fights there after, created by and for the military to stay one step ahead. Everything from internet, gps, advances in computing.

@@Dsrt_Rat i know that . but given the enormous amount of sheer waste and altogether ruin , the efficiency of such endeavour is ridiculous . war promotes innovation like nothing else ( even cold war ) . just because a common threat is the only way to make people at large willing to work together towards doing better . it's experimentally obvious , however pathetic , that prolonged peace times don't actually serve civilisation .

@@florin-titusniculescu5871 I do agree with you

Induction furnaces will always be possible as many forms of electricity not reliant on fossil fuels will always be possible. And unlike in this thought experiment, even launching all of our nukes won't destroy the electrical motors that have already been produced and are already stuffed with copper.
The electronics of these motors will be severely degraded if they are above ground. Electrical devices don't need electronics to function, though. Just conductors and insulators.
The motor windings will of most motors will survive. That's just copper. That and survivors will have millions of sump pumps safely in pits in basements to raid. Water is a decent shield against radiation so anything under water will be salvageable. It won't function, but survivors can look at their structure.
Not to mention the landfills and random dumps filled with underground deposits of all things from manuals to older, sturdier manufactured goods.

try to boom without fossil fuels to give us fertilizer

@@timothypopik2288 Oh You're 100% right. The implication is it wouldn't have boomed at all. Our technology progression probably would have taken many many more generations and be far slower.

Combustion is the only way to generate those heats. Electric can't do it. The heating elements themselves would melt.

@@davidkavanagh189 couldn't you store the heat though? you don't need to transmit it all at once, you could store it in salt for example, which is very good at retaining heat, and slowly build it up without ever overheating the components, right?
even if that doesn't work, the solar option still works, reflecting sunlight with quartz or something.

@@Deltexterity Combustion is the only way. If there was an alternative, it would be being worked on by people a lot smarter than you or I.

@@davidkavanagh189 that's not really a valid argument. right now nobody is working on this problem because it's not a problem, civilization hasn't collapsed yet. in the past, people used combustion because they didn't think of any other options, but if civilization collapsed humanity would still retain knowledge of the old world, so people would have an advantage and try things those who came before never did.

@@Deltexterity And how exactly would this collapsed society manage to make the super precise lensing for your sun machine or the complex materials and technology to make your electric metal melter? I think you'd find that burning stuff would still be the answer.

A full summary before beginning seems a bit unnecessary, but some historical context for STEM courses would be nice. A lot of the time just knowing why someone wanted to solve a problem and their limitations help you understand the solution.

Did your school not teach this?

@@paulrivers7248 Talking about the way it's summarised. anyway it's been over 20 years since i had any form of school.

@@andrewhooper7603 yea, just feel that lessons should have summaries based on important context instead of mindless regurgitations that some teachers do.

@@gab882 been almost 30 for me

Metric is used everywhere except Myanmar, Liberia, and the US. 95% use metric because it is the only thing that makes sense.

Wrong. Americans are too complacent. There's nothing like being confronted with the need to evolve and to join the world and the need to abandon those obsolete imperial measures. The American scientific community does it already. It's time to go metric. Like losing those little wheels behind a child's first bicycle...

Different? I think the word you're looking for is inferior.

@@BillPinkNye "Those of us" are eternal kids. Spoiled brats...

@@FridgeMinority Ok so it is and old abandoned system with huge flaws. How do you convert between units? For me it is dead easy with Metric.

Good one!

Yeah stacking heavy rocks is exactly the same as building industrial infrastructure to produce the necessary technology to leave the planet

Yeah but the guy has an accent so all of us are wrong😂😂

You could, but then you’d have to sit around for a few million years while the job got done

As long as they are human. They will fall into the same trap, of self interest.

It’s called stone carving. Done the same way as the Rosetta Stone. Then hopefully someone has kept their language and writing lol and it’s one of the languages written down.

🤣😂😘
@@whosaidthat5236

@@whosaidthat5236 record EVERYTHING WE'VE LEARNED by carving on rocks.....ok dokey dude.

