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 🤔
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.
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 🤔
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.