alexey_denisov

I agree that this thought could be presented better. On the other hand it is the first time that I see an important long-term idea came to the top of Hacker News. (Not staying long though.)

The tragedy of Peak Oil movement is its inability to capture collective imagination. Engineering devoted to efficiency faces reduced returns on effort. Let us look at aviation, past certain limit you are restricted by physics and cannot make more efficient airplanes. These enineering efforts can buy civilisation some time for a search of an alternative. And it comes with a cost of putting productive engineering workforce away from searching long-term alternative.

All-in-all problem is far from being solved.

Let us imagine a world, that is powered by solar panels. The only source of energy that we have is electricity from solar panels. So it would be a world poered by electricity. How would you make vehicles? I mean you need to melt metal, produce concrete (for buildings) etc. You would need to power the whole infrastructure by electricity. It might be possible, but it is not easy, and its technological feasibility is not demonstrated.

As soon as you start to think about the whole cycle, it becomes clear that having electricity form solar panels is not enough.

Well, you need to try to look beyound economy. There are such concepts as Energy return on Investment, when you start to thi9nk in pure energy terms. Horisontal drilling is much more energetically expensive. So you lower your return from 20:1 from conventional oil, to 7:1 or something like that. After some threshhold you don't have enough spare energy to pay to doctors, teachers and computer programmers. And industrial civilisation starts to collapse. Read Odum for these concepts.

Well, I have Ph.D. in Physics, and what he says makes a lot of sense to me. And I did experiements and know that managing reality is much harder than thinking about it.

"Can easily replace" - you can easily become the president of the US, it is political problem, etc... It is better to rephrase it difeerently: "At the moment we cannot replace fossil fuels with nuclear energy, and we do not know if we ever will be able. Due to different economical and political problems." This would be more honest and would not conceal a valid pint of the author.

Seems that you don't understand the problem. I try to simplify it for you. Point out a single energy extraction working technology, that pays its cost. Aka: "constructing wind electricity generator using only energy outputs from this generator". (You can replace electricity generator with solar cell, algae, anything.)

It is interesting that idea of overshot and resource-limitations managed to get to the top og Hacker News. Though from reading comments another problem is clearly seen, it is difficult for believers in religion of Progress to objectively evaluate something that goes against their core beliefs. Main objection being - people will surely think of something working. Though they cannot point out a single human, who managed to propose a working plan of dealing with resource limitations. I do not even mention implementing it.

At the moment there is no technology, that would allow human civilisation move past current overshot predicament. Accept this fact. Before such technology is invented we are on the path to death.