We Will Be the Last Civilization on Earth 

Damn, if only we'd invented nuclear reactors.

Well, yes. But personally, my argument against plastics (and more generally fossil fuels) has never been that we should stop using them: just that we stop using them for things for which we have viable alternatives.

Whatever extinction level event happens whether it be an asteroid like Apophis, envirnomental collapse or a war it's not only energy sources that would be affected. Infrastructure - food, health care, information access, communications, travel etc. would all be severely damaged. Not very long ago humans scrabbled for existence and could die from an infection. Hard to imagine from the paradise we take for granted.

Technically it might be possible to build an arc furnace in order to smelt silicon, using only charcoal-available materials to build it

Can't wait till the alien civilisation DLC drops.

There are also electric arcs that can melt materials, and induction works to heat and even microwave could be used to heat a wide range of materials.

Electricity plus water and air, in conjunction with catalysts, can be used to make fluid hydrocarbons. (Perhaps solid too.) Porsche is doing it today. I'd suggest compact modular thorium reactors as the electricity source - thousands and thousands (millions?) of them.

Very informative and an interesting thought experiment. I wonder if you have considered other ways to make steel such as those methods used by SSAB? There is no denying that fossil fuels have been convenient for fueling our population and technology growth, however, humans are extremely good at solving these challenges when we want to.

Seems to me previous civilizations built structures that lasted thousands of years out of the most common building material on earth.

Kind of a faulty premise to begin with. What apocalyptic disaster could erase all the refined materials already present on Earth? Even global thermonuclear war would leave large areas or former cities, mines, farms, etc. untouched. There is pretty much no scenario where humanity would have to restart from scratch (and even then, collective knowledge would jump-start that process). If we're talking human extinction and another species evolving intelligence, we can't possibly imagine what they would be capable of. If they were even 10% more intelligent than us, they might find innovations we can't even imagine.

It's always seemed to me to be a solution to the Fermi paradox. The amount of factors that had to come together just right in order for there to be huge fossil fuel deposits was remarkable. On how many planets would that occur? It's not impossible but so is winning the lottery a dozen times in a row. Then you've got all the other factors that allowed complex life -and ultimately civilization - to evolve. For example, how many proto planets got hit by just the right size and direction of a massive celestial object to form a moon that stabilises the planet's rotation so that you don't have environmental chaos? And that's just one factor. But that's a discussion for another day...

2:07 made me chuckle because I don’t think my teenage son would have a will to live without internet even if he survives the apocalypse.😂😂

The question about the great filter is always a scary thought to think about. Are we the first civilization ever to be in front of the great filter or is the great filter in front of us? Either thought Is scary

I very greatly doubt we get knocked back to "stone age". I see us going back to pre-industrial level, say 15th to 18th century level. And ancient Rome invented very durable concrete, without our technology.

Great video. Do not apologize for giving people real information. If they don't like it, it's because they are ideologically driven and that doesn't help anybody. They can stuff it. Thank you for admitting we don't know how much oil is out there. 20 years ago, a giant percentage of reputable people honestly believed that there was only another 30 years of oil left, and that we had already reached peak oil production. They forget just how much mankind can innovate.

You can get methane from biogenic sources and it burns hot enough for silicon smelting, especially with a little extra oxidizer added. And regardless, while silicon is an excellent semi-conductor, it isn't the only one, and it's quite easy to imagine a society that continued to miniaturize vacuum tube technology or find other options for high-powered computing. Plastics aren't even the only organic polymers available to us, and others would certainly be viable for the applications they are put to in an aerospace context. Honestly I think the biggest hurdle facing a non-fossil fueled space program is the raw energy requirements of chemical fuels, which if biogenically sourced will require a punishing amount of primary production to support, and would require the coordinated efforts of great empires, but it's not impossible.

The irony of fossil fuel is that it is made from natural sources. Dead plant and animal material, it always amazes me when I think about it. It’s literally the circle of life.

I think the biggest issue would be finding people who know enough about the old skills to actually smelt iron etc.

Humanity survived thousands of years without needing iron or concrete. The issue here is we are stuck in a post-industrial mindset, not a natural one.

If sufficient knowledge of engineering and science survives, we can kickstart civilization easily. If you know what you need and why you need it, you can find plenty of coal still, and from there build up. Without the knowledge, it will probably take a couple of thousand years more (and look probably very different to today's world) but human ingenuity is irrepressible.

a cool idea to the fermi paradox. One planet only having a finite amount of chances to gather resources of the planet to reach space, and be able to gather more resources.

