We’ve discovered the breaking point of paradise. Hope the next sentient species is a little less selfish.
Unfortunately, I don’t know if it would be possible for another species to reach our level of technology or civilization. We built up our society off of easily accessible energy resources (surface-level coal being our first source of industrial energy). This energy excess allowed us to develop other sources of energy, solar, wind, nuclear, etc. But if you tried starting from zero again, you could never get to this point, at least along the same path, as you need a high level of technology to access any available energy resources. Thus, if any new species took our place, they could only ever rise to the level of the pre-industrial revolution.
That’s a good thing, right? The vast majority of the results of technology and “civilization” has turned out to be nothing but a curse on this planet.
To an extent, but we have the chance of transitioning into a solar and wind society and remediate that damage. Subsequent species would not have that potential.
At the very least, even basic electricity production requires copper windings. Which requires copper wire. Which requires refined copper. Which requires copper ore. Which requires copper mining.
Generations of people with manual tools will need to die in the mines for enough electricity to be generated to run a small medical clinic, let alone get post-climate humans to a point of modern civilization.
While it’s definitely bleak, it’s not quite as bleak as that. Remember that we’re leaving behind vast amounts of ‘waste’, much of which contains things like copper, aluminium, steel and other useful components in relatively easily refinable states.
Future civilisations will be digging through our waste, wondering why we were so profligate, but glad to have it all to hand.
They wouldn’t be able to take the same oath we did but that isn’t saying they could never get to where we’re at more or less.
The enlightenment spawn the industrial revolution but it didn’t necessarily have to. Scientific inquiry could have eventually lead us to somewhere near where we’re at now without fossil fuels. The path would look wildly different and there’s a fairly high likelihood mass slavery could play a role in that but it’s still possible.
Kind of a tangent here but the book children of time goes into some depth on how the author thinks a race of super intelligent spiders could overcome many of the same hurdles we had to in wildly different ways to become a space-aring civilization. It’s science fiction and obviously not an in depth study into how feasible it all would be but it did get me thinking that there is more than one way to skin a cat.
I disagree. To unlock workable solar and wind powered electricity, you need something to carry you energetically through the ‘tech tree.’ I simply don’t think you can get to that level of technology without some fossil fuel use.
It’s really actually kind of fascinating when you think of how that energy source was made, with a mass die off of carbiniferous (I think) rootless trees, aka scale trees that all fell due to not being able to support their own weight probably because the incredible amount of oxygen in the atmosphere at the time, then the carbon from those trees got buried and pressed into “fuel diamonds”, plentiful and packed with all the energy a type 0 civilization would ever need, but the very fact that using the results of that die off to power our species unabashedly, has doomed us, because we finally reached that ever important ceiling that ecologists/biologists are always talking about. We thought we outsmarted evolution and nature, but we are just as much a part of it as any other being or object.
It’s kind of beautiful to me.
Perhaps if it’s a few million years later and all us dead humans have turned into coal and oil, like the dinosaurs of the past.