It’s getting to be rather a bad habit around here. And it all started with the Magna Carta. Bear with me. Many more qualified people have explained the ins and outs of the recent bank failures in our crazy financial system, here and here. I also have talked about the energy implications of money before.

I don’t want to talk about FDIC insurance. I want to talk about story.

MONEY IS A STORY

It’s a story we made up when we moved beyond a barter economy. It’s a brilliant story! I make cloth, and you grow apples. I want apples, but you don’t need cloth. So I give you a  tiny piece of metal instead, trusting that eventually somebody is going to need cloth and will replenish my stores of metal. None of us need the metal for anything, but it stands in for everything we do need.

Evolve that miracle system long enough, and apparently, you get pure imaginary money where we don’t even need the little pieces of metal, and we just tell each other we have it. What a story!

ANOTHER STORY: MONEY IS POWER

Another metaphor for money is power, which according to a basic dictionary, is the ability to either get things done or to make other people get things done. For most of human history, the guarantee on both kinds of power was violence and coercion. Do what I tell you because I have a big sword. Do what I tell you because I have all the little pieces of metal you need to stay alive. Do what I tell you because your eternal soul is in jeopardy if you don’t.

Do what I tell you, or bad things happen.

After a hard, millennia-long fight to declare that human beings are inherently valuable and threats and coercion are not the best way of organizing ourselves, we’ve gotten to the point where now people collect both kinds of power by promising it’s going to benefit everyone. At least a little bit.

Nowadays, they even occasionally work to make that happen when we do give them power. So instead of the point of a sword, we have stump speeches and ads about how great your life will be if you do what they say. Instead of serfs and subjects, we have customers and voters.

To sum up: in thousands of years of evolution, we’ve gone from doing what I say because I will hurt you if I don’t, to doing what I say because you’ll get something out of it too. Progress, I guess!?!

WE’RE MISSING PART OF THE STORY

The story of money changed, and culturally we have not caught up.

For the majority of our history, often called pre-history, which is hilarious, it seems like no one human was able to accumulate a huge amount of money or power. There were rich and poor stone age folks, and we do have the archeological records to prove that, but in general, keeping everyone alive was a group project. Most of life was communal and real close to the edge of subsistence.

Then we got agriculture, started settling down, and started valuing land and resources. And ever since, power has started to accumulate into ever fewer hands.

TO THE KINGS

Let’s skip ahead a little to the Kings. I think it’s a mistake to try and homogenize the politics of the ancient world. I know that there were actually a lot of ways that we organized ourselves, and there were quite a few egalitarian, matriarchal,  democratic, and pretty much every other way to politic in the world. The book, the Dawn of Everything (affiliate) brilliantly walks through the diversity of human politics. But the world powers that eventually dominated learned to concentrate political and economic power in one man/institution.

NO MORE KINGS

And then began the largely thankless work of clawing back and limiting the power of those men.  It took us several millennia in fits and starts and backtracks and success. We had an explosion of democracy, briefly, in southern Europe. We had the meritocracy of the Chinese government system but under the emperor. We had the Magna Carta declaring the rights of men in England that the pope immediately declared completely invalid and King John basically ignored. And many, many more examples of greater and lesser success.

But we got better and better at it. Most countries came up with a system of government where political power is split between many different people who are supposed to keep an eye on one another.

ALL BAD ROADS LEAD TO HITLER

Alongside the official changes, we changed our story.

We instinctively believe that no one man should be able to make decisions for an entire population and that when that happens it is almost entirely bad. Just witness the change from the word king to fascist. Practically, there’s no difference between them, just the story we tell about their actions.

I don’t think we’ll ever be done with this fight. Especially these days, there are constantly men arguing that it would be better if we all just did what one guy said again. But there is also always an instinctive counter-reaction that that’s a really bad idea. We can play out that story really easily in our minds and end up at Hitler.

THE WORLD HAS CHANGED AND OUR STORIES HAVE NOT KEPT UP

Since the industrial revolution, economic power, and political power have been split, and the people who run the government are not the people with all the money. Yes, they’re usually rich. There is great overlap, and they help each other out a whole lot, but the king used to be the richest man in the country. That is no longer the case by a long shot.

So on the political side, we have several millennial-long fights to balance political power and make sure the people who are telling us what to do are at least pretending it’s for our own good and have a bunch of other people with the power to stop them watching them.

WE JUST DON’T HAVE THE SAME INSTINCTS WHEN ECONOMIC POWER CONCENTRATES

We have had private citizen billionaires for 200 years, and we’ve already suffered the devastation of extreme economic concentration once as a world in the 1920s and many times in much smaller amounts since. And we came up with some really cool ways to fight that concentration, mostly with regulation and unions. And some really not cool like early systems of communism that just ended up with a different hierarchy. And we promptly forget all of those lessons again and again, because it’s just not in the story yet.

Culturally, they’re mostly still good guys.

