Life Briefly Analyzed

Is life energy? It’s reasonable to think so. After all, all the motion that we see here on earth or up in the sky is produced by energy—either by suns of or by the original Big Bang that created the universe. Trouble is that energy as such lacks one of the important features of life, consciousness. If consciousness is viewed as more valuable or in a higher order than mere energy, then to say that life is energy is to assert that something (consciousness) can be derived from something that does not have the potential for it (energy). With a little effort, we can in virtually all instances trace energy to specific chemical or physical causes. Okay. The Big Bang is a little more difficult to prove.

Is life purposive? Of course. But by purposive I don’t merely mean such things as satisfying hunger or building a career. Nor do I mean the capacity for reproduction. Reproduction, after all, simply builds other individuals like myself; all of them, myself included, must die. So life’s purpose is to die? Absurd.

It does not surprise me, therefore, that humanity has ages ago postulated that life’s meaning must be found beyond bodily existence. Death is too poor a purpose to justify the complexity of life or the maintenance of the incredible chemical machines that we are just to let them return to “dust”.

Now materialists will claim that humanity’s projection of an afterlife is just another human desire to “hang on” to life. That charge seems reasonable until you become genuinely old. When you finally are, you become indifferent to such things. Fall asleep dreamlessly and never awaken? That’s perfectly OK for most of us.

The New Energy

Seemingly intensifying troubles all over the globe—and just yesterday at the University of Missouri—produced the almost random thought this morning: global energy is rising—and it’s been going on for a while.

Behind that thought was the commonplace observation that uncontrolled, un-channeled energy almost always causes huge amounts of damage—as we know from tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like. Therefore what I’m observing across the world—be it in the middle-east, in Africa, and the Americas, not least a drum-beat of shootings, killings, and upheavals here—must be the consequence of extra energy.

But when I look at that, I noted that we’re in the gradual process of consuming what little is left  now of global hydrocarbon energy. By all accounts we should see the Age of Oil end by the end of this century. So where does this new energy come from?

Next it occurred to me that this New Energy is not of the fossil kind—or the candidates to replace it. Rather that it is new human energy chaotically “doing work,” and mostly destructive work, outside the old-fashioned institutional systems of family, markets, education, and government. Can we actually see it? Yes. We see its tooling almost everywhere except in the pools of swimming pools. That tooling is the cell phone. People use it taking the dog for a walk, driving, waiting for the doctor, while shopping, just before falling asleep and first thing after waking and on the toilet.

The cell phone, to be sure, is but the most visible icon of very rapid communication between individuals; it rests on digital technology and systems developed for its exploitation, most centrally the many different kinds of social media enabling people to form ad-hoc group that, when moved by some strong emotion of idea, take on the character of an institution of the old-fashioned, regular kind like a government or an army.

The difference between what I’ve been calling “old-fashioned” institutions and these new ad-hoc groups is that institutions require major investment, employees, work space, routine missions, and central administration. The ad-hoc groups have no office buildings, payrolls, or, often, recognizable leaders; but, often, they can actually function almost without titular leadership altogether. Rapid communication can gel into consensus; action then follows quite spontaneously.

The various emotions or ideas that move these groups may be quite innocent—like entertainment; but when the emotions are rebellion or opposition, they can and do become quite effectively aggressive and take over (often violently, as is the case with ISIS) all traditional institutions and come to dominate entire regions. The earliest of these groups were called flash mobs and date to the early 2000s.

The energy comes from the concerting of individual actions—individuals whom, before the cyber revolution, it would have taken monumental efforts to recruit to coordinate if they were physically close. Such efforts once took significant time to accomplish and could be relatively easily disrupted. The cyber revolution annihilates both space and time—space by being able to coordinate people at great distances and time by doing it in hours or days rather than months or years.  Open communications—on an unimaginable scale—make it almost impossible even to detect the formation and intensification of these groups until they have begun to act. There is also that first amendment guarantee of free speech and assembly to make action countering their destructive efforts difficult. At present this new energy looks like a permanent feature of modern life putting all sorts of institutions at risk. But stable institutions are necessary for order. It is order that has begun to yield—and will fill our media with chaos until a new order, after all kinds of transformations, once more takes hold.

Collective Wealth

Still reading Toynbee’s monumental work on history, it strikes me—as I see him assessing ancient cultures’ decline and occasionally touching on our own—that humanity has never experienced a situation like our current one (viewed some 80 years after Toynbee wrote his first five volumes). It is a situation in which extraordinary wealth touches a huge population—but it’s  not wealth as once understood, namely personal control of physical resources and money; it is wealth in the form of collective systems, structures, technologies, and organized knowledge.