I personally think that this is the key to the fermi paradox and why we dont see evidence for intelligent life out there. I think at a certain point, most civilizations become cradle locked as the first technologically advanced civilization burns itself out, the next cannot reach the same heights and thus becomes forever locked to their world.

Food, clothing, shelter and WATER.

Alex, I usually don’t comment on RU-vid. Just wanted to say you and the Astrum team create some of the best content on RU-vid in my opinion. The flow of the presentation, topics discussed, and your narration are spot on! Great work and please keep it going!

The technology we have using minerals such as copper may never be realized. In Earth 1.0 we found chunks of nearly pure copper laying on the surface. In Earth 2.0 they would have to dig way down to find tiny amounts of copper. It may never be exploited due to it being so rare.

I disagree about some things here, for a start there are definitely repositories that would safe guard the information on how most things here work. I also believe that in the case of stone age, iron age etc... They had to learn those techniques from scratch we already know about them so we would already have our start in the iron age plus because even if we don't have machines that doesn't mean we don't have the hand tools and know how, around at the moment.

You forgot to talk about Glass, which is also very important material in our world and requires temperatures around 1500°C. To sum it up : in a world deprived of fossil fuel you wouldn't be able to build Solar panels (steel+glass+silicon), Windmills (steel+concrete+fibre glass+electronics/silicon), any kind of electrical power plant including hydraulic (steel+concrete+divin+mining+metallurgy of complex alloys)... Basically, you can't build a "renewable world" unless you already have "non renewable resources"

25 years ago, when I first started taking interest in stuff like this, we had about 50 years of oil reserves left. Now we're all the way down to 50 years left. Not sure what we're going to do in 25 years when we only have 50 years of reserves left, probably raise prices 2-3x more.

So as some have mentioned Nuclear is an option. To get there we'd still need some initial hot burning fuel. But with copper decently accessible we can start doing electricity to make hydrogen, which burns at up to 2000c in air. Since we'd probably use electrolysis on water, we also got pure oxygen, in the stoimetric ratio at that. So thats 2600c flames, enough for even silicon. We can do U and Th with that too. W is another beast, and I actually dont know how they melt it today, without looking it up. Electric arc kilns perhaps?

I like to think maybe the “next” civilization would figure out different ways to surpass what we have done to this point

I like the honesty in this video. Yes, renewable resources are the way forward, but yes we must also continue to use fossil fuels to bridge the gap. I often compare it, somewhat jokingly, to air travel but you could use many analogies. I say that just halting fossil fuel usage today in favor of renewable resources only would be like asking the Wright Brothers to fly you to Paris. These things take time, but we will get there eventually. Keep in mind only about 20% of EVs out there are operating on renewable energy sources because that's roughly the percentage of our grid powered by wind and solar. The other 80% is coal, oil, and nuclear. Yes, nuclear isn't fossil fuel but it isn't exactly renewable either, there is a finite supply of materials. Not more than a few decades ago the percentage of renewable resources powering the grid were negligible. In another few decades maybe we will be double or even triple where we are now, which would be a great move forward. Who knows, there could be new ways and methods not even discovered yet that will take off in tge near future.

thorium reactors, hemp building materials, precision fermentation for protein..? could have seriously changed our trajectory since the 50-60s

I've wondered for decades if we might be inadvertently landlocking the future of humanity to Earth by wasteful resource usage today.

The Romans were quite good at making concrete. It sounds like the main issue is needing fossil fuels for reaching high temperatures.

A rational argument/thought experiment about why we should conserve the fossil fuel resources we have now just in case the doo-hits the fan. Rationally this should begin by stopping burning fossil fuels for electic generation (as we acclerate no carbon energy sources) since this wastes resources that can be used for making other stuff.

We only have to find ways to produce electricity without fossil fuels. Electricity can produce high enough temperatures to melt all kinds of metals. You can produce electricity without any high temperature materials via the sun. Sun ovens (mirror chambers) get water boiling, which turns brass or bronze turbines (at first). Once you can produce enough electricity with those, you can start refining higher melting point metals. Similarly, biogas can be produced without any metals at all. You just need big stone tanks and lots of plant waste, manure, excrement and other materials that produce gasses when digested by bacteria. That gas can be used in ovens to produce high temperatures either directly for melting metals with a relatively low to medium melting point (at first) or to produce electricity later on with those metals and alloys. Such a civilization could actually be much more sustainable from the get go and skip the dreadful fossil fuels. Maybe their development is a tad bit slower, but that doesn't have to be the case either. If we had skipped fossil fuels and all the decades and hundreds of years of development for machinery to use them and instead had that time used to develop machinery to produce electricity right away, we'd still have arrived at our current development level at the same time. Naturally, back in those ages we didn't have the knowledge we have today, so that would have never happened (save for external intervention.👽). But today we have this knowledge and could skip a lot of steps to speed up the process. Fossil fuels are a convenient source of energy but by far not the only source that allows for the development of a high-tech civilization.

