Timeline for What would it have taken for the world to skip fossil fuels?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Post Revisions
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 15, 2022 at 20:01 | answer | added | Jay | timeline score: 0 | |
| Feb 15, 2022 at 15:24 | comment | added | Dragongeek | I recently watched a video that speculates on the future of solar power (which I highly recommend: youtube.com/watch?v=W-TISSvR0L4) and one of the topics that is discussed is that there was a very real what-if chance that solar could've "beaten" internal combustion as a primary energy provider for vehicles if semiconductors and photovoltaic had been just discovered a bit earlier. ICE technology has been maturing for around 160 years now, while solar panels and modern batteries only seriously started being invested in rather recently. An alt history with earlier solar could work. | |
| Feb 15, 2022 at 12:15 | answer | added | Dvorkam | timeline score: 3 | |
| Feb 15, 2022 at 8:38 | answer | added | Thales | timeline score: 2 | |
| Feb 15, 2022 at 6:25 | answer | added | Ash | timeline score: 1 | |
| Feb 15, 2022 at 5:30 | comment | added | Ash | Weirdly enough, and not necessarily useful to you but possibly interesting, one of the first things that steam engines were used for, once they became small enough to be useful outside a coalmine, was to pump water uphill for grain mills. | |
| Feb 15, 2022 at 2:59 | answer | added | Vogon Poet | timeline score: 4 | |
| Feb 15, 2022 at 2:33 | comment | added | Vogon Poet | Travel back in time and kill Prometheus. We found black stuff bubbling in the swamp in Pennsylvania and once we found out it burned, game over. Humans are pyromaniacs, because fire brought the dawn of civilization. | |
| Feb 15, 2022 at 2:05 | comment | added | Willk | This is the same question. Which got closed, unfortunately. worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/207057/… | |
| Feb 15, 2022 at 0:53 | comment | added | Ucinorn | @EveninginGethsemane it is similar, however it incorrectly assumes we can't solve for the transport issue: batteries are a perfectly viable form of portable tech. However I'm struggling to think why 18th century inventors would favor primitive battery tech of the much higher energy density of coal and oil. | |
| Feb 15, 2022 at 0:44 | history | edited | Ucinorn | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Edit to clarify my intentions
|
| Feb 15, 2022 at 0:26 | comment | added | AlexP | Mankind used renewable energy sources, such as wind power, water power, and animal power for millennia before using fossil fuels. If you look at the big pictiure, the use of fossil fuels, roughly from the beginning of the 19th to the middle of the 21st centuries, is a mere blip on the historical timeline. (And anyway, the Industrial Revolution began with hydropower. The use of coal came only later, when the Industrial Revolution was already in full swing.) | |
| Feb 15, 2022 at 0:25 | comment | added | Escaped dental patient. | Related answer to a similar question. Not a dupe I think. | |
| Feb 15, 2022 at 0:16 | history | asked | Ucinorn | CC BY-SA 4.0 |