Two examples may be Communications and Health Care. Communications anciently demanded personal wealth in that, to deliver a message, one had to send a courrier to distant places; no such media as telegraphy, telephony, radio, or television existed—and general circulation news papers were also absent. Health Care then was centered on the person of a doctor, midwife, or a surgeon—and what small bag he or she carried. The hospital, with its emergency room—accessible even to the poor—did not exist; nor did colossal testing technologies, clean-rooms, remote and robotic surgery, or the pharmaceutical industries.

Behind communications today are submarine cables and space satellites; behind the satellites stands an aerospace industry. Behind medicine are mountains of extraordinarily sophisticated institutions, technical developers very much cut of the same cloth as aerospace, computer technology, and world-wide supervisory organizations communicating, by means of the never-before-seen communications sector, to inhibit the spread of plagues; among them is our own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These two sectors—and they are just two of many others that operate in the same way, for the collective—represent a form of wealth one cannot discover in ancient times except in the most rudimentary forms: state-built roads with their bridges and water control on a large scale for river management and for delivering water via aqueducts.

Can our collective wealth, which makes even the poor a little “wealthy,” be traced to a single discovery? Yes. It is the “discovery” of fossil fuels. I put that word in quotes because, of course, coal and oil were known before the age of fossil fuels dawned. They were also used, principally for making weapons-grade metals, usually employing human-made and therefore manufactured charcoal. The discovery, however, was triggered by a technological innovation, the steam engine. That device—the Luddites’ first nightmare—then led, step-by-step, to an extraordinarily massive geological raid of dormant energy hidden beneath the earth probably by cataclysmic global changes literally eons ago.

The quite foreseeable exhaustion of this incredible and non-replaceable deposit of wealth will have consequences we can logically project forward. The extent to which essentially “free” energy underlies virtually everything we do and touch—not least how we communicate and heal—is effectively invisible to the public—except its members visit filling stations. The sooner it becomes the daily conscious worry of the average citizen, the sooner can creative responses to future troubles begin. The most important job now is to slow our current energy consumption drastically—to give humanity more time to adapt to conditions where effective “wealth” will once more become personal and nothing much beyond—except roads, bridges, aqueducts, and (I hope) sewage systems that will still, collectively, support us all.

A Note on Technology

I did not undertake to play the book meme that went around a while ago (here and here), but my own habit is to read multiple books at the same time. Of those, very frequently, some will be re-reading books once more. Just recently I read again Arnold Toynbee’s Christianity Among the Religions of the World, a worthwhile venture at any time. It dates back to 1955 when Toynbee presented the contents of this book in a lecture series in the United States. What struck me this time, reading this book (the last time was in 1965) is Toynbee’s linkage of post-Christian western civilization with technology. The two are linked over and over again. The subject of technology is always present somewhere in my current thought. In fact I’d just read about the sputtering sort of appearance of it during the Hellenistic era in The Forgotten Revolution, on which more here. Years ago now, reading Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change, I’d come to the conclusion that—to the contrary of our common view—technology was present, changing, improving, and evolving as far back as we can see. And, indeed, as I was reading Toynbee I was also reading an essay by Sir Steven Runciman titled “Constantinople and Baghdad: Cultural Relations” in an essay collection titled Cultural Encounters. In that essay (here we go again!) there are several mentions of technological innovations, both on the Byzantine and on the Muslim side, dating back to the ninth, tenth, and later centuries, all of them considered pre-technological.

Why then, in these later centuries—say the eighteenth or nineteenth and thereafter—does technology suddenly begin to throw so great a shadow that an eminent historian chooses it as defining our times? The reason for that, it seems to me, is that the massive expansion of technology is very visible, its technical complexity and the engineering ingenuity is easily linked to advances in science (even though the two are not at all invariably linked), but the cause of this expansion is not. And the cause of that expansion has been the discovery and exploitation of fossil energy—coal and then petroleum.

