We Only Get One Shot

The world has never been here before. Human standards of living are at their all time highs, and have been going up almost continuously for hundreds of years in many parts of the world. Just in the last 30 years, over a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $1 per day). We have a real chance to even colonize parts of our solar system in the next 100 years or so, bringing the torch of life off-planet for the first time ever, taking our first step of expanding to the infinite.

But what if we falter? Societies have collapsed before. Many times those collapses are almost fully complete.

You Better Never Let It Go

A few notable deep collapses illustrate the reality of the danger:

• The Indus Valley (Harappan) civilization declined fairly quickly and completely (due to global cooling 4,000 years ago). It did so without leaving hardly any trace of progress on which subsequent civilizations could build upon, with the exception of a single known continuous settlement (Pirak) and a few possible religious carryovers (cremating the dead). All the indoor plumbing, international trade, and architectural progress accumulated in the Indus Valley were lost, as were the social technologies associated with advanced societal structures.

• When the Akkadian Empire collapsed (again, because of global cooling around four millennia ago), there is a significant gap in record keeping and strong indications that even agricultural technology like irrigation was lost and had to be rediscovered.

• The Mediterranean Bronze Age Civilizations experienced a major collapse around 1200-1050 B.C. This included regions of Greece, Turkey, Cypress, Syria, and even Egypt and Mesopotamia (the decline was less severe in the latter two areas). This ushered in 350 years of the “Greek Dark Ages,” which showed a dramatic population decline in Greece, and Greek foreign contact declined to almost zero.

An interesting echo in the Bronze Age Collapse is that societal complexity (specialization, extensive international trade, and top-heavy political structures) made the society more fragile, and this fragility is what led to its downfall. Others note that due to Iron Age technological progress, weapons became much cheaper than farmland, encouraging more violent takeovers.

Snap Back To Reality

But is this type of collapse really a danger to our modern world? There is an argument that the danger is very small. It sounds something like this:

“We are so much more interconnected. A drought or war in Ukraine might cause regional problems, but there are many other food-producing regions that can ship food there. And even if there is a more considerable collapse in civilization in a few countries, other countries will just move in and take over the technological progress of those countries. Information has no borders! And even if shipping gets dicey in, say, the Pacific, then lots of countries can just ship in the Atlantic, or send things by train. During shortages, there’s too much money to be made for peoples’ needs to not be met.”

All these are definitely mitigating factors that minimize the impacts of small, regional economic depressions or even times of regional war.

And I can say that the impacts of a broader, deeper societal collapse won’t be like they were for other ancient civilizations. They will be so much worse.

The biggest problem is that almost no one knows how to farm anymore. Humans require an amazing amount of food to just stay alive. Growing, packaging, transporting, and dispensing this food in stores is an insanely complex process requiring hundreds of steps. Each of those steps requires equipment that is very specialized, manufactured very cheaply usually by people very far away from the farms using materials mined from all over the world. Let’s follow a tomato.

Mom’s Spaghetti

First, a farmer in Florida ploughs his field using a tractor whose steel uses cobalt mined in the Congo and iron from North Carolina. The tractor runs on diesel distilled from crude shipped in from Russia. Once our tomato shoots begin to grow, it is fertilized with nitrogen grabbed from the air using heat energy derived from burning fossil fuels. Pesticides derived from natural gas help keep bugs off our tomato. Workers from Guatemala pick the tomato and place it into a diesel truck to a packing plant 60 miles away to be sorted on a machine containing aluminum rollers from Jamaica and Iceland, powered by a gas turbine made in Italy burning natural gas from Alberta. The cardboard boxes made in Georgia are filled up, and the one containing our tomato heads to a warehouse in Alabama and then a grocery store in Louisiana. Then you pick up your tomato and go pay $0.73 for it in order to make spaghetti that night.

Because of volume and specialization, all that work to get that food to you gets paid from that $0.73, and actually turns a profit, which motivates the system to keep self-perpetuating, to our great benefit.

Coast to Coast Shows

This incredible amount of interconnectedness makes many things available to very many people, and does so at very low costs (thanks mostly to safe and cheap oceanic shipping).

This illustrates, in part, how fragile our current wealth and ease really are. There are many steps in getting that tomato to your table that depend on supply chains connecting us to many parts of the world, and connected very cheaply.

To Seize Everything You Ever Wanted

But here comes the big problem: Did you notice something else throughout that tomato creation narrative? A huge number of parts are deeply dependent on fossil fuels.

Over the last 90 years especially, society has become turbocharged and extremely dependent on fossil energy and fossil outputs beside energy. First, the energy is very cheap — we just have to pump it out of the ground and do some refining. Second, the energy is very transportable because it is very energy dense. A pound of lithium batteries provides 1/100th the energy of a pound of gasoline. If you need to run a truck or machinery out in a field, gasoline or diesel is extremely easy to use. And refilling the tank doesn’t take two hours.

