[ExI] Silence in the sky-but why?

[Tomaz Kristan]

Eugen Leitl:

> It takes energy to get energy. Wood is easy, peat still reasonably easy,
coal hard and harder, as you you deplete shallow resources and have to
go deeper. You need to be quite advanced in order to tap undersea
resources, or even unconventional gases and liquids.


Isn't wind and solar always there? At least as I understand you posts about
this matter?




On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 05:09:56AM -0700, spike wrote:
>
> > Advanced life forms might also need some supply of abundant fossil fuel
> or
> > some access to practically unlimited quantities of concentrated energy,
> as
> > in our case with coal.  This notion then suggests that our current
> attempt
> > at a singularity is a one-shot event.  If we fail this time, this
> > millennium, then the supply of easily-attainable energy is gone forever.
>  If
>
> You've nailed another core aspect of the problem which should be blindingly
> obvious -- but for some strange reason isn't.
>
> Net free energy constraints the growth of a culture. Many failed
> civilizations literally burned through their forests in order to produce
> quicklime and charcoal and wood for construction, and then crashed.
>
> It takes energy to get energy. Wood is easy, peat still reasonably easy,
> coal hard and harder, as you you deplete shallow resources and have to
> go deeper. You need to be quite advanced in order to tap undersea
> resources, or even unconventional gases and liquids.
>
> As EROEI drops we eventually arrive at the energy cliff. Most of society's
> efforts are at this point needed to just obtain enough energy so that
> that society can stay where it is. There are no spare resources left.
> Every nonessential activity grinds to a halt.
>
> And then it gets worse. The fatal nature of the energy cliff is that
> it robs you of your ability to homeostate, resulting a regression runaway
> which is a yet another nasty positive-feedback process: the less E you can
> invest into the EROEI, the less total return. As soon as you lose
> your footing, and fall down the energy cliff you've lost the last
> bit of control you had. You're effectively in freefall.
>
> > we burn up the coal beds and the oil in the next few hundred years and
> fail
>
> In terms of oil volume, flat plateau (net energy decline) has been with
> us since roughly 2004. Total peak fossil and fissible is 2020,
> or thereabouts. The energy cliff begins at 8:1. I think we're
> already there, or nearly there. Our time has ran out. We've
> robbed outselves of all alternative choices which were available
> to us in the past. All the Roads Not Taken are in our past.
> I hope you like the road in front of you.
>
> > to develop something renewable and sustainable, it is too easy to
> envision
> > human populations dwindling back down to the actual steady-state carrying
> > capacity of the planet for our size mammal, perhaps a billion souls, but
>
> Considerably less. http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html
>
> > without the ability to develop or even maintain current technology.
>  Then we
>
> We already been unable to maintain our current technology for several
> decades. The regression is not uniform, and sufficiently slow so that
> it can be ignored by many.
>
> > would be unable to advance beyond what I have envisioned as an AD1000-ish
> > level of technology for lack of easily-available energy.  Even at current
>
> We have no idea what technology level is sustainable if we have allowed
> us to run out of energy.
>
> > intelligence levels, humankind would be stuck at that level of technology
> > indefinitely, with no clear path forward.
> >
> > So this current surge towards a singularity may be a one-shot deal, do it
> > now or do it not, forever.
>
> Our launch window is closing. Whether we still can make it -- we should
> be able to see soon enough (~2050).
>
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