Development of a civilization on a young world

Development of a civilization on a young world

Our civilization is on a relatively old world, a world which has gone through many epochs, and many events. We forget how much of our world is based on the fact that it is fairly old. This oldness is important for many different reasons. The first and most important is that our civilization feeds on fossil fuels and various metals; however at one period in our planet’s history there was not quite as much of these as they are now.  There had not passed enough time for the fossil fuels to accumulate to the point where we could use them with a relatively high frequency. This is also true with regard to various metals and also various minerals. All of these things are the result of millions of years of geological action, and climatic shifts, all producing the fossil fuels, the salty oceans, and the metals.  Most just shrug their shoulders and accept all of it as a fact of our current world. But it is useful to think of a what if, a what if where our civilization had to develop in a much younger world, or alternatively a alien civilization. In this world there are no coal deposits, no oil, no metals produced through millions of years of action, and no abundance of other materials. If our species could survive at all on this world, it certainly would not have been able to develop a civilization such as our current one. In this world the only source of high energy fuel is perhaps wood (if it evolved yet), and since that is only available in certain quantities the energy required to be create a civilization would not likely be made.

This would also be a problem if our civilization tries to colonize another  younger world, same problem, even if  it is as habitable as our own Earth,  you  can see it requires also the combination materials and fuels which our own has, and this likely means that colonizing a world would have to take into account its relative age. It has to be at not just the right habitability, but also the right time in the habitability or would likely be of little use to our high tech civilization.

Given that age is likely a determinate for use in our civilization, older worlds than Earth’s might be useful, but bear in mind this offers a different set of problems.  Older worlds will likely have their own sets of life on them, perhaps intelligence have consumed their own  resources, meaning that the ecology is destroyed, and materials that our civilization needs to survive would likely be rare as well. In this scenario wood would likely also is the only high energy fuel available. Hypothetically though, without a civilization it is the older worlds that would contain the most resources, and thus be most useful to colonize. But and there is a caveat, older worlds would also have the problem of having a limited lifetime of habitability, and given the trends of increased solar activity perhaps a much simpler ecology.