Overview:

As with materials, we can do nothing without energy. And, as with materials, we’ve made vast changes in our energy supply in the last couple of centuries. This chapter follows on from the previous one, shifting from materials to energy. It describes the swarm effects of the fourth stage of our industrial revolution: our mastery of hydrocarbons and electromagnetism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also looks at our current energy supplies. It continues the last chapter’s discussion of complex system behaviors, using them to argue that current worries about us running out of either materials or energy anytime soon are overrated. It also sketches some possibilities for our future energy supply.

Trigger Effect

On Saturday December 6th, 1884, the United States crowned its Washington Monument with a 100-ounce aluminum pyramid. A month before, that pyramid had been on display in Tiffany’s jewelry store in New York, which is odd because aluminum is the most abundant metal on earth. Yet at the time, it cost $16 a pound—the price of silver. Laborers in the United States at the time got about 10 cents (before taxes) an hour. Today, most laborers there get at least $6 (before taxes) an hour. So today aluminum could easily cost around $1,000 a pound. Instead, it costs about a dollar a pound. Our species also has about 100,000 times more of it than we did in 1884. Prices of most of our other mineral resources have similarly collapsed, leaving mostly only the cost of the energy we need to extract them. Today, over 95 percent of aluminum’s remaining small cost is due to energy.

In aluminum’s case, most of that energy is hydroelectric, but our most useful form of energy today comes from hydrocarbons—molecules made mostly of hydrogen and carbon—that we dig out of the earth as oil, coal, or natural gas. Many things that make famine, slavery, disease, want, and discomfort less common today than in 1884 are based on hydrocarbons.

We started using hydrocarbons a long way back though. Iraqis used bitumen to water-proof their grain bins 7,500 years ago. Noah apparently used it to caulk his ark too. So did Gilgamesh some time before. But our hydrocarbon use started exploding only in the late nineteenth century. That’s when we developed, through our usual bumbling, practical versions of both the internal combustion engine and the dynamo.

With them, those of us who could afford it then replaced our usual animal fats with petroleum (Latin for ‘rock oil’). Instead of killing whales to light lamps (and make corsets) we started drilling for oil, then gas. We also replaced our older lubricants and gave our vehicles new power. We largely replaced our wood-, wind-, and waterpower with coal. Then we invented machines that burned light hydrocarbons for power, heat, and motion. To coal we thus added gasoline, diesel oil, and natural gas, and in transport we replaced the external combustion of the steam engine with the internal combustion engine. Today, few of our vehicles are independent of hydrocarbons for power—chemical rockets, plus nuclear spacecraft, submarines, and aircraft carriers, are about all. Even bicycles depend on hydrocarbons, because cheap hydrocarbons make much of today’s cheap food possible.

Cheap coal, oil, and gas then triggered a fourth stage of industrialization, following on from the steam engine, the railroad, and mass production. As with those three earlier stages, that then had many effects. We freed our bulk transport from horses and oxen and then even rails. Trade, and the global division of labor it induces, sped up. We began to cultivate areas that we couldn’t before, and we did so with new hydrocarbon-fueled machines, like tractors. We used cheap coal to make energy in coal-fired power plants and the price of energy fell like a stone down an empty well. We used some of that cheap energy to make cheap aluminum, which drove down the price of copper and tin. We also used cheap energy to make better alloys, particularly high-tensility steel. Then we used those alloys to build cheap steel ships and railroads and skyscrapers. Gasoline and diesel oil then powered everything from cars to trucks to jets to oil tankers.

Our new hydrocarbons also changed our food, clothes, shelters, and drugs. With them we made cheap fertilizers and synthetics. Food and cloth prices fell. Synthetics then drove down the price of natural fibers, like cotton, wool, flax, and jute. Cotton farmers switched to wheat. Sheep farmers turned to cattle. Flax farmers moved to soybean. Jute farmers shifted to rice. Also, with the new fertilizers, farmers saw their crop and livestock yields doubling or tripling every few years. Soon, many of us had more food than we could eat, and more clothes than we could wear. We also had a new material made from hydrocarbons—plastics. At first, we molded it to look like old products (leather, wood, earthenware, stone, metal), but then we got used to it. We started making new things not possible before: nylons, respirators, scuba gear, surgical gloves, clingwrap, magnetic tapes, computers, data discs. While analyzing hydrocarbons we also stumbled over our first synthetic dyes. From that we learned enough to start making drugs on an industrial scale. Out of that came, to name just a few, aspirin, heroin (originally used to treat tuberculosis, it was also used for coughs), TNT, saccharin, and antibiotics. It was a chemical bonanza.

Compared to our usual famine cycle, our new hydrocarbon supply led to a huge windfall for our species. It gave us a huge breathing space, akin to a thousand years of summer compressed into about a century. In the United States, corn yields went up nearly 800 percent in a century. In the same country, over the last half century all harvests at least doubled with no increase in land and a two-thirds drop in the number of farmers. Worldwide, our numbers exploded. From 1930 to 1974, we jumped from two to four billion. Our oil use doubled every ten years from 1900 to 1973. It slowed after oil price spikes in the 1970s, but is now again doubling every ten years. Today, oil is the main ingredient, in dollar terms, in our food. But as with aluminum, that’s just another way of saying that we’ve now learned so much that we’ve reduced all our other costs and now mostly all we’re left with is energy costs.

The autocatalytic, synergetic, and stigmergic effects of cheap coal, oil, and gas rumbled on and on through our swarm. Those of our countries that achieved reaction network closure gained while many others lost. For example, Bangladesh used to export a lot of jute. Today, few of us want it. Plastic fibers do a better job, and with them we can make more things than just sacks, mats, and twine. On the other hand, Japan, like Bangladesh, has few natural resources. It also has fewer people (127 versus 150 million). Yet today it’s 20 times richer than Bangladesh. A net exporter of many costly goods, it has phase changed out of farming and achieved industrial closure. Bangladesh still hasn’t. But differences exist even among our operationally closed countries. For instance, both Singapore and New Zealand have about 4.5 million people. Singapore is 363 times smaller, yet it’s twice as rich. New Zealand sells the world sheep. Singapore sells the world electronics.

