Countdown to Intelligence

According to The Energy Store (emphasis added):

quote:

---

There are three major forms of fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas. ... The age they were formed is called the Carboniferous Period. ... The Carboniferous Period occurred from about 360 to 286 million years ago.

---

You can pitch this as a source. Oil and gas is found in formations ranging in age from the Cambrian (550 mya) to the Miocene(5.5mya).I don't know of any oil and gas deposits younger than Miocene, but they could surely exist given the right heat and burial history.During the Cambrian the CO2 concentration was about 7500ppm, it dropped to 200-350ppm during the ice ages of the Pennsylvanian and Permian (just like now), rose again to 1500-1700ppm by the Triassic, and has been doing a rather slow drop, with variations, since. Were these changes in CO2 over history caused by burning fossil fuels. I rather doubt it.For about 90% of the time from the Cambrian to now the Earth's average temperature was about 72 degrees F. It is presently 58 degrees F. It was warmer during the Halocene High 4000-7000 years ago.Did you know that previous to the last 40 years there were no vinyards in England. Used to be lots and rivaled the French industry, but the last one closed in 1314. Then we got 700 years of cold weather until now. You know that if that cold spell didn't hit it is highly likely that North America would have been colonized by the Viking, but all of them died in Greenland and half died in Iceland.Fossil fuels are cheap because the earth does the work for you. Just like a placer gold deposit, the creek does your sorting. Because it's cheap it spurs industry and thereby inovation and the advancement of science.Remember people used to chop down trees for heat and hunt whales for lamp oil.Given the Earth's history it seems unlikely that technologically advanced life forms would beat out the formation of fossil fuels.

There's a name for this. It's called the Little Ice Age

---

Disclaimer:

​

Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.

​

He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!

Well I don't follow you at all from you first post. Could you clarify please?

Interesting question. On earth, among human cultures, it was the West that intensively used fossil fuels as a cheap source of energy to drive industrialization and develop an economy based on the mass production of consumer goods. And this, in turn, led to incentives to develop ever cheaper methods of production (and newer consumer goods for the market) which has been the primary motivating factor for technological progress. So it is entirely possible that the level technological progress depends on the wide scale utilization of fossil fuels, and that the motivation for technological process will be tied to widescale environmental degradation (through the intensive use of resources and the production of wastes).On the other hand, even in our culture, the use of fossil fuels may be responsible, not for the amount of technological progress, but the pace at which the progress has been made. Gallileo and Newton were developing the notions of modern science at the very beginnings of industrialization, and the European powers were also beginning to explore the entire globe at this time as well. It is conceivable that steady technological advancement is possible even without the widespread use of fossil fuels.It would be slower, of course. The necessary research programs would be conducted on a much smaller scale in much fewer locations. Also, without the increase in economic production being the driving factor, the direction of research (and therefor of the progress) might be in a much different direction that what actually occurred on earth.One problem, though, is that we know very little about exopsychology. Who knows what might have ultimately guided a different intelligent species' culture on earth?

---

Q: If science doesn't know where this comes from, then couldn't it be God's doing?A: The only difference between that kind of thinking and the stereotype of the savage who thinks the Great White Hunter is a God because he doesn't know how the hunter's cigarette lighter works is that the savage has an excuse for his ignorance. -- jhuger

All I can do is to try repeating the argument.Before we have land life of any size it must have some food source.
That means plants or something similar - a likely source of fossil fuels.
From that beginning it will likely take longer for intelligence to evolve than for fossil fuels to form.
Therefore intelligent land life will likely have access to fossil fuels.How you can get from that argument to the idea that fossil fuels are somehow necessary to the evolution of intelligence is beyond me.

Well, you said as much! Ommit this bit and I see where you are comming from.Edited by Larni, : No reason given.

But I didn't. Even taken out of context, the sentence you quote did not imply a direct causal relationship. Read in context as the conclusion of the argument (it starts with "So..." to show that it IS the conclusion of the argument) it clearly does NOT claim any casual relationship.Really this is the stuff of quote mining and strawmen. You have to take my statement out of context for your reading to even be a possible reading. Even then the intended reading is still viable and makes more sense. So why do it ? Why insist that I said something I clearly did not ?

You CANNOT do the things with rocks, wood, etc., that you can do with metals. Metals have specific properties, especially those relating to how they TRANSMIT ELECTRICITY, which, we should all just admit now is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for a civilization to become advanced enough to send/receive radio transmissions. Afterall, radio transmissions are made from alternating EM waves made with an electric current flowing in a specific manner back and forth through a piece of metal.Now, you say there are other alternatives. Can you name a few?Jon

Are you implying I'm say what I said simply to piss you off?