@@whosaidthat5236 ...and by durable, I meant more than a few thousand years. Rocks don't last forever. Even the whole earth has an expiration date. It would have to be stored in many places, OFF earth.

True, a rusted skyscraper is a pile of iron ore. Glass is already refined. But also there are books everywhere now with mathematics and engineering specs. Even knowledge would be retained.

An other which is running out is: phosphorus, which we also use for food production.

Sry fossil fuels do not exist dinosaurs never existed and there has never been any great mass extinctions

Imagine using all our non-fossil fuels to power those electric arc furnaces to create or reshape just enough steel to keep replacing those power sources as they wear out. An eternal furnace to create power to keep the furnaces running eternal.

The easy to mine raw materials are probably mostly depleted...no?

That is if any forges survive or even the materials to make one.

For sure!, Well said 🙂

The scenario presented is full of so many flaws it's quite literally impossible.
1: Ruins of civilization would still exist to recover knowledge of technology making it possible for survivors to ever fall to the stone age, iron age would be the lowest possible.
2: Realistically a great portion of survivors would be the well educated and the wealthy to have had the knowledge & resources to survive such catastrophes.
3: shoutout to the submarines that literally could just be chilling deep enough during said catastrophe.

There is a fiction book titled: A cantacle for Leibowitz that explores how civilization come back after a nuclear war.

There is nothing available today that can replace fossil fuels. Over 80% of global energy comes from fossil fuels. Steel, concrete, silicone, plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, and energy are derived from fossil fuels. There are currently over 6000 products made from fossil fuels. From contact lenses to toothpaste. From camping gear to tires.

fossil fuels are not a problem for people. they are a problem for globalist elites interested in restricting people's freedom/power. that is why "misinformation" is a problem (not a problem when media corporations do it, only when independent small time people say the wrong thing). its not a threat to normal people. it is *empowering* for normal people to say what they think. who it does not help, is the elites wanting things to remain a certain way.

It takes more energy in, than we get out from hydrogen.

@@anthonymorris5084 but hydrogen can be produced by electrolysis, which doesn't necessarily need fossil fuel to generate the electricity. Maybe it takes a lot to produce, but what matters is the energy density of the end product.

@@GreenspudTrades Why would you use lots of energy, to produce a little energy? What source of energy will you use to create the hydrogen? Hydrogen is incredibly volatile. It also leaks through materials. If you have a tank of hydrogen and you let it sit, the tank will soon be empty. Hydrogen production is currently subsidized because it isn't economic.
I'm not against it necessarily, just pointing out that right now, it isn't viable.

​@@anthonymorris5084You would use it if that's all you have. I'm not talking about the practicality of H2. This video was about how we'd be screwed if we ran out of fossil fuel because we wouldn't have the coal needed to burn a fire hot enough for a steel mill. Regular wood doesn't burn at a high enough temperature. H2 is terribly inefficient, but that could be used if civilization gets desperate. It would come at a high cost.

And we will have burned through it all in a span of about three centuries at this rate. If these fuels are necessary for our civilisation to exist, we need to become much more economical with their use immediately. We need to switch to alternative energy sources as quickly as possible, so we still have enough left for everything else. We have had a limited window to find alternative energy sources, using fossil fuels to get there, and we have wasted most of that time.
It bothers me when people say that fossil fuels will "replenish" in the distant future. The amount of biomass required doesn't exist today and hasn't for a long time. Quite the opposite, we are stripping the Earth of its biomass. There will be no second chance for humanity, or any other Earth species, to become a self-sustaining technological civilisation.

@@Pushing_Pixels They might, but it would take a total Earth change, a reset of all life back to prokaryotic levels of evolution and a drastic change in atmospheric composition with much higher CO2. Needless to say, humans will not be around to see it happen.

We absolutely are not stripping the Earth it's biomass. The amount of plant life is actually growing. As the Earth warms, it becomes more habitable for plants. CO2 is literally plant food. The Earth is actually greening.@@Pushing_Pixels