But almost more important is the fact that we make our fertilizers and plastics and paints and solvents and additives and so many other things from oil or natural gas. Chemists have unleashed an explosion of very useful products derived from fossil fuels. If we turned off the mining of fossil fuels tomorrow because a miraculous new energy source or battery were discovered, our society would still collapse because the fossil fuels are the feedstocks of so many products that have become absolute necessities for modernity.

Source (this is only a small section of the table)

Oh, There Goes Gravity

This brings us to the very dark and grim reality of this article. We have already mined almost all of the easy-to-get oil and natural gas. With the possible exception of the opaque Saudi Arabian oil processes, almost none of the oil and gas deposits we currently draw upon are reachable using 1940s technology. We need modern technologies to keep pulling oil out of the ground at anything close to economically useful costs and rates. We need tungsten carbide drill bits and segmented high temperature steel drill casings and incredibly complex geological imaging and fracturing technology to get to the oil now. We need modernity to keep modernity going.

There is no more Texas Tea bubbling up from the ground while we were shootin’ for our food.

Ask your grandparents, or watch this historical record:

And so if society were to falter from its current technological heights for even a few generations, we would lose access to the very thing that enables modernity — cheap, potent, transportable energy, as well as thousands of non-energy products made from it.

If we allow society to fall any time in the next 100 years back to 1940 levels or worse, then it becomes extremely unlikely that we will be able to claw our way back to anything like the affluence and ease we have today for many hundreds of years. For instance, we simply won’t be able to make steel, the very framework of industry. We may be able to smelt it with coal (which is still relatively simple to get using 1940s tech), but we cannot mine the elements that comprise it, like nickel and molybdenum and chromium, without oil or natural gas. At best we could perhaps recycle steel to some extent using coal burners.

What about solar power and wind power? These sources are incredibly intermittent. Look at the graph below, which covers a year of power production (radial extent is power produced, and the full circle is a year in time, clockwise). Without batteries, we cannot power society just on these on and off technologies. And we are many decades from being able to produce enough batteries to make wind and solar work without other energy sources backing them up every single day.

Wind Energy is more reliable than solar, and wind is shown in red above. This is unusable for society without fossil or nuclear or hydro backup.

Another issue that looms very big is that solar and wind power are not good energy sources for creating solar and wind components. If society were to fall backwards a century, then we would have to largely bootstrap using surviving hydro power and solar and wind because oil and natural gas would be quite inaccessible. But solar and wind cannot power the diesel machines and trucks that are the main, key components of mining copper and lithium and nickel and cobalt and silica for fiberglass needed to create solar panels and wind turbines. Battery power is simply not there yet to run heavy machinery, and running wires to mobile mining equipment is largely infeasible. You can use fossil fuels to make the items you need to get more fossil energy. You cannot easily use wind and solar power to create the components needed for expanding wind and solar power.

What about ethanol? We could grow corn and turn that into something like gasoline. Using the world’s most efficient farming techniques, we can get 1/3 more energy out of ethanol than we put into producing it. So is this a viable option? Sure. Until we run out of fertilizer, which we derive from natural gas. (Nitrogen fertilizer is taken from the air, but using hydrogen derived from natural gas. Phosphorous fertilizer is mined from ocean bottoms, and you need diesel to run those vessels.) And once the efficiency of growing sugar cane or corn is reduced by even 1/3, ethanol becomes a net negative source of energy, a short term solution at best.

There are many, many more details and pathways that could be explored to see if we can bootstrap ourselves out of a new Dark Age without fossil fuels. The best version is likely a coal future, until we can build industry back up to 1950s levels or beyond so that we can get back to fracking oil out of the ground. But that will be a very difficult climb.

Your Chance to Blow

Coal is probably our best bet, because we still have coal plants and those can be used to power sections of different countries. But the somewhat hilarious outcome of this is that things would have to go back to steam power for quite a while.

Copyright Su Jeong Ahn

Which means that after any future Dark Age, we would end up a with an extended Steam Punk period. Which no one saw coming except the cosplayers.

This Opportunity Comes Once In (This Planet’s) Lifetime

But the coal “future” might very well fail. And if we have to fall back on coal without oil and gas and their by-products (especially easy mining and cheap fertilizers), it is very likely 6 billion humans will starve to death.

So we need to tread extremely carefully for the next 100 years until we become good at fusion and other nuclear energy sources and have very convenient batteries or other portable energy storage devices. If before then we stumble as a society and fall into Authoritarianism of Fascism or Communisms or any other utopian “ism” that always ends in a dystopia, humans may never claw their way back to air conditioners and year-round strawberries and widespread medical technology.

Remember, Society is the Most Important Technology. You better never let it go.