All those trigger effects have led to worries in our rich world of oil running out. Global trade, and global finance, so runs the argument, would largely end. Planes would sprawl on the ground, like poisoned birds. Factories would close. Mechanized farming would die. Schools would close. Cities would empty. Many corporations would collapse. So would many governments, as we squabble over the remaining trickle of oil. We’d all starve as fuel, then food, prices skyrocket. We must like the shivers that such predictions give us, because we make so many of them. Such tales may never die—they’re too much fun—but anyone who remembers chem class knows that they make little sense. One complex hydrocarbon is much like another. Often we can convert one into another. Cheap oil will one day run out, yes, but our planet has huge reserves of coal and natural gas. That’s enough for centuries of use at current levels. We also have a couple of decades to find new oil, make our present sources more efficient, or extract oil from more expensive sources, like tar sands. We can also make oil from coal. By 1943, wartime Germany, denied much of its normal oil supply, made 56 percent of its oil that way. So while crude oil is surely running out, oil itself isn’t going away anytime soon.

Of course, as long as crude oil remains relatively cheap, we shan’t bother with any of that. For example, making oil costs more than simply finding it. Plus making it can be messy. Also, making oil makes zero sense as a source of energy. It takes more energy to make oil than we would get out of the resulting oil. But it does make sense as a source of transport fuel, which is our biggest short-term problem. In the worst case that’ll do until we can shift to new fuel sources. Because of our huge investment in oil infrastructure, we’ll only shift away from oil after we’ve exhausted all possible alternatives and the price of oil rises a lot.

In any case, energy itself can’t ever be our real problem. Fast-breeder nuclear reactors, for instance, are costly. They can cause waste disposal problems, particularly with spent fuel. They can also create political problems, like enriched weapons-grade uranium. But they also make plutonium. So we’ll have energy in the future, but for a while it may not be cheap. Or if it’s cheap, it may not be clean. Or if it’s clean, it may not be portable. If so, our use of cars may drop for a time, but rail and bus travel will pick up some of the slack. We may even go back to blimps. We’ll conserve a bit more than we do now, and we’ll change how we organize and transport ourselves. We’ll also invest more in high-bandwidth communications to cut down on travel. And we’ll spend more on trying to make our food supply less linked to oil. There’s no reason an electrically powered food-machine isn’t sometime in our future.

It’s clear that oil worries us. It’s not clear why. For example, in our rich world today many of us describe our reliance on oil as an ‘addiction.’ What? While we’re at it, why not add that we’re addicted to food too? It’s also an odd word choice because were we to lose oil abruptly we wouldn’t all suffer the same withdrawal symptoms. For instance, the United States has vast distances to cover, a quarter-million planes, and a quarter-billion cars, trucks, and buses. It can’t go back to bullocks as quickly as Bangladesh could. However, in the event of an oil shock, Bangladesh would suffer far more than the food-rich United States. Its imported food prices would rise, and with them, every other price as well. At the same time, its export earnings would plumment as demand from the rich nations fell. Further, the United States, with a far larger toolbase, could shift to other resources far faster than Bangladesh could. The United States also has far more military muscle, so it could cow others much more easily. In every way, Bangladesh has far fewer options.

It’s hard to avoid thinking that those of us who use words like ‘addiction’ wish us to give up, not oil, but technology itself. That seems clear when they dismiss some proposed scheme to mitigate our potential future oil problem as ‘a mere technofix.’ What? Are sewer pipes a mere technofix? How about a new way to clean water? If new technology that might help us soften our coming oil problem is a technofix, then everything we do is a technofix. We’ve always had resource problems. Everything costs matter, energy, and labor, including matter, energy, and labor. Over time those costs have been falling for a larger and larger fraction of our species, while our species has also been growing larger and larger. That’s not just because of our recent cheap coal, oil, and gas. It’s mainly because of what we’ve learned and what we’ve built. It’s all one technofix after another, going back millennia. We have cheap aluminum today because we learned how to find it, mine it, and smelt it more cheaply, not because the earth made more of it. Our knowledge and our tools, those are the things that matter. The chance that we’ll give up technology anytime soon, even in Bangladesh, is zero.

Between 1150 and 1300, Europe’s population tripled, largely thanks to warming weather plus a new iron plow. Then came climate catastrophe as the Little Ice Age started. Temperatures plummeted. Crops and draft animals died. By the summer of 1314, Europe faced an emergency energy crunch. Ten percent of its population, over three million people, died in the next three years of famine. Famine conditions lasted for a further four years. Today some of us in rich countries believe that our whole species will soon be facing a similar level of threat. Perhaps. But that’s a strange thing to emphasize when the root cause of our coming energy challenge is the phase change of the bulk of our species—over a third of it in India and China alone—out of peasanthood and into the urban middle class. And parts of South America and south-central Asia will be next. Only Africa still has a long way to go. It’s odd that in what some might consider a time of immense celebration for our species, some of us in rich countries see only as a time of fear and looming catastrophe.

We’re All Cheapskates

If an oil shock is almost surely sometime in our future, why don’t we change our energy sources now, while we still have time? Especially given that solar power has such a wonderful political odor at present? It’s clean. It’s free. It’s inexhaustible. So why don’t we switch now instead of later? Well, for one thing, solar power isn’t trivial to do. Nor is it clean. No power system can be because it needs factories to make its parts. Most of all though, it isn’t free. It’s not even cheap.

