Peak Everything, Overshoot, & Collapse

Preface.  Coal only formed once on Earth over hundreds of millions of years because they had lignin and cellulose that microbes hadn’t yet evolved to consume. Eventually they did, and today termites, cows and other creatures are able to digest cellulose and lignin by outsourcing the job to microbes in their guts.  But it is still such a  complex process that scientists haven’t been able to copy it, which is why cellulosic ethanol is still not commercial and takes more energy and money to make than is returned.

Coal is still forming today, but will take tens if not hundreds of millions of years to form again, in far smaller amounts than in the Carboniferous period since it is forming from peat rather than hundreds of billions of trees.

I think that the reason we haven’t detected other civilizations, the Fermi paradox, is because fossil fuels didn’t form on most planets in the universe.  If they did, the odds are very high that intelligent life never evolved, as explained in the book by Ward & Brownlee “Rare Earth: Why Complex life is Uncommon in the Universe” (see my review here, and new science about why life may be rare in the universe here).   Even if intelligent life evolved, it may have lacked the dexterity of an oppositional thumb.  Or a history that led to inventing steam engines, and many more contingencies. Even if intelligent beings on other planets did evolve and discover coal, oil, and natural gas and built civilizations like ours, the distances between planets are too far apart, let alone stars or other galaxies, so they never went anywhere. And we didn’t detect their radio signals because like us, they exponentially consumed fossils until they went back to life before fossil fuels within 250 years.

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