Yes, their reputation has tarnished a little, but mostly due to personal weirdness, not the number in their bank account. We think of how convenient their products are. What geniuses they are. How amazing they are compared to the great towering intellectuals of previous times. They have big conferences in Switzerland where they try to solve the world’s problems.

It’s just generally thought of as a good thing to have a ridiculous amount of money. At the very least, we believe it’s fair that the labor of an entire society is going to very few people.

WE NEED A NEW MAGNA CARTA

Hopefully, it will work better than the original one. We are at the very beginning of this fight for the story of economic power. Who has it; who should have it and how we limit it.

It’s probably going to take a few more wobbles before we grow the same instincts around economic power that we have around political power. We need an allergy to extreme riches the same way we are now allergic to kings. Because it really is no different.

It should be just as ludicrous to concentrate economic power the way it’s ludicrous to concentrate political power.

HOW DARE THE POOR?

Right now we have a lot of the opposite – the laziness of welfare recipients, the unfairness of redistribution of wealth, and the insane policy that as you go up in the income brackets, you go down in taxes. The whole global economy is invested in enriching a few people.  That’s a story.

Another story could be that one man is completely incapable of creating that much value for the world by starting a company. That people with loads of success are should be responsible for funding loads of the structure that undergirds society that enabled their success. That helping struggling people actually enriches and uplifts everyone. That a strong social safety net actually leads to more wealth because more people can take more risks. That keeping everyone in the game is more important than ensuring one dude wins the game.

None of this is TRUE. None of this SHOULD HAPPEN. It’s all just a story too. Maybe none of these things will end up in our final story about money.

We left reality the second some dude in Turkey handed another dude a Lydian Stater, a misshapen lump of gold and silver in 600 BCE with a couple of animals stamped into the metal and exchanged it from actual flesh and blood real animals, and everyone went away happy from that transaction.

Since it’s all imagined anyway, why not imagine a story that goes a little better for a few more people?

The post Why Money is Just a Rollicking Good Story first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON’T HAVE ENOUGH COMPLEXITY?

I’m struck by this question whenever I can fortify myself to dip into the news (see my article about outrage addiction). We talk about the energy crisis and oil and gas and fracking. Then we talk about climate change and CO2 emissions. Then we talk about the economy and inflation. Then we talk about a childcare crisis (at least in the US). And then we talk about our crumbling infrastructure and skyrocketing debt. And we do this like we are talking about different things.

THEY ARE ALL THE SAME THING.

How are they possibly the same thing? Let me explain, and in the process, hopefully, I can pull back the curtain and reveal the wizard behind our economy, and our governments, and our art, children, health, everything on earth, really. His name is Dan. But let’s start at the beginning. 

DAN THE HYDROGEN ATOM

Once upon a time, there was a hydrogen atom named Dan who lived in the center of a star in one of the outer arms of a galaxy, in one of the outer spines in a supercluster of galaxies, which is where the address gets fuzzy, but that is surely one of the uncountable superclusters across the universe, but we can’t see that far away.

He is not long for his world, because he and three of his hydrogen friends on this particular day get squished into one helium atom, in what we call nuclear fusion. Except not all of him and his friends fit into one helium atom. There’s a little bit left.

It’s a blindingly small amount of mass. 29% of 4 hydrogen atoms are leftover, which is converted to pure energy. (Remember Einstein: E=MC² Matter is really dense energy and vice versa?) I don’t think it was ever impressed upon me just how much energy is in one little atom. In this case, the energy released could power a 60 KW light bulb for 100 years.

So the former hydrogen atom, now light and heat and movement (thermal, radiant, and kinetic energy), still named Dan, go flying out across space and unlike so many of his fellows, smacks into a planet. And unlike so many planets, this one has a layer of gas around it which traps him on the planet’s surface, never to leave it again.

THE MAGIC OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS

Dan continues his journey and runs smack dab into a little kale plant, which takes a few molecules of carbon from the water it drinks and another hydrogen molecule from the soil it eats. That hydrogen atom is an old cousin of Dan’s from a very, very long time ago and a galaxy far away, but they don’t really have time to connect because the kale releases the free oxygen into the atmosphere that used to be stuck to the carbon, and uses Dan to bind these three together (energy, hydrogen, and carbon), creating a teeny tiny glucose molecule.

And then a little human girl named Danielle, ironically enough, pulls the kale plant from her garden and reluctantly eats it in a salad her mother makes.

THE MAGIC OF DIGESTION

The glucose molecule containing Dan gets absorbed into Danielle’s intestine and wings around her bloodstream. (We won’t go into what happens to the rest of the kale plant.) That little glucose molecule finally reaches Danielle’s bicep, where in a very complicated reaction involving multiple intermediary steps I won’t go into without completely blowing the word count of this note, the glucose is ripped apart.

Dan is bound up in the cell, and the soil and water Dan rode in on go back into the bloodstream, and the carbon at least goes out of the lungs as carbon dioxide.  (Really FASCINATING side note, if Dan had gotten bound up in a fat cell, instead of a muscle cell, he would just sit there for a while until called back into the bloodstream to get used. Which means we lose weight by breathing. Seriously. And literally.)

