jaydeehess
Penultimate Amazing
You have no insight to offer then, is that it?
Thought Experiment: world without fossil fuels
- Thread starter Belz...
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You have no insight to offer then, is that it?
Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
The Titanic had a cruising speed of 21 knots, whereas clipper ships could only manage around 17 knots. However they didn't have to give up cargo space for fuel - a distinct advantage on longer voyages. In the early days of steam, sail was still very competitive.
National Maritime Museum: History of Cutty Sark
Another factor to consider in a fossil fuel free world is that steam ships need a lot more iron in their manufacture, which would have put further strain on wood resources. Without cheap and abundant coal they probably would have been prohibitively expensive to build, let alone run.
Yes, it's a pity that we weren't forced to deal with the problem back then. Now we face a much larger problem, because rather than just having to replant trees and wait 30 years for them to mature, we have to find a replacement for fossil fuels which took millions of years to form. If only we hadn't switched to fossil fuels, we might have figured out how to become sustainable and not have such a mess to clean up.Red Baron Farms said:
Fossil fuels certainly have accelerated technological 'progress' but eventually we will have to pay the piper. Our current model of economic growth and increasing affluence is top heavy and unsustainable, so the question is will our 'advanced' fossil fueled technology be able to avert disaster, or will it be the cause?
We talk about how fossil fuels have given 'us' advanced technology such as cars and computers, but 80% of the World's population earn less than $10 a day. How much benefit do you think they are getting out of it? With the way we are going, there's a good chance that the benefits of any tech which has trickled down to them will be negated by the effects of global warming and resource depletion. I bet that in the future a lot of people will be cursing us for our shortsightedness.
Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
Leonardo's problem wasn't technological. The first step in creating any new technology is discovering that it can be done, then you figure out how to do it. Leonardo cracked the first bit, but no one was willing to take the next step. Why? 'Necessity is the Mother of Invention'. In a civilization which is getting along just fine without infernal flying machines, why would you want them?
In the case of nuclear fission, the most obvious application is a bomb. But until WWII it just wasn't necessary to make a weapon with such destructive power, and in earlier times there wasn't enough demand for energy to risk blowing ourselves up over it. A nuclear plant is just a big steam engine that produces electricity, so it is demand for electricity that 'necessitates' nuclear power. But there are many other ways to make electricity that are safer and easier to develop.
If we didn't have cheap coal to burn then wind, solar, hydro and geothermal would have been developed to a much greater extent. It is a shame that we waited until now to get serious about sustainable energy sources (wind turbines and solar collectors could easily have been built with 19th century tech) but that stagnation is what happens when the necessity isn't there - why bother developing a whole new technology when we can just burn this coal?
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Belz...
Fiend God
I'm not sure this is on topic.
DC
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well your though Experiment world would spare us the biggest Problem humanity ever faced. so it is somehwat on Topic
jaydeehess
Penultimate Amazing
Your post illustrates that advances in sail tech were cut short by steam power. If steam were, by necessity, limited to land based specialty installations, then sail would continue to dominate and improvements in hull design, sail shape and material, and eventually airfoil tech, may well keep sail transport as an option.
Your note that steel/iron production would be strained to create steam engines is a good point. There are other iron implements that could be affected by this as well. It could come down to cannons versus plowshares.
Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
1. 80% of the World's population can't afford the 'level of technology' we have reached with fossil fuels. To them it makes no difference, and they might even be better off without it.
2. Right now it looks like we are painting ourselves into a corner. Without fossil fuels the pace of technological progress might have been slower, but more sustainable and perhaps reaching a higher level in the long term.
3. Just how do we measure the World's 'level' of technology? It has been suggested that without fossil fuels advanced tech would not get past the 'curiosity' stage, and most people would live a very low-tech existence. But that's the situation for 80% of the World's population now. Of course the few of us who were lucky enough to be born into wealthy families in first world countries have technology coming out of our ears, but should the 'level of technology' be based on what only the top 20% enjoy, or what is available to the average person?
And how do we determine how advanced a technology is anyway? Is a Kindle more advanced than a conventional book just because it has a few billion transistors in it, or because it can do more? What if we had e-books first, and then someone invented a cheaper device that didn't need power or an internet connection, featured super high resolution photographic color graphics and instant random page access, could be 'printed' in practically any size, and was made out of fully recyclable wood fibers? Would this new 'paper' book be a higher or lower tech?
