Last time, I imagined what a world with endless energy might be like in light of the new fusion breakthrough.
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!