But Dan ended up in a bicep and Danielle happens to be in the middle of a violin recital by the time this is all over, so very quickly, that muscle gets the message to move it and contract repeatedly as she saws out a passable rendition of twinkle twinkle little star (using a very teeny tiny bit of a star to do it, whom she does not know is named Dan.)

Dan relinquishes his job of holding an ATP molecule together (what became of him when the glucose broke down) in the mitochondria and becomes the heat/movement/kinetic energy again, in this case, to move a violin bow and heat Danielle’s bicep. In short, converting energy to music, which is not an equation you’ll find in your physics textbook, but what else is it made of?!

WHAT HAPPENS TO DAN FROM THERE?

Some of him went off in the auditorium as sound waves. Some as heat released from Danielle’s skin. Some as the movement of air stirred up by the movement of her arm. He dances around the atmosphere with the rest of the solar energy and maybe one day to escape to go flinging into space until he gets suctioned up by a black hole or another bit of gravity to start the dance all over again.

He could eventually find himself back as potential energy again. Remember, energy is not created or destroyed, it just moves around.

The long and short of it is, we are all just dirt and sunshine and ocean.

And every spec of heat, light, movement, and life on earth came from the sun. (With a couple of minor nuclear exceptions.)

How is this useful? (if you’re not creating alien species for a novel or trying to pass a high school biology exam?)

Like it or not, there are a couple of really big collective decisions we need to make as a species (well, ideally about 200 years ago) but soon is the next best option. Losing track of the fact that our entire planet, life, and economy is about sunlight obfuscates those decisions.

The only reason we exist is sunlight and the atmosphere that traps it here. We forget that at our peril.

The post How to Make Music & Babies with Sunshine first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

This is one way an author can world-build a totally new civilization: you take one variable like the energy supply, change it, and see how it might affect everything from the morning coffee to marriage customs to the global economy.

But lest you think our problems would be solved with enough energy (without the downsides of torching the world), I don’t think it’s going to be that simple…

WE’VE HAD ENOUGH FOR OVER A CENTURY

According to some sources, we’ve had enough energy to feed, house, clothe, and care for every human on earth since about 1870. Yes, it came with the downside of torching the world, and no, we haven’t actually done that with our munificent bounty, but not enough energy is not our problem and hasn’t been for a while.

The problem and opportunity, and challenge, are what we build with that energy. The true constraint is taking that raw energy and building complexity with it.

WE’RE ONE OF THE ONLY PLACES IN THE UNIVERSE THIS CAN HAPPEN!

Most energy stays in its simplest form and gets flung out into space by the stars. Occasionally, endless energy will collect and squeeze together into an impossibly small space until it’s too dense to even comprehend, and you get a black hole. And very occasionally, you get a little chunk of rock that builds a layer of gas around itself where the energy hitting the surface and leaving the atmosphere is close to even. Basically, where entropy doesn’t win for a couple hundred million years.

And if you wait long enough,  weird things start to happen! Like eventually that energy self-organizes and starts breathing.

And if nothing happens to destabilize this exceptional little pocket of complexity in millions upon millions upon millions of years, it starts becoming aware of its own existence. And then it starts having existential crises, dancing on its toes, blowing into sheep’s bladder to create an instrument that can be heard two miles away, chasing balls in circles, and building other things of even more beauty and complexity.

WHEN THERE IS ENOUGH COMPLEXITY

It’s amazing. The vast majority of the universe is enjoying ever-increasing entropy: more and more chaos and less and less order until everything is far-flung and dark.  We’re one tiny little planetary exception to that rule where energy has been able to complexify for millions of years.

Which is why adding to our available energy is not going to solve all our problems.  We don’t need a bunch of energy; we need to turn that raw power into more complexity.

HOW DO WE DO THAT?

On a physiological level, we eat food, digest the food, and take the energy and the dirt and build ourselves. But even without any excess, most of our lives are spent just maintaining our own complexity. Just keeping a bit of complex intelligent life breathing takes enormous energy and work.

But some of us are extremely lucky to have a little bit extra. When we don’t have to just survive, we have kids. We write books. We build businesses. We make music. We build our bodies and see who can be the strongest and fastest. We play games.

It’s my favorite thing about humans: all the crazy complex beauty and fun we can create out of sunlight.

I think a lot about what it actually takes to do this. Yes, it takes the power that we get from food, which came from the sun via the plants we eat (or the animals that ate the plants that we eat). It also takes the stability of the ozone layer, the climate, and no giant asteroids to maintain the homeostasis that makes complexity building possible.

What else?

TIME

Growing a human takes time. Digesting food and turning it into muscle takes time. Putting one word after another on paper takes time. Teaching a kid the nuances of manners (and spoons, the alphabet, Russian disinformation campaigns, and every other insanely complicated skill we’re expected to master) takes time.  Yes, you can speed it up with an influx of more energy, but only to a certain point. Things take the time they take.

