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Underground > Creation >

One Million Years A.F.F. (after fossil fuels).

Less searchable M0rd4nt

16:41 / 04.02.02

Okay, here's the deal: it's a million years in the future. The Western World has pissed away all the fossil fuel on the planet like a bunch of Jeremy Clarksons on PCP, then destroyed all of society as we know it in a vast and pointless war. All our industrial and technological achivements are gone.

Somehow, the human race is emerging from its long sojourn in the darkness, and it's not doing too badly; they've got wind-power, water-power and horse-power. Given that there are no fossil fuels left, how might the next industrial revolution come about? Would it come about?

12:37 / 05.02.02

Worth noting: the original diesel engine ran on vegetable oil.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

22:00 / 05.02.02

Point. (While we're on the subject, we might also consider alcohol as a fuel.) However, one might contend that the technology that paved the way for the deisel engine would have been hard to develop without its fossil-fuelled precursors.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

11:01 / 06.02.02

The big debate is whether to experiment with Geothermal power. Huge potential, grave risk. Similarly, nuclear power.

Satellite communications are active, but patchy. Satellites are solarpowered, and a solar renaissance is planned when the cloud thins.

Society has localised - comms are patchy and distance travel more troublesome. Local power is easier and more readily repaired. Ironically, this often means wood-burning stoves in outlying areas, creating more smoke and fume.

The days are hot, the nights are cold, the weather is extremely violent.

(Mordant, I don't want to be picky, but a million years is a really long time in terms of the human race. By this point we'd probably have evolved physically some...possibly to cope with new conditions...)

Whisky Priestess

12:49 / 06.02.02

I reckon we'd all be post-human gaseous entities by then.

But seriously folks, a book I started during the fuel crisis of late 2000 addresses the immediate problem of what happens when we're literally wringing the last drop of petrol out of the earth - I'm afraid the old chestnut of cold fusion makes an appearance, but the more interesting thing is the way society breaks down into insular big towns, larger and larger self-sufficient units - villages and small towns simply die out because you can't get the essentials of life to them with any reliability or speed. A sort of futuristic medievalism prevails, especially in Oxford . . . now read on.

If it ever gets published, that is.

13:07 / 06.02.02

methane. get a field of pigs.

14:21 / 06.02.02

Basically, the engines of industry used fossil fuels because they used to be plentiful, and they burned well.

So you might have engines working on whatever else burns well that's plentiful. I think the heritage of the internal combustion engine goes back to wood fires under a steam kettle. So that discovery's pretty basic and not fossil-fuel reliant.

It might be possible to get electrical generation based on something non-combustible, since that was discovered pretty much independently.

What that means is you might have a world where batteries predate the steam engine -- hmm. Where electric trains (mind the third rail!) supplant highways. Of course, transport would be more priveleged possibly, freight being more important than sightseers, and no other way to move 'em.

Tesla also had this thing about "harvesting" ambient electrical power in the form of radio waves an' such. If this technological revolution was electric first and mechanical after, you might expect lots of low-wattage devices running on ambient power like that (I'm thinking walkie-talkies or, simpler, something like a portable telegraph station.)

Oh, and hot-air balloons, gotta have them....

Hmm. Come to think of it, run an electric current through water and you get two very flammable gasses. You might have a whole hydrogen based industrial machinery as well. Lots of armor plating, to avoid explosion risk. And possibly, horrendous exploitation of the machine-operating class, sent to work in huge, flammable machines.

02:41 / 07.02.02

first, bacteriological power sources...like methanogens or the chemosynthetic bacterium.
requires, of course a food supply and a vat system for the macroculture. Again, dystopic visions of literal "untouchable" class designated to work in biotoxic environment tending the vats [and would they be priests or outcasts? or both? or a monkey on a stick?], with the greatest fear being a secondary contamination of the culture with a human pathogen...thus the simultaneous risk of epidemic and power-outage.

grant is a genius for bringing up nikola tesla...one of my heroes (sorry grant, i mean tesla). and think of the radio-wave-collection unit as something like a solar cell...really low efficiency...so societies have to organize to do all of their mechanized labor within a very limited timeframe while there's enough juice. building season? the hour of power?

finally, and this one is old school...plantation economy, where forced labor is essentially substituted for mechanization. think pyramid builders, the South and the Caribbean.... better yet, forced labor as a mechanical power source...human indentured gerbil wheels. would such a society then be structured by captive-taking, thus a slave-basis of power, or by division of labor (how much time do spend on the treadmill, dear? it's for the good of humanity).

hydrogen power economy could make for a very interesting visual world...given the combustion potential, what would be the impact on architecture, physical tech design. i go the other way from grant...armor equals shrapnel in an explosion, and weighs vehicles down [although so people could still try armor as part of a militaristic application....] i'm thinking of power stations essentially made of pliable vinyl or other plastics, valves and hoses...a minimum of spark-producing items in the environment.
which means, btw, that arid environments are right out. think though, of a tent culture, perhaps even nomadic...following water supplies, oases etc. integrated with a power supply...polymer chemistry as a basic need and skill of the material culture, and synthetic fabrics/materials as more common than natural.

Bedouin meets fetishwear

[ 07-02-2002: Message edited by: tastes like jackboots ]

07:41 / 07.02.02

Just questions from me, I'm afraid:

Tastes Like Jackboots:
"power stations essentially made of pliable vinyl or other plastics,"

This is crucial, I reckon: is it possible to make adequate plastic materials from anything other than oil (of the mineral sort)? Are there organic resources that will do the job? I always thought that to be the scariest aspect of oil running out, given our reliance on plastics.

Also - we've lost all of the industrial and technological achievements, but have we lost knowledge of what was achieved in the past? I don't mean technical specs, but simply the history; stories and legends even. I'm sure that would affect the way things developed.

13:09 / 07.02.02

That's a key point in Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, which is a great damn post-nuclear-Iron-Age book.

You *could* get rubber from latex (tree sap), and possibly something similar with leather or actual animal guts, but it'd be *very* labor intensive.

The armor = shrapnel is a good point - my image was of stationary factory-type plants, with most transport being electrical or else zeppelins (silk, or rubberized silk, or maybe tarred canvas).

12:55 / 08.02.02

Sav: I've heard about genetically modified bacteries around these days which excrete plastic crystals that could be used, if the technology could survive.