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Is Rare Coal/Oil or Rare Fossil Fuels in general a good candidate for a Great Filter? Intelligent and sapient life needs fossil fuels to kickstart an Industrial Revolution, so without them there is no space colonization. I’m not sure if there are any paths to industrialization that don’t begin with burning energy-packed fossil fuels.
Also if an apocalypse event destroys human civilization or the human race, all the easily available coal that existed on Earth in the 1500s won’t be there for the next go around. Humanity’s remnants and their descendants might never be able to access the coal that’s available on the planet today, so they can’t industrialize again.
A chemical industry creating high value products can use wood or whatever as a starting material just fine. So in this world, plastic is slightly more expensive, and drugs/dyes etc are basically unchanged in price.
Unfortunately that's not the case. The 'free' carbon chains you fraction off in bulk during refining would be exponentially more expensive and rarer if you tried to get them from wood.
My bad. I see we were having two different conversations.
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Energy and availability.
Oil just sits there in massive deposits and can be continually pumped for years on end. Forests take a long time to grow and converting, say, cellulose into ethylene requires high pressure vessels, extreme temperatures and very pure catalysts.
All of which has to be fuelled by wood.
You don't just stumble across this kind of science or Industrial base without being extremely lucky or being taught by an outside source or having a thousand year science loving empire.
I'm not saying anything about this is impossible but it's far far more difficult than it is commonly assumed.