A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 19

This is the sixth year in a row I’ve run this series in April. And this is a first: A guest post for the Story Idea series, courtesy of Will King!

Today’s story: Could civilization reboot without fossil fuels.

The article examines the question: if civilization as we know it came to an end, are there enough resources left in the world to reboot humanity?

Imagine that the world as we know it ends tomorrow. There’s a global catastrophe: a pandemic virus, an asteroid strike, or perhaps a nuclear holocaust. The vast majority of the human race perishes. Our civilisation collapses. The post-apocalyptic survivors find themselves in a devastated world of decaying, deserted cities and roving gangs of bandits looting and taking by force.

Bad as things sound, that’s not the end for humanity. We bounce back. Sooner or later, peace and order emerge again, just as they have time and again through history. Stable communities take shape. They begin the agonising process of rebuilding their technological base from scratch. 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?

This got me thinking about the post-apocalyptic genre, which has spawned a lot of movies, everything from The Last Man on Earth/Omega Man/I Am Legend to On The Beach and Damnation Alley. But they are often focus on the immediate aftermath of the devastation and on survival.

This article, however, imagines needs and possibilities well past that point, once humanity has gotten to its feet again. There have been films that examined this era. The Hunger Games exists in a rebuilt future after the end of civilization, and posits that technology fully recovered. The original Planet of the Apes also assumed the world recovered, just with apes instead of humans, but technology stalled at a pre-industrialized stage.

The article proposes that fossil fuels would be the limiting factor because the reserves we can get to now require a great deal of technology to harvest. If technology were obliterated and humanity had to reboot, we might not be able to use the same development timeline which relied heavily on fossil fuels to make other innovations possible.

The real need, according to the article, is for heat, which is what fossil fuels provide (coal, natural gas, oil). White heat. The temperatures needed to melt steel and produce cement and pure silicon are not something you can do over a bonfire. However, one possibility is the use of charcoal. The article points out how Brazil has built their steel industry around sustainable charcoal production.

These particular paragraphs caught my interest:

In a temperate climate such as the UK’s, an acre of broadleaf trees produces about four to five tonnes of biomass fuel every year. If you cultivated fast-growing kinds such as willow or miscanthus grass, you could quadruple that. The trick to maximising timber production is to employ coppicing — cultivating trees such as ash or willow that resprout from their own stump, becoming ready for harvest again in five to 15 years. This way you can ensure a sustained supply of timber and not face an energy crisis once you’ve deforested your surroundings.

But here’s the thing: coppicing was already a well-developed technique in pre-industrial Britain. It couldn’t meet all of the energy requirements of the burgeoning society. The central problem is that woodland, even when it is well-managed, competes with other land uses, principally agriculture. The double-whammy of development is that, as a society’s population grows, it requires more farmland to provide enough food and also greater timber production for energy. The two needs compete for largely the same land areas.

So, suppose civilization is in need of heat-producing wood, but is limited to a finite tillable area (perhaps surrounded by radiation or other factors that prevent widespread planting). But, people also need food. One can imagine a situation similar to what happened in the American west in the competition between cattle ranchers and sheep ranchers as they tried to graze their respective herds and got into battles over land use. What might happen between two sets of farmers: one dead set on producing enough food to keep people alive while another group needs the heat-producing capacity of trees and grasses to get mankind back to previous tech capabilities? There might be a story of two farmers as they plot and scheme to get control of a precious plot of land, each motivated by the best of intentions for the future of humanity.

And what might a skilled producer of charcoal be able to command as his or her price for services?

Without the manpower or skills to use them as intended, what might become of offshore oil derricks and gigantic cargo ships? Floating cities a la Waterworld?

It seems that there’s a lot of fertile story space in the era long past the collapse of civilization to imagine what the rebooted world looks like. What technologies could we repurpose, what would be lost, and what new ideas might come to the forefront if fossil fuels hadn’t supplanted them in the first place?

This is real sci-fi, post-apocalyptic stuff, really push it out. Depending on how lo-fi the society is, that could help push down the budget.

Thanks, Will, for that set-up. What would you do with this?

Each day this month, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Gender bend, genre bend, what if. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments (hit Reply to join the conversation). And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.

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