SKILL

Skill is really just neurons that can fire in a particular pattern at the right time. There’s a reason humans are capable of more complex feats of engineering than a turkey. We can shove more skills into our brains. That process also takes time and energy.

EFFORT

There’s a myth in our society that the more skill, time, and money you have, the better you should feel about life. And there’s some truth to that. Things get easier, but that’s because of the complexity you’ve already built. Building new skills, houses, books, and humans is hard and stays hard no matter how long you do it. 

We are literally patterning chaos and that is ridiculously hard to do.

CHAOS

We have less chaos here with energy constantly entering the system, but the number is not zero, and can’t ever be.  The whole of evolution came from random mutations. Chance, luck, disaster, and problems are vital to building complexity. They are two sides of the same coin, constantly melting into one another. This is the part where I say that a life you can predict would be boring. I don’t know about that. We could do with some more boring, but I will say that it won’t be very complex.

What else? Seriously?

What does it take to create something new? Because I don’t think we’re very good at it yet, nor do we understand it that well. We’re currently engaged in the madness of ever-expanding energy, even as the consequences of that are completely screwing up the air quality as we use our filters for fuel.

We need a new way to look at what we’re doing here when we can’t accumulate great excesses of stored sunlight. I actually think we’ll be better for it because then we can focus on the time, effort, and skill to manage the energy and build so many more fun things!

The post We’ve Had Enough Energy Since 1870. What Have We Done With it? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Well, maybe. Someday.

It’s important to note that sustaining a tiny sun on earth may never be possible; though we said that about the energy! At the very least, this solution is decades and decades away.

If it ever happens, what does it mean? Let’s do a little world-building, shall we?

One of the most fun and important steps of writing speculative fiction is, well, speculating. Change a variable in your made-up world and play out all of the implications on money, religion, gender, power all of it.

Variable: We now get energy from fusion, not from ancient dead plants.

What does a world like that look like?

POWER INDUSTRY

I feel like this would be the least changed, ironically, since it doesn’t fundamentally change electricity. We already have the grid. We even have real estate for power plants. We just hook our existing cables to a different source. (Which, hey, we don’t have to wait to do! The same is true of all green energy too! Yay!)

TRANSPORTATION

What if you could go anywhere you wanted for the price of a car or plane? It puts a whole new spin on globalization, borders, fiancé visas, and moving for work. People will get a whole lot more mobile with a whole lot less fuss.

ECONOMICS

Here, things start to get more fun. Our insanely complex economy obscures the fact that money is energy and energy is oil. The whole of our economy would shift completely if we switched to a different fuel source. This is where fusion and green energy start to diverge because oil is old sunlight and solar is new sunlight, so there are still recognizable constraints on both.

But when we make our own sun?

Power gets cheaper, so that is one bill shrunk immediately. Food gets way cheaper. (Do you know how much oil it takes to deliver a pineapple to your average grocery store?) Building things gets way cheaper. Which means everyone everywhere gets a lot more disposable income.

This is so hard to imagine because right now, the excess is getting funneled up to a few individuals and why would it be any different with fusion?

But that is deceptive because we don’t have endless energy. In fact, energy is getting more and more expensive. Digging up oil is more expensive; rich countries have already exploited all the poor countries, and there are no new frontiers to vacuum up for money. So now we’re cannibalizing ourselves and hollowing out the middle class and pushing the poverty line down to continue the merry-go-round a little longer. But what happens when that squeeze lets up and there’s just always more energy? They can hoard as much as they want, and for the cost of a power plant, there’s more where that came from?

LABOR

If living expenses become a fraction of your salary, current monopolies become harder to maintain. The labor market gets tighter. The robot revolution takes on even more importance. Job perks become insanely more important. And work weeks would get shorter, which I know is something that has been predicted for decades, but instead, we’re all killing ourselves by enriching billionaires. But if there was no limit to energy, even billionaires can have their cake and eat it too.

ART

Everyone will have a lot more time, which means amateur art will experience a renaissance.

All of these are relatively small changes at the personal level. Professional art and sports will also improve like we can’t possibly imagine. Why? Because more people can participate, and more people will have the resources to devote to full-time study. Right now, pursuing professional athletics is a game of desperation, luck, and sacrifice. What if all those variables were two clicks easier? Even a slight change in how easy it is dramatically changes who wins.

POLITICS

The global order as we know it would be over completely. It would take a few decades, but the Middle East would fade from importance as their main export becomes useless. Oh don’t worry, we’d still compete for resources like precious metals and raw materials, but the pinch points would shift around the globe.

The talking points at home would also shift as everyone gets a little bit less desperate. What would be the selling point then in a political campaign? Perhaps the culture wars become even more important?

HEALTH

Healthcare is one of the most resource-intensive industries we have. It just takes a lot of money to keep people well. So what happens when you glut the system with energy? Hopefully, again, less desperation. More access. More resources to put towards research. More positions funded. And yes, probably more 21st-century diseases as food becomes more ubiquitous and we can get more for less, so staying active becomes even more of a choice.

