Here is a comment I wrote in response to an article. The article was asking whether industrial civilization could be reconstituted from scratch after a worldwide collapse. The author argues that it would be more difficult to rebuild, now that the best fossil fuels are depleted. I argue that it would be easier to industrialize the second time around. As follows:
I think that industrial civilization would be reconstituted fairly quickly, like within two centuries.
In my opinion, It would be FAR easier to industrialize the second time, despite fewer and worse fuels. Any reborn civilization would progress through the industrial revolution far faster, and far easier, than we did originally. That is because they would start with our technical knowledge, which would more than compensate for any degradation of fuel quality.
For the first 80 years, up until about 1790, steam engines had an efficiency of just 1%. Early steam engines lost 99% of their coal energy as waste heat. This was because nobody had invented the Watt engine, the Corliss engine, the Wilkonson boring machine, the compound engine, and the Parsons engine. Those basic inventions in steam technology increased the efficiency of steam engines from 1% to 15%. In other words, that basic technical knowledge allowed steam engines to obtain 15x as much power per unit of fuel. A triple expansion steam engine from 1890 is not much harder to manufacture than a Newcomen engine from 1790, but it provides 15x the work per unit of fuel. Simply understanding the basics of thermodynamics and how to build a more efficient steam engine, results in a 15x advantage.
Any reborn civilization would start with that knowledge. They would start with engines which produce 15x the power, per unit of fuel. That advantage would more than compensate for any degradation of fuel quality. Does coal really have 15x as much energy as charcoal? The answer is no.
If industrial civilization was able to advance with 1% efficient engines, then it would be able to advance with 15% efficient engines. That advantage would far outweigh any degradation of fuel quality.
As long as a few textbooks survive and those textbooks describe how to build such engines, then industrial civilization would bounce back fairly quickly. Any new industrial revolution would be far faster than the original one.
After that, if we retained even 15 textbooks about basic physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, electricity, inventions, and so on, it would be enough to bring us well into the 20th century fairly quickly.
(The original article, to which this was a response, is here.)
