Energy is the Mother of Invention

Here’s a little thought experiment. You are in charge of a mission to populate a distant planet. There are 10 people in the expedition, including you. The planet is just like the Earth 20 million years ago. The biology is not toxic to humans. You can even eat some of the animals and plants.

You have limited cargo capacity: 200,000 kg. You will bring some food and water, of course. You can bring supplies and equipment to start the colony, such as seeds, farm animals, guns, an electrical generator, etc. You can also bring all the knowledge of humanity, accessible through a computer.

Given those starting conditions, could you create a complex technological society like the one on Earth today?

No. Not for thousands of years, at least.

In the first generation, you would have whatever complex technology you brought with you. But it would eventually break down, and you would have no way of repairing or replacing it. You could bring an electrical generator, but electrical generators do not replicate themselves. Only a large, complex economy can produce an electrical generator, or the parts needed to fix one.

So, you would have to revert to a simpler way of life, such as hunting and gathering, or farming. The colony might be able to smelt iron for tools, but that requires a large investment of labor, and it might not be worth doing. If the colony succeeded, it might eventually grow to the size necessary for advanced technology, but that would take a very long time. The knowledge brought from the Earth would be lost, and it would have to be relearned. The steam engine would have to be reinvented. The laws of electromagnetism would have to be rediscovered. And so on.

Why didn’t cave-men have guns? One reason is that they didn’t know how to make guns. But there is another reason. Even if a cave-man knew how to make a gun, it wouldn’t have been efficient to make a gun. The knowledge of how to make a gun is only useful if guns can be made efficiently.

Imagine that you have fallen through a time-warp to the Stone Age, and you want to make a gun. You would need certain raw materials, such as iron for the barrel, lead for the bullets, and potassium nitrate and sulfur for gunpowder. You would have to find, extract and process all of those materials yourself. Then you would have to make the gun. The barrel would very hard to make. Smelting and forging iron is a difficult job. It is not too hard to make an iron axe or hammer, if you already have an iron hammer and anvil. It is much harder to make something like a gun barrel if all you can do is heat and pound iron.

You could spend your entire lifetime and never succeed in making a crappy gun. Meanwhile, your buddies would be hunting mastodons with spears and getting all the hot cave-girls.

The point of technology is to do work efficiently. Whether a gun is more efficient than a spear depends on the amount of work required to make each tool.

Generally speaking, we use technology only if there is a positive return on the energetic cost of creating and maintaining it. Technology is a type of capital. It requires energy to create and maintain. It provides a return on that investment by making work more efficient.

There are two other things that make technology efficient:

• It can be efficiently produced.
• It can be efficiently used.

Mass production makes technology more efficient in both ways. It produces technology efficiently, and it uses technology efficiently.

Mass production is more efficient than small-scale production, for two reasons. One is that it allows for a greater division of labor. Different tasks (such as mining, smelting, forging, etc.) can be done by different people in different places. Mass production also allows for a greater and more efficient use of capital. Consider the hammer and anvil of a blacksmith. The cost of those tools can be amortized over all the output of the blacksmith. It isn’t efficient to make an anvil just to make a single knife or spearhead. But if you use the anvil to make a thousand knives and a thousand spearheads, it is very efficient.

The larger the scale of the economy, the more efficient it becomes, generally speaking. As the economy grows, it makes new types of technology worth producing and using.

Consider the computer chip, for example. It would require an enormous investment to make a single computer chip from scratch. Essentially, it requires a huge, complex factory to make a single computer chip. Once that factory is built, however, it can produce billions of computer chips. Without a computer chip factory, it is almost impossible to make a computer chip. With a computer chip factory, it is very easy to make a computer chip. Today, computer chips are so efficiently produced that we put them into toys.

There is no point building a computer chip factory for a society of a hundred, a thousand or even a million. But when you can sell billions of chips around the world, it becomes economical to build a computer chip factory.

Complex technology requires a large, complex economy. Otherwise, it is either too costly to make, or there is no reason to make it. An anvil is efficient at the scale of a village. A gun is efficient at the scale of a small country. A computer chip is efficient at the scale of a global economy of billions.

Mass production makes complex technology efficient. It is true that mass production depends on complex technology, but it is also true that complex technology depends on mass production.

Mass production requires:

• Complex technology.
• A large population, so that mass production is worth doing.
• A complex economy, with a high degree of specialization and large-scale exchange.
• Theoretical and practical knowledge.
• Sources of energy that can be used to do work.