MILITARY

Oh, the wars we can wage with endless energy. The weapons we can dream up. Even the fusion plants themselves can be major targets. But also, hopefully, the fewer wars we’ll feel we need to wage. We’ve waged purely ideological wars, but the majority have been over resources and if everyone has more, you take those off the table. [She says, naively. I mean, optimistically…]

TECHNOLOGY

Tech of all sorts will accelerate rapidly. Building complex machines takes a great deal of energy. If that suddenly got cheap, AI computing suddenly looks totally doable. Cloud storage that currently has to be built on literal rivers to keep them cool becomes much more feasible. New players can have access to more, more informally, to invent things much more quickly.

SPACE

Getting off the planet also becomes ridiculously easy when you strap yourself to a tiny sun. As does mitigating the inhospitableness. It’s hard for humans not to live on earth. Which means we start becoming a true space-faring civilization. Though, that literally means our little solar system. I think we forget how big the galaxy is. We’re not going that far.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

Getting off oil has been the rallying cry of the green movement for decades. Plus cleaning up climate change will take a truly insane amount of energy. I think we turn more and more to technology and geoengineering to fix it instead of behavior change, and we deal with a host of unintended consequences. I mean, we’ll still be the short-sighted, reactive species we are now. Free energy won’t change our ability to screw up our main safe haven, but at least we won’t be actively setting more of it on fire anymore.

EDUCATION

This is another resource-intensive project that will hopefully get easier and more ubiquitous every decade, especially worldwide. Raising kids in general takes an insane amount of energy.

INTENSITY

The last way to think about this is not what exactly is changing but how much. There is a plausible scenario where a new energy source plugs into our existing extractive capitalism. Billionaires become trillionaires, and the world order pretty much stays the same.

On the opposite end: if everyone truly, madly, deeply has enough energy to live and to move, the concept of a nation-state as we know it dissolves and we become a truly globalized society where you can be employed anywhere by anyone and the world looks NOTHING like it does today.

WHAT’S YOUR GUESS?

Is this what’s Going To Happen? Some of it, yes, and some of it, no. That’s the difference between telling a story and trying to foretell the future. These are just some of the different ways to think about how changing things change other things.

Do you agree? Disagree? It’s within the realm of possibility that this could happen. Okay, very far from now and still more unlikely than likely, but it’s within the realm of possibility!

Is it the start of a grand utopia on earth?

No, we’re far too competitive, violent, and short-sighted ever to achieve that. But will life get just a little bit easier? Absolutely. When you have enough energy, you get more time and have to spend less of it surviving, which makes it just a little more pleasant.

Everyone will hopefully be just a little less tired and a little less desperate. Tourism, arts, entertainment, and sports will loom larger in people’s imagination as the basics get cheaper. Global society will develop as moving becomes easy. The geopolitical order will shift completely and rearrange around the new mineral and raw material bottlenecks, not oil. And we’ll find ways to muck up the climate some other way and compete and kill each other for new reasons.

The post How to World Build a New Future with Endless Energy first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.” ― Herman Hesse, Wandering

What is the function of a tree?

At least, what is the function for one ice age primate that has managed to take over the globe? For almost half of our history, they have been bed, shade, safety, and food. And then that changed.

I talked about how we can solve problems by seeing the function of things apart from what they’re meant to do.

Of course, trees don’t need to have a function or be useful to humans to have perfectly worthy lives. In fact, the farther away a tree is from a human, the safer it is.

THE OLD STORY: HUMANS TAMED FIRE

Even now in our air-conditioned lives, we make sure to tell our children the story: humans tamed fire and dominated the earth. I think this may be one of the oldest stories in our oral tradition, sometimes called an ur-myth, because it’s in every single culture. It has reached the level of quixotic instinct because even now, we know we’d be screwed without fire.

Evidence today points to the fact that it wasn’t even us; it was a cousin Homo Erectus way before us. Or at least one band in a cave in South Africa, lighting cooking fires between 1.5 and 2 million years ago. Homo sapiens got in on the fun about 125,000 years ago.

That’s one way to look at it: humans tamed fire.  Here’s another:

HUMANS DISCOVERED A NEW USE FOR TREES: BATTERIES

Why is fire always the star of the show? We got fire and then we got cooked food, and then we invented steam engines, and then we went to the moon. And it’s always about fire.

It wasn’t burning energy that changed everything; it was access to stored energy that changed everything. It was the wood that was the important part.

Until that point, all plants and animals had very limited energy storage options. The sun shone down on plants which used it to build themselves by creating bonds between carbon atoms in CO2, hydrogen in water, and minerals in dirt. Then they breathed out the oxygen left over.

Humans ate those plants (or ate the animals that ate those plants) and broke down those bonds between carbon atoms to use the sunlight (and breath out the carbon hooked back up to the oxygen, which plants would take back and the whole thing started again.)

