Today I want to rant about a technological revolution.
I’ve written a lot about things like the rise of batteries, the triumph of green energy, and other technological revolutions happening in the 2020s. But many of these developments are connected; I see them as visible protrusions of a shift so deep and fundamental that it’s almost hard to describe it. It’s about a shift in which fundamental physical processes human technology as a whole is based on.
I remember a time when I was a teenager, watching the cartoon show Robotech with my friends (it was many years after its initial release; I’m not that old!). In the show there was a secret super-powerful energy source called “protoculture”. I remember one of my friends asking “How do you actually get energy from protoculture? And another friend said “Well, first you use protoculture to boil water into steam, then you use it to turn a turbine…”
We all laughed, but the joke was deeply rooted in technological reality. To this day, most power sources — including nuclear power — basically just heat up water, which turns it into steam, which pushes some sort of a wheel, which either A) turns some gears that make a machine run, or B) turns a magnet that generates an electrical current. For fossil fuel power sources (although not for nuclear), this involves combustion — the rapid release of heat from chemical reactions.
Combustion is one of humanity’s two main methods for extracting and transporting energy. Understanding how to harness combustion was probably the most important technological revolution in human history. The energy provided by coal-powered steam engines, and then by oil-powered internal combustion engines, was what allowed the creation of mechanized agriculture, modern manufacturing, rail transport, cars, trucks, modern shipping, powered flight, and most of the things that raised humanity up out of the muck of abject poverty where we started.
But a second technological revolution was underway at the same time, which also changed the face of our world. This was electricity — the ability to move electrons through conducting materials.
Electricity and combustion are complementary — for example, when you burn coal to boil water to turn a turbine to turn a generator that creates electricity. And of course both rely on some form of chemical potential energy — a gas tank, a battery, etc. —to transport stored energy from place to place.
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Author: Noah Smith
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