These things emerged together, because they depend on each other and enable each other. The complexity of modern civilization emerged by a virtuous cycle. Social, economic, technological and scientific complexity all increased together. Energy use increased in tandem with the size and complexity of civilization, because new sources of energy were harnessed, and because there was a greater demand for energy. Modern civilization climbed up a spiral of increasing size, complexity and energy use.

Everything depends on energy. Work requires energy. Capital is stored energy. Even knowledge is a type of stored energy, because it takes work to acquire knowledge. The economy is a complex machine that consumes energy and does work. Living beings are complex machines that consume energy and use it to reproduce.

Tools make work more efficient, and thus free up energy for other uses. Tools also allow us to use other forms of energy. For example, the plow allowed us to convert grass into work. Horses that ate grass could be harnessed to a plow and used to do work. Windmills and sails allowed us to harness the energy of the wind. The steam engine allowed us to use the energy stored in coal to do work. Technology gives us more energy either by increasing the efficiency of work or by harnessing new sources of energy.

Just as tools are required to make tools, energy is required to extract energy from the environment. That applies to both biology and economics. It takes energy for a plant to grow leaves, and for a cheetah to run down a gazelle. It takes energy to build a sailing ship, and to dig coal out of the ground. A large, complex economy requires energy, and it allows us to extract more energy from the environment.

A large, complex economy creates the potential for new technologies. Suppose that I want to make a new computerized gadget. To do that, I don’t have to make computer chips myself. I can order them from a supplier. I don’t need to make the plastic case myself. I can have that produced by a plastic factory. I don’t need to make the tiny screws myself. I can order them from a hardware supplier. The same goes for wires, displays, etc. Because those things are already being produced efficiently, I can make my gadget efficiently.

To produce something efficiently, two things are required:

1. You can sell enough of the product to justify the capital investment.
2. The inputs to production are available and affordable. That means the inputs must be produced efficiently, typically on a large scale.

That’s why we have to climb the ladder of economic and social complexity one step at a time. We can’t make guns efficiently until the inputs to gun production are being produced efficiently. We can’t make computers efficiently until the inputs to computer production are being produced efficiently. Etc.

And that’s why you couldn’t recreate a complex technological society on the alien planet, even if you had all the knowledge of humanity and plenty of starter capital. You would have to build up the population and the economy step by step. To get back to industrial civilization, you would have to go through the same stages that our ancestors did: hunting and gathering, small-scale farming and herding, large-scale agricultural civilization, etc. It would take thousands of years to get back to industrial civilization.

And that’s assuming that you have the key ingredient for industrial civilization just lying around: fossil fuels.

Remember, modern civilization was created with the energy of fossil fuels. That new source of energy allowed us to produce everything more cheaply, which allowed us to climb up the ladder of technological and social complexity. Before we had that source of energy, most people had to work all day to feed themselves and their families. Without fossil fuels, or a replacement for them, the same would be true today. There would be no time to make computers, and no point making them.

To get some idea of the amount of fossil fuel energy that we use, consider the following. A human laborer can do work at a rate of roughly 25 to 50 watts, which is the amount necessary to power a small light bulb. Human beings are able to do complex tasks that require intelligence, but we can’t work very hard for long periods of time. Globally, we consume fossil fuels at a rate of roughly 15 terawatts. That is about 2000 watts per person, which is the equivalent of 40 human laborers working all day, every day.

Of course, some of that energy is used to heat our homes, and some of it is wasted, but a lot of it is converted into more complex types of work, such as the work done by a washing machine to clean clothes, or the work done in a factory to produce washing machines. Machine labor has freed up human labor to do more complex tasks, such as designing and building washing machine factories.

Think about all the work that is done for you by machines — not just the machines in your house, but machines all over the world. By making life easier, industrial civilization freed up human labor to invent and build new things. It gave us the time to develop scientific theories, write computer programs, and write essays about industrial civilization.

Industrial civilization is both a cause and an effect of progress. There is a virtuous cycle involved, but that means you can’t just start industrial civilization from scratch. You have to go through many iterations of that cycle. And that cycle requires a huge input of energy.

To summarize, complex technology depends on more than just knowledge. It depends on the entire system of industrial civilization, which includes:

• A large population.
• A complex economy.
• Complex knowledge.
• Complex technology.
• A large input of energy.