In the United States in 2006, a kilowatt-hour of electricity cost about nine cents. That pricepoint is the fundamental fact upon which all our competing energy sources, and all our future energy technology investments, turn. So far, all renewable energy sources cost far more than that. About half the United States’ electricity comes from coal-fired plants. Nuclear and natural-gas plants each supply roughly another 20 percent or so. Those fuels are in no danger of giving out. Oil only adds about three more percent. That accounts for about nine-tenths of the nation’s electrical energy. Hydroelectric plants add more than half of the remaining ten percent. Most of the rest comes from biomass. Tiny fractions come from geothermal, wind, tidal, and solar. That picture isn’t likely to change much for at least the next 20 years. In terms of electricity needs alone, if all oil vanished tomorrow the United States mostly wouldn’t notice.

But the picture changes a lot when looking at the same nation’s overall energy use. Oil accounts for about two-fifths of that. (About two-thirds of that oil goes to transport, and about a quarter to industry.) Coal and natural gas each account for a further 25 percent or so. Nuclear adds another eight percent or so. That’s about 94 percent of all energy used (electricity included). Again, about half of the rest is hydroelectric. And, again, most of what’s left is biomass. The remaining renewables—geothermal, wind, tidal, and solar—are all tiny fractions. That picture might well change over the next 20 years. But it won’t change much. Any changes will likely come partly because of new tools, and partly because of politics. Mostly though, they’ll likely come because of our rising population, urbanization, and industrialization. That’ll drive oil prices up. And that’s the only thing that’ll shift our snouts from the oil trough.

In terms of energy use and options the United States is a good country to focus on because its economy alone is about a fifth of our entire economy. (The European Union and East Asia are each about a fifth as well.) Today, the United States alone uses about a quarter of all our oil. It uses about a quarter of all our coal and natural gas. It uses over two-fifths of all our gasoline. In total, it alone uses about a quarter of all our energy.

It uses much of that energy in transport, and of that, cars and light trucks alone use 60 percent. Heavy trucks use 16 percent; planes, nine percent; water transport (mostly diesel), five; farming and construction, four; buses and trains, three. So were oil prices to rise from year to year, food and heavy transport wouldn’t go away. Global trade wouldn’t end. Cities wouldn’t collapse—in fact, they’d grow. Nor would schools close. Mining wouldn’t stop. Nor would new housing. Home heating and heavy industry wouldn’t die. Nor would plastics vanish, nor synthetics, nor fertilizers, and so on. But the biggest oil drinker—the personal cars and light trucks—and the suburban sprawl they triggered—would change. Today’s suburbia is only around 50 years old anyway. The boomers built it on cheap gas. Now that cheap gas and the boomers are going away, the suburbs may too.

(Of course, that’s only what would happen on some planet of unexcitable aliens. On this planet, we’d overshoot every time oil’s price rose or fell, thus making everything worse—and making a lot of money for those who keep their heads. And if oil prices were to quadruple in a year, as happened in 1973, it would likely lead to total panic—and a bonanza for traders who think longer-term.)

Worldwide, transport is today our single biggest industry overall. Of the ten richest companies in the world, seven are American. (The other three are Dutch, British, and Japanese.) And nine are in transport. Worldwide, coal, oil, and gas together give us about four-fifths of all our energy. Our single biggest resource problem over our next two to three decades is finding a cheap and clean transport fuel. But not finding one in the next decade or two won’t destroy us as a species. Our energy toolbase changes slowly, and it, not our current political desires, limits how fast we can change, and in what direction. Two simple thought experiments show why that’s true.

Suppose an alien spaceship crashlanded tomorrow. In it, besides some dead aliens, we find an exotic energy source, perhaps a trapped black hole or a zero-point energy device. Good news, right? (Assuming it isn’t some dastardly trick to get us to destroy ourselves.) But what would happen? In the short term, probably not much. Our stock markets might react in hours, discounting the stocks of all energy companies. Many portfolios might collapse. Many rich foreheads might furrow. Some might jump out of windows. The media would surely shriek and moan that the end of the world had come at last. But unless the alien tech at once triggered a global war to own it, our toolbase would take decades to adjust. And that’s assuming that we could understand and copy the technology. And that we could make it cheap, clean, and portable. All that would take time. We’d also need time to put new tools in place to use it. And time to find ways to minimize its new wastes and dangers (whatever they might be). And time to adjust our present machines to take full advantage of it.

Science fiction, you scoff? Nope. Something like that has already happened. In 1954, when atomic energy was young, a technocrat foretold that it would one day yield electricity “too cheap to meter.” It was just as if an alien power source had dropped from the sky. But while a nuclear fission plant might look either exciting or frightening, depending on your politics, it’s actually just a really big kettle. It’s nearly the same as a coal-fired plant. It has the same boilers, steam pipes, electromagnets, turbines, rectifiers, and such. It mainly differs only in its fuel. And, relative to the cost of all that infrastructure, that fuel is cheap. It doesn’t matter whether it’s coal or uranium. It’s the cost of the toolbase needed to release, condition, and distribute the fuel’s energy content that matters. (Even the biggest fear that many today have about nukes is misplaced. Nuclear power plants release far less radiation than coal-fired plants do.)

Thus, today a kilowatt-hour can cost as little as nine cents U.S., but that’s not the cost of the fuel. That only costs tenths of a cent per kilowatt-hour, even for uranium. (Per pound, uranium costs over a thousand times as much as coal, but a pound of uranium will yield more energy than about nine tons of coal.) Most of that nine cents is the marginal cost of our whole power network, spread over its lifetime. We need lots of infrastructure to find, fetch, store, and burn fuel. Now add more infrastructure to convert that energy to electricity. Then add yet more infrastructure to condition and transport that electricity to homes. It doesn’t matter whether that fuel is wood or plutonium. Also, that nine cents often doesn’t include the possible military costs of gaining access to the fuel in the first place—or the pollution costs of burning it.

