Imagine a hypothetical alternate earth where there was no coal.
Could humans ever have invented things like current computers, the internet, and so on? Is there any alternate pathway of historical development that does not require coal, and achieves modern levels of technology?
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Burning wood? There are very few things that coal can do which wood cannot, albeit at a lower efficiency and higher cost.
the Chinese were piping and burning natural gas for energy before Jesus was born, so I'd guess it's possible to skip the coal step.
We have other fossil fuels right? Just no coal?
The US would not be the greatest country on Earth. Our success is largely because of our enormous coal deposits (there's a reason both sub periods of the Carboniferous are named after places in the US). But with other fossil fuels available we would simply rely on them more.
The question is, can you have an industrial revolution without the cheap condensed energy of coal, or an information era without the industrial revolution.
Historically, it really took off because of cheap coal deposits in the UK. Maybe that was a threshold thing, to reach a certain complexity.
Yes, but their industrial development biggybacked on the industrial revolution started by UK coal. Not sure they would have industrialized with natural gas, after all, as you say, they had it for ages.
Oh I think it's clear they wouldn't have. I think by the time the UK started burning coal the Chinese were actually moving backwards technologically.
It just seems likely that at some point someone would've put natural gas to use to drive machines. It's not like it was completely unknown, just fairly hard to get and transport. Well, unless you happened to have a lot of bamboo for drilling wells and making pipes.
>Imagine a hypothetical to coal
no, you tell me what is your alternative
to coal, since it is your hypothesis, fgt pls
I wrote alternative earth, as in a world like ours but without coal.
I am genuine uncertain whether we could ever invent, e.g. the internet in such a world.
I think the industrial revolution is possible, but not the revolution aspect of it, with the advances occurring over thousands of years rather than decades.
>I am genuine uncertain whether we could ever invent, e.g. the internet in such a world.
I don't see why not.
Without coal things would take longer to get running, but if it was nessisary we would have developed non-coal energy forms a lot earlier and faster than we actually did.
It's possible there is some threshold of cheap energy you need available at once in order to create the feedback loops that we saw in Britain at the time.
It's not clear you would ever start from a wood-burning economy to steel railroads and then eventually build nuclear reactors, without cheap coal as a stepping stone.
Tech isn't like in the Civ games where you just add little science points up linearly and then unlock the next technology, in the real world there are other feedback mechanisms from politics and economics. For example, it's hard to defend projects that are very expensive if they don't pay returns in a very long time.
>It's not clear you would ever start from a wood-burning economy to steel railroads and then eventually build nuclear reactors, without cheap coal as a stepping stone.
There are plenty of other steps you could use between wood and fission.
Someone else has already pointed out natural gas. Electrically driven systems could also have been adopted much earlier, potentially being driven from wind and water turbines.
>Electrically driven systems could also have been adopted much earlier, potentially being driven from wind and water turbines.
Yes. And you could still refine aluminum electrolytically
We would have just had solar energy be more widely adopted
Steel production
The thing is, our development of photovoltaics was built on the industrial revolution. It's not like you can just invent them from a 17th century knowledge base without intermediary steps.
Alternate history is masturbation
ok, high quality steel production.
Also, steel and cast iron requires carbon content which is from coke (coal)
Actually, it's trying to understand historical dynamics.
It can come from charcoal too.
There might be things that coal can do which wood cannot, but steel is not one of them
Don't we only have coal because for a long time there was nothing capable of rotting and eating wood?
The supply of wood also matters. You need a lot of wood to replace a coal mine. Deforestation would have been a negative feedback.
You can still make steel, and places like Russia, Canada and South America have an almost endless supply of trees.
Not saying it would be ideal, not saying it wouldn't fuck up the environment, but it is possible.
Replacing coal with charcoal would not necessitate deforestation until you need more charcoal than you can grow trees. We'd have gotten some plantation policies running that would be unrecognizable to our world, but e.g. pine is cheap and grows real fast. It would obviously be more expensive if it was a primary fuel source, but it would still grow fast.