It sucks that we have the technology to solve all our problems but lack the cooperation to achive it.

Many of our inventions and tech are based on what is easily available around us. A civilisation after us would find new ways to get to space. And currently do to plate tectonics new areas of fossil fuels will resurface. But conserving energy needs to be a virtue for any civilisation that want to last.

Lots of popular misconceptions in this video: 1. Biomethane and biofuel liquid fuels are a thing. 2. Bioplastics are a thing. 3. Molten Oxide Electrolysis can be used to make iron from ore with nothing but electricity. 4. Hydrogen is also a thing and it can be made with electricity and water. That hydrogen can be used to make fertilizers, cement, steel, and yes, purified silicon. Also rocket fuel. 5. Electricity can be made with wind power, solar, hydroelectricity, bioenergy, geothermal, and nuclear. Fossil fuels are not currently necessary with current technology and while they were the path to development we took, they are not necessary to get to this level for the above reasons missed out in this video.

Methane can be extracted from a lot of biological processes like fermentation. It's slower, but if you use renewables for heating and cooking, you'd be able to make due. Also, one could use alcohol to achieve higher temperatures. Alcohol production isn't that hard with rudimentary tools, though main difficulty with that one is keeping it from "evaporating".

I'm definitely probably missing something in this scenario, but why couldnt humans just use charcoal power to reach up to a point of electrical generation capability without fossil fuels (like the late 1800s and early 1900s) but instead use electrical resistance and arc furnaces to melt/work higher temperature materials without needing fossil fuels to generate the heat?

After having read American Prometheus this past spring, and now patiently waiting for Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer, nuclear war has really been on my mind a lot more lately…. And this type of subject matter overall. Great video.

You mean get to space, not "get to the stars". Even with our current civilization we dont have the faintest hope of getting to the stars short of some sort of miraculous sci-fi breakthrough.

I get that the point of the video is whether or not we'd be able to reach the point we are now again, but in any realistic sense not all would be lost, those who survive would still have basic knowledge of many things that would provide an edge in a new world, and even if everything were to be wiped out, there is the question, why should we develop so far beyond our needs again, for what purpose. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a tumour, and technological progression does not always equal good, for the people in the system, and the ecosystems around it.

This was very informative, I wasnt expecting to learn so much from your topic. Great stuff

I did a technology module for my OU degree back in the mid-eighties. And one of our lectures was "When will oil run out?" The consensus seemed to be before the end of the century. And yet, here we are, forty years later, still with plenty of oil. It turns out that there is oil everywhere - far, far more than we ever thought. It gets harder to get to, of course, but, as the easier oil is used up, we simply adapt, accept higher costs, invent new technology, and move on the the more difficult oil. I can see no end to this. And the same is pretty much true of all the other essentials you mention. It would appear that, if we want to destroy the Earth twice, there are more than enough resources still left to do it all over again.

"And worst of all no internet?" I doubt the internet will be the last of the few survivors worries... Lol.

Maybe I missed something but, how do you get from societal collapse and nuclear war to how will we get to the moon?

I think more people need to realize that regardless of how it affects the environment, fossil fuels are a necessary step and part of society. We won’t ever fully remove them, though now that we have good energy production, we can spend time working to replace them a lot of the time.

Some of these stock clips are so odd it really makes you wonder if whoever made them isn't actually an alien themselves. Like some of these people do things people just don't do at all. I can't get over it, it's so odd! :O

1:30 It doesn't matter how much of this stuff is left. What matters is the easy stuff has already been mined, burned and is gone. What is left requires an advanced civilization to extract. No pre-industrial society is going to produce deep sea oil or deep sea gas or run tarsands operations in Alberta or even in Venezuela. It requires enormous industrial equipment and a ton of already available cheap energy and a vast transportation and logistics system. That is why this stuff wasn't produced first.

So the next civilization after this one might be a steampunk one? That would be interesting! At least without electronics, it would be harder to have a surveillance state!

You could replace fossil fuels with H2 and O2 (burns at about 3000°C) which can be easily obtained by electrolysing water. Or you can just smelt your metal ores directly with the electricity, arc furnaces exist/could be invented again.

i wonder how much of that energy has been used so far on weapons , in wars , i.e. the most inefficient method of mutual suicide .

At current rates of usage fossil fuels will never run out in any of our lifetimes. Remember Antarctica. Remember the deep oceanic crust deposits.