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In 'our world' those might be fair prices, but in 'wood world', where wood is precious, I imagine those woodlands would fetch premium prices.
You also mention coppicing as the efficient way to harvest the wood. In terms of biomass/area that seems right, but coppicing is hugely labour-internsive in the absence of industrial machinery, and that includes chainsaws (I really can't picture a steam chainsaw and my electric chainsaw is pretty useless beyond the range of my 50m extension reel).
I think to be useful as commercial fuel coppiced wood needs chipping and pelleting, or being fed into the gaping maws of power station furnaces. The hassle of using smallish branches for liner fuel is horrible to contemplate, the volume alone would be terrifying.
Then factor in that every family involved in the process - from woodcutter to passenger - requires, what, an acre of woodland to provide sustainable wood just for domestic heating and cooking? (I don't mean outside their back door, but somewhere) Even more in cold climates? I doubt whether 'our world' calculations are very realistic here.
A more fun point might be to ask exactly what these transatlantic tourists are expecting to see when they arrive. The British Museum and National Gallery? A twinkling Manhattan skyline?
Just thought I'd point out that :
Over 6.8 billion mobile phones in the world
World population = 7,012,000,000[1]
No, I'm not saying that 87% of the people have mobile phones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use
Also, is there a country without any cars?
At which point we can refer to Wiki:
In other words, as already noted, those canals only existed because of coal. You may argue that they also stimulated increased settlement, agriculture, and so on. But like steam powered locomotion, those are again things that merely tagged along after the fact. They are factors that have always existed, but were never enough to actually drive the development of steam power or an equivalent to modern canal systems. It's easy to look back at things that were possible because of a particular innovation and say that if things were different they might have been the driving force behind it. But the fact is that they weren't, and without an argument to say how likely it is that they actually might have become such, the mere fact that it's not actually impossible doesn't make in at all probable.
I think your cost analysis misses an important point. According to this, the UK has 3.13 million hectares of woodland, which makes 31,300 km2. 30,000 acres is ~120 km2. So it would take 0.4% of the UK's existing woodland, or 0.05% of its total land area to run a single passenger liner. Want to run 100 ships, which really isn't all that many? That's a pretty significant amount of land you're going to be using up, and that's certainly not going to be cheap.
People have mentioned things like Concorde, so maybe it would only be a few luxury ships that would run this way? But note that we already had jet aircraft, Concorde was just a faster one. Building a wood-powered cruise liner without first having a wood-powered steam ship industry would be like R.J. Mitchell building Concorde. It's not physically impossible, but no-one is going to invent, develop and perfect an entirely new method of propulsion that can only ever be used in a couple of luxury prototypes. we developed planes, then we developed jets, then we developed supersonic jets, then we developed supersonic luxury passenger jets. It's not that we couldn't possibly have jumped straight to the last one, it's just that there's no incentive for anyone to do so so that's not what happened. Take away the middle steps and that incentive doesn't magically appear out of nowhere.
It's not enough to say that people could have developed all kinds of alternatives to modern technology, you need to have a good reason for that development to have actually taken place. So far most of the reasons given pretty much boil down to "obviously the end goal is something approximating modern technology, so people would have done whatever it takes to get there". That's not how technology works. We don't have an end goal for how civilisation should look a couple of centuries down the line, we try to come up with things that will be useful right now, or at least in the near future. The industrial revolution was not inevitable. If coal didn't exist, people wouldn't have just said "Screw it, let's have a solar powered industrial revolution instead", they'd have just not had one at all. Different things would have then led to different developments at some point in the future, but all the speculation on what people could have done is so far very light on what those things might actually have been, and why they would have led to particular developments.
Tin mining had one of the first steam engines set up in Cornwall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine
They were introduced to both coal and tin mines at roughly the same time, although the exact dates are unknown.
Belz...
Fiend God
Belz...
Fiend God
Point taken.
I remain unconvinced that those alternatives would have become known or cheap enough to become widespread.
I don't think that changes the point that the technologies would be much, much more limited than they are today. 80% is better than 100%.
