Not oil per se but and equally energy dense and versatile substance.
I just watched a fascinating program about oil. I had no idea it and it’s byproducts are so prevalent in our society. It literally touches almost every aspect of our life. I remember Sagan saying something to the effect that any signals we would get from aliens in space would come from a civilization that had developed metal technology as it’s needed for radio transmissions.
We, as a species, developed metal technology quite a while ago and it sure helped our development quite a bit but we would never have made it to the moon on steam or coal power. I’m questioning if we could have built nuclear reactors without oil and its spinoff materials. Or computers and microchips.
Supposed the earth had developed in such a way that all of the planet’s oil was so deep we would never have thought of drilling for it (because we did not know of its existence), wouldn’t we still be putting around in steam-powered cars?
So if aliens exist - and are much more intelligent than us - wouldn’t they still need oil or an equivalent to reach our planet?
ETA: To be more clear, wouldn’t they need an oil type energy substance as an interim to building more advanced energy systems; nuclear, warp drives, etc?
You can compress certain things, but there’s a point where you just can’t carry enough fuel for the energy required to move a mass from point A to point B. As the mass increases, the mass of the energy increases, which means more energy, which means more mass, etc. etc. etc.
For interstellar distances, the fuel would have to have a huge energy to mass ratio, and very likely oil isn’t going to have it.
I think perhaps the OP isn’t just suggesting its use as a fuel to travel space, but its use as a versatile resource and stepping stone to space. Maybe the OP is wondering more if an alien race would need to develop some sort of organic chemistry to get things like plastics and such.
Well, to get oil you need life, and I really doubt an alien race with spaceships would pin their survival on finding a planet who had plant/animal remains a million of years ago every few light years.
It could be possible that they have interstellar “gas stations,” but it seems to be a tremendous waste of resources as well, since your delivery system would probably use as much or more of the fuel in transit just to deliver it.
In regards to the use of plastic, I would go by the old axiom: More advanced technology, to the less advanced civilization, would appear to be magic. I doubt they use plastic, but what they do use is something we’ve probably never thought of.
Well if there’s no oil theres still coal, which can serve perfectly well to power an industrial civilization. It’s not too hard to imagine going from coal/steam to Nuclear skipping oil/petrol. Plastics can also be made from coal byproducts:
Now without coal or oil then thats another matter, but my WAG is that technology using lifeforms can only evolve after long enough periods that some kind of fossilized “plant analog organism” will be lying around.
More interesting question, if theres a total collapse and loss of knowledge on earth (say an asteroid strike), can a resurgent civilization in 2000 years get back to current levels now that all the easily accessible surface oil and coal is already gone?
Yes that’s it exactly. To build an inter-stellar space craft like a nuclear pulse propulsion, fusion rocket, interstellar ramjets, magnetic sail, antimatter rocket or even a craft the is propelled by detonating nuclear bombs behind it seems like it, it would first require organic chemistry to get things like plastics that would be needed to build these sophisticated machines (and the computers that operate them). Regardless of how advanced or intelligent a civilization is, without oil it seems they would be unable ever leave their planet.
This is what triggered my question in my mind. To me it seems like a BIG step. Without oil would we have had the resources to build a nuclear facility? I’m not that learned about this subject but my WAG is that we could not have because we wouldn’t have been able make all the interim steps/discoveries.
Before the turn of the 20th century, I don’t think oil products where used for much energy needs but lighting and much of that was whale oil not fossil oil. So the question seems to be could you get from say 1900 technology to nuclear power without oil. I’d say definitely yes if you had coal and probably yes without coal assuming you had something like renewable wood supplies. It might have taken longer, but I don’t doubt it could have been done. What oil products give you is easy of transport since their energy density is high. I’d think the civilization would be much more dependent on what we think of as mass transportation rather than individual transport (cars).
I think a much bigger question is even given nuclear power is interstellar travel feasible or worthwhile.
I don’t see the interrelationship between oil and nuclear. Certainly a reactor is a costly investment, with bricks, mortar, steel and other raw components. But these inputs could have been manufactured in an oilless society using steam and water power, for example. I don’t think that building a nuclear reactor in such a world would be that difficult.
Oil certainly isn’t that useful interstellarly (new word!)
And as for it being essential for plastics and therefore more advanced machinery, moulding etc…you can make plastics without oil. At the moment such plastics don’t cover the range of properties that petroleum-based plastics do, and they aren’t as cost-effective.
But nonetheless, it’s not too much of a stretch to suppose an alien civilisation would find an acceptable way to synthesize plastics. Which could eventually even surpass our ability to synthesize such materials, once their nanotech and genetic engineering gather pace.
Maybe. Not in the 20th century, for sure. But who knows what we might have come up with in another thousand years, if we hadn’t been given the bonanza of oil?
I don’t think there’s anything fundamental about what oil did for us–it gave us a huge jump start, allowed us to make what might have been many centuries of tech progress in just the past one and a half.
I’m not convinced that that kind of jump start is actually a good thing for our long-term interstellar prospects. Maybe taking millennia to develop very low-energy solutions actually works out better. As yet, we don’t have a single data point (an interstellar civilization, with or without an oil-like energy source on its home planet) on either side.
Given that in Asimov’s Foundation stories, humans achieved interstellar colonization through combustion engines, his “calculations” should be taken with a grain of salt.
We had electric cars 100 years ago. We didn’t pursue advanced battery and storage capability because the gas engine was so much cheaper for the power requirements. But we certainly would have if oil hadn’t been an alternative.
Electric power was always side-by-side with the internal combustion engine in our 20th century. Very little oil is used to run power plants. Even if coal weren’t available, then the variety of wind, solar, tidal, geothermal and other sources would have been exploited, just as there are starting to be now. Imagine if we had spent the last 100 years making them better. And that’s assuming no easy access to uranium for nuclear power.
Electricity is necessary for our civilization. Oil isn’t. It’s merely cheap and convenient.
You make the mistake of assuming Asimov’s body of work consisted of loopy space opera. He also wrote many nonfiction articles about science and chemistry (in which he held a Ph. D.) that presented well-reasoned and well-supported arguments. He even mentions his own Foundation series during his essay about the realities of potential interstellar travel, with a touch of disappointment that the laws of physics were firmly against it.
Asimov’s work did consist of loopy space opera. Any work about interstellar federations of civilizations is loopy space opera. But without lots of aliens you lose most of science fiction, especially the sf of that era. So you have aliens, even though there is no way to justify them. (And time travel and all the other fun stuff that sf deals with.)
Fiction is not nonfiction. Science fiction is organized suspended disbelief. You either accept it even though you know better or you toss it all out. But 99% of it is scientifically loopy, even the supposedly “good” stuff. (And 99.9% is sociological loopy.)
I suggest you read his wiki page. Although Asimov’s early writing career is marked by known- or suspected-impossible sci-fi, he’d largely tapered off by 1958, spending more of his time (and indeed the last 30+ years of his life) writing nonfiction and more realistic fiction.