Plastic can be made from plants and is unnecessary, any heating could be done with electricity. It would be harder but the answer is not "No we can't do it" This video is so simplistic and it's great to see you are such a shill for oil companies

I can imagine a civilization focused on mining plastics or even focusing on genetic engineering to breed new kinds of bamboo or hemp.

We really need to "Manhattan Project" ourselves into fusion power. Have the whole planet focus on that and share whatever comes of it.

Oh no! If only we had invented electric arc furnaces before the collapse - we'd be able to melt iron without the need for fossil fuels. Wait, we already have them? Ok - nevermind.

This is a slick apology for using fossil fuels. I am impressed with how it is presented so we keep the Saudi's and West Texas oil people in business at the expense of every else. I hope the producers sleep well.

for the heating problems, what about methods of generating heat than combustion? it should be possible to set up glass panels in a way that focuses all the light into one spot, heating it up enough to melt even silicon. you also don't necessarily need fossil fuels first to generate electricity. copper melts at 1085c, meaning charcoal (or solar) can melt it, so you could absolutely make turbines out of it and start generating electricity by placing them in waterfalls for example. from there, you could use that electricity to generate the heat required to melt other metals.

If fossil fuels are something that are extremely rare and not likely to occur even on planets with life, then the lack of fossil fuels in the universe should be considered a major filter for the Fermi Paradox

NIce ad placement at the end there. That's the way to do it right.

Last thing on the mind of people who would have survived, is space travel.

The Pyramids weren’t built with fossil fuels, the granite wasn’t cut from mountains and transported to its location and foisted 100’s of feet up a pyramid. The mathematicians and chemists that put together the plans and the building materials didn’t need fossil fuels to the work that they did that has stood for over 5000 years. Could they have gone to the Stars if they continued their incredible development from over 5000 years ago?

This is a great summary of the important materials throughout history in a chronological order and their temperature points. Feels like this is what schools should show us before we start science class. Giving context will make lessons more interesting

"Somebody will think of something!" 😆

poop of cow will be renewable energy resource. You can still make steel from poop of cow as heat Resources and build architecture with wood and bamboo. You can still build sailing ships with bamboo reinforced concrete . But forget about private jet and cars.

I honestly appreciate any channel that converts kilometers to miles and Celsius to Fahrenheit (and vice-versa) for it's viewers; It makes it a hell of a lot easier for those of us using a different measurement option than the one being presented.

I do feel like we could get to the temperatures we needed with other means but it would undoubtedly be far far far more difficult. I doubt that a civilization would boom as quick as ours has without it but I don't think it is impossible.

Do we need to go to other planets? The answer is we do not. There is generally millions of light years between galaxies. We just need to sit and wait for terrestrials from advanced planets to move us along.

I have a total green invention, I can produce as much green electricity as I want.

I'm always in awe, every time a new Astrum video comes out. Initially I craved for the talent these guys put in their creations; but recently, I found myself more and more entertained in how could they pick a different, entirely new subject, and do an amazing work in presenting it. I love their rythm and balance, the perfect equilibrium they reach in presenting the visuals while the narration goes on... Amazing job, love it.

About melting metal. You've forgotten about a thing called a "solar furnace". One that is located at South Table Mountain campus can create a temperature of 3000 degrees C. Granted, the next civilization would have to build such solar furnaces in the first place, and they probably won't be as effective as fossil fuel furnaces. But still, dealing with iron and other metal IS possible without fossil fuels.

I'm pretty sure that if there was a doomsday scenario that destroyed all books, then there are no survivors at all. If you can't save a book, you can't save a person.

It’s ok, regardless of global warming trends. In 50,000 years we will enter another ice age.

obtaining tin is quite hard due it's rareness and scattered locations. It's thought by some that it was because of this it was one of the main factor in the collapse of the bronze age.. Once one source of tin had dried up it put extra pressure on the remaining sites which quickly exhausted one mine after another. Even with modern techniques tin is still a rare commodity so unless we went straight to iron/steel we wouldn't get beyond pointed sticks with chipped stones to do any cutting etc.

I can just imagine what would be made first from iron - knives and swords. Fossil fuels are really stored solar energy. And plastics which potentially a huge source of energy are littering the planet. They could be burnt (to the further degradation of the environment) with no energy required to mine them (already above the ground in abundance). One irony in all of this is that had the population been restricted in the first place, those living could have enjoyed everything we have now but with a much lower consumption of the resources we currently use as if they were inexhaustible.

