Energy is a foundation of material progress
Progress is not just about bleeding-edge innovation. The biggest benefits come from some of the most mundane technologies.
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Food & Energy
As Vaclav Smil has pointed out in his very impressive works on the subject, energy is critical to survival and innovation. The most important type of energy for animals is food. Food is essentially a form of energy that animals can consume to convert into useful energy to perform a behavior. The energy acquired from food is then devoted to behaviors that promote survival and reproduction.
Ongoing consumption of energy enables biological organisms to overcome the Second Law of Thermodynamics; they effectively create order from chaos (thus reversing what scientists call “entropy”). As soon as a biological organism loses the ability to consume energy and transform it to a useful form, it dies. The order of life is transformed back into the chaos of the rest of the universe.
For biological organisms, the ultimate source of energy is the sun. The sun fuses hydrogen into helium and releases huge amounts of solar energy. A small portion of that solar energy reaches Earth. Plants use the process of photosynthesis to consume that energy, then combine it with carbon dioxide and water to create sugars. Sugar enables plants to survive, grow and reproduce. Herbivores consume plants and use the energy to survive, grow and reproduce. Carnivores in turn consume the herbivores to fuel their survival and reproduction.
Human societies also rely on large amounts of energy to survive and reproduce. Just as with other biological organisms, the ultimate source of that energy is the sun. Energy in the form of food is the most important; without food, survival and reproduction are impossible. As we will later see, the quest to produce, prepare and consume food has been the dominant struggle in human history.
But humans have been able to innovate technologies that have enabled them to use other forms of energy: animal power, power from burning wood, windpower and waterpower. These additional energy sources have enabled humans to use far greater amounts of energy than any other species. Humans have used this additional energy to create far more complex technologies than would otherwise have been possible. In doing so, they have been able to solve problems far beyond the scope of any other animal.
The greater the technological base of a society, the larger the amounts of energy that the society needs to consume. As a society innovates new technologies, it sometimes identifies more efficient energy sources that can then be combined with natural materials to make useful technologies. These new energy sources effectively increase the rate of innovation.
Historically, by far the most important non-food energy source over the last two centuries has been fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have the critical advantage of being far denser (i.e. they have far more energy per unit of mass) than other energy sources used by humans. Energy density is critical to progress, as each additional unit of energy enables humans to innovate more specialized and complex technologies, skills and social organizations.
The following is an excerpt from my book From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement. You can purchase discounted copies of my book at my website, or pay full prize at Amazon.
Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
See also my other posts on Energy:
Energy and the Five Keys to Progress
Energy transfer also plays an important role in explaining why the Five Keys to Progress are so important to creating the necessary precondition for progress. Food, energy that humans are able to consume, is critical to the first key (an effective food production and distribution system). Without enough energy in the form of food, a society simply cannot grow very complex or create progress.
Fossil fuels, the fifth key, is also closely related to the concept of energy. Fossil fuels enable humans to capture the solar energy stored hundreds of millions of years ago and consume it today. This injects vast amounts of energy into society, making increasing complexity possible.
The other three keys, while not directly related to energy, can be understood as a form of energy transfer. Societies can grow complex and progress can evolve when the energy captured in the food surplus gets distributed to free people living in cities rather than elites bent on military conquest and conspicuous consumption. Export industries also transfer money and energy produced elsewhere and concentrate it in cities where it can be used most productively by society.
The above is an excerpt from my book From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement. You can purchase discounted copies of my book at my website, or pay full prize at Amazon.
Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
See also my other posts on Energy:
What I think amazes me most about fossil fuels is that they are highly dense, but also impure, forms of sunlight....solar energy.
Life on Earth is Carbon-based, which itself is a natural probabilistic consequence of the characteristics of Carbon itself. Compared with the rest of the Periodic Table, Carbon readily bonds with itself and other elements, allowing the formation of complex molecules including DNA and proteins. This is because Carbon has 4 valance electrons and is uniquely able to form strong, yet pliable bonds with other elements; perfect for life which must maintain enough structure to counter entropy, but be adaptable enough to evolve, grow, and change.
Over billions of years, Carbon-based life has been absorbing energy from the nuclear activity of the Sun, either directly from sunlight, or indirectly by consuming plants or animals that had previously stored this energy. When these life forms died, they took that chemically-stored energy with them to the grave. Over millions of years, deposits of deceased life became covered with silt, compressed, and heated. This formed highly dense deposits of energy that we now call “fossil fuels.”