There was a small amount of redundancy built into that system. Plants stored enough water and enough sunshine to get through a dry day or a rainy day.  Animals stored similar amounts of water and fat to get through a bad season.

Outside of our own bodies, options are few. Squirrels hoard nuts. Bees hoard vomit. There are small examples all over the animal kingdom of stored energy. But for the most part, the energy shining down on them today or the very recent past is all the energy they have access to.

Enter trees: years and years and years of sunlight, trapped between those carbon molecules, just waiting to be released.

Suddenly we could predigest our food (known by the more palatable name of cooking) and have access to far more calories for far less work. Suddenly we could keep warm without having to even ingest a bunch of energy and burn it ourselves. We didn’t have to eat anything at all. We could just sit there and all that stored sunlight would burst to life again with all that light and heat whenever we wanted it. 

It no longer mattered whether it was day or not or where in the world we lived; we could summon daylight whenever we wanted it.  Trees are still the main source of heat and light in most rural areas of the world.

THEN WE DISCOVERED ANCIENT TREES

The discovery of oil (coal, natural gas, etc) was a similarly momentous occasion for our species – suddenly, we weren’t limited by the sunlight of the immediate past, stored in recently dead trees.

We had access to millions and millions of days of sunlight, available whenever we wanted them, and we weren’t limited to predigesting food and keeping ourselves warm. We could use it to augment our muscles and go faster and faster, even fast enough to escape gravity. We didn’t have to use our voices to shout at each other – we could take that energy and throw our voices across the world.

We didn’t have to store all the information we learned in our huge brains; we could put it on paper (ANOTHER use for trees: storage!) Or etch it into a chip so we didn’t even have to be there when our voice traversed the world.

And we could do totally “useless” things with that energy like sing and dance and write stories and run nowhere. Can you imagine? Expend a huge amount of energy to run as fast as humanly possible…in circles.

Just burning up sunshine.

I know it’s not just trees, or even mostly trees. There were significant amounts of ferns and algae – but nobody has ever stared at ferns contemplating infinity or written poems to algae. It’s the metaphor of the thing.

HERE IS ANOTHER FUNCTION OF TREES: FILTER

Trees split CO₂ into carbon and oxygen, use the carbon to build themselves with sunlight, and spit out the oxygen. We take that, bind it with carbon, and spit out ourselves. It’s a beautiful system.

This process doesn’t end when trees die; they sink into the ground and shelter any leftover carbon from mucking up the system, sometimes for eons on end. But what happens when you burn your filter for fuel? Not only do you get the sunlight, but you also get the waste that was happily sequestered and pretty to look at. And what happens when you burn ridiculous amounts of ancient and current trees every day? You cook the world.

HOW PRIVILIGING ONE FUNCTION LED TO US COOKING THE WORLD

One might call climate change a tree problem. It’s one of the reasons we haven’t solved it yet: we haven’t made the shift in our minds about the function of plants: from fuel to filter.

And we don’t have nearly a good enough battery ready to replace the energy we can no longer touch. I get it; we don’t want to go back to the days of razor-thin margins when the only time we have heat and light is when the sky is clear.

We talk a lot about whether this problem is real or what the solution is. Looking at function helps surface one explanation: We need vastly more trees (ancient and current) as filters (or we need to invent our own stat) and vastly fewer trees as batteries – which means we definitely need to invent those even more stat.

I can’t overstate how huge this species-wide mindset change is. The story of fire still looms large in our imagination. It’s a part of our identity. We are the ones, the only ones, who tamed fire. And now we have to be the ones to Put. It. Back.

OTHER FUNCTIONS OF TREES

Shelter (wood), information storage/communication medium (paper), fuel (wood stoves), literal food (bananas), decoration.

Humidifier:  Did you know trees sweat?  And that they are significantly involved in cloud production?

Erosion prevention: A recent lowlander moved to the woods where I lived. I should specify the woods are on large hills. They brought their cherry-picked builder from their old, flat, home and had to spend a significant amount of money shoring up the hillside so their house didn’t fall down it because they cut down all the trees to have a better view. Let’s just say their functional fixedness did not let them consider the implications of roots. That’s a tiny example, but it happens all over the world on a huge scale. If you want dirt to stay where it is, don’t rip up the trees.

Fertilizer: once they die, they provide food for insects, and other animals, and nutrients for soil for the next generation to use.

Sanity perseveres: we like trees. I don’t know if that’s a genetic thing passed down from the days when we slept in trees and we automatically associate them with safety, but they feature in our art and popular imaginations at astonishing volume.

Plus, we’re not the only ones using them! For other animals, they are also homes, food, temperature regulators, safety from predators, ladders, shade, and playground.

What have I missed?  My mother makes baskets out of pine needles.  (Needles are long and flexible)  My father carves furniture out of it. (Pine is stiff and strong enough to sit on.) A local artist uses bark as a painting canvas (bark is smooth and flat.) 

