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But we also rely on a range of different industrial materials, and in most cases, high temperatures are required to transform the stuff we dig out of the ground or harvest from the landscape into something useful.

In everyday life, their most visible use is the petrol or diesel pumped into the vehicles that fill our roads, and the coal and natural gas which fire the power stations that electrify our modern lives. It’s easy to underestimate our current dependence on fossil fuels. So, would a society starting over on a planet stripped of its fossil fuel deposits have the chance to progress through its own Industrial Revolution? Or to phrase it another way, what might have happened if, for whatever reason, the Earth had never acquired its extensive underground deposits of coal and oil in the first place? Would our progress necessarily have halted in the 18th century, in a pre-industrial state? Those, by the way, are distinct roles: even if we could somehow do without fossil fuels now (which we can’t, quite), it’s a different question whether we could have got to where we are without ever having had them. Fossil fuels are central to the organisation of modern industrial society, just as they were central to its development. Today, we have already consumed the most easily drainable crude oil and, particularly in Britain, much of the shallowest, most readily mined deposits of coal. Let’s make the basis of this thought experiment a little more specific. But here’s the question: how far could such a society rebuild? Is there any chance, for instance, that a post-apocalyptic society could reboot a technological civilisation?

They begin the agonising process of rebuilding their technological base from scratch. Sooner or later, peace and order emerge again, just as they have time and again through history. The post-apocalyptic survivors find themselves in a devastated world of decaying, deserted cities and roving gangs of bandits looting and taking by force.īad as things sound, that’s not the end for humanity.

The vast majority of the human race perishes. There’s a global catastrophe: a pandemic virus, an asteroid strike, or perhaps a nuclear holocaust. Imagine that the world as we know it ends tomorrow.