A good way to assess how things have changed is to look back a reasonably long time and then to make comparisons to the present, after which we look ahead the same number of years.
Suppose we use 200-year framework and look back to a very young nineteenth century and, in that context, examine a single but very important aspects of modern civilization, energy. Indeed it is worth noting that energy became important since that time. In the year 1809, if we had been present then and at the peak of our lives, and if someone had asked us to identify the most important source of people’s well-being, we’d probably have thought about it and then settled on agriculture. More significantly, going backward from that year, agriculture would have remained the answer until we got tired of counting the years. In 1809 energy use in the modern sense was just beginning.
Coal-mining in the United States had begun around 1748. The steam engine had been invented and pummeled into useful shape in the 1770s, thus roughly forty years before. It had become a serious market for coal. Oil production stood practically at zero barrels in ‘09. In 1806 a Swiss engineer named François Isaac de Rivaz had invented the first internal combustion engine; it was a laboratory sort of thing and ran on hydrogen and oxygen; the proof-of-concept, in a manner of speaking, had been produced three years before our reference year. If you wanted electricity, you could get it—provided you had a voltaic pile. The first of those was introduced just nine years before. But all of this activity was concentrated in a few places in Europe and in America. The dominant heating fuel on offer then—and, folks, it literally owned the market—was good-old-fashioned wood.
The changes in two hundred years are quite beyond description in detail. Literally everything we touch and see today—unless we’re looking at things built or made in 1809 or earlier—were made using some form of energy not commercially available 200 years ago. Energy has transformed everything, not least materials made of byproducts of petroleum, including fabrics and adhesives. Today our entire civilizations comes to a screeching halt even if only electric power fails, including our favorite forms of entertainment. Thus I needn’t dwell on the comparison. To be sure, many young people aren’t really sharply conscious of the extent to which we’re riding on top of a bubble of oil, but those able to look back, say, to the era before World War II are wise by simple experience. And any technological and economic analyst can give chapter and verse ad nauseam.
Now let us peer 200 years ahead. The odds are very high, close to 100 percent, that oil will be gone and coal exhausted in 2209. Only a catastrophic shrinkage of the population—and soon—would produce a different scenario that far out. Indeed if population continues to grow at current rates, all oil will be gone before this century is over. This opens up a two-forked projection heading to our target year.
One is that, by 2209, 1809 will have returned if in a modified form. The exceptions will be notable and will make life more pleasant, tolerable, and richer than it was in the kick-off decade of the nineteenth century: we’ll probably still have electricity, including fairly rapid transportation using that kind of power. But in many other ways life will have reverted to an economy much more dependent on human and animal energy because alternatives to coal and oil will simply not produce as many British thermal units as the age of fossil fuels could so easily deliver.
The second possibility is that we will have plenty of energy, indeed much cleaner if not necessarily cheaper. Transportation systems much as we know them will still be around—although I wouldn’t dare to speculate on what the new cars would be like. What would be the shape of the new system? It would depend on a scientific breakthrough, namely the harnessing of fusion power. If that power could be obtained cheaply enough, water would be electrically sliced apart into oxygen and hydrogen; our vehicles, ships, and planes would run on H (hat tip here to John Magee who reminded me of this last weekend).
How likely is it that we can fuse hydrogen atoms in bottles made of magnetic force? Who knows? The present forecast is that “decades” of work still lie ahead. But here I have to add the comment that about two decades ago, when I myself first became aware of tokamaks, those magnetic vessel—or, rather, the fantastic structures needed to contain them—the people then also thought that “decades” of work remained. So the odds don’t seem terribly good. The word itself, tokamak, comes from the Russian; those folk were in on the beginning of this modern quest for the grail of energy.
Filed under: Agriculture, Energy, Forecasts, Fusion Power