Plus, at each step we lose energy. We lose about two-thirds of all the electrical energy we generate during production and transport. So for you to make a cup of tea, some power plant somewhere had to release enough energy to heat three cups of water. We also lose more than half our transport fuel. So some distillery somewhere had to refine more than two tankfuls of gasoline for you to burn one tankful in your car. Right now we have no cheap way to store energy other than as fuels. If we could make our fuels more efficiently we’d save a lot. Similarly, if we could transport our energy efficiently, perhaps with cheap room-temperature superconducting cables, or cheap huge batteries, we’d save a lot. But developing either of those would take knowledge and tools that we don’t yet have.

So even if we could each buy a home fusion plant tomorrow, energy still wouldn’t be free. That plant would cost money to make—and money to maintain. It would also have wastes—heat, if nothing else. Our energy supply depends far more on our knowledge and toolbase than it does on our fuel sources. Thus, much of the cost of energy today isn’t the cost of making it. It’s the cost of transforming and moving it. So even a zero-cost energy supply would still have costs. It would thus be a decade or more before any new energy technology could have major effect—lowering materials prices, dislocating workers, and plunging many of our nations into recession (and, possibly, war).

Conversely, suppose half our oil vanished tomorrow, perhaps in some bizarre subsurface fire. What would happen? Again, in the short term, probably not much. Again, our stock markets might react in hours, bidding up the price of oil. Again, many rich foreheads might furrow. Again, some might jump out of windows. Again, the media would surely shriek and moan that the end of the world had finally come. And, of course, again we’d face a big adjustment. We’d have to retool to more quickly use our more expensive, or more polluting, or less portable, options. But unless our sudden energy shortfall at once triggered a global war to own the remaining supplies, it would be a decade or more before we really felt its effect—raised materials prices, dislocated workers, and recession in many of our nations (and, possibly, war).

Some Assembly Required

Energy is vital to everything we do, so every part of our swarm synergetically depends on it. Much of our toolbase is devoted to energy capture, conversion, storage, and distribution. And changing any of that is hard.

For example, suppose we decided we wanted orbital solar energy, one possible future energy source. It’s certainly attractive. Today our species only burns about 14 terawatts. That’s counting all our energy sources—oil, nuclear, wood, wind, everything. The sun bathes our planet in an energy flux over 12,000 times larger. Given our paltry needs today, the sun’s energy is unlimited. But what would it take to tap that monstrous energy stream? One way might be to orbit solar panels high enough so that they’re always in sunlight. They could then beam their collected energy back to earth as microwaves. That would solve all our energy problems for the next thousand years. Sounds simple enough. It would surely work on Star Trek. But while the energy supply is free, the knowledge and toolbase we’d need to harness it isn’t.

First off, launch costs are high. Today it can cost up to $18,000 U.S. to put a pound of anything into geostationary orbit. That’s more than the price of platinum—and twice the price of gold. If Rumpelstiltskin aliens lived in high orbit and said they’d turn all the straw we sent them into platinum for us, we’d laugh.

That high launch cost isn’t just because we’re still using throw-away chemical rockets. It’s mostly because of politics and bureaucracy. Today’s launch systems are nearly all state-owned. They’re designed for attack, defense, spying, and prestige—not efficiency. They employ tens of thousands of us, and everyone gets paid, whether or not any rocket launches. In the United States, for instance, a single shuttle launch costs about $1.3 billion. Mostly that’s because 50,000 people get paid to do it. That’s a $5 billion a year payroll, every year, whether a shuttle flies or not. Since 1981, those shuttles have flown only 115 missions. (For comparison, Atlanta International Airport alone averages 115 airplane flights an hour.) The shuttle program’s total cost since 1981, counting buildings, support, and research, is $150 billion in today’s money. Thus, each mission averages $1.3 billion. Fuel and other consumables cost almost nothing—about $60 million per flight. Again, it’s our toolbase that matters, not our fuel.

If we could convert the energy needed to get to orbit into kilowatt-hours, it would only cost each passenger a few hundred dollars. But we don’t yet have the toolbase to do that. As usual, our chief problem is ignorance. We don’t yet know the cheapest way to get off a planet. And it costs gobs of money to find cheaper ways. Only our major governments have that kind of money, so they do all the heavy lifting. Once they solve the basic problems they might get out of the way, but even 50 years after Sputnik, space flight’s biggest problem (high launch cost) is still unsolved. And why? In government-supported aerospace, if you fail at something, the government ups your budget. What’s your incentive to cut costs? And what kind of idiot would you have to be to spend your own money to make future launches cheaper? Aerospace looks sexy, but it’s still mostly a cottage industry, just as gun-making was back in the 1700s. Mass production has yet to reach it so everything is still made in ones and twos. Imagine if every time you wanted to watch a TV show, 50,000 people had to show up at your house to rebuild your TV set—and the house in which you’ll watch it—using handbuilt tools—and handbuilt parts. Plus you had to keep them on salary all year long. And they left with the warning that if you turned it on, it might blow up.

That’s the launch cost; what about the solar panels we’re launching? Commodity versions today have energy efficiencies only around 15 percent. That is, they capture only 15 percent of the energy hitting them. (Research versions are now up to about 40 percent.) Because of that, they have a power-to-weight ratio of about 22 watts per pound. Also, for every pound of panel, we might need at least a pound of satellite. In orbit the panels must track the sun, change their angle to get the most energy, and beam that energy back to earth. And every extra pound might cost $18,000 to get into orbit. Plus we’d lose maybe half the beamed energy to the atmosphere. So in total we’d be paying about $18,000 to receive perhaps 5 watts. That’s $3.6 trillion per gigawatt. (On earth, new coal plants might cost around $1 billion per gigawatt. Natural gas, $1.2 billion. Hydroelectric, $1.3 billion. Nuclear, $2 billion. Solar $5.1 billion—except that none yet exist in the gigawatt range.)