The post Two Competing Uses for Trees and How We Got These so Wrong first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

AVALANCHES OF OPINIONS

There has been an avalanche of opinions and think pieces about the future. I have written before about the dangers of taking these accounts at face value.

But we just can’t help ourselves.

BRAINS LOVE STORIES

That seems like a positive statement. Especially coming from an author who spends all her time writing stories. But it isn’t.

We make meaning out of anything and everything. This concept is ubiquitous in modern psychology and difficult to trace to a specific source. There are thousands of articles that reference the concept and yet no single origin.

Essentially we create a logical chain of cause and effect for everything that happens in our lives (even though the universe is mostly random chaos).

Sometimes we know we’re doing it and name it, like with superstitions. We know that we didn’t get the job because of the tie we wore, but it’s better to be safe than sorry at the next interview and wear it. Or astrology where we know that a bunch of long-dead Greek men looking at a sky that doesn’t even match today’s stars could not possibly have codified billions of humans. But sometimes it’s impossible not to see the pattern.

SOMETIMES OUR STORIES HURT LIKE HELL

We get a bad grade on a couple of math tests and believe for decades that we are bad at math. Worse, sometimes our math teacher treats us differently because we don’t look like someone who is good at math, and we believe them, for decades. Sometimes, horrible things happen and there has to be a grand design behind it proving we are awful people.

Think about that. It’s insane. It’s easier for our brain to believe we are horrible than it is to acknowledge random chance.

In fact, designers have to make random number generators less random because we are so prone to detecting (creating?) patterns. We won’t believe numbers are truly random unless we take out things like runs and repeated numbers. (From The Drunkards Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow, a great book about randomness.)

WHY MAKING UP STORIES (EVEN IF THEY’RE WRONG) IS MOSTLY AN ADVANTAGE

Paul Zak researches story and posits that they aid us as social creatures who associate with strangers. More than random facts, telling a story evokes an emotional reaction, and emotions are motivation, especially to engage in survival behaviors.

Story turns out to be a huge survival advantage.

We don’t have to see a lion to panic. Someone else can tell us that when he was walking along this stretch of road yesterday, he almost got mauled. We will be as motivated as he was with just a few words.

Contrary to popular opinion, we’re not the only animal out there with language.

Dolphins, whales, other primates, and a host of other animals have ways to communicate with each other. From whistles and clicks to a bee wiggling its little body in a specific way, animals tell each other stories, but they are an order of magnitude simpler than a single text message.

BUT IT HAS LEFT US WITH A MAJOR WEAKNESS

The universe is super chaotic.

We want everything that we do, everything that happens to us, and everything that happens to other people to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. We want our lives to have a cause and an effect.  We search the world over for our purpose. Or at the very least, we expect hard work to mean something and meanness to be punished. And most days, even though none of that is true, it’s far healthier to act as if it is. Because in a universe of random chance, there’s always a chance we get what we want too!

But it can really shoot us in the foot when there’s a massive upheaval and social change and many people are predicting the end of the world.

We have a real blind spot when it comes to chaos, randomness, and sheer bloody chance.

When you really look back at history, and try to extract it from the beginning and middle and end that has been superimposed on it, you’ll find a great deal more randomness than I think anyone is really comfortable with.

THE VIETNAM WAR STARTED BECAUSE OF FREAK RADAR ECHOES AND SQUIRRELY SONARMEN

American ships were damaged in the Gulf of Tonkin in a brazen attack in the middle of a thunderstorm on August 4, 1964. Thus justifying and precipitating the first direct American attack on North Vietnam. And everything that came after it.

Except… They weren’t attacked.

It turns out, now that communications have been declassified, that there was no actual evidence of torpedoes or other boats. No one will ever know for sure, but looking back, the Navy thinks the equipment malfunctioned in the storms, and the sonarmen, seeing something on their displays, declared it had to be an attack. And then higher-ups cherry-picked the data to enhance the certainty over the next few days to argue for an attack.

I personally am shocked. So extremely shocked. This is my shocked face.

Arguably, America was funding South Vietnamese raids and had two carriers in the gulf, and it was only a matter of time. But… we’ll never really know.

ONE INVENTION STARTED A NEW AGE

I have a favorite encyclopedia entry. I also read the dictionary as a kid for fun. Don’t judge.

James Watt was a Scottish inventor who took someone else’s steam engine, (It wasn’t even his steam engine!) and came up with a separate condenser. Just a tiny little tweak.

Basically, he separated heating the steam and cooling the steam, so it was insanely more efficient. And with that one invention, he managed to kick off both the industrial revolution and the entire Anthropocene age. He also got a unit of power named after him, just for fun.

And now for my favorite encyclopedia entry:

REMEMBER THAT AS YOU LOOK AT THE NEWS THIS WEEK AND THE COMING MONTHS AND YEARS

Do not fall into the trap of believing that the future is written, foreordained, or inevitable. It’s none of those things.

