The Industrial Revolution was largely powered by coal . Wood and charcoal were used as fuel, and to smelt iron. But even before then, in the 16th Century, wood was already becoming scarce in Britain when the population was still under 10 million. Trees are slow to replace and take up a lot of land area. Wood also has only half the energy density of coal, so you need to burn more of it. Political power probably would have shifted towards Russia, Canada and South America with their huge areas of forested land. Without coal and oil, early chemists would have faced the much more challenging proposition of synthesising long-chain hydrocarbons from ethanol or vegetable oil. Plastics and synthetic rubber would not be developed until much later and would probably have been too expensive to use for toys and disposable packaging. Worse, natural gas is an essential ingredient for the production of ammonia fertilisers . Without them, the world would need four times as much agricultural land to...
There is no way to know what’s outside of the simulation. This isn’t just unknown, in the way that the existence of life after death, or parallel universes , is unknown; it is an unanswerable question. Let’s suppose that we are in a computer simulation, either created by a higher intelligence or humans in the future. Now imagine that through some bug left in the code, we are accidentally able to step beyond the constraints of our programming and ‘see’ the simulation’s raw scaffolding, like Neo in The Matrix . How would you be able to decide whether this lay outside the simulation, or was still part of it – as a joke or an Easter egg, put there by programmers? Could you even definitively say that the columns of ones and zeros scrolling past your eyes proved that reality was a simulation at all? Maybe that’s just what the Universe is made of, once you zoom all the way in past the atoms and quarks . And even if you were able to unplug yourself a...
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