That trillion-dollar price tag doesn’t even include the cost of failures in space. Even after 50 years of experience in space we still lose about one in five of our satellites because they fail to deploy for one reason or another. (Electrical shorts, fuel-line breaks, failed explosive bolts, bad software, it’s a long list.) The price also doesn’t include the cost of assembly in space. It also doesn’t count the ground station we’d need to rectify the beamed microwave power. Nor its power-conditioning equipment. Nor the capital costs of salaries, buildings, maintenance, insurance, interest, and depreciation. There’s also the costs of designing and building the satellite parts in the first place. Oh, and don’t forget the cost of the solar panels themselves.

The economics would improve a bit if the price of earthbound energy were to skyrocket. (Although if it did, we’d have far more serious problems than reducing launch costs.) However we’d still need cheap launches. We have various proposed solutions today but none are practical yet. In the long run, we likely won’t so much reduce launch cost as reduce the payload we need by sending robots instead. That could happen once our computers get good enough for us to build robots that can assemble themselves starting just with lunar rocks and solar energy. We could use them to build the orbital plant for us out of more lunar rocks and energy. Sending robots is about ten times cheaper than sending people. Mostly what we’d then be launching is knowledge, and what we’d get back is power.

But even after we reduce all other costs, there’d still be financial risk. Investors in orbital energy would be skittish because the usual investment advice is to invest in what you know. That’s why so much more of our money chases better mouse traps rather than better mouse genes. Most of us don’t know mouse genes from mouse droppings, but we all know what a mouse trap is. Just as we do, our money likes to reproduce itself in safe, well-lit places. Investors won’t risk megabucks unless they can make gigabucks. A satellite power system would take years to figure out, years more to build, and years more to turn a profit. Investors would be paying interest on their loans for all those years. Plus they’d be paying an opportunity cost since they couldn’t use their money for anything else in that time. Thaty’d all be scared that some non-space option, like fusion, might get real in that time.

Nor is that some fanciful possibility. It’s exactly what happened during the dotcom boom in the 1990s. At least five satellite-phone projects—Iridium, Celestri, OrbComm, GlobalStar, and Teledesic—failed. Investors lost billions. On the other hand, those billions also fueled many start-ups to get those satellites into orbit. Most of them failed as well, but a few survived, as did their knowledge and tools. And those few are now powering our next wave of orbitals. Today, if you have $300 million U.S. to burn, you too might do tomorrow what only major nations could do yesterday: you could build your very own orbital rocket. The first private manned spaceflight happened in 2004. The first private suborbital rocket launched in 2007. Commercial orbitals are in our near future.

However, whoever’s gaining by our present energy supply will resist any attempt to change it. Their stockholders would crucify them if they didn’t. So they’ll fight to retain their profit margins for as long they can—while pretending to do otherwise. Nor is that hard to do; we’re so easy to fool. For example, in 2006 British Petroleum pledged to invest $500 million U.S. in new energy research over the next ten years. In 2002, Exxon Mobil partnered with others to fund a similar research effort. It pledged $100 million. Such funding levels make the news. But the news reports don’t say that $500 million is only about a week’s profits for BP. As for Exxon, $100 million is only about two days’ profits. Thus the new investments amount to small side bets. On the other hand, back in the 1970s, oil was suddenly expensive. All our big oil companies invested in new energy research. Again, their stockholders would’ve crucified them had they not done so. The result? Oil suppliers scrambled to slash prices again. They knew that was the only sure way to kill investment in other options. That cycle will continue until demand is too high and supply too low for anyone to manipulate. Not even the world’s biggest players drive this process. The market does—which means we, the cheapskates, do. We’ll continue to do so.

For all those reasons, orbital solar energy is at least two decades away, probably more. So are all our other energy options. It doesn’t matter whether it’s wind, tidal, solar thermal, ocean thermal, oil from shale, mining the ocean floor, genetically engineering microbes to make oil, or making syngas or hydrogen to replace gasoline. All hold promise. All have problems. All need new knowledge and new tools. And that takes time and money, and we’re too cheap (because we can’t see into the future). So our currently cheap and well-understood technologies will continue to beat them. That’s the trouble with the future. We often forget that it’s marked ‘Some Assembly Required.’ However, our energy supply will surely change. It might take a generation, it might take two, but our energy problems aren’t insoluble. What we principally lack is knowledge of how to solve them, and that’ll come. But it’ll cost money and effort—and lives—until it does.

In sum, all our future energy options are probably at least 20 years out as viable concerns. Most will never even make it out of the lab. Today around the world, all our non-hydrocarbon, non-nuclear energy sources add up to only about seven percent of our commercial energy supply. About half of that is hydroelectric, and most of the rest is biomass, mainly firewood. In transport, none of them can compete with oil at current prices. We need much more research, and many more tools, before anything can change a lot. So for our near term we’ll go with what we already know—coal and nuclear. Add in oil and natural gas, plus a little more conservation and recycling, and you have a picture of our likely near future. But as the decades pass, oil prices will rise. Our other options will grow more and more attractive. We’ll learn how to develop them more cheaply too. But we’ll deploy them only when they pay, and not much before. It’ll be messy, it may be dangerous too, but it’s how things have to be. Energy is all around us, yet to tap it cheaply, safely, portably, and cleanly, we need both knowledge and tools.

Knowledge Is Power

Our principal limiter has never been energy; it’s always been knowledge and tools. Materials, energy, and knowledge are related. If you have a lot of energy and knowledge, you can get materials. For example, you can smelt aluminum with lots of energy—if you also know what you’re doing. You can get as much clean water as you want, if you have the energy to boil water—and know why you need to. Similarly, if you have a lot of materials and knowledge, you can get energy. You can build drilling platforms or nuclear power stations or orbital solar plants. So with energy and knowledge you can get materials, and with materials and knowledge you can get energy. But it’s hard to get knowledge unless you already have a lot of energy and materials—and knowledge. Knowledge is costly to make. It’s also costly to maintain. And it’s costly to spread. As our toolbase grows, knowledge is growing cheaper for us to make, maintain, and spread, but it’s still costly. Knowledge is our main limiter, not materials or energy.