Do not think that the odds are overwhelming or that this is forever because none of those things are true.

Do not think that a small action will not make a difference, because sometimes a radar signal helps your plane land and sometimes it starts a war. And sometimes a tweak to a design gets you a microwave with 15 buttons (why? Seriously, why!?!) and sometimes it starts a new epoch.

No, I’m not trying to say it’s not going to be bad. We don’t know what the next radarman is going to see. It could be worse than anything we predicted. I’m just trying to say, we truly, madly, deeply don’t know.

The stories we are telling with a cohesive narrative feel like they’re true, but that’s only because of the way our brains evolved. Reality does not have a beginning, middle, and end. It’s just all middles all the time, where anything can happen.

The post How Radar Started a War and Condensers Started a New Age first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Here are some tricks to help see the existing world in new ways and hopefully shine a different light on the water we’re swimming in and come up with new solutions in the existing world. Or just make you giggle.

Fundamental #1:  Life is dirt and sunshine, full of ocean.

Every bit of energy, movement, heat, light, thought, and life in the world comes from our sun (with very few nuclear exceptions). It shines down on the world; the plants take dirt and marry it with that sunshine and fill it up with water; we eat the plants and break down those bonds to make ourselves. Complex life is just dirt and sunshine full of ocean.

And it’s not just that we do this once; we run out of ocean every few minutes and sunshine and dirt every few hours.

We are constantly remaking ourselves and trying to maintain our own complexity.

And we will eventually, inevitably fail, decaying back into just the dirt without any ocean or sunshine, and we know it. It changes everything about what we do.

Fundamental #2:  The purpose of life: Homeostasis

(I didn’t say the meaning of life.)

What do we do with this energy that takes so much of our lives gathering? Staying the same.

Yes, we spend the majority of our lives, even in the vaunted first world where we are so good at everything [saracasm], trying to stay at the right temperature, the right arousal (the sexy kind and the safety kind), and the right amount of water and food, and other unsexy things like salt balance. We are not self-improvement machines, we are self-maintaining machines, who, yes, have to improve when circumstances grow more inhospitable.

I’ve been wrestling with migraine recently and feel this deeply. Migraine triggers are basically anything a little bit outside of perfect homeostasis, so I essentially wear a shock collar that zaps all the blood vessels in my head the moment I get thirsty, cold, sleep-deprived, or anything else. (Though we all suck at this one… Put this down and go get some water!)

Special Human Wrinkle to this Fundamental fact #1: We are herd animals.

Our main project after ensuring our blood has the best salinity is maintaining membership in the herd. We are a social species, which means we mostly get all of these needs met through our group membership, not directly.

Arguably these days, we don’t have to worry about thirst or hunger directly if we maintain our place in our group. (Short of actually picking up a water bottle. Did you get some water? Go get some water.)

This means we spend almost all of the rest of our energy cooperating or building dominance and are constantly balancing between what we need, what our group needs, what the other groups have, and who is in our group.

Special Human Wrinkle #2: We don’t mature for a quarter-century.

The current accepted thought is that our brain is done cooking by the time we’re 25 years old. That is crazy when you think about all the threats to it.

It’s a huge drain on our collective energy stores, those with and without kids. Though obviously, it’s the hardest on parents to launch the next generation, especially because in the vaunted first world we treat it as an individual project.

It informs so much of what we do, takes so much of our energy, and informs so much of our policy and our world.

Special Human Wrinkle #3: We have way more than we need.

The most special part of being human: we have leftovers!

I’m not even kidding. In the animal kingdom, scavengers and dung beetles take care of the excess, but the rest of the ecosystem lives really close to the edge, finding extra energy just in time. We are the only ones who have figured out how to store vast amounts of dirt and sunshine and water for our use whenever we want it.

Don’t get me wrong, it still takes most of our lives to maintain complexity and homeostasis, our spot in our group, and spend a quarter of our lives launching the next generation…

But what do we do with the extra?

That’s the biggest existential question.

I write these postcards. (This is not a newsletter. If I ever break any news…. you’ll have your signal that a great deal of our civic institutions is in serious trouble.)

Or we write symphonies. Run the fastest. Swing a bat at a ball. None of our hobbies violate the first two rules, but one of the miracles of humanity is that we manage to grab hold of extra energy beyond what we need for right now and we do genuinely spectacular things with it.

And it’s also I’d say the Achilles heel of humanity as we eat everything in sight.

What isn’t in one of these boxes?

I’m not going to try to sum up all of civilization in one postcard, usually, but this is a big place to start. Our laws, entertainment, technology, communication, schools, military, law enforcement, marriages, water treatment plants, religion, and spa retreats with little circles of cucumbers – everything can fit into these boxes like Russian nesting dolls of reality.

Okay, maybe not the cucumber water. That is totally irrational and has no function on earth, contributes nothing to our survival, does not help us raise our young, maintain our group, or have any redeemable value.  I am not biased. That is an objective fact.

The post Life is just dirt and sunshine first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.