Loved the video, but should be called "Why we SHOULD stop using fossil fuels... we are running out of easily acessible sources. so after a masive catastrophy we will not have the capacity to reach what little fossil fuel is left. Garbage dumploads will become the new mining sites, where we search for plastics that are made of these fossil fuels to use as some sort of energy, i think. LOVED THE VIDEO

If and only if, we could figure a way to harness the unlimited and immense heat sitting just below the earth crust. But again, exploring deep into earth's mantle is harder than exploring away into space.

The fact that everything that we're surrounded by came from the ground is just insane. The phone that I'm typing this on literally came from the Earth.

The space is vast void. There’s a lot more out there to discover. Amazing video on this video. God bless you always.

I mean, we could always use mirrors to focus the sun and melt stuf right? And with copper and a few magnets we could do electrolisis to get hydrogen which can burn up to 3200 c right? It would be super dangerous and we would probably be limited to small sacale for some time, but once we get enought tools we coul expand

LFTRs generate very high heat which can be used directly for such refinement processes.

This video was amazing. I've been watching your videos for years but this was my favourite so far. Please continue making themed videos like this

All the steel and iron we've already made is still going to be there. If there were some sort of catastrophe there's no need to restart from scratch with material resources. The material resource might be more resilient then intellectual resources.

When we have finally assembled, in no ordinary way, for the moment will come, when we express ourselves most diligently, and escape our mortal forms and rise into Space.

People always say, "Food, Clothing, and Shelter", but that is OLD style thinking. You don't really need Clothing. Unless it is cold. MOST importantly, OVER ALL, you need WATER. So, it SHOULD be, "Water, Food, Shelter, and Clothing", in that order.

My view on fossil fuels has been to be thankful for the point they have gotten us to. However, we are also very technologically advanced now and capable of using other forms of energy that can be much more sustainable than fossil fuels. We are at a point now where we might be able to minimize fossil fuel consumption while continuing to innovate and improve!

We need to find a way to record everything we've learned, good and bad, in a durable form, that future civilizations could understand. Hopefully, they could do it better than we did.

Im guessing farming algea could be a feasible way of getting fuel oil if desperate, Really interesting and thought provoking video.

As the resources become harder to get, the cost will rapidly increase, thereby making other resource recovery methods more viable that aren't yet viable. e.g. Under the right conditions most plastics can be composted/digested into their base elements. More funding will go to R&D to find these new recovery methods, and then there is the results to be achieved by slowing down life and recognition of other developments.

Maybe there are alternative chemistries we havent discovered because fossil fuels are so cheap and widely available. For example, hydrogen can be used to smelt steel.

This scenario doesn't even take into account climate change and how much harder it will be to organize society as we leave the climate sweet spot we've benefitted from over the last few thousand years...

The reason we use so much steel is partly because we can make so much steel. However, not everything we use it for has to be steel or even exist at all for modern civilization to work.

Toward the end of the video, the commentator says, 'if we are ever to get to the stars again...' I would just like to point out that there is no 'again', we haven't got to the stars yet and probably never will, the stars are vast distances away and to even try to get to them is a tremendous waste of resources. (So far, we have only been to the moon. - a tiny distance away.) Great civilisations, capable of producing beautiful cities, amazing works of art, wonderful music, etc., have already been and gone without any of them even having electricity never mind spaceships, so, the answer to the question of whether another great civilisation could arise after the demise of our own, is almost certainly, yes.

7:26 A lack of concrete isn’t going to hinder a civilisation reboot. Look at the Greeks, Ancient Egyptians, the Mesoamerican civilisations, The Indus Civilisation, the Mesopotamians, etc. Cement was never used by these peoples but life seemed to go on perfectly well for them. The more pressing problem is finding a strong and resilient material for foundations in earthquake-prone regions. Or maybe not. Given the premiss in this video, the world population might have dwindled to the point where the remaining humans will have decided to just move to areas where earthquakes are exceptionally rare.

I'm pretty sure the amount of gas my kids generate could probably feed a space program while also feeding a small star. Don't get me wrong, I love my little gas clouds.

Wood distillation produces every chemical found in oil, coal and natural gas. The ratios are slightly different, but no show stoppers.

Fossil fuels are incredibly useful as feedstock for many industries (chemical) and we’d be foolish to stop using them for that…I don’t think anyone is actually saying we stop doing that. We do however need to stop *burning* it for electricity and transportation. Smelting iron, aluminum and other critical metals can all be done with electric blast furnaces using hydropower and nuclear (something you didn’t even neary a mention), in fact my nearby province of Quebec is a massive aluminum producer and uses nothing but Hydropower…same with Ontario which uses hydro and nuclear mainly.