In Victorian Britain, coal tar—the viscous liquid left after heating coal to make either coke or syngas—was a smelly, sticky, awkward waste product. For over half a century it was a huge, foul disposal problem. You couldn’t burn it or bury it—or, rather, if you did, you had an even worse problem. So you’d sneak out at night and dump it in rivers, stinking up the water and killing fish for hundreds of miles downstream. Folks complained. Lawsuits flew. Year by year the mountains of tar grew. Then came a series of largely accidental discoveries as organic chemistry began to grow. We figured out that from coal tar we could make waterproof goods, like raincoats, then varnish, wood preservatives, and asphalt. We also figured out that we could make colorfast dyes, then perfumes, cosmetics, drugs, explosives, then nylon, plastics, fertilizers, and on and on. Coal tar changed from something smelly that we paid someone to cart away into a guarded resource. Today we know that it contains over 10,000 different hydrocarbons. So far we’ve found uses for less than half of them. Coal tar’s value could easily double as we learn more about it.

Discovering new knowledge is vital but unless our new knowledge also gets extruded into new tools it doesn’t help much. For example, most of our poorest countries today don’t have clean water. Millions of us die each year because of that. To someone in a rich country, the problem may sound simple: just buy a water filter for $5 U.S. But what if you’re living on $1 U.S. a day? Forty percent of us in sub-Saharan Africa live on less than that. But perhaps the problem still sounds simple: just boil your water. But you need about a gallon a day just to drink. Boiling it might take 1.4 pounds of wood, and wood costs money—which you don’t have. Even if you had free wood, it can take women 2.5 hours a day to gather. Perhaps the problem still sounds easy: get your government to build a water-filter factory. But what if you have no effective government? Even if you have one, where would it get the money? Even if it had the money, why would that money go to the plant and not into someone’s pocket? Even if you can ensure low corruption, what about the skill to build the factory? Even if the factory got built, why wouldn’t its products get smuggled out for private gain? Even if you manage to build many such factories, if you’re landlocked and have hostile neighbors, as, for instance, the Congo does, why wouldn’t they simply invade and steal your stuff? (Which they’ve done—repeatedly.) Your synergetic network isn’t closed. It’s leaking everywhere.

What you need is a cheap, easy-to-build, maintenance-free water filter. You must be able to make it out of cheap and common materials too. And with unskilled labor. You must also need only a little energy to run it. And your fuel source must also be easy to get anywhere. Plus, it must be cheap. It can’t need steel milling plants, or plastics plants, or electrical energy networks. The poorest of us don’t yet have such luxuries. However, such low-demand, low-energy filters do exist. To make one, mix equal parts clay and coffee grounds—or rice hulls or tea leaves—then form it into a cup and fire it for one hour with cow dung.

A simple and cheap clay cup, made the right way, would filter out almost all microbes. That would save millions of lives. But today almost none of us, rich or poor, knows about that simple cup.

It’s knowledge, not materials or energy, that makes our reality. Today we live surrounded by resources that we could use except that we’ve lost understanding of their use. In our backyards and parks we have stones that we could shape into tools and weapons. We have meat on foot all around us—sometimes as pets—that we could use to make clothes, shoes, knives, flutes. We could also use their fat to make tallow for ointments, candles, torches. We could make fire with a stick, a cord, and dried moss; or build a bow with sinew; or build a hut with brush and clay. We could make soap from ashes and tallow, corrosives from limestone, soft metals from rock, and glass from sand, ashes, and limestone. With various fungi, we could make beer from barley, wine from grapes, mead from honey, kumiss from milk, sake from rice. We could get aspirin from willow trees, morphine and codeine from poppies, mescaline from cacti, psilocybin from fungi, LSA from morning glories. We could make abortion aids from pennyroyal, menopausal aids from black cohosh, cyanide from apples, ricin from castor beans. Once upon a time, all of us knew all that and much more. Today, nearly all of us, including most of us even in our poorest nations, lack the knowledge, and the need. Yet the raw materials are still there, all around us.

Conversely, when we were hunter-gatherers, we had silicon to build computers, but we didn’t know how to refine it from sand. We didn’t know how to smelt it, how to shape it, how to dope it, how to keep it pristine. We lacked the tools to etch it, the power plants to run it, the networks to magnify it. Uranium, too, was always available to us. But we didn’t use it to build power plants. Navajos and Utes in Colorado used carnotite, one of its powdery yellow ores, as body paint. Czechs and Germans in Bohemia used another of its ores, pitchblende, to glaze pottery. We had parchment lurking in sheep, and ink concealed in oak tree galls, but they hid too well for us to see. We had antibiotics as well, growing ignored all around us, often as molds in the soil, like penicillium and cephalosporium. They were just waiting to be put to use—but we didn’t know. Even our own bodies make resources. We can make phosphorus and ammonia from urine, and gunpowder from honey, sulfur, urine and dung. Today we think so little of such resources that we pay people to cart them away.

Only three things count in this cosmos: matter, energy, and information. Of those, in the long run, information counts far more than either matter or energy. We use matter and energy to gain information. Then we use that to turn more matter and energy into tools—which are a kind of frozen information. Then we use those tools to gain more information. Our factories, power plants, water filters—all were always there. They were buried in the earth or floating in the sky, waiting for us to see through their various disguises. All the matter and energy we use today to make steel plows and breast implants and protease inhibitors were ready for us 50,000 years ago. What we lacked was knowledge that they were possible, and knowledge of how to make them cheaply. The same will be true in the future. Many things are still buried in the earth, perhaps including cheap food machines, cheap mobile robots, cheap water filters, cheap solar satellites, and cheap oil. All we have to do is dig them up. Yesterday we learned how to make beer in vats. Tomorrow we may learn how to make oil in vats. By then, things that we once thought of as vital, like flint and obsidian, or that we today think of as irreplaceable, like oil and diamonds, we tomorrow will think of as garbage—and we’ll pay someone to cart them away. And when we look back, it’ll only be to marvel that we once lived surrounded by resources without seeing them for what they were. Instead we called them weeds and rocks and seawater and dirt. Even the poorest nation on earth is a wondrous garden stuffed with resources that we could use, if only we knew how.

