COLLAPSE
The Mythical Rise (and Imminent Fall) of Humankind
We Can Fight Physics, But We Can’t Win
Humanity thrives on stories. We live for stories, we live through stories, we understand the world by making, telling and experiencing stories. Some of them are true, some are embellished, some are completely fictitious.
Some stories are about gods and demons, others about mortals, ordinary and extraordinary, others about animals or fantastical entities. Most of them are meant to convey some meaning about reality, about the mysteries of the universe or about the various aspects of human nature.
As humanity matured and science took its first, uncertain steps, those stories that were meant as an attempt to interpret the natural world around us gradually lost their value as a tool of understanding. We still tell stories about Zeus’ thunder and lightning, but science has explained how these phenomena work. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t involve an old man throwing bolts from a mountain or a bearded guy pounding the ground with a magical hammer.
We still tell stories about mythical heroes and their superhuman abilities, be they Hercules or Gilgamesh or Superman, but we know that in the real world we have limitations. We can’t fly without a means of propulsion and we can shoot lasers, but not through our eye sockets.
Physics has explained that energy can’t magically appear on demand. We need ways to produce it, harness it and put it to use for any kind of work we want done.
Despite decades of denial, willful or otherwise, we have come to accept that our energy use since the Industrial revolution has come with a heavy price.
At the same time, however, we have fallen prey to our own myths: we now know that Thor isn’t channeling lightning through the skies, but our cunning and inventive uses of electricity has led us to believe that we can do anything we want with it.
Granted, our civilization would be impossible without electricity, but we tend to forget how it is produced and we disregard how much we still depend on fossil fuels.
Contrary to what we might want to believe, electricity still doesn’t come from renewable sources, for the most part. In fact, over 60% of global electricity production in 2023 came from fossil fuels. Sure, you’ll say, but we are working to reduce that percentage, right?
Well, yes, but there are two significant issues: since solar and wind power are not constant sources of energy, we’re going to need a lot of batteries to make those energy sources viable and a lot of work to adjust our power grids to intermittent power sources.
But the real kicker is this: none of the renewable sources of energy we currently utilize can be used without fossil fuels. We need diesel to power mining drills, to transport and refine the ore, to make steel, silicon, cobalt, lithium or copper. In short we need “dirty” energy to produce “clean” energy.
Which means that no energy is really “clean”.
It gets worse.
Since we’ve exhausted all of the easy to get resources on the planet, we have to use more and more energy to extract diminishing amounts of fossil fuels and minerals. Our ancestors could make beautiful weapons and armour from bronze and look all heroic wearing them because metals were so abundant that you didn’t need to dig thousands of metres into the earth to extract rock with trace amounts of copper in it. If the ancients had to do that, we wouldn’t have progressed beyond the Stone Age. Using muscle power alone, it would take someone of Herculean strength to dig that deep. Not to mention dissolving tons of rocks with chemicals that were unknown at the time.
Lacking said heroic strength, we need to do all that using fossil fuels. Mining. Refining. Transportation. Construction. Assembly. Transportation.
The greatest myth of our time is, ironically, technology. We believe that we can do anything with it. Renowned sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke famously formulated three “laws”:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
He was right about many things, but even though advanced technology might look like magic, it doesn’t mean that it is magic. In the long run, Clarke’s ideas hurt us more than benefitted us. By thinking that anything would be possible with technology, we fooled ourselves into thinking that we could do the impossible.
We replaced the gods of antiquity with a new one: technology.
We could control the weather! We could invent new power sources! We could have limitless energy!
However, unlike the gods of old who could do more or less anything we imagined, technology has limits. It’s inescapably beholden to physical laws. Most importantly, the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
There are many ways to put it, but I find this to be the simplest way to understand it:
As energy is transferred or transformed, more and more of it is wasted.
When our distant ancestors learned how to cook their meat over an open fire to make it more digestible and less perishable they didn’t know that most of the energy coming from burning wood just spread in the atmosphere. In fact, they depended on that during winter to keep them warm. But it’s still very inefficient.
Fast forward millennia later and the perfect internal combustion engine (which is only theoretical and doesn’t exist) could boast just 80% maximum efficiency. The real-world efficiency varies, but it’s much, much lower than that. For cars it would be around 30–35%.
You read that right. Despite our best efforts, we only use one third of the fuel we put into our cars to drive them. The rest becomes waste heat.
Think about that. Imagine going to the gas station in your perfect, magical car of 100% efficiency, buying enough fuel to fill the tank, and finding out you only received one third of what you paid for.
So just think what happens when we pretend that we can capture all that CO2 we’ve put into the atmosphere in an efficient way. Spoiler alert: we can’t. We would have to use more energy than we got out of burning the coal, oil or gas that put the CO2 there in the first place.
What we can do is efficiently use CCS at the source of the problem: power plants, ships and so on. But even that is subject to additional “energy penalties”, meaning in simple terms that you need additional energy to operate the system and transfer the captured CO2 to its storage area. Not to mention building the proper infrastructure to ensure that it doesn’t just creep into the atmosphere again.
Capturing CO2 from the air? Forget about it.
And the end result? We still increase total emissions, but to a lesser degree. We curb the rate of increase. We don’t reduce our net emissions, we just increase them less. That’s like saying we’re still dying, but a bit slower. It’s important to understand what this means: we’re going away, folks. George Carlin was right.
Whatever we do, unless we stop burning fossil fuels completely, (and thus go back to the Stone Age) we can’t stop CO2 emissions that are turning our very climate against us.
For a civilization that’s supposed to be based on reason and science, we’re remarkably starry-eyed and disconnected from the physical realities of our situation. Perhaps because we thought that Prometheus’ gift, the forbidden fruit, our remarkable intellect and ingenuity, call it what you will, would make us gods. We have achieved so much, it’s true, coming from humble beginnings. We did spectacularly well for glorified apes. It’s only natural that we would come to believe in our own myth. To believe that we could do anything.
Reality, however, begs to differ.
