responding to this super late but two quick things.
But windmills, solar panels, nuclear reactors etc need constant maintenance. Within a couple of generations they’d probably all have stopped functioning at a useful level
Does anyone have incentives to make long-lasting renewable resources? Curious about what would happen if a significant portion of energy tech switched from trying to optimize efficiency to lifespan (my intuition here is that there isn’t much incentive to make long-lasting stuff). Seems like this could be low-hanging fruit and change the decay paradigm—of course, possible this has been extensively looked at and I’m out of my depth.
It doesn’t seem realistic to let them develop the economy to settle other planets without getting any harmful tech, though. We don’t have good enough rocket technology to send much mass other planets yet, so the future civilisations would have to leapfrog our current capabilities without getting any time to develop eg biotech on the way. And Robert Zubrin, the main voice for Mars colonisation strategies before Elon Musk, thinks it would be almost impossible to set up a permanent Mars base without nuclear technology, so you’d need to develop nuclear energy without getting nuclear weaponry.
I guess I wouldn’t see this as a binary. Can we set up a civilization that will get to space before creating nukes, via well-placed knowledge about spaceships that conveniently don’t include stuff about weapons? probably not, but it’s not a binary. We could in theory push in this direction to reduce the time of perils length or magnitude.
and regarding the phosphorus stuff, I’ve unfortunately exposed my knowledge of the hard sciences.
responding to this super late but two quick things.
Does anyone have incentives to make long-lasting renewable resources? Curious about what would happen if a significant portion of energy tech switched from trying to optimize efficiency to lifespan (my intuition here is that there isn’t much incentive to make long-lasting stuff). Seems like this could be low-hanging fruit and change the decay paradigm—of course, possible this has been extensively looked at and I’m out of my depth.
I guess I wouldn’t see this as a binary. Can we set up a civilization that will get to space before creating nukes, via well-placed knowledge about spaceships that conveniently don’t include stuff about weapons? probably not, but it’s not a binary. We could in theory push in this direction to reduce the time of perils length or magnitude.
and regarding the phosphorus stuff, I’ve unfortunately exposed my knowledge of the hard sciences.