Two Islands, Two Futures

Our material resources constrain how we must live, but they’re also not fixed, and when they change, we change. Yet change for us is rarely easy. In the short term at least, it’s costly and messy. Most of all, it’s scary because before the change our swarm synergetically arranges itself to function with conditions as they are—even when that includes the death of millions of our babies. So, often, few of us want change, despite what we might say in public. Thus, many of us fight change. And most of us fail to see where it could lead. So rather than intending our major changes, mostly we simply get used to them after they’ve happened. How we change thus depends much less on our votes than on our toolbase, and that usually changes only slowly. Big ships turn slowly.

So we’re not likely to stop guzzling gasoline anytime soon. Nothing that ingrained can change quickly. For instance, suppose some biochemists walk out of the lab tomorrow morning with a miracle way to make fuel from corn. We stuff Nobel prizes in their pockets then quickly turn their idea into a way to make money. Suppose it needs only a small tool change. Suppose it doesn’t need huge start-up costs or heavy government subsidies. Suppose it’s easy to add to our fuel supply chain (tankers, gasoline stations, new cars). Also suppose that oil companies lose their minds and don’t lobby for price relief, or otherwise interfere with the market. Wonderful. But now farmers switch from corn for food to corn for fuel. With less food corn, its price rises. Soybean farmers then switch to corn. Ranchers then lose both fodder and pasture for their cattle, so they cut down more forest and spread to more grassland. Result: the price of corn, soybean, and meat goes up; the amount of wildland goes down. For that not to happen, next suppose that the new fuel’s process is so miraculous that it doesn’t effect landuse. What’ll happen? Within a decade the new fuel might displace perhaps five percent of our gasoline usage worldwide. Wonderful. But gasoline prices would then fall, so we’d use more of it, so overall energy use would rise. The result: the ratio of our use of gasoline to all other fuels would drop, but we’d be burning about as much gasoline as before. Of course, there’s no reason we couldn’t find such a fuel, but the chance of us finding it anytime soon is small. The chance that it would displace gasoline as a fuel anytime soon is even smaller.

We can’t see into the future so we change a lot only after we discover a chunk of new information. That tells us what new things are possible. But simply knowing how to build something isn’t enough. To actually build it takes time and money. Then once we build it, it fits into our synergetic network. Over time that links it to everything else we’ve so far built, making it one more soon-forgotten organ of our growing swarm. It then carries on, in some sense largely on its own. As it does so, it stigmergically affects us. It acts like a spinning flywheel, aiding some things, deterring others. Synergetic linkage acts on it like inertia, keeping it to a mostly even keel. Changing its direction of spin becomes very hard. Thus our toolbase often grows slowly. And its direction of growth isn’t fully under our control. It both enhances and limits what we can do next. And it’s usually quite hard to change. So we aren’t likely to change much about how we capture, store, share, and use energy and materials anytime soon. Dirty water will continue to kill us. Our materials will continue to cheapen. And our fossil fuels will continue to grow more expensive. So today we’re likely to do what we’ve always done. We’ll continue to splurge and squabble until our present cheap energy supply becomes an energy crunch, then an energy crisis. Then we’ll panic.

Two possibilities might drive more rapid movement away from gasoline. A serious war in Western Asia might lead to radioactive contamination of significant oil reserves. War always gets our attention. A new temperance movement, if widely adopted, might also drive change. Perhaps the new slogan might be: ‘The hands that drive gas guzzlers shall never touch mine.’ Sex always gets our attention. Perhaps a major nation might then decide on a crash program to develop and deploy alternate transport fuels, for one of the two above reasons. Likely though, our fuel supply will continue much as it has for the last couple centuries. Instead of spending trillions on research, we’ll spend billions or trillions on occasional wars and other patches and bandaids to preserve the current state of affairs. But, no matter how many wars we fight, the price of oil will rise. As it does, we’ll divert a few millions to alternate options. We’ll discover a small improvement here and a small improvement there, until alternates become competitive. But even then, oil will still have the cheapskate advantage because of its huge infrastructure. Then will come some sort of crisis, then we’ll panic, then investment will more quickly move into new infrastructure for the new fuels. It seems stupid. And maybe it is. But it also seems inevitable.

Around 1,600 years ago, a couple dozen of us jumped in our canoes and headed out to sea. We took with us our usual foods: our rats, chickens, yams, bananas, sugarcane, and such. We were seafarers from what is today an island in Polynesia, and we made landfall on one of the world’s remotest islands. Today it’s called Rapa Nui (or Easter Island). It’s a 64-square-mile oasis of land 1,290 miles of lonely ocean away from anywhere. We set up life on the tiny forested island with its many birds and fish and rich soil. We cleared some forest, planted crops, and built villages. Our numbers grew and grew. A few centuries later, we started making monuments. At first they were small stone toppings for our burial chambers, but over time they grew into giant stone statues with big heads. We dragged them from the quarries to their resting places near the coast with logs. We got the logs by chopping down our largest palm trees. We also chopped trees for tillage, fire, housing, tools, and weapons. Chop, chop, chop. Over the next thousand years, our numbers grew to perhaps 7,000, maybe more. Our monuments also grew, finally reaching 145 tons. Our tree-chopping also grew, until one day we had no more big trees left to chop down. Oops.

With no more big trees, we couldn’t build any more of our big canoes. We were trapped on the island. We also could no longer fish the deep waters. Also, with no more big trees, many bird species lost their nesting sites. They died out. With fewer trees overall, our once-rich soil eroded, which reduced our crop yields. With fewer birds and fish, and less bananas, we fell back on our rats, chickens, yams. Our numbers fell—we no longer know by how much. So did more of our remaining trees—again we no longer know how many. But we do know that on April 5th, 1722, visitors came.