I'm not looking for a moral analysis of the disparity between first- and third-world countries, here, but an analysis of the feasibility of modern technology in a world where coal and petrol do not exist, and therefore where several of the steps that led us to today's technology would be missing.
Belz...
Fiend God
Thank you Cuddles, yet again. This is what I'm looking for: the incentives themselves for development would have been different in the absence of fossil fuels. I might not have made this clear in the OP, but it's not just what could have happened if 1700s people knew they had to develop nuclear power and the internet at some point, but whether they would ever have found out about the very possibility.
Well put.
DC
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It's hard to believe that humans could achieve the technology for e-books without first having some other means of efficiently communicating recorded information for education and research. That wouldn't necessarily have to be ink and paper, but it would have to allow mechanical copying, i.e. some equivalent to the printing press. (It's almost conceivable that a small educated elite could make slow progress with hand copying alone, but to do that these scholars, their "library," their philosophical will to pursue such projects, and their economic freedom to do so would all have to survive all wars and cultural upheavals for many generations running, which might just be too unlikely.)
In other words, while the chain of development of specific technological solutions might vary greatly in alternate histories, some basic capabilities are almost certainly prerequisites for certain technologies.
With that caveat, though, if some other earlier technology had filled the role of printing, I could certainly see printing being developed after e-books and being seen as a clever novelty; it seems unlikely to be seen as "high tech" though, given that people started painting on cave walls pretty early on. However, actual paper, very well could be.
Respectfully,
Myriad
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Well, these are questions about price elasticity and economics. Here's a basis for comparison:
1 acre-year of coppice gets you:
a) One passenger Atlantic crossing (at Titanic-level efficiency)
b) Electricity for two modern refrigerators
c) Heat for 1/2 for a suburban house in Maine.
Transatlantic travel is a premium good---even today, it's something the rich do occasionally and the poor don't at all, or do very rarely. The sort of people who want "an acre-year's worth of wood for an Atlantic crossing" are much richer than some of the poor folks struggling to run refrigerators and heat houses. At some point, imagine there's a wood-broker with a cord of wood for sale. He asks $X. Both (a) a poor person with a house to heat and (b) the White Star Line say they'll take it. He raises the price to $Y, whereupon either the poor person or the White Star Line drops out of the bidding. The poor person, failing to buy wood at $Y/cord, has the option to move into smaller living quarters, or move south, or bundle up and shiver. The White Star Line, failing to buy wood at $Y/cord, has the option to send passengers by sailing ship instead.
To put numbers to this, you sort of have to understand the whole economy, and all of the different choices and priorities of all the different wood-users. This is a known difficult task, as Communist central planners found out (PS: read Red Plenty! It's great!). So I'm only guessing, like the worst sort of central planner. But I guess that the White Star guys would be able to find enough Richie Rich steam passengers, to outbid a bunch of poor shivering people for the scarce resource of wood fuel.
Why? Because that's what happens already. If you want to read three paragraphs of examples, click on the spoiler:
So, yeah, I don't know the details. But I have a general sense that resource scarcity falls hardest on the backs of the poor, and doesn't do much to stop the rich. If the rich start taking a share of a resource, the price goes up, and the "elasticity"---people deciding they can do without the resource at $Y---really comes from poor people. So, when you tell me to imagine a world where the only source of heat-energy (prior to any invention of solar panels etc.) is wood, I imagine that as a world where rich folks use lots of wood-heat-energy (including for luxury/comfort/convenience) and poor folks use little or none (barely even for survival/safety/necessity).
So, assuming that a wood-fired steam engine gets invented in the wood-1800s, will a bunch of rich people, who find sailing ships terribly slow and uncomfortable, have the idea of moving boats quickly under steam? Of course they will---it was a matter of years between the unveiling of Newcomen's and Watt's engines, and the first people attempting to put them on ships. It's an obvious idea. Will these rich people be able to buy enough wood to do so? Of course they will. Will they outbid a bunch of people who otherwise would have used the wood? Of course they will.
