Humans rely on a few classes of scarcity resources to sustain life. Appropriate atmosphere - air - is required at all times, potable water on a daily basis, edible and hopefully healthy food, some form of protection from the environment - shelter / clothing. Without these physical, objective needs people will eventually die; while they are unavailable they tend to command the full attention of the human in lack: all effort goes towards procuring the scarce resource, and to situating one’s self to have sustainable access. And another physical resource is consumed to enable life, largely by enabling humans to more efficiently produce or accumulate these resources: energy. In this case, stored energy, or the potential to do work, accessible on demand, has emerged as another physical resource that communities of humans rely on to sustain themselves. This essay seeks to unpack the answer to one central question: what would it mean if energy were free and abundant? Energy enables three foundational capabilities, capabilities which lie at the heart of what it means to sustain life.

Heat: Temperate modulation

Probably one of the first moments humans discovered what could be gained by having access to a stable but accessible form of energy was upon the discovery of the flint. This moment - when humans worked out how to convert internal energy (i.e. ATP stored in muscles) into a spark that could be used to light a fire, given an appropriate source of fuel (AKA a stable but accessible form of energy - wood) - this may be the moment Homo whateveris became Homo sapiens; the first rung on the ladder to mastery of the environment. Suddenly we could survive in hostile environments, simply by finding naturally abundant objects, configuring them just so, and exercising our newfound control over matter to overcome an activation energy, ignite the fuel source and release the heat energy contained therein to warm our bodies. We discovered that cooking our food unlocks nutritional potential, meaning we needed to do less work to get the same utility from what we ate.

Fast forward to late modernity and our mastery of our physical environment is just about complete. We can not only release heat into the environment from a fuel source; we can also cool down spaces - suddenly the food we accumulate can retain its edibility orders of magnitude longer than if left in a temperate environment. Our ability to control temperate, along with the developments in materials science and fabrication, mean that we can create enclosed environments that can sustain life in the all but the most inhospitable contexts. We can survive the Antarctic winter, we can survive a descent to the deepest part of the ocean, we can travel to the moon and back alive. Energy storage and release, and consequential developments related to temperature modulation and segregation of energy and atmosphere, are foundational technologies for modern humans’ survival.

Matter: Propulsion of vehicles

While understanding the mechanism would require a sophisticated understanding of physics, its implications are apparent to everyone: stored and accessible energy can be converted to physically move matter. This simple truth has profound implications: humans have created replicable systems that can convert a standard fuel source into the ability to move matter through space. Here a bit more thought on the differences between biological and chemical energy is required (because animals can convert energy stored in cells into motion), but this latter achievement - storing and converting non-biological energy into motion - represents a second foundational capability enabled by energy. Prior to this, we relied on biological energy - stock animals or humans, primarily - and naturally-occurring sources of motion (i.e. wind) to move ourselves and goods around. It really can’t be understated how constraining this is - other than on sailing ships, which, again, rely on wind to move, or possibly on rolling contraptions placed at the top of a hill - if a person needed something somewhere, they had to move it or rely on a team of animals or people to move it. Case in point: all the stones comprising the Great Pyramid of Giza weighs approximately 5,750,000 tons. Details are unknown, but estimates that construction required 15,000 - 40,000 humans working for 10 - 20 years are considered plausible. Biological organisms are rapidly limited in their ability to move matter as the volume and mass of objects increase.

Compare this with the 21st century. A Lockheed Martin C-5M Super Galaxy - the largest cargo plane in use by the US Air Forece - has a maximum payload of 180,000 lbs - 90 tons. Put another way, with 63,000 of these one could transport the entire Great Pyramid from Egypt to Thailand in less than a day. That’s a lot of planes, but it is nowhere near 80,000 human-years of effort. And air travel is the most difficult way to transport material: in 2001 BHP, a global resource company, operated a train weighing 99,734 tons 170 miles in Australia. 58 of these trains could transport all the material in the Great Pyramid. The CSCL Globe - the largest container ship in the world, owned by China Shipping Container Lines - can carry 184,605 tons of stuff at 20 - 22 knots. Just 31 of these ships - crewed by fewer than 1000 people - could transport the Great Pyramid to the other side of the world in under a month.

Our ability move physical objects is foundational to our ability to produce the resources of survival more efficiently. With a rock plow and an ox a person can sow a small area of land with edible plants; aggregating materials into a John Deere factory, applying industrial and assembly processes to them (often themselves reliant on the mechanical motion enabled by energy technologies), then transporting the goods produced to appropriate land can enable a person to sow land capable of producing many orders of magnitude more nutrition for a similar input of time. This improvement in production efficiency - not to mention the compounding effect of refrigeration on food distribution system capacity - means that humans can accumulate scarcity resources and their tools of production with decreasing requirements of human effort.

Light: Information transmission and processing

Humans have developed ways to encode subjective meaning into an objective form. Over time this capacity has evolved to a stunningly sophisticated degree, and it seems as though contemporary society often overlooks both the basic nature of information exchange and processing and the miracle of our capabilities. We use symbols strung together to represent ideas; these symbols can be encoded into a persistent format or onto a carrier wave of electricity or electromagnetic radiation, transmitted at the speed of light. The large but conceivable leap between transmitting a message a distance by sending up a plume of smoke or reflecting some light and video chatting with someone on the other side of the world boils down to one central achievement: the ability to coordinate human activity. Modern information technologies enable groups to coordinate by allowing ideas and knowledge to be disseminated, shared to relevant agents in a community, thereby empowering them to occupy some specialized role in a grander type of organism - an organization. The impact achievable by coordinated agents with specialized skills has a non-linear relationship to the number of agents involved - Taleb: “Collaboration has explosive upside, what is mathematically called a superadditive function, i.e., one plus one equals more than two, and one plus one plus one equals much, much more than three.” Collaboration depends on communication; advanced (i.e. dispersed and real-time) collaboration relies on modern information technologies.