They shot 13 of us that day with a new thing, guns. Then, starting with an American ship in 1805, more visitors came. They enslaved over 1,000 of us, taking our women for sex and our men for labor. They killed many of us to do so. We raised our spears against their guns and fought. But it was useless. Life got bad. Some of us turned cannibal—fingers and toes were said to be the best bits. Thousands of us died, either in slavery or from the visitor’s new diseases. Our priests and headmen also died, or were deliberately taken. With them gone, knowledge of our past died out. All we had left were the mysterious statues we could no longer explain. Our numbers fell and fell. By 1877, we’d already died as a people. Only 111 of us were left, many old, most sick. The visitors then put us in a barbed-wire concentration camp. They left us there for nearly a century, until 1964.

Back in 1722, on the other side of the globe, others of us were also stuck on an island with few trees. The six million of us living in the 58,367 square miles of England and Wales had spent the previous two centuries chopping down nearly all our trees within 15 miles of any river or coast. From 1500 to 1630 alone, the price of wood climbed 700 percent. By 1722, our fuel crisis was a disaster. Several of our industries, particularly iron, were dying. Iron was particularly important because from it we made tools and weapons. Without tools, we couldn’t build. Without weapons, we were defenseless.

Our tree-hunger had been rising since 1543, when we’d made our first cast-iron cannon to repel visitors with guns in their hands and rape in their eyes. Over time, that upped prices for everyone who needed wood—which was everyone. We needed wood to cook food and stay warm. To build our houses and machines and tools and weapons took more wood. Building our ships, making glass and salt and ale, and firing our furnaces and industries took even more wood. We stripped our forests, then Ireland’s, until our remaining trees were too far from water to be cheap fuel. Our land transport technology was too expensive to get more. We tried switching to coal and peat to make up for lost trees. We planted new trees. We coppiced our remaining trees. We dug canals to get at more trees. We recycled metals to save trees. Chop, chop, chop. Still our tree-hunger rose.

However, most of us didn’t then die. Nor were we raped and enslaved. Nor did we turn cannibal, or end up in a concentration camp. We didn’t die as a people. We had something in England that we didn’t have in Rapa Nui—we had access to three main parts of a huge dynamo of change. That dynamo was far larger than one particular kind of electromagnetic machine that we first perfected around 1890. To begin with, we had much written knowledge of the world. Tens of thousands of us had generated, collected, and translated it over many countries and many centuries. Also, relatively many of us, by that point, could read such works. And many of us could even add to them—not just our priests and headmen. Our knowledge base was in no danger of dying out. Nor was our toolbase. We had a huge toolbase, compared to Rapa Nui, made by many generations of us. And we had powerful weapons, preventing our neighbors from raping and enslaving us. As well, we had a lot of capital, gathered partly from our huge slave trading—including from places like Rapa Nui. Plus we had ships, so we weren’t cut off from the rest of our kind. All those parts formed our dynamo, built unwittingly over many centuries and many countries. With that knowledge and that literacy and that money and those devices and those weapons we cast about for tree-substitutes to quench our raging tree-hunger. Chop, chop, chop.

At first we didn’t look too hard. We didn’t have to. We weren’t stuck on a tiny island 1,290 miles from anywhere. Our non-industrial neighbors, like Sweden and Russia, had masses of easily reached trees. We had goods they wanted, like cloth, which didn’t depend as much on wood as our other products. We also had financial tools that let us work together without necessarily meaning to do so. Those neighbors and arrangements and goods let us trade for wood by legally evaluating and protecting our worth in land and other immovables. We still fought many wars, but none meant disaster for our whole island. As the price of our fuel rose, the price of our bread, which needs fuel, rose. As it rose, we couldn’t afford extra clothes during heavy winters. For a while we starved more, and were frostbitten more. But no visitors came against us with overwhelming force in their hands and rape in their eyes. Within a half century we had begun working out our tree shortage. We built machines and developed skills that increased another of our fuel sources: coal. That then cheapened our production of other of our building materials: iron and glass and brick. At first they were expensive, either in money or labor or pollution. But over time we reduced those costs until coal became cheaper even than the trees we’d started with.

The result of all that was a dynamo of change that not only changed everything around it, it built on itself as it went. It was recursive. Like pistons firing one after another in an engine, that recursion first gave us the steam engine, and thus the first stage of our industrial phase change. Then came the railroad, and a second stage. Then came mass production, and a third stage. Then come mastery of both hydrocarbons and electromagnetism, and a fourth stage. The levels of economic growth we’re used to in the rich world today began in Britain in the mid eighteenth century. It spread to the United States in the late eighteenth century. France sped up soon after. By the nineteenth century, Germany, and many European countries and their transplants also phase changed. By the late nineteenth century, so did Japan. By the twentieth century, growth extended to parts of Asia aside from Japan as places like South Korea took off. Today our fastest growth is in India and China, where over a third of us live. We’re a corporate being, not a set of nations. And that being is recursively building something.

Those two islands back in 1722 give us a picture of what our future might be like. Do we today have enough resources, both physical and mental, to keep inventing our way out of serious trouble, or will we hit some limit of what’s possible given the numbers we can support and the resources we have available, then fall into starvation, cannibalism, slavery, rape, and despair? So far, the former seems more likely than the latter. Our swarm is in the midst of a species-wide phase change powered by a recursive dynamo of change. Today we’re always running to find money we don’t have yet, to build factories we haven’t finalized yet, to make technology we haven’t invented yet, to run things we haven’t designed yet, to sell to markets we can’t really imagine yet. And next year we’ll do it again, except faster. Chop, chop, chop. Our swarm appears to be up to something. But what? That’s the subject of the next part of this book.