The age of technology is also the age of metals. But humanity has worked metals as far back as the Bronze Age (3000 BC). Why the recent expansion of the use of metals beyond weaponry? Again. Same answer. Massive metalworking requires enormous amounts of cheap energy. We might say that technology, viewed over millennia, is the consequence of human ingenuity. Its expansion is the consequence of the Age of Oil. But this has important implications. We are approaching Fossil Sunset now. And while our technological optimism is high (but itself caused by the free wealth we discovered underground) when oil runs out and coal is used up rapidly—minimally within a hundred years—the remaining ways of generating energy will yield vastly less usable power. Hence, therefore, technology cannot be viewed as a permanent gain—except in the millennial view, thus at low levels of use. In the not too distant future, our technology will be better. Technology as always improved and will continue to do so. But it will no longer be pervasively present in everyday life and major re-adaptations are in the offing. The consoling thought is that we are extraordinarily adaptive, and when that time comes, those of us now who have an existential crisis when the Internet fails will no longer be alive.

We're Oddly Privileged Observers

The chart I present today is a somewhat more rationalized version of data from the Bureau of the Census that I had already posted here a while back. It shows the best scholarly estimates available on the subject of human global population for the period 1 to 1950 A.D. What I have done is simply extrapolated data points to fill in the gaps in the estimates, thus enabling me to show population on a continuous scale at 50-year intervals for the current chronological era. The raw numbers are available here. To this I might add that the original tabulation also provides estimates from 10,000 B.C. down to 200 B.C. The estimates for the human population for the time—and it’s nothing more than a guess-and-a-golly—suggest that in that entire period the human headcount was always below 230,000 million. When I arrived in America—the 1950 census was still being processed then—our population here was just a hair under 151 million. If I’d charted the entire range of the scholarly guesstimates, it would show a straight line running just above zero for all recorded history—and a huge, unbelievable spike appearing the day before yesterday.

In this chart I’ve plotted, along with the lower and upper estimates of scholars, the running average of the low estimate (green bars) and, overlaying them for most of the temporal trip, the difference between that average and the actual low estimate. What this tells me is that the real divergence from the perennials of history had its beginning in or around 1700, thus before the Age of Oil actually began. The early rising of the curve no doubt owed a great deal to advancements in agriculture discovered and applied in medieval times as documented by Lynn White in his fascinating Medieval Technology and Social Change. Coal mining began in the late 1740s; the steam engine appeared in 1770. And it was “hold on to your seats” after that.

We’re oddly privileged observers. We’re also, if you think about it, challenged to make the most of this odd and wondrous opportunity. The Age of Oil has already begun its descent from Mount Petroleum, and in another wink or two of historical time, the found wealth—which we, in fact, did very little to obtain beyond extraction—will have been consumed. We have a tiny window of time in which, somehow, we must, if we can, learn something from all this—and make the kinds of arrangements whereby we save and protect the physical gains we have been able to realize—not least electric light and the vast deposits of knowledge leisure has made possible to study under lamps—and to apply that knowledge to social well being.

The oddity of all this is how little one person can actually do. Thus this subject, already once touched upon in this blog, deserves this repetition—in new words and with a chart that features a blue sky.

Reminder

Power failures are intended, I believe, to remind us that the most important technological innovation of the modern age is the discovery of electricity. That reminder came again abruptly yesterday evening at 5:30 p.m. Light enough remained to let us find the flashlights and, using those, to find the matches to light the candles. The message for me, personally, was that while technology may be neutral, its absence can be felt as something positively annoying. Light is that ultimate symbol of value. Let there be light!

I’ve spent a substantial part of my life studying technology from various points of vantage. This began for me as a personal point of curiosity while I was still in the Army and later became a professional activity. I remember once in the service filling an empty hour looking up the respective populations per square mile of India and the United States and then calculating the U.S. population as it would be if it had India’s population density. That is a technological preoccupation? Absolutely. By the time I first chanced across Blake’s “Energy is eternal delight,” I lit up, as it were, already adequate to understand that feeling.

You cannot spend your time doing things of that sort without becoming painfully aware of the fact that our civilization is largely defined by the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels beginning early in the nineteenth century. In my personal parlance we have been and are still traveling on a bubble of oil, suspended in air, as it were, but this bubble, like the soapy kind, is of a brief duration. What follows after we’ve exhausted oil, gas, and eventually all coal? What I am hoping is that we shall still have the most important gift that we discovered: light.

That may happen if we eventually master fusion technology. The interesting aspect of that potential development is that it promises to give us light and modern communications and, possibly, energy enough for emergency transportation—and not much more than that. The reasons for that are that the yield of energy obtained, per unit of new energy needed to get it, will be modest. I’ve summarized the issues on LaMarotte here. Still, if we could get there, it would be a great boon—although, at present, mastery still eludes us. But if this brief blip in history, the Age of Oil, now stumbling towards its chaotic end, leaves us with electric power, that will have justified its vast excesses and violence for endless generations to come.