Beyond enabling discrete individuals to collaborate with one another, these information processing, storage and transmission abilities allow individual people to document their ideas, then access them in interpretable form at some point in the future, a sort of temporal self-collaboration. This has a similar superadditive effect, enabling the complexity of human thought to compound on itself. These effects of information technology - the tools of which rely on energy storage and access - serve as a basis for theoretical and empirical enquiry, the generation of knowledge and distillation of insight, and, ultimately, creative innovation.

A third point related to information - perhaps a stretch, but I think not: energy can be converted into visible light, thereby enabling humans to illuminate and perceive their physical surroundings, and navigate their immediate world. I see this as residing within the ‘information transmission’ heading - there is not much effective difference, really, between a human with a flashlight and the sense of sight and, say, a bat echolocating and interpreting the reflected signal to create a mental representation of their physical surroundings, or a robot scanning a space to generate an internal map. It is all a form of remote sensing, encoding meaning into some transmissible form and extracting the meaning from the transmission at a distance.

In these ways, information and communication technologies enable intra- and intersubjective collaboration, and enable people to operate effectively in the world, even in contexts where a savage human (i.e. in animal state, with technological tools) would be unable to.

Conclusion

Society’s foundational technologies of temperature modulation, physical transport and information processing and communication have developed as we have improved our ability to store and access energy on demand. These capabilities are foundational because they are required for people to survive the immediate environment and aggregate the resources necessary for continued survival. We can preserve food and create spaces, shelters, of suitable temperature. We can move objects mechanically; pumps enable us to transport anything from fluids to vehicles. We can coordinate with others and ourselves by encoding, storing and transmitting meaning. As one might expect, the people who were able to commercialize these capabilities at scale became the titans of commerce and generated enormous wealth: the Vanderbilts in transportation in America; the owners of GE (including the Vanderbilts and JP Morgan), the first company to commercialize home refrigerators; now Bill Gates and Sergey Brin as magnates of information technologies. These men attained their wealth because they situated themselves as owners and innovators of the world’s fundamental capabilities, and scaled that capacity to meet the demands of an exploding human population. The availability of a storable, easily accessible energy source enabled all of it, explaining the inclusion of the Rockefellers in the list of of the world’s elite power class.

Scarcity constrains the bounds of how humans behave, acts as a cage. We are animals in captivity, driven by fear - fear of an inability to survive, uncertainty of the accessibility of what we need to live. As demonstrated, energy enables us to access those resources more efficiently. So, what would an abundance of energy mean for human society in the 21st century? What if our grids were configured such that we did not need to continue consuming an abundant-yet-finite resource to conduct our affairs, which primarily consist of meeting resource demands? What if the input required for these three foundational human capabilities was free and abundant? Since energy is the primary consumable requirement for production, I suspect that it would unleash human potential, unlock the cage of resource scarcity we’ve been living in since life began and free us to truly adopt our role as a global sentient species coordinated to ensure the thriving of every organism and the preservation of beauty in the world. Energy may be the most consequential scarcity need for life since with it - and tools we’ve devised - an individual can produce so much more than they need to survive. A small proportion of people can provide enough for everyone to survive. With abundant energy the constraints to this emerging truth are all but removed.

So what? Yes all this ballyhoo about technological development and the Great Pyramid of Giza - what about a practical proposal for bringing this state of abundance of the physical requirements for life about, ideally in a sustainable and rapid fashion? There are obviously a few approaches to creating a situation of energy abundance, all of which ought to be investigated and pursued with maximum effort.

First, probably, is to minimize our needs. It is the negative approach, and probably the most impactful: if we can figure out how to do the same work for a lesser energy input, and can scale the efficiencies won, we reduce the work we have to do to reach a state of abundance.

Second, we need to capitalize on the abundance of free (i.e. effectively infinite) energy sources available to us on the surface of this planet. The energy available every second of the day in the form of solar, wind and water energy is many orders of magnitude more than we need to create this state of abundance. Regressive inertia of a fossil fuel addiction needs to be overcome as quickly as possible, especially since this habit and accompanying financial flows are fueling human conflicts around the world as it compounds the effects of global warming.

Third - perhaps the ace up our sleeve, if we play our cards right. Humans have developed phenomenally sophisticated ways to destroy, and invested heavily in the militarization of the planet up to the present. Destruction requires energy - all these bombs and bullets are concentrations of fuel configured to detonate at an intended time and space. Could the immense stores of conventional weapons be converted to usable fuel for energy production? And, even greater potential: the global nuclear arsenal is the greatest threat and opportunity in the history of the world. While we’ve been accumulating the ability to vaporize every city on earth, we’ve been concurrently, unintentionally developing the ability to power humanity to the stars. Yes there are risks to nuclear power, risks that deserve careful consideration and diligent mitigation. But to miss the opportunity to convert our global nuclear arsenal into an abundant energy - to convert Megatons to Megawatts - would be humanity’s fatal error.