If we had never found any fossil fuels on Earth whatsoever, what would we be using for transport now? I appreciate that almost everything we as a race have done in the last few centuries would probably have been greatly affected too, but the group's about cars :)
Si
we'd all be driving Volvo's ;o)
Feet and / or any animals we hadn't driven to extinction
Fossil fuels come from long dead vegetation, and without vegetation to be deaded we'd be dead. Or rather never born.
Diesel engine vehicles.
The original Diesel engine was designed to run on Vegetable Oil.
Wood burning steam engines. Filling stations would offer a range of different timbers depending whether you wanted slow burning economy (maximum mpl) for your Foden MPV or a fast burning acceleration boost for your Aveling & Porter GTR EVO-8. The plod would run stop checks to prosecute anyone running on home-sawn MDF without paying duty.
Hang on - could we have built the steam engines without fossil fuels, does wood burn hot enough to get the metal from the ore? You are also assuming we have trees so we would have to be pretty thick not to work out that the coal we found at the surface burns hotter than wood so I doubt if we would be bright enough even to realise we could ride horses let alone build steam engines :-)
Might get me in trouble on here, but I'll bet we'd use bicycles a lot more, at least for shorter journeys....
Charcoal has been used in blast furnaces since about 2000 years ago.
And anyway, you could build a steam engine from stone and wood.
Andrew
With no fossil fuels, would we be able to mass produce bicycles?
David Taylor ( snipped-for-privacy@yadt.co.uk) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :
Certainly not in their current form.
That was my point really. Disregarding the fact that we'd have probably died out anyway without fossil fuels, I was wondering if we'd have come up with "something else" that may still be undiscovered/unused because we've never needed it? Necessity being the doodah of wotsit and all that.
Si
"Mungo \"Two Sheds\" Toadfoot" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@pipex.net:
We'd be driving cars made from compressed Pot Noodle from those Welsh mines, isn't it.
Dr. Diesel's first engine ran on coal dust.
Why would we have died out without fossil fuels? We did OK without them and the planet would probably have been in a much better state simply because there would have been far less humans on it to bugger it up.
We wouldn't exist without fossil fuel.
It comes from decayed vegetation. If there was no vegetation to decay there'd be no animals as we know them and certainly no human race.
That's making the assumption that we had found the fossil fuel. The human race used un-fossilised fuel before it found any of the other stuff. Like living trees or peat from bogs.
All men are not Socrates - the existence of vegetation doesn't necessarily mean the existence of fossil fuel. That requires other more geological factors.
cheers, clive
Peat is just fossilised fuel a little bit further down the chain.
I don't think it makes a difference if man hadn't 'found' it. Although it would be difficult not to since crude oil comes to the surface in some places, and coal gets washed ashore.
But without the existence of vegetation long before 'animals' existed, they wouldn't, as it were.
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