The Concorde is a good point---it is possible for a luxury technology to be too costly to succeed, even for the rich. However, I think my wood-lot-acre calculations suggest that transatlantic steam travel is easily within the ballpark of doable. The "underlying" costs of fuel (i.e. the cost of wood today, say $100/cord) is dirt cheap. And then ... well then we have to add the (unknown) outcome of the scarce-wood bidding war. Honestly, I find it hard to imagine that it adds a factor of 4---if the cost of wood goes up to $400/cord, a lot of the obvious buyers (poor people needing basic heat/electricity/wood-powered land transit) are going to skimp really hard or do without. Add another factor of 2 because a wood-Titanic is less efficient than a coal-Titanic (as Capeldodger points out, it needs more bunker volume). So, with all of that put together, the wood-Titanic is crossing the Atlantic with a $800-per-passenger fuel bill.
Are there lots of people in wood-world who would choose to pay a $800 fuel bill for a safe, fast Atlantic crossing, rather than boarding a no-fuel, slow, seasick, risky sailing ship? I bet there are.
Cuddles makes a very good point, too---I hadn't appreciated *how many* of the James Watt era engine uses were coal-mine related. Both mines and canals, eh? Yeah, I would guess that that delays the development of steam power. In particular, if you're sitting around at a coal mine and experimenting with ways to run the pumps, there is a very low barrier to the idea of "let's start a big coal fire under this prototype"---the coal is right there. If you're sitting around on a Dutch dyke experimenting with ways to run pumps, "let's start a big wood fire" is a whole operation, because the wood is far away. Maybe in wood-world, the first impetus would come from sawmills, where there is both a need for endless, concentrated mechanical work, and a lot of fuel sitting around for inspiration.
Thanks for the fun thread Belz...
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Ziggurat
Penultimate Amazing
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There's at least one additional cost you didn't include in your analysis. Aside from competition for wood (no small thing), there's also the missing fact that the cost to harvest and transport the wood will also go up drastically without fossil fuels. You can't have a steam-powered chain saw. People will have to cut down (and chop up) the wood with axes, and probably transport it with horses, and all of that is going to add a LOT to labor costs which are currently pretty low. I don't know what number to put on all that, but I suspect it's not negligible for your purposes.
Maybe the Industrial Revolution in England began the very moment someone carried a bucket of coal into London and said, "what can we do with this stuff?", but the early Industrial Revolution in the U.S. was well underway before coal was a major factor, powered by water and wood. Equating the Industrial Revolution with coal is like equating the Internet with digital video.
For me, the interesting part of this scenario game is looking at what was going on just at the point where fossil fuels started radically changing the game, so we can branch our alternate history from there. In America, that was the first two decades of the 1800s. England had the wealth of an empire (ironically, recently increased by winning the world war that was touched off by the American War for Independence), while the U.S. had all the natural resources of a conquered half a continent whose native population had collapsed two centuries earlier. With or without fossil fuels, those populations and their works were bound to increase for a while. They were not going to say, "Oops, turns out none of our rocks burn, might as well forget about water wheels and foundries and interchangeable parts and glassworks and power looms and fast shipping and reapers and cotton gins. Let's just settle down to a nice sustainable pastoral lifestyle instead." Wealth, not coal, first got the ball rolling.
I didn't intend to obsess on canals, it's just that that's one of the most dramatic and, if coal etc. hadn't come along, most important developments going on in the northeastern U.S. at that time. Coal wasn't used to build those canals (except perhaps for the metalwork where charcoal could have been used instead; the U.S. was not out of charcoal by 1820 and it was only around 1850 that coal exceeded wood for heating fuel in Northeastern cities) and there was plenty of need for transport for stuff besides coal. Farmers settling in the Ohio Valley weren't establishing self-sufficient survivalist compounds; they needed and expected to be able to get their products to market and purchase the supplies they needed and generally participate in the economy. A two hundred mile run on a canal barge would permit that, where multiple two hundred mile cart hauls on dirt paths would not.
It might be argued that the engineering know-how to build and operate canals might not have existed in the U.S., nor been developed, without an import of knowledge from coal-savvy England, but I'd have to see the argument. Coal might also have been the main reason the major canals were widened later, but as I said before, I'm talking about the 1820s-era versions with 40 foot wide channels and mule barges.
Heck, the Romans built navigable canals; how much coal were they carrying around?
Anyhow, kind of tired of answering the "The canals were used to transport coal so they wouldn't have existed without coal" argument over and over. (And the Internet wouldn't have existed without Facebook, by the same reasoning.) So, onto other things in my next posts.
Respectfully,
Myriad