this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
670 points (99.0% liked)

Curated Tumblr

5242 readers
82 users here now

For preserving the least toxic and most culturally relevant Tumblr heritage posts.

Here are some OCR tools to assist you in transcribing posts:

Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Chadus_Maximus@lemm.ee 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

But maybe that's what normal civilizations go though before leaving their planet, and the abundant access to oil will cause us to destroy earth before we can leave it ๐Ÿค”

[โ€“] rekabis@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 months ago

I recall one paper that tried to analyze how long it would have taken to go from a pre-coal civilization in the 1800s to spaceflight, all without hydrocarbons from the ground, and they estimated over 8,000 years to develop sufficient biological sources of hydrocarbons that could advance tech enough to just get into orbit. And the planetary population would have never exceeded 2B in the process. Oil, gas, and coal have done a shitton to enable technology. Even something as simple as electricity requires significant hydrocarbons Just in the infrastructure, not to mention the production of electricity itself.