661
Luna (slrpnk.net)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] rekabis@lemmy.ca 10 points 2 weeks ago

There are some schools of thought that say that a large moon like ours should be a part of the Drake Equation, because without which life would have a very hard time even on supposed “garden planets”.

Another factor that is likely to affect civilizations is an easy source of energy, like oil. We got lucky, in that the evolutionary development in Lignin in plants - and the several million years needed for bacteria to catch up and be able to break it down - are what created those massive deposits of organic matter that became trapped deep in the Earth and modified into oil. Without that oil we are unlikely to have reached several milestones, including transportation, population levels, trade, high technology, and even access to space. And this would start affecting us several hundred years back, with steam engines.

[-] Chadus_Maximus@lemm.ee 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

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 🤔

[-] rekabis@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week 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.

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

Curated Tumblr

4092 readers
14 users here now

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

Image descriptions and plain text captions of written content are expected of all screenshots. Here are some image text extractors (I looked these up quick and will gladly take FOSS recommendations):

-web

-iOS

-android

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

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS